A great piece from Pacific Standard, here. Money quote:
The backers of Franklin’s List are trying to get science literacy back into American politics by recruiting, training, and sponsoring actual professionals from the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—to run for office. Franklin’s List is modeled on another political action committee, Emily’s List
A good idea to start 2014 I think…
On the whole, 2013 was not as disastrous for science as I had feared. Both here at the Krasnow Institute and nationally, the worst effects of the federal budget debacle seem to have been managed or at least ameliorated. Our students continue to make us proud with their scholarship. Our faculty continue to make really substantive contributions to their fields, and our staff make it possible for all of that to happen. So I thank everyone.
Looking forward, in the coming months we will begin implementing our Institute-wide strategic plan. This includes plans for seriously stepping up our research funding in some pretty novel ways, making the case to our donors for funding Phase III of the Krasnow facility and introducing a new emphasis of the Institute: the intersection of science and art, within the global context of human and animal cognition. So big plans ahead, time to execute.
I wish all of the loyal readers of Advanced Study a very happy and prosperous 2014.
Latest survey of federal workplaces is here. My former employer, the NIH, took a nasty dive this time. NSF went up and NASA is at the top of the heap.
I remember my years at the NIH as terrific, but that was long before 9/11 and construction of the big security fence around campus.
Money quote from ScienceInsider:
factors include a continued pay freeze, a 30% cut in travel budgets, and the elimination of a pot of money for year-end bonuses for exceptional service
I’d say the transformation of NIH from an open campus (really similar to a large university) to secured compound is also part of the problem.
Andrew Sullivan summarizes the interface between certain commodities and high tech manufacturing here.
This one I really like…thanks to the drone footage….
The report in SCIENCE is here. News story here. Short version: the Curiosity Mars Rover has found very strong evidence for a water-filled lake that lasted a minimum of thousands of years in Gale Crater (the landing site). Importantly, the lake’s PH (acidity) would have supported life. Even more exciting, there appears to be evidence for organic material–money quote from the news story:
When SAM heated the samples, the lakebed samples emitted more carbon dioxide than equal-size dust samples did, and their carbon dioxide came off at lower temperatures. Those observations suggested that heating the dust had simply decomposed naturally occurring, inorganic carbonate minerals, but that heating the lakebed samples had burned organic matter. Most telling, as carbon dioxide from the lakebed surged, the level of oxygen gas from decomposing perchlorates dropped. On seeing those data, one SAM team member reportedly declared, “This is combustion of organic carbon, folks.”
In her always entertaining blog, here. Note especially Humans of New York.
Nobelist Randy Shekman will boycott of Cell, Nature and Science, story here. Money quote from the article in The Guardian:
Schekman said pressure to publish in “luxury” journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.
Are we at a tipping point? Potentially so, particularly with regards to the use of Impact Factor as a metric in assessing quality of scientific publications. Further quoting:
A journal’s impact factor is a measure of how often its papers are cited, and is used as a proxy for quality. But Schekman said it was “toxic influence” on science that “introduced a distortion”. He writes: “A paper can become highly cited because it is good science – or because it is eye-catching, provocative, or wrong.”
It definitely improves the situation for American science. ScienceInsider has the story here. I think it’ll pass the House with the leadership getting Democratic votes under an exception to the Hastert Rule.
Discoverers and Discoveries 