In all of FDA’s history, I am unable to find a single instance where a congressional committee investigated the failure of FDA to approve a new drug. But, the times when hearings have been held to criticize our approval of new drugs have been so frequent that we aren’t able to count them. … The message to FDA staff could not be clearer.
At the same time that the NSA is secretly and illegally obtaining information about Americans the FDA is making it illegal for Americans to obtain information about themselves.
2014-08-05: the FDA could help by eliminating its onerous rules for diseases with 60% mortality rates. Won’t happen of course, it’s easier to bury lots of innocents than to overcome cover-your-ass (pretty much the reason for the FDA to exist). Or as the onion put it, the Ebola Vaccine is at least 50 white people away. 2016-07-15: Fluoride still not available
American dentists first started using similar silver-based treatments in the early 1900s. The FDA is literally over 100 years behind the times.It seems that the future of dental treatment has been here all along but a combination of dentists wanting to be surgeons, lost knowledge, and FDA cost and delay prevented it from being distributed
Silver diamine fluoride been used for decades in Japan, but it’s been available in the United States, under the brand name Advantage Arrest, for just ~1 year. Toddlers in low-income families sometimes have to wait 1 year for fillings in an operating room. Transporting and treating frail patients, assuming they can afford to see a dentist, can be difficult. But now some patients can be quickly treated where they live. 2020-04-17: Nutrition overregulation
1 reason why food intended for restaurants is not reallocated to supermarkets: Nutrition labeling also frequently doesn’t comply with Agriculture Department and FDA guidelines for consumer sales
2020-12-05: This is nonsense. “Delay to allay” won’t convince anyone, and meanwhile people are dying.
Dr. Fauci said the politicization of the pandemic in his own country had led regulators to move a little more cautiously than the British, to avoid losing public support. There is no plausible reason why this basic analysis cannot be done in 24 hours. The FDA and external scientists have a simple task: confirm or reject the review already conducted by the trial’s independent data safety monitoring board before FDA submission.
Think of centers of expertise like the CDC or the IGM Economists Panel as giant systems for disentangling corruption and power. Their job is to produce 1 or 2 people who can get in front of the population and say something which has some resemblance to reality, even though the entire rest of the economy and body politic is trying to corrupt them. They…actually do sort of okay. Anthony Fauci is neither Attila the Hun nor Trofim Lysenko. He’s a kind of bumbling careerist with a decent understanding of epidemiology and a heart that’s more or less in the right place. The whole scientific-technocratic complex is a machine which takes Moloch as input and manages – after spending billions of $ and the careers of 1000s of hard-working public servants – to produce Anthony Fauci as output. This should be astonishing, and we are insufficiently grateful.
2021-02-15: Why isn’t there a reciprocal approval with the EU?
I’ve long argued that if a drug or medical device is approved in another country with a Stringent Regulatory Authority it ought to be approved in the United States. But, of course, the argument is even stronger in the other direction. Drugs and devices approved in the United States ought to be approved elsewhere. Indeed, this is how much of the world actually works because most countries do not have capability to evaluate drugs and devices the way the FDA or the EMA does. Although it’s the way the world works, few will admit it because that would violate pretensions of regulatory nationalism. Moreover, keeping up with pretenses means transaction costs and unnecessary delays. Regulatory nationalism has added months to vaccine delivery and now threatens to put to waste millions of stockpiled doses.
2021-03-02: millions of people die of heart disease every year. there has been no progress in artificial hearts in 50 years due to.. wait for it.. FDA:
The FDA gave Abiomed permission to implant 60 more devices, but it was clear that the heart would need to be updated, and then approved all over again—a lengthy process for which no one had the fortitude. “Abiomed threw in the towel. They were, like, ‘This is too hard!’ ”
Grocery store workers are working, meat packers are working, hell bars and restaurants are open in many parts of the country but FDA inspectors aren’t inspecting. It boggles the mind.
2021-04-14: the FDA is completely insane and is halting the distribution for the J&J vaccine due to very rare side effects. as before, there’s no consequences for acts of omission vs acts of commission. they’re much more worried about their “reputation” than actually saving lives, just like ethicists have been in this crisis. a disgrace.
As the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pauses in the United States, Philip Bump for The Washington Post offers a quick visualization that shows 100 vaccinations per second. A red one appears if there’s a side effect. But because the side effect is rare, currently at 1 in 1.1M, the red dot on the visualization likely never appears as you watch. The blue dots are potential lives saved if the J&J vaccine continues.
Many people have an initial reaction that invitro meat would be yucky and they do not want it. However, people already eat meat slurry in fairly large quantities.
Yuck – invitro meat. But deep fry it and call them improved McNuggets and they eat billions.
It looks more like squid than steak and because it lacks the fat and protein found in real cattle, does not taste like traditional beef. So why would anyone eat meat grown in a lab? In-vitro meat may still be years away from our supermarkets, but they will be able to grow a hamburger by the end of this year.
2015-01-01: Overblown title, but still interesting:
Why turn plant proteins into burgers? Why not just eat them as peas? Culture is a lump of flesh wrapped in dough. If you want to save the world, you’d better make it convenient. Sometime in the next 10 years, Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods or another rival will perfect vegetarian beef, chicken, and pork that is tastier, healthier, and cheaper than the fast-food versions of the real thing. Overnight, meat will become the coal of 2025—dirty, uncompetitive, outcast.
The Netherlands Nutrition Center is recommending people eat just 2 servings of meat a week, setting an explicit limit on meat consumption for the first time. The recommendations come 5 years after a government panel weighed the ecological impact of the average Dutch person’s diet, concluding last year that eating less meat is better for human and environmental health.
Most people have a vague feeling that factory farms aren’t quite ethical. But few people are willing to give up meat so such feelings are suppressed because acknowledging them would only make one feel guilty not just. Once the costs of giving up meat fall, however, vegetarianism will spread like a prairie wildfire changing eating habits, the use of farmland, and the science and economics of climate change.
as usual, don’t read the dumb comments. 2017-09-04: Memphis Meats
Memphis Meats is announcing their Series A syndicate today, and it is a fascinating group of people coming together to help the world modernize the manufacturing of meat by removing animals from the process. It is identical to the meat we eat, down to the cellular level; it’s just the manufacturing method that radically changes. For full disclosure, DFJ led the $17M Series A, and I’ll be joining the board. It has been hard to contain my excitement as I have been looking for a meat solution for 5 years now. Since signing the term sheet, I have been wearing their t-shirt for a month now, and it is quite an evangelical conversation starter, generating keen interest the likes of which I have rarely seen before (e.g., Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Kimbal Musk joined us). We also got leading research institutions and some of the largest meat industry corporations to join the syndicate.
By January 2016 they had grown up enough for a taste test. At a cost of $1200, it was by far the most expensive meatball either man had ever eaten. The process is now orders of magnitudes more efficient. But there’s still more work to do. Clearing the cost hurdle will be key to cultured meat catching on. Consumers aren’t going to spring for a bioreactor burger if the farm-raised or grass-grazed version is 1000s of times less expensive. Valeti is feeling the pressure. “We need to get this expansion done in a timely fashion so it can actually make an impact while we still have a window. There’s definitely a race on.”
The beef industry has started to quiver, and rightfully so: Flush with untold capital, Impossible Foods has apparently decided to spend some of it on a Washington lobbyist. Back in 2016, people from Memphis Meats, Just (formerly Hampton Creek), and other “clean meat” start-ups banded together to form the Good Food Institute.
Burger King has announced that it is introducing a vegetarian Whopper on its menu. Burger King will test the new meatless option at 59 restaurants in the St. Louis area. If it proves popular, the “Impossible Whopper” will become available in all 7200 United States Burger King branches. Burger King is the latest fast food chain to add a vegetarian burger, following in the footsteps of Carl’s Jr. restaurants that added a vegetarian burger using Beyond Meat, in January and the “Impossible Slider” added by White Castle last year.
Rick Wiles, host of TruNews, reveals that meatless burgers are “plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products, is part of a satanic plot to alter human DNA so that people can no longer worship God.”
2019-09-30: Longer term, much more will be replaced:
Precision biology will displace, replace or transform agriculture by using designed microorganisms and adapting beer industry fermentation processes to produce food that is identical to milk and meat but without using animals. The first product we are seeing with mass impact is the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat products that are impacting ground meat.
Overall, the case for reduced meat consumption is strong. Vegetarianism is cheaper, better for your health (if you can afford a diverse diet and are not an infant), and is less impactful for the environment. It also has a significant moral cost in terms of animal suffering.
2020-01-07: Impossible Pork targeting the chinese market.
that tester agreed that the texture was off but the flavor was there. Lopatto tried a bánh mi sandwich, char siu buns, dan dan noodles, katsu, and sweet, sour, and numbing meatballs all made with Impossible Pork.
There’s no time to waste in pushing forward solutions for what is likely the underlying cause of this pandemic, and what has been at the root of dozens of prior zoonotic events. We can’t afford not to have the same level of urgency in directing funding, effort, and talent into accelerating the development and deployment of safer, modern meat production methods. It is past time to move away from animal-derived meat altogether.
if every burger eaten in the USA were replaced with an Impossible burger, that would require 90% less land and water while reducing GHG emissions by 90%.
My first taste of their cultivated meat, duck in this case. It was delicious and indistinguishable from duck, because it was duck. It just did not quack like a duck. Future generations will marvel that we thought we had to grow and slaughter a whole animal to get all the yummy meat that we might like to eat.
Some people do care about eating something that tastes exactly like chicken, so I took Beyond Chicken tenders to the toughest food critic I know: my 87-year-old grandmother. She’s been cooking incredible chicken dishes for decades, and I wanted to see if she’d sniff out the difference if I didn’t tell her that what she was being served was not real chicken. After taking a few bites, she said it tasted “very good.” Then I revealed to her that this was not real chicken; it was made from plants. She stared at me for 1 second. Then she said, “I don’t mind, as long as it tastes like chicken. And it does! It’s a bit heavier, but if you hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have noticed.”
But plant-based companies are not yet able to mimic chicken in all its forms. Making a breaded tender is one thing — the breading can act as camouflage. Creating a convincing chicken breast is a whole other dream, and Brown suggested we shouldn’t expect it to come true anytime soon.
2023-03-23: In vitro meat has tons of challenges, the plant alternatives are doing much better.
But while the industry releases increasingly optimistic projections, well-informed commentators remain skeptical. It’s still unclear if cultivated meat can be made affordable or at large-enough scale to compete with conventional animal products. As we approach the decade anniversary of Mark Post’s first burger, many are confused as to when, if ever, cultivated meat will be on their plates.
After spending a few years inside the industry, I’ve come to believe that the true prognosis for cultivated meat is somewhere in the middle, between that exuberant initial hopefulness and more recent cynicism. I agree with the pessimistic commentators that “The Dream” of cultivated meat — full bio-replicas, cost competitive, at scale — is not feasible in the short term. However, comparison to other technologies like solar energy suggests that cultivated meat may take decades and 100s of billions of dollars in investment — but is ultimately possible. If we accept longer time scales, many of the seemingly intractable problems become tractable. In the meantime, companies can justify large venture capital investments by pursuing cheaper products that combine cultivated and plant-based components.
Because stupid people demonize managed care, and the standardization benefits can thus not be reaped across the board. 2015-07-11: Coding is crazy.
I was not able to verify the existence of an ICD-10 code for falling from a non-military spacecraft, but there certainly is an ICD-10 code for being burned due to water-skis on fire
2015-07-23: Until this is fixed, we can’t have nice things. The recent progress with open access journals is a tiny first step, but it’s still not common to attach your raw data to your study for easy replication, or to to publish negative results.
So some of the results of this individual trial shifted, under closer examination, and that is definitely problematic. But fundamentally there is only one thing different about this deworming trial and the rest of social science and medicine: Miguel and Kremer had the decency, generosity, strength of character, and intellectual confidence to let someone else peer under the bonnet.
This kind of statistical replication is almost vanishingly rare. A recent study set out to find all well-documented cases in which the raw data from a randomized trial had been reanalysed. It found just 37, out of many 1000s. What’s more, only 5 were conducted by entirely independent researchers, people not involved in the original trial.
2015-10-25: Epic is benefiting greatly from the lock-in it has created.
instead of ushering in a new age of secure and easily accessible medical files, Epic has helped create a fragmented system that leaves doctors unable to trade information across practices or hospitals. That hurts patients who can’t be assured that their records—drug allergies, test results, X-rays—will be available to the doctors who need to see them. This is especially important for patients with lengthy and complicated health histories. But it also means we’re all missing out on the kind of system-wide savings that President Barack Obama predicted nearly 7 years ago, when the federal government poured billions of $ into digitizing the country’s medical records.
2020-04-20: And then we have the usual problems with IRB / EMR
If you want to report the number of times a patient has cut her nails in the last week, you would need approval. And it’s not easy at all to search the EMR for any of this information. You’d have to hire someone specifically to look through it.
“Why are nearly all notes in Epic . . . basically useless to understand what’s happening to patient during hospital course?” Another doctor’s reply: “Because notes are used to bill, determine level of service, and document it rather than their intended purpose, which was to convey our observations, assessment, and plan. Our important work has been co-opted by billing.”
2020-04-22: The software is only designed for billing, not evidence.
Electronic health record software in the US is not set up to make clinical research faster and easier. We have billing claims as, absurdly, our only reliable and easily integratable national source of raw patient data. What we don’t have is anything useful to produce evidence-based medicine.
Is this loose, informal transmission of anecdotal findings—call it chatter, call it rumor—part of medicine? It isn’t what anyone is taught in medical school; it doesn’t fit in with the professional’s image as a purveyor of rigorously tested interventions. But continuous, iterative clinical knowledge—the kind that can be updated minute by minute—is invaluable during this tumult, when time is of the essence and there’s scant research to fall back on.
2023-07-30: Clinical trials keep getting more expensive due to regulatory capture, lack of competition, and luddite tendencies. Vial might do an end run around this if they don’t get stopped by the enemies of progress
Instead of dealing with the difficulty of collecting data on new medicines, both society and government sidestepped it by focusing on treatments for much rarer illnesses: relatively rare cancers, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis to name a few, not to mention very rare illnesses such as cystic fibrosis or paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria. The North Star for Vial is to drive a 10x improvement in both the speed and cost of clinical trials. This can sound hyperbolic, but it is likely not impossible, given the massive inflation of trial costs over the last 50 years. In the bull case for Vial, the development of TrialOS would enable companies to pursue 10x as many drug candidates in parallel. This would open the aperture for drug development, giving emerging companies more breathing room in pursuit of their first clinical success.
Vial has now had a front-row seat to 10s of trials. They’ve seen the product features that trial sponsors have adopted and shied away from. Their electronic tablets and eSource solutions have been welcomed with open arms. On the other hand, their remote data capture solutions—which could make the difference between a 2-3x cost reduction and a 10x cost reduction—have been less widely adopted so far.
What if they could aggressively dogfood the most cutting-edge features of their platform? This could further accelerate reductions in trial speed and costs and open the door to massive value capture. Taken individually, no part of their stack is groundbreaking. There is fierce competition to innovate within in silico drug discovery. Organoids are not new technology. Faster chemical synthesis won’t spark a revolution on its own. The fundamental insight is that integrating each part together will give Vial a chance to exploit their true advantage: faster and cheaper trial execution.
2023-07-31: HIPPA is one of the enemies of civilization.
The path forward is therefore clear. We should be doing more to get more data into the hands of more researchers. Unfortunately, we have laws and regulations surrounding privacy that make that extremely difficult. Reform in this area would do a great deal to advance progress in the fields of science, medicine, and health. Privacy concerns also stand in the way of attempts to make healthcare more affordable. The privacy advocates have 2 arguments:
Someone might make a profit while they’re curing disease
We shouldn’t even try to achieve any more medical progress until we achieve socialism
These objections are almost too silly to refute, but I’m including them because it’s useful to understand the irrational motivations of many privacy advocates.
DOT presented its renovation plan for the intersection of Ninth Ave. and 14th St. to Manhattan Community Board 4 on Wednesday evening. Ryan Russo, DOT’s Director for Street Management and Safety, explained that the agency is taking advantage of a scheduled repaving of Ninth Ave. in mid-July to respond to long-standing community request to remove the 2-block northbound contra-flow traffic lane from the avenue, which has been blamed for several pedestrian fatalities
the NYC DOT seems quite pragmatic, coming up with workable solutions in months rather than decades. 2008-07-31:
For Mr. Tsao, taking over a piece of the bridge for a dinner party, as he did Friday night and likes to do at least once each summer, is an act both political and personal, a conscious gesture of civic engagement and a way to lay claim to a terrific party space. He is captivated and inspired by the persona of the 19th-century flâneur “the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” Being a flâneur “is all about taking in the world we’ve been given; we want to embrace it and engage with it.”
more take back the streets stuff. 2011-01-06: nice! astor place is currently a downside of living in the east village. not much longer. 2013-10-09: janette is one of my heroines. she is responsible for a huge quality of life increase in nyc in the last 5 years. in this video she talks about how she made even that pimple on nyc, times square, bearable.
2020-04-30: Restaurant reopening could include seats on closed streets. Perhaps this will trigger a longer-term change in street usage, which would be a great thing. 2021-01-28:
The New York City Council voted Thursday to approve Intro. 1116-B, the legislation that will create 4000 new permits for street vendors in the city over the next 10 years.
This is a tiny step in the right direction. The future of much of NYC is in the street, we shouldn’t limit these permits at all. Let a million flowers bloom.
Certain types of news — for example dramatic disasters and terrorist actions — are massively over-reported, others — such as scientific progress and meaningful statistical surveys of the state of the world — massively under-reported.
2013-08-25: Media reporting 2021-02-22: Vaccine effectiveness is a great example of media innumeracy:
It is imperative to dispel any ambiguity about how vaccine efficacy shown in trials translates into protecting individuals and populations. The mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were shown to have 94–95% efficacy in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, calculated as 100 × (1 minus the attack rate with vaccine divided by the attack rate with placebo). It means that in a population such as the one enrolled in the trials, with a cumulated COVID-19 attack rate over a period of 3 months of ~1% without a vaccine, we would expect 0.05% of vaccinated people would get diseased.
Tiles to reduce air pollution in a city, respiratory oases. I love it when architecture solves problems instead of creating them (ie suburbia):
The tiles are coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2), a pollution-fighting technology that is activated by ambient daylight. TiO2 is a photo-catalyst already known for its self-cleaning and germicidal qualities; it requires only small amounts of naturally occurring UV light and humidity to effectively reduce air pollutants into harmless amounts of carbon dioxide and water. When positioned near pollution sources, the tiles neutralize NOx and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) directly where they are generated. They transform previously inert urban surfaces into active surfaces, re-appropriate polluted spaces for safer pedestrian use, and invert problem spaces – dark, polluted, uninhabitable – to benevolent spaces that benefit communities.
PigeonBlog enlists homing pigeons to participate in a grassroots scientific data gathering initiative designed to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public. Pigeons are equipped with custom-built miniature air pollution sensing devices enabled to send the collected localized information to an online server without delay. Pollution levels are visualized and plotted in real-time over Google’s mapping environment, thus allowing immediate access to the collected information to anyone with connection to the Internet.
Air pollution has decreased even though population and the number of cars on the roads have increased. The shift is the result of regulations, technology improvements and economic change. New York City has seen a 32% decrease in nitrogen dioxide between the 2005-2007 and 2009-2011 periods.
2014-11-26: Pollution can be cleaned up quickly. This should make China’s pledge to improve air quality / reduce greenhouse gases quite feasible.
In 2002, South Korea was ranked 120th for air quality, and 43rd in 2014
2015-09-23: VW 1M tons of pollution. It is time to get tough, and destroy VW.
Volkswagen’s intentional fraud resulted in an extra 1M metric tons of air pollution being spewed into the skies over America; if they’d extended the con to Europe (where there are far more diesels), it would have been orders of magnitude worse.
In regions that lean heavily on coal-fired power plants, plug-in cars can end up polluting more heavily at the smokestack than gasoline cars at their tailpipes. But as grids get greener, that’s becoming less true nationwide.
2017-06-17: Schlieren Imaging. This is what the world would look like if you could see invisible air currents, temperature gradients, and differences in pressure or composition of the air
2018-01-22: Far UVC disinfection. There’s part of the uv spectrum that kills viruses & bacteria, but does not damage skin.
If CO2 can affect sleep quality, that would explain how it could produce a whole-day effect. Strøm-Tejsen tests this on 16 subjects and finds that “objectively measured sleep quality and the perceived freshness of bedroom air improved significantly when the CO2 level was lower, as did next-day reported sleepiness and ability to concentrate and the subjects’ performance of a test of logical thinking.” Good things about this study: subjects were blinded to condition, the paper contains a pilot experiment and a main experiment which mostly replicate each other’s results. Bad things about this study: the experiments were about n = 15 each, the researchers didn’t correct for multiple comparisons, and they admit to manipulating the statistics surrounding their logical reasoning tests to get better results.
Ditching fossil fuels would pay for itself through clean air alone. Over the next 50 years, keeping to the 2°C pathway would prevent 4.5m premature deaths, 3.5m hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and 300m lost workdays in the US.
air filtration and UV disinfection can greatly reduce SARS-COV-II in hospital wards. The authors installed portable air filters with UV disinfection on 2 COVID hospital wards in the UK. The air was tested for viruses, bacteria and fungi before the filters were turned on, during the time the filters were on and then again after the filters were turned off. Airborne SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the ward on all 5 days before activation of air/UV filtration, but on 0 of the 5 days when the air/UV filter was operational; SARS-CoV-2 was again detected on 4 out of 5 days when the filter was off.
“Far-UVC rapidly reduces the amount of active microbes in the indoor air to almost 0, making indoor air essentially as safe as outdoor air” The lamps inactivated more than 98% of the airborne microbes in 5 minutes. The low level of viable microbes was maintained over time, even though microbes continued to be sprayed into the room. The efficacy of different approaches to reducing indoor virus levels is usually measured in terms of equivalent air changes per hour. In this study, far-UVC lamps produced the equivalent of 184 equivalent air exchanges per hour. This surpasses any other approach to disinfecting occupied indoor spaces, where 5-20 equivalent air changes per hour is the best that can be achieved practically.
2022-08-19: Startups are entering this space to bring the cost down.
Beam ($5000) is an LED-based, upper room disinfection device that uses 265-nanometer ultraviolet light to create a disinfection zone located above people in a room. Vive ($3000), meanwhile, uses a wavelength known as far-UVC at 222-nanometers to inactivate harmful microorganisms in the air and on surfaces, even while people are present. While the Beam works in large open spaces, like classrooms and office lobbies, the Vive can be installed in smaller spaces, such as conference rooms and bathrooms. “What we have come to realize is that there is not one-size, fits-all for infection protection. What Arc competes with is some form of chemical intervention. For Beam and Vive, it’s HVAC upgrades.”
2022-10-28: Without massive improvements to LEDs, far UVC is not practical due to cost. Unclear what the deal with these startups is but I suspect they don’t output enough power to be effective.
$2000 is a ballpark retail price for a lamp installed by specialists, and the lamps have an expected lifetime of 15 months if they run continuously. There’s hope that far-UV lamps based on LEDs will eventually provide cheaper and longer-lived alternatives to the gas lamps currently being used, but prototype LED far-UV lamps are currently restricted to impractically low levels of power.
China’s pollution levels in 2021 had fallen 42% from 2013. The improvement means the average Chinese citizen’s lifespan is now 2.2 years longer. Chinese cities used to dominate global rankings of the world’s worst air quality; while some are still on those lists, in many cases they have been overtaken by cities in South Asia and the Middle East. In 2021, Beijing recorded its best monthly air quality since records began in 2013. There is still work to do as China remains the world’s 13th most polluted country. And Beijing’s particulate pollution – the tiny but highly dangerous pollutants that can evade the human body’s usual defenses – is still 40% higher than in the most polluted county in the United States.
Light in the 200-235 nm range, or far-UVC, is one of the most promising tools for dramatically reducing airborne transmission from day one of almost any pandemic caused by airborne pathogens. If adopted widely, it could also have a dramatic impact on seasonal flu, colds, and endemic COVID-19.
Unfortunately, progress on development and adoption has been much slower than one would have hoped. One bottleneck is the high cost and low efficiency of the only commercially available source at this wavelength range, 222 nm krypton chloride excimer lamps. For example, by our calculations, equipping a classroom with far-UVC would cost >$10k/classroom/year in lamps alone.
While directly supporting solid-state far-UVC R&D to accelerate availability is important, growing the far-UVC market in general and enabling greater private investment is even more critical.
It is time the academic review process is made more transparent. Bertrand Meyer on why reviews could learn from open source and weblogs. If most of your thoughts are in the public record, it affects your thought processes. For the better I think.
It is widely believed that anonymous refereeing helps fairness, by liberating reviewers from the fear that openly stated criticism might hurt their careers. In my experience, the effects of anonymity are worse than this hypothetical damage. Referees too often hide behind anonymity to turn in sloppy reviews; worse, some dismiss contributions unfairly to protect their own competing ideas or products. Even people who are not fundamentally dishonest will produce reviews of unsatisfactory quality out of negligence, laziness or lack of time because they know they can’t be challenged. Putting your name on an assessment forces you to do a decent job.
The day that you find a more interesting paper in Citeseer than in any IEEE or ACM e-journal, it’s the day you don’t look back. But what would happen next? What about the academic symbiosis with the peer review system? Citeseer uses a Google page-rank-like algorithm for ranking: which is analyzing the properties of the citation network topology to understand which papers are more influential than others. Just like Google does with hyperlinks for web pages, Citeseer does it for bibliographic citations: the result is that peer review is not done by a panel of experts, but by every researcher in the field!!
what strikes me is how much pomp, circumstance and apparatus academia requires in order to frame even a very small and simple point. References to everything in the literature ever said on any vaguely related topic, detailed comparisons of your work to whatever it is the average journal referee is likely to find important — blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…. A point that I would more naturally get across in 5 pages of clear and simple text winds up being a 30 page paper!
I’m writing some books describing the Novamente AI system — one of them, 600 pages of text, was just submitted to a publisher. The other 2, 300 and 200 pages respectively, should be submitted later this year. Writing these books took a really long time but they are only semi-technical books, and they don’t follow all the rules of academic writing — for instance, the whole 600 page book has a reference list no longer than I’ve seen on many 50-page academic papers, which is because I only referenced the works I actually used in writing the book, rather than every relevant book or paper ever written. I estimate that to turn these books into academic papers would require me to write 60 papers. To sculpt a paper out of text from the book would probably take me 2-7 days of writing work, depending on the particular case. So it would be at least 1 full year of work, probably 2 full years of work, to write publishable academic papers on the material in these books!
The lack of risk-taking is particularly evident in computer science:
Furthermore, if as a computer scientist you develop a new algorithm intended to solve real problems that you have identified as important for some purpose (say, AI), you will probably have trouble publishing this algorithm unless you spend time comparing it to other algorithms in terms of its performance on very easy “toy problems” that other researchers have used in their papers. Never mind if the performance of an algorithm on toy problems bears no resemblance to its performance on real problems. Solving a unique problem that no one has thought of before is much less impressive to academic referees than getting a 2% better solution to some standard “toy problem.” As a result, the whole computer science literature (and the academic AI literature in particular) is full of algorithms that are entirely useless except for their good performance on the simple “toy” test problems that are popular with journal referees.
His first scenario makes me wonder if amateur scientists could again make meaningful contributions to research, combined with a wiki-like process that (hopefully) would identify promising directions better than today’s peer reviews:
And so, those of us who want to advance knowledge rapidly are stuck in a bind. Either generate new knowledge quickly and don’t bother to ram it through the publication mill … or, generate new knowledge at the rate that’s acceptable in academia, and spend 50% of your time wording things politically and looking up references and doing comparative analyzes rather than doing truly productive creative research.
2006-12-31: The trend towards cross-disciplinary research is getting stronger. this is very good news for this dabbler 😉
There is an increasing coalescence of scientific disciplines in many areas. Thus the discovery of the structure of the genome not only required contributions from parts of biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and information technology, but in turn it led to further advances in biology, physics, chemistry, technology, medicine, ecology, and even ethics. And all this scientific advance is leading, as it should, to the hopeful betterment of the human condition (as had been also one of the platform promises of the Unity of Science movement, especially in its branch in the Vienna Circle).
Similar developments happen in the physical sciences—a coalescence of particle physics and large-scale astronomy, of physics and biology, and so forth. It is a telling and not merely parochial indicator that ~50% of my 45 colleagues in my Physics Department, owing to their widespread research interests, now have joint appointments with other departments at the University: with Molecular and Cellular Biology, with Mathematics, with Chemistry, with Applied Sciences and Engineering, with History of Science. Just now, a new building is being erected next to our Physics Department. It has the acronym LISE, which stands for the remarkable name, Laboratory of Integrated Science and Engineering. Although in industry, here and there, equivalent labs have existed for years, the most fervent follower of the Unity of Science movement would not have hoped then for such an indicator of the promise of interdisciplinarity. But as the new saying goes, most of the easy problems have been solved, and the hard ones need to be tackled by a consortium of different competences.
Delicious is the Rome, Jerusalem, and Paris of my existence as a researcher these days. It’s where I make my friends, how I get the news, and where I go to trade.
Our goal is to make collaboration and open source come to life in the field of clinical research. With our partners, we will identify specific projects where the sharing of information will lead to better, more accurate research.
2007-10-10: Publication bias: Only positive correlations are published. Time for a big expert system to feed the data from all experiments in. 2007-12-14: Creative Commons
Nature Magazine’s announced that it’s going to share all its human genome papers under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licenses.The genomes themselves are not copyrightable and go into a public database, but the papers — which are a vital part of the science — may now be freely copied by any non-commercial publisher.
2009-03-11: Strangest college courses. Can’t let Sarah find this list!
15. Arguing with Judge Judy: Popular ‘Logic’ on TV Judge Shows
14. Underwater Basket Weaving
13. Learning From YouTube
12. Philosophy and Star Trek
11. The Art of Walking
10. Daytime Serials: Family and Social Roles
9. Joy of Garbage
8. The Science of Superheroes
7. Zombies in Popular Media
6. The Science of Harry Potter
5. Cyberporn and Society
4. Simpsons and Philosophy
3. Far Side Entomology
2. Myth and Science Fiction: Star Wars, The Matrix, and Lord of the Rings
1. The Strategy of StarCraft
2009-03-12: Subsidizing intellectually challenged people to go to college just exacerbates the glut of useless degrees.
Scholars in their 60s are not producing path-breaking new research, but they are the people that tenure protects. Scholars in their 20s have no academic freedom at all.
2011-10-28: Makes the argument that #ows is people with useless degrees and a lot of student loan debt. the useless degree bubble is definitely one to pop.
But the lower tier of the New Class — the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies — with or without the benefit of law school — has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program — John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”
Even more frightening is the young woman who graduated from UC Berkeley, wanting to work in “sustainable conservation.” She is now raising chickens at home, dying wool and knitting knick-knacks to sell at craft fairs. Her husband has been studying criminal justice and EMT — i.e., preparing to work for government in some of California’s hitherto most lucrative positions — but as those work possibilities have dried up, he is hedging with a (sensible) apprenticeship as an electrician. These young people are looking at serious downward mobility, in income as well as status. The prospects of the lower tier New Class semi-professionals are dissolving at an alarming rate. Student loan debt is a large part of its problems, but that’s essentially a cost question accompanying a loss of demand for these professionals’ services.
2013-04-12: You can observe the useless degrees epidemic every day in Williamsburg.
At present, high % of high school graduates are continuing to enroll in college, often taking on punishing levels of debt in the process. As nearly any recent college graduate knows, many of these people are ending up working in lower wage service jobs (Baristas for example). I think it is entirely possible that future high school graduates will begin to look at these outcomes begin shying away from college.
2014-02-09: Everyone going to college is completely wrong.
Student population: now in decline; Admissions: harder & harder to make targets; Finance: banks not willing to take on more student loans; Research: shift from tenure to adjuncts.
I don’t think MOOCs are the solution. The premise that “everyone” should have a university education is wrong, and deprives people of quality apprenticeships.
On top of that, there are massive problems with science itself. Academic literature is a relic of the era of typesetting, modeled on static, irrevocable, publication. A dependency graph would tell us, at a click, which of the pillars of scientific theory are truly load-bearing. Revision control (git anyone?) would allow for a much more mature way to incorporate improvements from anyone. 2014-06-12: From upworthy university:
You NEED to see this hot model (NSFW) of ethnic politics and foreign policy These squirrels were forced to migrate south because of the Ice Age. What happened next WILL SHOCK YOU
2014-07-01: Amusing given how many overeducated people with useless degrees already work at Starbucks. I don’t think more degrees is the answer.
Starbucks will provide a free online college education to 1000s of its workers, without requiring that they remain with the company
published p-values cluster suspiciously around this 0.05 level, suggesting that some degree of p-hacking is going on. This is also often described as torturing the data until it confesses
Nature has decided to add an option for double-blind peer review – papers would be sent to the referees without author names or institutional affiliation on them. papers from Big Names won’t bother, because they have more to lose by being covered up. So the double-blinded papers might end up disproportionately from smaller groups who are trying to even the playing field, and it risks becoming a negative signal. It might be better if Nature were to take the plunge and blind everything.
2015-05-08: Or you could have saved yourself 250k and gotten a useful education right from the start.
In a Boston basement that houses a new kind of vocational training school, Katy Feng is working harder than she ever did at Dartmouth College. The 22-year-old graduated last year with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and studio art that cost more than $250K. She sent out 10s of résumés looking for a full-time job in graphic design but wound up working a contract gig for a Boston clothing store. “I thought, they’ll see Dartmouth, and they’ll hire me. That’s not really how it works, I found.” She figures programming is the best way to get the job she wants. Hence the basement, where she’s paying $11500 for a 3-month crash course in coding.
Actually, no, let’s not do that, and just let people hold basic jobs even if they don’t cough up $100K from somewhere to get a degree in Medieval History? Sanders’s plan would subsidize the continuation of a useless tradition that has turned into a speculation bubble, prevent the bubble from ever popping, and disincentivize people from figuring out a way to route around the problem
2015-06-08: Scientific publishing is stuck in the 18th century.
to a great extent the internet is used as a PDF delivery device by many publishers, and the PDF is an electronic form of the classic paper journal article, whose basic outlines were established in the 17th and 18th centuries. In other words, in a qualitative sense we’re not that much beyond the Age of Newton and the heyday of the Royal Society. Scientific publishing today is analogous to “steampunk.” An anachronistic mix of elements somehow persisting deep into the 21st century. Its real purpose is to turn the norms of the past into cold hard cash for large corporations.
Our research suggests that open access policies have a tremendous impact on the diffusion of science to the broader general public through an intermediary like Wikipedia
Principal Deputy Manager of the Subcommittee for Athletic Communications
Assistant Vice Dean of the Committee on Neighborhood Compliance
Lead Associate Provost for the Office of Dining Compliance
2016-07-17: This Open Science Framework is excellent, starts peer review during the experiment design phase when it’s still cheap to make corrections, rather than when it’s all done. 2017-02-01: Scientific fraud is rampant
Hartgerink is 1 of only a handful of researchers in the world who work full-time on the problem of scientific fraud – and he is perfectly happy to upset his peers. “The scientific system as we know it is pretty screwed up. I’ve known for years that I want to help improve it. Statcheck is a good example of what is now possible”. The top priority is something much more grave than correcting simple statistical miscalculations. He is now proposing to deploy a similar program that will uncover fake or manipulated results – which he believes are far more prevalent than most scientists would like to admit.
2017-04-15: I wonder how many people ended up graduating with their head trauma degrees?
It was a bold new idea: an all-sports college, classes be damned. But for the athletes at Forest Trail Sports University who faced hunger, sickness and worse, it turned into a nightmare.
Scientific revolutions occur on all scales, but here let’s talk about some of the biggies:
1850-1950: Darwinian revolution in biology, changed how we think about human life and its place in the world.
1890-1930: Relativity and quantum revolutions in physics, changed how we think about the universe.
2000-2020: Replication revolution in experimental science, changed our understanding of how we learn about the world.
We are in the middle of a scientific revolution involving statistics and replication in many areas of science, moving from an old paradigm in which important discoveries are a regular, expected product of statistically-significant p-values obtained from routine data collection and analysis, to a new paradigm of . . . weeelll, I’m not quite sure what the new paradigm is.
Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”
But the scientific journal as we know it was actually born because of popular demand for information during a pandemic.
In the early 1820s, a smallpox outbreak struck Paris and other French cities. A new vaccine was in existence at the time, but reports varied about how effective it was. A powerful medical institution in Paris, the Académie de Médecine, gathered its members to discuss what advice it should issue to the nation. Historically, such meetings were held privately, but the French Revolution had ushered in a new era of government accountability, and journalists were allowed to attend. The scientific debate they relayed upset some members of the Académie, which had hoped to make a clear, unified statement. In response, the Académie sought to regain control of its message by publishing its own weekly accounts of its discussions, which evolved into the academic journals we know today.
The massive effort to develop vaccines for COVID-19 will boost and accelerate the development of cancer vaccines. Streamlined regulatory approvals will speed up the approval of all new medical treatments. Elon Musk was successfully executing a transformation to fully reusable rockets, mass-produced satellites, electric cars, electric trucks, and self-driving vehicles. Elon Musk will continue to execute and win.
In just 3 months, 1 British research team identified the first life-saving drug of the pandemic (and helped cancel hydroxychloroquine). The Recovery trial has an adaptive design, built to evaluate 6 different drugs at once, with methods and goals announced in advance.
Science funding mechanisms are too slow in normal times and may be much too slow during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fast Grants are an effort to correct this. If you are a scientist at an academic institution currently working on a COVID-19 related project and in need of funding, we invite you to apply for a Fast Grant. Fast Grants are $10k to $500k and decisions are made in under 14 days. If we approve the grant, you’ll receive payment as quickly as your university can receive it.
2021-06-15: They were a big success, here’s what they learned:
The first round of grants were given out within 48 hours. Later rounds of grants, which often required additional scrutiny of earlier results, were given out within 2 weeks. These timelines were much shorter than the alternative sources of funding available to most scientists. Grant recipients were required to do little more than publish open access preprints and provide monthly 1-paragraph updates. We allowed research teams to repurpose funds in any plausible manner, as long as they were used for research related to COVID-19. Besides the 20 reviewers, from whom perhaps 20-40 hours each was required, the total Fast Grants staff consisted of 4 part-time individuals, each of whom spent a few hours per week on the project after the initial setup.
We found it interesting that relatively few organizations contributed to Fast Grants. The project seemed a bit weird and individuals seemed much more willing to take the “risk”. We were very positively surprised at the quality of the applications. We didn’t expect people at top universities to struggle so much with funding during the pandemic. 32% said that Fast Grants accelerated their work by “a few months”. 64% of respondents told us that the work in question wouldn’t have happened without receiving a Fast Grant. We were disappointed that very few trials actually happened. This was typically because of delays from university institutional review boards (IRBs) and similar internal administrative bodies that were consistently slow to approve trials even during the pandemic. In our survey of the scientists who received Fast Grants, 78% said that they would change their research program “a lot” if their existing funding could be spent in an unconstrained fashion. We find this number to be far too high: the current grant funding apparatus does not allow some of the best scientists in the world to pursue the research agendas that they themselves think are best. Scientists are in the paradoxical position of being deemed the very best people to fund in order to make important discoveries but not so trustworthy that they should be able to decide what work would actually make the most sense!
Another effect of ASU’s pragmatic research culture is reducing overspecialization among academic disciplines. Crow and Dabar recognize that “specialization has been the key to scientific success” and that disciplines have historic value, but they worry that “such specialization simultaneously takes us away from any knowledge of the whole,” leaving us ill-prepared for the future. Disciplines make it harder to synthesize information, and if a university wants to remain a flexible knowledge enterprise, they need to be prepared to take a holistic approach. During Crow’s tenure, ASU consolidated quite a few academic departments, such as history and political science, or English and modern languages, in order to encourage these fields to solve real problems together – which also had the added benefit of reducing administrative costs. Instead of having to apply to ASU first, then, a student can start by doing the coursework, then enroll when they’re ready, with part of their degree already completed. This feels well-aligned to me with tech’s focus on prioritizing output over credentials. It’s also worth noting that because this experiment lives in Learning Enterprise, it doesn’t detract from the more traditional degree work that lives under Academic Enterprise. ASU also seems to share a lot of values that I cherish about tech, such as optimism, entrepreneurialism, and responsiveness, as well as being results-oriented, and it appears to be a culture that’s enforced from the top. While ASU might not run as fast as a startup, their culture of testing, prototyping, and reinvention seems rare for such a large institution.
2021-11-18: A fascinating look at all the research around Ivermetcin, and what lessons to draw from it about the state of science
This is one of the most carefully-pored-over scientific issues of our time. 10s of teams published studies saying ivermectin definitely worked. Then most scientists concluded it didn’t. What a great opportunity to exercise our study-analyzing muscles! To learn stuff about how science works which we can then apply to less well-traveled terrain! If the lesson of the original replication crisis was “read the methodology” and “read the preregistration document”, this year’s lesson is “read the raw data”. Which is a bit more of an ask. Especially since most studies don’t make it available.
I worked on biomedical literature search, discovery and recommender web applications for many months and concluded that extracting, structuring or synthesizing “insights” from academic publications (papers) or building knowledge bases from a domain corpus of literature has negligible value in industry. Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web. Research questions that can be answered logically through just reading papers and connecting the dots don’t require a biotech corp to be formed around them. There’s much less logic and deduction happening than you’d expect in a scientific discipline.
Now founders and investors—including tech CEOs, crypto billionaires, bloggers, economists, celebrities, and scientists—are coming together to address stasis with experimentation. They’re building a fleet of new scientific labs to speed progress in understanding complex disease, extending healthy lifespans, and uncovering nature’s secrets in long-ignored organisms. In the process, they’re making research funding one of the hottest spaces in Silicon Valley.
Arc Institute
Problem: U.S. science funding attaches too many strings to our best researchers, preventing them from working on the most interesting problems.
Solution: Arc gives scientists no-strings-attached, multiyear funding so that they don’t have to apply for external grants.
Arcadia Science
Problem: Modern science is too siloed—both because researchers are too narrowly focused and because peer-reviewed journals stymie collaboration.
Solution: Expand the menu of species that we deeply research—and embrace an open-science policy.
New Science
Problem: Science is getting old, fast.
Solution: New Science sponsors young scientists.
Bringing all method advances together:
Altogether, these examples are largely restricted to specific disciplines: while research in genomics has pioneered the use of massive open databases, it rarely contains robustness checks or the pre-registration of methods. While the methods of clinical trials are required to be pre-registered, their analysis code is rarely shared publicly.
We believe that good practices from individual fields should serve as models for how science ought to work across the board, and that the scientific process should be radically reassembled from start to finish. How would it work?
To begin with, scientists would spend far more time clarifying the theories they are studying – developing appropriate measures to record data, and testing the assumptions of their research – as the meta-scientist Anne Scheel and others have suggested. Scientists would use programs such as DeclareDesign to simulate data, and test and refine their methods.
Instead of writing research in the form of static documents, scientists would record their work in the form of interactive online documents (such as in Markdown format). Past versions of their writing and analysis would be fully availableto view through platforms such as Git and OSF. Robustness checks and multiverse analysis would be the norm, showing readers the impact of various methodological decisions interactively.
Once research is freed from the need to exist in static form, it can be treated as if it were a live software product. Analysis code would be standardized in format and regularly tested by code-checkers, and data would be stored in formats that were machine-readable, which would enable others to quickly replicate research or apply methods to other contexts. It would also be used to apply new methods to old data with ease.
Some types of results would be stored in mass public databases with entries that would be updated if needed, and other researchers would reuse their results in further analysis. Citations would be viewer-friendly, appearing as pop-ups that highlight passages or refer to specific figures or datasets in prior research (each with their own doi codes), and these citations would be automatically checked for corrections and retractions.
Peer review would operate openly, where the wider scientific community and professional reviewers would comment on working papers, Red Teams would be contracted to challenge research, and comments and criticisms of studies would be displayed alongside them on platforms such as PubPeer. Journals would largely be limited to aggregating papers and disseminating them in different formats (for researchers, laypeople and policymakers); they would act, perhaps, in parallel with organizers of conferences. They could perform essential functions such as code-checking and copy-editing, working through platforms such as GitHub.
2022-02-07: Why Isn’t There a Replication Crisis in Math?
There’s a lot to say about the mathematics we use in social science research, especially statistically, and how bad math feeds the replication crisis.1 But I want to approach it from a different angle. Why doesn’t the field of mathematics have a replication crisis? And what does that tell us about other fields, that do? 1 of the distinctive things about math is that our papers aren’t just records of experiments we did elsewhere. In experimental sciences, the experiment is the “real work” and the paper is just a description of it. But in math, the paper, itself, is the “real work”. Our papers don’t describe everything we do, of course. But the paper contains a (hopefully) complete version of the argument that we’ve constructed. And that means that you can replicate a math paper by reading it. Mathematicians have pretty good idea of what results should be true; but so do psychologists! Mathematicians sometimes make mistakes, but since they’re mostly trying to prove true things, it all works out okay. Social scientists are also (generally) trying to prove true things, but it doesn’t work out nearly so well. Why not? In math, a result that’s too good looks just as troubling as one that isn’t good enough. If a study suggest humans aren’t capable of making reasoned decisions at 11:30, it’s confounded by something, even if we don’t know what.
2022-03-06: There’s much less of a replication crisis in Biology:
In biology, when one research team publishes something useful, then other labs want to use it too. Important work in biology gets replicated all the time—not because people want to prove it’s right, not because people want to shoot it down, not as part of a “replication study,” but just because they want to use the method. So if there’s something that everybody’s talking about, and it doesn’t replicate, word will get out.
To avoid rent dissipation and risk aversion, our state funding of science should be simplified and decentralized into Researcher Guided Funding. Researcher Guided Funding would take the ~$120b spent by the federal government on science each year and distribute it equally to the 250k full-time research and teaching faculty in STEM fields at high research activity universities, who already get 90% of this money. This amounts to about $500k for each researcher every year. You could increase the amount allocated to some researchers while still avoiding dissipating resources on applications by allocating larger grants in a lottery that only some of them win each year. 60% of this money can be spent pursuing any project they want, with no requirements for peer consensus or approval. With no strings attached, Katalin Karikó and Charles Townes could use these funds to pursue their world-changing ideas despite doubt and disapproval from their colleagues. The other 40% would have to be spent funding projects of their peers. This allows important projects to gain a lot of extra funding if a group of researchers are excited about it. With over 5000 authors on the paper chronicling the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle in the Hadron Supercollider, this group of physicists could muster $2.5b a year in funding without consulting any outside sources. This system would avoid the negative effects of long and expensive review processes, because the state hands out the money with very few strings, and risk aversion among funders, because the researchers individually get to decide what to fund and pursue.
2022-10-20: Maybe not all hope is lost. It seems there’s improvement in preregistering studies, more data sharing etc.
There are encouraging signs that pre-registered study designs like this are helping address the methodological problems described above. Consider the following five graphs. The graphs show the results from 5 major studies, each of which attempted to replicate many experiments from the social sciences literature. Filled in circles indicate the replication found a statistically significant result, in the same direction as the original study. Open circles indicate this criterion wasn’t met. Circles above the line indicate the replication effect was larger than the original effect size, while circles below the line indicate the effect size was smaller. A high degree of replicability would mean many experiments with filled circles, clustered fairly close to the line. Here’s what these 5 replication studies actually found:
As you can see, the first 4 replication studies show many replications with questionable results – large changes in effect size, or a failure to meet statistical significance. This suggests a need for further investigation, and possibly that the initial result was faulty. The fifth study is different, with statistical significance replicating in all cases, and much smaller changes in effect sizes. This is a 2020 study by John Protzko et al that aims to be a “best practices” study. By this, they mean the original studies were done using pre-registered study design, as well as: large samples, and open sharing of code, data and other methodological materials, making experiments and analysis easier to replicate…In short, the replications in the fifth graph are based on studies using much higher evidentiary standards than had previously been the norm in psychology. Of course, the results don’t show that the effects are real. But they’re extremely encouraging, and suggest the spread of ideas like Registered Reports contribute to substantial progress.
There’s also some interesting ideas about funding:
Fund-by-variance: Instead of funding grants that get the highest average score from reviewers, a funder should use the variance (or kurtosis or some similar measurement of disagreement) in reviewer scores as a primary signal: only fund things that are highly polarizing (some people love it, some people hate it). One thesis to support such a program is that you may prefer to fund projects with a modest chance of outlier success over projects with a high chance of modest success. An alternate thesis is that you should aspire to fund things only you would fund, and so should look for signal to that end: projects everyone agrees are good will certainly get funded elsewhere. And if you merely fund what everyone else is funding, then you have little marginal impact
2023-02-23: Registered reports for publishing negative results
The fundamental principle underpinning a Registered Report is that a journal commits to publishing a paper if the research question and the methodology chosen to address it pass peer review, with the result itself taking a back seat. For now, Nature is offering Registered Reports in the field of cognitive neuroscience and in the behavioral and social sciences. In the future, we plan to extend this to other fields, as well as to other types of study, such as more exploratory research.
Why are we introducing this format? In part to try to address publication bias, the tendency of the research system — editors, reviewers and authors — to favor the publication of positive over negative results. Registered Reports help to incentivize research regardless of the result. An elegant and robust study should be appreciated as much for its methodology as for its results. More than 300 journals already offer this format, up from around 200 in 2019. But despite having been around for a while, Registered Reports are still not widely known — or widely understood — among researchers. This must change. And, at Nature, we want to play a part in changing it.
2023-08-31: History and other disciplines are even worse than Psychology
Science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis. Replication is when you can repeat an experiment with new data or new materials and get the same result. Reproducibility is when you use exactly the same evidence as another person and still get the same result — so it has a much, much lower bar for success, which is what makes the lack of it in history all the more worrying.
2024-04-12: Mandating open access as a condition of funding
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s top biomedical research funders, will from next year require grant holders to make their research publicly available as preprints. The foundation also said it would stop paying for article-processing charges (APCs) — fees imposed by some journal publishers to make scientific articles freely available online for all readers, a system known as open access (OA).
Gregor J. Rothfuss 