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
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
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.
Continue reading Déjà vue database finally
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 ;-)
There is a great new proposal (although it will be never accepted in the scientific community)
Compile an ‘alternative’ CV of failures. Log every unsuccessful application, refused grant proposal and rejected paper. Don’t dwell on it for hours, just keep a running, up-to-date tally. If you dare — and can afford to — make it public. It will be six times as long as your normal CV.
That’s something that I just read in the DHV newsletter 11/2010 – teaching science in the church :-)
Studierende der Universität Kassel lernen auch auf Kirchenbänken. 20.616 Studierende sind derzeit eingeschrieben. Das sind 1.000 mehr als zu Beginn des vergangenen Wintersemesters und damit mehr als je zuvor. Hörsäle, Mensen und Seminarräume platzen aus den Nähten. Die Hochschulleitung hat daher zusätzliche Räume im Stadtgebiet angemietet. Hierzu gehören ein Hörsaal im Klinikum, Räume in Schulen und zwei Kirchen.
Leo at zenhabits has a great new piece:
Why I don’t care about success. ‘Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.’ (Albert Einstein)
A lot of people in my field write about how to be successful, but I try to avoid it. It’s just not something I believe is important. Now, that might seem weird: what kind of loser doesn’t want to be successful?
Me. I’m that loser. Continue reading Science success sucks (sometimes)
A Nature correspondence letter laments
Universities are experiencing a crisis of purpose, focus and content, rooted in a fundamental confusion about all three. The crisis is all the more visible as their pace of social, intellectual and technological change falls increasingly out of step with that outside. Furthermore, universities are largely reactive where they should be visionary and critical.
Of course, that’s right – how to study “biology”? What’s should be purpose, content and focus? Maybe that’s easier with “medicine” Continue reading A crisis of purpose, focus and content
is a quote from http://current.com/182434c. The comment to the post there is even better: Continue reading Humans will need two Earths by 2030
is a quote from the Enzensberger interview in ZEIT Magazin Nr. 33 (12.8.2010).
Teaching students means even teaching yourself -as thoughts are being built during speaking.
The quote seems to go back to Kleist “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” who Continue reading Die Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Sprechen
A recent article in Nature Medicine finds that the price of misconduct probes can surpass $500,000. Sure, that may be expensive Continue reading Price of poor research can surpass $5,000,000
I confess, yea, there is a misunderstanding (sometimes) between generations. A new mindset list like the Beloit College List is therefore very handy as it explains
Most students entering college for the first time this fall […] were born in 1992.
2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. […]
7. Caramel macchiato and venti half-caf vanilla latte have always been street corner lingo. […]
20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed. […]
46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station. […]
52. There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church. […]
65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus. […]
Maybe I should reserve some time to rewrite that in German with my children, yea, yea.
Being hit by some recent turns in science politics I remember a quote by Freud
“I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something you can not say aloud, or perhaps even think, though your experience of life can hardly have been different than mine.”
The source, however, is difficult to find – a letter to Oskar Pfister on Oct, 9, 1918 published in: Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, eds. Heinrich Meng and Ernst L. Freud, trans. by Eric Mosbacher. New York: Basic Books, 1963. The German version is being published in Sigmund Freud, Oskar Pfister, Briefe 1909-1939, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1963, 2. Aufl. S. 62.
Continue reading I have found little that is good about human beings on the whole
Great tips from Hugh MacLeod
1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.
3. Put the hours in. Continue reading Ignore everybody