Tag: research

Replication studies: Bad copy. Many published experiments end up not entirely reproducible. Journals and academic publications can skew toward the eye-catching and implausible. This chart was particularly fascinating.

Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research. The proscriptive part of the article is shallow, but the process of how an article gets published is fascinating. If you’re looking for an area of higher education ripe for disruption I’m not sure it gets much better than this.

Innovation Starvation. We’re struggling to get big stuff done in the world and Neal Stephenson has some ideas as to why that may be. Interesting thoughts as to what context allows a society to take risks and strive to accomplish the difficult.

Disrupting College

It’s taken a while but I got around to reading the Center for American Progress report, Disrupting College. 1 It was a really fascinating read, highly recommend it.

One quote particularly stood out. While describing the disruption that occurred in the computer industry the authors characterize the old mainframe model by writing:

We had to take our computational problems to these centralized computer centers where experts solved them for us.

This contrasts with the current smartphone era. We now have the computational power for many daily tasks residing in our front pocket. This all got me thinking about college.

With the traditional college system we have the same mainframe model. We take our knowledge problems and inexperience to a centralized place where experts with many years of training help solve them for, or in the best case with, us. Carry the analogy from mainframe computing over to education and holy mind explosion Batman! If we could even achieve half of the transformation accomplished with computers we’d be in for some wonderful times.

A future where the tools for education are accessible on an individual scale and where geographic location is no longer a limiting factor makes me really excited.

Openness, Socialism, and Capitalism. Open knowledge in education is far from a socialist idea. Instead, it fits well with the root ideals behind capitalism. If you are the one paying for research and innovation then you darn well ought to be able to share in the products that are created. Buy one get one.

Science Proves You’re Stupid. Terrific article about the human brain. Wonderful little nuggets like “The feeling of knowing is just that, a sensation.”

Tracking a whale via Flickr

Interesting story from the Boston Globe about a researcher who stumbled across a record whale migration via Flickr. Turns out the whale traveled more than 6,000 miles between photographs.

Found via the Atlantic’s Science and Technology blog.