Category Archives: Philosophy

Vanish

Finally, here is a technical solution to a proposal that I made here earlier

Ok, we are aware that recovery is always possible with cut & paste into other applications or printing a text -so we may better think about some watermarked graphics. “Don’t ever say anything on e-mail or text messaging that you don’t want to come back and bite you.”

Attention grabbing headlines

NI has an editorial on hyping research

Although these attention-grabbing headlines might help sell papers and increase traffic to newspaper websites, such reporting is irresponsible to the public and to science in general. Even if the article itself is more balanced, it must be remembered that many readers never get much beyond the headline. The net result is the public comes away with much misinformation.

Continue reading Attention grabbing headlines

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

I have just discovered that the book of Helmut Kiene”Komplementäre Methodenlehre der klinischen Forschung. Cognition-based Medicine. Berlin – Heidelberg – New York: Springer; 2001, 193 S. ISBN 3-540-41022-8 is now being online available as PDF – a must read for all clinical researchers.

Addendum 26 Feb 2021

Sorry for the title that involuntarily replicated a title from paper published already 14 years before  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7647644/

Rejection hurts. Why everybody needs somebody

515 citations of an article in 5 years – it is timely to revisit “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion” by Eisenberger in Science magazine. I was refered to that study by “Lob der Schule” (an excellent book).

Participants were scanned while playing a virtual ball-tossing game in which they were ultimately excluded. Paralleling results from physical pain studies, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active during exclusion.

These are bad news for all victims of workplace bullying or university harassment – their brains will react like under stimulation of physical harm leading to aggression as found in many studies

A wide variety of studies with animal as well as human subjects demonstrate that pain often gives rise to an inclination to hurt an available target, and also, at the human level, that people in pain are apt to be angry.

So, the final aggression of the victim is used to further isolate it – a vicious circle.

Rolling Stones

Blues Brothers

10.1.2019 revisited

The facts seem to be now largely accepted, see an article in Psychology Today: Is Social Pain Real Pain? and the 2012 review by Eisenberger. More recently some authors even think that “The salience of self, not social pain, is encoded by dorsal anterior cingulate and insula“.

 

How to increase blogging?

Nature has a headline about “how to stop blogging

Is the scientific conference in its death throes? Researchers have long anguished about the hyper-competitive culture that leads attendees to suppress their most interesting unpublished results. Such protectiveness can only be worsened by the increasing dissemination of results beyond the conference hall by bloggers.

Oh, do they really ask if scientific conferences are in its death throes? Big scientific conferences that have deadlines 1 year in advance? Big scientific conferences where I take notes for 6 or 8 hours and discover in the evening that there is nothing, definitely nothing new?

What is a fake journal?

I have no answer on that question – the differentiation between qualified science, parascience and quack is not easy. Nature medicine, however, knows

The recent controversy kicked off when The Australian newspaper and The Scientist magazine reported on the existence of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine … Continue reading What is a fake journal?

What discriminates science journalists and science bloggers?

A recent opinion article in Nature may serve as my diving board here. Althoug texts are much better edited by professional journalists, the content isn’t better (driven mainly by press release). And of course, journalists must write about topics outside of their knowledge zone. Funny, they resemble

more that of a priest, taking information from a source of authority and communicating it to the congregation.

Journalists don’t have enough time for the details while bloggers can restrict themselves to their main expertise ;-) raising also a large amount of public awareness.

My 5th sense

We are equipped with senses to react to sudden environmental changes but we do not even have any reflex to react to slow and gradual environmental changes. Wikibooks has a nice entry about Peter Senge that covers in more detail his “5th sense”. I found this entry by the beer game(while reasoning about logistics of science factories).

Clash between our genes & environment

Thenew book by Gibson “It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick” raises some interesting points (from the Amazon review)

Our genome is out of equilibrium, both with itself and its environment. Simply put, our genes aren’t coping well with modern culture. Continue reading Clash between our genes & environment

Stagnancy at terrific speed or the impact of impact

Besides another critical review of the impact game this month in LJ, I found a ever more devastating paper at the University of Konstanzclick for the Babelfish translation. Continue reading Stagnancy at terrific speed or the impact of impact

The use of Powerpoint has been a disaster

Being asked to give another presentation on whatesoever topic and to deposit my slides on whatsoever intranet, the famous quote of John Sweller came to my point

It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.

So, as I tend to use only slides with cartoons and figures (but no bullet points which are in my notes only) these illustrations are rather useless as a stand-alone file at any Ilias platform. In other words

if your presentation visuals taken in the aggregate (e.g., your “owerPoint deck”) can be perfectly and completely understood without your narration, then it begs the question: why are you there?

I remember a lecture by my doctoral advisor who came in the lecture room with just 1 glass slide in his shirt pocket … More intelligent comments about that issue at presentationzen.com