Alex Weber @weberam2@qoto.org

🔥 Next week we'll be presenting and discussing the Open Science Network initiative at #fediforum alongside a growing network of academics and open science activists 🧬

Together, we'll explore how we can build open and federated digital spaces that are co-designed and governed by scientific communities.

Join us to explore how we can create digital spaces that foster collaboration, ensure data ownership, and push the boundaries of open science practices in federated environments.

@open_science

Good opinion piece in Nature today emphasising the value of slow science, and taking the time to think deeply. I think it holds merit, but only if we all jump off the hamster wheel together.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02540-0

@alexh

Too many people review previous work as if they are complete instead of data points. For that matter, too many people think of their own scientific results as if they are the only experiment evah and complete answers to questions.

In my lab, we never "show", nor do we ever say someone else "showed". We say we "found", and that others "found"... they found that in that experiment, under these conditions, on that day, something happened.

The "replication crisis" mostly (mostly) disappears once you move away from "paper as discovery" to "paper as one small piece of a large puzzle."

IMO, there is no such thing as a perfect study design. It is really rare that a study design can actually answer a question. Instead, those questions get answered by integrating and triangulating over many studies.

Anna's Archive continues to be doing amazing work. Pirate archives are becoming increasingly more important as we realize that copyright makes it impossible to legally archive humanity's knowledge in a redundant and safe way.

If you have some extra storage space lying around, consider seeding a few of the torrents here to help preserve humanity's books, scientific papers, magazines, comics and more.

https://annas-archive.org/blog/critical-window.html

#archivists #AnnasArchive #books

"Notes on Taylor and Maclaurin series", by Eli Bendersky.
https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2024/notes-on-taylor-and-maclaurin-series/

Beautifully and clearly explained.
#math

Latest data confirm abysmal track record of so-called "transformative agreements":
"39 titles (4%) had flipped to full #openaccess "
"552 titles (56%) failed to meet their #OA growth targets "

https://www.coalition-s.org/blog/transformative-journals-analysis-from-the-2023-reports/

Everybody should follow PlanS's example and stop these agreements immediately!

One particularly cool discovery from the new Harvard-Google brain images:

Some brain cells are arranged in mirror-image pairs, for reasons not yet well understood.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4858 #science #brain #mind #neuroscience #tech

Behold "Pnogstrom", a fun and wild new updating of Pong

mesmerizing

I thought I'd play it for a few minutes, didn't stop for half an hour

Item #1 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter: https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-21-wooden-satellites-post-binary-fonts/

Follow the whole thread of @brembs here: https://mastodon.social/@brembs/112586300096993602 Publishing fake science in "prestigious" journals is far more dangerous than uploading it to public repositories or academia.edu and the like, because of the halo effect associated with the (bad) habit of linking these journals with science rather than with the so-called "prestige", which is just reputation (earned, unearned, or just imposed by bureaucratic research evaluation). #OpenScience

Fact check gem of the day: On Karl Popper's contribution to neurotransmission

In the early 1950s, neuroscientists were arguing about whether neurons communicate with one another via electricity (sparks) or chemical neurotransmissions (soups). It was known as "The War of the Soups and the Sparks" (Big reveal: It's mostly soups).

The experiment that put the debate to rest (at least for the spinal cord) was performed in 1950 by John Eccles and colleagues. In that experiment, they demonstrated that their own hypothesis (sparks) was wrong.

What inspired them to do a "disproving" experiment as opposed to the type that would gather support for their favorite theory? In 1944, Eccles met Karl Popper, and they began corresponding. Per one historian,

"The association with Popper made Eccles reformulate his experimental questions in accord with Popper’s philosophy that apparent ‘‘authentication” is no proof at all. It is only the clear-cut ‘‘falsification” of a theory that carried intellectual weight."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18617413/

The five Fs of preprinting 💡

We’re giving you the rundown on preprints, how they benefit you and your research community, and bonus tools to help you keep up with the preprint literature.
https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/85d36b45?utm_source=mastofdon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

Two new biology themed wood puzzles from Nervous System! They feature artwork by scientist/artist David S. Goodsell, whose intricate watercolor paintings explore the molecular landscapes of cells https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/blog/?p=9537

Sorry to see that Daniel Dennett has died. I was just thinking about him the other day and how he was the only member of that “new atheist” group to not turn out to be a total jerk. I knew him from way before that as I was doing a lot of reading in philosophy of mind in my early undergrad days in the ‘80s. I think I read Brainstorms right after G.E.B.

https://dailynous.com/2024/04/19/daniel-dennett-death-1942-2024/

Incredibly sad to hear of Daniel Dennett's passing. He was an astonishing thinker whose groundbreaking ideas guided me (and numerous others) towards a much more scientific and sane world.

Thank you for your intuition pumps, memes, unwavering pursuit of truth, and service to human thinking in general.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html

A while back, I heard a comedian describe an anecdote where they asked their possibly autistic friend if they were "on the spectrum", and the friend responded "we're all on the spectrum - that's why it's a spectrum". The punchline being something like "it was completely accurate but also the most on-the-spectrum answer someone could give".

I like the idea of it and have trouble finding a more accurate or illustrative example. Is it problematic when delivered with care?