We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements. Continue reading Science is an emergent system too
Category Archives: Philosophy
LIMIT TO 5! What about a maximum of 5 papers per year per scientist?
Undoubtly, there is an avalanche of poor research – as the Chronicle wrote last June, “we must stop the avalanche of low-quality research”
the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further
Also Genomeweb writes
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.
Continuing a discussion Continue reading LIMIT TO 5! What about a maximum of 5 papers per year per scientist?
Gambling with the planet
Found at project-syndicate.org, a piece by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Professor at Columbia University and a Nobel laureate in Economics):
In the end, those gambling in Las Vegas lose more than they gain. As a society, we are gambling – with our big banks, with our nuclear power facilities, with our planet. As in Las Vegas, the lucky few – the bankers that put our economy at risk and the owners of energy companies that put our planet at risk – may walk off with a mint. But on average and almost certainly, we as a society, like all gamblers, will lose.
That, unfortunately, is a lesson of Japan’s disaster that we continue to ignore at our peril.
The DNA window at the King’s College Chapel at the Strand
Here is another take home item of the recent EMGS 2011 meeting at the King’s College. Located in the apse there are 5 topics as originally conceived by Gilbert Scott: Christ in the carpenter’s shop, Christ and the lawyers, Christ healing the sick, Christ teaching the people and The Cruxification. While that may all be appropriate for today’s Sunday Continue reading The DNA window at the King’s College Chapel at the Strand
4 tons of CO2
I flew this night to San Francisco, having a chance to read some magazines in flight, including an interview of Stefan Klein with Peter Singer in ZEIT MAGAZIN yesterday. The interview has been done by Skype as Singer says “it is immoral to travel without serious reasons” – a classical Utilitarian perspective that does however not even stop him arguing Continue reading 4 tons of CO2
Papers 2 – disappointing
I have long been waiting for upgrading Papers 1.9 as it is getting so slow with 10,000+ PDFs; there are notorious bugs that were never fixed (just delete an entry and see what happens). With the big hype around Papers 2, I hoped that all these problems would be cured while I also urgently need OCR, annotation and citation management.
When reading at the new support forum at http://support.mekentosj.com/discussions/problems/3118-papers-2-going-back-to-papers-1 of all the glitches introduced instead, it is probably time to say good bye now to Mekentosj.
Plagiarism or sloppy citation?
We have an interesting discussion here in Germany, how many sloppy citations are being allowed in a dissertation. Does plagiarism only start with central text passages? We all have signed a form like
Ich versichere, dass ich die Arbeit ohne fremde Hilfe und ohne Benutzung anderer als der angegebenen Quellen angefertigt habe und dass die Arbeit in gleicher oder ähnlicher Form noch keiner anderen Prüfungsbehörde vorgelegen hat und von dieser als Teil einer Prüfungsleistung angenommen wurde. Alle Ausführungen, die wörtlich oder sinngemäß übernommen wurden, sind als solche gekennzeichnet.
which is rather clear: “I used only the cited references and nothing else.” Continue reading Plagiarism or sloppy citation?
We are not suggesting that peer review is infallible
Nature medicine recently acknowledged our work as science bloggers by admitting
We are not suggesting, however, that peer review is infallible. Nonetheless, as editors, we hope that anyone accepting an invitation to review a manuscript considers that commitment as being of comparable importance to the other responsibilities of a busy researcher. And although we know that more pressing issues can take precedence over reviewing a manuscript, we still expect that the same level of integrity and objective, critical analysis will be applied to the assessment of the manuscript under review as is applied to the referee’s own work.
In German we say “blauäugig” which translates to “wonderful naive”. There are so many examples of non-integrity and non-objectivity of published research where the peer review failed to a large extent – many examples here and at other sites like retractionwatch or badscience. All these papers by Friedhelm Herrmann, Marion Brach and Roland Mertelsmann with the most recent examples by Carsten Carlberg (“It’s all her fault, and probably today is the worst day of her life when the world sees what she has done”“) and Silvia Bulfone Paus (“it was Elena and Vadim and the journal editors should have caught us“)
With the pervasiveness of the Internet, and the speed of communication it permits, commentary and criticism of research findings can occur almost immediately after their online publi cation. This medium should be actively embraced by the research community as a dynamic forum.
There is not even a trackback possibility for that Nature medicine editorial – the whole blogger’s laudatio thing reeks of hypocrisy.
On the impossibility of being expert
The BMJ christmas edition has again some nice papers – with a theoretical account on denialism and the next paper on the impossibility of being expert. This looks like the best joke there, sorry Tony, probably unintended.
Since Alvin Toffler coined the phrase “information overload” in 1970, the growth of scientific and medical information has been inexorable. There are now 25 400 journals in science, technology, and medicine, and their number is increasing by 3.5% a year; in 2009, they published 1.5 million articles. PubMed now cites more than 20 million papers.
Yea, yea.
Keep secret
There is a new Edge Special Event about the Hillis’s question “WHO GETS TO KEEP SECRETS?”
The question of secrecy in the information age is clearly a deep social (and mathematical) problem, and well worth paying attention to.
When does my right to privacy trump your need for security?; Should a democratic government be allowed to practice secret diplomacy? Would we rather live in a world with guaranteed privacy or a world in which there are no secrets? If the answer is somewhere in between, how do we draw the line?
With all the wikileaks hype over the last year, the Edge essay is la perfect supplement to our last paper about anonymity in genetics – check out BMC Ethics “Caught you: Threats to confidentiality due to the public release of large-scale genetic data sets“.
What we didn’t mention in this paper are more complicated statistics like stochastic record linkage – more on that in RJournal 2/2010, p.61 ff
Lies, damned lies
The best science journalism paper IMHO this year is about a researcher who could resist the
intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded
The story may be found at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/ Continue reading Lies, damned lies
Science – a belief system
I haven’t followed up most recent developments in philosophy and was therefore quite intrigued by a lecture of Hannes Leitgeb last week about “Reducing belief simpliciter to degrees of belief” – or should I say degrees of probability? Details about the lecture in my notes. While common sense would put belief more to the theology department, modern philosophers have a quite different position as he further explained me (and which are excellently summarized at plato.stanford.edu)
contemporary analytic philosophers of mind generally use the term “belief” to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. To believe something, in this sense, needn’t involve actively reflecting on it: Of the vast number of things ordinary adults believe, only a few can be at the fore of the mind at any single time. Nor does the term “belief”, in standard philosophical usage, imply any uncertainty or any extended reflection about the matter in question (as it sometimes does in ordinary English usage). Many of the things we believe, in the relevant sense, are quite mundane: that we have heads, that it’s the 21st century, that a coffee mug is on the desk. Forming beliefs is thus one of the most basic and important features of the mind, and the concept of belief plays a crucial role in both philosophy of mind and epistemology.
Philosophers target a universal definition Continue reading Science – a belief system
Déjà vue database finally
There is a new database that describes itself as
a database of extremely similar Medline citations. Many, but not all, of which contain instances of duplicate publication and potential plagiarism. Deja vu is a dynamic resource for the community, with manual curation ongoing continuously, and we welcome input and comments.
Getting most out of your money
Funding strategies are seldom reviewed. But note, there is a new paper in Nature “Follow the money” with an result that I find plausible:
In general, we find that sponsors who concentrate funds in fewer institutions have lower research impact as measured by early-citation counts. It may well be that when groups from multiple institutions vie for funding, competition increases, review processes become less partial and more promising projects are selected.
So, funding should not be concentrated too much (and together with an earlier finding here from the Ig Noble prize 2010) it even doesn’t matter whom to fund ;-)
Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
see also www.thelastlecture.com