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Weiye Loh

Religion: Faith in science : Nature News - 0 views

www.nature.com/...470323a.html

Science Religion Faith Funding Academic Academic Research

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?
  • With a current endowment estimated at US$2.1 billion, the organization continues to pursue Templeton's goal of building bridges between science and religion. Each year, it doles out some $70 million in grants, more than $40 million of which goes to research in fields such as cosmology, evolutionary biology and psychology.
  • however, many scientists find it troubling — and some see it as a threat. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, calls the foundation "sneakier than the creationists". Through its grants to researchers, Coyne alleges, the foundation is trying to insinuate religious values into science. "It claims to be on the side of science, but wants to make faith a virtue," he says.
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  • But other researchers, both with and without Templeton grants, say that they find the foundation remarkably open and non-dogmatic. "The Templeton Foundation has never in my experience pressured, suggested or hinted at any kind of ideological slant," says Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic, a magazine that debunks pseudoscience, who was hired by the foundation to edit an essay series entitled 'Does science make belief in God obsolete?'
  • The debate highlights some of the challenges facing the Templeton Foundation after the death of its founder in July 2008, at the age of 95.
  • With the help of a $528-million bequest from Templeton, the foundation has been radically reframing its research programme. As part of that effort, it is reducing its emphasis on religion to make its programmes more palatable to the broader scientific community. Like many of his generation, Templeton was a great believer in progress, learning, initiative and the power of human imagination — not to mention the free-enterprise system that allowed him, a middle-class boy from Winchester, Tennessee, to earn billions of dollars on Wall Street. The foundation accordingly allocates 40% of its annual grants to programmes with names such as 'character development', 'freedom and free enterprise' and 'exceptional cognitive talent and genius'.
  • Unlike most of his peers, however, Templeton thought that the principles of progress should also apply to religion. He described himself as "an enthusiastic Christian" — but was also open to learning from Hinduism, Islam and other religious traditions. Why, he wondered, couldn't religious ideas be open to the type of constructive competition that had produced so many advances in science and the free market?
  • That question sparked Templeton's mission to make religion "just as progressive as medicine or astronomy".
  • Early Templeton prizes had nothing to do with science: the first went to the Catholic missionary Mother Theresa of Calcutta in 1973.
  • By the 1980s, however, Templeton had begun to realize that fields such as neuroscience, psychology and physics could advance understanding of topics that are usually considered spiritual matters — among them forgiveness, morality and even the nature of reality. So he started to appoint scientists to the prize panel, and in 1985 the award went to a research scientist for the first time: Alister Hardy, a marine biologist who also investigated religious experience. Since then, scientists have won with increasing frequency.
  • "There's a distinct feeling in the research community that Templeton just gives the award to the most senior scientist they can find who's willing to say something nice about religion," says Harold Kroto, a chemist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who was co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and describes himself as a devout atheist.
  • Yet Templeton saw scientists as allies. They had what he called "the humble approach" to knowledge, as opposed to the dogmatic approach. "Almost every scientist will agree that they know so little and they need to learn," he once said.
  • Templeton wasn't interested in funding mainstream research, says Barnaby Marsh, the foundation's executive vice-president. Templeton wanted to explore areas — such as kindness and hatred — that were not well known and did not attract major funding agencies. Marsh says Templeton wondered, "Why is it that some conflicts go on for centuries, yet some groups are able to move on?"
  • Templeton's interests gave the resulting list of grants a certain New Age quality (See Table 1). For example, in 1999 the foundation gave $4.6 million for forgiveness research at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and in 2001 it donated $8.2 million to create an Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (that is, altruism and compassion) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "A lot of money wasted on nonsensical ideas," says Kroto. Worse, says Coyne, these projects are profoundly corrupting to science, because the money tempts researchers into wasting time and effort on topics that aren't worth it. If someone is willing to sell out for a million dollars, he says, "Templeton is there to oblige him".
  • At the same time, says Marsh, the 'dean of value investing', as Templeton was known on Wall Street, had no intention of wasting his money on junk science or unanswerables such as whether God exists. So before pursuing a scientific topic he would ask his staff to get an assessment from appropriate scholars — a practice that soon evolved into a peer-review process drawing on experts from across the scientific community.
  • Because Templeton didn't like bureaucracy, adds Marsh, the foundation outsourced much of its peer review and grant giving. In 1996, for example, it gave $5.3 million to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC, to fund efforts that work with evangelical groups to find common ground on issues such as the environment, and to get more science into seminary curricula. In 2006, Templeton gave $8.8 million towards the creation of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), which funds research on the origins of the Universe and other fundamental issues in physics, under the leadership of Anthony Aguirre, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
  • But external peer review hasn't always kept the foundation out of trouble. In the 1990s, for example, Templeton-funded organizations gave book-writing grants to Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist now at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and William Dembski, a philosopher now at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. After obtaining the grants, both later joined the Discovery Institute — a think-tank based in Seattle, Washington, that promotes intelligent design. Other Templeton grants supported a number of college courses in which intelligent design was discussed. Then, in 1999, the foundation funded a conference at Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin, in which intelligent-design proponents confronted critics. Those awards became a major embarrassment in late 2005, during a highly publicized court fight over the teaching of intelligent design in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. A number of media accounts of the intelligent design movement described the Templeton Foundation as a major supporter — a charge that Charles Harper, then senior vice-president, was at pains to deny.
  • Some foundation officials were initially intrigued by intelligent design, Harper told The New York Times. But disillusionment set in — and Templeton funding stopped — when it became clear that the theory was part of a political movement from the Christian right wing, not science. Today, the foundation website explicitly warns intelligent-design researchers not to bother submitting proposals: they will not be considered.
  • Avowedly antireligious scientists such as Coyne and Kroto see the intelligent-design imbroglio as a symptom of their fundamental complaint that religion and science should not mix at all. "Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning," says Coyne, echoing an argument made by many others. "In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice." The purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to break down that wall, he says — to reconcile the irreconcilable and give religion scholarly legitimacy.
  • Foundation officials insist that this is backwards: questioning is their reason for being. Religious dogma is what they are fighting. That does seem to be the experience of many scientists who have taken Templeton money. During the launch of FQXi, says Aguirre, "Max and I were very suspicious at first. So we said, 'We'll try this out, and the minute something smells, we'll cut and run.' It never happened. The grants we've given have not been connected with religion in any way, and they seem perfectly happy about that."
  • John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, also had concerns when he started a Templeton-funded project in 2007. He had just published a paper with survey data showing that religious affiliation had a negative correlation with health among African-Americans — the opposite of what he assumed the foundation wanted to hear. He was bracing for a protest when someone told him to look at the foundation's website. They had displayed his finding on the front page. "That made me relax a bit," says Cacioppo.
  • Yet, even scientists who give the foundation high marks for openness often find it hard to shake their unease. Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is willing to participate in Templeton-funded events — but worries about the foundation's emphasis on research into 'spiritual' matters. "The act of doing science means that you accept a purely material explanation of the Universe, that no spiritual dimension is required," he says.
  • It hasn't helped that Jack Templeton is much more politically and religiously conservative than his father was. The foundation shows no obvious rightwards trend in its grant-giving and other activities since John Templeton's death — and it is barred from supporting political activities by its legal status as a not-for-profit corporation. Still, many scientists find it hard to trust an organization whose president has used his personal fortune to support right-leaning candidates and causes such as the 2008 ballot initiative that outlawed gay marriage in California.
  • Scientists' discomfort with the foundation is probably inevitable in the current political climate, says Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The past 30 years have seen the growing power of the Christian religious right in the United States, the rise of radical Islam around the world, and religiously motivated terrorist attacks such as those in the United States on 11 September 2001. Given all that, says Atran, many scientists find it almost impossible to think of religion as anything but fundamentalism at war with reason.
  • the foundation has embraced the theme of 'science and the big questions' — an open-ended list that includes topics such as 'Does the Universe have a purpose?'
  • Towards the end of Templeton's life, says Marsh, he became increasingly concerned that this reaction was getting in the way of the foundation's mission: that the word 'religion' was alienating too many good scientists.
  • The peer-review and grant-making system has also been revamped: whereas in the past the foundation ran an informal mix of projects generated by Templeton and outside grant seekers, the system is now organized around an annual list of explicit funding priorities.
  • The foundation is still a work in progress, says Jack Templeton — and it always will be. "My father believed," he says, "we were all called to be part of an ongoing creative process. He was always trying to make people think differently." "And he always said, 'If you're still doing today what you tried to do two years ago, then you're not making progress.'" 
Weiye Loh

Cash-Strapped Scientists Turn to Public Crowd-Funding | The Utopianist - Think Bigger - 0 views

utopianist.com/...s-turn-to-public-crowd-funding

Science Crowd-Sourcing Funding Academic Research Cultural Industries

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 19 Jul 11
     
    These websites started primarily as a way to provide funding for creative projects involving film, music and other art mediums. Scientists using crowd funding is a relatively new phenomenon. Here's how The New York Times described it: "As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of Web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom - and generosity - of the crowds will come to the rescue." "Most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process. Instead, money talks: the public decides which projects are worth pursuing by fully financing them."
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Investing in Basic Science - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...investing-in-basic-science

Science Uncertainty

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • A recent editorial in the New York Times by Nicholas Wade raises some interesting points about the nature of basic science research – primarily that its’ risky.
  • As I have pointed out about the medical literature, researcher John Ioaniddis has explained why most published studies turn out in retrospect to be wrong. The same is true of most basic science research – and the underlying reason is the same. The world is complex, and most of our guesses about how it might work turn out to be either flat-out wrong, incomplete, or superficial. And so most of our probing and prodding of the natural world, looking for the path to the actual answer, turn out to miss the target.
  • research costs considerable resources of time, space, money, opportunity, and people-hours. There may also be some risk involved (such as to subjects in the clinical trial). Further, negative studies are actually valuable (more so than terrible pictures). They still teach us something about the world – they teach us what is not true. At the very least this narrows the field of possibilities. But the analogy holds in so far as the goal of scientific research is to improve our understanding of the world and to provide practical applications that make our lives better. Wade writes mostly about how we fund research, and this relates to our objectives. Most of the corporate research money is interested in the latter – practical (and profitable) applications. If this is your goal, than basic science research is a bad bet. Most investments will be losers, and for most companies this will not be offset by the big payoffs of the rare winners. So many companies will allow others to do the basic science (government, universities, start up companies) then raid the winners by using their resources to buy them out, and then bring them the final steps to a marketable application. There is nothing wrong or unethical about this. It’s a good business model.
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  • What, then, is the role of public (government) funding of research? Primarily, Wade argues (and I agree), to provide infrastructure for expensive research programs, such as building large colliders.
  • the more the government invests in basic science and infrastructure, the more winners will emerge that private industry can then capitalize on. This is a good way to build a competitive dynamic economy.
  • But there is a pitfall – prematurely picking winners and losers. Wade give the example of California investing specifically into developing stem cell treatments. He argues that stem cells, while promising, do not hold a guarantee of eventual success, and perhaps there are other technologies that will work and are being neglected. The history of science and technology has clearly demonstrated that it is wickedly difficult to predict the future (and all those who try are destined to be mocked by future generations with the benefit of perfect hindsight). Prematurely committing to one technology therefore contains a high risk of wasting a great deal of limited resources, and missing other perhaps more fruitful opportunities.
  • The underlying concept is that science research is a long-term game. Many avenues of research will not pan out, and those that do will take time to inspire specific applications. The media, however, likes catchy headlines. That means when they are reporting on basic science research journalists ask themselves – why should people care? What is the application of this that the average person can relate to? This seems reasonable from a journalistic point of view, but with basic science reporting it leads to wild speculation about a distant possible future application. The public is then left with the impression that we are on the verge of curing the common cold or cancer, or developing invisibility cloaks or flying cars, or replacing organs and having household robot servants. When a few years go by and we don’t have our personal android butlers, the public then thinks that the basic science was a bust, when in fact there was never a reasonable expectation that it would lead to a specific application anytime soon. But it still may be on track for interesting applications in a decade or two.
  • this also means that the government, generally, should not be in the game of picking winners an losers – putting their thumb on the scale, as it were. Rather, they will get the most bang for the research buck if they simply invest in science infrastructure, and also fund scientists in broad areas.
  • The same is true of technology – don’t pick winners and losers. The much-hyped “hydrogen economy” comes to mind. Let industry and the free market sort out what will work. If you have to invest in infrastructure before a technology is mature, then at least hedge your bets and keep funding flexible. Fund “alternative fuel” as a general category, and reassess on a regular basis how funds should be allocated. But don’t get too specific.
  • Funding research but leaving the details to scientists may be optimal
  • The scientific community can do their part by getting better at communicating with the media and the public. Try to avoid the temptation to overhype your own research, just because it is the most interesting thing in the world to you personally and you feel hype will help your funding. Don’t make it easy for the media to sensationalize your research – you should be the ones trying to hold back the reigns. Perhaps this is too much to hope for – market forces conspire too much to promote sensationalism.
Weiye Loh

The Matthew Effect § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM - 0 views

seedmagazine.com/...the_matthew_effect

Publication Selection Academic Journal

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Feb 10 - Cached
  • For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. —Matthew 25:29
  • Sociologist Robert K. Merton was the first to publish a paper on the similarity between this phrase in the Gospel of Matthew and the realities of how scientific research is rewarded
  • Even if two researchers do similar work, the most eminent of the pair will get more acclaim, Merton observed—more praise within the community, more or better job offers, better opportunities. And it goes without saying that even if a graduate student publishes stellar work in a prestigious journal, their well-known advisor is likely to get more of the credit. 
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  • Merton published his theory, called the “Matthew Effect,” in 1968. At that time, the average age of a biomedical researcher in the US receiving his or her first significant funding was 35 or younger. That meant that researchers who had little in terms of fame (at 35, they would have completed a PhD and a post-doc and would be just starting out on their own) could still get funded if they wrote interesting proposals. So Merton’s observation about getting credit for one’s work, however true in terms of prestige, wasn’t adversely affecting the funding of new ideas.
  • Over the last 40 years, the importance of fame in science has increased. The effect has compounded because famous researchers have gathered the smartest and most ambitious graduate students and post-docs around them, so that each notable paper from a high-wattage group bootstraps their collective power. The famous grow more famous, and the younger researchers in their coterie are able to use that fame to their benefit. The effect of this concentration of power has finally trickled down to the level of funding: The average age on first receipt of the most common “starter” grants at the NIH is now almost 42. This means younger researchers without the strength of a fame-based community are cut out of the funding process, and their ideas, separate from an older researcher’s sphere of influence, don’t get pursued. This causes a founder effect in modern science, where the prestigious few dictate the direction of research. It’s not only unfair—it’s also actively dangerous to science’s progress.
  • How can we fund science in a way that is fair? By judging researchers independently of their fame—in other words, not by how many times their papers have been cited. By judging them instead via new measures, measures that until recently have been too ephemeral to use.
  • Right now, the gold standard worldwide for measuring a scientist’s worth is the number of times his or her papers are cited, along with the importance of the journal where the papers were published. Decisions of funding, faculty positions, and eminence in the field all derive from a scientist’s citation history. But relying on these measures entrenches the Matthew Effect: Even when the lead author is a graduate student, the majority of the credit accrues to the much older principal investigator. And an influential lab can inflate its citations by referring to its own work in papers that themselves go on to be heavy-hitters.
  • what is most profoundly unbalanced about relying on citations is that the paper-based metric distorts the reality of the scientific enterprise. Scientists make data points, narratives, research tools, inventions, pictures, sounds, videos, and more. Journal articles are a compressed and heavily edited version of what happens in the lab.
  • We have the capacity to measure the quality of a scientist across multiple dimensions, not just in terms of papers and citations. Was the scientist’s data online? Was it comprehensible? Can I replicate the results? Run the code? Access the research tools? Use them to write a new paper? What ideas were examined and discarded along the way, so that I might know the reality of the research? What is the impact of the scientist as an individual, rather than the impact of the paper he or she wrote? When we can see the scientist as a whole, we’re less prone to relying on reputation alone to assess merit.
  • Multidimensionality is one of the only counters to the Matthew Effect we have available. In forums where this kind of meritocracy prevails over seniority, like Linux or Wikipedia, the Matthew Effect is much less pronounced. And we have the capacity to measure each of these individual factors of a scientist’s work, using the basic discourse of the Web: the blog, the wiki, the comment, the trackback. We can find out who is talented in a lab, not just who was smart enough to hire that talent. As we develop the ability to measure multiple dimensions of scientific knowledge creation, dissemination, and re-use, we open up a new way to recognize excellence. What we can measure, we can value.
  • Weiye Loh on 25 Feb 10
     
    WHEN IT COMES TO SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING AND FAME, THE RICH GET RICHER AND THE POOR GET POORER. HOW CAN WE BREAK THIS FEEDBACK LOOP?
Weiye Loh

If climate scientists are in it for the money, they're doing it wrong - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...nsus-its-not-for-the-money.ars

Climate Science Funding

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Since it doesn't have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department's salary information available. It's easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.
  • That's a pretty healthy salary by many standards, but it's hardly a racket. Penn State appears to be on the low end of similar institutions, and is outdone by two other institutions in its own state (based on this report). But, more significantly for the question at hand, we can see that Earth Sciences faculty aren't paid especially well. Sure, they do much better than the Arts faculty, but they're somewhere in the middle of the pack, and get stomped on by professors in the Business and IT departments.
  • This is all, of course, ignoring what someone who can do the sort of data analysis or modeling of complex systems that climatologists perform might make if they went to Wall Street.
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  • It's also worth pointing out what they get that money for, as exemplified by a fairly typical program announcement for NSF grants. Note that it calls for studies of past climate change and its impact on the weather. This sort of research could support the current consensus view, but it just as easily might not. And here's the thing: it's impossible to tell before the work's done. Even a study looking at the flow of carbon into and out of the atmosphere, which would seem to be destined to focus on anthropogenic climate influences, might identify a previously unknown or underestimated sink or feedback. So, even if the granting process were biased (and there's been no indication that it is), there is no way for it to prevent people from obtaining contrary data. The granting system is also set up to induce people to publish it, since a grant that doesn't produce scientific papers can make it impossible for a professor to obtain future funding.
  • Maybe the money is in the perks that come with grants, which provide for travel and lab toys. Unfortunately, there's no indication that there's lots of money out there for the taking, either from the public or private sector. For the US government, spending on climate research across 13 different agencies (from the Department of State to NASA) is tracked by the US Climate Change Science Program. The group has tracked the research budget since 1989, but not everything was brought under its umbrella until 1991. That year, according to CCSP figures, about $1.45 billion was spent on climate research (all figures are in 2007 dollars). Funding peaked back in 1995 at $2.4 billion, then bottomed out in 2006 at only $1.7 billion.
  • Funding has gone up a bit over the last couple of years, and some stimulus money went into related programs. But, in general, the trend has been a downward one for 15 years; it's not an area you'd want to go into if you were looking for a rich source of grant money. If you were, you would target medical research, for which the NIH had a $31 billion budget plus another $10 billion in stimulus money.
  • Not all of this money went to researchers anyway; part of the budget goes to NASA, and includes some of that agency's (rather pricey) hardware. For example, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory cost roughly $200 million, but failed to go into orbit; its replacement is costing another $170 million.
  • Might the private sector make up for the lack of government money? Pretty unlikely. For starters, it's tough to identify many companies that have a vested interest in the scientific consensus. Renewable energy companies would seem to be the biggest winners, but they're still relatively tiny. Neither the largest wind or photovoltaic manufacturers (Vestas and First Solar) appear in the Financial Times' list of the world's 500 largest companies. In contrast, there are 16 oil companies in the of the top 100, and they occupy the top two spots. Exxon's profits in 2010 were nearly enough to buy both Vestas and First Solar, given their market valuations in late February.
  • climate researchers are scrambling for a piece of a smaller piece of the government-funded pie, and the resources of the private sector are far, far more likely to go to groups that oppose their conclusions.
  • If you were paying careful attention to that last section, you would have noticed something funny: the industry that seems most likely to benefit from taking climate change seriously produces renewable energy products. However, those companies don't employ any climatologists. They probably have plenty of space for engineers, materials scientists, and maybe a quantum physicist or two, but there's not much that a photovoltaic company would do with a climatologist. Even by convincing the public of their findings—namely, climate change is real, and could have serious impacts—the scientists are not doing themselves any favors in terms of job security or alternative careers.
  • But, surely, by convincing the public, or at least the politicians, that there's something serious here, they ensure their own funding? That's arguably not true either, and the stimulus package demonstrates that nicely. The US CCSP programs, in total, got a few hundred million dollars from the stimulus. In contrast, the Department of Energy got a few billion. Carbon capture and sequestration alone received $2.4 billion, more than the entire CCSP budget.
  • The problem is that climatologists are well equipped to identify potential problems, but very poorly equipped to solve them; it would be a bit like expecting an astronomer to know how to destroy a threatening asteroid.
  • The solutions to problems related to climate change are going to come in areas like renewable energy, carbon sequestration, and efficiency measures; that's where most of the current administration's efforts have focused. None of these are areas where someone studying the climate is likely to have a whole lot to add. So, when they advocate that the public take them seriously, they're essentially asking the public to send money to someone else.
Weiye Loh

News: Tabloid Science - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...criticism_of_research_projects

Science Funding

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The Sex Life of the Screwworm -- a silly subject for federally funded research, no?Some members of Congress thought so: they singled out the project about 30 years ago as the nation’s top symbol of wasteful spending -- and later apologized when, upon further review, they realized the research was actually incredibly useful. Now, at a time when Congressional scrutiny of science spending (supposedly silly and otherwise) is rising, the other side of the debate is reviving the symbol of the screwworm to bring attention to its cause, through a method that seems too un-scientific to be true: a tabloid.
  • Using silliness to combat accusations of silliness, the Association of American Universities published its inaugural issue of "Scientific Enquirer," defending federal funding for research that may seem utterly irrelevant at first glance, but is actually productive.
  • The screwworms scored the cover story for the January 2011 issue. “Sex and the Screwworm,” the headline reads, “Your tax dollars go to study the sex life of a parasite, Congress wants to know why.” Directly below, slapped on like a bumper sticker and in commanding font: “Saves Country Billions!” It’s not what you’d expect to see from a prestigious group of research institutions better known for its formality (if not occasional stuffiness), but if attracting eyeballs is the goal, they just might be on to something. After all, who understands the art of getting attention better than tabloid publishers?
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  • The AAU aims to curb misunderstanding of screwworms and other research through the broader effort of which the "Enquirer" is a part: The Societal Benefits of Research Illustrated, an online compilation of visual fact sheets that aims to make science -- and the scholarly research behind it -- accessible and understandable to members of Congress as well as the general public.
  • Last year, as Republican lawmakers prepared for and then carried out a political takeover of one house of Congress and dozens of state legislatures, they began the traditional process -- not unique to either party -- of publicizing odd research, often of the social sciences, to try to sway federal agencies’ funding.
  • In the Enquirer’s inaugural issue, published online late last month, the AAU highlights three federally funded research projects that legislators have singled out as a waste of money, explaining why they are significant and how they have contributed to society. The screwworm research, as it happens, led to the flesh-eating parasite’s eradication in the United States. Screwworms had killed millions of cattle annually; their elimination saved the country $20 billion and resulted in a 5 percent reduction in supermarket beef prices, the AAU says.
  • “While the titles of many scientific grants awarded by federal science agencies may sound funny, grants made by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other key agencies are generally awarded only after a rigorous and competitive peer review process,” the Enquirer reads. “If critics are able to marginalize science that seems unorthodox, or to defund research that may sound silly, how much creativity and innovation might we lose?” Among the funny topics featured in this issue: watching people make faces, and levitating frogs
  • “Some of these researchers just get dragged through the mud [by critics], even though they’re doing really high-quality research,” Smith said. “I think there’s lots of examples and that’s just what we’re trying to point out with these pieces.”For instance, Smith said that on Wednesday he received a list of 25 examples of “ridiculous government spending,” which highlighted research where scientists tested how alcohol affected the motor skills of mice. It’s “amazing” that Congress would pick on “alcoholic mice,” he said, because of course that sort of important research cannot be done on humans – so scientists use mice as model organisms.
  • “The real focus here is on this seemingly increasing [and longstanding] notion of picking on individual grants because they can be made to sound funny,” Smith said. The purpose of the Enquirer -- as well as the broader effort -- isn't necessarily to protect federal funding, Smith said; it’s to educate people about science and and make sure that scientific breakthroughs aren't derailed by people who misunderstand the research.
  • Weiye Loh on 17 Mar 11
     
    Some members of Congress thought so: they singled out the project about 30 years ago as the nation's top symbol of wasteful spending -- and later apologized when, upon further review, they realized the research was actually incredibly useful. Now, at a time when Congressional scrutiny of science spending (supposedly silly and otherwise) is rising, the other side of the debate is reviving the symbol of the screwworm to bring attention to its cause, through a method that seems too un-scientific to be true: a tabloid.
Weiye Loh

Let's make science metrics more scientific : Article : Nature - 0 views

www.nature.com/...464488a.html

Science Knowledge

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Measuring and assessing academic performance is now a fact of scientific life.
  • Yet current systems of measurement are inadequate. Widely used metrics, from the newly-fashionable Hirsch index to the 50-year-old citation index, are of limited use1
  • Existing metrics do not capture the full range of activities that support and transmit scientific ideas, which can be as varied as mentoring, blogging or creating industrial prototypes.
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  • narrow or biased measures of scientific achievement can lead to narrow and biased science.
  • Global demand for, and interest in, metrics should galvanize stakeholders — national funding agencies, scientific research organizations and publishing houses — to combine forces. They can set an agenda and foster research that establishes sound scientific metrics: grounded in theory, built with high-quality data and developed by a community with strong incentives to use them.
  • Scientists are often reticent to see themselves or their institutions labelled, categorized or ranked. Although happy to tag specimens as one species or another, many researchers do not like to see themselves as specimens under a microscope — they feel that their work is too complex to be evaluated in such simplistic terms. Some argue that science is unpredictable, and that any metric used to prioritize research money risks missing out on an important discovery from left field.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 27 Mar 10
       
      It is ironic that while scientists feel that their work are too complex to be evaluated in simplistic terms or matrics, they nevertheless feel ok to evaluate the world in simplistic terms. 
  • It is true that good metrics are difficult to develop, but this is not a reason to abandon them. Rather it should be a spur to basing their development in sound science. If we do not press harder for better metrics, we risk making poor funding decisions or sidelining good scientists.
  • Metrics are data driven, so developing a reliable, joined-up infrastructure is a necessary first step.
  • We need a concerted international effort to combine, augment and institutionalize these databases within a cohesive infrastructure.
  • On an international level, the issue of a unique researcher identification system is one that needs urgent attention. There are various efforts under way in the open-source and publishing communities to create unique researcher identifiers using the same principles as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) protocol, which has become the international standard for identifying unique documents. The ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) project, for example, was launched in December 2009 by parties including Thompson Reuters and Nature Publishing Group. The engagement of international funding agencies would help to push this movement towards an international standard.
  • if all funding agencies used a universal template for reporting scientific achievements, it could improve data quality and reduce the burden on investigators.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 27 Mar 10
       
      So in future, we'll only have one robust matric to evaluate scientific contribution? hmm...
  • Importantly, data collected for use in metrics must be open to the scientific community, so that metric calculations can be reproduced. This also allows the data to be efficiently repurposed.
  • As well as building an open and consistent data infrastructure, there is the added challenge of deciding what data to collect and how to use them. This is not trivial. Knowledge creation is a complex process, so perhaps alternative measures of creativity and productivity should be included in scientific metrics, such as the filing of patents, the creation of prototypes4 and even the production of YouTube videos.
  • Perhaps publications in these different media should be weighted differently in different fields.
  • There needs to be a greater focus on what these data mean, and how they can be best interpreted.
  • This requires the input of social scientists, rather than just those more traditionally involved in data capture, such as computer scientists.
  • An international data platform supported by funding agencies could include a virtual 'collaboratory', in which ideas and potential solutions can be posited and discussed. This would bring social scientists together with working natural scientists to develop metrics and test their validity through wikis, blogs and discussion groups, thus building a community of practice. Such a discussion should be open to all ideas and theories and not restricted to traditional bibliometric approaches.
  • Far-sighted action can ensure that metrics goes beyond identifying 'star' researchers, nations or ideas, to capturing the essence of what it means to be a good scientist.
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Mar 10
     
    Let's make science metrics more scientific Julia Lane1 Top of pageAbstract To capture the essence of good science, stakeholders must combine forces to create an open, sound and consistent system for measuring all the activities that make up academic productivity, says Julia Lane.
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: The problem of replicability in science - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...-replicability-in-science.html

Truth Science Evidence Data

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  • The problem of replicability in science from xkcdby Massimo Pigliucci
  • In recent months much has been written about the apparent fact that a surprising, indeed disturbing, number of scientific findings cannot be replicated, or when replicated the effect size turns out to be much smaller than previously thought.
  • Arguably, the recent streak of articles on this topic began with one penned by David Freedman in The Atlantic, and provocatively entitled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science.” In it, the major character was John Ioannidis, the author of some influential meta-studies about the low degree of replicability and high number of technical flaws in a significant portion of published papers in the biomedical literature.
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  • As Freedman put it in The Atlantic: “80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.” Ioannidis himself was quoted uttering some sobering words for the medical community (and the public at large): “Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor. I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”
  • Julia and I actually addressed this topic during a Rationally Speaking podcast, featuring as guest our friend Steve Novella, of Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe and Science-Based Medicine fame. But while Steve did quibble with the tone of the Atlantic article, he agreed that Ioannidis’ results are well known and accepted by the medical research community. Steve did point out that it should not be surprising that results get better and better as one moves toward more stringent protocols like large randomized trials, but it seems to me that one should be surprised (actually, appalled) by the fact that even there the percentage of flawed studies is high — not to mention the fact that most studies are in fact neither large nor properly randomized.
  • The second big recent blow to public perception of the reliability of scientific results is an article published in The New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer, entitled “The truth wears off.” Lehrer also mentions Ioannidis, but the bulk of his essay is about findings in psychiatry, psychology and evolutionary biology (and even in research on the paranormal!).
  • In these disciplines there are now several documented cases of results that were initially spectacularly positive — for instance the effects of second generation antipsychotic drugs, or the hypothesized relationship between a male’s body symmetry and the quality of his genes — that turned out to be increasingly difficult to replicate over time, with the original effect sizes being cut down dramatically, or even disappearing altogether.
  • As Lehrer concludes at the end of his article: “Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling.”
  • None of this should actually be particularly surprising to any practicing scientist. If you have spent a significant time of your life in labs and reading the technical literature, you will appreciate the difficulties posed by empirical research, not to mention a number of issues such as the fact that few scientists ever actually bother to replicate someone else’s results, for the simple reason that there is no Nobel (or even funded grant, or tenured position) waiting for the guy who arrived second.
  • n the midst of this I was directed by a tweet by my colleague Neil deGrasse Tyson (who has also appeared on the RS podcast, though in a different context) to a recent ABC News article penned by John Allen Paulos, which meant to explain the decline effect in science.
  • Paulos’ article is indeed concise and on the mark (though several of the explanations he proposes were already brought up in both the Atlantic and New Yorker essays), but it doesn’t really make things much better.
  • Paulos suggests that one explanation for the decline effect is the well known statistical phenomenon of the regression toward the mean. This phenomenon is responsible, among other things, for a fair number of superstitions: you’ve probably heard of some athletes’ and other celebrities’ fear of being featured on the cover of a magazine after a particularly impressive series of accomplishments, because this brings “bad luck,” meaning that the following year one will not be able to repeat the performance at the same level. This is actually true, not because of magical reasons, but simply as a result of the regression to the mean: extraordinary performances are the result of a large number of factors that have to line up just right for the spectacular result to be achieved. The statistical chances of such an alignment to repeat itself are low, so inevitably next year’s performance will likely be below par. Paulos correctly argues that this also explains some of the decline effect of scientific results: the first discovery might have been the result of a number of factors that are unlikely to repeat themselves in exactly the same way, thus reducing the effect size when the study is replicated.
  • nother major determinant of the unreliability of scientific results mentioned by Paulos is the well know problem of publication bias: crudely put, science journals (particularly the high-profile ones, like Nature and Science) are interested only in positive, spectacular, “sexy” results. Which creates a powerful filter against negative, or marginally significant results. What you see in science journals, in other words, isn’t a statistically representative sample of scientific results, but a highly biased one, in favor of positive outcomes. No wonder that when people try to repeat the feat they often come up empty handed.
  • A third cause for the problem, not mentioned by Paulos but addressed in the New Yorker article, is the selective reporting of results by scientists themselves. This is essentially the same phenomenon as the publication bias, except that this time it is scientists themselves, not editors and reviewers, who don’t bother to submit for publication results that are either negative or not strongly conclusive. Again, the outcome is that what we see in the literature isn’t all the science that we ought to see. And it’s no good to argue that it is the “best” science, because the quality of scientific research is measured by the appropriateness of the experimental protocols (including the use of large samples) and of the data analyses — not by whether the results happen to confirm the scientist’s favorite theory.
  • The conclusion of all this is not, of course, that we should throw the baby (science) out with the bath water (bad or unreliable results). But scientists should also be under no illusion that these are rare anomalies that do not affect scientific research at large. Too much emphasis is being put on the “publish or perish” culture of modern academia, with the result that graduate students are explicitly instructed to go for the SPU’s — Smallest Publishable Units — when they have to decide how much of their work to submit to a journal. That way they maximize the number of their publications, which maximizes the chances of landing a postdoc position, and then a tenure track one, and then of getting grants funded, and finally of getting tenure. The result is that, according to statistics published by Nature, it turns out that about ⅓ of published studies is never cited (not to mention replicated!).
  • “Scientists these days tend to keep up the polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist’s field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist’s, and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants. ... We speak piously of taking measurements and making small studies that will ‘add another brick to the temple of science.’ Most such bricks lie around the brickyard.”
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 05 Jan 11
       
      Written by John Platt in a "Science" article published in 1964
  • Most damning of all, however, is the potential effect that all of this may have on science’s already dubious reputation with the general public (think evolution-creation, vaccine-autism, or climate change)
  • “If we don’t tell the public about these problems, then we’re no better than non-scientists who falsely claim they can heal. If the drugs don’t work and we’re not sure how to treat something, why should we claim differently? Some fear that there may be less funding because we stop claiming we can prove we have miraculous treatments. But if we can’t really provide those miracles, how long will we be able to fool the public anyway? The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing.”
  • Joseph T. Lapp said... But is any of this new for science? Perhaps science has operated this way all along, full of fits and starts, mostly duds. How do we know that this isn't the optimal way for science to operate?My issues are with the understanding of science that high school graduates have, and with the reporting of science.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 05 Jan 11
       
      It's the media at fault again.
  • What seems to have emerged in recent decades is a change in the institutional setting that got science advancing spectacularly since the establishment of the Royal Society. Flaws in the system such as corporate funded research, pal-review instead of peer-review, publication bias, science entangled with policy advocacy, and suchlike, may be distorting the environment, making it less suitable for the production of good science, especially in some fields.
  • Remedies should exist, but they should evolve rather than being imposed on a reluctant sociological-economic science establishment driven by powerful motives such as professional advance or funding. After all, who or what would have the authority to impose those rules, other than the scientific establishment itself?
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: New Bridges Column: The Origins of "Basic Research" - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.sg/...s-column-origins-of-basic.html

Science Basic Research Research Google Search

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 12
     
    "The appealing imagery of a scientist who simply follows his curiosity and then makes a discovery with a large societal payoff is part of the core mythology of post-World War II science policies. The mythology shapes how governments around the world organize, account for, and fund research. A large body of scholarship has critiqued postwar science policies and found that, despite many notable successes, the science policies that may have made sense in the middle of the last century may need updating in the 21st century. In short, investments in "basic research" are not enough. Benoit Godin has asserted (PDF) that: "The problem is that the academic lobby has successfully claimed a monopoly on the creation of new knowledge, and that policy makers have been persuaded to confuse the necessary with the sufficient condition that investment in basic research would by itself necessarily lead to successful applications." Or as Leshner and Cooper declare in The Washington Post: "Federal investments in R&D have fueled half of the nation's economic growth since World War II." A closer look at the actual history of Google reveals how history becomes mythology. The 1994 NSF project that funded the scientific work underpinning the search engine that became Google (as we know it today) was conducted from the start with commercialization in mind: "The technology developed in this project will provide the 'glue' that will make this worldwide collection usable as a unified entity, in a scalable and economically viable fashion." In this case, the scientist following his curiosity had at least one eye simultaneously on commercialization."
Weiye Loh

Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change? | Science | The ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...entists-end-climate-change-war

Climate Science Academic Research Data Mining Data Open Source Funding ClimateGate Polarisation Statistics

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  • Muller calls his latest obsession the Berkeley Earth project. The aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the undertaking is easy to miss. Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and more data than has ever been used, they will arrive at an independent assessment of global warming. The team will also make every piece of data it uses – 1.6bn data points – freely available on a website. It will post its workings alongside, including full information on how more than 100 years of data from thousands of instruments around the world are stitched together to give a historic record of the planet's temperature.
  • Muller is fed up with the politicised row that all too often engulfs climate science. By laying all its data and workings out in the open, where they can be checked and challenged by anyone, the Berkeley team hopes to achieve something remarkable: a broader consensus on global warming. In no other field would Muller's dream seem so ambitious, or perhaps, so naive.
  • "We are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious," Muller says, over a cup of tea. "We are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find." Why does Muller feel compelled to shake up the world of climate change? "We are doing this because it is the most important project in the world today. Nothing else comes close," he says.
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  • There are already three heavyweight groups that could be considered the official keepers of the world's climate data. Each publishes its own figures that feed into the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City produces a rolling estimate of the world's warming. A separate assessment comes from another US agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). The third group is based in the UK and led by the Met Office. They all take readings from instruments around the world to come up with a rolling record of the Earth's mean surface temperature. The numbers differ because each group uses its own dataset and does its own analysis, but they show a similar trend. Since pre-industrial times, all point to a warming of around 0.75C.
  • You might think three groups was enough, but Muller rolls out a list of shortcomings, some real, some perceived, that he suspects might undermine public confidence in global warming records. For a start, he says, warming trends are not based on all the available temperature records. The data that is used is filtered and might not be as representative as it could be. He also cites a poor history of transparency in climate science, though others argue many climate records and the tools to analyse them have been public for years.
  • Then there is the fiasco of 2009 that saw roughly 1,000 emails from a server at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) find their way on to the internet. The fuss over the messages, inevitably dubbed Climategate, gave Muller's nascent project added impetus. Climate sceptics had already attacked James Hansen, head of the Nasa group, for making political statements on climate change while maintaining his role as an objective scientist. The Climategate emails fuelled their protests. "With CRU's credibility undergoing a severe test, it was all the more important to have a new team jump in, do the analysis fresh and address all of the legitimate issues raised by sceptics," says Muller.
  • This latest point is where Muller faces his most delicate challenge. To concede that climate sceptics raise fair criticisms means acknowledging that scientists and government agencies have got things wrong, or at least could do better. But the debate around global warming is so highly charged that open discussion, which science requires, can be difficult to hold in public. At worst, criticising poor climate science can be taken as an attack on science itself, a knee-jerk reaction that has unhealthy consequences. "Scientists will jump to the defence of alarmists because they don't recognise that the alarmists are exaggerating," Muller says.
  • The Berkeley Earth project came together more than a year ago, when Muller rang David Brillinger, a statistics professor at Berkeley and the man Nasa called when it wanted someone to check its risk estimates of space debris smashing into the International Space Station. He wanted Brillinger to oversee every stage of the project. Brillinger accepted straight away. Since the first meeting he has advised the scientists on how best to analyse their data and what pitfalls to avoid. "You can think of statisticians as the keepers of the scientific method, " Brillinger told me. "Can scientists and doctors reasonably draw the conclusions they are setting down? That's what we're here for."
  • For the rest of the team, Muller says he picked scientists known for original thinking. One is Saul Perlmutter, the Berkeley physicist who found evidence that the universe is expanding at an ever faster rate, courtesy of mysterious "dark energy" that pushes against gravity. Another is Art Rosenfeld, the last student of the legendary Manhattan Project physicist Enrico Fermi, and something of a legend himself in energy research. Then there is Robert Jacobsen, a Berkeley physicist who is an expert on giant datasets; and Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Institute of Technology, who has raised concerns over tribalism and hubris in climate science.
  • Robert Rohde, a young physicist who left Berkeley with a PhD last year, does most of the hard work. He has written software that trawls public databases, themselves the product of years of painstaking work, for global temperature records. These are compiled, de-duplicated and merged into one huge historical temperature record. The data, by all accounts, are a mess. There are 16 separate datasets in 14 different formats and they overlap, but not completely. Muller likens Rohde's achievement to Hercules's enormous task of cleaning the Augean stables.
  • The wealth of data Rohde has collected so far – and some dates back to the 1700s – makes for what Muller believes is the most complete historical record of land temperatures ever compiled. It will, of itself, Muller claims, be a priceless resource for anyone who wishes to study climate change. So far, Rohde has gathered records from 39,340 individual stations worldwide.
  • Publishing an extensive set of temperature records is the first goal of Muller's project. The second is to turn this vast haul of data into an assessment on global warming.
  • The big three groups – Nasa, Noaa and the Met Office – work out global warming trends by placing an imaginary grid over the planet and averaging temperatures records in each square. So for a given month, all the records in England and Wales might be averaged out to give one number. Muller's team will take temperature records from individual stations and weight them according to how reliable they are.
  • This is where the Berkeley group faces its toughest task by far and it will be judged on how well it deals with it. There are errors running through global warming data that arise from the simple fact that the global network of temperature stations was never designed or maintained to monitor climate change. The network grew in a piecemeal fashion, starting with temperature stations installed here and there, usually to record local weather.
  • Among the trickiest errors to deal with are so-called systematic biases, which skew temperature measurements in fiendishly complex ways. Stations get moved around, replaced with newer models, or swapped for instruments that record in celsius instead of fahrenheit. The times measurements are taken varies, from say 6am to 9pm. The accuracy of individual stations drift over time and even changes in the surroundings, such as growing trees, can shield a station more from wind and sun one year to the next. Each of these interferes with a station's temperature measurements, perhaps making it read too cold, or too hot. And these errors combine and build up.
  • This is the real mess that will take a Herculean effort to clean up. The Berkeley Earth team is using algorithms that automatically correct for some of the errors, a strategy Muller favours because it doesn't rely on human interference. When the team publishes its results, this is where the scrutiny will be most intense.
  • Despite the scale of the task, and the fact that world-class scientific organisations have been wrestling with it for decades, Muller is convinced his approach will lead to a better assessment of how much the world is warming. "I've told the team I don't know if global warming is more or less than we hear, but I do believe we can get a more precise number, and we can do it in a way that will cool the arguments over climate change, if nothing else," says Muller. "Science has its weaknesses and it doesn't have a stranglehold on the truth, but it has a way of approaching technical issues that is a closer approximation of truth than any other method we have."
  • It might not be a good sign that one prominent climate sceptic contacted by the Guardian, Canadian economist Ross McKitrick, had never heard of the project. Another, Stephen McIntyre, whom Muller has defended on some issues, hasn't followed the project either, but said "anything that [Muller] does will be well done". Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia was unclear on the details of the Berkeley project and didn't comment.
  • Elsewhere, Muller has qualified support from some of the biggest names in the business. At Nasa, Hansen welcomed the project, but warned against over-emphasising what he expects to be the minor differences between Berkeley's global warming assessment and those from the other groups. "We have enough trouble communicating with the public already," Hansen says. At the Met Office, Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution, was in favour of the project if it was open and peer-reviewed.
  • Peter Thorne, who left the Met Office's Hadley Centre last year to join the Co-operative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North Carolina, is enthusiastic about the Berkeley project but raises an eyebrow at some of Muller's claims. The Berkeley group will not be the first to put its data and tools online, he says. Teams at Nasa and Noaa have been doing this for many years. And while Muller may have more data, they add little real value, Thorne says. Most are records from stations installed from the 1950s onwards, and then only in a few regions, such as North America. "Do you really need 20 stations in one region to get a monthly temperature figure? The answer is no. Supersaturating your coverage doesn't give you much more bang for your buck," he says. They will, however, help researchers spot short-term regional variations in climate change, something that is likely to be valuable as climate change takes hold.
  • Despite his reservations, Thorne says climate science stands to benefit from Muller's project. "We need groups like Berkeley stepping up to the plate and taking this challenge on, because it's the only way we're going to move forwards. I wish there were 10 other groups doing this," he says.
  • Muller's project is organised under the auspices of Novim, a Santa Barbara-based non-profit organisation that uses science to find answers to the most pressing issues facing society and to publish them "without advocacy or agenda". Funding has come from a variety of places, including the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (funded by Bill Gates), and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Lab. One donor has had some climate bloggers up in arms: the man behind the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation owns, with his brother David, Koch Industries, a company Greenpeace called a "kingpin of climate science denial". On this point, Muller says the project has taken money from right and left alike.
  • No one who spoke to the Guardian about the Berkeley Earth project believed it would shake the faith of the minority who have set their minds against global warming. "As new kids on the block, I think they will be given a favourable view by people, but I don't think it will fundamentally change people's minds," says Thorne. Brillinger has reservations too. "There are people you are never going to change. They have their beliefs and they're not going to back away from them."
Weiye Loh

Climate sceptic Willie Soon received $1m from oil companies, papers show | Environment ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ate-change-sceptic-willie-soon

Capitalism Lobbying Climate Science Denial Skepticism Funding

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  • freedom of information documents suggest that Soon corresponded in 2003 with other prominent climate sceptics to try to weaken a major assessment of global warming being conducted by the UN's leading climate science body, the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Soon, who had previously disclosed corporate funding he received in the 1990s, was today reportely unapologetic, telling Reuters that he agreed that he had received money from all of the groups and companies named in the report but denied that any group would have influenced his studies.
  • "I have never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research," he said. "I would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research."
  • Charles G Koch Foundation, a leading provider of funds for climate sceptic groups, gave Soon two grants totalling $175,000 (then roughly £102,000) in 2005/6 and again in 2010. In addition the American Petroleum insitute (API), which represents the US petroleum and natural gas industries, gave him multiple grants between 2001 and 2007 totalling $274,000, oil company Exxon Mobil provided $335,000 between 2005 and 2010, and Soon received other grants from coal and oil industry sources including the Mobil Foundation, the Texaco Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute.
Weiye Loh

The Origins of "Basic Research" - 0 views

www.ostina.org/index.php

Science Basic Research Research Google Search

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  • For many scientists, "basic research" means "fundamental" or "pure" research conducted without consideration of practical applications. At the same time, policy makers see "basic research" as that which leads to societal benefits including economic growth and jobs.
  • The mechanism that has allowed such divergent views to coexist is of course the so-called "linear model" of innovation, which holds that investments in "basic research" are but the first step in a sequence that progresses through applied research, development, and application. As recently explained in a major report of the US National Academy of Sciences: "[B]asic research ... has the potential to be transformational to maintain the flow of new ideas that fuel the economy, provide security, and enhance the quality of life" (Rising Above the Gathering Storm).
  • A closer look at the actual history of Google reveals how history becomes mythology. The 1994 NSF project that funded the scientific work underpinning the search engine that became Google (as we know it today) was conducted from the start with commercialization in mind: "The technology developed in this project will provide the 'glue' that will make this worldwide collection usable as a unified entity, in a scalable and economically viable fashion." In this case, the scientist following his curiosity had at least one eye simultaneously on commercialization.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In their appeal for more funding for scientific research, Leshner and Cooper argued that: "Across society, we don't have to look far for examples of basic research that paid off." They cite the creation of Google as a prime example of such payoffs: "Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then a National Science Foundation [NSF] fellow, did not intend to invent the Google search engine. Originally, they were intrigued by a mathematical challenge ..." The appealing imagery of a scientist who simply follows his curiosity and then makes a discovery with a large societal payoff is part of the core mythology of post-World War II science policies. The mythology shapes how governments around the world organize, account for, and fund research. A large body of scholarship has critiqued postwar science policies and found that, despite many notable successes, the science policies that may have made sense in the middle of the last century may need updating in the 21st century. In short, investments in "basic research" are not enough. Benoit Godin has asserted (PDF) that: "The problem is that the academic lobby has successfully claimed a monopoly on the creation of new knowledge, and that policy makers have been persuaded to confuse the necessary with the sufficient condition that investment in basic research would by itself necessarily lead to successful applications." Or as Leshner and Cooper declare in The Washington Post: "Federal investments in R&D have fueled half of the nation's economic growth since World War II."
Weiye Loh

Bankers, Buyouts & Billionaires: Why Big Herba's Research Deficit Isn't About... - 0 views

www.skepticnorth.com/...-isn%e2%80%99t-about-the-money

Funding Research Medicine Nature Patent Capitalism

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  • A skeptic challenges a natural health product for the lack of an evidentiary base.  A proponent of that product responds that the skeptic has made a logical error – an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and in such a scenario it’s not unreasonable to rely on patient reporting and traditional uses as a guide. The skeptic chimes back with a dissertation on the limits of anecdotal evidence and arguments from antiquity — especially when the corresponding pharma products have a data trail supporting their safety and efficacy. The proponent responds that it’s unfair to hold natural health products to the same evidentiary standard, because only pharma has the money to fund proper research, and they only do so for products they can patent. You can’t patent nature, so no research into natural health products gets done.
  • look here, here, and here for recent examples
  • natural health industry isn’t rich enough to sustain proper research.  Is that true? Natural health, by the numbers On the surface, it certainly wouldn’t appear so. While the industry can be difficult to get a bead on – due both to differing definitions of what it includes (organic foods? natural toothpaste?), and the fact that many of the key players are private companies that don’t report revenues – by any measure it’s sizable. A survey by the University of Guelph  references KPMG estimates that the Natural Health Products sector in Canada grew from $1.24B in 2000 to $1.82B in 2006 – a growth rate that would bring the market to about $2.5B today.   Figures from the Nutrition Business Journal quoted in the same survey seem to agree, suggesting Canada is 3% of a global “supplements” (herbal, homeopathy, vitamins) market that was $68B globally in 2006 and growing at 5% a year – bringing it to perhaps $85B today. Figures from various sources quoted in a recent Health Canada report support these estimates.
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  • While certainly not as big as the ($820B) pharmaceutical industry, $85B is still an awful lot of money, and it’s hard to imagine it not being enough to carve out a research budget from. Yet research isn’t done by entire industries, but by one tier of the value chain — the companies that manufacture and distribute the products.  If they’re not big enough to fund the type of research skeptics are looking for, it won’t be done, so let’s consider some of the bigger players before we make that call.
  • French giant Boiron (EPA:BOI) is by far the largest distributor of natural health products in Canada – they’re responsible for nearly 4000 (15%) of the 26,000 products approved by Health Canada’s Natural Health Products Directorate. They’re also one of largest natural health products companies globally, with 2010 revenues of €520M ($700M CAD) – a size achieved not just through the success of killer products like Oscillococcinum, but also through acquisitions. In recent years, the company has acquired both its main French rival Dolisos (giving them 90% of the French homeopathy market) and the largest homeopathy company in Belgium, Unda. So this is a big company that’s prepared to spend money to get even bigger. What about spending some of that money on research?  Well ostensibly it’s a priority: “Since 2005, we have devoted a growing level of resources to develop research,” they proclaim in the opening pages of their latest annual report, citing 70 in-progress research projects. Yet the numbers tell a different story – €4.2M in R&D expenditures in 2009, just 0.8% of revenues.
  • To put that in perspective, consider that in the same year, GlaxoSmithKline spent 14% of its revenues on R&D, Pfizer spent 15%, and Merck spent a whopping 21%.
  • But if Boiron’s not spending like pharma on research, there’s one line item where they do go toe to toe: Marketing. The company spent €114M – a full 21% of revenues on marketing in 2009. By contrast, GSK, Pfizer and Merck reported 33%, 29%, and 30% of revenues respectively on their “Selling, General, and Administrative” (SG&A) line – which includes not just sales & marketing expenses, but also executive salaries, support staff, legal, rent, utilities, and other overhead costs. Once those are subtracted out, it’s likely that Boiron spends at least as much of its revenues on marketing as Big Pharma.
Weiye Loh

Have you heard of the Koch Brothers? | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=10234

News media bias Protest Violence Union

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • I return to the Guardian online site expressly to search for those elusive articles on Wisconsin. The main page has none. I click on News – US, and there are none. I click on ‘Commentary is Free’- US, and find one article on protests in Ohio. I go to the New York Times online site. Earlier, on my phone, I had seen one article at the bottom of the main page on Wisconsin. By the time I managed to get on my computer to find it again however, the NYT main page was quite devoid of any articles on the protests at all. I am stumped; clearly, I have to reconfigure my daily news sources and reading diet.
  • It is not that the media is not covering the protests in Wisconsin at all – but effective media coverage in the US at least, in my view, is as much about volume as it is about substantive coverage. That week, more prime-time slots and the bulk of the US national attention were given to Charlie Sheen and his crazy antics (whatever they were about, I am still not too sure) than to Libya and the rest of the Middle East, or more significantly, to a pertinent domestic issue, the teacher protests  - not just in Wisconsin but also in other cities in the north-eastern part of the US.
  • In the March 2nd episode of The Colbert Report, it was shown that the Fox News coverage of the Wisconsin protests had re-used footage from more violent protests in California (the palm trees in the background gave Fox News away). Bill O’Reilly at Fox News had apparently issued an apology – but how many viewers who had seen the footage and believed it to be on-the-ground footage of Wisconsin would have followed-up on the report and the apology? And anyway, why portray the teacher protests as violent?
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  • In this New York Times’ article, “Teachers Wonder, Why the scorn?“, the writer notes the often scathing comments from counter-demonstrators – “Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.” What had begun as an ostensibly ‘economic reform’ targeted at teachers’ unions has gradually transmogrified into a kind of “character attack” to this section of American society – teachers are people who wage violent protests (thanks to borrowed footage from the West Coast) and they are undeserving of their economic benefits, and indeed treat these privileges as ‘rights’. The ‘war’ is waged on multiple fronts, economic, political, social, psychological even — or at least one gets this sort of picture from reading these articles.
  • as Singaporeans with a uniquely Singaporean work ethic, we may perceive functioning ‘trade unions’ as those institutions in the so-called “West” where they amass lots of membership, then hold the government ‘hostage’ in order to negotiate higher wages and benefits. Think of trade unions in the Singaporean context, and I think of SIA pilots. And of LKY’s various firm and stern comments on those issues. Think of trade unions and I think of strikes in France, in South Korea, when I was younger, and of my mum saying, “How irresponsible!” before flipping the TV channel.
  • The reason why I think the teachers’ protests should not be seen solely as an issue about trade-unions, and evaluated myopically and naively in terms of whether trade unions are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is because the protests feature in a larger political context with the billionaire Koch brothers at the helm, financing and directing much of what has transpired in recent weeks. Or at least according to certain articles which I present here.
  • In this NYT article entitled “Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute“, the writer noted that Koch Industries had been “one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.” Further, the president of Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit group financed by the Koch brothers, had reportedly addressed counter-demonstrators last Saturday saying that “the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits.” and in his own words -“ ‘We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation’ ”. All this rhetoric would be more convincing to me if they weren’t funded by the same two billionaires who financially enabled Walker’s governorship.
  • I now refer you to a long piece by Jane Mayer for The New Yorker titled, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama“. According to her, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.”
  • Their libertarian modus operandi involves great expenses in lobbying, in political contributions and in setting up think tanks. From 2006-2010, Koch Industries have led energy companies in political contributions; “[i]n the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation.” More statistics, or at least those of the non-anonymous donation records, can be found on page 5 of Mayer’s piece.
  • Naturally, the Democrats also have their billionaire donors, most notably in the form of George Soros. Mayer writes that he has made ‘generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s.” Yet what distinguishes him from the Koch brothers here is, as Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued, ‘that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” ‘ Of course, this must be taken with a healthy dose of salt, but I will note here that in Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job, which was about the 2008 financial crisis, George Soros was one of those interviewed who was not portrayed negatively. (My review of it is here.)
  • Of the Koch brothers’ political investments, what interested me more was the US’ “first libertarian thinktank”, the Cato Institute. Mayer writes, ‘When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told [Mayer] that “global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy.” ‘
  • K Street refers to a major street in Washington, D.C. where major think tanks, lobbyists and advocacy groups are located.
  • with recent developments as the Citizens United case where corporations are now ‘persons’ and have no caps in political contributions, the Koch brothers are ever better-positioned to take down their perceived big, bad government and carry out their ideological agenda as sketched in Mayer’s piece
  • with much important news around the world jostling for our attention – earthquake in Japan, Middle East revolutions – the passing of an anti-union bill (which finally happened today, for better or for worse) in an American state is unlikely to make a headline able to compete with natural disasters and revolutions. Then, to quote Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during that prank call conversation, “Sooner or later the media stops finding it [the teacher protests] interesting.”
  • What remains more puzzling for me is why the American public seems to buy into the Koch-funded libertarian rhetoric. Mayer writes, ‘ “Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist.” I suppose that not knowing who is funding the political rhetoric makes it easier for the public to imbibe it.
Weiye Loh

Open science: a future shaped by shared experience | Education | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ience-shared-research-internet

Open Source Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 May 11 - No Cached
  • one day he took one of these – finding a mathematical proof about the properties of multidimensional objects – and put his thoughts on his blog. How would other people go about solving this conundrum? Would somebody else have any useful insights? Would mathematicians, notoriously competitive, be prepared to collaborate? "It was an experiment," he admits. "I thought it would be interesting to try."He called it the Polymath Project and it rapidly took on a life of its own. Within days, readers, including high-ranking academics, had chipped in vital pieces of information or new ideas. In just a few weeks, the number of contributors had reached more than 40 and a result was on the horizon. Since then, the joint effort has led to several papers published in journals under the collective pseudonym DHJ Polymath. It was an astonishing and unexpected result.
  • "If you set out to solve a problem, there's no guarantee you will succeed," says Gowers. "But different people have different aptitudes and they know different tricks… it turned out their combined efforts can be much quicker."
  • There are many interpretations of what open science means, with different motivations across different disciplines. Some are driven by the backlash against corporate-funded science, with its profit-driven research agenda. Others are internet radicals who take the "information wants to be free" slogan literally. Others want to make important discoveries more likely to happen. But for all their differences, the ambition remains roughly the same: to try and revolutionise the way research is performed by unlocking it and making it more public.
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  • Jackson is a young bioscientist who, like many others, has discovered that the technologies used in genetics and molecular biology, once the preserve of only the most well-funded labs, are now cheap enough to allow experimental work to take place in their garages. For many, this means that they can conduct genetic experiments in a new way, adopting the so-called "hacker ethic" – the desire to tinker, deconstruct, rebuild.
  • The rise of this group is entertainingly documented in a new book by science writer Marcus Wohlsen, Biopunk (Current £18.99), which describes the parallels between today's generation of biological innovators and the rise of computer software pioneers of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, Bill Gates has said that if he were a teenager today, he would be working on biotechnology, not computer software.
  • open scientists suggest that it doesn't have to be that way. Their arguments are propelled by a number of different factors that are making transparency more viable than ever.The first and most powerful change has been the use of the web to connect people and collect information. The internet, now an indelible part of our lives, allows like-minded individuals to seek one another out and share vast amounts of raw data. Researchers can lay claim to an idea not by publishing first in a journal (a process that can take many months) but by sharing their work online in an instant.And while the rapidly decreasing cost of previously expensive technical procedures has opened up new directions for research, there is also increasing pressure for researchers to cut costs and deliver results. The economic crisis left many budgets in tatters and governments around the world are cutting back on investment in science as they try to balance the books. Open science can, sometimes, make the process faster and cheaper, showing what one advocate, Cameron Neylon, calls "an obligation and responsibility to the public purse".
  • "The litmus test of openness is whether you can have access to the data," says Dr Rufus Pollock, a co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a group that promotes broader access to information and data. "If you have access to the data, then anyone can get it, use it, reuse it and redistribute it… we've always built on the work of others, stood on the shoulders of giants and learned from those who have gone before."
  • moves are afoot to disrupt the closed world of academic journals and make high-level teaching materials available to the public. The Public Library of Science, based in San Francisco, is working to make journals more freely accessible
  • it's more than just politics at stake – it's also a fundamental right to share knowledge, rather than hide it. The best example of open science in action, he suggests, is the Human Genome Project, which successfully mapped our DNA and then made the data public. In doing so, it outflanked J Craig Venter's proprietary attempt to patent the human genome, opening up the very essence of human life for science, rather than handing our biological information over to corporate interests.
  • the rise of open science does not please everyone. Critics have argued that while it benefits those at either end of the scientific chain – the well-established at the top of the academic tree or the outsiders who have nothing to lose – it hurts those in the middle. Most professional scientists rely on the current system for funding and reputation. Others suggest it is throwing out some of the most important elements of science and making deep, long-term research more difficult.
  • Open science proponents say that they do not want to make the current system a thing of the past, but that it shouldn't be seen as immutable either. In fact, they say, the way most people conceive of science – as a highly specialised academic discipline conducted by white-coated professionals in universities or commercial laboratories – is a very modern construction.It is only over the last century that scientific disciplines became industrialised and compartmentalised.
  • open scientists say they don't want to throw scientists to the wolves: they just want to help answer questions that, in many cases, are seen as insurmountable.
  • "Some people, very straightforwardly, said that they didn't like the idea because it undermined the concept of the romantic, lone genius." Even the most dedicated open scientists understand that appeal. "I do plan to keep going at them," he says of collaborative projects. "But I haven't given up on solitary thinking about problems entirely."
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Global Warming Skeptic Changes His Tune - by Doing the Science ... - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...rming-skeptic-changes-his-tune

Climate Science Skepticism Berkeley Earth

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • To the global warming deniers, Muller had been an important scientific figure with good credentials who had expressed doubt about the temperature data used to track the last few decades of global warming. Muller was influenced by Anthony Watts, a former TV weatherman (not a trained climate scientist) and blogger who has argued that the data set is mostly from large cities, where the “urban heat island” effect might bias the overall pool of worldwide temperature data. Climate scientists have pointed out that they have accounted for this possible effect already, but Watts and Muller were unconvinced. With $150,000 (25% of their funding) from the Koch brothers (the nation’s largest supporters of climate denial research), as well as the Getty Foundation (their wealth largely based on oil money) and other funding sources, Muller set out to reanalyze all the temperature data by setting up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project.
  • Although only 2% of the data were analyzed by last month, the Republican climate deniers in Congress called him to testify in their March 31 hearing to attack global warming science, expecting him to give them scientific data supporting their biases. To their dismay, Muller behaved like a real scientist and not an ideologue—he followed his data and told them the truth, not what they wanted to hear. Muller pointed out that his analysis of the data set almost exactly tracked what the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Goddard Institute of Space Science (GISS), and the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK had already published (see figure).
  • Muller testified before the House Committee that: The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was created to make the best possible estimate of global temperature change using as complete a record of measurements as possible and by applying novel methods for the estimation and elimination of systematic biases. We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups. The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine global temperature trends. Despite potential biases in the data, methods of analysis can be used to reduce bias effects well enough to enable us to measure long-term Earth temperature changes. Data integrity is adequate. Based on our initial work at Berkeley Earth, I believe that some of the most worrisome biases are less of a problem than I had previously thought.
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  • The right-wing ideologues were sorely disappointed, and reacted viciously in the political sphere by attacking their own scientist, but Muller’s scientific integrity overcame any biases he might have harbored at the beginning. He “called ‘em as he saw ‘em” and told truth to power.
  • it speaks well of the scientific process when a prominent skeptic like Muller does his job properly and admits that his original biases were wrong. As reported in the Los Angeles Times : Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, which contributed some funding to the Berkeley effort, said Muller’s statement to Congress was “honorable” in recognizing that “previous temperature reconstructions basically got it right…. Willingness to revise views in the face of empirical data is the hallmark of the good scientific process.”
  • This is the essence of the scientific method at its best. There may be biases in our perceptions, and we may want to find data that fits our preconceptions about the world, but if science is done properly, we get a real answer, often one we did not expect or didn’t want to hear. That’s the true test of when science is giving us a reality check: when it tells us “an inconvenient truth”, something we do not like, but is inescapable if one follows the scientific method and analyzes the data honestly.
  • Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
Weiye Loh

Our local Animation industry | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=11456

Education Media Singapore Capitalism Governance

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • What is the truth regarding our local Animation industry, you ask? The truth is… our local industry… is dying. Dying from foreign competition from giants. Dying because our locals are not supportive of our native talents. Dying before we make an animation that is truly made in Singapore.
  • our education system has failed its citizens to make sure that we are up to the mark for the various requirements of the job market in whichever industry. This made us much more vulnerable to the influx of foreign animators, who can accept lower pay and produce higher quality work than the locals; effectively starving out the local animators and animation companies.
  • To make matters worse, the government managed to woo top foreign animation companies to set up shop in Singapore, effectively killing the local companies. Many of these foreign animation companies hire lesser locals and receive government funding while local companies are left to fend for themselves. If you think about it, with the billions of dollars it makes every year, does Lucasfilm Singapore require that government funding to set up shop in Singapore? My mentor’s studio once had courses that only costed $2K with government subsidy. But now with government funding cut, the courses now costs $10K. These put a lot of financial pressure on artists with the passion for the animation industry but are financially tight. I was one of the last batches who were under the $2K scheme. Many artists like myself have already been financially drained studying in tertiary education. What they need is a job to feed themselves or in some cases repay the bank! It is not helping given the fact that our locals are being out competed due to an incompetent education system.
Weiye Loh

Google is funding a new software project that will automate writing local news - Recode - 0 views

www.recode.net/...ate-writing-local-news-stories

News Natural Language Artificial Intelligence AI Google

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 09 Jul 17
     
    "Radar aims to automate local reporting with large public databases from government agencies or local law enforcement - basically roboticizing the work of reporters. Stories from the data will be penned using Natural Language Generation, which converts information gleaned from the data into words. The robotic reporters won't be working alone. The grant includes funds allocated to hire five journalists to identify datasets, as well as curate and edit the news articles generated from Radar. The project also aims to create automated ways to add images and video to robot-made stories."
Weiye Loh

Study: OLPC Fails Students as a Tool for Education | News & Opinion | PCMag.com - 0 views

www.pcmag.com/...0,2817,2402756,00.asp

UNICEF One Laptop Per Child Technology Access Academic

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Apr 12
     
    The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program of low-cost laptops for developing countries has not led to any measurable impact in academic achievement, according to a recent report. Instead, the study concluded that Peru might be better off spending funding on acquiring and training high-quality teachers, and not investing in technology without complementary instruction. The paper, published in February, concluded that the "intense access to computers" the program provided "does not lead to measurable effects in academic achievement, but it did generate some positive impact on general cognitive skills."
Weiye Loh

Red-Wine Researcher Charged With 'Photoshop' Fraud - 0 views

www.medscape.com/...756865

Academic Research Wine Alcohol Photoshop

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 12
     
    A University of Connecticut researcher known for touting the health benefits of red wine is guilty of 145 counts of fabricating and falsifying data with image-editing software, according to a 3-year university investigation made public Wednesday. The researcher, Dipak K. Das, PhD, is a director of the university's Cardiovascular Research Center (CRC) and a professor in the Department of Surgery. The university stated in a press release that it has frozen all externally funded research in Dr. Das's lab and turned down $890,000 in federal research grants awarded to him. The process to dismiss Dr. Das from the university is already underway, the university added.
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