May 15, 2013, 1:30 pm
By Tom Bartlett
David Birnbaum believes he has unified the fields of religion and science. He told me so in an e-mail. A book he wrote, Summa Metaphysica, Volumes I and II, “unifies the two fields—elegantly—and seemlessly” (sic).
In April of last year, Bard College devoted a three-day* conference to the role of metaphysics in science and religion, prompted by the “reflections flowing” from Birnbaum’s books, according to a program e-mailed to participants from prestigious institutions including Dartmouth, Grinnell, and Oxford. “We are especially pleased to announce that David Birnbaum will be present during discussion,” the program enthused.
Left unmentioned was that Birnbaum helped finance the conference, that he has no academic affiliation, and that his works are published by an entity that he himself runs, called “Harvard Matrix” or “Harvard Yard Press” or, as sometimes printed on the…
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April 4, 2013, 2:13 pm
By Paul Voosen
Prepare yourselves, dear readers: The United States of North America is coming.
Writing in the newest issue of Dædalus, two historians of science, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, have taken on a quixotic task: imagining a future historian looking back at our time, in an effort to tease out how we failed to avert a climate-caused collapse. Or, as they put it, how it came to be that “a second Dark Age” fell “on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.” (The full version of the article is online here.)
Known for their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which examined the role of industry in casting doubts on the findings of scientists on cigarettes, climate change, and other topics, Oreskes, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, and…
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April 4, 2013, 4:57 am
By Tom Bartlett
Colin Purrington
Colin Purrington wrote a funny, helpful guide about designing scientific posters. It has loads of practical tips (don’t make it too long, use a nonserif font for titles, etc.) and jokes about the mating habits of cute red pandas. The guide has been remarkably popular—he estimates it’s been viewed about two million times over the years—and he gets e-mails thanking him all the time. It has become a claim to minor fame.
Sometimes people, um, borrow his guide without giving him credit. This happens fairly regularly, and when he finds out about it, he sends an e-mail asking them to take it down. Usually they do. But when he sent an e-mail to the Consortium for Plant Biotechnology Research, asking that a roughly 1,200-word, near-verbatim, uncredited chunk from his guide be removed from the…
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February 14, 2013, 8:30 pm
By Paul Basken
Boston — Scientists have a hard enough time getting people to understand what they’re talking about.
Their thoughts can be complicated. Their sentences can be laden with jargon. And their conclusions can offend political or religious sensibilities.
And now, to make things worse, readers have an immediate forum to talk back. And when some readers post uncivil comments at the bottom of online articles, that alone can raise doubts about the underlying science, a new study has found. Or at least reinforce those doubts.
The study, outlined on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, involved a survey of 2,338 Americans asked to read an article that discussed the risks of nanotechnology, which involves engineering materials at the atomic scale.
Of participants who had already expressed wariness toward the technology, those who…
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January 16, 2013, 9:01 am
By Paul Voosen
Like many scientific disciplines, mental health is a fragmented place, with individual researchers plugging away on their favorite disorders, like depression, often without regard to how the disease connects to, say, physical health, let alone molecular biology.
So just where is it that a group of scientists studying the intersection of Buddhist meditation and human-cell aging is supposed to publish?
Alan Kazdin, a Yale psychologist, has decided it will be in his new journal, Clinical Psychological Science. Started this month by the Association for Psychological Science, the journal is an attempt to provide a high-profile home for interdisciplinary research that pushes the study of mental health in new—and curious—directions.
“We’re doing the science of mental health, broadly conceived,” Kazdin says.
The director of the Yale Parenting Center, Kazdin formerly edited…
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November 8, 2012, 3:44 pm
By Paul Basken
In one of Dr. Seuss’s better-known tales of jealousy and prejudice, the Sneetches with stars on their bellies are considered superior to those without.
Now there’s more evidence that journals’ impact factors are similarly misleading.
A study published by three Canadian researchers has identified a two-decade-long trend in which the world’s top-ranked scientific journals are slowly losing their share of the most-cited articles.
The study, published in the November issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, found that in 1990, 45 percent of the top 5 percent of the most cited articles were published in journals whose impact factor was in the top 5 percent—publications like Cell, Nature, Science, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. By 2009, that rate had fallen to 36 percent, the authors found.
“We’re still…
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October 1, 2012, 3:35 pm
By Tom Bartlett
Karen King
In the past two weeks, thousands of words have been published about these six: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …”
That bit of dialogue comes from a papyrus fragment written in Coptic and thought to date from the fourth century. Its existence was revealed by Karen L. King, a professor of divinity at Harvard, at the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies, in Rome. Even though King cautioned early and repeatedly that the fragment did not prove that Jesus had a wife, that immediately became the focus of popular discussion. BuzzFeed featured a video in which people were asked what they would get Jesus and his wife for a wedding gift (a blender was nixed since everyone already has one).
Among scholars, the discussion has focused on its authenticity. Francis Watson of Durham University, in…
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September 12, 2012, 2:04 pm
By Paul Basken
First there was the “impact factor.” Then came the “h-index.” Now, for those who believe that scientific prowess can be measured by statistical metrics, comes the Acuna-Allesina-Kording formula.
The formula, outlined on Wednesday in the journal Nature, is intended to improve upon the h-index—a tally of a researcher’s publications and citations—by adding a few more numerical measures of a scientist’s publishing history to allow for predictions of future success.
The idea, said the paper’s senior author, Konrad P. Kording, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University, is to help universities and grant-writing agencies “fund someone who will have high impact in the future.”
Kording readily admitted his method—tweaking the h-index by adding numbers such as years of publication and number of distinct journals—cannot…
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September 5, 2012, 3:55 pm
By Tom Bartlett
Marc Hauser (Gaye Gerard, Getty Images)
Marc Hauser was once among the big, impressive names in psychology, head of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard University, author of popular books like Moral Minds. That reputation unraveled when a university investigation found him responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct, which led to his resignation last year.
Now the federal Office of Research Integrity has released its report on Hauser’s actions, determining that he fabricated and falsified results from experiments. Here is a sampling:
- Hauser published “fabricated data” in a paper on how cotton-top tamarin monkeys learn rules. In one of the graphs “half of the data” was made up. That paper has since been retracted.
- Hauser falsified coding in two other experiments with tamarins “making…
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August 29, 2012, 7:59 pm
By Tom Bartlett
Mark Regnerus
An inquiry by the University of Texas at Austin has found no evidence of scientific misconduct by Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology whose controversial gay-parenting study caused a stir when it was published, in June.
But, according to a report released on Wednesday by the university, that does not mean the study isn’t “seriously flawed,” only that there was no evidence of falsification or other unethical practices.
The inquiry was prompted by a complaint by Scott Rose, a blogger for the New Civil Rights Movement who has aggressively covered the Regnerus case. As part of the inquiry, Regnerus’s computers, e-mail, and grant applications were examined, and the professor responded to each of Rose’s allegations.
According to the university’s report, the inquiry found that “[n]on…
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