Category Archives: Politics

Politics

The most important issues in scientific publishing

I’m in a bit of a pickle with a paper I’ve been writing for a while, and this post (which I had bookmarked because I thought it would have good writing tips — and it did, but not the kind I wanted) gave me a little bit of comic relief.

Actually, a lot of comic relief. If you’ve ever done research, applied for a grant, or tried to write a scientific paper, I’m 90+/-5% sure that you’ll get a kick out of this guy’s writeup.  I give an except below to give you some idea about how it reads:

Improbable Research

3. Scientific Writing
You have spent years on a project and have finally discovered that you cannot solve the problem you set out to solve. Nonetheless, you have a responsibility to present your research to the scientific community (Schulman et al. 1993d). Be aware that negative results can be just as important as positive results, and also that if you don’t publish enough you will never be able to stay in science. While writing a scientific paper, the most important thing to remember is that the word “which” should almost never be used. Be sure to spend at least 50% of your time (i.e. 12 hours a day) typesetting the paper so that all the tables look nice (Schulman & Bregman 1992).

Peer review, fraud, and “Media Science”

There’s a great article on spiked science covering the recent stem cell fraud and why peer review ultimately succeeds in keeping research honest.  The scientific tenet that for research to be valid, it must be reproducible by others is pivotal in this.

spiked-science | Article | Peer review and ‘media science’

As we have seen, peer review will not necessarily detect if someone deliberately sets out to falsify data. There is often no way of knowing this until the paper is published and others in the scientific community have the opportunity to scrutinise the work. However, if Hwang Woo-Suk’s paper hadn’t been peer reviewed, and he had gone directly to the media with his ‘results’, it would have taken far longer than six months for the fraud to be discovered and rectified.

Demolition of flooded homes in New Orleans has begun

A lot of those homes, including my former apartment, might be turned into parks since they’re not in a good place should another hurricane hit.

City starts to raze homes hit by Katrina – Americas – International Herald Tribune

It was a moment of fearful anticipation for New Orleans, the first demolitions of flooded homes in the six months since Hurricane Katrina. Three were razed Monday in a process that was long delayed by legal challenges, physical obstacles, and the difficulty in getting money to search for bodies that almost certainly remain in some of the houses.

Army Corps of Engineers officials estimate millions of cubic yards of debris from demolished houses will have been removed in Orleans Parish when the process ends, roughly a year from now, representing perhaps as many as 25,000 houses. About 120 houses, nearly all in the Lower 9th Ward, are set for immediate demolition.

If they outlaw evolution, only outlaws will evolve…

My friend Alex from Back In The Day™wrote an interesting post about his hope for the future of Humanity based on the democratizing effects of technology and the Internet. Except that he put it a lot more poetically. Here’s a snippet:

earthbound01: the internet is wide

broadly, there’s some kind of metaphorical Library of Alexandria here, it’s depth of knowledge wide and deep. Virtually all human learning is available here if you have the right passwords and authorization. I’m able to read scholarly journals now from a little terminal. All of our culture is slowly being uploaded, explained, digested. Perhaps one day all cultures will be there. Just think for a minute how sweet the future is going to be now that information is available broadly. Think of it though- all knowledge, all art, all human creation and technology available, or at least explicable. And communication! Instantaneous text, sound, or video transmission. Amazing!

…

There’s some kind of air-strike going on in Iraq, and I’m worried about “collateral damage”, and our soldiers, and really everyone involved. Wars are great for stopping nazis, but I am starting to think they aren’t very good for stopping concepts like or terrorism. Still, these things are temporary, and I think people aren’t stupid and are learning.
Life goes on.
and adapts.
Maybe we can tell the creationistas that if they outlaw evolution only outlaws will evolve.

Protecting wetlands that protect oil revenues

The Washington crowd cannot even get this right.

“in the last two years [2004-2005], we have spent more to rebuild Iraq’s wetlands than Louisiana’s” (for those who aren’t sure, a large amount of oil is regularly pulled out of the gulf of Louisiana’s shoreline, shipped through New Orleans’ port system, and processed locally along Mississippi between the sea and Baton Rouge).

Quote is from John Barry and Newt Gingrich, Time magazine, 6 March 2006, reproduced here