He’s the President-emeritus, in Propublica, here. The article assumes a bit of background knowledge about Ohio higher ed, but the messages are clear: high quality teaching and research are at risk when you invest in climbing walls and the like. The other casualty I think is diversity.
Is NIH moving to restrict RO1 demand?
The story is here. The basic idea as I see it is that NIH plans to save money by trying to eliminate non-competitive grant applications on the front-end. The key statistical finding is that there is apparently no correlation between a university’s number of NIH grant applications and its number of NIH awards.
Retracting a paper in science….
Apparently there is a feed-back retraction penalty in citations, article from Nature Scientific Reports, here. But…if you self-report, there is no penalty. Really interesting study I think.
Tearing down cities….
What Baltimore and Detroit are doing, here. As they lose population, they are taking down whole blocks of blighted housing stocks to create open land.
The importance of Big Data….
Michael White’s excellent piece is here. His view is that it’s different from the Popperian hypothesis-based science we are all used to and I tend to agree. I also worry that the term ‘Big Data’ is in serious danger of being over-sold. That happened once upon a time to another hot new discipline: Artificial Intelligence… and the results were not pretty.
Tyler Cowen on Peak Driving…
I guess analogous to Peak Oil, here. I am more of the Elon Musk school myself. I think transportation systems will be qualitatively different. Perhaps we’ll go regularly go to work at L5.
Mason’s Center for Social Complexity…
I don’t often brag about our own centers on Advanced Studies, but can’t resist a pointer to the new web site of our Center for Social Complexity, here. And while I’m going there, I might as well jump the shark and offer a pointer to our Department of Computational Social science, here. The faculty of the center and the department overlap to a large extent and represent the Institute’s scientific program in the area of social cognition. Over the years, the Institute’s existing strength in neuroscience has led perhaps to the wrong notion that Krasnow is a pure brain research institute. In fact, we are very much an institute for advanced study and the waterfront of Krasnow research stretches from theoretical physics to poppy farming in Afghanistan…
Jack of all trades, master of…?
On the advantages of being a polymath, here. Read the comments too.
Money quote on the defense of disciplinary boundaries:
One sees this in the academic arena, where ancient professors vie with each other to expel intruders from their hard-won patches. Just look at the bitter arguments over how far the sciences should be allowed to encroach on the humanities.
Malware taken to the next level…
Read about badbios here. This is malware that supposedly jumps an air gap between proximal computers by using the speaker and the microphone operating a high frequencies.
National Journal on rewriting the US constitution…
The long piece is here and it’s quite interesting. I didn’t know that when the US had the chance to impose a democratic form of government on Germany and Japan after WW2, it chose a parliamentary architecture instead of the US model. It would be interesting from a historical standpoint to understand why.
Discoverers and Discoveries 