Science & Society
Can crowdsourcing lead to better medicine? Crowdsourcing is used in astronomy and protein folding in biology, along with engineering and computer software. But can the 'wisdom of crowds' also help cure disease?
It's certainly possible. An unheralded clockmaker in England named John Harrison showed that longitude could be determined by using a timepiece, making the study of astronomy by experts overkill and revolutionizing travel by sea
A group at Harvard created The Challenge in February to find out if citizen science could work for diabetes research too, and their results…
A group of scientists say they have conducted a comprehensive study of how different body measurements correspond with ratings of female attractiveness. Even across cultural divides, women who are young, tall and long armed were considered the most attractive, they found, to little surprise.
According to the researchers, traditional studies of attractiveness used a natural selection framework - an individual will always choose the best possible mate that circumstances will allow (romance of the fitter?). Those studies focused on torso, waist, bust and hip measurements.
In this new…
If you are a scientist in any field you have had to deal with a member of the public who did not understand the word theory. This blog post intends to be a simple explanation for the willing but confused. What are theories how are they arrived at?
The word theory has it's roots in the scientific method. (In order to divorce this from creationism or the theory that the ancient Egyptians were really black Africans and other emotionally charged topics I shall write in Abstract terms. )
The scientific method has several basic steps.
Observation of some phenomena.…
A postdoc's view of the changing world of academic research
'What's on your mind?' These are the four words taunting me on my Facebook page as I wind down from a long day at work. Today that may be a tough one to answer in a witty one-liner. The postdoc union this week reached a tentative agreement with the University of California to help implement a whole host of improvements to postdoc working conditions, and I was obliged to vote for or against its ratification.
Negotiations have been ongoing over the past two years since I arrived at the University and…
Airlines, hotel companies, anything with a date attached, know they have you on the hook the closer to that date because no one buys airline tickets for tomorrow unless they are desperate, and there are fewer tickets available, so capitalism says you consumers will pay more because they must.
But even William Shatner knows the airline seat or hotel room has no value for the corporation either, once it is gone - he works for a corporation that makes money selling last-minute fares and hotel rooms because it is an asset that expires. That can be your advantage also because airlines and others…
vongehr |
I live in China, in Nanjing, which is not too far from Shanghai, and work at Nanjing University (NJU). This type of adventure becomes popular. China gains in popularity also among academics. It seems to become a viable career move. I have been by now off and on for 5 years in China and can attest that it booms at a frightening, literally scary speed. It cannot go on at this pace, but nothing stops people from coming to the cities except the slow choking of everything.
5 years ago, it seemed I was one of few foreigners here, although Nanjing is traditionally a beautiful university town popular…
Hank |
There was a time a few years ago when the music industry was in the doldrums. They blamed MP3 piracy, though it made no sense unless you were the kind of person who believes 'jobs saved or created' is also a valid metric for beneficial impact of government stimulus plans - basically, claiming that every pirated piece of music was a lost sale was unrealistically hopeful. Most pirates may download something, but they weren't going to buy it anyway.
Yet capitalism began to reshape the music industry even when they couldn't figure out how themselves. iTunes made it elegant for…
Hank |
It's been a mantra that more money has to be spent on outreach for women in academia, or even quotas implemented. Why? Women PhDs are now the majority, at least in the US. This was an obvious trend since there were more underclass and graduate program females (60%).
But like any sort of cultural agenda, it is perpetual, so now it will be the case that not enough department heads are female. This was the same in the NBA, where after it became 70% black there were no calls to recruit more whites or latinos, but rather calls to have 70% of the coaches be black.
Culture…
The scientific elite have been moving forward with their advancements in science at an accelerated pace over the past one hundred years. It is this exponentially speedy development that is providing modest hope to even the Gen-X babies at reaching the moment in the near future--maybe as early as 2042--where living forever will be a technological reality.
This seemly unbounded, fast-forward approach is presumed to be an unquestioned modus operandi for the professional scientist. One must publish or perish in the academic world, and one must be the first to figure out the new…
vongehr |
My series on cheating is about very disturbing trends in science. These posts will draw a gloomy picture about modern science. And I am not talking from the outside like philosophers in so called 'science studies', who mostly would not look at a test tube if you hit them over the head with one.
I am still personally involved (!), and this in turn implies that I cannot present you with anything but the mere tip of an iceberg, otherwise I would kill my own career. I have already almost no career, because I blew the whistle when doing my PhD. Big mistake – stupid me still believed in the…