2,772 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2021
    1. Το να πούμε, όπως λέχθηκε απ’ όσους υπέγραψαν την «Έκκληση της Χαϊλδεβέργης» (την οποία, από την πλευρά μου, μάλλον θα ονόμαζα Έκκληση της Νυρεμβέργης), ότι η επιστήμη και μόνο η επιστήμη μπορεί να λύσει όλα τα προβλήματα, είναι αποκαρδιωτικό.
    1. Π.χ. στην έκκληση της Χαϊδελβέργης, που υπέγραψαν 264 επιστήμονες, με αφορμή τη Συνδιάσκεψη για το περιβάλλον στο Ρίο ντε Ζανέιρο το 1993, υπήρχαν ανάμεσά τους και 59 νομπελίστες που απέρριπταν την οικολογία σαν μια «άλογη ιδεολογία που αντιτίθεται στην επιστημονική και βιομηχανική πρόοδο»
    1. The “honest and accurate” science that society expects relies in part on skepticism, the willingness to doubt results and, when possible, to carefully replicate their findings.
    2. But missing from the third edition is skepticism, one of the fundamental elements of doing science.
  2. Jan 2021
    1. The courses span a suite of synthesis methods, including systematic review and systematic mapping, stakeholder engagement in evidence synthesis, and evidence synthesis technology.
    1. Because there is no time left for trial and error and since resources for organising a transformation into a carbon‐neutral world are inherently limited, decision‐making on climate solutions needs to be based on the best available evidence.
    1. Evidence synthesis, which collates, appraises, and summarises results from individual studies across an evidence base and makes them available for policy advice, is particularly well organised in the health sciences; a key role is played here by the global knowledge network Cochrane, founded in 1993 and seated in London. T
    1. Science’s culture of critique discourages groupthink, countermands the effects of human biases, and protects knowledge, not only by rewarding a dispassionate stance toward the subject and institutionalizing organized skepticism but also by fostering competition among scientists able to replicate and hence challenge each other’s work.

      Great aspirations, but how well are they actually achieved in practice/reality?

    1. ReconfigBehSci [@SciBeh] (2020-01-27) new post on Scibeh's meta-science reddit describing the new rubric for peer review of preprints aimed at broadening the pool of potential 'reviewers' so that students could provide evaluations as well! https://reddit.com/r/BehSciMeta/comments/l64y1l/reviewing_peer_review_does_the_process_need_to/ please take a look and provide feedback! Twitter. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1354456393877749763

    1. Yesterday was the day that NASA, NOAA, the Hadley Centre and Berkeley Earth delivered their final assessments for temperatures in Dec 2020, and thus their annual summaries. The headline results have received a fair bit of attention in the media (NYT, WaPo, BBC, The Guardian etc.) and the conclusion that 2020 was pretty much tied with 2016 for the warmest year in the instrumental record is robust.

      Links zur Berichterstattung in der englischsprachigen Presse. Der Artikel geht vor allem auf die Sicherheit und Unsicherheit der Angaben zur Durchschnittstemperatur ein.

    1. Weingarten. E., Chen. Q., McAdams., Yi. J., (2016). From Primed Concepts to Action: A Meta-Analysis of the BehavioralEffects of Incidentally Presented Words. Psychological Bulletin 2016 (142) pp 472-497.

    1. However, there is still a gap in research efforts moving from laboratory studies to real-world settings. A small number of research has verified when a physiological response is a reaction to an extrinsic stimulus of the participant’s environment in real-world settings.
    1. Ways will be found to make communities sustainable,

      Ways will also be found to legibilize the deliberately inscrutable. With biomed funding so centralized, forces can be applied to increase the adoption of practices like data sharing and open science.

    2. Scientific work must therefore be spiritually, organizationally, and materially decoupled from the forces of science at scale. The way to achieve this is to give primacy to the organization of small groups and the space for those groups to develop their own norms.

      Which is the opposite of the vision Xi Jinpeng has for science

    3. Progress in a scientific field has never been a function of total effort.

      Which is why Total Factor Productivity is not a good measure.

    4. In our time, machine learning conference attendance and submission rates continue to compound, often outstripping the doubling of Moore's law the discipline relies on to make any forward progress. The quality of results in these and other fields since the vast expansion of their communities has not increased.

      Just wait until you see what publishers have planned for India and China

    5. Communities break down with scale, losing the vitality they had when small and ultimately becoming an undifferentiated mass with an enormous diffusion of focus, to the point that any given group of sufficient scale is not really differentiable from any other.

      Going local, again. Need a solution for scaling the commons.

    1. However, by the time scientific studies make it to the real world, shortcomings and limitations are removed to present palatable (and often wrong) conclusions to a general audience.
  3. Dec 2020
    1. The response of the science settlers to the serious questions that have been raised about their unscientific advocacy has been to demand a more closed system, to hide more data, to urge newspapers to stop printing letters from anyone who questions Global Warming and to even propose the imprisonment of Warming critics.

      Science deniers.

    2. The science of the "Science is settled" crowd isn't an open system of skeptical inquiry, but a closed system of centralized authority funded and controlled by special interests, beholden to political agendas and intolerant of dissent. It has the same relationship to science that the various People's Democracies had to democracy.

      They try to mold our opinions so we are more amenable to their agendas.

    3. But this vision of science as an absolute, a post-modern abstract oracle, is less true than it ever was. Science is a state of uncertainty.

      Science is a process.

    4. It isn't science that gives a thing legitimacy, but the processes of thinking and testing that do.

      The process makes science.

    5. The worship of the expert class is no more credible for PhD's than it is for witch doctors.

      The tyranny of experts.

    6. A scientist who does not utilize the scientific method is as much use as a carpenter who cannot make chairs or a plumber who cannot fix toilets. A science that exists as a fixed absolute, whose premises are not to be questioned, whose data is not to be examined and whose conclusions are not to be debated, is a pile of wood or a leaky toilet. Not the conclusion of a process, but its absence.

      Understanding science is a process.

    1. To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language Neuroscientists find that interpreting code activates a general-purpose brain network, but not language-processing centers.

      Summary of the article:

      • Understanding code is neither done by language centers, nor by mathematical centers of the brain — it’s a whole different ball game.
      • This comes from a researcher who’s studying how different cognitive functions relate to language processing parts of the brain.
      • The study involved young programmers who analysed code while their brains were scanned.
      • People either say that great coders are great at language, or great at maths - neither seems to be true, and there is no single specialized area that lights up from coding.
      • The test activated the multiple demand network in participants’ brains, a wide network for performing mentally challenging tasks.
    1. Stuaert Rtchie [@StuartJRitchie] (2020) This encapsulates the problem nicely. Sure, there’s a paper. But actually read it & what do you find? p-values mostly juuuust under .05 (a red flag) and a sample size that’s FAR less than “25m”. If you think this is in any way compelling evidence, you’ve totally been sold a pup. Twitter. Retrieved from:https://twitter.com/StuartJRitchie/status/1305963050302877697

    1. limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, developed in thefifteenth century todistinguish between“Old Christians”and those of Jewish, Muslim, orheretical origin, also shaped Iberian ideas of difference between Africansand Europeans.

      limpieza de sangre

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. with the help of new generations of innovators and explorers, these visions of the future can become a reality. As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations, remember that you can be an architect of the future

      These are really beautiful and inspiring posters.

      Via @chrisaldrich

  4. Nov 2020
    1. The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards, desperately trying to find something, anything to support the president’s aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the evidence and reacting as warranted.

      What do you expect after they've spent four years doing the same thing day in and day out?

    1. A standard example of a non-personalized nudge involves retirement planning. An employer could (i) leave it to employees to set-up their 401K plans and decide how much to save or (ii) set up the plans by default so that a predetermined amount is saved automatically and allow employees to make adjustments. Saving by default is an architected choice that relies on two facts: first, people often fail to set up a retirement plan, which is a social problem, and second, people tend to stick with default rules. Thus, by choosing option (ii), the choice architect nudges people to start with the better position for them and society.

      The non-personalized nudge

      An employer can choose to let their employee set up their own pensions plan or set them up with a default plan and allow them to change. The second scenario is an "architected choice" that relies on two phenomena:

      1. The fact people often fail to set up a retirement plan
      2. The tendency of people to stick with default rules

      The default plan is a non-personalized nudge which (supposedly) benefits the people as well as society.

      This reminds me of Michael Malice's idea of "the people that need leaders are not able to pick good ones".

  5. Oct 2020
    1. We found that those medications, some of them at least 40 years past their manufacture date, still retained full potency
    1. We have increased the power of gossip-mongers and correspondingly reduced the power of elite institutions of the 20th century, including politicians, mainstream media, and scientists.

      The scaling up of the gossip mechanism on top of ISS has resulted in an increase in power for gossip mongers and a decrease in power of the institutions we relied on before: politicians, mainstream media, scientists.

    1. Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future Paperback – Illustrated, July 12, 2016 by {"isAjaxInProgress_B002RCTIHU":"0","isAjaxComplete_B002RCTIHU":"0"} Martin Ford (Author) › Visit Amazon's Martin Ford Page Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author Are you an author? Learn about Author Central Martin Ford (Author)
    1. Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything Hardcover – Illustrated, October 17, 2017 by {"isAjaxComplete_B06XHKDZVZ":"0","isAjaxInProgress_B06XHKDZVZ":"0"} Kelly Weinersmith (Author) › Visit Amazon's Kelly Weinersmith Page Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author Are you an author? Learn about Author Central Kelly Weinersmith (Author), Zach Weinersmith
    1. The Future of Humanity: Our Destiny in the Universe Paperback – Illustrated, April 2, 2019 by {"isAjaxComplete_B000ARDFYQ":"0","isAjaxInProgress_B000ARDFYQ":"0"} Michio Kaku (Author) › Visit Amazon's Michio Kaku Page Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author Are you an author? Learn about Author Central Michio Kaku (Author)
    1. The ideas here make me think that being able to publish on one's own site (and potentially syndicate) and send/receive webmentions may be a very useful tool within open science. We should move toward a model of academic samizdat where researchers can publish their own work for themselves and others. Doing this will give them the credit (and job prospects, etc.) while still allowing movement forward.

    1. Whom exactly were we trusting with our care? Why did we decide to trust them in the first place? Who says that only certain kinds of people are allowed to give us the answers?

      Part of the broader cultural eschewing of science as well? Is this part of what put Trump and celebrities in charge?

    2. She reached behind her to her bookshelf, which held about a dozen blue bottles of something called Real Water, which is not stripped of “valuable electrons,” which supposedly creates free radicals something something from the body’s cells.

      I question her credibility to market claims like this. I suspect she has no staff scientist or people with the sort of background to make such claims. Even snake oil salesmen like Dr. Oz are pointedly putting us in hands way too make a buck.

    1. First, I will focus in these larger groups because reviews that transcend the boundary between the social and natural sciences are rare, but I believe them to be valuable. One such review is Borgatti et al. (2009), which compares the network science of natural and social sciences arriving at a similar conclusion to the one I arrived.
    2. Social scientists focus on explaining how context specific social and economic mechanisms drive the structure of networks and on how networks shape social and economic outcomes. By contrast, natural scientists focus primarily on modeling network characteristics that are independent of context, since their focus is to identify universal characteristics of systems instead of context specific mechanisms.
    3. Science and Complexity (Weaver 1948); explained the three eras that according to him defined the history of science. These were the era of simplicity, disorganized complexity, and organized complexity. In the eyes of Weaver what separated these three eras was the development of mathematical tools allowing scholars to describe systems of increasing complexity.
    4. For instance, in the study of mobile phone networks, the frequency and length of interactions has often been used as measures of link weight (Onnela et al. 2007), (Hidalgo and Rodriguez-Sickert 1008), (Miritello et al. 2011).

      And they probably shouldn't because typically different levels of people are making these decisions. Studio brass and producers typically have more to say about the lead roles and don't care as much about the smaller ones which are overseen by casting directors or sometimes the producers. The only person who has oversight of all of them is the director, and even then they may quit caring at some point.

    5. heterogeneous networks have been found to be effective promoters of the evolution of cooperation, since there are advantages to being a cooperator when you are a hub, and hubs tend to stabilize networks in equilibriums where levels of cooperation are high (Ohtsuki et al. 2006), (Pacheco et al. 2006), (Lieberman et al. 2005), (Santos and Pacheco 2005).
    1. Scientists can find the latest data and analysis on their areas of research, determine experiments that have already been performed that they don’t need to replicate and find new opportunities for investigation

      "Don't need to replicate"!!! A big part of science is the ability to exactly replicate and double check others' work! We need the ability to do more replication, not less!

    1. High-level bodies such as the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the European Commission have called for science to become more open and endorsed a set of data-management standards known as the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles.
    1. People are rewarded for being productive rather than being right, for building ever upward instead of checking the foundations. These incentives allow weak studies to be published. And once enough have amassed, they create a collective perception of strength that can be hard to pierce.

      We desperately need to fix these foundations of science to focus on solid foundations and reproducibility...

  6. www.projectinfolit.org www.projectinfolit.org
    1. Major Findings (2:35 minutes)

      I'm quite taken with the variety of means this study is using to communicate its findings. There are blogposts, tweets/social posts, a website, executive summaries, the full paper, and even a short video! I wish more studies went to these lengths.

    1. I n 1808, New York physician John Augustine Smith, a disciple of Charles White, r ebuked Samuel Stanhope Smith as a minister dabbling in sci-ence. “ I hold it my duty to lay before you all t he facts which are rele-vant,” J ohn Augustine Smith announced in his circulated lecture. The principal f act was t hat t he “ anatomical s tructure” of t he European was “superior” t o that of t he other races. As different species, Blacks and Whites had been “placed at t he opposite extremes of t he scale.” The polygenesis l ecture l aunched Smith’s academic career: he became edi-tor of t he Medical and Physiological Journal, t enth president of t he Col-lege of William & Mary, and president of t he New York College of Physicians and Surgeons.

      Another example of a scion in academia using racial ideas to launch his career to prominence.

      This also provides a schism for a break between science and religion which we're still heavily dealing with in American culture.

    1. Because I’m old, I still have my students set up Feedly accounts and plug in the RSS feeds of their classmates and hopefully add other blogs to their feeds as well. And like blogging, I realize only a handful will continue but I want to expose them to the power of sharing their own research/learning via blogging and how to find others who do as well via Feedly.
    1. To further assist students in reading annotated articles, individual annotations are tagged according to a particular “learning lens,” including: glossary, for key terms; previous work; author’s experiments; results and conclusions; news and policy links; connections to learning standards; and also reference and notes.

      I once remarked on the evolution of scientific journal article titles and am surprised that they don’t mention visiting popular science journalism as a means of entering some journal articles from a broader perspective before delving into a journal article itself? They don’t always exist for all articles, but for those with interesting/broad impact they can be a more immediate way into the topic before getting in to the heavier jargon of a scientific article itself.

    1. The plan is to use the site to share surveys, interviews, and researcher notes.

      Note to self: I need to keep documenting examples of these open labs, open notebooks, etc. in the open science area.


      [also on boffosocko.com]

    1. Archaeologists said Monday that they have discovered a major prehistoric monument under the earth near Stonehenge that could shed new light on the origins of the mystical stone circle in southwestern England.

      Why in God's name are they using the word "mystical" in a science article about this? It's use only serves to muddy the water and encourage fanciful speculation and further myths.

    1. the Frauchiger-Renner paper when it first appeared on arxiv.org. In that version of the paper, the authors favored the many-worlds scenario. (The latest version of the paper, which was peer reviewed and published in Nature Communications in September, takes a more agnostic stance.

      I really love it when articles about science papers actually reference and link the original papers!

    1. In a study of the Swedish Word of Life Church, he noted that members felt part of a complex gift-exchange system, giving to God and then awaiting a gift in return (either from God directly or through another church member).[66]

      This philosophy has been around long enough that there ought to be evidence that it works for more than just the leaders of the churches. If anything, it feels like the middle classes that are practicing it are practicing it right towards poverty over the past 20 years.

    1. His weak-tie networks had been politically activated

      This makes me wonder if she's cited Mark Granovetter or any of similar sociologists yet?

      Apparently she did in footnote 32 in chapter 1. Ha!

    2. Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally to affect the entire environment. In Egypt in 2011, only 25 percent of the population of the country was on-line, with a smaller portion of those on Facebook, but these people still managed to change the wholesale public discussion, including conversa-tions among people who had never been on the site.

      There's some definite connection to this to network theory of those like Stuart Kaufmann. You don't need every node to be directly connected to create a robust network, particularly when there are other layers--here interpersonal connections, cellular, etc.

    1. A statistician is the exact same thing as a data scientist or machine learning researcher with the differences that there are qualifications needed to be a statistician, and that we are snarkier.
    1. Science experiments for kids, delivered to your door

      Neat idea for when the kids are a bit older. Science delivered.

  7. Sep 2020
    1. “Oh, what heathen advice!” I thought to myself. “In this Christian country, what heathen advice!”

      This made me chuckle a bit. Collins challenges the tension between religion and science here. It's worth noting how it is during the Victorian period that England's Christianity was put to the test the most because of famous science figures of its time like Darwin.

    1. natural sciences

      The definition for natural science are fields related to that of the physical side of the world and how it runs. This being said; wouldn't Sociology be considered up there as a Natural Science? It is the study of Social patterns which can be physical trends that influence some outcomes/events in which the world works.

    1. Hennessy, E. A., Acabchuk, R., Arnold, P. A., Dunn, A. G., Foo, Y. Z., Johnson, B. T., Geange, S. R., Haddaway, N. R., Nakagawa, S., Mapanga, W., Mengersen, K., Page, M. J., Sánchez-Tójar, A., Welch, V., & McGuinness, L. A. (2020). Ensuring Prevention Science Research is Synthesis-Ready for Immediate and Lasting Scientific Impact [Preprint]. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/ptg9j

    1. the science wars,” a fierce contest between theoretical physicists and the humanists they felt were making much ado about insuf-ficiently understood advances in science,

      Les science wars (littéralement guerres de la science) réfèrent à une série d'échanges entre des tenants du réalisme scientifique et du postmodernisme concernant la nature de la méthode scientifique. Ces échanges se sont grandement tenus lors des années 1990 dans des publications académiques et populaires américaines. [...] Les réalistes ont critiqué les approches de disciplines telles les Cultural Studies, l'anthropologie culturelle, les études féministes, la littérature comparée, la sociologie des médias et les études des sciences et technologies. Ils ont également affirmé que les critiques postmodernistes ne savent pas de quoi ils parlent (Wikipédia, « Science wars », consulté le 23 septembre 2020).

    1. ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: “having spent a few days looking at ‘debate’ about COVID policy on lay twitter (not the conspiracy stuff, just the ‘we should all be Sweden’ discussions), the single most jarring (and worrying) thing I noticed is that posters seem completely undeterred by self contradiction 1/3” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2020, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1308340430170456064

    1. “It’s this sort of infinitely flexible philosophy where, regardless of what anyone said was true about physics, they could then assert, ‘Oh, yeah, you could graft something like that onto our model,’”

      in a way, sounds like astrology

    2. 448-page preprint paper

      how can he expect people to read that with scrutiny?

    1. Had it not been for the attentiveness of one person who went beyond the task of classifying galaxies into predetermined categories and was able to communicate this to the researchers via the online forum, what turned out to be important new phenomena might have gone undiscovered.

      Sometimes our attempts to improve data quality in citizen science projects can actually work against us. Pre-determined categories and strict regulations could prevent the reporting of important outliers.

    1. However, very little has been published in the academic literature about the factors that influence people to take part in citizen science projects and why participants continue their involvement, or not.

      What do we know so far? Where are clear areas where research can be done to improve our understanding of this?

    1. A training session was not carried out by the authors for the Asian Longhorned Beetle Swimming Pool Survey, a project specific to New York State.

      Why was there not a training session for this specific project?