Science 2.0
Peer-Review vs. Info Prizes and Markets
I have been having a 140 character discussion with Ciarán Brewster (@macbruski) via twitter. And while it’s kind of interesting to force complex subject matter into very few characters, it is limiting the discussion, so I will summarize it so far here and hopefully others can weigh in too.…
Cold Fusion
I remember reading this Wired article in 1998 suggesting that the “debunking” of cold fusion may have been way premature. Last night, 60 Minutes did a pretty convincing piece claiming that more than 20 labs around the world have reported “excess heat” from cold fusion experiments:
Click here for the full story. Watch here.
It’s interesting to me that the best skeptic they could find on the subject (Richard Garwin) was thoroughly unconvincing, simply asserting that there must be a measurement problem, without he himself daring to go measure. You’d think it would be worth a looksy. More interesting still was the independent expert in measuring energy (Rob Duncan) who came in as a total skeptic and came out as a believer.
But my favorite part of the story is near the end when Fleischmann (co-discoverer of cold fusion) appears to be having both a literal and figurative last laugh. Man, what a bad beat he and Pons got.
Besides Garwin, who are the …
The Vanguard of Science: Bonnie Bassler
The import of this talk goes way beyond the specific and stunning work that Bassler and her team have done on quorum sensing. In my mind, this is the prototype for good biological science:…
The Nature of Innovation
One of my favorite talks of all time is Ken Robinson’s on how children are born naturally innovative and the process of schooling and growing up in our society beats it out of them by the time they are adults. More recently, Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat Pray Love fame) opened some eyes with this talk on how we think of individual creativity and where it comes from.…
Teaching Metacognition to 7th Graders
Gary Marcus says he’d like for there to be a course on metacognition for kids:
Call it “The Human Mind: A User’s Guide,” aimed at, say, seventh-graders. Instead of emphasizing facts, I’d expose students to the architecture of the mind, what it does well, and what it doesn’t. And most important, how to cope with its limitations, to consider evidence in a more balanced way, to be sensitive to biases in our reasoning, to make choices in ways that better suit our long-term goals.
What a brilliant and practical idea.
Anyone want to take a stab at a syllabus?…
Best Talk of Pop!Tech '08
The reason I like this talk so much (besides that it’s well-presented) is that it introduces us to the idea of invisible etiology. Such a powerful concept, one that I feel has the power to help us solve so many mysteries, once we take it seriously.
Something that I’ve been thinking about lately: does homelessness have an invisible etiology (or etiologies), and if so, what is it?…
The Conflict Between Complex Systems and Reductionism
The following is a recent paper by Henry Heng published in JAMA. I’ve linked concepts mentioned in the paper to corresponding explications from this blog.
JAMA. 2008;300(13):1580-1581.
The Conflict Between Complex Systems and Reductionism
Henry H. Q. Heng, PhD
Author Affiliations: Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics, Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, Michigan.
Descartes’ reductionist principle has had a profound influence on medicine. Similar to repairing a clock in which each broken part is fixed in order, investigators have attempted to discover causal relationships among key components of an individual and to treat those components accordingly. …
Invisible Etiology
One of the most poignant moments of this year’s Pop!Tech for me — which, BTW had many — was Gary Slutkin’s talk on the idea of violence being a virus. You may have heard about his work in stopping violence in Chicago in a NY Times Magazine cover article earlier this year. The premise is simple: if you throw out what you think you know about violence and just look at the etiology of how it manifests in the world, you find incredible similarities to the etiology of microbial viruses. This includes not only how it spreads from person to person, but also the larger epidemiological patterns, and importantly, how it can be stopped via interventions which logically follow from the hypothesis that violence is a virus. Not that violence is caused by those invisible critters we call viruses, but rather that violence itself is a virus.…
Go Forth and Reify
reify |ˈrēəˌfī|
verb ( -fies, -fied) [ trans. ] formal
make (something abstract) more concrete or real
Imagine if an alien landed on Earth to study modern society and you were assigned the task of being its local guide. You get to the subject of money and the alien is perplexed. What is money? Is it paper currency? Clearly not, since you can exchange that paper for other forms of currency, such as coins, foreign bank notes, electronic funds, treasury bills, and all sorts of derivatives, assets (both tangible and intangible, liquid and illiquid), services, promises, and so on. After hearing all of the various aspects of money, the alien tells you that money doesn’t really exist.…
Beyond the Gene
In an earlier post, I argued that the gene concept is in bad need of a makeover. It turns out that Evelyn Fox Keller and David Harel feel the same way and have made an actual start of it in a paper titled Beyond the Gene. In the paper they propose a new lexicon: