Nature: The rise and fall of scientific authority — and how to bring it back. “It is tempting to think that scientific authority is natural and will soon reassert itself like a sturdy self-righting boat knocked over by a rogue wave. The ugly truth is that science is more like Facebook, whose positive features are also vulnerabilities. Precisely because it allows us to connect and share, Facebook creates opportunities for misuse. Similarly, science is an exemplary form of enquiry because it is technical, fallible, done in communities and able to reshape our values. But these very features allow detractors to reject the authority even of eminent experts.”
research
Penn State News: Seed grants awarded to projects using Twitter data
Penn State News: Seed grants awarded to projects using Twitter data. “Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), in collaboration with the Institute for CyberScience (ICS) and the College of Information Sciences and Technology, has awarded over $100,000 in funding to support six new interdisciplinary teams of Penn State researchers whose work is aimed at developing innovative research programs using Twitter data.”
Phys .org: All publicly funded Australian research could soon be free for you, the taxpayer, to read
Phys .org: All publicly funded Australian research could soon be free for you, the taxpayer, to read. “What happens to research that is funded by taxpayers? A lot ends up in subscription-only journals, protected from the eyes of most by a paywall. But a new initiative known as Plan S could change that. Plan S focuses on making all publicly funded research immediately fully and freely available by open access publication.”
Hackaday: Open Source Biological Gear For The Masses
Hackaday: Open Source Biological Gear For The Masses. “At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, Hackaday exists because people are out there building and documenting open source gadgets. If the person who built a particular gizmo is willing to show the world how they did it, consider us interested. Since you’re reading this, we’ll assume you are as well. Over the years, this mentality has been spreading out from the relatively niche hacker community into the greater engineering world, and we couldn’t be happier.”
Harvard Gazette: Radcliffe scholar Nicole C. Nelson probes key moments in reproducibility crisis
Harvard Gazette: Radcliffe scholar Nicole C. Nelson probes key moments in reproducibility crisis. “Nicole C. Nelson, Radcliffe’s Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow, examines scientists’ assumptions about the natural world and how they play into their research. This year at Radcliffe, the assistant professor of science and technology studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will delve into the scientific reproducibility crisis, a recent phenomenon in which subsequent scientific investigation has found many supposedly stable findings to be difficult to replicate.”
Kellogg Insight: Who Gets Blamed When a Group Project Goes Wrong?
Kellogg Insight: Who Gets Blamed When a Group Project Goes Wrong?. “New research into that question calls to mind the curious case of one much-maligned researcher. It began in 1986, when six researchers published a major paper in the journal Cell. Among the authors were a little-known assistant professor named Thereza Imanishi-Kari, who had devised the paper’s central experiment, and Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore. But soon after the paper was published, Imanishi-Kari was accused of falsifying her data.”
National Institute on Aging: A Wealth of Shared Data, Specimens for Aging Research
National Institute on Aging: A Wealth of Shared Data, Specimens for Aging Research . “As part of NIA’s mission, we conduct and support various longitudinal and clinical studies on aging that generate a vast collection of biospecimens and related phenotypic and clinical data. When these grants end, it is often hard to maintain such collections with no support for them. And sometimes the cost of maintaining and distributing these resources taxes even funded awards. To address this issue, we are pleased to announce the establishment of the AgingResearchBiobank, a central biorepository to provide a state-of-the-art inventory system for the storage and distribution of these collections to the broader scientific community.”
