Tag Archives: scientific research
Avoiding ‘muddled science’ in the newsroom
On April 23, I was part of a webinar called ProtoCall, organised by Pro.to with the support of International Centre for Journalists and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. It happens once a week and is hosted by Ameya Nagarajan and … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm, Science
Tagged coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, International Centre for Journalists, new coronavirus, novel coronavirus, ProtoCall, science journalism, scientific research, Shahid jameel
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Freeman Dyson’s PhD
The physicist, thinker and writer Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28, 2020, at the age of 96. I wrote his obituary for The Wire Science; excerpt: The 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of [quantum electrodynamics] excluded Dyson. … … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Science
Tagged Cornell University, doctorate, Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, Julian Schwinger, Nobel Prize, PhD, privilege, quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman, scientific publishing, scientific research, Shin'ichiro Tomonaga, Vannevar Bush
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The scientist as inadvertent loser
Twice this week, I’d had occasion to write about how science is an immutably human enterprise and therefore some of its loftier ideals are aspirational at best, and about how transparency is one of the chief USPs of preprint repositories … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics journal, citation, citation racket, H-index, impact factor, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Kuo-Chen Chou, Lorenz attractor, peer review, post-publication peer-review, preprint papers, preprint repositories, reviewer coercion, scientific research, transparency, trustlessness
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The chrysalis that isn’t there
I wrote the following post while listening to this track. Perhaps you will enjoy reading it to the same sounds. Otherwise, please consider it a whimsical recommendation. 🙂 I should really start keeping a log of different stories in the … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Science
Tagged British Medical Journal, chrysalis, experiments, gender discrimination, industry of science, modern science, patriarchy, publish or perish, science and society, scientific enterprise, scientific literature, scientific method, scientific research
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A science for the non-1%
David Michaels, an epidemiologist and a former US assistant secretary of labour for occupational safety and health under Barack Obama, writes in the Boston Review: [Product defence] operations have on their payrolls—or can bring in on a moment’s notice—toxicologists, epidemiologists, … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Science
Tagged 1%, higher education, humanities, ivory tower, Jeffrey Epstein, manufacturing doubt, political participation, publish or perish, reason for state, scientific knowledge, scientific research, scientism, social science
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The not-so-obvious obvious
If your job requires you to pore through a dozen or two scientific papers every month – as mine does – you’ll start to notice a few every now and then couching a somewhat well-known fact in study-speak. I don’t … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm, Science
Tagged Brian Wansink, Cornell University, data torturing, Higgs boson, Ig Nobel Prizes, incremental research, Large Hadron Collider, Marc Abrahams, modelling, ozone, p-hacking, Ronald H Coase, scientific research, statistical significance, University of Exeter
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How science is presented and consumed on Facebook
This post is a breakdown of the Pew study titled The Science People See on Social Media, published March 21, 2018. Without further ado… In an effort to better understand the science information that social media users encounter on these … Continue reading
Posted in Life notes, Scicomm
Tagged Facebook, IFLScience, Mehmet Oz, Pew Research Center, scientific discoveries, scientific research, social media, social network, Twitter, user engagement
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By the way: the Chekhov’s gun and the science article
“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” (source) This is the principle of the Chekhov’s gun: that all items within … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Chekhov's gun, coherence, redundancy, science communication, science writing, scientific research, trivia
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Vanilla entertainment
One of the first, and most important in hindsight, bits of advice I got from the journalist Siddharth Varadarajan was about how to choose what to write: “Write what you’d like to read” (Dan Fagin would later add the important … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Abhay Ashtekar, Brian Greene, scientific research, Shinichi Mochizuki
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