Les Hatton, an international expert in software testing resident in the Universities of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several million lines of scientific code. He showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies.
Scientific History and the Lessons for Today's Emerging Ideas - Technology Review - 1 views
Massively collaborative mathematics : Article : Nature - 28 views
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peer-to-peer theorem-proving
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it seems that i should visit you guys at estec... :-)
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urgently!! btw: we will have the ACT christmas dinner on the 9th in the evening ... are you coming?
Climate scientists told to 'cover up' the fact that the Earth's temperature hasn't rise... - 5 views
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This is becoming a mess :)
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I see your point, and I agree that funding was also promoted through the energy players and their political influence. A coincident parallel interest which is irrelevant to the fact that the question remains vital. How do we affect climate and how does it respond. Huge complex system to analyse which responds in various time scales which could obscure the trend. What if we made a conceptual parallelism with the L Ácquila case : Is the scientific method guilty or the interpretation of uncertainty in terms of societal mobilization? Should we leave the humanitarian aspect outside any scientific activity?
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I do not think there is anyone arguing that the question is not interesting and complex. The debate, instead, addresses the predictive value of the models produced so far. Are they good enough to be used outside of the scientific process aimed at improving them? Or should one wait for "the scientific method" to bring forth substantial improvements to the current understanding and only then start using its results? One can take both stand points, but some recent developments will bring many towards the second approach.
Cell Beta Prototypes - 0 views
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Cell Press and Elsevier have launched a project called Article of the Future that is an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how the scientific article is presented online....
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well - none of the two examples that they have given show much imagination - don't think that any of these will be better than just using the full screen pdf, my preferred way after printing and reading on paper ... btw: Kevin: are you still around? could we meet?
STIX Fonts - General Information - 0 views
Physics anniversaries: How Professor Maxwell changed the world | The Economist - 1 views
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Maxwell remains the great unsung hero of human progress, the physicists' physicist whose name means little to those without a scientific bent. His life's work [....] is among the most enduring scientific legacies of all time, on a par with those of his more widely acclaimed peers, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.
HUBbub 2013 - 0 views
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HUBbub 2013 is the annual conference for researchers, educators, and IT professionals engaged in building and using cyberinfrastructure. Learn about the latest features in the HUBzero tool box and how they can be used to address the unique challenges of scientific pursuits.
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It is probably more interesting to check the parent site: hubzero.org: HUBzero ® is a powerful, open source software platform for creating dynamic web sites that support scientific research and educational activities.
If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too!!! - 3 views
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haha. this guy won't have any new friends with this article! I kind of agree but making your code public doesn't mean you are doing good science...and inversely! He takes experimental physics as a counter example but even there, some teams keep their little secrets on the details of the experiment to have a bit of advance on other labs. Research is competitive in its current state, and I think only collaborations can overcome this fact.
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My view is that the only proper way to do scientific communication is full transparency: methodologies, tests, codes, etc. Everything else should be unacceptable. This should hold both for publicly funded science (for which there is the additional moral requirement to give back to the public domain what was produced with taxpayers' money) and privately-funded science (where the need to turn a profit should be of lesser importance than the proper application of the scientifc method).
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Same battle we are fighting since a few years....
Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics - 2 views
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Interesting article about theoretical physics theories vs. experimental verification. Can we state that a theory can be so good that its existence supplants the need for data and testing ? If a theory is proved to be untestable experimentally, can we still say that it is a scientific theory ? (not in my opinion)
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There is an interesting approach by Feynman that it does not make sense to describe something of which we cannot measure the consequences. So a theory that is so removed from experiment that it cannot be backed by it is pointless and of no consequence. It is a bit as with the statement "if a tree falls in the forrest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?". We would typically extrapolate to say that it does make a sound. But actually nobody knows - you would have to take some kind of measurement. But even more fundamentally it does not make any difference! For all intents and purposes there is no point in forcing a prediction that you cannot measure and that therefore has noto reflect an event in your world.
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"Mathematics is the model of the universe, not the other way round" - M. R.
Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past - 6 views
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Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?
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still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and
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It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.
18 Complicated Scientific Ideas Explained Simply - 8 views
Our approach to replication in computational science - 2 views
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So what did we do to make this paper extra super replicable? If you go to the paper Web site, you'll find:
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p.s. I think I have to refer to this cancer results not reproducible paper somewhere. Done.
Role of data visualization in the scientific community @britishlibrary - 1 views
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In a new exhibition titled Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight [bl.uk], the British Library pays homage to the important role data visualization plays in the scientific process. The exhibition can be visited from 20 February until 26 May 2014, and contains works ranging from John Snow's plotting of the 1854 London cholera infections on a map to colourful depictions of the Tree of Life.
Kerbal Space Program | Media - 2 views
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what seems to be an impressively detailed space game
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> The games we write are always games with a scientific purpose (not training not educational) I'd say investigating how to get the crowd may be an important part of "science of crowdsourcing". So, an obvious example would be comparing how many participants the original ACT space mission game attracted versus a variant implemented in Kerbal and why. Easily made and easily publishable I think. But that's just an obvious example I can give on the spot. I think there is more potential than that, so would not dismiss the idea so definitively. But then, correct me if I'm wrong, social sciences are still not represented in the ACT... Perhaps an idea to revive during the upcoming retreat? ;-)
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it's on sale on steam til tomorrow by the way if anyone's interested
Lotus Plant-Inspired Dust-Busting Shield To Protect Space Gear - 3 views
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replicate to prevent dirt from accumulating on the surfaces of spacesuits, scientific instruments, robotic rovers, solar array panels and other hardware used to gather scientific data or carry out exploratory activities on other objects in the solar system
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The team also is trying to partner with Northrop Grumman to add a biocide to the coating, which would kill bacteria that thrive and produce foul odors wherever people are confined to a small space for long periods, like the space station.
The importance of stupidity in scientific research. - 10 views
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I suggest you this easy reading ( is on a peer-reviewed scientific journal, IF = 6.14) 'We just don't know what we're doing!!!'
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I tend to agree with you but I think that you are too harsh - its still only an "essay" and one of his points of making sure that education at post graduate level is not about indoctrinating what we know already is valid ...
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I think this quote by Richard Horton is relevant to the discussion: "We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong." :P
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