Science & Society
A Fake Smithsonian Exhibit
The integrity of the Smithsonian Institution hinges on disseminating knowledge in an objective, thorough and fair manner. Like the freedoms that our forefathers included in the First Amendment, the freedom to present information must be a top priority of the Smithsonian. The intrusion of bias or censorship would compromise the ability of the Institution to fulfill its Congressional mandate, and would jeopardize the outstanding reputation the Institution has developed in its 157-year history.
Senator Joe Lieberman, May 20 2003lieberman-challenges-smithsonian-decision…
Hank |
Publishing is evolving and, of the big publishers (The Lancet, Cell, etc.), no one is more forward-thinking than Elsevier.
They recently announced Article-Based Publishing, their new way to publish articles as final (and citable) without needing to wait for the full journal to be complete. Article-Based Publishing is the assigning of final citation data on an article-by-article basis, separate from production of the journal issue.
This is a big step forward. The traditional model, for both pay-to-subscribe and pay-to-publish journals, is that articles are…
vongehr |
What is on the mind of all the physicists all over the world right now? Quantum Gravity? Global warming? No. It is the same that is on the mind of all the other scientists in academia, too. Impact factor (IF)! How can I get my name on a paper into a high IF journal – that is the question. Publish Or Perish – POP science, popular science.
I came across a new paper (and some older ones) these days that are definitively worth a read if you are interested in the precarious state of science and its likely getting worse:
"Nefarious numbers" by Douglas N. Arnold and Kristine Fowler just appeared on…
vongehr |
Since China becomes ever more important also for academia and science, here insights into difficulties that are not widely mentioned. I started with the language barrier, and there were points that need to be explained further.
My first point was that if you usually speak German or some such language, learning Spanish is just one more language while Mandarin equals learning three new languages: Written characters, spoken Mandarin, and Pinyin Romanization.
Reading Spanish tells you directly how to pronounce it. You talk internally while you read, training two things (that are basically just…
Hank |
Is the name Andre Geim familiar to you? If you are in science, you know him because he just won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on graphene with Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester.
If you instead like to make fun of science, you may know Geim because he received an Ig Nobel prize for levitating a frog with magnets. No, really, here is his paper Of flying frogs and levitrons. He probably took the Ig Nobel in stride and had a good time at the dinner, since he said he wasn't even aware it was Nobel season before he got the call that he was the…
A new poll by Nature and Scientific American, out in SA's October 2010 issue, notes that scientists have had a tough year - the "leaked 'Climategate' e-mails painted researchers as censorious," the H1N1 outbreak "led to charges that health officials exaggerated the danger to help Big Pharma sell more drugs," and the Harvard investigation that found holes in a professor's data. Nature and SA wanted to know - does the public1 still trust scientists?
The two polled readers using an internet survey on their Web sites, and more than 21,000 people responded.2 Here are the results:
How much do…
Hank |
I have to be honest, if a casual question arose like 'who would you believe on science topics, Michael Shermer or Lady Gaga?' I would side with Shermer.
I know, I know, that is a vicious stereotype and I haven't read every single thing Lady Gaga has said regarding science, some of which might be correct, and then compared it to every speculation someone might have overheard Shermer say somewhere, which might have been incorrect - and because I have not been able to do that sort of comparison, some fringe pseudo-science apostates will claim it is entirely possible that Lady Gaga knows more…
It's election season and the biggest schism in American culture come November voting won't be abortion or global warming, it will be the size and role of the U.S. government in the last two years. But increased government involvement is not new in American cultural debates - nor is it even new in science.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution were concerned about science and innovation in the early days of America and addressed patent rights in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution but they were also cautious about the usual bureaucracy of government holding innovation…
antunes |
When you think 'geek', is your first thought 'marry one'? If so, you may enjoy this 'how to' from blogger Leslie Sobol over at AMD (yeah, the processor manufacturers). If, on the other hand, you are yourself a geek, at least you can be happy discovering there's a cheat sheet on how to date _you_. Mostly for your paycheck and job security, I suspect, but hey, this makes us mainstream!
And yet, and yet... I find some of the Cosmo-level advice sadly viable. Not just for geek-bagging, but for snaring any spouse through faked interest and false intentions.
You don’t really…
Our ideal image of the perfect partner differs greatly from the one we have, according to new research from the University of Sheffield and the University of Montpellier in France. Why would we choose partners with a different height, weight and body mass index than those we would ideally choose?
It may be that we take what we can get.
The study found that most men and women express different mating preferences for body morphology than the actual morphology of their partners and the discrepancies between real mates and fantasies were often larger for women than for men.
The study…