Enlarge (credit: David Aubrey ) Over the last decade or so, the science community has been concerned about what has been called the “reproducibility crisis”: the apparent failure of some significant experiments to produce the same results when they’re repeated. That failure has led to many suggestions about what might be done to improve matters, […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Over the last few decades, there’s been a heavy emphasis on techniques that fall under the concept of “proactive policing.” These generally involve identifying the areas of a city that have the highest crime rates and applying more aggressive policing in those locations. While there have been some successes, the approach […]
(credit: Deanna Barch) One of the unfortunate realities of science is that small data sets often produce unreliable results, as any minor, random fluctuations can have a large impact. One solution to this issue has been building ever-larger data sets, where these fluctuations tend to be small compared to any actual effects. One of the […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) Prior to the pandemic, the opposition to vaccines was apolitical. The true believers were a small population and confined to the fringes of both major parties, with no significant representation in the political mainstream. But over the past year, political opposition to vaccine mandates has solidified, with a steady stream of […]
(credit: MIT Press) “What makes machines, animals, and people smart?” asks the subtitle of Paul Thagard’s new book. Not “Are computers smarter than humans? or “will computers ever be smarter than humans?” or even “are computers and animals conscious, sentient, or self-aware (whatever any of that might mean)?” And that’s unfortunate, becausethough most people are […]
Enlarge / Do these people look prone to motivated reasoning? (credit: Getty Images) A new study lays out a bit of a conundrum in its opening paragraphs. It notes that scientific progress depends on the ability to update what ideas are considered acceptable in light of new evidence. But science itself has produced no shortage […]
Enlarge / False color image of bacteria on a human tongue. (credit: STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/ Getty Images) An altered microbiome has been associated with—and thereby either implicitly or explicitly implicated as a partial cause of—a wide range of human maladies. These include immune disorders like celiac disease, asthma, and diabetes; obesity; cancers; psychiatric disorders like depression […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson) Many of us make jokes about how we’ve outsourced part of our brain to electronic devices. But based on a new paper by the University of Texas at Austin’s Adrian Ward, this is just a variation on something that has been happening throughout human history. No person could […]
Enlarge (credit: Gordon Jolly / Flickr ) In the wake of the flood of misinformation that’s drowning the US, lots of organizations have turned to fact-checks. Many newsrooms set up dedicated fact-check groups, and some independent organizations were formed to provide the service. We get live fact-checking of political debates, and Facebook will now tag […]
Enlarge (credit: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/trader-works-in-front-of-a-board-displaying-germanys-share-news-photo/1234893457?adppopup=true ) There’s extensive academic literature on the risks faced by investors who are overly confident of their ability to beat the market. They tend to trade more often, even if you may not they’re losing money doing so. They take on too much debt and don’t diversify their holdings. When the market […]