And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he secs on all sides the eyes of the universe tele-scopically focused upon his action and thought. It is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence.

We also think that there is too much of a disconnect between research and the people who it serves.

These are called “vestigial” characteristics.

With Anenke, a French orthodontics company, they are patient-testing a new process that uses digital scanning to create a dental device which is printed with safe polymers.

“We’ve figured out how to print custom wood grain by taking sawdust and plastic, combining it into a filament and extruding or forcing it out,” says Tibbits.

Tibbits has pioneered the field of 4D printing — that is, using 3D printers to create material that then transforms into a predetermined shape (TED Talk: The emergence of 4D printing).

At MIT’s International Design Center, Self-Assembly Lab founder Skylar Tibbits, co-director Jared Laucks and their team are inventing smart materials that can automatically take shape in useful — and sometimes surprising — ways.

“A lesson about every single element on the periodic table.”

The climate scientists gave the conspiracy theorists an opening by letting their advocacy color their science, which compromised the legitimacy of their enterprise and, ironically, weakened the political movement itself.

With scientific claims, the only definitive answer is to reexamine the original research data and repeat the experiments and analysis. But no one has the time or the expertise to examine the original research literature on every topic, let alone repeat the research. As such, it is important to have some guidelines for deciding which theories are plausible enough to merit serious examination.

After a brief training session, participants spent six hours archiving environmental data from government websites, including those of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department.

An anonymous donor has provided storage on Amazon servers, and the information can be searched from a website at the University of Pennsylvania called Data Refuge. Though the Federal Records Act theoretically protects government data from deletion, scientists who rely on it say would rather be safe than sorry.

“But if we want to defend the role of science in policy making, scientists need to run for office.

Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics

Some or the new instruments or science arc, ./ """\ \ themselves, sciences; others arc arts; still others, c\v,W{' . producL'i of either art or nature

science (and politics) of eugenics

One of those values is the principle of material honesty. One material should not be used as a substitute for another. Otherwise the end result is deceptive.

In Python, as well as in any other object-oriented programming language, we define a class to be a description of what the data look like (the state) and what the data can do (the behavior). Classes are analogous to abstract data types because a user of a class only sees the state and behavior of a data item. Data items are called objects in the object-oriented paradigm. An object is an instance of a class.

Bullshit is much harder to detect when we want to agree with it. The first and most important step is to recognise the limits of our own cognition. We must be humble about our ability to justify our own beliefs. These are the keys to adopting a critical mindset – which is our only hope in a world so full of bullshit.

Montreal Neurological Institute

European Union, Japan and the United States

Another 23 percent showed signs of accepting the story to some degree, the researchers said.

Every theorem of mathematics, every significant result of science, is a challenge to our imagination as interface designers. Can we find ways of expressing these principles in an interface? What new objects and new operations does a principle suggest? What a priori surprising relationship between those objects and operations are revealed by the principle? Can we find interfaces which vividly reveal those relationships, preferably in a way that is unique to the phenomenon being studied?

Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss

The participants with relatively strong spatial abilities tended to gravitate towards, and excel in, scientific and technical fields such as the physical sciences, engineering, mathematics, and computer science.

Democratizing science does not mean settling questions about Nature by plebiscite, any more than democratizing politics means setting the prime rate by referendum. What democratization does mean, in science as elsewhere, is creating institutions and practices that fully incorporate principles of accessibility, transparency, and accountability. It means considering the societal outcomes of research at least as attentively as the scientific and technological outputs. It means insisting that in addition to being rigorous, science be popular, relevant, and participatory.

(courses.csail.mit.edu/18.337/2015/docs/50YearsDataScience.pdf)

Buridan begins to explore the idea of inertia, also known as Newton’s First Law

Activities such as time spent on task and discussion board interactions are at the forefront of research.

The point of replication isn't to shame researchers — it's to build better science

Performance CategoryDesign Categoriesi. StructureFrame design, shape and materials –for functionii. MobilityThrusters: number, power, orientationiii. SensorsCameras, lights, sonar, touch sensors, compass, GPSiv. ToolsArms, claws, rakes, wrenches, hammersv. Ranging DistanceTether length: waterproofing required vi. Buoyancy/ BallastFixed or variable, location and materialsvii. ControlsRC via wire or signal via fibre optic cableviii. Other?Depends on the specific mission

Bibliometric studies of research collaboration:A review

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.

If the RRID is well-formed, and if the lookup found the right record, a human validator tags it a valid RRID — one that can now be associated mechanically with occurrences of the same resource in other contexts. If the RRID is not well-formed, or if the lookup fails to find the right record, a human validator tags the annotation as an exception and can discuss with others how to handle it. If an RRID is just missing, the validator notes that with another kind of exception tag.

“papers are the only scientific artifacts that are guaranteed to be preserved.”

verningthis function is the belief that there must be - at a particular levelof an author's thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire — apoint where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatibleelements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere arounda fundamental and originating contradiction. Fin

a scientific programme, the founding act is on an equal footingI with its future transformations: it is merely one among the manymodifications that it makes possible. This interdependence cantake several forms. In the future development of a science, thefounding act may appear as little more than a single instance of amore general phenomenon that has been discovered. It might bequestioned, in retrospect, for being too intuitive or empirical andsubmitted to the rigours of new theoretical operations in order tosituate it in a formal domain. Finally, it might be thought a hastygeneralization whose validity should be restricted. In other words,the founding act of a science can always be rechannelled through' the machinery of transformations it has instituted.

The distinctive contribution of these authors is that they pro-duced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rulesof formation of other texts. In this sense, their role differs entirelyfrom that of a novelist, for example, who is basically never morethan the author of his own text. Freud is not simply the author ofThe Interpretation of Dreams or of Wit and its Relation to theUnconscious and Marx is not simply the author of the CommunistManifesto or Capital: they both established the endless possibilityof discourse. Obviously, an easy objection can be made. The authorof a novel may be responsible for more than his own text; if heacquires some 'importance' in the literary world, his influence canhave significant ramifications. To take a very simple example, onecould say that Ann Radcliffe did not simply write The Mysteriesof Udolpho and a few other novels, but also made possible theappearance of Gothic Romances at the beginning of the nine-teenth century. To this extent, her function as an author exceedsthe limits of her work. However, this objection can be answeredby the fact that the possibilities disclosed by the initiators of dis-cursive practices (using the examples of Marx and Freud, whomI believe to be the first and the most important) are significantlydifferent from those suggested by novelists. The novels of AnnRadcliffe put into circulation a certain number of resemblances andanalogies patterned on her work - various characteristic signs,figures, relationships, and structures that could be integrated intoother books. In short, to say that Ann Radcliffe created the GothicRomance means that there are certain elements common to herworks and to the nineteenth-century Gothic romance: the heroineruined by her own innocence, the secret fortress that functions as

Another thesis has detained us from taking full measure of the 17author's disappearance. It avoids confronting the specific event thatmakes it possible and, in subtle ways, continues to preserve theexistence of the author. This is the notion of icriture. Strictlyspeaking,.it should allow us not only to circumvent references toan author, but to situate his recent absence. The conception oficriture, as currently employed, is concerned with neither the actof writing nor the indications, as symptoms or signs within a text,of an author's meaning; rather, it stands for a remarkably profoundattempt to elaborate the conditions of any text, both the conditionsof its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment

his problem is both theoretical and practical. If we wishto publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for example, where dowe draw the line? Certainly, everything must be published, but canwe agree on what 'everything' means? We will, of course, includeeverything that Nietzsche himself published, along with the draftsof his works, his plans for aphorisms, his marginal notations andcorrections. But what if, in a notebook filled with aphorisms, wefind a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an address, or alaundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why not? T

Beaver and Rosen (1978) have shown how the differentialrates of scientific institutionalization in France, England,and Germany are mirrored in the relative output of coau-thored papers.

In some domains, path-breaking work is nec-essarily the outcome of collaborative activity rather thanindividualistic scholarship, a fact reflected in the modestproportion of federal research funds which is allocated toindividual investigators rather than teams. Collaborationsare a necessary feature of much, though by no means all,contemporary scientific research.

After World War II, collaboration became a defin-ing feature of ‘big science’ (Bordons & Gomez, 2000;Cronin, 1995, pp. 4 –13; Katz & Martin, 1997).

n general terms, the lone authorstereotype ignores the fact that a great deal of the scholarlyliterature is the product of a “socio-technical production andcommunications network” (Kling, McKim, Fortuna, &King, 1999),

hapin (1995,p. 178) notes in his brilliant study of trust in 17th-centuryEnglish science,

Before the precursors of today’s scholarly journals es-tablished themselves in the second half of the 17th century,scientists communicated via letters.

A few cognitive scientists – notably Anthony Chemero of the University of Cincinnati, the author of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009) – now completely reject the view that the human brain works like a computer. The mainstream view is that we, like computers, make sense of the world by performing computations on mental representations of it, but Chemero and others describe another way of understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world.

Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.

Therein lies the power of mistakes as a vehicle for, as Rilke famously put it, “living the questions” and thus advancing knowledge in a way that certainty cannot — for, as Richard Feynman memorably noted, the scientist’s job is to remain unsure, and so seems the philosopher’s. Dennett writes:

The history of philosophy is in large measure the history of very smart people making very tempting mistakes, and if you don’t know the history, you are doomed to making the same darn mistakes all over again. … There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

Writing and submission. The process of compiling findings, writing accompanying narrative and making this available for public view and scrutiny can be simplified by the use of new improved software. These tools can help identify relevant papers through increasingly powerful learning algorithms (e.g. F1000Workspace, Mendeley, Readcube). They can also enable collaborative authoring (e.g. F1000Workspace, Overleaf, Google docs), and provide formatting tools to simplify the process of structuring an article to ensure all the necessary underlying information has been captured (e.g. F1000Workspace, EndNote). Submission for posting as a preprint, and/or for formal publication and peer review, should be as simple as a single click.

one of the roles of philosophy over the past two and half millennia has been to prepare the ground for the birth and eventual intellectual independence of a number of scientific disciplines. But contra what you seem to think, this hasn’t stopped with the Scientific Revolution, or with the advent of quantum mechanics. Physics became independent with Galileo and Newton (so much so that the latter actually inspired David Hume and Immanuel Kant to do something akin to natural philosophizing in ethics and metaphysics); biology awaited Darwin (whose mentor, William Whewell, was a prominent philosopher, and the guy who coined the term “scientist,” in analogy to artist, of all things); psychology spun out of its philosophical cocoon thanks to William James, as recently (by the standards of the history of philosophy) as the late 19th century. Linguistics followed through a few decades later (ask Chomsky); and cognitive science is still deeply entwined with philosophy of mind (see any book by Daniel Dennett). Do you see a pattern of, ahem, progress there? And the story doesn’t end with the newly gained independence of a given field of empirical research. As soon as physics, biology, psychology, linguistics and cognitive science came into their own, philosophers turned to the analysis (and sometimes even criticism) of those same fields seen from the outside: hence the astounding growth during the last century of so called “philosophies of”: of physics (and, more specifically, even of quantum physics), of biology (particularly of evolutionary biology), of psychology, of language, and of mind.

. Referees ofgrant proposals agree much more about what is unworthy of support than about what does have scientific value. In

A system that assumes a "quite good" institution is unable to get better, and thus denies them the funds that would enable them to get better, is probably not an optimal system for promoting merit. A system that rewards in proportion to merit would at least be able to recognise and reflect the dynamism of university research; research groups wax and wane as people come, go, get disheartened, get re-invigorated.

it could be argued that we don’t just need an elite: we need a reasonable number of institutions in which there is a strong research environment, where more senior researchers feel valued and their graduate students and postdocs are encouraged to aim high. Our best strategy for retaining international competitiveness might be by fostering those who are doing well but have potential to do even better

. I consider that my job, as a philosopher, is to activate the possible, and not to describe the probable, that is, to think situations with and through their unknowns when I can feel them

The science of the individual relies on dynamic systems theory rather than group statistics. Its research methodology is characterized by “analyze, then aggregate” (analyze each subject separately, then combine individual patterns into collective understanding) rather than “aggregate, then analyze” (derive group statistics based on aggregate data, then use these statistics to evaluate and understand individuals).

An all-star international team of astrophysicists used an exquisitely sensitive, $1.1 billion set of twin instruments known as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, to detect a gravitational wave generated by the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years from Earth.

Since its start in 1998, Software Carpentry has evolved from a week-long training course at the US national laboratories into a worldwide volunteer effort to improve researchers' computing skills. This paper explains what we have learned along the way, the challenges we now face, and our plans for the future.

While there are some features shared between a university repository and us we are distinctly different for the following reasons: We offer DOIs to all content published on The Winnower All content is automatically typeset on The Winnower Content published on the winnower is not restricted to one university but is published amongst work from peers at different institutions around the world Work is published from around the world it is more discoverable We offer Altmetrics to content  Our site is much more visually appealing than a typical repository  Work can be openly reviewed on The Winnower but often times not even commented on in repositories. This is not to say that repositories have no place, but that we should focus on offering authors choices not restricting them to products developed in house.

educators and business leaders are increasingly recognizing that CS is a “new basic” skill necessary for economic opportunity. The President referenced his Computer Science for All Initiative, which provides $4 billion in funding for states and $100 million directly for districts in his upcoming budget; and invests more than $135 million beginning this year by the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service to support and train CS teachers.

open Science

This has implications far beyond the cryptocurrency

"A friend of mine said a really great phrase: 'remember those times in early 1990's when every single brick-and-mortar store wanted a webmaster and a small website. Now they want to have a data scientist.' It's good for an industry when an attitude precedes the technology."

Stupid models are extremely useful. They are usefulbecause humans are boundedly rational and because language is imprecise. It is often only by formalizing a complex system that we can make progress in understanding it. Formal models should be a necessary component of the behavioral scientist’s toolkit. Models are stupid, and we need more of them.

Microeconomic models based on rational choice theory are useful for developing intuition, and may even approximate reality in a fewspecial cases, but the history of behavioral economics shows that standard economic theory has also provided a smorgasbord of null hypotheses to be struck down by empirical observation.

Where differences between conditions are indicated, avoid the mistake of running statistical analyses as if you were sampling from a larger population.

A model’s strength stemsfromits precision.

However, I want to be careful not to elevate modelers above those scientists who employ other methods.

Ultimately,the theory has been shown to be incorrect, and has been epistemically replaced by the theory of General Relativity. Nevertheless, the theory is able to make exceptionally good approximations of gravitational forces –so good that NASA’s moon missions have relied upon them.

Table 1.Twelve functions served by false models. Adapted with permissionfrom Wimsatt

To paraphrase Gunawardena (2014), a model is a logical engine for turning assumptions into conclusions.

the stupidity of a model is often its strength. By focusing on some key aspects of a real-world system(i.e., those aspectsinstantiated in the model), we can investigate how such a system would work if, in principle, we really couldignore everything we are ignoring. This only sounds absurd until one recognizes that, in our theorizing about the nature of reality –both as scientists and as quotidianhumans hopelessly entangled in myriad webs of connection and conflict –weignore thingsall the time.

The generalized linear model, the work horse ofthe social sciences, models data as being randomly drawn from a distribution whose mean varies according to some parameter. The linear model is so obviously wrong yet so useful that the mathematical anthropologist Richard McElreathhas dubbed it “the geocentric model of applied statistics,”in reference to the Ptolemaic model of the solar system that erroneously placed the earth rather than the sun at the center but nevertheless produced accurate predictions of planetary motion as they appeared in the night sky(McElreath 2015).

Unfortunately, my own experience working with complex systems and working among complexity scientistssuggests that we are hardly immune to such stupidity. Consider the case of Marilyn Vos Savantand the Monty Hall problem.

Mitch Resnick, in his book Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, details his experiences teaching gifted high school students about the dynamics of complex systems using artificial life models (Resnick 1994). He showed them how organized behavior could emerge when individualsresponded only to local stimuli using simple rules, without the need for a central coordinating authority. Resnick reports that even after weeks spent demonstrating the principles of emergence,using computer simulations that the students programmed themselves, many students still refused to believe that what they were seeing could really work without central leadership.

how

Maybe digital history is at the midway point on the continuum between art and science

As part of EFF’s 25th Anniversary celebrations, we are releasing “Pwning Tomorrow: Stories from the Electronic Frontier,” an anthology of speculative fiction from more than 20 authors, including Bruce Sterling, Lauren Beukes, Cory Doctorow, and Charlie Jane Anders. To get the ebook, you can make an optional contribution to support EFF’s work, or you can download it at no cost. We're releasing the ebook under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license, which permits sharing among users. 

Part of Galileo’s genius was to transfer the spirit of the Italian Renaissance in the plastic arts to the mathematical and observational ones.

Big Sur is our newest Open Rack-compatible hardware designed for AI computing at a large scale. In collaboration with partners, we've built Big Sur to incorporate eight high-performance GPUs

Similarly, in science there exists substantial expertise making brilliant connectionsbetween concepts, but it is being conveyed in silos of English prose known as journalarticles. Every scientific journal article has a methods section, but it is almost impossibleto read a methods section and subsequently repeat the experiment—the English languageis inadequate to precisely and concisely convey what is being done.

As mentioned above category theory has branched out into certain areas of scienceas well. Baez and Dolan have shown its value in making sense of quantum physics, itis well established in computer science, and it has found proponents in several otherfields as well. But to my mind, we are the very beginning of its venture into scientificmethodology. Category theory was invented as a bridge and it will continue to serve inthat role.

In 1980 Joachim Lambek showed that the types and programs used in computerscience form a specific kind of category. This provided a new semantics for talking aboutprograms, allowing people to investigate how programs combine and compose to createother programs, without caring about the specifics of implementation. Eugenio Moggibrought the category theoretic notion of monads into computer science to encapsulateideas that up to that point were considered outside the realm of such theory.

The paradigm shift brought on by Einstein’s theory of relativity brought on the real-ization that there is no single perspective from which to view the world. There is nobackground framework that we need to find; there are infinitely many different frame-works and perspectives, and the real power lies in being able to translate between them.It is in this historical context that category theory got its start.

Agreementis the good stuff in science; it’s the high fives.But it is easy to think we’re in agreement, when really we’re not. Modeling ourthoughts on heuristics and pictures may be convenient for quick travel down the road,but we’re liable to miss our turnoff at the first mile. The danger is in mistaking ourconvenient conceptualizations for what’s actually there. It is imperative that we havethe ability at any time to ground out in reality.

For me the interesting part of Stiegler’s work is the idea that it is technics that invents human beings; it is technics that constitutes the human.

Les représentants de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) annoncèrent leur objectif de ramener le délai de traitement des documents à six semaines en moyenne

“Many random number generators in use today are not very good. There is a tendency for people to avoid learning anything about such subroutines; quite often we find that some old method that is comparatively unsatisfactory has blindly been passed down from one programmer to another, and today’s users have no understanding of its limitations.”— Donald Knuth; The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2.

TPOT is a Python tool that automatically creates and optimizes machine learning pipelines using genetic programming. Think of TPOT as your “Data Science Assistant”: TPOT will automate the most tedious part of machine learning by intelligently exploring thousands of possible pipelines, then recommending the pipelines that work best for your data.

Max Planck, when asked how often science changes and adopts new ideas, said, “with every funeral.” And for better or worse, they happen pretty regularly.

Who among us could predict anything five years into the future? What kind of science would science be if it could make reliable predictions about stuff five years out? Science is about what we don’t know yet and how we’re going to get to know it.

I know how crazy that sounds, but it is of course exactly the right way to proceed. If you are reviewing a grant, you should be interested in how it will fail—usefully or just by not succeeding. Not succeeding is not the same as failing. Not in science.

Too often you fail until you succeed, and then you are expected to stop failing. Once you have succeeded you supposedly know something that helps you to avoid further failure. But that is not the way of science. Success can lead only to more failure. The success, when it comes, has to be tested rigorously and then it has to be considered for what it doesn’t tell us, not just what it does tell us. It has to be used to get to the next stop in our ignorance—it has to be challenged until it fails, challenged so that it fails.

According to Mark T. Mitchell, professor of political science at Patrick Henry College in Virginia: Gratitude is born of humility, for it acknowledges the giftedness of the creation and the benevolence of the Creator. This recognition gives birth to acts marked by attention and responsibility. Ingratitude, on the other hand, is marked by hubris, which denies the gift, and this always leads to inattention, irresponsibility, and abuse.

Davidson shocked his professors by taking off for India to explore meditation practice and Buddhist teachings. After three months there and in Sri Lanka, he came back convinced he would do meditation research. He was quickly disabused of this notion by his professors, who let him know that if he had any hope of a career in science, he’d better stow the meditation and follow a more conventional path of research. He became a closet meditator and an affective neuroscientist—a deep student of the emotions.

as Brent Tully (known for his discovery of supergalaxies) observed: “It’s disturbing  that there is a new theory every time there is a new observation.”

when the built environment ceases to accommodate behavioral requirements, people seek to correct the problem through construction, renovation, or moving to a different building

However, if an open access version of a text is available, this must always be treated as the primary text. Here the commercial version of the text becomes the secondary version and it should always be cited second and in a manner that makes this completely clear. For instance, after the primary reference to the full text, you could write: ‘Also available as: ….’