Erika Check Hayden ( who asked me by email before she wrote that piece ) has a new article about “A broken contract – as researchers find more uses for data, informed consent has become a source of confusion. Something has to change“. While I largely agree with her analysis of the current situation, her points for change are somewhat weakly described ( BTW that paper already generated a heated discussion at The Mermaid’s Tale: “Informed consent — who’s it supposed to protect, anyway?” ). Continue reading A broken contract
Category Archives: Philosophy
What is life?
There is an interesting discussion going on starting with Trifinov’s ( whom I met here last year ) seminal paper in J Biomol Struct Dyn 2011
Analysis of the vocabulary of 123 tabulated definitions of life reveals nine groups of defining terms of which the groups (self-)reproduction and evolution (variation) appear as the minimal set for a concise and inclusive definition: Life is self-reproduction with variations… Over 100 of definitions of life exist today– learned opinions each one of which is, or has been in the past, defended not without a reason though generally met with skepticism. Continue reading What is life?
A biased scientific result is no different from a useless one
is a quote from a recent Nature column “Beware the creeping cracks of bias”. A great article, that summarizes why the impact oriented biomedical science is at risk producing meaningless and useless results: Continue reading A biased scientific result is no different from a useless one
Science is not about certainity. But also not objective at all?
Re-post of a conversation with Carlo Rovelli 30/5/2012
I seem to be saying two things that contradict each other. On the one hand, we trust scientific knowledge, on the other hand, we are always ready to modify in-depth part of our conceptual structure about the world. But there is no contradiction, because the idea of a contradiction comes from what I see as the deepest misunderstanding about science: the idea that science is about certainty.”
which is in line Continue reading Science is not about certainity. But also not objective at all?
Wearing headphones at work
When visiting other institutes, I frequently see scientists wearing headphones ( I only use my Bose headphones to make noise – only yesterday I couldn’t resist t download the free Goldberg variations from Kickstarter ). entertainment.slashdot.org now details what I already feared Continue reading Wearing headphones at work
Peer Review Lottery
From a recent call for a conference in my mailbox ( July 17th, Orlando, Florida, KGCM 2012
Richard Smith also affirmed that regarding peer review there is “more evidence of harm than benefit…[and] Studies so far have shown that it is slow, expensive, ineffective, something of a lottery, prone to bias and abuse, and hopeless at spotting errors and fraud.”
Smith, R, 2006, “The trouble with medical journals,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 99, March, 2006, p. 116 (accessed at http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/content/99/3/115.full.pdf)
38% – not such a big interest
Only 38% voted in the DFG election
Zur Fachkollegienwahl waren mehr als 110.000 Wissenschaftler aufgerufen. Sie konnten vom 7. November bis zum 5. Dezember 2011 in einer der weltweit größten Online-Wahlen über die Besetzung der Fachkollegien für die Amtsperiode von 2012 bis 2015 entscheiden. Rund 38,2 Prozent der Wahlberechtigten nutzten ihr Stimmrecht.
The psychology behind exaggerated research
just a link today Continue reading The psychology behind exaggerated research
Who needs a leader?
asks a second-hand report in Nature” last week citing an earlier PNAS study Continue reading Who needs a leader?
Crossmarks
Papers are not sacred – this what I have been advocating even after having personal distress after commenting on a PLoS ONE paper. Nevertheless, the new Nature editorial supports my view
What is needed, instead, is a system of publication that is more meritocratic in its evaluation of performance and productivity in the sciences. It should expand the record of a scientific study past an individual paper, including additional material such as worthy blog posts about the results, media coverage and the number of times that the paper has been downloaded.
where Crossmark may jump in Continue reading Crossmarks
Infinite stupidity?
This is a new Edge conversation with Mark D Pagel.
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. Continue reading Infinite stupidity?
I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers
(Blanche DuBois, played by Vivien Leigh in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ by Tennessee Williams, 1951). And science even more depends on the ingenuity of others – maybe another reason why all these impact and best cited counters should be a thing of the past.
The lying Dutchman
Another series of faked studies are reported by washingtonpost
“Many of Stapel’s students graduated without having ever run an experiment, the report says. Stapel told them that their time was better spent analyzing data and writing. The commission writes that Stapel was ’lord of the data’ in his collaborations. It says colleagues or students who asked to see raw data were given excuses or even threatened and insulted.”
Make hypotheses!
The main challenge for bioinformatics is certainly not to stop at the description of all these nice networks and pathways but to develop hypotheses that add to our understanding (and that may be tested further). So, I am a little bit late to say that I liked the presentation of Sascha Sauer ( MPG Berlin ) at a meeting Paris at May 31, 2011 on genomic epidemiology using the title “Make hypotheses”. Continue reading Make hypotheses!
Too much to read too little time
I didn’t find so much time to update the blog during the past few months – there are too many attractions out there, and so many interesting things to do. The never ending problem is that there is too much to read and too little time. This is, however, what also other people find, for example genomeweb.com
Pedro Beltrao at the Public Rambling blog says there never seems to be enough time to keep up with all the literature researchers keep churning out. In 2009, 848,865 papers were added to PubMed, he says — that’s something like 1.6 papers per minute. While there’s definitely no scarcity of outlets to publish, is anyone even paying attention?
Or the Latest Everything blog
From a half-forgotten Einstein quote to the complete works of J. S. Bach, everything is instantly available. But what can we really do with it all? A HALF-CENTURY ago Marshall McLuhan wrote: “We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience.”
who republishes theNew Scientist article (04 April 2011) pp. 1-3 in Surfing the data flood: Continue reading Too much to read too little time