Bjorn Lomborg’s eloquent case for increased R&D on green energy sources, from the FT, here.
Money quote:
The analogy here is the computer in the 1950s. We did not get better computers by mass-producing subsidised vacuum tubes or taxing typewriters. The breakthroughs were achieved through a dramatic increase in R&D, leading to innovations such as the transistor and the integrated circuit, which enabled companies such as IBM and Apple to produce computers that consumers wanted.
The context is Selingo’s book, College Unbound. Stearns critique, which I agree with, is here.
More to the point, my sense is that the book is something of a polemic. And sad to say, that may be the way to gain notoriety these days. Which is not to say that there are many serious points in the book worthy of discussion–there are.
Out of Tonegawa’s research group at MIT. My colleague Earl Miller blog has good links to the original paper and science media stories about it, here.
I think it’s a real tour de force. They used optogenetics to essentially demonstrate the power of a cell assembly to represent an engram. Hebb would be proud.
Apparently the DTRA DNA grand challenge has run into scoring issues. The story from ScienceInsider is here. I still think this a terrific way to fund scientific and technological progress. As pointed out, putting together a successful grant application does not necessarily imply actual scientific success.
From the Spectator, here. I know at least one top flight neuroscientist who, early in his career, used to do the equivalent of air guitar….with a fountain pen.
In any case, the whole deal works for me…in the audience. I say keep them on.
The PNAS paper by King and Janik can be found here.
Note added later: how is this different from individual-specific bird calls?
Yale University’s Nicholas Christakis advocates for change in the social sciences in the pages of the NYT here. Christakis is co-director of Yale’s Institute for Network Science. Money quote:
For the past century, people have looked to the physical and biological sciences to solve important problems. The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today’s intellectual challenges.
I would submit that Krasnow’s own department of Computational Social Sciences represents just such an evolution.
David Malakoff’s excellent news piece in Science, here. My take: these are huge organizations. My 30 years or so in Washington has taught me that the inertia of these places is pretty large even relative to the zeal of powerful reformers.
Discoverers and Discoveries 