Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
The Use of Bad Data Reveals a Need for Retraction in Governmental Data Bases
Retractions are generally framed as a negative: as science not working properly, as an embarrassment for the institutions involved, or as a flaw in the peer review process. They can be all those things. But they can also be part of a story of science working the right way: finding and correcting errors, and publicly acknowledging when information turns out to be incorrect.
Safiya Noble on Search Engines
In an age where things like facial recognition or financial software algorithms are shown to uncannily reproduce the prejudices of their creators, this was much less obvious earlier in the century, when researchers like Safiya Umoja Noble were dissecting search engine results and revealing the sometimes appalling material they were highlighting.
Did Turing Miss the Point? Should He Have Thought of the Limerick Test?
David Canter is horrified by the power of readily available large language technology.
The Silver Lining in Bulk Retractions
This is the opening from a longer post by Adya Misra, the research integrity and inclusion manager at Social Science Space’s parent, Sage. The full post, which addresses the hows and the whys of bulk retractions in Sage’s academic journals, appears at Retraction Watch.
Fake News, Misinformation Focus of New Microsite
A new Information Literacy Microsite from sage can be your new home for pressing research on the digital age and the ways to combat mis-, dis-, and misinformation.
From Rejections to Reflections: Unveiling the Role of Horizontal Linkages in Academia
Mental health issues in early-career researchers are on the rise: could “horizontal linkages” amongst peers help foster emotional support? Lucas Amaral Lauriano, Julia Grimm, and Camilo Arciniegas Pradilla reflect on the origins of their paper, “Navigating Academia’s Stressful Waters: Discussing the Power of Horizontal Linkages for Early-Career Researchers.”
Efforts To Protect Endangered Minority Languages: Helpful Or Harmful?
Headlines abound with the plight of endangered minority languages around the world. Read a few of these and you’ll see some common themes: the rising number of languages dying worldwide, the distressing isolation of individual last speakers and the wider cultural loss for humanity.
Book Review: A Memoir Highlighting Scientific Complexity
In this brief, crisply written memoir, “In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems,” Parisi takes the reader on a journey through his scientific life in the realm of complex, disordered systems, from fundamental particles to migratory birds. He argues that science’s struggle to understand and master the universe’s complexity, and especially to communicate it to an ever-more skeptical public, holds the key to humanity’s future well-being.
