3,058 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2020
    1. To further assist students in reading annotated articles, individual annotations are tagged according to a particular “learning lens,” including: glossary, for key terms; previous work; author’s experiments; results and conclusions; news and policy links; connections to learning standards; and also reference and notes.

      I once remarked on the evolution of scientific journal article titles and am surprised that they don’t mention visiting popular science journalism as a means of entering some journal articles from a broader perspective before delving into a journal article itself? They don’t always exist for all articles, but for those with interesting/broad impact they can be a more immediate way into the topic before getting in to the heavier jargon of a scientific article itself.

    1. Social scientists focus on explaining how context specific social and economic mechanisms drive the structure of networks and on how networks shape social and economic outcomes. By contrast, natural scientists focus primarily on modeling network characteristics that are independent of context, since their focus is to identify universal characteristics of systems instead of context specific mechanisms.
    2. For instance, in the study of mobile phone networks, the frequency and length of interactions has often been used as measures of link weight (Onnela et al. 2007), (Hidalgo and Rodriguez-Sickert 1008), (Miritello et al. 2011).

      And they probably shouldn't because typically different levels of people are making these decisions. Studio brass and producers typically have more to say about the lead roles and don't care as much about the smaller ones which are overseen by casting directors or sometimes the producers. The only person who has oversight of all of them is the director, and even then they may quit caring at some point.

    1. Archaeologists said Monday that they have discovered a major prehistoric monument under the earth near Stonehenge that could shed new light on the origins of the mystical stone circle in southwestern England.

      Why in God's name are they using the word "mystical" in a science article about this? It's use only serves to muddy the water and encourage fanciful speculation and further myths.

    1. the Frauchiger-Renner paper when it first appeared on arxiv.org. In that version of the paper, the authors favored the many-worlds scenario. (The latest version of the paper, which was peer reviewed and published in Nature Communications in September, takes a more agnostic stance.

      I really love it when articles about science papers actually reference and link the original papers!

    1. In a study of the Swedish Word of Life Church, he noted that members felt part of a complex gift-exchange system, giving to God and then awaiting a gift in return (either from God directly or through another church member).[66]

      This philosophy has been around long enough that there ought to be evidence that it works for more than just the leaders of the churches. If anything, it feels like the middle classes that are practicing it are practicing it right towards poverty over the past 20 years.

    1. Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally to affect the entire environment. In Egypt in 2011, only 25 percent of the population of the country was on-line, with a smaller portion of those on Facebook, but these people still managed to change the wholesale public discussion, including conversa-tions among people who had never been on the site.

      There's some definite connection to this to network theory of those like Stuart Kaufmann. You don't need every node to be directly connected to create a robust network, particularly when there are other layers--here interpersonal connections, cellular, etc.

  2. Sep 2020
    1. “Oh, what heathen advice!” I thought to myself. “In this Christian country, what heathen advice!”

      This made me chuckle a bit. Collins challenges the tension between religion and science here. It's worth noting how it is during the Victorian period that England's Christianity was put to the test the most because of famous science figures of its time like Darwin.

    1. natural sciences

      The definition for natural science are fields related to that of the physical side of the world and how it runs. This being said; wouldn't Sociology be considered up there as a Natural Science? It is the study of Social patterns which can be physical trends that influence some outcomes/events in which the world works.

    1. Hennessy, E. A., Acabchuk, R., Arnold, P. A., Dunn, A. G., Foo, Y. Z., Johnson, B. T., Geange, S. R., Haddaway, N. R., Nakagawa, S., Mapanga, W., Mengersen, K., Page, M. J., Sánchez-Tójar, A., Welch, V., & McGuinness, L. A. (2020). Ensuring Prevention Science Research is Synthesis-Ready for Immediate and Lasting Scientific Impact [Preprint]. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/ptg9j

    1. the science wars,” a fierce contest between theoretical physicists and the humanists they felt were making much ado about insuf-ficiently understood advances in science,

      Les science wars (littéralement guerres de la science) réfèrent à une série d'échanges entre des tenants du réalisme scientifique et du postmodernisme concernant la nature de la méthode scientifique. Ces échanges se sont grandement tenus lors des années 1990 dans des publications académiques et populaires américaines. [...] Les réalistes ont critiqué les approches de disciplines telles les Cultural Studies, l'anthropologie culturelle, les études féministes, la littérature comparée, la sociologie des médias et les études des sciences et technologies. Ils ont également affirmé que les critiques postmodernistes ne savent pas de quoi ils parlent (Wikipédia, « Science wars », consulté le 23 septembre 2020).

    1. ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: “having spent a few days looking at ‘debate’ about COVID policy on lay twitter (not the conspiracy stuff, just the ‘we should all be Sweden’ discussions), the single most jarring (and worrying) thing I noticed is that posters seem completely undeterred by self contradiction 1/3” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2020, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1308340430170456064

    1. “It’s this sort of infinitely flexible philosophy where, regardless of what anyone said was true about physics, they could then assert, ‘Oh, yeah, you could graft something like that onto our model,’”

      in a way, sounds like astrology

    1. Had it not been for the attentiveness of one person who went beyond the task of classifying galaxies into predetermined categories and was able to communicate this to the researchers via the online forum, what turned out to be important new phenomena might have gone undiscovered.

      Sometimes our attempts to improve data quality in citizen science projects can actually work against us. Pre-determined categories and strict regulations could prevent the reporting of important outliers.

  3. Aug 2020
    1. Cats are strange and the scientific community at least agrees on this fact. A 2014 study wondered what the physical nature of cats was, asking the very important question: are cats solid or fluid?

      I thought cats were also found in solid, liquid and gas forms.

    1. Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the idea of natural selection independently of Charles Darwin, was an implacable opponent of the smallpox vaccine during the late 19th Century

      Being an anti-vaxxer makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

      Fixing any disease that could kill an individual before his/her childbearing age is only helping weaknesses (diseases) propagate in the human populous.

    1. Cells, for example, are a central category, but there’s no definite criterion for what counts as a cell. If you attempt to find one, you rapidly bog down in a maze of exceptions. You might start with something like “a self-reproducing living unit carrying a single copy of the organism’s DNA within a membrane.” But red blood cells don’t self-reproduce and have no DNA. Mitochondria are not cells, but they self-reproduce using their own DNA within a membrane. Muscle cells have multiple nuclei, each with a separate complete copy of the DNA. Some algae have life stages in which they have no cell membranes. And so on indefinitely.8

      I'm not an expert in biology or anything, but perhaps the moral there is we should rethink this 'cell' idea? IIRC astronomers continue to talk about 'planets' even though the longer you examine the concept the more incoherent it becomes. (For an extended example, see the infamous Discourse about whether "Pluto is a planet", which led to hilarious goal post stretching where people kept trying to find a definition of 'planet' that exactly fit the traditional celestial objects we classify as planets without having to include any new ones or exclude existing ones)

      There is obviously no rule that says the categorizations we come up with for stuff when a field is young should be expected to have infinite inferential reach as that field of knowledge expands.

    1. Using esoteric equipment and methods to get some tiny bit of reality to behave according to theory is most of what you do in a science lab.

      Not quite. You use esoteric equipment and methods to get the opportunity to make an observation of some tiny bit of reality that would help you narrow down hypothesis space.

  4. Jul 2020
    1. O’Connor, D. B., Aggleton, J. P., Chakrabarti, B., Cooper, C. L., Creswell, C., Dunsmuir, S., Fiske, S. T., Gathercole, S., Gough, B., Ireland, J. L., Jones, M. V., Jowett, A., Kagan, C., Karanika‐Murray, M., Kaye, L. K., Kumari, V., Lewandowsky, S., Lightman, S., Malpass, D., … Armitage, C. J. (n.d.). Research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond: A call to action for psychological science. British Journal of Psychology, n/a(n/a), e12468. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12468

    1. He had put the case (without mentioning names) to an eminent physician; and the eminent physician had smiled, had shaken his head, and had said–nothing. On these grounds, Mr. Bruff entered his protest, and left it there.

      So to say nothing is enough proof that there is no merit to this experiment? Isn't Ezra's thoughts inspired by textbooks/an intention to mimic the scientific process?

      I feel like such ignorance towards science is relevant today *cough*,*cough* people who refuse to wear face masks *cough*,*cough*