Interdisciplinarity and Productivity

In a blog post at the London School of Economics, University of Arizona Sociology Professor Erin Leahey describes some of her recent work on the costs and benefits of interdisciplinary research for productivity and impact metrics in science. The basic pattern is that interdisciplinary work tends to receive more citations (a common metric used to judge …

Narcissism in Science

For some reason, I guess narcissism was on people’s minds last Friday. Hannah Devlin had a story in the Guardian about a lecture given by immunologist Bruno Lemaitre about the crisis of narcissism in science. “Many great scientists are narcissists. It’s a bit sad, but it’s a fact,” he said. “This might surprise an external observer, …

Updates to Landry’s Work on Metaphysics

Ronin Institute Research Scholar Forrest Landry‘s essays on Analytic Metaphysics are available at http://uvsm.com. Recently, Forrest has updated some of those essays, converting them to dialog form. Details follow, but Forrest notes that he welcomes comment particularly on the new dialog on the Incommensuration Theorem. So, those of you with an Analytic and/or Metaphysical mindset, have at …

Duerr Chapter(s) in New Book on Curating Research Data

Just published by the American Library Association is Curating Research Data, a two-volume collection edited by Lisa Johnston. Research Scholar Ruth Duerr writes: Karen Baker and I wrote the first chapter in Volume 1 – Chapter 1. Research and the Changing Nature of Data Repositories.  Karen and I both have a long history with all …

Battle-Fisher Producing Documentary on Transhumanism

Congratulations to Ronin Institute Research Scholar Michele Battle-Fisher, who will be a co-producer on News2Share’s upcoming film Transhumanism: A Documentary. Here’s the concept trailer: The project is currently raising funds on indiegogo. Check out the project page to learn more: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/transhuman-a-documentary-news-film#/ On a related note:

Banerjee on International Scientific Collaboration

Ronin Institute Research Scholar Soumya Banerjee has posted a preprint of an analysis of scientific collaboration networks, focusing on patterns of collaboration within and among different nations. He writes that Our latest article looks at a scientific collaboration network and finds novel patterns and clusters in the data that may reflect past foreign policies and contemporary geopolitics. Our model …

Ruth Duerr and Colleagues Win International Data Rescue Award

Congratulations to Research Scholar Ruth Duerr, who accepted the 2016 International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences on behalf of a team of researchers from multiple institutions. From an article on the award in Eos: This year’s winning project, “Revealing Our Melting Past: Rescuing Historical Snow and Ice Data,” is an effort to digitize the Roger …

Help Fund Scans of Dolphin Genitalia

Research Scholar Diane Kelly and her collaborators at Mount Holyoke College are raising money right now to fund CT scans of dolphin genitalia. From the project description at Experiment: Our goal is to assess the depth of penile penetration during copulation and to explore which anatomical landmarks are in contact and where. The penises of …

Graeber on the Transformation of Universities

Following up on the previous posts on bullshit and tenure, Research Scholar Ralph Haygood drew my attention to this passage from a 2014 article by David Graeber in the Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Universities are—or, better said, until recently have been— among the only institutions that survived more or less intact from the High Middle Ages. …

Paul Graham on Risk and Discovery

In a short post Paul Graham (computer scientist, venture capitalist, and opinion haver) notes that biographies of famous scientists tend to focus on the subset of their ideas that panned out, neglecting their failures. Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics than alchemy or theology. The impression we get is that his …