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Megan Flanagan

Football's dangers, illustrated by one man's brain - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

football brain

shared by Megan Flanagan on 12 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Michael Keck has added more fuel to the fire about whether young children should play football.
  • diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the Alzheimer's-like disease
  • telltale sign of the disease is tangles of the protein tau, which takes over parts of the brain. They result from repeated hits to the head
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • I have never seen this (brain) pathology in someone under the age of 30"
  • he had more than 10 concussions
  • He lost consciousness, suffered headaches, neck pain, insomnia and anxiety. He couldn't remember things or concentrate.
  • ventually saw a neurologist, who prescribed him a muscle relaxant and anti-seizure medication, but they did little and the symptoms continued
  • he stopped playing football because the symptoms were so strong
  • he had great opportunities, and he had to turn these opportunities down because of something that was taking over his brain
  • became increasingly depressed and suicidal
  • Keck believed he suffered from CTE, but it cannot be diagnosed in living people.
  • Keck died from cardiac arrest in 2013, and it does appear his life was lost to CTE.
  • Usually there's a latent period. He seemed to develop it while he was playing. Even after he quit playing, it seemed to get worse."
  • factors such as environment and genetics may have a role.
  • I think its becoming more and more clear that the developing brain is more susceptible to concussion; it has a delayed recovery from concussion,"
  • "We really need to limit the amount of head contact that young children and adolescents are experiencing
  • teach proper technique
  • We are taking out unnecessary head contact out of the sport, out of practice. We're enforcing rule changes
Megan Flanagan

The Big Search to Find Out Where Dogs Come From - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-out-where-dogs-come-from.html

science research dogs

shared by Megan Flanagan on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • scientists are still debating exactly when and where the ancient bond originated
  • agree that they evolved from ancient wolves
  • he essence of the idea is that people actively bred wolves to become dogs just the way they now breed dogs to be tiny or large, or to herd sheep.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Wolves are hard to tame, even as puppies, and many researchers find it much more plausible that dogs, in effect, invented themselves.
  • gradually evolved to become tamer and tamer, producing lots of offspring because of the relatively easy pickings
  • researchers question whether dogs experience feelings like love and loyalty, or whether their winning ways are just a matter of instincts that evolved because being a hanger-on is an easier way to make a living than running down elk.
  • dogs and wolves interbreed easily and some scientists are not convinced that the two are even different species
  • generally agree that there is good evidence that dogs were domesticated around 15,000 years ago
  • “Maybe dog domestication on some level kicks off this whole change in the way that humans are involved and responding to and interacting with their environment,
  • most dog breeds were invented in the 19th century during a period of dog obsession that he called “the giant whirlwind blender of the European crazy Victorian dog-breeding frenzy.
  • “There’s hardly a person working in canine genetics that’s not working on that project
  • Almost every group has a different origination hypothesis
  • jaws and occasionally nearly complete skulls from old and recent dogs, wolves and canids that could fall into either category.
  • will be able to determine whether the domestication process occurred closer to 15,000 or 30,000 years ago,
  • major achievement in the world of canine science, and a landmark in the analysis of ancient DNA to show evolution, migrations and descent,
  • based on DNA evidence and the shape of ancient skulls, that dog domestication occurred well over 30,000 years ago.
  • he became fed up with the lack of ancient DNA evidence in papers about the origin of dogs.
  • identified a skull about 32,000 years old from a Belgian cave in Goyet as an early dog.
  • arguing that the evidence just wasn’t there to call the Goyet skull a dog,
  • claims are controversial and is willing, like the rest of the world of canine science, to risk damage to the fossils themselves to get more information on not just the mitochondrial DNA but also the nuclear DNA.
  • geneticists try to establish is how different the DNA of one animal is from another. Adding ancient DNA gives many more points of reference over a long time span.
  • will be able to identify changes in the skulls or jaws of those wolves that show shifts to more doglike shapes, helping to narrow the origins of domestication
  • the project will publish a flagship paper from all of the participants describing their general findings
  • a group in China was forming with the goal of sequencing 10,000 dog genomes
  • growing increasingly confident that they will find what they want, and come close to settling the thorny question of when and where the tearing power of a wolf jaw first gave way to the persuasive force of a nudge from a dog’s cold nose.
alliefulginiti1

Infection Raises Specter of Superbugs Resistant to All Antibiotics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...istant-to-all-antibiotics.html

infection antibiotics

shared by alliefulginiti1 on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • dentified the first patient in the United States to be infected with bacteria that are resistant to an antibiotic
  • superbugs that could cause untreatable infections,
  • The resistance can spread
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • We have that genetic element that would allow for bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic.”
  • colistin
  • We are one step away from CRE strains that cannot be treated with antibiotics.
  • overuse of antibiotics in people and in animals put human health at risk by reducing the power of the drugs,
nataliedepaulo1

The Mistrust of Science - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-mistrust-of-science

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The Mistrust of Science
  • The scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly, that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).
  • People are prone to resist scientific claims when they clash with intuitive beliefs. They don’t see measles or mumps around anymore. They do see children with autism. And they see a mom who says, “My child was perfectly fine until he got a vaccine and became autistic.”
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  • Even more than what you think, how you think matters. The stakes for understanding this could not be higher than they are today, because we are not just battling for what it means to be scientists. We are battling for what it means to be citizens.
sissij

A Scar on the Chinese Soul - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-scar-on-the-chinese-soul.html

new york times language social media

shared by sissij on 19 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • It “is that the Chinese, without direct orders, were so cruel to each other.”
  • The blurry distinction between perpetrators and victims makes collective healing by confronting the past a thorny project.
  • neither joining the Red Guards nor believing in Maoism protected someone from suffering long-term trauma.
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  • Cultural Revolution trauma differs from that related to other horrific events, like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, studies have noted, in part because in China, people were persecuted not for “unalterable” characteristics such as ethnicity and race, but for having the wrong frame of mind.
  • The idea that life experiences could cause inheritable genetic changes has been identified among children of Holocaust survivors, who have been shown to have an increased likelihood of stress-related illnesses.
  • The possibility of epigenetic inheritance has been raised by Chinese academics regarding the Cultural Revolution, but to research the topic would most certainly invite state punishment.
    • sissij
      sissij on 19 Jan 17
       
      I think this article is a little bit exaggerating. Nobody is perfect, even the Mao that saved China from the hand of the Japanese. The title "a scar on the Chinese soul" is just too heavy. It is only showing one perspective of the event and it can be misleading to the general population America. From a media course I took during the winter break, it shows that there are cultural elements influencing the media inevitably. For America, the key words are "freedom", "supremacy", "heroism", "democracy"... I can see those elements influencing the view of the author in this article. And he is not the only one. There is a book called "Street of Eternal Happiness". It is also talking about Chinese suffering. There is confirmation bias in whom the author is interviewing and what data he is using in support to his argument. --Sissi (1/19/2017)
sissij

The Year of Conquering Negative Thinking - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...quering-negative-thinking.html

new york times psychology brain science

shared by sissij on 04 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • All humans have a tendency to be a bit more like Eeyore than Tigger, to ruminate more on bad experiences than positive ones. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that helps us avoid danger and react quickly in a crisis.
  • Thinking styles can be genetic or the result of childhood experiences, said Judith Beck
  • “We were built to overlearn from negative experiences, but under learn from positive ones,” said Rick Hanson, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The first step to stopping negative thoughts is a surprising one. Don’t try to stop them.
  • You can remind yourself to notice your thoughts in a nonjudgmental manner, without trying to change or alter them right away.
  • A study conducted at Ohio State University found that this method — known as Socratic questioning — was a simple way to reduce depressive symptoms in adults.
  • If you’re ruminating on your financial problems during a run around the track in hopes of finding a solution, then that is useful. But fretting for lap after lap about the president-elect or a foreign crisis is not going to accomplish anything.
  • sissij on 04 Jan 17
     
    Negative thinking is the result of the logic of survival. It is sometime essential and beneficial for us. I always think that negative things are bad and useless, but even negative things have their reason to exist. I was very surprised to know that our emotion is just like a child in puberty. If we oppressed it too much, it will stand back against. Instead, we should try to be friends with our emotion and accept them. It's just like parents should be calm and reasonable when their children do something wrong. They should talk reasonable with their children and try to persuade them. --Sissi (1/4/2017)
Javier E

The Selfish Gene turns 40 | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ideas-stand-up-adam-rutherford

science gene genetics selfishness natural selection darwinism

shared by Javier E on 30 May 16 - No Cached
  • The idea was this: genes strive for immortality, and individuals, families, and species are merely vehicles in that quest. The behaviour of all living things is in service of their genes hence, metaphorically, they are selfish.
  • Before this, it had been proposed that natural selection was honing the behaviour of living things to promote the continuance through time of the individual creature, or family, or group or species. But in fact, Dawkins said, it was the gene itself that was trying to survive, and it just so happened that the best way for it to survive was in concert with other genes in the impermanent husk of an individual
  • This gene-centric view of evolution also began to explain one of the oddities of life on Earth – the behaviour of social insects. What is the point of a drone bee, doomed to remain childless and in the service of a totalitarian queen? Suddenly it made sense that, with the gene itself steering evolution, the fact that the drone shared its DNA with the queen meant that its servitude guarantees not the individual’s survival, but the endurance of the genes they shar
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  • the subject is taught bafflingly minimally and late in the curriculum even today; evolution by natural selection is crucial to every aspect of the living world. In the words of the Russian scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
  • his true legacy is The Selfish Gene and its profound effect on multiple generations of scientists and lay readers. In a sense, The Selfish Gene and Dawkins himself are bridges, both intellectually and chronologically, between the titans of mid-century biology – Ronald Fisher, Trivers, Hamilton, Maynard Smith and Williams – and our era of the genome, in which the interrogation of DNA dominates the study of evolution.
  • Genes aren’t what they used to be either. In 1976 they were simply stretches of DNA that encoded proteins. We now know about genes made of DNA’s cousin, RNA; we’ve discovered genes that hop from genome to genome
  • Since 1976, our understanding of why life is the way it is has blossomed and changed. Once the gene became the dominant idea in biology in the 1990s there followed a technological goldrush – the Human Genome Project – to find them all.
  • None of the complications of modern genomes erodes the central premise of the selfish gene.
  • Much of the enmity stems from people misunderstanding that selfishness is being used as a metaphor. The irony of these attacks is that the selfish gene metaphor actually explains altruism. We help others who are not directly related to us because we share similar versions of genes with them.
  • In the scientific community, the chief objection maintains that natural selection can operate at the level of a group of animals, not solely on genes or even individuals
  • To my mind, and that of the majority of evolutionary biologists, the gene-centric view of evolution always emerges intact.
  • the premise remains exciting that a gene’s only desire is to reproduce itself, and that the complexity of genomes makes that reproduction more efficient.
Javier E

Choose to Be Grateful. It Will Make You Happier. - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...-it-will-make-you-happier.html

gratitude happiness authenticity psychology

shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Building the best life does not require fealty to feelings in the name of authenticity, but rather rebelling against negative impulses and acting right even when we don’t feel like it. In a nutshell, acting grateful can actually make you grateful.
  • some people are just naturally more grateful than others. A 2014 article in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience identified a variation in a gene (CD38) associated with gratitude. Some people simply have a heightened genetic tendency to experience, in the researchers’ words, “global relationship satisfaction, perceived partner responsiveness and positive emotions (particularly love).” That is, those relentlessly positive people you know who seem grateful all the time may simply be mutants.
  • Evidence suggests that we can actively choose to practice gratitude — and that doing so raises our happiness.
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  • , researchers in one 2003 study randomly assigned one group of study participants to keep a short weekly list of the things they were grateful for, while other groups listed hassles or neutral events. Ten weeks later, the first group enjoyed significantly greater life satisfaction than the others
  • acting happy, regardless of feelings, coaxes one’s brain into processing positive emotions. In one famous 1993 experiment, researchers asked human subjects to smile forcibly for 20 seconds while tensing facial muscles, notably the muscles around the eyes called the orbicularis oculi (which create “crow’s feet”). They found that this action stimulated brain activity associated with positive emotions.
  • gratitude stimulates the hypothalamus (a key part of the brain that regulates stress) and the ventral tegmental area (part of our “reward circuitry” that produces the sensation of pleasure).
  • In the slightly more elegant language of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, “He is a man of sense who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has.”
  • In addition to building our own happiness, choosing gratitude can also bring out the best in those around us
  • when their competence was questioned, the subjects tended to lash out with aggression and personal denigration. When shown gratitude, however, they reduced the bad behavior. That is, the best way to disarm an angry interlocutor is with a warm “thank you.”
  • A new study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology finds evidence that people begin to crave sweets when they are asked to express gratitude.
  • There are concrete strategies that each of us can adopt. First, start with “interior gratitude,” the practice of giving thanks privately
  • he recommends that readers systematically express gratitude in letters to loved ones and colleagues. A disciplined way to put this into practice is to make it as routine as morning coffee. Write two short emails each morning to friends, family or colleagues, thanking them for what they do.
  • Finally, be grateful for useless things
  • think of the small, useless things you experience — the smell of fall in the air, the fragment of a song that reminds you of when you were a kid. Give thanks.
Javier E

How Did Consciousness Evolve? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...485558

Evolution Consciousness psychology brain science

shared by Javier E on 09 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?
  • The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions.
  • The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence
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  • Even before the evolution of a central brain, nervous systems took advantage of a simple computing trick: competition.
  • It coordinates something called overt attention – aiming the satellite dishes of the eyes, ears, and nose toward anything important.
  • Selective enhancement therefore probably evolved sometime between hydras and arthropods—between about 700 and 600 million years ago, close to the beginning of complex, multicellular life
  • The next evolutionary advance was a centralized controller for attention that could coordinate among all senses. In many animals, that central controller is a brain area called the tectum
  • At any moment only a few neurons win that intense competition, their signals rising up above the noise and impacting the animal’s behavior. This process is called selective signal enhancement, and without it, a nervous system can do almost nothing.
  • All vertebrates—fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals—have a tectum. Even lampreys have one, and they appeared so early in evolution that they don’t even have a lower jaw. But as far as anyone knows, the tectum is absent from all invertebrates
  • According to fossil and genetic evidence, vertebrates evolved around 520 million years ago. The tectum and the central control of attention probably evolved around then, during the so-called Cambrian Explosion when vertebrates were tiny wriggling creatures competing with a vast range of invertebrates in the sea.
  • The tectum is a beautiful piece of engineering. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning.
  • The tectum’s internal model is a set of information encoded in the complex pattern of activity of the neurons. That information simulates the current state of the eyes, head, and other major body parts, making predictions about how these body parts will move next and about the consequences of their movement
  • In fish and amphibians, the tectum is the pinnacle of sophistication and the largest part of the brain. A frog has a pretty good simulation of itself.
  • With the evolution of reptiles around 350 to 300 million years ago, a new brain structure began to emerge – the wulst. Birds inherited a wulst from their reptile ancestors. Mammals did too, but our version is usually called the cerebral cortex and has expanded enormously
  • The cortex also takes in sensory signals and coordinates movement, but it has a more flexible repertoire. Depending on context, you might look toward, look away, make a sound, do a dance, or simply store the sensory event in memory in case the information is useful for the future.
  • The most important difference between the cortex and the tectum may be the kind of attention they control. The tectum is the master of overt attention—pointing the sensory apparatus toward anything important. The cortex ups the ante with something called covert attention. You don’t need to look directly at something to covertly attend to it. Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it
  • The cortex needs to control that virtual movement, and therefore like any efficient controller it needs an internal model. Unlike the tectum, which models concrete objects like the eyes and the head, the cortex must model something much more abstract. According to the AST, it does so by constructing an attention schema—a constantly updated set of information that describes what covert attention is doing moment-by-moment and what its consequences are
  • Covert attention isn’t intangible. It has a physical basis, but that physical basis lies in the microscopic details of neurons, synapses, and signals. The brain has no need to know those details. The attention schema is therefore strategically vague. It depicts covert attention in a physically incoherent way, as a non-physical essence
  • this, according to the theory, is the origin of consciousness. We say we have consciousness because deep in the brain, something quite primitive is computing that semi-magical self-description.
  • I’m reminded of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.” Evolution is the master of that kind of opportunism. Fins become feet. Gill arches become jaws. And self-models become models of others. In the AST, the attention schema first evolved as a model of one’s own covert attention. But once the basic mechanism was in place, according to the theory, it was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction. Not only could the brain attribute consciousness to itself, it began to attribute consciousness to others.
  • In the AST’s evolutionary story, social cognition begins to ramp up shortly after the reptilian wulst evolved. Crocodiles may not be the most socially complex creatures on earth, but they live in large communities, care for their young, and can make loyal if somewhat dangerous pets.
  • If AST is correct, 300 million years of reptilian, avian, and mammalian evolution have allowed the self-model and the social model to evolve in tandem, each influencing the other. We understand other people by projecting ourselves onto them. But we also understand ourselves by considering the way other people might see us.
  • t the cortical networks in the human brain that allow us to attribute consciousness to others overlap extensively with the networks that construct our own sense of consciousness.
  • Language is perhaps the most recent big leap in the evolution of consciousness. Nobody knows when human language first evolved. Certainly we had it by 70 thousand years ago when people began to disperse around the world, since all dispersed groups have a sophisticated language. The relationship between language and consciousness is often debated, but we can be sure of at least this much: once we developed language, we could talk about consciousness and compare notes
  • Maybe partly because of language and culture, humans have a hair-trigger tendency to attribute consciousness to everything around us. We attribute consciousness to characters in a story, puppets and dolls, storms, rivers, empty spaces, ghosts and gods. Justin Barrett called it the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, or HADD
  • the HADD goes way beyond detecting predators. It’s a consequence of our hyper-social nature. Evolution turned up the amplitude on our tendency to model others and now we’re supremely attuned to each other’s mind states. It gives us our adaptive edge. The inevitable side effect is the detection of false positives, or ghosts.
nataliedepaulo1

Psychologists Find An Alarming Long-Term Effect Of Teen Sleep Deprivation | The Huffing... - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ts_us_58b70880e4b019d36d0fec64

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • People comparing current crime rates with those of past decades tend to agree that today’s numbers should be lower. And new research points to a relatively easy way to do that: Help teens get more sleep.
  • Lack of sleep is only one risk factor that may affect an individual’s odds of becoming a criminal, Raine said, noting genetic and social factors. “But sleep is something we can do something about,” he said.
Javier E

Crowd-Sourcing Brain Research Leads to Breakthrough - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rch-leads-to-breakthrough.html

research brain science crowdsourcing

shared by Javier E on 16 Apr 12 - Cached
  • these guys finally did what needed to be done to take a real stab at merging imaging and genomics
  • Brain imaging studies are expensive and, as a result, far too small to reliably tease out the effects of common gene variations. These effects tend to be tiny, for one thing, and difficult to distinguish from the background “noise” of other influences. And brain imaging is notoriously noisy: not only does overall brain size vary from person to person, for instance, but so do the sizes of specialized brain regions like the hippocampus, which is critical for memory formation.
  • persuaded research centers around the world to pool their resources and create one large database. It included genetic and extensive brain imaging results from about 21,000 people. The team then analyzed the collective data to see whether any genes were linked to brain structure.
Duncan H

Study Weakens Case for Preventive Mastectomy - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4528204577010180419303576.html

cancer knowledge research science

shared by Duncan H on 03 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Stanford University researchers affirmed that women with mothers and sisters who carry one of the BRCA gene mutations but who aren't carriers themselves don't have an especially heightened risk of breast cancer.
  • The findings run counter to an influential 2007 study, which found that such women could have as much as a five-fold higher risk of developing the disease as the general population, even if they tested negative for the two genetic mutations known as BRCA1 and BRCA2.
  • a negative BRCA test didn't necessarily mean women had escaped the risk associated with the mutations, which significantly raise a woman's risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Some women who test positive opt for prophylactic surgery to remove their breasts or ovaries.
  • Duncan H on 03 Nov 11
     
    How do you think these findings will change what people believe and do, if at all?
Javier E

Christine Rosen: The Machine And The Ghost | The New Republic - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...chnology-morality-intelligence

tech online persuasive utopianism ethics

shared by Javier E on 31 Jul 12 - Cached
  • Ultimately, the goal of creators of Ambient Intelligence and persuasive technologies and the Internet of Things is not merely to offer context-aware, adaptive, personalized responses in real time, but to divine future needs. As one contributor to The New Everyday noted, eventually these technologies will “anticipate your desires without conscious mediation.” 
  • The challenge for ethicists such as Verbeek is whether a society composed of “smart” cities like Songdo might also bring an increase in moral laziness and a decline in individual freedom. Freedom is a hollow promise in the absence of agency and choice. 
  • these technologies also undermine a crucial (albeit often maligned) human quality: self-deception. Self-deception is inefficient. It causes problems. It makes things messy—which is why our technologists would like us to replace it with the seemingly greater honesty of data that, once processed, promise to know us better than we know ourselves. But being human is a messy business; and exercising judgment and self-control, and learning the complicated social norms that signal acceptable behavior, are the very things that make us human.
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  • in a broader sense, as the case of genetic testing has shown, the right not to know some things (like the right to forget foolish, youthful behavior that is now permanently archived on the Internet) is as crucially important (if not more so) in our age as the voracious pursuit of information and transparency. 
  • Merely because something is possible, is it also desirable? And if it is possible, must we immediately accommodate ourselves to it? In The Forlorn Demon, Allen Tate noted, “We no longer ask, ‘Is it right?’ We ask: ‘Does it work?’” In our contemporary engagement with technology, we would do well to spend more time with the first question, even as we live ever more mediated lives relentlessly pursuing an answer to the second. 
Javier E

Big Data Troves Stay Forbidden to Social Scientists - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dden-to-social-scientists.html

science data transparency verification research process

shared by Javier E on 02 Jun 12 - Cached
  • When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists.
  • lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge. It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such information public, sometimes for competitive reasons and sometimes to protect customers’ privacy. But to many scientists, the practice is an invitation to bad science, secrecy and even potential fraud.
  • corporate control of data could give preferential access to an elite group of scientists at the largest corporations.
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  • “In the Internet era,” said Andreas Weigend, a physicist and former chief scientist at Amazon, “research has moved out of the universities to the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of the world.”
  • A recent review found that 44 of 50 leading scientific journals instructed their authors on sharing data but that fewer than 30 percent of the papers they published fully adhered to the instructions. A 2008 review of sharing requirements for genetics data found that 40 of 70 journals surveyed had policies, and that 17 of those were “weak.”
markfrankel18

Malcolm Gladwell: Do Genetic Advantages Make Sports Unfair? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130909crat_atlarge_gladwell

gladwell ethics sports

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 03 Sep 13
     
    "Eyesight can be improved-in some cases dramatically-through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. Major League Baseball also permits pitchers to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow of their throwing arm with a tendon taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in the athlete's body. Tendon-replacement surgery is similar to laser surgery: it turns the athlete into an improved version of his natural self. But when it comes to drugs Major League Baseball-like most sports-draws the line. An athlete cannot use a drug to become an improved version of his natural self, even if the drug is used in doses that are not harmful, and is something that-like testosterone-is no more than a copy of a naturally occurring hormone, available by prescription to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world."
Sophia C

BBC News - Viewpoint: Human evolution, from tree to braid - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-25559172

viewpoint evolution science knowledge brain science

shared by Sophia C on 03 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • What was, in my view, a logical conclusion reached by the authors was too much for some researchers to take.
  • he conclusion of the Dmanisi study was that the variation in skull shape and morphology observed in this small sample, derived from a single population of Homo erectus, matched the entire variation observed among African fossils ascribed to three species - H. erectus, H. habilis and H. rudolfensis.
  • a single population of H. erectus,
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  • They all had to be the same species.
  • was not surprising to find that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, a clear expectation of the biological species concept.
  • I wonder when the penny will drop: when we have five pieces of a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, every new bit that we add is likely to change the picture.
  • e identity of the fourth player remains unknown but it was an ancient lineage that had been separate for probably over a million years. H. erectus seems a likely candidate. Whatever the name we choose to give this mystery lineage, what these results show is that gene flow was possible not just among contemporaries but also between ancient and more modern lineages.
  • cientists succeeded in extracting the most ancient mitochondrial DNA so far, from the Sima de los Huesos site in Atapuerca, Spain.
  • We have built a picture of our evolution based on the morphology of fossils and it was wrong.
    • Sophia C
      Sophia C on 03 Jan 14
       
      Kuhn
  • when we know how plastic - or easily changeable - skull shape is in humans. And our paradigms must also change.
  • e must abandon, once and for all, views of modern human superiority over archaic (ancient) humans. The terms "archaic" and "modern" lose all meaning as do concepts of modern human replacement of all other lineages.
  • he deep-rooted shackles that have sought to link human evolution with stone tool-making technological stages - the Stone Ages - even when we have known that these have overlapped with each other for half-a-million years in some instances.
  • e world of our biological and cultural evolution was far too fluid for us to constrain it into a few stages linked by transitions.
  • We have to flesh out the genetic information and this is where archaeology comes into the picture.
  • Rather than focus on differences between modern humans and Neanderthals, what the examples show is the range of possibilities open to humans (Neanderthals included) in different circumstances.
  • research using new technology on old archaeological sites, as at La Chapelle; and
Javier E

Let's Shake Up the Social Sciences - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ke-up-the-social-sciences.html

social science natural science methods

shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomena does not help us fix them.
  • social scientists should devote a small palace guard to settled subjects and redeploy most of their forces to new fields like social neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and social epigenetics, most of which, not coincidentally, lie at the intersection of the natural and social science
  • It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Yale University, is a co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science.
grayton downing

2013 Life Sciences Salary Survey | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38033/title/2013-Life-Sciences-Salary-Survey/

sciences salary survey research

shared by grayton downing on 11 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • US researchers across academia, industry, and government earn an average of nearly $96,000 per year in total compensation, including base salary, bonuses, and other income, compared with a European average of just $66,700. Life scientists in Canada come in right in the middle, at $78,200, while researchers in India lag far behind, earning an average of just $11,200.
  • life sciences, could explain the oft-cited “brain drain,” which has seen foreign researchers flock to the U.S. in search of good jobs with ample compensation.
  • Across the globe, scientists earn a wide range of salaries, with US researchers earning nearly $96,000 total compensation per year while India lags far behind at less than $11,200, though this discrepancy is at least partly explained by the vast differences in cost of living in the two countries. Still, this enormous gulf is a strong driver of “brain drain
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Dramatic budget cuts in the past few years, however, may make US academia less of a paradise.
  • European salaries also lag behind those in the U.S., with the average European life scientist making anywhere from 41 to 82 percent of what the average American researcher earns.
  • Europe make around 50 percent of what full professors there make, postdocs in the U.S. earn less than a third of a professor’s salary.
  • Equal Pay Act prohibited unequal pay for men and women doing the same jobs. But salary disparities remain, including in the life sciences. “It is a persistent problem,” says Curtis. “It’s important for people to realize that there are continuing inequalities.” In this year’s survey, for example, male respondents in the U.S. reported an average total income of around $111,000 per year, while their female counterparts averaged just $77,000 in annual pay.
  • fewer women make it to high-level positions than men do, says Curtis.
  • life-science specialty is often tomorrow’s overcrowded field. Case in point: genomics versus genetics. Genomics relies heavily on bioinformatics, mathematics, and computational modeling
  • survey highlights the well-established discrepancy between industry and academic salaries. According to the data, life scientists in industry make around $136,000 per year, compared to average academic earnings of $85,000.
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