Philosophy & Ethics

Once upon a time, journals were horribly expensive to produce and to read.  Your research might only be read by 200 people but those 200 people knew the work was vetted by reviewers.   It had a quality standard. Open access publishing is a blessing and a curse in some ways.   Some very popular journals are not peer-reviewed, they are instead looked over by an editor who may or may not be qualified to determined its technical validity - but since they are taking money from scientists to publish the article, rather than relying on subscriptions, the concern is that the researcher…

In 2009,  UK drugs advisor Dr. David Nutt was relieved of his duties due to controversial views on the harmfulness of different drugs and the lack of evidence behind current drug policy. Various claims were that this was politically motivated and concern was that scholarly research such as Nutt's should not be subject to political attack. Agreed, but a new article in Addiction says the attack was justified because Nutt's work on the harmfulness of drugs is scientifically flawed.Jonathan Caulkins, Peter Reuter, and Carolyn Coulso argue that Nutt erred by assuming that…

Belief systems are the stories we tell ourselves to define our personal sense of "reality".  Every human being has a belief system that they utilize, and it is through this mechanism that we individually, "make sense" of the world around us. There are two forms such belief systems can take;  evidence-based or faith-based.   Science is used to build an evidence-based belief system, under the premise that the world is ultimately understandable through observation, experiment, and prediction.  The key element of science, is recognition that humans possess individual beliefs,…

Science 2.0 fave Dan Vergano at USA Today wrote an article based on the arXiv preprint written by Panagiota Kanti, Burkhard Kleihaus and Jutta Kunz called "Wormholes in Dilatonic Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet Theory". They get right to it, writing "We construct traversable wormholes in dilatonic Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory in four spacetime dimensions, without needing any form of exotic matter" - magic stuff being what Caltech's Kip Thorne said would be needed to prevent collapse of these holes in space if, you know, wormholes were science. It's a relief they were able to fix that pesky issue…

Warning: Snark Attack Ahead So you've been in the skeptic movement for a bit, dipped your toes in the waters, so to speak, and gone looking for the woonuts so as to have a blast pointing out their every fallacy and poorly thought out idea. Now what? You wanna upgrade your game some, show off your intellectual superiority and really go to town. Why limit yourself to just garden variety woo like homeopathy? If you read Stephen Law's new book Believing Bullshit, you'll be armed with a ton of great information which you can use to alienate 70% of Americans: those who believe in God. Hey…

What constitutes racism?   If you have a pool of applicants for a research grant and applications with good scores were likely to be funded, regardless of race or ethnicity, can there be racism?   A recent survey of NIH R01 applications found that applications from black investigators were 13.2 % less likely to be awarded than whites while Asian investigators were 3.9 % less likely to have their work funded.   This correlates to the number of applicants as well; blacks are only 1.4% of total applications while Asians are 16.2% and whites are almost 70%. NIH funding is not…

Turn off all of your electronic devices and gaze out the window for a few minutes. Reflect on the changes taking place on the earth. What do you see?  What do you experience? Spring in Northern Italy As you look out the window, do you see you see anything of nature?  What do you see of nature in her wholeness?  Is there, by chance, an entire ecosystem laid out before you?  If so, you are one of the fortunate souls who is viewing the earth as native cultures around the world once did.  Native peoples experienced exhilaration, joy, peace, harmony and a sense of…

Recently, by looking the faith of many people, I thought I wish to have their conviction. I would like to experience the sense of the knowledge without evidence taking for sure what I´m telling to others, the reliability of a life after this, the calmness of a universe created only for my happiness by someone I can´t see, but I can feel. I can see how happy they are, how sure they are that what they know is true and everyone else who experiences something different or a different way of thinking, is wrong. I wish to have that felling, I wish to give meaning to my life by the only act of…

If you look at the most politicized aspects of science, it is areas where scientists and science journalists became advocates and stopped being trusted guides for the public. Result: the collapse of science journalism and increased distrust of scientists in those fields. Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford, says scientists need to be more political and not less. He summed it up this way: "You often hear people say scientists should not be advocates. I think that is bull." In an interview a few days before the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America…

Because it is substantially easier, in a globally connected Internet world, to leverage someone else's names, likenesses and trademarks, American courts have expanded the legal rights regarded their uses. University at Buffalo Law School professor Mark Bartholomew is questioning whether these courts have gone too far.   A surprise, since he must know the law.  If people don't pursue active protection of their rights, they lose them.  People allowed to steal them for their own purposes have gotten less ability to do so in recent decisions but Bartholomew says the courts have…