The peer review system, one of the bedrocks of academic publishing that helps to ensure the quality of research papers, is in trouble. For those not familiar with the system, when a researcher wants to publish the results of their labors, they send the finished manuscript to their journal of choice. The editors in turn have three choices: choose on their own to publish or reject if they feel they have the expertise to judge, or send it out to one or more reviewers who are experts in the same field to obtain their opinion first. The last option is the most common one.
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Myths are tenacious. Many of us get frustrated in our attempts to try and set things straight because it seems like people will believe them against all the evidence. Trying to convince them they are wrong does not seem to work. But maybe we are going about it the wrong way, two authors argue, with the result that we end up actually strengthening the belief rather than weakening it.
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Science research can be tricky. There are many important questions that for various reasons cannot be investigated directly and so imaginative scientists try to find some proxy method that can shed light on the question. That proxy method can seem outlandish to people who are unable or unwilling to look below the surface to see what the connection is between the visible research activity and the underlying research question. Grandstanding politicians who are anti-science often seize on these things as examples of dilettante behavior by scientists and frivolous use of taxpayer money.
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The Equivalence Principle enunciated by Albert Einstein says that any two objects in a uniform gravity field will fall at the same rate if dropped from a height. Of course, if we drop a feather and a bowling ball, that is not what we see and we explain that by saying it is because the air resistance slows down the feather much more than it does the bowling ball. But if you could drop the two items in a vacuum, they should fall at the same rate.
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While US infrastructure continues its slow but steady degeneration as politicians stay fixated on richer people paying less taxes and thus starving the government and making it unable to maintain even what we have now let alone make ambitious plans for improvements in the future, we have to look to other countries for the nice things that we cannot have.
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Research results in applied psychology often have a big impact on the general public because those works address questions that people can directly relate to. Who isn’t interested in what we are like and how we relate to others? Sometimes the research results cause great controversy and can even lead to rapid changes in public policy.
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If I were a religious person looking for something to prove the existence of god, I would not waste my time with things like the bacterial flagellum or the blood clotting mechanism or other esoteric phenomena that few other than biologists really understand. I would instead point to the properties of water.
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Off and on, depending upon whether it coincides with my eating dinner, I listen to the daily CBC-produced radio program Q with Jian Ghomeshi that is broadcast by my local NPR station. It is a reasonably good program, more heavy on longer interviews with arts and cultural figures than the CBC show it replaced that was called As It Happens.
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I have had mild lactose intolerance since childhood. This means that I have no problems with butter or ice cream or milk in my coffee and tea and cereal and in other foods but cannot drink a full glass of milk with getting an upset stomach. It turns out that what I thought of as a limitation and even a minor health hazard (milk is good for you, right?) may actually be a positive thing. While butter and eggs got the green light some years ago, switching from being bad for you to being either good or neutral, a new study suggests that milk may go the other way, switching from being an unalloyed good to health hazard.
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