My colleague Andrew Crooks new paper on social media is out. The paper is here. He blogs about it here. This is an excellent example of how computational methodologies are transforming the social sciences. I’m pleased to see Krasnow’s Computational Social Science department at the forefront.
More on the replication problem in Science…from The Economist
The article is here. The figure above demonstrates the non-fraud side of the problem. Central to the problem is the concept of statistical power. A lot of published science studies are statistically underpowered. Kudos to The Economist for publishing a serious and understandable piece about this problem.
Russian Science….
It is well known what happened to the excellent Russian scientific enterprise in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991. Brain Drain is a simple phrase which encapsulates the effects of cutting off sustained and predictable investment in scientific research. For a summary of how Russian science is slowly moving beyond what was surely a national scientific catastrophe, read here. For the perspective from the Chronicle of Higher Education, look here.
In the meantime, that famous downward trajectory is surely a cautionary tale for those of us here in the States, who have witnessed a slow atrophying public support for science.
Quite separately, but reflecting a similar decay in public understanding of how science investments are made to pay off practically, the recent shutdown cost American research dearly…..experiments that are interrupted are often irreparably lost.
The "Replication Issue" as written up in the Economist….
The article is here. Their money quote:
“Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour [sic] of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics.”
The Replication Issue is a complicated one and is something that I am actively working on with colleagues around the country. I am most definitely not for getting rid of peer review. BUt the post-publications comments might be a good idea to add on.
On sexism and the mentor…
Many of us have been following the twitter controversy regarding Scientific American Blogs. What started out as bad, got a lot worse. Laura Helmuth at Slate has the complete story here. I’m appalled.
The notion of using a mentorship role to sexually harass is just wrong. Where we find it, we should call it out.
The return of David Riesman…
And the Lonely Crowd in the age of social media, from Paul Hiebert in Pacific Standard, here. Like many high school students of the early 1970’s, the writing of Riesman was pretty much the first serious sociology that I was exposed to.
Richard Florida on DC…
Paraphrased here in the Washington Post. Bottom line? It’s a boom town. Even with the recently ended shutdown, this area feels so different from the rest of the US economy. Perhaps that’s part of the problem?
Where are our readers?
From our analytics: Advanced Studies readers are truly international. Thank you for continuing to support us and we’ll continue to call them as we see them….
The future of non-wet lab bioscience….
Story is behind Science Magazine’s firewall, but the abstract is here. The overall meme is of course Big Data….but….at some point, we’ll continue to need new data, so there is a future for wet-lab science too.
Norman Augustine on the shutdown’s effect on US Antarctic research…
From today’s Chronicle, behind their pay wall:
“I do not know what the cost of the shutdown will be,” Mr. Augustine said when asked for an estimate of the losses that could result from an Antarctic shutdown. “It is just one more example of what we are doing to rip apart at the grassroots level the fabric of what is one of America’s few remaining competitive advantages: our research and education system. No enemy could have been so effective.”
I couldn’t have said it better.
Discoverers and Discoveries 