The H-Prize: The ultimate in competitive science

The H-Prize takes its shape and name from the privately funded $10 million Ansari X Prize, which led, in 2004, to the first privately developed manned rocket to reach outer space twice.
Members of the House Science Committee said that their bill would draw on American’s competitive spirit. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who [...]

Academic papers in Open Access journals receive better recognition

Here’s the abstract of the paper by Gunther Eysenbach.

Open access (OA) to the research literature has the potential to accelerate recognition and dissemination of research findings, but its actual effects are controversial. This was a longitudinal bibliometric analysis of a cohort of OA and non-OA articles published between June 8, 2004, and December 20, 2004, [...]

On Roman myths and barbarians

It has been easy to underestimate Celtic technological achievements because so much has vanished or been misunderstood. Of course, it was thoughtless of the Celts not to leave us anything much in the way of written records — they should have known that the lack of books putting forward their own propaganda would weight the [...]

Fryer and Levitt on “Racial differences in the mental ability of young children”

Roland G. Fryer and Steven D. Levitt (2006): Testing for racial differences in the mental ability of young children. Here is the abstract:

On tests of intelligence, Blacks systematically score worse than Whites, whereas Asians frequently outperform Whites. Some have argued that genetic differences across races account for the gap. Using a newly available nationally representative [...]

Faked research on computer chip design

Here is the NYTimes story that broke the news. The quote below is from the follow-up story:

[A] top computer scientist, Chen Jin, … became a national hero in 2003 when he said he had created one of China’s first digital signal processing computer chips, sophisticated microchips that can process digitized data for mobile phones, cameras [...]

Can economic models ‘prove’ anything?

This has something to do with the little ‘just-so’ theory I indulged myself in yesterday. Though my intention was totally non-serious (but not frivolous!), one still has to wonder if serious economic models can ever be said to ‘prove’ something — in fact, anything. This question was triggered recently by the NYTimes obiturary ofJohn Kenneth [...]

It’s financial impropriety now

The aftermath of Hwang Woo Suk scandal has taken yet another bizarre turn. He has now been accused of financial impropriety too!
Prosecutors on Friday indicted a disgraced cloning scientist on embezzlement and bioethics law violations linked to faked stem cell research, officials said.
Government auditors said in February that it was unclear how he had spent [...]

John Kenneth Galbraith

Two links:

The first, to a profile in Guardian, is from several years ago.

The second, to a NYTimes op-ed by Robert H. Frank, goes into some of the possible reasons for why he didn’t get the Nobel.

* * *
Here is the link to the NYTimes obituary. I have collected a few quotes here.

Quotas are economically efficient!

Alternate title: “Fun and Frolic on the Beaches of the Just-So Land”
(from the Annals of Just-So Theories, May 2006)

Introduction: In this paper, we propose a simple (heck, it’s even simplistic!) model to show that quotas are economically efficient.

Model: Consider two students A-1 and A-20 who are about to enter college. Let their intellectual abilities be [...]

Death of the industrial research lab

Basic research performed in industrial laboratories is declining — is the focus on profitability to the detriment of furthering scientific knowledge?
Do read this interesting article by A. Michael Noll (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California) in Nature Materials.

In metallurgy and materials science, many great researchers started their career at industrial labs. John W. [...]

Is the peer review system broken?

The New York Times ran an article yesterday with the following opening:

Recent disclosures of fraudulent or flawed studies in medical and scientific journals have called into question as never before the merits of their peer-review system.
The system is based on journals inviting independent experts to critique submitted manuscripts. The stated aim is to weed [...]

Is the peer review system broken?

The New York Times ran an article yesterday with the following opening:

Recent disclosures of fraudulent or flawed studies in medical and scientific journals have called into question as never before the merits of their peer-review system.
The system is based on journals inviting independent experts to critique submitted manuscripts. The stated aim is to weed [...]