-
“It might be OK for a beefy Wallaby to stare down a bunch of powerfully built Kiwis as they launch into a ferocious, blood-curdling haka. [Sydney Morning Herald]
“
-
How ‘Deprogramming’ Kids From How to ‘Do School’ Could Improve Learning | MindShift | KQED News
“Holman also asked students to read “Sermons For Grumpy Campers,” by Richard Felder, a graduate level professor who never lectured. In it, Felder describes his students grumbling that they hated group work and that it was his job to teach them, not the other way around. Holman’s students said the complaints sounded like they came from kindergarteners or themselves and were amazed to find out the complainers were graduate level engineering students.
“
-
5 Instagram Tips for Science Artists – Symbiartic – Scientific American Blog Network
“Here are my five tips for science artists on Instagram.”
“Go hashtag crazy.” -
Disinformation Visualization: How to lie with datavis | Visualising Information for Advocacy
“But all maps lie. In fact, maps have to lie, otherwise they wouldn’t be useful. Some are transparent and obvious lies, such as a tree icon on a map often represents more than one tree. Others are white lies – rounding numbers and prioritising details to create a more legible representation. And then there’s the third type of lie, those lies that convey a bias, be it deliberately or subconsciously. A bias that misrepresents the data and skews it towards a certain reading.
It all sounds very sinister, and indeed sometimes it is. It’s hard to see through a lie unless you stare it right in the face, and what better way to do that than to get our minds dirty and look at some examples of creative and mischievous visual manipulation.”
-
Empathy: The designer’s superpower – O’Reilly Radar
Key element in instructional design as well.
“When I reflected on what I wanted people to understand, what the core thing was, it wasn’t a technique. It wasn’t a visual style. It wasn’t learning a certain program. The core thing was making sure that you never thought about the product from your point of view, but from somebody else’s point of view. That’s what prompted the [The Paradox of Empathy] post.
“
-
Science is often flawed. It’s time we embraced that. – Vox
“And if we simply accepted that science often works imperfectly, we’d be better off. We’d stop considering science a collection of immutable facts. We’d stop assuming every single study has definitive answers that should be trumpeted in over-the-top headlines. Instead, we’d start to appreciate science for what it is: a long and grinding process carried out by fallible humans, involving false starts, dead ends, and, along the way, incorrect and unimportant studies that only grope at the truth, slowly and incrementally.”
-
What’s Behind Big Science Frauds? – NYTimes.com
“But dishonest scholars aren’t the only guilty ones. Science fetishizes the published paper as the ultimate marker of individual productivity. And it doubles down on that bias with a concept called “impact factor” — how likely the studies in a given journal are to be referenced by subsequent articles. The more “downstream” citations, the theory goes, the more impactful the original article.
Continue reading the main story
RECENT COMMENTSMark Feldman Yesterday
Here is Alexandre Grothendieck on ethics in science. (He was one of the great mathematicians of the last century.)“…the ethical standards…
Tom Dobson Yesterday
Don’t just look at the published paper…go to the source, the laboratory notebook! There should be the truth.
Kithara Yesterday
You ask “what is behind big science frauds” Let’s begin with the conflict of interest between corporations and government such as the…
SEE ALL COMMENTS
Except for this: Journals with higher impact factors retract papers more often than those with lower impact factors. It’s not clear why. It could be that these prominent periodicals have more, and more careful, readers, who notice mistakes. But there’s another explanation: Scientists view high-profile journals as the pinnacle of success — and they’ll cut corners, or worse, for a shot at glory.And while those top journals like to say that their peer reviewers are the most authoritative experts around, they seem to keep missing critical flaws that readers pick up days or even hours after publication — perhaps because journals rush peer reviewers so that authors will want to publish their supposedly groundbreaking work with them.”
-
It Is, in Fact, Rocket Science – NYTimes.com
“The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth. But in science, at least, they are destructive, in that they promote false conceptions of the evolution of scientific thought.
Of the tale of Newton and the apple, the historian Richard S. Westfall wrote, “The story vulgarizes universal gravitation by treating it as a bright idea … A bright idea cannot shape a scientific tradition.” Science is just not that simple and it is not that easy.
Still, you might ask, so what? What happens when we misjudge the scientific process, when we underestimate its complexity?
The oversimplification of discovery makes science appear far less rich and complex than it really is. In the film “The Theory of Everything,” Stephen Hawking is seen staring at glowing embers in a fireplace when he has a vision of black holes emitting heat. In the next scene he is announcing to an astonished audience that, contrary to prior theory, black holes will leak particles, shrink and then explode. But that is not how his discovery happened.
In reality, Mr. Hawking had been inspired not by glowing embers, but by the work of two Russian physicists.
“