According to Nature news Matthias Kleiner is cited as
This low percentage of women [in professorships] is a scandal for German science, and at the same time it’s a waste of intellectual resources.
The percentage of women in science is not a waste of intellectual resources -beware- it is the missing high percentage which is certainly not the same….
This question goes back nearly 20 years when I asked Professor Busch (who wrote a most insightful biography on Karl Barth) as I couldn’t find anything neither in Günsbach nor in Zürich where most of Schweitzer’s writing are being stored. But now – equipped with a national license to the digital Barth library– I found a letter of Barth to Thurneysen that makes such a meeting likely in November 1928 Continue reading Did Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer ever meet?
According to Wikipedia on May 24, 1844 Samuel Morse sent his famous words “What hath God wrought” from the B&O’s Baltimore station to the Capitol Building along the wire – the first email. Continue reading First email or the driving force of science
LJ 11/2008 has a two page report about German science bloggers – they estimate their current number to 180 – not really a big number if science is being viewed as “knowledge broking business” in a country with 377 universities, yea, yea.
I had to give several lectures last week explaining lay people how genomic studies work. I finally decided to compare the human DNA with the bible text – not so much in the sense of Collins’ language of God but the sheer amount of information contained in a single cell.
Here is just one slide of this talk – it seems that the comparison worked quite well – in particular the fact that if you can read a text you will not necessarily understand it. Continue reading How to explain genomics to lay people
Although having travelled this year more than ever before (with 8x Bozen, 2x London, 2x Berlin, 1x Paris, 1x Barcelona, 1x Prague and 1x Washington) there are two important conferences that I missed. Both were aiming at the inner workings of science that interests me more than science itself Continue reading Conferences I should have attended in 2008
or any patent from oblivion, in preservations below the moon – the predicament of Sir Thomas Browne in Cyril Connolly’s “Enemies of Promise”, a book just recently recommended to me. My pidgin science is certainly not good enough to appreciate enough to wonderful descriptions like on page 30 “look on my works ye mortals and despair”. The scientist Continue reading In vain do individuals hope for immortality
… also for some people in the field the main paradigma in science. To cite Wikipedia
Bush’s assertion — and the sign itself — became controversial after guerilla warfare in Iraq increased during the Iraqi insurgency. The vast majority of casualties, among both coalition (approximately 98.3% as of October 2008) and Iraqi combatants, and among Iraqi civilians, have occurred after the speech. Due to this fact, “Mission Accomplished” is now a winged word for uncompleted operations with an unclear ending.
goodbye GB!
We already discussed here “how doctors think?k” while a new essay in the Lancet now even asks “Can doctors think“?
Disease can be recognised by the doctor and the patient (mumps), by the doctor but not the patient (schizophrenia), by some doctors but not others (social phobia), by doctors in some times but not others (melancholy …), and by doctors in some places but not others (embedded incisor tooth because an ancestor’s ghost is angry).
marvelous, yea, yea.
I am currently working on a literature survey on the genetics of ageing when I came across a series of nice monographs at the Max Planck Institute in Rostock.
… the Deluge swept away the pluricentenarians. Ernest (1938) mentioned that the semi-divine persons of the Hindu Sagas lived hundred of thousands of years, and that on average each of ten rulers of Ancient Babylon lived about 43,000 years. Continue reading Would you like to be a centenarian?
As our government now even pays us to write applications for European collaborations instead of putting this money directly into grants – here comes another quick post on what a Nobel says:
There is a notion favored by some that individual scientists need to be corralled to work together under a more rigid, directed framework to solve important problems. We disagree. Real innovation comes from the bottom up, and good science policy requires promoting the free market of ideas rather than central planning.
BTW the postdog is sitting at the Kornberg site.
Truthiness was the 2005 neologism in the large country somewhere over/under our horizon (depending on what horizon you are looking). Continue reading Truthiness in science
A paper by Young / Ioannidis / Al-Ubaydli attacks the oligopoly of biomedical journals (just as I have done here many times including also the idea of a winner’s curse). From the press release
The current system of publishing medical and scientific research provides “a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic,” says a team of researchers in this week’s PLoS Medicine […]
There is an “extreme imbalance,” they say, between the abundance of supply (the output of basic science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the increasingly limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact). Continue reading The price we have to pay for better science
It seems that there are two numbering systems in humans – a general sense of numbers for some quick and dirty estimates and some more genuine computation skills of showing the result of (2327)^2. At least the first capacity seems to be inborn (and an important survival skill). According a recent SZ article (29th Sept 2008) a host of new studies now show that
the two number systems, the bestial and celestial, may be profoundly related, an insight with potentially broad implications for math education
and as I believe – for science in general as most science fields are being dominated by the Fermi problem. Continue reading Basic instinct for math?
Under the headline â€Journals under Threat: A Joint Response from HSTM Editors†the editors of some of the leading international journals for history and philosophy of science and social studies of science have issued a joint declaration that I received by email and that I am reprinting here to give it a larger audience.
We live in an age of metrics. All around us, things are being standardized,
quantified, measured. Scholars concerned with the work of science and
technology must regard this as a fascinating and crucial practical, Continue reading Journals under Threat