So it's significant because it's been published, and it's published because it's significant.
Only the second part of your statement is true, or you're using two different senses of the word 'because'. The significance of an article is a criterion (though not the only one) for it's publication, and so if an article has been published then I can assume that a couple of people somewhere decided that it was significant enough. That's not circular (compare it with 'only birds have feathers' => 'if it has feathers then it's a bird') , and I still have to read the thing myself to make sure. Peer review is really just a filter for academic work that stops the absolute rubbish from being printed. Also, the effect more often than not is to send an article back to the authors, with insights and comments from experts in the field so that the author can rethink and write a better article.
The Journal of Universal Peer Review (JUPR) has been created to satisfy two needs of information dissemination in this age of Computer Mediated Communication. The first is a more rapid dissemination of information while assuring the quality of that information. Even the most recent print journal reflects the thinking and work of an author that was written two years ago. JUPR will publish article abstracts along with the comments of reviewers and the article will be discussed in a public forum. JUPR-DIS is that public forum. Within a month of the original dissemination, the article will have been reviewed, evaluated and its worth established in an open debate.
This leads directly into the second need satisfied by JUPR. In the current peer review system, the decision with respect to the quality of any scientific work is in the hands of anonymous reviewers from whom there is no real appeal. Many new ideas are rejected because they go against traditional thought or are out of the zeitgeist. JUPR will give voice to authors and the whole readership and who will have the opportunity to discuss the critiques of reviewers.... Note that this critique was not publishing in a peer reviewed journal. It was published in a mailing list announcing a peer review journal.
Maybe because it would not have survived the peer-review process. None of those 'facts' are true. Most journals now peer-review and publish within six months (electronically at least, print may take a year) , often much sooner. All journals have a 'rapid review' process for articles that are felt to be urgent. The peer review process does have an appeals system, authors can argue, editors can weigh up opinions, and in the ultimate form of appeal, authors can send work to a different journal.
Many journals now publish the reviewers comments, and reviewers for many journals are no longer anonymous.
The peer-review process is important to prevent the spread of the kind of mis-information exemplified by the above quote.
Perhaps the peer review system has issues with self critique.
You obviously didn't look very hard. The peer-review process is heavily self critical. Do a Google Scholar search on 'peer review'. There's lots of critical articles published in all kinds of medical and social science journals.
But there is an even more important point here - Google generation has obviously decided that it's much more efficient to look at the result of such systematic literature review done by someone else (or by google computers, if possible), than to do it themselves. Are they wrong?
Of course not! They are exactly right so long as the review exists, they know to look for it, they are able to judge it's quality and they understand its significance compared to the anecdotal evidence that might shout louder and come up higher on their Google search. Teaching the review process seems to me a good way to impart that knowledge.
Also I'm a medic so obviously I know more about that but IMO the systematic review process in some form is essential if you want to make an objective assessment of any body of evidence.
You're being ignorant or silly. It's not possible to find "all of the available" information on any topic, and much less to be -certain- that you've found it all. Not even for tiny, specialised subjects. For larger more complex subjects, you can easily find enough information that you'd spend 10 lifetimes just reading trough it once, nevermind critically assess and synthesise anything whatsoever. Then what ?
You're wrong about that. The academic indexes are good enough that you can be certain enough not to have missed anything important. If somebody has done some significant (yes even Indian students), then they will have sent it to a peer reviewed journal, and that journal will be indexed. I'm not saying it's easy, and it can take months to do right. I know the model for publication in Computer Science is different to all other academic subjects so maybe it wouldn't work there, I don't really know.
There are areas where you can get a reasonable overview -- namely those areas where we know next to nothing or that interest nobody (or both!), but that is by nessecity niche.
Well obviously. You only need to do this where there is a significant conflict of evidence and opinion (so you can identify where the conflicts arise), or where there isn't much evidence and it's never been collated. Otherwise Googling will work just fine.
Of course you can't review 'computer science' or 'medicine'. You have to be very specific about the question you are trying to answer. For example, you might look for information on the pattern of occurrence of a particular disease, or the effect of a particular social intervention on crime rates, or the most efficient implemenation of some algorithm. You'd maybe have to read the titles of 10000 articles, the abstracts of 1000, and the text of a hundred just to get to the four or five that will provide the important information.
An good exercise is a systematic literature review. You have to make sure that you don't just find some information about the topic you are interested in, but you find all of the available information, then you must critically assess each piece of literature and synthesise them properly. Each stage of the process must be justified and repeatable (so no Googling)
I'm in the middle of one of these and its really shown up my impatience to get answers. In my opinion something like this should be a part of the school curriculum, or at least a part of undergradute courses.
Phantom limb syndrome would be a pretty good reason. But then I don't know how bad the existing condition is. I recall a story of a woman who deliberately cut off her own legs because of a strange mental illness, 'body integrity identity disorder' it was called (thanks, Google!).
Is it worth the cost of keeping a permanently brain dead man alive for a year at the expense of providing excellent cancer treatment to a child? These things both have a dollar value, but the dollar value hides the real decision that is taking place every time you spend or don't spend money.
Are you confusing value with cost? Otherwise I don't see how you can place relative values (that is a dollar value on the benefit) on those two scenarios. Unless I'm missing something.
In a world of competing uses for scarce resources economics provides a non-normative way to analyze and balance those interests. Space exploration is great; so would be a cure to childhood leukemia. Don't look at it as depressing, rather as illuminating.
The problem is that economics provides no real way to quantify the relative benefits of either space exploration or curing childhood leukemia, apart from the obvious jobs created, non-stick pans, boring etc. How do you economically measure the magnificence of space travel or the fulfillment of human ambition? Can you put a value on knowing how the Earth looks from space?
By the way I am a medical researcher, and although I think my work is valuable, I often wish my job was more about achieving something positive for mankind, rather than just preventing bad things from happening. I also sometimes am involved in health economic assessments, and to see a year of healthy life expressed in its worth in $$ is also quite depressing.
You're right. We shouldn't have to justify our ambitions economically, it's such a depressing way to see the world. Lets just do something because its awesome.
We should be capable of deciding what are the goals for mankind, especially those we cannot realise as individuals. I suppose the economic benefits help to sugar the pill for those who are not inspired by exploration and understanding of the universe.
Isn't your bank the only institution able to transfer money out of your account? Don't you have to show your ID? Don't you have to sign some documents???
Not at all. I've just set up direct debits to pay my bills just by sending my bank account number to the electricity company. They do the rest. Presumably they just take my word for it that it's my money, and then the bank sets up the debit without asking any questions.
Oh actually I think there was a 'this is not a fraud' tickybox.
I would like to see computer users with more knowledge and more security awareness. However, it is easy to throw some HTML/ASP/whatever on to a website. How can we let novice users create "secure" sites without banning them the web?
You've hit exactly on the real problem. I'm a sort of hobbyist web developer with no real training. I can hack together websites using ASP.Net and SQL server that work (that is do what they're supposed to do), but I have no idea how write secure websites. I don't even understand the sorts of attacks I should be expecting. Furthermore, the 'my first website' books I learnt from don't really cover this sort of stuff except in passing, and learning about security is frankly boring.
Sadly I don't have a solution, and I don't think there is one. Thinking along a public health analogy, advocating 'safe web programming' is difficult because its far less fun, and advocating abstainance for those who aren't qualified isn't going to work because, well you know what kids are like. Enforcing a ban is culturally unacceptable and impossible in any case.
It's easy to get the idea that athletes are stupid.
People are usually well known because they are either smart, athletic or pretty (or I suppose exceptional in some other way). Then, out of the people who are well known, athletes and blondes will be less smart, and when they speak publically can come across quite badly (although probably no worse than you or I would).
Similarly, if universities award scholorships on the basis of brains or athletic ability, the athletes at the university will be among the less academically successful, creating a perception among the rest of the studentry that athletes are stupid.
It doesn't matter if we evolve, because we change the environment around us as opposed to adapting to it.
Well that's partly right, but that's assuming that we can control our environment. Our man-made environment does harm us in ways we can't seem to do a lot about. Think about the high availability of high energy foods leading to disease, inactivity and pollution, a high rate and fast transmission of infectious diseases. None of these things will change soon. We might start to lose the genes that evolved to store energy in places with
We are sexually attracted to people who look to be thriving (health and wealth, confidence etc) the best in the environment we find ourselves in. In this way we continue to evolve to fit our admittedly man made surroundings. For example we might start to lose the genes that evolved to store energy in places with unreliable food supplies, that in the modern world lead to vascular disease and early death.
"You call that comment a pointless refutation that has no actual substance? Hardly. Hell, give me a scientific breakthrough and an ignorant bastard and I'll come up with a better pointless refutation that has no actual substance."
Whereas this might be the first glow in the dark cat (for which I can think of many, many uses), there have been glow in the dark mice for ages (although now I wonder for how much longer). Also many animal models for human genetic diseases already exist, including fruitfly with early onset Alzheimer's disease, and mice with Down syndrome. I'm sure there are tons more.
I agree with this, and the IT people at the university department where I work do treat the relationship like a client based practice, in that they listen to what we need and then do their best to achieve it. Although it's difficult for an IT guy to get to know everybody he is responsible for, the people who look after my department do pretty well, and know how to talk to each of us. It has been proposed that the entire university should have a centralised IT support service. I really hope this doesn't happen.
I take issue with your point about photon storage.
Of course you do, I was trolling. But I think the point is valid. Important and awesome as these technological advances are, they don't constitute a contribution to knowledge. If you use the photon thingy to actually discover something, then that's science. Otherwise you've just solved an engineering problem.
I worked in a computational biology lab once. A big argument at the time concerned whether or not students could be awarded a PhD if all they did was software engineering for scientific applications. I think it was decided that it could be the bulk of their work, but only if an application was then made to a dataset that provided a genuine biological insight. I'm not saying it was right or wrong, but it's an important issue.
Its kind of a shame, yes, but not that much if you think about it. This is the oldest one they've found, but there are probably plenty of others that are older down there. Leaving it alive wasn't going to teach anybody anything, whether if it lived a few more years or died wouldn't help really. And quite frankly clams don't make particularly good pets.
Discovering the brightest supernova or the oldest living animal have their merit, but really they're just interesting things that people found.
The oldest animal is important. There's a huge debate in medicine about whether ageing is a disease process or a biological inevitability for animals. Finding really old animals supports the 'disease' argument, since the evidence is increasing those clams at least don't seem to age.
You could argue that this is a real scientific advance, whereas others like the photon storage you cite are just a technological advances of no real scientific merit.
The "sex offender" registry hasn't prevented one crime against children,
How can you possibly know this? (I'm not disagreeing with you, I think you might even be right, I'm just curious about the method used to make such an assertion.)
As an aside, you shouldn't confuse 'standard of living' with 'quality of life'. Standard of livng is about how much you have, basically your wealth and your leisure, although I don't know a lot about it. Quality of life I do know about, and is defined as (by the WHO)
'an individual's perceptions of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live, and in relation to their goals, expectations and standards'
This doesn't have much to do with absolute measures of wealth. Its more about how you see the world and your situation within it. It's possible to have a very high quality of life but a very low standard of living, as many people in developing countries do (sorry I hate that term but I can't find a better one), and vice versa as many people do in the West.
Whether we should be aiming to improve our quality of life, our standard of living, or our happiness (which is something else altogether) is debatable.
Slashdot Mirror
Only the second part of your statement is true, or you're using two different senses of the word 'because'. The significance of an article is a criterion (though not the only one) for it's publication, and so if an article has been published then I can assume that a couple of people somewhere decided that it was significant enough. That's not circular (compare it with 'only birds have feathers' => 'if it has feathers then it's a bird') , and I still have to read the thing myself to make sure. Peer review is really just a filter for academic work that stops the absolute rubbish from being printed. Also, the effect more often than not is to send an article back to the authors, with insights and comments from experts in the field so that the author can rethink and write a better article.
Maybe because it would not have survived the peer-review process. None of those 'facts' are true. Most journals now peer-review and publish within six months (electronically at least, print may take a year) , often much sooner. All journals have a 'rapid review' process for articles that are felt to be urgent. The peer review process does have an appeals system, authors can argue, editors can weigh up opinions, and in the ultimate form of appeal, authors can send work to a different journal.
Many journals now publish the reviewers comments, and reviewers for many journals are no longer anonymous.
The peer-review process is important to prevent the spread of the kind of mis-information exemplified by the above quote.
Perhaps the peer review system has issues with self critique.You obviously didn't look very hard. The peer-review process is heavily self critical. Do a Google Scholar search on 'peer review'. There's lots of critical articles published in all kinds of medical and social science journals.
Of course not! They are exactly right so long as the review exists, they know to look for it, they are able to judge it's quality and they understand its significance compared to the anecdotal evidence that might shout louder and come up higher on their Google search. Teaching the review process seems to me a good way to impart that knowledge.
Also I'm a medic so obviously I know more about that but IMO the systematic review process in some form is essential if you want to make an objective assessment of any body of evidence.
You're wrong about that. The academic indexes are good enough that you can be certain enough not to have missed anything important. If somebody has done some significant (yes even Indian students), then they will have sent it to a peer reviewed journal, and that journal will be indexed. I'm not saying it's easy, and it can take months to do right. I know the model for publication in Computer Science is different to all other academic subjects so maybe it wouldn't work there, I don't really know.
There are areas where you can get a reasonable overview -- namely those areas where we know next to nothing or that interest nobody (or both!), but that is by nessecity niche.Well obviously. You only need to do this where there is a significant conflict of evidence and opinion (so you can identify where the conflicts arise), or where there isn't much evidence and it's never been collated. Otherwise Googling will work just fine.
Of course you can't review 'computer science' or 'medicine'. You have to be very specific about the question you are trying to answer. For example, you might look for information on the pattern of occurrence of a particular disease, or the effect of a particular social intervention on crime rates, or the most efficient implemenation of some algorithm. You'd maybe have to read the titles of 10000 articles, the abstracts of 1000, and the text of a hundred just to get to the four or five that will provide the important information.
An good exercise is a systematic literature review. You have to make sure that you don't just find some information about the topic you are interested in, but you find all of the available information, then you must critically assess each piece of literature and synthesise them properly. Each stage of the process must be justified and repeatable (so no Googling)
I'm in the middle of one of these and its really shown up my impatience to get answers. In my opinion something like this should be a part of the school curriculum, or at least a part of undergradute courses.
Phantom limb syndrome would be a pretty good reason. But then I don't know how bad the existing condition is. I recall a story of a woman who deliberately cut off her own legs because of a strange mental illness, 'body integrity identity disorder' it was called (thanks, Google!).
Are you confusing value with cost? Otherwise I don't see how you can place relative values (that is a dollar value on the benefit) on those two scenarios. Unless I'm missing something.
The rest of your comment was interesting.
Only if the results were donated to science.
The problem is that economics provides no real way to quantify the relative benefits of either space exploration or curing childhood leukemia, apart from the obvious jobs created, non-stick pans, boring etc. How do you economically measure the magnificence of space travel or the fulfillment of human ambition? Can you put a value on knowing how the Earth looks from space?
By the way I am a medical researcher, and although I think my work is valuable, I often wish my job was more about achieving something positive for mankind, rather than just preventing bad things from happening. I also sometimes am involved in health economic assessments, and to see a year of healthy life expressed in its worth in $$ is also quite depressing.
You're right. We shouldn't have to justify our ambitions economically, it's such a depressing way to see the world. Lets just do something because its awesome.
We should be capable of deciding what are the goals for mankind, especially those we cannot realise as individuals. I suppose the economic benefits help to sugar the pill for those who are not inspired by exploration and understanding of the universe.
Not at all. I've just set up direct debits to pay my bills just by sending my bank account number to the electricity company. They do the rest. Presumably they just take my word for it that it's my money, and then the bank sets up the debit without asking any questions.
Oh actually I think there was a 'this is not a fraud' tickybox.
'16. Do not follow this recommendation'.
I think in the UK right now that'd get you some kind of public service medal.
You've hit exactly on the real problem. I'm a sort of hobbyist web developer with no real training. I can hack together websites using ASP.Net and SQL server that work (that is do what they're supposed to do), but I have no idea how write secure websites. I don't even understand the sorts of attacks I should be expecting. Furthermore, the 'my first website' books I learnt from don't really cover this sort of stuff except in passing, and learning about security is frankly boring.
Sadly I don't have a solution, and I don't think there is one. Thinking along a public health analogy, advocating 'safe web programming' is difficult because its far less fun, and advocating abstainance for those who aren't qualified isn't going to work because, well you know what kids are like. Enforcing a ban is culturally unacceptable and impossible in any case.
It's easy to get the idea that athletes are stupid.
People are usually well known because they are either smart, athletic or pretty (or I suppose exceptional in some other way). Then, out of the people who are well known, athletes and blondes will be less smart, and when they speak publically can come across quite badly (although probably no worse than you or I would).
Similarly, if universities award scholorships on the basis of brains or athletic ability, the athletes at the university will be among the less academically successful, creating a perception among the rest of the studentry that athletes are stupid.
Well that's partly right, but that's assuming that we can control our environment. Our man-made environment does harm us in ways we can't seem to do a lot about. Think about the high availability of high energy foods leading to disease, inactivity and pollution, a high rate and fast transmission of infectious diseases. None of these things will change soon. We might start to lose the genes that evolved to store energy in places with
We are sexually attracted to people who look to be thriving (health and wealth, confidence etc) the best in the environment we find ourselves in. In this way we continue to evolve to fit our admittedly man made surroundings. For example we might start to lose the genes that evolved to store energy in places with unreliable food supplies, that in the modern world lead to vascular disease and early death.
I get it! Okay how's this..
"You call that comment a pointless refutation that has no actual substance? Hardly. Hell, give me a scientific breakthrough and an ignorant bastard and I'll come up with a better pointless refutation that has no actual substance."
Do I win £5?
Really? I'll have a piece of that. Shall we say, evens?
Whereas this might be the first glow in the dark cat (for which I can think of many, many uses), there have been glow in the dark mice for ages (although now I wonder for how much longer). Also many animal models for human genetic diseases already exist, including fruitfly with early onset Alzheimer's disease, and mice with Down syndrome. I'm sure there are tons more.
I agree with this, and the IT people at the university department where I work do treat the relationship like a client based practice, in that they listen to what we need and then do their best to achieve it. Although it's difficult for an IT guy to get to know everybody he is responsible for, the people who look after my department do pretty well, and know how to talk to each of us. It has been proposed that the entire university should have a centralised IT support service. I really hope this doesn't happen.
Of course you do, I was trolling. But I think the point is valid. Important and awesome as these technological advances are, they don't constitute a contribution to knowledge. If you use the photon thingy to actually discover something, then that's science. Otherwise you've just solved an engineering problem.
I worked in a computational biology lab once. A big argument at the time concerned whether or not students could be awarded a PhD if all they did was software engineering for scientific applications. I think it was decided that it could be the bulk of their work, but only if an application was then made to a dataset that provided a genuine biological insight. I'm not saying it was right or wrong, but it's an important issue.
Its kind of a shame, yes, but not that much if you think about it. This is the oldest one they've found, but there are probably plenty of others that are older down there. Leaving it alive wasn't going to teach anybody anything, whether if it lived a few more years or died wouldn't help really. And quite frankly clams don't make particularly good pets.
The oldest animal is important. There's a huge debate in medicine about whether ageing is a disease process or a biological inevitability for animals. Finding really old animals supports the 'disease' argument, since the evidence is increasing those clams at least don't seem to age.
You could argue that this is a real scientific advance, whereas others like the photon storage you cite are just a technological advances of no real scientific merit.
How can you possibly know this? (I'm not disagreeing with you, I think you might even be right, I'm just curious about the method used to make such an assertion.)
As an aside, you shouldn't confuse 'standard of living' with 'quality of life'. Standard of livng is about how much you have, basically your wealth and your leisure, although I don't know a lot about it. Quality of life I do know about, and is defined as (by the WHO)
'an individual's perceptions of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live, and in relation to their goals, expectations and standards'This doesn't have much to do with absolute measures of wealth. Its more about how you see the world and your situation within it. It's possible to have a very high quality of life but a very low standard of living, as many people in developing countries do (sorry I hate that term but I can't find a better one), and vice versa as many people do in the West.
Whether we should be aiming to improve our quality of life, our standard of living, or our happiness (which is something else altogether) is debatable.