Getting rid of the GRE
An investigation by Science has found that, today, just 3% of “PhD programs in eight disciplines at 50 top-ranked US universities” require applicants’ GRE scores, “compared with 84% four years ago”. T…
impact factor
8 posts
Defending philosophy of science
From Carl Bergstrom's Twitter thread about a new book called How Irrationality Created Modern Science, by Michael Strevens: The Iron Rule from the book is, in Bergstrom's retelling, "n…
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 o…
To see faces where there are none
This week in "neither university press offices nor prestigious journals know what they're doing": a professor emeritus at Ohio University who claimed he had evidence of life on Mars, and…
The cycle
Is it just me or does everyone see a self-fulfilling prophecy here? https://twitter.com/nature/status/1192129029924634625 For a long time, and assisted ably by the ‘publish or perish’ paradigm, rese…
Why are the Nobel Prizes still relevant?
Note: A condensed version of this post has been published in The Wire. Around this time last week, the world had nine new Nobel Prize winners in the sciences (physics, chemistry and medicine), all bu…
The case for preprints
Daniel Mansur, the principal investigator of a lab at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina that studies how cells respond to viruses, had this to say about why preprints are useful in an intervi…
Priggish NEJM editorial on data-sharing misses the point it almost made
The editorial expresses fear that people who publish in the journal's pages could be wrong – cleanly forgetting that replication and revalidation are a big part of science.…