Who should own the Moon?

From Air and Space Smithsonian, here. Money quote:

Earth’s scientists have studied the returned data and we’ve dreamed of returning to the Moon and to new places where humanity has never set foot. Entrepreneurs and social engineers see a time in the near future when we will make that next step and they each hold somewhat different views — some want to develop and capitalize on their investment, some want to preserve and permit only limited access.

The article raises some very interesting points, ones that will have important implications for the future of space exploration into the future.

James Garland’s take on Miami University of Ohio….

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.

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.