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The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has helped produce a report on fact-checking in science journalism, and it is an eye-opening read. It was drafted by Deborah Blum and Brooke Borel; there is a nice summary here. The standout findings for me, as a science editor working with journalists for
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The 28th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony concluded yesterday, handing out 10 prizes to 38 recipients with institutional affiliations in 26 countries. There is one recipient with an affiliation in India, though I doubt anyone is keeping track. They should (John Barry for the reproductive medicine prize, see below)
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Every Thursday, a Bangalore-based community called ReRoll organises an evening of boardgames open to all at Lahe Lahe, a café in Indira Nagar. According to the organisers, about 40 people come each time and about 10-15% of them are first-timers – like I was today – and a similar fraction are regulars,
Science
There's only one absolute zero but there are multiple absolute 'hots', depending on the temperature at which various theories of physics break down. This is an interesting conception because, while absolute zero is very well-defined and perfectly understood, absolute hot simply stands for the exact opposite
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The ISRO homepage has been hijacked by an almost-full-page banner soliciting readers' comments about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Independence Day speech. A friend was understandably irked by this and wanted to know if it could be discussed in an article. This is annoying for sure. The '
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We are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society. Normally this kind of comment would be a platitude. In fact,
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TL;DR – Journalists are already more accountable than the publishers of scientific journals are. If scientists find journalistic review of the scientific literature to be lacking, help them improve instead of completely disabling them from doing it. *** The recent conversation about preprints, motivated by Tom Sheldon's article in
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The new content editor in the Ghost CMS, named Koenig, is quite good, a much smoother use than WordPress's new Gutenberg. Ghost's latest iteration in v1.25.3 (as of today) has a full-screen minimal layout and bold serif text type brought together with the Markdown
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I just spent the weekend at Sunti koppa, a small village to the northwest of Mysore, in Kodagu, a.k.a. Coorg, district. I was there with my relatives – six of us in all – and we were put up at a homestay in the middle of a coffee and pepper
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After I published my rebuttal to the Nature anti-preprints article, a scientist in the US wrote to me saying he was on the journal's side and that he expects preprints to be done away with in the future. It was dispiriting to hear. But in the last five
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Ergodicity is the condition wherein a sample is representative of the whole vis-a-vis some statistical parameter. An ergodic system is one that visits all possible states of its existence as it evolves. Axiomatically, a non-ergodic system is one that does not. Stuart A. Kauffman, a scientist at the University of
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An article in KurzweilAI begins, Plants could soon provide our electricity. Why would anyone take this seriously? More than excitement, this line rouses a discerning reader to suspicion. It is bound to be centred on the word "soon", implying in the near-future, imminently. You're not sure