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being both a working scientist and a science writer gives me a unique perspective on science, scientific publications, and the significance of scientific work. The final disclosure should be that I have never published in any of the top rank physics journals or in Science, Nature, or PNAS. I don't believe I have an axe to grind about that, but I am also sure that you can ascribe some of my opinions to PNAS envy.

If you asked most scientists what their goals were, the answer would boil down to the generation of new knowledge. But, at some point, science and scientists have to interact with money and administrators, which has significant consequences for science. For instance, when trying to employ someone to do a job, you try to objectively decide if the skills set of the prospective employee matches that required to do the job. In science, the same question has to be asked—instead of being asked once per job interview, however, this question gets asked all the time.

Because science requires funding, and no one gets a lifetime dollop-o-cash to explore their favorite corner of the universe. So, the question gets broken down to "how competent is the scientist?" "Is the question they want to answer interesting?" "Do they have the resources to do what they say they will?" We will ignore the last question and focus on the first two.

Scientists these days tend to keep up a 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.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

Google Books allows users to search a massive database of books — Google has digitized more than 15 million, and its ambition is to eventually reach all the books ever printed.  Google does not allow access to copyrighted books unless it has an agreement with a book’s publisher. Instead, users receive a list of books that include their search term.  Click on a book, and Google shows as much as its publisher has authorized, or, if there is no agreement with the publisher, Google shows only a few lines of text containing the relevant terms.

Google Books also provides — for the first time — access to millions of what are called  “orphan works.”  These are books that are out of print, but remain under copyright.  Google Books makes orphan works searchable too.  And that turns out to be extremely important.

The orphan problem arises because most books go out of print very quickly. A few copies may be available in used book stores or filed away in library stacks.  But for most purposes, these books might as well not exist.  Copyright, on the other hand, lasts a very long time — currently, the life of the author plus 70 years.  So for millions of books that are out of print and remain under copyright, would-be users — i.e., anyone who wishes to re-print the book, or to use it in a derivative work — must seek permission.

University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

Vipul Bhrigu, a former postdoc at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center, wears a dark-blue three-buttoned suit and a pinched expression as he cups his pregnant wife's hand in both of his. When Pollard Hines calls Bhrigu's case to order, she has stern words for him: "I was inclined to send you to jail when I came out here this morning."

Bhrigu, over the course of several months at Michigan, had meticulously and systematically sabotaged the work of Heather Ames, a graduate student in his lab, by tampering with her experiments and poisoning her cell-culture media. Captured on hidden camera, Bhrigu confessed to university police in April and pleaded guilty to malicious destruction of personal property, a misdemeanour that apparently usually involves cars: in the spaces for make and model on the police report, the arresting officer wrote "lab research" and "cells". Bhrigu has said on multiple occasions that he was compelled by "internal pressure" and had hoped to slow down Ames's work. Speaking earlier this month, he was contrite. "It was a complete lack of moral judgement on my part," he said.

most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize.

In terms of immediate political stability, there is less to the income inequality issue than meets the eye. Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points. First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark. I don’t have a private jet or take luxury vacations, and—I think it is fair to say—my house is much smaller than his. I can’t meet with the world’s elite on demand. Still, by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.

when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream.

We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did. COMMENTS (7) SHARE: Twitter   Reddit   Buzz   More... But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night?

unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.

Ambrose invented pop history. He was the historical advisor on Saving Private Ryan and wrote the book Band of Brothers, that miniseries about WWII that starred the guy from Office Space.

In 1995, an almost unknown historian named Thomas Childers published the book Wings of Morning. It was a well-received but relatively obscure novel about the crew of a specific B-24 bomber during WWII. Ambrose was a fan of the book and, as a firm believer that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, he proceeded to plagiarize the fuck out of it for his hit 2001 novel, The Wild Blue, which was the account of a different group of B-24 crewmen. Ambrose ripped off whole passages of text and stole several sentences and descriptions word for word. Then he got his book published and just sort of hoped no one would notice.

but fortunately for truth, he got caught. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard noticed what was going on and revealed it to the world. Ambrose was fast to respond. He had cited Childers' book in his bibliography (although he hadn't come close to listing everything he 'borrowed' from his fellow historian's work) and basically claimed that he'd just "forgotten" to attribute the stolen passages in the text, like he was supposed to.

Intellectual-property doctrine isn't a straightforward application of the ethical principle "Thou shalt not steal." At its core is the notion that there are certain situations where you can steal. The protections of copyright, for instance, are time-limited; once something passes into the public domain, anyone can copy it without restriction. Or suppose that you invented a cure for breast cancer in your basement lab. Any patent you received would protect your intellectual property for twenty years, but after that anyone could take your invention.

You get an initial monopoly on your creation because we want to provide economic incentives for people to invent things like cancer drugs. But everyone gets to steal your breast-cancer cure—after a decent interval—because it is also in society's interest to let as many people as possible copy your invention; only then can others learn from it, and build on it, and come up with better and cheaper alternatives. This balance between the protecting and the limiting of intellectual property

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig argues in his new book "Free Culture": In ordinary language, to call a copyright a "property" right is a bit misleading, for the property of copyright is an odd kind of property. . . . I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it, you don't have it. But what am I taking when I take the good idea you had to put a picnic table in the backyard—by, for example, going to Sears, buying a table, and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing that I am taking then? The point is not just about the thingness of picnic tables versus ideas, though that is an important difference. The point instead is that in the ordinary case—indeed, in practically every case except for a narrow range of exceptions—ideas released to the world are free. I don't take anything from you when I copy the way you dress—though I might seem weird if I do it every day. . . . Instead, as Thomas Jefferson said (and this is especially true when I copy the way someone dresses), "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

Creative Commons works by providing a framework for people to specify how their work can be used. Creators can use the Creative Commons website to choose the licence they want and generate the HTML code to include on their own website. The licences can allow people to copy it, remix it and share it and set various conditions under which those things can be done, for example allowing only non-commercial use of their work or allowing use only if they are credited as the source.

the licensing made possible new business models. She told the Telegraph that the existing system had failed because people saw the world as “either the chaos of piracy or the lockdown”. She added: “But the lockdown doesn’t work and it wouldn’t work even if it was ideal.”

In 1950 Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled "The Hermit Scientist," about what we would today call pseudoscientists.

there has been some progress since Gardner offered his first criticisms of pseudoscience. Now largely antiquated are his chapters on believers in a flat Earth, a hollow Earth, Atlantis and Lemuria, Alfred William Lawson, Roger Babson, Trofim Lysenko, Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Korzybski. But disturbingly, a good two thirds of the book's contents are relevant today, including Gardner's discussions of homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, iridiagnosis (reading the iris of the eye to deter- mine bodily malfunctions), food faddists, cancer cures and other forms of medical quackery, Edgar Cayce, the Great Pyramid's alleged mystical powers, handwriting analysis, ESP and PK (psychokinesis), reincarnation, dowsing rods, eccentric sexual theories, and theories of group racial differences.

The "hermit scientist," a youthful Gardner wrote, works alone and is ignored by mainstream scientists. "Such neglect, of course, only strengthens the convictions of the self-declared genius."

On paper, Singaporean education is great. Our universities are in the Top 200 in the Times Higher Education list. We win Olympiads all the time. When it comes to knowing a basic inventory of facts, Singaporean education is just about the best you can get. And that is a fact.

So what’s missing?

Singapore is a true melting pot. In the past, as is today, and as will be tomorrow, many cultures came together into one. It has been lauded as one of Singapore’s big selling points – an eclectic fusion of Orient and Occident, a quaint East-meets-West mixture which happens to work. But have we taken this metaphor and looked at it from another perspective? Many cultures came together under the band of meritocracy – may the best rule, and may they rule with wisdom. And since they are the best, they are paid the best money one can get too. This is the fire which managed to melt, or should i say meld East and West into a functioning whole. And since we are such fans of meritocracy, society has been geared in that direction too. This melting pot which is Singapore has had certain repercussions, which the post I have linked to above shows. It seems that in developing the concept of meritocracy, what “The Best” is was artificially defined. And in artificially defining something, you create an artificial standard to compare everything against. In doing so, everything else becomes irrelevant. It creates a strong tendency towards conformity, which is the negative result of the melting pot. The individual loses his/her uniqueness and becomes part of this stew of uniformity. In school, you are told to study hard, you are told what you have to study, without any care as to what you actually think.

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. 

Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, had given a rousing speech to a crowd at Bethel University in Minnesota, near where I live.His speech was on global warming and his style was convincing and irreverent. Anyone listening to him was given the impression that global warming was not happening, or that if it did happen it wouldn't be so bad, and scientists who warned about it were part of a vast conspiracy.

Monckton cited scientist after scientist whose work "disproved" global warming.He contended that polar bears are not really at risk (in fact they do better as weather warms); projections of sea level rise are a mere 6cm; Arctic ice has not declined in a decade; Greenland is not melting; sea levels are not rising; ocean temperatures are not increasing; medieval times were warmer than today; ocean acidification is not occurring; and global temperatures are not increasing.

I actually tracked down the articles and authors that Monckton cited. What I discovered was incredible, even to a scientist who follows the politics of climate change. I found that he had misrepresented the science.

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.

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.

Drug companies exert this hold on knowledge through publication planning agencies, an obscure subsection of the pharmaceutical industry that has ballooned in size in recent years, and is now a key lever in the commercial machinery that gets drugs sold.The planning companies are paid to implement high-impact publication strategies for specific drugs. They target the most influential academics to act as authors, draft the articles, and ensure that these include clearly-defined branding messages and appear in the most prestigious journals.

In selling their services to drug companies, the agencies' explain their work in frank language. Current Medical Directions, a medical communications company based in New York, promises to create "scientific content in support of our clients' messages". A rival firm from Macclesfield, Complete HealthVizion, describes what it does as "a fusion of evidence and inspiration."

There are now at least 250 different companies engaged in the business of planning clinical publications for the pharmaceutical industry, according to the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals, which said it has over 1000 individual members.Many firms are based in the UK and the east coast of the United States in traditional "pharma" centres like Pennsylvania and New Jersey.Precise figures are hard to pin down because publication planning is widely dispersed and is only beginning to be recognized as something like a discrete profession.

in a discipline that regards ingenuity as the ultimate virtue, those who engage in the grunt work of data cleaning and replication receive few rewards. Nobel prizes are not awarded for constructing new historical estimates of GDP that allow policy analysis to be extended back in time.

How could a flawed study have appeared first in the prestigious working-paper series of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and then in a journal of the American Economic Association? And, if this was possible, why should policymakers and a discerning public vest any credibility in economic research?CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphIt was possible because economists are not obliged to make their data and programs publicly available when publishing scientific research. It is said that NBER working papers are even more prestigious than publication in refereed journals. Yet the Bureau does not require scholars to post their data and programs to its Web site as a condition for working-paper publication.

Statistics are helpful. But in economics, as in other lines of social inquiry, they are no substitute for proper historical analysis.

Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.

somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).