Ideologija Nauke?

[Meho Krljic]

Nisam, nisam.

[Dzouzi]

Možda će vas neko i braniti kada vi prestanete da vređate druge. To je tako jednostavno.

Siledžiji ne pristaje da glumi žrtvu.

Sa druge strane, ovde niko nikada nije nikoga branio od uvreda. Niste ni vi druge (štaviše, često možemo da vas pronađemo u poziciji potpaljivanja vatre), pa što biste očekivali da neko sada brani vas?

Kao što rekoh, svako žanje ono što je posejao.

[scallop]

Meho, evo ti pacijenta pa vidi šta ćeš.

[Meho Krljic]

Što meni? Nisam ja zvanični lekar ovog foruma.   

[scallop]

Ali si zaštitnik svih ugroženih manjina, a mora da priznaš da ti je ova manjina toliko ugrožena koliko i sve ostale zajedno. Pa, baci se na posao.

[Josephine]

Ja sam u manjini. Ali meni ne treba odbrana.

Vas brane Miljan, Steva, Batica, Džon, Boban... Zar vam nije dovoljna njihova odbrana? Ili koristite Mehu za vaše (uobičajene) manipulacije?

[scallop]

O, pa zakasnila si. Njega manipulišem svakodnevno. Dok si ti sređivala Dubajce i ja sam bio vredan. Jeste Meho tvrd orah, ali i on pusti suzu.

[Josephine]

Pre nego što ga rasplačete ponovo, setite se da se danas, sa svojim prvim postom, uopšte nisam obratila vama. No, vi ste osetili potrebu da mi na nos natrljavate da sam ograničena na dva posta dnevno. I saznali ste to pre mene (kada govorimo o zlostavljanju). A onda zapamtite kako ću reagovati svaki put kada mi se obratite bez razloga, na ružan način, kao danas.

[scallop]

Stvaaarno! Ustvari, tvoj dugogodišnji mentor mi je juče tvrdio da si ograničena na jedan post dnevno. Lažov sto posto. Kako si uopšte mogla da ga voliš? Sad Meho već suzi pomalo.

[Josephine]

Kako vas je lako, istinom, vratiti u poziciju zlostavljača.

[scallop]

Pa, ovo je topik Ideologija nauke. Imaš li nešto konstruktivno ili da te ispratim tamo gde pripadaš. Meho nema terapiju za tebe.

[Josephine]

I vi prljate po temi. Niste primetili? Ili mislite da vaše govno ne smrdi?

Zapamtite, ja nisam dobra žrtva.

[scallop]

Naravno da nisi. Ti si idealna žrtva.

[Josephine]

A vaše govno smrdi najviše.

[Albedo 0]

ako si ti žrtva onda je i Luj 16. žrtva, toliko o tome

i jel stvarno imaš potrebu za tolikim štancovanjem istovjetnih i besmislenih postova

mislim, i ja pitam svašta, to repetitivno histerično ponašanje je izgleda i jedino što si pokazala na Sagiti

[scallop]

Sad si postala prosta. A ja bio ubeđen da bi ti malo fitnesa koristilo da se razmrdaš. Zarđala si.

[Josephine]

Stvari treba zvati pravim imenom.

[scallop]

Eh, kad bi bilo tako. Nikada nisi mogla da izdržiš ni pola sata, a da ne prsneš.

[Meho Krljic]

Ali si zaštitnik svih ugroženih manjina, a mora da priznaš da ti je ova manjina toliko ugrožena koliko i sve ostale zajedno. Pa, baci se na posao.

Na poslu sam ja sve vreme. Ko zna na šta bi tek forum ličio da me nema.

[scallop]

Znam ja muke tvoje. Samo sam želeo da vidiš i moje.

[Nightflier]

Ali si zaštitnik svih ugroženih manjina, a mora da priznaš da ti je ova manjina toliko ugrožena koliko i sve ostale zajedno. Pa, baci se na posao.

Na poslu sam ja sve vreme. Ko zna na šta bi tek forum ličio da me nema.

Me'met efendija Krljić - The Batman of Sagita! (Ta-na-na-na MEHO!)

[Meho Krljic]

E, sad:
 8 Logical Fallacies That Fuel Anti-Science Sentiments

[Meho Krljic]

Evo sad, šta misli javnost a šta kaže nauka (o nekim stvarima) (u Americi, obvijzli):
 Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society
 

Scientific innovations are deeply embedded in national life — in the economy, in core policy choices about how people care for themselves and use the resources around them, and in the topmost reaches of Americans’ imaginations. New Pew Research Center surveys of citizens and a representative sample of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) show powerful crosscurrents that both recognize the achievements of scientists and expose stark fissures between scientists and citizens on a range of science, engineering and technology issues. This report highlights these major findings:
 Science holds an esteemed place among citizens and professionals. Americans recognize the accomplishments of scientists in key fields and, despite considerable dispute about the role of government in other realms, there is broad public support for government investment in scientific research.
The key data:
 

• 79% of adults say that science has made life easier for most people and a majority is positive about science’s impact on the quality of health care, food and the environment.
• 54% of adults consider U.S. scientific achievements to be either the best in the world (15%) or above average (39%) compared with other industrial countries.
• 92% of AAAS scientists say scientific achievements in the U.S. are the best in the world (45%) or above average (47%).
• About seven-in-ten adults say that government investments in engineering and technology (72%) and in basic scientific research (71%) usually pay off in the long run. Some 61% say that government investment is essential for scientific progress, while 34% say private investment is enough to ensure scientific progress is made.

At the same time, both the public and scientists are critical of the quality of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM subjects) in grades K-12.
The key data:
 

• Only 16% of AAAS scientists and 29% of the general public rank U.S. STEM education for grades K-12 as above average or the best in the world. Fully 46% of AAAS scientists and 29% of the public rank K-12 STEM as “below average.”
• 75% of AAAS scientists say too little STEM education for grades K-12 is a major factor in the public’s limited knowledge about science. An overwhelming majority of scientists see the public’s limited scientific knowledge as a problem for science.

Despite broadly similar views about the overall place of science in America, citizens and scientists often see science-related issues through different sets of eyes. There are large differences in their views across a host of issues.
 
The key data:
 

• A majority of the general public (57%) says that genetically modified (GM) foods are generally unsafe to eat, while 37% says such foods are safe; by contrast, 88% of AAAS scientists say GM foods are generally safe. The gap between citizens and scientists in seeing GM foods as safe is 51 percentage points. This is the largest opinion difference between the public and scientists.
• Citizens are closely divided over animal research: 47% favor and 50% oppose the use of animals in scientific research.1  By contrast, an overwhelming majority of scientists (89%) favor animal research. The difference in the share favoring such research is 42 percentage points.
• In some areas, like energy, the differences between the groups do not follow a single direction — they can vary depending on the specific issue. For example, 52% of citizens favor allowing more offshore drilling, while fewer AAAS scientists (32%), by comparison, favor increased drilling. The gap in support of offshore drilling is 20 percentage points. But when it comes to nuclear power, the gap runs in the opposite direction. Forty-five percent of citizens favor building more nuclear power plants, while 65% of AAAS scientists favor this idea.
• The only one of 13 issues compared where the differences between the two groups are especially modest is the space station. Fully 64% of the public and 68% of AAAS scientists say that the space station has been a good investment for the country; a difference of four percentage points.

Compared with five years ago, both citizens and scientists are less upbeat about the scientific enterprise. Citizens are still broadly positive about the place of U.S. scientific achievements and its impact on society, but slightly more are negative than five years ago. And, while a majority of scientists think it is a good time for science, they are less upbeat than they were five years ago. Most scientists believe that policy regulations on land use and clean air and water are not often guided by the best science.
The key data:
 

• While a majority of the public sees U.S. scientific achievements in positive terms, the share saying U.S. scientific achievements are the best in the world or above average is down 11 points to 54% today, compared with 65% in 2009.
• 79% of citizens say that science has made life easier for most people, while just 15% say it has made life more difficult. However, the balance of opinion is slightly less positive today than in 2009 when positive views outpaced negative ones by a margin of 83% to 10%. A similar pattern is found in views about the effect of science on the quality of health care, food, and the environment. In each case, while most adults see a positive effect of science, there is a slight rise in the share expressing negative views.
• 52% of AAAS scientists say this is generally a good time for science, down 24 percentage points from 76% in 2009. Similarly, the share of scientists who say this is generally a good time for their scientific specialty is down from 73% in 2009 to 62% today. And, the share of AAAS scientists saying that this is a good or very good time to begin a career in their field now stands at 59%, down from 67% in 2009.
• Only 15% of scientists say they believe policy choices about land use are guided by the best science most of the time or always; 27% think the best science frequently guides regulations about clean air and water; 46% think the best science is frequently used in food safety regulations and 58% say the same when it comes to regulations about new drug and medical treatments.

These are some of the findings from a new pair of surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the AAAS. The survey of the general public was conducted by landline and cellular telephone August 15-25, 2014 with a representative sample of 2,002 adults nationwide. The margin of sampling error for results based on all adults is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The survey of scientists is based on a representative sample of 3,748 U.S.-based members of AAAS; the survey was conducted online from Sept. 11 to Oct. 13, 2014.² A Sizable Opinion Gap Exists Between the General Public and Scientists on a Range of Science and Technology Topics
Citizens’ and scientists’ views diverge sharply across a range of science, engineering and technology topics. Opinion differences occur on all 13 issues where a direct comparison is available. A difference of less than 10 percentage points occurs on only two of the 13.
 
The largest differences between the public and the AAAS scientists are found in beliefs about the safety of eating genetically modified (GM) foods. Nearly nine-in-ten (88%) scientists say it is generally safe to eat GM foods compared with 37% of the general public, a difference of 51 percentage points. One possible reason for the gap: when it comes to GM crops, two-thirds of the public (67%) say scientists do not have a clear understanding about the health effects.
 
Chapter 3 looks at public and scientists’ attitudes on each of these issues in more detail along with several topics asked only of the general public, including access to experimental medical treatments, bioengineering and genetic modifications.
 Both the Public and Scientists See U.S. Scientific Achievements in a Positive Light. But They Are Critical of K-12 STEM Education.
 
Despite differences in views about a range of biomedical and physical science topics, both the public and scientists give relatively high marks to the nation’s scientific achievements and give distinctly lower marks to K-12 education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (known as STEM). Just 16% of AAAS scientists and 29% of adults in the general public considers K-12 STEM education in the U.S. to be the best or above average compared with other industrialized countries. Both groups see U.S. scientific achievements and medical treatment in a more positive light, by comparison.
 
About half of Americans (54%) consider U.S. scientific achievements to be above average or among the best in the world. The only aspect of American society rated more favorably is the U.S. military system (77%). About half (51%) also see U.S. medical treatment as in the top tier compared with other industrialized countries. Public views about K-12 STEM are markedly more negative: 29% say it is the best or above average, while 39% say it is average and another 29% say it is below average. (For more on public assessments of key institutions and industries, including the economy, health care, and the political system see Chapter 2.)
 
Compared with the general public, scientists are even more positive about the place of U.S. scientific achievements. Fully nine-in-ten (92%) AAAS scientists consider scientific achievements in the U.S. to be the best in the world (45%) or above average (47%).
 
Scientists also have largely positive views about the global standing of U.S. medical treatment (64% say it is the best in the world or above average) as well as other aspects of science and technology including doctoral training (87%), cutting edge basic research (87%) and industry research and development innovation (81%).
 Just 16% of scientists say the same about K-12 STEM.
Among scientists, the public’s knowledge about science — or lack thereof — is widely considered to be a major (84%) or minor (14%) problem for the field.
 
And when asked about four possible reasons for the public having limited science knowledge, three-quarters of AAAS scientists in the new survey say too little K-12 STEM education is a major factor.
 Citizens Are Still Broadly Positive About the Achievements of American Science and Its Impact on Society, But Slightly More Are Negative than Five Years Ago. Scientists Are Also Still Largely Positive, But Less Upbeat than Five Years Ago.
A number of the questions asked in these new surveys repeat questions that Pew Research Center asked citizens and scientists in 2009. In key areas, both the public and AAAS scientists are less upbeat today.
 
Among the public, perceptions of the scientific enterprise and its contribution to society, while still largely positive, are a little less rosy than five years ago. Fewer citizens see U.S. scientific contributions as top tier compared with other nations. And, while most adults see positive contributions of science on life overall and on the quality of health care, food and the environment, there is a slight rise in negative views in each area. Similarly, most citizens say government investment in research pays off in the long run, but slightly more are skeptical about the benefits of government spending today than in 2009. While the change is modest on several of these measures, the share expressing negative views on each is slightly larger today than in 2009.³
Scientists’ views have moved in the same direction. Though scientists hold mostly positive assessments of the state of science and their scientific specialty today, they are less sanguine than they were in 2009 when Pew Research conducted a previous survey of AAAS members. The downturn is shared widely among AAAS scientists regardless of discipline and employment sector.
 Perception of U.S. Scientific Achievements
 
Overall, 54% of adults consider U.S. scientific achievements to be either the best in the world (15%) or above average (39%) compared with other industrial countries. Of the seven aspects of American society rated, only one was seen more favorably: the U.S. military. Compared with 2009, however, the share saying that U.S. scientific achievements are the best in the world or above average is down 11 points, from 65% in 2009 to 54% today. More now see U.S. scientific achievements as “average” in the global context (up from 26% in 2009 to 34% today) or “below average” (up slightly from 5% in 2009 to 9% today). Perceptions of some other key sectors, including U.S. health care, also dropped during this timeframe. See Chapter 2 for details.
 
Partisan groups tend to hold similar views of U.S. scientific achievements and, the drop in ratings of U.S. scientific achievements since 2009 has occurred across the political spectrum.
 
When it comes to policy prescriptions, however, a partisan divide emerges. A separate Pew Research Center report released this month finds that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to prioritize “supporting scientific research” for the President and the Congress in the coming year. Younger adults are also more likely than their elders to say supporting scientific research should be a top priority for the President and the new Congress.⁴ Effects of Science on Society
Overall the American public tends to see the effects of science on society in a positive light. Fully 79% of citizens say that science has made life easier for most people, while just 15% say it has made life more difficult. However, the balance of opinion is slightly less positive today than in 2009 when positive views outpaced negative ones by a margin of 83% to 10%.
 
Similarly, a majority of adults says the effect of science on the quality of U.S. health care, food and the environment is mostly positive as was also the case in 2009. The share saying that science has had a negative effect in each area has increased slightly. For example, 79% of adults say that science has had a positive effect on the quality of health care, down from 85% in 2009 while negative views have ticked up from 10% in 2009 to 18% today.
 
When it comes to food, 62% of Americans say science has had a mostly positive effect, while 34% say science has mostly had a negative effect on the quality of food. The balance of opinion is a bit less rosy on this issue compared with 2009 when positive views outstripped negative ones by a margin of 66% to 24%.
 
Similarly, more say science has had a positive (62%) than negative (31%) effect on the quality of the environment today. But, the balance of opinion on this issue has shifted somewhat compared with 2009 when 66% said science had a positive effect and 23% said it had a negative effect.
 
These modest changes over time have occurred among both Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) as well as Democrats (including independents who lean Democratic). However, Republicans’ views about the effect of science on health care and food have changed more than those of Democrats.
 
Both Republicans and Democrats have shifted by about the same amount in their assessment of science’s effect on the quality of the environment; there are no significant differences by party affiliation when it comes to the overall effect of science on the environment. Two-thirds (66%) of Republicans and independents who lean to the Republican Party say the effect of science on the quality of the environment in the U.S. has been mostly positive, as do 61% of Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party. (A detailed look at attitudes about science and technology topics by political groups is forthcoming later this year).
 Public Support for Research Funding Since 2009
 
A majority of the public sees societal benefit from government investment in science and engineering research. Roughly seven-in-ten adults say that government investment in engineering and technology (72%) as well as basic science research (71%) pays off in the long run while a minority says such spending is not worth it (22% and 24%, respectively). Positive views about the value of government investment in each area is about the same as in 2009, though negative views that such spending is not worth it have ticked up 5 points for engineering and technology research and 6 points for basic science research.
 
Views about the role of government funding as compared with private investment show steady support for government investment (61% in 2014 and 60% in 2009) but, there is a slight rise in the view that private investment, without government funds, will be enough to ensure scientific progress (from 29% in 2009 to 34% today). The modest difference over time stems from more expressing an opinion today than did so five years ago.
 Mixed Perceptions About the Degree of Scientific Consensus
The general public tends to hold mixed views about the degree to which they believe there is scientific consensus on three hot-button science topics — the “Big Bang” theory, climate change and evolution.
 
Asked whether scientists generally believe that the universe was created in a single violent event often called “the Big Bang,” about four-in-ten (42%) say yes while about half (52%) say scientists are generally divided about this issue.
 
When it comes to climate change and evolution, a majority of adults see scientists as generally in agreement that the earth is getting warmer due to human activity (57%) or that humans have evolved over time (66%), though a sizeable minority see scientists as divided over each. Perceptions of where the scientific community stands on both climate change and evolution tend to be associated with individual views on the issue.
 Scientists Are Still Largely Positive, But Are Less Upbeat About the State of Science Today Than They Were Five Years Ago.
 
Scientists’ overall assessments of the field, while still mostly positive, are less upbeat than they were in 2009 when Pew Research conducted a previous survey of AAAS members.
 
Today, about half of AAAS scientists (52%) say this is good time for science, down 24 percentage points from three-quarters (76%) in 2009.
 
Scientists are more positive, by comparison, when it comes to the state of their scientific specialty. But here, too, scientists are less rosy in their assessments than five years ago: 62% of AAAS scientists say this is a good time for their specialty area, down 11 percentage points from 2009.
 
These more downbeat assessments occur among AAAS scientists across all disciplines, among those with both a basic and applied research focus,⁵ and across all employer types.
 
Some 59% of AAAS scientists say this is a good or very good time to begin a career in their specialty, down from 67% in 2009. Assessments about the state of their specialty for new entrants is about the same as 2009 for those focused on applied research (71% in 2009 and 69% today say it a good or very good time), but it is down 15 percentage points among those doing basic research, from 63% in 2009 to 48% today saying this is a good or very good time to begin a career in their specialty area.
 
 
There are a number of possible reasons for scientists’ less optimistic assessments over this period including the different economic and political contexts,⁶ heightened concerns among scientists about the research funding environment, and, perhaps, what scientists see as the limited impact their work is having on policy regulations.
 
Fully 83% of AAAS scientists report that obtaining federal research funding is harder today than it was five years ago. More than four-in-ten say the same about industry funding (45%) and private foundation funding (45%) compared with five years ago. Further, when asked to consider each of seven potential issues as a “serious problem for conducting high quality research today,” fully 88% of AAAS scientists say that a lack of funding for basic research is a serious problem, substantially more than any of the other issues considered.⁷
 
 
Scientists have, at best, mixed views about the impact of the research enterprise on four areas of government regulations. A majority of AAAS scientists (58%) say that the best scientific information guides government regulations about new drug and medical treatments at least most of the time, while about four-in-ten (41%) say such information guides regulations only some of the time or never. Views about the impact of scientific information on food safety regulations are more mixed with 46% saying the best information guides regulations always or most of the time and a slightly larger share (52%) saying it does so only some of the time or never. Scientists are largely pessimistic that the best information guides regulations when it comes to clean air and water regulations or land use regulations: 72% and 84%, respectively, say this occurs only some of the time or never.
 
Scientists’ views about the impact of research on government regulations in each domain tend to be associated with their views about the state of the overall science environment.
 
For example, those who see a more frequent impact of scientific findings on land use regulations also tend to be more upbeat about the state of science today; 62% say this is generally a good time for science. By comparison, those who say the best science guides land use regulations only some of the time or never are less positive. Half (50%) of this group says it is a good time and an equal share says it is a bad time for science overall. The same pattern holds for each of the four types of regulations considered in the survey. Scientists who perceive a more frequent influence of the best science on regulations are also more likely to say this is a good time for science compared with scientists who see less frequent impact of the best scientific information on policy rules.
 Roadmap to the report
 
The remainder of this report details the findings on both public and scientists’ views about science, engineering and technology topics. Chapter 1 briefly outlines related Pew Research Center studies and reviews some of the key caveats and concerns in conducting research in this area. Chapter 2 looks at overall views about science and society, the image of the U.S. as a global leader, perceived contributions of science to society, and views about government funding for scientific research. Chapter 3 covers attitudes and beliefs about a range of biomedical and physical science topics. It focuses on comparisons between the public and AAAS scientists and also covers public attitudes on access to experimental drugs, bioengineering of artificial organs, genetic modifications and perceptions of scientific consensus. Chapter 4 examines the views of AAAS scientists about the scientific enterprise, issues and concerns facing the scientific community, and issues for those newly entering careers in science. It also includes the experiences and background characteristics of the AAAS scientists in the survey. Appendices provide a detailed report on the methodology used in each survey as well as the full question wording and frequency results for each question in this report.
 About This Report
This report is based on a pair of surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It looks at the views of the general public and scientists about the place of science in American culture, their views about major science-related issues, and the role of science in public policy.
 
This is the first of several reports analyzing the data from this pair of surveys. This report focuses on a comparison of the views of the general public and those of AAAS scientists as a whole. Follow up reports planned for later this year will analyze views of the general public in more detail, especially by demographic, religious, and political subgroups. And, some results from the survey of AAAS scientists will be presented in a follow-up report in mid-February.
 
The fieldwork for both surveys was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. Contact with AAAS members invited to participate in the survey was managed by AAAS staff with the help of Princeton Survey Research Associates International; AAAS also covered part of the costs associated with mailing members. All other costs of conducting the pair of surveys were covered by the Pew Research Center. Pew Research bears all responsibility for the content, design and analysis of both the AAAS member survey and the survey of the general public.
 Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Jeanne Braha and Tiffany Lohwater of AAAS who facilitated the interactions between Pew Research and AAAS staff to conduct the survey of members and to Ian King, director of marketing at AAAS, as well as Elizabeth Sattler and Julianne Wielga, who prepared the random sample of members and sent out all contacts with AAAS members selected for participation. We are also grateful to the team at Princeton Survey Research International who led the data collection efforts for the two surveys.
 

• Animal research is a common short-hand in survey-based reports to describe views about “the use of animals in scientific research” such as medical research that tests the effectiveness of drugs and procedures on animals. The two terms are used interchangeably in this report. ↩
• The AAAS survey is a sample of the U.S. based membership of the organization The margin of sampling error for estimates about the full U.S.-based membership of AAAS is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points ↩
• The General Social Survey (GSS) has tracked public confidence in key institutions since the 1970s. In the most recent survey, completed in 2012, four-in-ten (40%) adults had “a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community, 49% had “only some” confidence and 7% had “hardly any” confidence. The share of adults holding a great deal of confidence in the scientific community has been fairly stable since the 1970’s, though there has been long-term declines in confidence across the set of 12 institutions. See Tom W. Smith and Jaesok Son, May 2013, “Trends in Public Attitudes about Confidence in Institutions.” A multivariate analysis of the same data through 2010 by Gordon Gauchat suggest a long term decline in trust of the scientific community among political conservatives, particularly those with more education. See “Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010,” American Sociological Review, 77(2):167-187. ↩
• Pew Research Center report “Public’s Policy Priorities Reflect Changing Conditions at Home and Abroad,” January 15, 2015. Partisan differences in policy priorities also occur on: dealing with global warming, protecting the environment, and dealing with the nation’s energy problem. ↩
• AAAS scientists were asked to self-identify whether any scientific research they have been involved in during the past five years primarily addresses basic knowledge questions or applied research questions. The OECD defines basic research as “experimental or theoretical work undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge of the underlying foundations of phenomena and observable facts, without any particular application or use in view.” The chief difference between basic and applied research is that applied research has a specific practical aim or objective. ↩
• While the 2009 survey was conducted when the Great Recession was taking hold, there was also a promise of scientific funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 around the same time. ↩
• For data on trends in research funding from government and industry sources see Chapters 4, 5 and 6 in the Science and Engineering Indicators 2014. The Congressional Research Office reviews federal research and development funding

[Meho Krljic]

Problem sa mnogo informacija je između ostalog i u tome što se njihova vrednost time snižava. Recimo:

There are too many scientific studies, says scientific study

Technically Incorrect: Researchers suggest there are so many scientific papers that their contents are being rapidly forgotten.


    Scientists are being overwhelmed by too much science.
 A new scientific study concludes that there are too many scientific studies. Written by researchers in Finland and California, it is entitled "Attention Decay In Science" (pdf).
 The paper outlines some very simple and difficult realities. For example, it notes that scientists simply can't keep track of all the studies in their field. And it concludes that the citation rate of papers is rapidly declining over time.
    "Nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly," says the study. The ultimate result for these researchers is that the "attention of scholars depends on the number of published items, not on real time."
    The problem, the paper says, is remarkably modern and so very Facebook: "Attention, measured by the number and lifetime of citations, is the main currency of the scientific community, and along with other forms of recognition forms the basis for promotions and the reputation of scientists."
    Yes, scientists appear to be publishing more and more. They are identical to we, mere paeans, who are desperately trying to offer interesting Facebook updates to make our alleged friends believe we are interesting people.
 These researchers looked at "all publications (articles and reviews) written in English till the end of 2010 included in the database of the Thomson Reuters (TR) Web of Science.  For each publication we extracted its year of publication, the subject category of the journal in which it is published and the corresponding citations  to  that  publication."
 An interesting word was used in this research to describe the more rapid disappearance of studies: decay. It's as if there is an organic mass of scientific work that rots away as more and more scientific work grows.
    Just as with Facebook, YouTube or any other means of publication, how can you make this organic process stop? If publication has become too easy, there will be more and more of it.


    Scientists crave recognition by publication, because that is the means by which they can advance. Ergo, there will be more papers creating a likely indigestion of information.
    That indigestion will lead to, as paper says, rapid amnesia.
 Place that likelihood into a world in which attention spans are the length of your average Vine and you face a difficult perspective for distinguishing research that might be breakthrough from research that might, say, make for a fine YouTube video.
    Mind you, it was scientists who created our caring, sharing, digital world. Let's see if they can get us beyond it.
    I think this needs more research.
    (Via CBS Sacramento)

[Albedo 0]

funny cause it's true

bilo bi savršeno da je umjesto fejsbuka spomenuo twitter, tu samo ime govori sve

[Meho Krljic]

The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust
 
 

[Meho Krljic]

Evo sad, šta misli javnost a šta kaže nauka (o nekim stvarima) (u Americi, obvijzli):

Pet meseci kasnije imamo novu studiju na istu temu:



Americans, Politics and Science Issues (PDF)


ili, ko prezire PDF, evo seksije, interaktivne varijante:



Major Gaps Between the Public, Scientists on Key Issues

[Meho Krljic]

Faked peer reviews prompt 64 retractions

A leading scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals, after an internal investigation discovered fabricated peer-review reports linked to the articles’ publication.
Berlin-based Springer announced the retractions in an 18 August statement. In May, Springer merged with parts of Macmillan Science and Education — which publishes Nature — to form the new company Springer Nature.
The cull comes after similar discoveries of ‘fake peer review’ by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing "reviews from fabricated reviewers". The practice can occur when researchers submitting a paper for publication suggest reviewers, but supply contact details for them that actually route requests for review back to the researchers themselves.


The Springer investigation began in November 2014 after a journal editor-in-chief noticed irregularities in contact details for peer reviewers. These included e-mail addresses that the editor they suspected were bogus but were accompanied by the names of real researchers, says William Curtis, executive vice-president for publishing, medicine and biomedicine at Springer. The investigation, which focused on articles for which authors had suggested their own reviewers, detected numerous fabricated peer-review reports. Affected authors and their institutions have been told about the investigation’s findings, says Curtis.
   Future vetting                                                            Springer declined to name the articles or journals involved. However, a search of the publisher’s website identified more than 40 retraction notices dated between 17 and 19 August 2015 for articles in 8 Springer journals.
Springer now plans to vet peer-reviewer suggestions more carefully, Curtis says. Its journals may in future request the supply of institutional e-mail addresses or Scopus author IDs for reviewers.
When BioMed Central uncovered its peer-review problem, senior editor for research integrity Elizabeth Moylan noted that some of the issues seemed to involve companies that charge scientists to edit their manuscripts and help them with journal submission. Curtis says that Springer has “limited evidence” to implicate such third parties in some of the cases it uncovered.
   Double-checks                                                            Some publishers, such as BioMed Central and San Francisco-based PLoS, have ended the practice of author-suggested reviewers in response to fake peer review. But Elizabeth Wager, a publication consultant and former chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), says that “less drastic” measures, such as double-checking non-institutional e-mail addresses given for reviewers, would allow journals to hold on to the expertise that these reviewers often provide.
“The particular problem of fake review comes about when authors are allowed to suggest possible peer reviewers,” says Wager. “The system sounds good. The trouble is when people game the system and use it as a loophole.”
The involvement of third-party companies in bogus peer review is “more worrying”, Wager adds, because it could mean that the practice is more systemic and extends beyond a handful of rogue authors.
Virginia Barbour, the current chair of COPE, says that Springer has informed the committee about the investigation. “It is important publishers take rapid but careful action, as here,” she says.
 Naturedoi:10.1038/nature.2015.18202

[Father Jape]

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20795

Pogledati obavezno i komentare, koji se uglavnom tiču Cracked listiclea, poput:

I have to admit that my main reaction to the Cracked article was "the stupid… it burns." It's a mishmash of genuine problems, the Recency Illusion, confusion, and dunderheaded wrongness.
More precisely:

 "Negative Results Are Ignored": this is a problem, but is it a new one? What's arguably new is the concern with trying to address something that's probably been around for a long, long time.

"Scientists Don't Have to Show Their Work": same thing, except that this is an area where science has been getting better and better in recent years. The sharing and availability of raw data is in fact far better than it's ever been in the past — it's just not as good as many of us think it ought to be or could be.

"No One Can Share Their Work": … that's pretty much just backwards. Preprint archives, hosting on personal websites, and open access publishing mean that it's never been easier to access scientific papers. (Yes, Elsevier is acting in a horrible manner and needs to be smacked down — but twenty years ago, you basically couldn't read any scientific papers without physically traveling to a university library.)

And I'm a bit skeptical about sham journals "destroying" science, since most scientists already know which journals in their sub-fields are legitimate.

[Meho Krljic]

Kao da je onima iz prirodnjačkih i tehničkih nauka bio potreban dodatni razlog da ismevaju društvenjake    Studija pokazuje da oko 50% rezultata iz psiholoških istraživanja ne mogu da se repliciraju.
 
  Study reveals that a lot of psychology research really is just 'psycho-babble'
 

  Psychology has long been the butt of jokes about its deep insight into the human mind – especially from the “hard” sciences such as physics – and now a study has revealed that much of its published research really is psycho-babble.
     More than half of the findings from 100 different studies published in leading, peer-reviewed psychology journals cannot be reproduced by other researchers who followed the same methodological protocol.
A study by more than 270 researchers from around the world has found that just 39 per cent of the claims made in psychology papers published in three prominent journals could be reproduced unambiguously – and even then they were found to be less significant statistically than the original findings.
The non-reproducible research includes studies into what factors influence men's and women's choice of romantic partners, whether peoples’ ability to identify an object is slowed down if it is wrongly labelled, and whether people show any racial bias when asked to identify different kinds of weapons.
The researchers who carried out the work, published in the journal Science, said that reproducibility is the essence of the scientific method and more must be done to ensure that what is published can be replicated by other researchers.
“Scientific evidence does not rely on trusting the authority of the person who made the discovery. Rather, credibility accumulates through independent replication and elaboration of the ideas and evidence,” said Angela Attwood, professor of psychology at Bristol University, who was part of the reproducibility project.
There is growing concern about the reproducibility of scientific findings, especially in the medical journals where there is great emphasis on “evidence-based” medicine. The levels of statistical significance needed in some fields of research, such as particle physics, are much higher for instance than those employed in “softer” fields such as psychology and medicine.
“For years there has been concern about the reproducibility of scientific findings, but little direct, systematic evidence. This project is the first of its kind and adds substantial evidence that the concerns are real and addressable,” said Brian Nosek, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who led the study.
The researchers who tried to reproduce the findings in the 100 published studies said there were three possible reasons for their failure to replicate the results. The first is that there may be slight differences in materials or methods that were not obvious in the published methodology.
The second is that the replication failed by chance alone, and finally that the original results might have been a “false positive”, possibly as a result of researchers enthusiastically pursuing one line of inquiry and ignoring anything that may be inconsistent with it – rather than outright fraud.
Professor Nosek said that there is often a contradiction between the incentives and motives of researchers – whether in psychology or other fields of science – and the need to ensure that their research findings can be reproduced by other scientists.
“Scientists aim to contribute reliable knowledge, but also need to produce results that help them keep their job as a researcher. To thrive in science, researchers need to earn publications, and some kind of results are easier to publish than others, particularly ones that are novel and show unexpected or exciting new directions,” he said.
However, the researchers found that some of the attempted replications even produced the opposite effect to the one originally reported. Many psychological associations and journals are not trying to improve reproducibility and openness, the researchers said.
“This very well done study shows that psychology has nothing to be proud of when it comes to replication,” Charles Gallistel, president of the Association for Psychological Science, told Science.

 
 
Srećom, barem su tehničke nauke oslobođene ove stignme, tu se bre zna kako se radi i kako se izveštava, pa je tu procenat ponovljivosti rezultata mnogo ubedljivijih...
 
...
 
...čekajte...
 
deset odsto?   
 Studies show only 10% of published science articles are reproducible. What is happening?
 

Studies show a very low reproducibility for articles published in scientific journals, often as low as 10-30%. Here is a partial list:[/size][/color]
 

• [/size]The biotech company Amgen had a team of about 100 scientists trying to reproduce the findings of 53 “landmark” articles in cancer research published by reputable labs in top journals.
   Only 6 of the 53 studies were reproduced[/url] (about 10%).
   [/size][/color]
• [/size]Scientists at the pharmaceutical company, Bayer, examined 67 target-validation projects in oncology, women’s health, and cardiovascular medicine.  Published results were reproduced in only
   14 out of 67 projects[/url] (about 21%).
   [/size][/color]
• [/size]The project, PsychFileDrawer, dedicated to replication of published articles in experimental psychology, shows a
   replication rate 3 out of 9[/url] (33%) so far.[/size][/color]

[/size]My hair is standing on end as I read these numbers! Unbelievable! The reproducibility of published experiments is the foundation of science. No reproducibility – no science. If these numbers are true, or even half-true, it means there is something fundamentally wrong in today’s system of scientific research and education.[/color]
 
[/size]On a practical level, the US government gives nearly
 $31 billion every year in science funding through NIH only, which is mainly distributed in research grants to academic scientists. The 10% reproducibility rate means that 90% of this money ($28 billion) is wasted. That’s a lot. How are the tax-payers supposed to respond to the scientist plight for more research funding given these numbers? Would you give more of your own money to someone who delivered you such a result?
 
[/size]Beyond the practicalities, there is an interesting philosophical question. Since the middle of the 20-th century, life science research concepts and technologies have rapidly grown from the discovery of DNA to sequencing of genomes. Amazing technologies like microarrays, mass spectrometry, high-throughput assays, imaging, and robotic surgeries were introduced, making biology a data-rich science. One would expect that all these new tools would make science more rigorous and precise, but something opposite is happening.

Jasno je da moramo malo pažljiviji da budemo kad je u pitanju verovanje tim... naučnicima.
 

[Albedo 0]

prirodnjački prevaranti!

[Meho Krljic]

Ovde se dosta radilo na tome da Dobrica Ćosić dobije Nobelovu nagradu za... već nešto, ali u stvari sada vidimo da bi Skalop tu bio značajno prirodniji izbor:


The Correlation Between Arts and Crafts and a Nobel Prize

[mac]

Imamo krizu u nauci, gde naučnici vide obrasce tamo gde ih nema, jer koriste automatizovane sisteme za uočavanje obrazaca. Ima ih koji kažu da moramo da unapređujemo sistem, ali da to nije ništa neobično, niti se sada dešava po prvi put.

http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-fool-themselves-and-how-they-can-stop-1.18517

[scallop]

Ovde se dosta radilo na tome da Dobrica Ćosić dobije Nobelovu nagradu za... već nešto, ali u stvari sada vidimo da bi Skalop tu bio značajno prirodniji izbor

Meho, ostavi se šale. SF i Art & Craft su povezani po difoltu i tu nema neobičnosti. Bolje pomeni Pavla Zelića. Eno ga, govori na TV u ime Agencije za lekova, a značajne rezultate ima i u literaturi i u stripu. Mnogo je mlađi.

[Meho Krljic]

Pa, ta nagrada se obično dodeljuje manje mlađima... Ali izvinjavam se ako je moj humor nekog povredio.

[scallop]

Onda uzmi dr Jakšića. On je manje mlad. Nije mi potaman.

[Meho Krljic]

Interesantan (i inherentno štetan & pogrešan, dodao bih) članak na Wall Street Journalu gde autor argumentuje da ulaganje država u nauku nije isplativo jer veliki tehnološki prodori dolaze isključivo kroz privatne inicijative a ne kroz "basic science". Naravno, ironija je što članak čitamo na internetu, jednom od bitnijih tehnoloških prodora što oblikuju socijalne, ekonomske i političke zbiljnosti modernog doba, a koji je nastao kao državni projekat. Opet, članak ima interesantne teze o tome da tehnologija ima svojevrsnu sopstvenu volju i da "sama" traži izumitelje što je u najmanju ruku simpatična slika.

[Irena Adler]

Ne piše da traži investitore (investors) nego pronalazače (inventors). A tu Kelijevu knjigu ću na kraju stvarno morati da pročitam.
Inače osnovne teze jesu pogrešne, ili bar jednostrane.

[Meho Krljic]

  Slepac. Hvala na ukazanju. Ispravljeno. I dalje je simpatična slika, to da tehnologija ima neku svoju volju ili makar instinkt.

[Irena Adler]

Simpatična i opasna.

[Meho Krljic]

Mene to podseća na koncept koji je Gibson imao u New Rose Hotel, gde jedan od likova opisuje korporacije kao oblike života koje bi potencijalna vanzemaljska inteligencija prve (možda i jedine) prepoznala kao dominantan oblik života na Zemlji - konzumiranje resursa, rast, proizvodnja otpada, razmnožavanje, deoba, ratovanje... 

[Ukronija]

Slepac. Hvala na ukazanju. Ispravljeno. I dalje je simpatična slika, to da tehnologija ima neku svoju volju ili makar instinkt.

Nije li Tesla govorio da ideje dobija iz nekog kosmičkog izvora, ili tako nečega, a on je samo (s)provodnik tih ideja?

[Meho Krljic]

The Information Theory of Life
 

here are few bigger — or harder — questions to tackle in science than the question of how life arose. We weren’t around when it happened, of course, and apart from the fact that life exists, there’s no evidence to suggest that life can come from anything besides prior life. Which presents a quandary.
 
Christoph Adami does not know how life got started, but he knows a lot of other things. His main expertise is in information theory, a branch of applied mathematics developed in the 1940s for understanding information transmissions over a wire. Since then, the field has found wide application, and few researchers have done more in that regard than Adami, who is a professor of physics and astronomy and also microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University. He takes the analytical perspective provided by information theory and transplants it into a great range of disciplines, including microbiology, genetics, physics, astronomy and neuroscience. Lately, he’s been using it to pry open a statistical window onto the circumstances that might have existed at the moment life first clicked into place.
 
To do this, he begins with a mental leap: Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information. The shift in perspective provides a tidy way in which to begin tackling a messy question. In the following interview, Adami defines information as “the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance,” and he says we should think of the human genome — or the genome of any organism — as a repository of information about the world gathered in small bits over time through the process of evolution. The repository includes information on everything we could possibly need to know, such as how to convert sugar into energy, how to evade a predator on the savannah, and, most critically for evolution, how to reproduce or self-replicate.
 
This reconceptualization doesn’t by itself resolve the issue of how life got started, but it does provide a framework in which we can start to calculate the odds of life developing in the first place. Adami explains that a precondition for information is the existence of an alphabet, a set of pieces that, when assembled in the right order, expresses something meaningful. No one knows what that alphabet was at the time that inanimate molecules coupled up to produce the first bits of information. Using information theory, though, Adami tries to help chemists think about the distribution of molecules that would have had to be present at the beginning in order to make it even statistically plausible for life to arise by chance.
 
Quanta Magazine spoke with Adami about what information theory has to say about the origins of life. An edited and condensed version of the interview follows.
 
QUANTA MAGAZINE: How does the concept of information help us understand how life works?
 
CHRISTOPH ADAMI: Information is the currency of life. One definition of information is the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance. That’s what any living organism needs to be able to do, because if you can do that, you’re surviving at a higher rate. [Lower organisms] make predictions that there’s carbon, water and sugar. Higher organisms make predictions about, for example, whether an organism is after you and you want to escape. Our DNA is an encyclopedia about the world we live in and how to survive in it.
 
Think of evolution as a process where information is flowing from the environment into the genome. The genome learns more about the environment, and with this information, the genome can make predictions about the state of the environment.
 
If the genome is a reflection of the world, doesn’t that make the information context specific?
 
Information in a sequence needs to be interpreted in its environment. Your DNA means nothing on Mars or underwater because underwater is not where you live. A sequence is information in context. A virus’s sequence in its context — its host — has enough information to replicate because it can take advantage of its environment.
 
What happens when the environment changes?
 
The first thing that happens is that stuff that was information about the environment isn’t information anymore. Cataclysmic change means the amount of information you have about the environment may have dropped. And because information is the currency of life, suddenly you’re not so fit anymore. That’s what happened with dinosaurs.
 
Once you start thinking about life as information, how does it change the way you think about the conditions under which life might have arisen?
 
Life is information stored in a symbolic language. It’s self-referential, which is necessary because any piece of information is rare, and the only way you make it stop being rare is by copying the sequence with instructions given within the sequence. The secret of all life is that through the copying process, we take something that is extraordinarily rare and make it extraordinarily abundant.
But where did that first bit of self-referential information come from?
 
We of course know that all life on Earth has enormous amounts of information that comes from evolution, which allows information to grow slowly. Before evolution, you couldn’t have this process. As a consequence, the first piece of information has to have arisen by chance.
 
A lot of your work has been in figuring out just that probability, that life would have arisen by chance.
 
On the one hand, the problem is easy; on the other, it’s difficult. We don’t know what that symbolic language was at the origins of life. It could have been RNA or any other set of molecules. But it has to have been an alphabet. The easy part is asking simply what the likelihood of life is, given absolutely no knowledge of the distribution of the letters of the alphabet. In other words, each letter of the alphabet is at your disposal with equal frequency.
 
The equivalent of that is, let’s say, that instead of looking for a self-replicating [form of life], we’re looking for an English word. Take the word “origins.” If I type letters randomly, how likely is it that I’m going to type “origins”? It is one in 10 billion.
 
Even simple words are very rare. Then you can do a calculation: How likely would it be to get 100 bits of information by chance? It quickly becomes so unlikely that in a finite universe, the probability is effectively zero.
 
But there’s no reason to assume that each letter of the alphabet was present in equal proportion when life started. Could the deck have been stacked?
 
The letters of the alphabet, the monomers of hypothetical primordial chemistry, don’t occur with equal frequency. The rate at which they occur depends tremendously on local conditions like temperature, pressure and acidity levels.
How does this affect the chance that life would arise?
 
What if the probability distribution of letters is biased, so some letters are more likely than others? We can do this for the English language. Let’s imagine that the letter distribution is that of the English language, with e more common than t, which is more common than i. If you do this, it turns out the likelihood of the emergence of “origins” increases by an order of magnitude. Just by having a frequency distribution that’s closer to what you might want, it doesn’t just buy you a little bit, it buys you an exponentially amplifying factor.
 
What does this mean for the origin of life? If you make a naive mathematical calculation of the likelihood of spontaneous emergence, the answer is that it cannot happen on Earth or on any planet anywhere in the universe. But it turns out you’re disregarding a process that adjusts the likelihood.
 
There’s an enormous diversity of environmental niches on Earth. We have all kinds of different places — maybe millions or billions of different places — with different probability distributions. We only need one that by chance approximates the correct composition. By having this huge variety of different environments, we might get information for free.
 
But we don’t know the conditions at the time the first piece of information appeared by chance.
 
There are an extraordinary number of unknowns. The biggest one is that we don’t know what the original set of chemicals was. I have heard tremendous amounts of interesting stuff about what happens in volcanic vents [under the ocean]. It seems that this kind of environment is set up to get information for free. It’s always a question in the origins of life, what came first, metabolism or replication. In this case it seems you’re getting metabolism for free. Replication needs energy; you can’t do it without energy. Where does energy come from if you don’t have metabolism? It turns out that at these vents, you get metabolism for free.
 
If you have achieved that, the only thing you need is a way of moving away from this source of metabolism to establish genes that make metabolism work.
 
Your take on the origins of life is very different from more familiar approaches, like thinking about the chemistry of amino acids. Are there ways in which your approach complements those?
 
If you just look at chemicals, you don’t know how much information is in there. You have to have processes that give you information for free, and without those, the mathematics just isn’t going to work out. Creating certain types of molecules makes you more likely to create others and biases the probability distribution in a way that makes life less rare. The amount of information you need for free is essentially zero.
 
Chemists say, “I still don’t understand what you’re saying,” because they don’t understand information theory, but they’re listening. This is perhaps the first time the rigorous application of information theory is raining upon these chemists, but they’re willing to learn. I’ve asked chemists, “Do you believe that the basis of life is information?” And most of them answered, “You’ve convinced me it’s information.”
Your models investigate how life could emerge by chance. Do you find that people are philosophically opposed to that possibility?
 
I’ve been under attack from creationists from the moment I created life when designing [the artificial life simulator] Avida. I was on their primary target list right away. I’m used to these kinds of fights. They’ve made kind of timid attacks because they weren’t really understanding what I’m saying, which is normal because I don’t think they’ve ever understood the concept of information.
 
You have footholds in lots of fields, like biology, physics, astronomy and neuroscience. In a blog post last year you approvingly quoted Erwin Schrödinger, who wrote, “Some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them.” Do you see yourself and your work that way?
 
Yes. I’m trained as a theoretical physicist, but the more you learn about different fields, the more you realize these fields aren’t separated by the boundaries people have put upon them, but in fact share enormous commonalities. As a consequence, I have learned to discover a possible application in a remote field and start jumping in there and trying to make progress. It’s a method that’s not without its detractors. Every time I jump into a field, I have a new set of reviewers and they say, “Who the hell is he?” I do believe I’m able to see further than others because I have looked at so many different fields of science.
 
Schrödinger goes on to say that scientists undertake this kind of synthesis work “at the risk of making fools of ourselves.” Do you worry about that?
 
I am acutely aware of that, which is why when I do jump into another field I’m trying to read as much as I can about it because I have a bias not to make a fool of myself. If I jump into a field, I need to have full control of the literature and must therefore be able to act as if I’ve been in the field for 20 years, which makes it difficult. So you have to work twice as hard. People say, “Why do you do it?” If I see a problem where I think I can make a contribution, I have a hard time saying I’m letting other people do it.
 

[дејан]

веома занимљив чланак (инспирсан књигом 'Spooky Action at a Distance' џорџа маслера који је један од уредника 'сајентифик американа') између осталог и о особинама људи и заједнице које, на жалост, чешће него што би смело спутавају напредак...

What makes science science? The pious answers are: its ceaseless curiosity in the face of mystery, its keen edge of experimental objectivity, its endless accumulation of new data, and the cool machines it uses. We stare, the scientists see; we gawk, they gaze. We guess; they know.

But there are revisionist scholars who question the role of scientists as magi. Think how much we take on faith, even with those wonders of science that seem open to the non-specialist's eye. The proliferation of hominids'--all those near-men and proto-men and half-apes found in the fossil record, exactly as Darwin predicted'--rests on the interpretation of a few blackened Serengeti mandibles that it would take a lifetime's training to really evaluate. (And those who have put in the time end up squabbling anyway.)

Worse, small hints of what seems like scamming reach even us believers. Every few weeks or so, in the Science Times, we find out that some basic question of the universe has now been answered'--but why, we wonder, weren't we told about the puzzle until after it was solved? Results announced as certain turn out to be hard to replicate. Triumphs look retrospectively engineered. This has led revisionist historians and philosophers to suggest that science is a kind of scam'--a socially agreed-on fiction no more empirically grounded than any other socially agreed-on fiction, a faith like any other (as the defenders of faiths like any other like to say). Back when, people looked at old teeth and broken bones with the eye of faith and called them relics; we look at them with the eye of another faith and call them proof. What's different?

The defense of science against this claim turns out to be complicated, for the simple reason that, as a social activity, science is vulnerable to all the comedy inherent in any social activity: group thinking, self-pleasing, and running down the competition in order to get the customer's (or, in this case, the government's) cash. Books about the history of science should therefore be about both science and scientists, about the things they found and the way they found them. A good science writer has to show us the fallible men and women who made the theory, and then show us why, after the human foibles are boiled off, the theory remains reliable.

No well-tested scientific concept is more astonishing than the one that gives its name to a new book by the Scientific American contributing editor George Musser, ''Spooky Action at a Distance'' (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The ostensible subject is the mechanics of quantum entanglement; the actual subject is the entanglement of its observers. Musser presents the hard-to-grasp physics of ''non-locality,'' and his question isn't so much how this weird thing can be true as why, given that this weird thing had been known about for so long, so many scientists were so reluctant to confront it. What keeps a scientific truth from spreading?

The story dates to the early decades of quantum theory, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when Albert Einstein was holding out against the ''probabilistic'' views about the identity of particles and waves held by a younger generation of theoretical physicists. He created what he thought of as a reductio ad absurdum. Suppose, he said, that particles like photons and electrons really do act like waves, as the new interpretations insisted, and that, as they also insisted, their properties can be determined only as they are being measured. Then, he pointed out, something else would have to be true: particles that were part of a single wave function would be permanently ''entangled,'' no matter how far from each other they migrated. If you have a box full of photons governed by one wave function, and one escapes, the escapee remains entangled in the fate of the particles it left behind'--like the outer edges of the ripples spreading from a pebble thrown into a pond. An entangled particle, measured here in the Milky Way, would have to show the same spin'--or the opposite spin, depending'--or momentum as its partner, conjoined millions of light-years away, when measured at the same time. Like Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, no matter how far they spread apart they would still be helplessly conjoined. Einstein's point was that such a phenomenon could only mean that the particles were somehow communicating with each other instantaneously, at a speed faster than light, violating the laws of nature. This was what he condemned as ''spooky action at a distance.''

John Donne, thou shouldst be living at this hour! One can only imagine what the science-loving Metaphysical poet would have made of a metaphor that had two lovers spinning in unison no matter how far apart they were. But Musser has a nice, if less exalted, analogy for the event: it is as if two magic coins, flipped at different corners of the cosmos, always came up heads or tails together. (The spooky action takes place only in the context of simultaneous measurement. The particles share states, but they don't send signals.)

What started out as a reductio ad absurdum became proof that the cosmos is in certain ways absurd. What began as a bug became a feature and is now a fact. Musser takes us into the lab of the Colgate professor Enrique Galvez, who has constructed a simple apparatus that allows him to entangle photons and then show that ''the photons are behaving like a pair of magic coins. . . .They are not in contact, and no known force links them, yet they act as one.'' With near-quantum serendipity, the publication of Musser's book has coincided with news of another breakthrough experiment, in which scientists at Delft University measured two hundred and forty-five pairs of entangled electrons and confirmed the phenomenon with greater rigor than before. The certainty that spooky action at a distance takes place, Musser says, challenges the very notion of ''locality,'' our intuitive sense that some stuff happens only here, and some stuff over there. What's happening isn't really spooky action at a distance; it's spooky distance, revealed through an action.

Why, then, did Einstein's question get excluded for so long from reputable theoretical physics? The reasons, unfolding through generations of physicists, have several notable social aspects, worthy of Trollope's studies of how private feuds affect public decisions. Musser tells us that fashion, temperament, zeitgeist, and sheer tenacity affected the debate, along with evidence and argument. The ''indeterminacy'' of the atom was, for younger European physicists, ''a lesson of modernity, an antidote to a misplaced Enlightenment trust in reason, which German intellectuals in the 1920's widely held responsible for their country's defeat in the First World War.'' The tonal and temperamental difference between the scientists was as great as the evidence they called on.

Musser tracks the action at the ''Solvay'' meetings, scientific conferences held at an institute in Brussels in the twenties. (Ernest Solvay was a rich Belgian chemist with a taste for high science.) Einstein and Niels Bohr met and argued over breakfast and dinner there, talking past each other more than to each other. Musser writes, ''Bohr punted on Einstein's central concern about links between distant locations in space,'' preferring to focus on the disputes about probability and randomness in nature. As Musser says, the ''indeterminacy'' questions of whether what you measured was actually indefinite or just unknowable until you measured it was an important point, but not this important point.

Musser explains that the big issue was settled mainly by being pushed aside. Generational imperatives trumped evidentiary ones. The things that made Einstein the lovable genius of popular imagination were also the things that made him an easy object of condescension. The hot younger theorists patronized him, one of Bohr's colleagues sneering that if a student had raised Einstein's objections ''I would have considered him quite intelligent and promising.''

There was never a decisive debate, never a hallowed crucial experiment, never even a winning argument to settle the case, with one physicist admitting, ''Most physicists (including me) accept that Bohr won the debate, although like most physicists I am hard pressed to put into words just how it was done.'' Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this account, almost the way ''Rock Around the Clock'' displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts.

The same pattern of avoidance and talking-past and taking on the temper of the times turns up in the contemporary science that has returned to the possibility of non-locality. Musser notes that Geoffrey Chew's attack on the notion of underlying laws in physics ''was radical, and radicalism went over well in '60's-era Berkeley.'' The British mathematician Roger Penrose's assaults on string theory in the nineties were intriguing but too intemperate and too inconclusive for the room: ''Penrose didn't help his cause with his outspoken skepticism. . . . Valid though his critiques might have been, they weren't calculated to endear him to his colleagues.''

Indeed, Musser, though committed to empirical explanation, suggests that the revival of ''non-locality'' as a topic in physics may be due to our finding the metaphor of non-locality ever more palatable: ''Modern communications technology may not technically be non-local but it sure feels that it is.'' Living among distant connections, where what happens in Bangalore happens in Boston, we are more receptive to the idea of such a strange order in the universe. Musser sums it up in an enviable aphorism: ''If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then science is tranquility recollected in emotion.'' The seemingly neutral order of the natural world becomes the sounding board for every passionate feeling the physicist possesses.

Is science, then, a club like any other, with fetishes and fashions, with schemers, dreamers, and blackballed applicants? Is there a real demarcation to be made between science and every other kind of social activity? One of Musser's themes is that the boundary between inexplicable-seeming magical actions and explicable physical phenomena is a fuzzy one. The lunar theory of tides is an instance. Galileo's objection to it was like Einstein's to the quantum theory: that the moon working an occult influence on the oceans was obviously magical nonsense. This objection became Newton's point: occult influences could be understood soberly and would explain the movement of the stars and planets. What was magic became mathematical and then mundane. ''Magical'' explanations, like spooky action, are constantly being revived and rebuffed, until, at last, they are reinterpreted and accepted. Instead of a neat line between science and magic, then, we see a jumpy, shifting boundary that keeps getting redrawn. It's like the ''Looney Tunes'' cartoon where Bugs draws a line in the dirt and dares Yosemite Sam to ''just cross over dis line'''--and then, when Sam does, Bugs redraws it, over and over, ever backward, until, in the end, Sam steps over a cliff. Real-world demarcations between science and magic, Musser's story suggests, are like Bugs's: made on the move and as much a trap as a teaching aid.

In the past several decades, certainly, the old lines between the history of astrology and astronomy, and between alchemy and chemistry, have been blurred; historians of the scientific revolution no longer insist on a clean break between science and earlier forms of magic. Where once logical criteria between science and non-science (or pseudo-science) were sought and taken seriously'--Karl Popper's criterion of ''falsifiability'' was perhaps the most famous, insisting that a sound theory could, in principle, be proved wrong by one test or another'--many historians and philosophers of science have come to think that this is a na¯ve view of how the scientific enterprise actually works. They see a muddle of coercion, old magical ideas, occasional experiment, hushed-up failures'--all coming together in a social practice that gets results but rarely follows a definable logic.
Yet the old notion of a scientific revolution that was really a revolution is regaining some credibility. David Wootton, in his new, encyclopedic history, ''The Invention of Science'' (Harper), recognizes the blurred lines between magic and science but insists that the revolution lay in the public nature of the new approach. ''What killed alchemy was not experimentation,'' he writes. He goes on: What killed alchemy was the insistence that experiments must be openly reported in publications which presented a clear account of what had happened, and they must then be replicated, preferably before independent witnesses. The alchemists had pursued a secret learning, convinced that only a few were fit to have knowledge of divine secrets and that the social order would collapse if gold ceased to be in short supply. . . . Esoteric knowledge was replaced by a new form of knowledge, which depended both on publication and on public or semi-public performance. A closed society was replaced by an open one.

In a piquant way, Wootton, while making little of Popper's criterion of falsifiability, makes it up to him by borrowing a criterion from his political philosophy. Scientific societies are open societies. One day the lunar tides are occult, the next day they are science, and what changes is the way in which we choose to talk about them.

Wootton also insists, against the grain of contemporary academia, that single observed facts, what he calls ''killer facts,'' really did polish off antique authorities. Facts are not themselves obvious: the fact of the fact had to be invented, litigated, and re-litigated. But, once we agree that the facts are facts, they can do amazing work. Traditional Ptolemaic astronomy, in place for more than a millennium, was destroyed by what Galileo discovered about the phases of Venus. That killer fact ''serves as a single, solid, and strong argument to establish its revolution around the Sun, such that no room whatsoever remains for doubt,'' Galileo wrote, and Wootton adds, ''No one was so foolish as to dispute these claims.'' Observation was theory-soaked'--Wootton shows a delightful drawing of a crater on the moon that does not actually exist, drawn by a dutiful English astronomer who had just been reading Galileo'--and facts were, as always, tempered by our desires. But there they were, all the same, smiling fiendishly, like cartoon barracudas, as they ate up old orbits.

Several things flow from Wootton's view. One is that ''group think'' in the sciences is often true think. Science has always been made in a cloud of social networks. But this power of assent is valuable only if there's a willingness to look a killer fact in the eye. The Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall's new book, ''Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs'' (Ecco), has as its arresting central thesis the idea that a disk of dark matter might exist in the Milky Way, perturbing the orbits of comets and potentially sending them periodically toward Earth, where they are likely to produce large craters and extinctions. But the theory is plausible only because a single killer fact murdered an earlier theory'--which held that an unseen star was out there, doing the perturbing and the extincting. Every newer orbiting telescope has scanned the skies, and the so-called Nemesis star hasn't shown up. Disks of dark matter can now appear in the space left empty by the star's absence.

A similar pattern is apparent in the case of the search for ''Vulcan,'' the hypothesized planet that, in the nineteenth century, sat between Mercury and the sun and explained perturbations in Mercury's orbit. As Thomas Levenson explains in ''The Hunt for Vulcan'' (Random House), nineteenth-century astronomers were so in love with the idea of the missing planet that many of them, bewitched by random shadows, insisted they had seen it through their telescopes. Only in 1915, when Einstein emerged with a new interpretation of the perturbations (something to do with gravity as space-time curvature), could astronomers stop ''seeing'' what wasn't there.

There has been much talk in the pop-sci world of ''memes'''--ideas that somehow manage to replicate themselves in our heads. But perhaps the real memes are not ideas or tunes or artifacts but ways of making them'--habits of mind rather than products of mind. Science isn't a slot machine, where you drop in facts and get out truths. But it is a special kind of social activity, one where lots of different human traits'--obstinacy, curiosity, resentment of authority, sheer cussedness, and a grudging readiness to submit pet notions to popular scrutiny'--end by producing reliable knowledge. The spread of Bill James's ideas on baseball, from mimeographed sheets to the front offices of the Red Sox, is a nice instance of how a scientific turn of mind spread to a place where science hadn't usually gone. (James himself knew it, remarking that if he was going to be Galileo someone had to be the Pope.)

One way or another, science really happens. The claim that basic research is valuable because it leads to applied technology may be true but perhaps is not at the heart of the social use of the enterprise. The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think. Samuel Johnson said that a performer riding on three horses may not accomplish anything, but he increases our respect for the faculties of man. The scientists who show that nature rides three horses at once'--or even two horses, on opposite sides of the universe'--also widen our respect for what we are capable of imagining, and it is this action, at its own spooky distance, that really entangles our minds. '...

[Meho Krljic]

Ethan Siegel pred božić rešio da se svađa:
 
 Why String Theory Is Not A Scientific Theory

[scallop]

Ne znam šta se svađ'o, jer neće da mi otvori link, ali i ja bih. Meni je teorija struna kao stvorena za SF i kreaciju paralelnih svetova. Da ne pominjem pozitivna rešenja vremenskog paradoksa.   Od nauke ima samo tračak neophodan za klasifikaciju SF dela.

[Meho Krljic]

Nije baš ideologija nauke, nego izračunavanje koliko bi kojoj teoriji zavere trebalo da se pokaže da je tačna, ako bi bila tačna:


Maths study shows conspiracies 'prone to unravelling'

It's difficult to keep a conspiracy under wraps, scientists say, because sooner or later, one of the conspirators will blow its cover.
A study has examined how long alleged conspiracies could "survive" before being revealed - deliberately or unwittingly - to the public at large.
Dr David Grimes, from Oxford University, devised an equation to express this, and then applied it to four famous collusions.
The work appears in Plos One journal.
The equation developed by Dr Grimes, a post-doctoral physicist at Oxford, relied upon three factors: the number of conspirators involved, the amount of time that has passed, and the intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing.
He then applied his equation to four famous conspiracy theories: The belief that the Moon landing was faked, the belief that climate change is a fraud, the belief that vaccines cause autism, and the belief that pharmaceutical companies have suppressed a cure for cancer.
Dr Grimes's analysis suggests that if these four conspiracies were real, most are very likely to have been revealed as such by now.
Specifically, the Moon landing "hoax" would have been revealed in 3.7 years, the climate change "fraud" in 3.7 to 26.8 years, the vaccine-autism "conspiracy" in 3.2 to 34.8 years, and the cancer "conspiracy" in 3.2 years.
"The mathematical methods used in this paper were broadly similar to the mathematics I have used before in my academic research on radiation physics," Dr Grimes said.Building the equationTo derive his equation, Dr Grimes began with the Poisson distribution, a common statistical tool that measures the probability of a particular event occurring over a certain amount of time.
Using a handful of assumptions, combined with mathematical deduction, Dr Grimes produced a general, but incomplete, formula.
Specifically, he was missing a good estimate for the intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing. To determine this, Dr Grimes analysed data from three genuine collusions.
The first was the surveillance program conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA), known as PRISM. This programme involved, at most, 36,000 people and was famously revealed by Edward Snowden after about six years.


The second was the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which the cure for syphilis (penicillin) was purposefully withheld from African-American patients.
The experiment may have involved up to 6,700 people, and Dr Peter Buxtun blew the whistle after about 25 years.
The third was an FBI scandal in which it was revealed by Dr Frederic Whitehurst that the agency's forensic analysis was unscientific and misleading, resulting in the imprisonment and execution of innocent people.
Dr Grimes estimates that a maximum of 500 people could have been involved and that it took about six years for the scandal to be exposed.
The equation he created represents a "best case scenario" for conspirators - that is, it optimistically assumes that conspirators are good at keeping secrets and that there are no external investigations at play.Connecting the dotsCrunching the numbers from the three known conspiracies, Dr Grimes calculated that the intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing is four in one million.
Though this number is low, the chance that a conspiracy is revealed becomes quite large as time passes and the number of conspirators grows.
The Moon landing hoax, for instance, began in 1965 and would have involved about 411,000 Nasa employees. With these parameters, Dr Grimes's equation suggests that the hoax would have been revealed after 3.7 years.



Additionally, since the Moon landing hoax is now more than 50 years old, Dr Grimes's equation predicts that, at most, only 251 conspirators could have been involved.
Thus, it is more reasonable to believe that the Moon landing was real.
Prof Monty McGovern, a mathematician at the University of Washington, said the study's methods "strike me as reasonable and the probabilities computed quite plausible".
Dr Grimes added: "While I think it's difficult to impossible to sway those with a conviction... I would hope this paper is useful to those more in the middle ground who might wonder whether scientists could perpetuate a hoax or not."

[дејан]

^ ово је много глупо и притом неистинито...рецимо само таскиги експеримент је трајао(!!!!) 40 година

[mac]

Da, ali koliko ljudi je učestvovalo u zaveri? Što manje ljudi, to je manja šansa da će nešto da procuri.


Edit: bolji kontraprimer su sve organizovane religije.

[дејан]

40 година је тај програм добијао финансије од државе, тако да стварно немам појма колико је људи учествовало...колико администрација...колико одбора...надзорних органа...комитета...блаблабла...итд....а директна и лако проверљива лаж у тексту је да је прошло 'око 25 година' а прошло је 34 од првог покушаја и тачно 40 од чланка који је 'разоткрио' заверу (таскиги је до тад била 'теорија завере')
докон поп и јариће крсти...још кад му дају паре за то, крсти их и са левом и са десном и осталим (за јариће) пригодним и мање пригодним екстремитетима...


пс. да, организована религија је стварно врло добар контрапример