A review of “Unscientific America” on p 678 in Science Magazine 7 Aug 2009 finds
According to Mooney and Kirshenbaum, atheistic scientists such as Richard Dawkins and P. Z. Myers [who runs the immensely popular science blog Pharyngula] drive people away from science by forcing them to choose between the facts and their faith.
I am curently working on a new lecture series on that topic – having a gut feeling that the evolutionary history will explain how and why we get diseases. Some German magazines (“Fehlkonstruktion Mensch” DER SPIEGEL 40/2009) even write about that topic quoting a forthcoming book of Ganten / Deichmann / Spahl). I will rely, however, mostly on Continue reading evo-devo-dis
was die Welt zusammen hält… Continue reading Collegium logicum
From a press release
Today, the open-access publisher the Public Library of Science (PLoS; www.plos.org), announces the release of an expanded set of article-level metrics Continue reading First major publisher releases article metrics
Overfunding of research seems to be a largely neglected area. Getting money twice for the same project (or doing something different than being in the application) seems to be the “creative” Continue reading How to cheat with timesheet
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.”
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
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/
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“.
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?
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?
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.
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).
Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Continue reading Encased in darkness
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