The Conversation sur Twitter : "Why we should be teaching scientific thinking rather than scientific facts #science #edchat. Pseudoscience and conspiracy theory are not victimless crimes against science. News of anti-vaxxer movements, demands to teach creationism in schools as science, and dubious claims for the health-giving properties of strange diets is enough to make you wonder if some people have forgotten or forsaken the scientific method entirely. Astronomer Carl Sagan once said: In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness. Despite the progress of education and living standards, the world must seem like a scary place for many people – full of chemicals in the sky, aliens trying to abduct us, and government or corporate conspiracies.
What’s the harm in ‘alternative’ science? What’s the harm in applying alternative medicine to treat cancer? The truth is that in science there are no authorities. The demon-haunted world. A mathematical model of oppression: the Petrie Multiplier | Jon Butterworth | Life & Physics | Science. I’m oppressed. I have the kind of mind that repeatedly replays any minor slight, insensitivity or insult I suffer, distracting me from my work and undermining my confidence. As I have grown older, I’ve got better at limiting the damage, but my memory is still strewn with unpleasant little landmines which pop up occasionally, triggered by some event, place, or similar association.
Luckily for me, such incidents are rare, so no matter how much I build them up in my head, I can generally function pretty well in a big physics department in a major university. So I am not very oppressed, really. It’s just part of life, the way people are. The rarity of incidents has a lot to do with the fact that I’m a member of the dominant ethnic and gender group in my working environment.
This effect has been named the “Petrie Multiplier”, shown in the context of sexism in a male-dominated environment (the technology industry, originally). So the behaviour is the same for both genders. Nanogirl sur Twitter : "Email from 8 year old asking if plate tectonics could cause global warming Any #science tweeps want to chip in reply? Naturefestiveflashback.pgtb. Teoremadegoedel : Real Image of T4 bacteriophage ... Button 2.0. We're building a tool that lets people report when they are denied access to research, then find alternative access to it.
How we publish research is broken, but it can be fixed and the Open Access Button is here to help. Open Access has the potential to give everyone free access to the world’s cutting edge research. This will help your doctor save lives, families get access to the latest research on their loved one's disease, researchers advance our understanding of the world, and students better further their education. With the Open Access Button we can realise this potential, but we need your donation to do it. Currently research is published in journals with expensive subscriptions, which hides knowledge behind paywalls away from the public who paid for it. The solution to this is Open Access, which allows research to be accessed and reused by whoever needs it. Our story so far One year ago we discovered the true injustice of the traditional publishing system. Other ways you can help. NIWA seeks volunteers for climate science experiment | NIWA. A citizen science experiment for weather enthusiasts that participants can undertake from the comfort of home is being launched on Wednesday by NIWA, in collaboration with researchers from the UK and Australia.
Volunteers are now being sought to participate in Weather @ home ANZ, a project that will enable members of the public to contribute to scientists' understanding of how climate change might be affecting weather in New Zealand and Australia. All you need to take part is a computer and Internet connection. NIWA climate scientist and Weather @ home New Zealand programme leader Dr Suzanne Rosier says the aim of the project initially is to improve understanding of how extremeweather conditions such as heatwaves and drought may be changing. It works by participants volunteering the spare processing power on their computers to crunch weather data from a state-of-the-art global climate model that includes a finely detailed regional model over Australia and New Zealand. weatherathome.net →
These 40 Science Experts Will Completely Revamp Your Social Media Feed. Alan-alda-wants-to-make-science-accessible. Continue reading the main story Video Play Video CHICAGO — The most popular speaker at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was not a scientist but one of science’s most high-profile advocates: the actor and writer Alan Alda. Best known for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the long-running television series “M*A*S*H,” Mr. Alda, 78, has a new mission: helping train scientists to communicate to a wider audience. We spoke twice, for a total of two hours. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversations. Q. A. Unfortunately, the way things were organized, I was forced to decide between them. Photo Years later, it turns out that some scientists think it’s healthy to laugh.
How did you become so passionate about science? Through reading. After that, I began to read books about science avidly. You must have been thrilled when the magazine asked you to host its television series “Scientific American Frontiers.” Which is? You bet it does. Photos du journal - NIWA Invertebrate Collection. Paulmwatson: Eureka? #science... Researchers propose alternative way to allocate science funding. Researchers in the United States have suggested an alternative way to allocate science funding. The method, which is described in EMBO reports, depends on a collective distribution of funding by the scientific community, requires only a fraction of the costs associated with the traditional peer review of grant proposals and, according to the authors, may yield comparable or even better results.
“Peer review of scientific proposals and grants has served science very well for decades. However, there is a strong sense in the scientific community that things could be improved,” said Johan Bollen, professor and lead author of the study from the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana Univ. “Our most productive researchers invest an increasing amount of time, energy, and effort into writing and reviewing research proposals, most of which do not get funded. That time could be spent performing the proposed research in the first place.” Report: Source: EMBO. Monkeys Stay Away from Mean People. When does a monkey turn down a free treat? When it is offered by a selfish person, apparently.
Given the choice between accepting goodies from helpful, neutral or unhelpful people, capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) tend to avoid individuals who refuse aid to others, according to a study published today in Nature Communications. “Humans can build up an impression about somebody just based on what we see,” says author James Anderson, a comparative psychologist at the University of Stirling, UK. The capuchin results suggest that this skill “probably extends to other species”, he says. Anderson chose to study capuchins because of their highly social and cooperative instincts. Monkeys in the study watched as a person either agreed or refused to help another person to open a jar containing a toy. When help was given, the capuchins showed little preference between the person requesting help and the one providing aid.
“You really don’t know what they’re inferring,” she says. Revolutionary web-based peer review platform made in NZ - Publons. Kiwis are famous for their ingenuity and self-sufficiency. It is said that Kiwis can create amazing things — all they need is ‘a piece of Number 8 wire’. Today there is a new species of ingenious New Zealander emerging. All they need is a laptop and an internet connection.
Andrew Preston is one of those Kiwis, and the “thing” he’s created is Publons, a peer-review platform that is completely revamping the world of academic reviewing and publishing. Peer reviewing is the practice of formally checking the veracity of the work written into scholarly articles by professionals who operate in the same field. This ensures that the quality and accuracy of the work is pristine before (and after) it is published and becomes widely accepted.
Saying that the current system is broken is a bit of an overstatement. Now Publons has come in and created an environment where reviews are encouraged, conversations are facilitated, and the reviewing process is completely transparent. The Science of Citizenship | Belle Boggs. What’s at stake when schools skimp on science? By Belle Boggs ONE OF THE MOST remarkable scenes in Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 work of science journalism, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, happens about halfway through the book, in a smoky Baltimore kitchen. Skloot has been pursuing the reluctant Lacks family for about a year and has finally managed an introduction to Lawrence Lacks, the oldest son of Henrietta and Day Lacks. He cooks eggs and pork chops for Skloot and begins reminiscing about his mother, a strict, pretty woman who died of cervical cancer when he was a young teenager, but soon admits that, at sixty-four, he barely remembers her at all.
Instead of memories, photographs, and family anecdotes, he and his siblings have only the ominous stories of her stolen cells: that there are enough of them now to “cover the whole earth,” that they have cured diseases, that they will soon make it possible for humans to live to be eight hundred years old. What did they do in there? Witter / teh_aimee : become a citizen scientist! ... Academic Startup Publons Gives Peer Reviewers Credit For Their Work. The traditional anonymous peer review process used in academic publishing is meant to ensure objectivity, but it means reviewers give up their time for very little reward.
The lack of transparency is also vulnerable to exploitation, which can lead to flawed (if not fraudulent) research making it into prestigious publications. Publons, a platform for post-publication peer review, wants to address these problems by becoming “the Stack Overflow of academic research.” The Wellington, New Zealand-based startup’s goal is to help scholars advance their careers by building a portfolio of article critiques and, in turn, help journals find quality reviewers. Founded by Andrew Preston and Daniel Johnston, Publons recently participated in accelerator program Lightning Lab and has received $350,000 New Zealand dollars (about $291,000 USD) in seed funding. He says both reflect Publons’ mission to improve understanding of the original article and speed up academia’s research-feedback loop.
National : Nights : 26 Jul 2013 : On The Spot. Johns Hopkins University's Graduate Science Writing Program to Close. For 30 years, the Writing Seminars Department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has offered scientists and science-minded journalists the opportunity to hone their writing and communication skills through its master's degree in science writing. The program was one of the big five graduate science-writing programs in the United States. (The others are the University of California, Santa Cruz; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; and Boston University.*) Graduates of John Hopkins University's program have gone on to staff positions with Scientific American, Science News, New Scientist, Time, USA Today, NPR, Radiolab, NASA, Science, and many others—including Science Careers. (That would be me, your humble correspondent.) On Monday, the science writing program's director, Ann Finkbeiner, e-mailed alumni of the program to announce that there would be no 2013–2014 class.
The Hopkins program isn't the first to go. Publishing frontiers: The library reboot. Sayeed Choudhury demonstrates the visualization wall, part of Johns Hopkins University's drive to transform how its libraries and researchers deal with data. A few passing students do a double take as Sayeed Choudhury waves his outstretched right arm. In his crisply pressed dress shirt and trousers, the engineer looks as if he is practising dance moves in slow motion. But he is really playing with astronomical data. Standing in a US$32-million library building opened last year at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, Choudhury faces a 2-metre-by-4-metre 'visualization wall' of television screens. This wall is the brainchild of computer scientist Greg Hager and Choudhury, who directs digital research and curation at the library.
“As we create more and more digital content, there's a question of how do you get people to even realize we have it and then interact with it in new ways,” says Choudhury, who thinks that the wall is starting to catch on. The new data wranglers. Citizen science class: Using the “bigfoot genome” for 21st century biology. Those of you who read this blog regularly (or not) will likely have picked up that I have something of a passion for things involving citizen science and education-type stuff.
So, with that in mind, I present to you ‘science: cryptogenomics – using the “bigfoot genome” for 21st century biology‘. The class is being run through Chalkle, a local and award-winning education platform/community. What’s it all about, though, and what will you get out of it? According to its description: Earlier this year researchers claimed to have published a bigfoot genome sequence.We will use publicly available tools and data to learn what they actually sequenced, then compare their results to those of recent studies that really used DNA evidence to show the existence on different human species.what you will learnLearn how to use free on-line tools to compare the genetics of the “sasquatch sequence” with other known species – all from your own laptop!
So, SO many reasons to go along. Related posts: Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe on Wonders Of Life. The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.
Critter of the Week 63: Penagione (elpidiid sea cucumber) 27 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts In 2012. Browse Images. Science humour. Pure science.