A brief history of anomalous diffusion as it relates to complex systems. — Haroldo Ribeiro
Individual intelligence vs. collective wisdom?
To both philosophers and scientists, the way that the human society is organized has always been a compelling subject. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Niccolo Machiavelli may enjoy telling stories about social contracts, monarchy and oligarchy, and modern physicists and social scientists see a world full of “links” and “hub nodes”. Regardless ...
Review of PRX
The American Physical Society, publishers of Physical Review Letters among other journals, has recently started a new online-only open-access journal: PRX. The publisher claims that “PRX will bring valuable and innovative results to the broader physics readership.” Does PRX make good on this claim? In this blog post I examine the three articles that relate to this lab’s interests and come up with mixed results. — David Mertens
The Danger of Truthiness
This is an interesting article that talks about how certain things that seem intuitive become accepted as conventional wisdom (“truthiness”). “Apparently horses in races are almost always (98%) whipped.* The main reason is to make them go faster. Congratulations to the scientists from the University of Sydney who won a ...
Anthropocentrism and biology
A recent The Scientist commentary on a recent paper (D. Dickinson, et al., “ A polarized epithelium organized by beta- and alpha-catenin predates cadherin and metazoan origins,” Science, 331: 1336-39, 2011) makes some wonderful points about the working and evolution of biological systems. The first point relates to anthropocentrism: “Yet ...
Accountability and the Research Enterprise
The Republican leadership has recently turned its attention to “wasteful” research sponsored by NSF (see YouCut for details.) In a youtube video, Representative Adrian Smith (R-Neb.) calls for Americans to search the NSF database and report “wasteful” grants and cites two projects as examples of such waste, a $750,000 grant ...
NRC Rankings have arrived
(Revised Oct. 3, 2010) The long awaited for NRC rankings have arrived and, as expected, lots of controversy ensued. To avoid suspense, I will state up front that I am convinced that someone has finally gotten the rankings right. The notion espoused by the 1995 NRC rankings or the annual ...
The role of controversy in scientific discourse
Returning from a scientific meeting reminded me again of the current bias against controversy in scientific discussions. Maybe as a result of the hazing-like practices in some circles (math, statistics, old Sovietic academic institutions), many now appear to abhor public disagreement on scientific matters. This is sad, as there is ...
Being timely or the need to "convert" editors and reviewers
Steve Wiley discusses in “The Scientist” (Timing is Everything) the importance of timeliness in one’s research. One does not want to be behind the curve, but neither does one want to be too ahead of the curve. This raises the question of what to do if you are too ahead ...
Making a bad situation worse
There is a general consensus that many things are wrong with the way U.S. intelligence agencies operate. The weaknesses of the present system have been clearly brought to light by the 9/11 commission’s report. Included in that report is a recommendation to create the new position of national intelligence director ...
It all comes down to the people in your team.
In 2002, the Pentagon picked Paul van Riper, a retired Marine and a veteran of the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, to lead the “enemy” forces battling US forces in the Millenium Challenge war game. Van Riper’s mission was “clearly: impossible; his forces had to contain much better ...
Expert evaluation vs. citation analysis
The recent Nature editorial “Experts still needed” (Nature, vol 457,pp. 7-8, 2009) made me smile with amusement. There is no question that there is still a significant lack of understandingof what bibliometric measures actually measure, and that the heavy,simple-minded, use of such metrics for evaluation of disciplines,nations, organizations, or scientists ...