It would be interesting to follow up this historical (1571x cited) paper on mechanisms of consumer choice. Are there similar mechanisms in science consumation e.g. the price we are willing to pay after having read an abstract?
We have learned new genomics and metabolomics (etc not to confuse with economics!) while even complete websites are now dedicated to the omics explosion. What I do not understand is the increasing omics use in completely unrelated fields like humanomics – a good or bad omen?
Besides another critical review of the impact game this month in LJ, I found a ever more devastating paper at the University of Konstanz – click for the Babelfish translation. Continue reading Stagnancy at terrific speed or the impact of impact
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
A slide set that I would have liked as a trailer for my recent talk about science and religion…
When I could not replicate results from original data of a recent study I thought this to be my private problem. It seems, however, that I am not alone here when reading another reanalysis attempt:
We reproduced two analyses in principle and six partially or with some discrepancies; ten could not be reproduced.
Continue reading I can not confirm that
Nassim Taleb points in his black swan book (p181 in the German edition 2008) towards the “toxicity” of continuously added information. He is citing experiments from the 1960ies where students were offered increasingly sharp pictures of water pipes. Students in the group with slightly inceasing sharp pictures had much more problems to recognize the pipe in constrast to the group being offered the same picture without any interim pictures. Together with the experiments of Stuart Oskamp it seems more difficult to discover real breakthroughs when being too deeply involved (and obsessed by getting the complete literature in a particular field). This even questions my daily Pubmed alerts; I will change them now to monthly update.
Bert Brecht
… Ich, sagte er uns
Bin der Zweifler, ich zweifle, ob
Die Arbeit gelungen ist, die eure Tage verschlungen hat.
Ob, was ihr gesagt, auch schlechter gesagt, noch für einige Wert hätte. Continue reading Le Doubs
Widely cheered in the blogosphere, Science magazine asked if we as scientists “are ready to be become a number”.
So, in general, I think there’s plenty of agreement that this sort of author ID system is past due. It can do everything from ease the process of manuscript submission to help researchers mine the existing volume of scientific data.
Sure, a unique DOI like ID Continue reading I am a scientist
Life expectancy of physicians is lower in most countries – an argument why Karl Kraus may be right:
Was ist’s mit den Analysen? Kann da ein Zweifel bleiben? Die Methode ist bewiesen an jenen, die sie treiben. Daß man mit euch nur scherzte – welch törichter Gedanke! Im Gegenteil: die Ärzte sind Kranke.
While just recovering from an orthopedic procedure (see picture below) my impression is that the quality of medical care has very much approved during the years. The performance of a surgeon can be always immediately verified ;-)
Neuroscientists largely see the “free will as an illusion” – according to a recent essay in Nature. As the author of this interesting essay, I have a major problem to give up the idea of a “free will” (mainly for theodicy reasons that needs a free will of humans). Maybe our will is being influenced by many factors, it is not always a conscious decision and it can of course be altered by chemicals or diseases. Nevertheless the subjective, sudden and not anticipated impetus to do something – for example writing a blog about free will – is a symptom of free will even with all existing antinomies, yea, yea.
Still in the spirit of the last few posts, here comes something exciting: sciflies.org aims at
We look forward to receiving your application for funding of initial proof-of-concept STEM research projects in the range of $5,000 to $12,000. To participate in this unique online grassroots-funded opportunity, please complete the questionnaire about your project, including details of its possible outcome/impact and profiles of the researchers or research team.
but, sorry, I have to warn you – the website does NOT save your project – it took me 20 minutes to figure that out.
During my recent lecture series on science and religion, I tried to make clear that science includes many beliefs in addition to hard facts while religions encompasses hard facts in addition to many beliefs.
So what about the fuzzy approach of intuition or educated guess in a prototypical biological experiment? If this is not just a dose or time variation from a previous experiment, it will always involve an extrapolation from somewhat related facts believing that the next experiment will be better than the last Continue reading In-tui-tion, In-tui-fiction and educated guess
FYI – a citation from “Accountability of Research”
Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of $30,000 (average grant). This means the Canadian Federal Government could institute direct grants for 100% of qualified applicants for the same money. We anticipate that the net result would be more and better research since more research would be conducted at the critical idea or discovery stage.
Will that be ever read by our governments? Nay, nay.
Frequently given answers – an article at Spiegel online has some of the answers you will need when being asked by research administratives or journalists for your work.
Please, please, please don’t try on my phone.