courtesy of Dr Lutz Boehm on Jun 26, 2022

courtesy of Dr Lutz Boehm on Jun 26, 2022

This is a quote from Harry Potter book about the Knight Bus
The Knight Bus is a triple-decker, purple AEC Regent III RT that assists stranded individuals of the wizarding community through public transportation. It operates at a very fast speed and obstacles will jump out of its way. To hail the bus, a witch or wizard must stick their wand hand in the air in the same manner that a Muggle might do to hail a taxi. The Knight Bus’ conductor is Stan Shunpike, who greets passengers and handles baggage. It is driven by Ernie Prang.
How come the Muggles don’t hear the bus? Because they don’t look for it. Nobody looks for a bus moving at the speed that the Night Bus moves at.
U.S. science is moving at Night Bus speed when the White House issued a new policy yesterday that will require, by 2026, all federally-funded research results to be freely available to the public without delay.
This research, which changes our lives and transforms our world, is made possible by American tax dollars. And yet, these advancements are behind a paywall and out of reach for too many Americans. In too many cases, discrimination and structural inequalities – such as funding disadvantages experienced by minority-serving colleges and institutions – prevent some communities from reaping the rewards of the scientific and technological advancements they have helped to fund. Factors including race, age, disability status, geography, economic background, and gender have historically and systemically excluded some Americans from the accessing the full benefits of scientific research. To tackle this injustice, and building on the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to advance policy that benefits all of America, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released new policy guidance today to ensure more equitable access to federally funded research.
What about the German muggles BMBF, DFG, the major German academies, research and ethics organizations? How come that muggles don’t hear the bus? Because they don’t look for it. Nobody looks for a bus moving at the speed that the Night Bus moves at.
There is an interesting paper on brain drain Why does the U.S. have the best research universities? Incentives, resources, and virtuous circles?
A demand for denominational sorting drove the creation of the nine American colonial colleges. For example, Massachusetts Puritans created Harvard to produce what they saw as a theologically sound education … Connecticut-based Puritans created Yale because they perceived that the Harvard of Massachusetts-based Puritans was too physically distant (in addition to too religiously liberal)
The authors attribute the following U.S. success to “reforms that began after the Civil War and enhanced the incentives and resources the system directs at research” which may be true. Maybe the overall strategy of the paper is questionable, looking at biographies of Nobel prize winners only- nevertheless the trend is clear that German impact is decreasing already in 1920 – while I always thought of an exodus of scientists only after 1933.
The U.S. does not spread so much money to various non-university based “Großforschung” organisations and there is much more private sponsoring of U.S. universities, so monies are more concentrated.
Higher salaries, lower teaching, and enhanced laboratory space illustrate some ways in which professors’ compensation began to reflect research performance. Furthermore, this period saw the emergence of tenure, a salient reward for performance.
The emergence of tenure seems to be important if you can make your living from your work and do not need to start campaigning like #IchbinHanna in Germany.

Schön jedenfalls die vielen juristischen und historischen Einordnungen in diesem Twitter Thread. Es fehlt dabei nur Grafton
Die Fußnote, besonders die deutsche, wird oft für den Inbegriff langweiliger Wissenschaft, für einen Geheim-Code trockener akademischer Gelehrsamkeit gehalten. Doch das heißt, sie als Tummelplatz der Leidenschaften, als Schlachtfeld intellektueller Kämpfe zu verkennen. Anthony Grafton ist es unter Einsatz von zahlreichen Fußnoten gelungen, neues Licht auf ihr Schattendasein zu werfen und ihre dramatische Bandbreite darzulegen.
und die FAZ Fußnote zu Grafton
Geisteswissenschaftler lächeln gerne über den vermeintlich naiven Objektivismus der Naturwissenschaftler. Dabei ist die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft der geisteswissenschaftlichen Konkurrenz in der Kritik der wissenschaftlichen Denkformen weit voraus. Thomas Kuhn regte Chemiker und Physiker an, nach der Geschichte von Versuchsanordnungen und Beweisverfahren zu fragen.
/www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04198-4 (via @emollick)
Surveys are a crucial tool for understanding public opinion and behaviour, and their accuracy depends on maintaining statistical representativeness of their target populations by minimizing biases from all sources. Increasing data size shrinks confidence intervals but magnifies the effect of survey bias: an instance of the Big Data Paradox … We show how a survey of 250,000 respondents can produce an estimate of the population mean that is no more accurate than an estimate from a simple random sample of size 10
It basically confirms my earlier observation in asthma genetics
this result was possible with just 415 individuals instead of 500,000 individuals nowadays
Comment on the Palm paper by u/Flaky_Suit_8665 via @hardmaru
67 authors, 83 pages, 5408 parameters in a model, the internals of which no one can say they comprehend with a straight face, 6144 TPUs in a commercial lab that no one has access to, on a rig that no one can afford, trained on a volume of data that a human couldn’t process in a lifetime, 1 page on ethics with the same ideas that have been rehashed over and over elsewhere with no attempt at a solution – bias, racism, malicious use, etc. – for purposes that who asked for?
(Brandon Stell)
(Boris Barbour)
700.000 page hits/ day show that the trust based system of science is broken
“Intensive research goes for fundamental laws … there is always much less intensive research going on”.

hinted by @spornslab
a new proposal by Ivan Oransky
Retractions must be supported as an essential part of healthy science. Sleuths should be compensated and given access to tools to improve the hunt for errors and fraud — not face ridicule, harassment and legal action. Publishers could create a cash pool to pay them, similar to the ‘bug bounties’ that reward hackers who detect flaws in computer security systems. At the same time, institutions should appropriately assess researchers who honestly aim to correct the record. Retractions should not be career killers — those correcting honest errors should be celebrated.
We always laughed at the papers in the “Journal of Irreproducible Results”

then we had the replication crisis and nobody laughed anymore.
And today? It seems that irreproducible research is set to reach a new height. Elizabeth Gibney discusses an arXiv paper by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan basically saying that
reviewers do not have the time to scrutinize these models, so academia currently lacks mechanisms to root out irreproducible papers, he says. Kapoor and his co-author Arvind Narayanan created guidelines for scientists to avoid such pitfalls, including an explicit checklist to submit with each paper … The failures are not the fault of any individual researcher, he adds. Instead, a combination of hype around AI and inadequate checks and balances is to blame.
Algorithms being stuck on shortcuts that don’t always hold has been discussed here earlier . Also data leakage (good old confounding) due to proxy variables seems to be also a common issue.
Wikipedia zu Hausberufung / internal appointment
Unter einer Hausberufung versteht man die Berufung eines Hochschulbediensteten zum Professor an derselben Hochschule bzw. Universität, an der er bislang fest beschäftigt ist. In der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (DDR) war die Hausberufung eine übliche Vorgehensweise.In der Bundesrepublik Deutschland besteht hingegen landläufig ein sogenanntes Hausberufungsverbot … Ziel der Beschränkungen ist es, eine ungebührliche „wissenschaftliche Ämterpatronage“, Nepotismus oder unlautere Bevorzugung aufgrund persönlicher Beziehungen bei der Besetzung akademischer Stellen zu verhindern.
Viele oder wenig Hausberufungen machen also den Unterschied zwischen einem demokratischen und einem diktatorischen System aus.
information has (capitalized) value
libraries have seen the impact of increased corporate domination, budget shortfalls, and the corporatization of higher education. We are gouged by publishers like Elsevier who offer package subscriptions with exponentially increasing costs … Many corporate library vendors have consolidated to further ensure market power and control, a process which has often rewarded the largest companies…. While companies like Elsevier make record profits, library workers of all types face increasingly precarious work arrangements and they serve students who are anxious about affording skyrocketing tuition as well as outrageous textbook prices.