Category Archives: Philosophy

Kuhn is Kant on wheels

5.06.2007 admin

I liked that quote from Professor Lipton in a recent essay about the “World of Science” where he repeats his earlier “Kuhn is Kant on wheels“:

Like Kant, Kuhn held that the world described by science is a world partially constituted by cognition. But whereas Kant held that there is only one form the human contribution could take, Kuhn argued that the contribution changes as science changes. Kuhn is Kant on wheels.

I am more attracted by an objectivist than a constructivist view — where the world has its own structure that is only revealed by science (at least in part) and religion (also in other parts). As I am currently reading Klemke – probably one of the best books in the field – maybe that will change my mind? Nay, nay.

Philosophy

Impact – the only currency that counts?

4.06.2007 admin

From Third Culture:

… a competent connoisseur of French wine is not one who has drunk the largest number of different bottles of wine, but someone who is able to make sense of labels, appelations, regions [and] names of grapes…

Cheers!

Philosophy

The fourth major problem in epidemiology

2.06.2007 admin

Moblog: Madrid, Parque del Retiro. Epidemiology ist always a cost intensive enterprise. Only those epidemiologists have enough funds for doing research who are spending most of their time on fund raising, speaking into every microphone and smiling into every camera. Continue reading The fourth major problem in epidemiology →

Philosophy, Software

Advertising on Pubmed

25.05.2007 admin

You donÂ´t believe that? It is possible as you can see here Continue reading Advertising on Pubmed →

Philosophy

How doctors think

24.05.2007 admin

I attended yesterday a video talk by Jerome Groopman as he had become too ill to travel from Boston to San Francisco. His speech was one of the highlights of this year’s ATS conference – basically a summary of his new book “How doctors think“. It tells you about MDs and how they make up their diagnosis. Mostly everything goes right but sometimes everything goes wrong. According to empirical research a working diagnosis is already being made within 18 seconds Continue reading How doctors think →

Allergy, Genetics, Philosophy

The third largest problem in epidemiology

22.05.2007 admin

-moblog- In my view, epidemiology is not very flexible to adjust to new methods and new techniques. Following some discussion that I had today with STW about eQTLs (quantitative traits derived by RNA microarrays or metabolome profiles) and JMA about system biology, it is likely that we are facing huge changes. Phenotypes may no more called intermediary and we may soon forget old controversies of disease definition. We will instead use new system-terms like NonImm076Trig31Ste0098 or TLR9-096321-Auto5337. Yea, yea.

Philosophy, Software

Delete until 16-May-2008 12:00:00

17.05.2007 admin 1 Comment

Süddeutsche Zeitung complains that data are permanently stored but never deleted. Even my irrelevant newsgroup comments have been stored (for 14 years) although they have never been intended to a larger audience. As humans we have no built-in timescale and are not particular good in judging the context of any data. This might be the reason according to SZ that Victor Mayer-Schönberger argues for meta-data when data should be deleted. I agree on this proposal and want this blog entry to be deleted until 16-May-2008 12:00:00 from any server in any world, yea, yea.

Joke, Philosophy

Every rule can be broken, but no rule may be ignored

15.05.2007 admin

.. is the central rule of typography but is it also valid in science? More on LaTeX writing and presentation at the blog above.

Genetics, Philosophy

A sense for justice

12.05.2007 admin

Hans-Werner Bierhoff (in a recent ZEIT interview) believes that our ability to recognise a punishment as fair/just or not fair/just depends on social norms. The ultimate driving force to sense justice, however, seems to be an inborn trait. I even believe in a QTL – a quantitative trait that can clearly defined and even mapped some time to distinct genetic variants.
Monkeys reject unequal pay (scienceblog:doi:10.1038/nature01963:) in the famous Brosnan study – why should humans do?
More details may be found at tit-for-tat.

Philosophy, Theology

Landing on the moon

30.04.2007 admin

Nature magazine has an interesting essay how science works: “The security of knowing nothing” is basically arguing that we need to trust other scientists. Continue reading Landing on the moon →

Philosophy, Software

Input stream processing

29.04.2007 admin

A Spiegel Science article reports

1,000,000 bit/s external data stream at the various human organs
How much of this is actively processed?

And how are unconscious (intuitive?) decisions made? Another mapping attempt at scienceblog:doi:10.1162/jocn.2006.18.12.2077

Philosophy

Physician’s industry dependency

29.04.2007 admin

The NEJM has an article about “A National Survey of Physician’s Industry Relationships” – a topic that I did not expect in the NEJM at least from what I have read during the recent change at the editorial office. That’s life – always a surprise. Continue reading Physician’s industry dependency →

Genetics, Philosophy

Is utilitarian moral judgment hosted by the prefrontal cortex?

27.04.2007 admin

This now post no. 3 in a rather short time period about location of a behavioural trait to a certain brain region Continue reading Is utilitarian moral judgment hosted by the prefrontal cortex? →

Joke, Philosophy

Random

27.04.2007 admin

What is a random figure? Computer may be biased when true random numbers are needed (for example for cryptography). Here is a truly random generator, use it at your own risk…

Philosophy, Software

Open call to the science blog community for using a DOI in all posts

25.04.2007 admin 2 Comments

Science blogs usually refer to a scientific paper. To increase the visibility of science blogs, e.g. for a reverse lookup by search engines like “find all science blogs to a particular paper” it would be useful if science blogs would include a defined tag to which paper they relate. A http link will only partially work as single articles may be found at duplicate sites (journal or the publishers site or even through agencies like OVID and PUBMED CENTRAL). Using the DOI identifier is an alternative. To recognize any source document I therefore propose the following (unofficial) IANA scheme to be included somewhere in the body of your post
scienceblog:doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040072:
If there is no DOI available, I propose to use the link instead
scienceblog:http:www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS014067360209654X: Please note that there should be an extra “:” at the end of the string; alternatively you may use a white space.

Addendum

05.05.2007 Automatic DOI number extraction from blogs following this convention is now available at the Science Blog Finder page – just enter you rss feed address to get your blog indexed every 24 hours.