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Tag Archives: Science
Happy fourth anniversary, Retraction Watch
Originally posted on Retraction Watch:
Yesterday was our fourth birthday. We published our first post, “Why write a blog about retractions?” on August 3, 2010, and the anniversary seems as good a time as any to review where we’ve been.…
Laboratory Life, B. Latour & S. Woolgar (1979)
Originally posted on A Fine Theorem:
Let’s do one more post on the economics of science; if you haven’t heard of Latour and the book that made him famous, all I can say is that it is 30% completely crazy…
Science bounty hunters?
Dr Christopher Keating says via his global warming website that he is willing to pay a bounty or reward of $10,000 USD to anyone who is able to disprove global warming. The official rules of this contest are thus: 1. Dr Keating will … Continue reading
Turing test bet
Alan Turing’s simple machine intelligence test has been in the news lately. It is worth noting that there are many possible versions of Turing’s test. One version of the test, for example, is currently the subject of a $20,000 bet between Ray Kurzweil … Continue reading
“The evolutionary path of the law”
That is the title of our review of Nature’s Oracle, Ullica Segerstrale’s recent biography of the life and work of W.D. “Bill” Hamilton. Please enjoy responsibly …
“Do you know … bees have no judges or lawyers?”
This iconoclastic quotation — from the private correspondence of the late great evolutionary biologist W. D. “Bill” Hamilton — appears on page 46 of Nature’s Oracle, Professor Ullica Segerstrale’s masterful biography of the life and work of the man. Professor Hamilton spent … Continue reading
Stephen Hawking wins theoretical physics bet …
Or has he? Prof. Hawking had bet Neil Turok, the director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, that gravitational waves from the cosmic big bang would eventually be detected. But according to this report in The Guardian, Dr. Turok refuses to pay up … for now. … Continue reading
Shadow prediction markets?
In our previous post (see Fate of Flight 370 … below), we quixotically called for the creation of a single-event prediction market in order to (1) bypass all the rampant speculation regarding the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight, which has been missing since 8 … Continue reading
Who researches the researchers?
John Ioannidis does, that’s who. His 2005 paper “Why most published research findings are false” created quite a stir in academia, and now Dr Ioannidis is at it again with a new large-scale research project, the Meta-Research Innovation Center, at Stanford University. … Continue reading
The most important date in history?
On March 12, 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall fell, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, wrote up and distributed a revolutionary proposal to improve information flows among computers: “a ‘web’ of notes with links between them.” (See diagram below from Berners-Lee’s proposal.) … Continue reading
prior probability 