Download or read book Science Today written by Ralph Levinson and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book The Problem with Science written by R. Barker Bausell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent events have vividly underscored the societal importance of science, yet the majority of the public are unaware that a large proportion of published scientific results are simply wrong. The Problem with Science is an exploration of the manifestations and causes of this scientific crisis, accompanied by a description of the very promising corrective initiatives largely developed over the past decade to stem the spate of irreproducible results that have come to characterize many of our sciences. More importantly, Dr. R. Barker Bausell has designed it to provide guidance to practicing and aspiring scientists regarding how (a) to change the way in which science has come to be both conducted and reported in order to avoid producing false positive, irreproducible results in their own work and (b) to change those institutional practices (primarily but not exclusively involving the traditional journal publishing process and the academic reward system) that have unwittingly contributed to the present crisis. There is a need for change in the scientific culture itself. A culture which prioritizes conducting research correctly in order to get things right rather than simply getting it published.
Download or read book The Creativity Crisis written by Roberta B. Ness and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Creativity Crisis excavates the root causes of America's innovation slow-down, showing why revolutionary insights are no longer chased by young talent. Economically and socially, caution has overtaken creation. This book is ultimately a roadmap for reinvigorating innovation within the system of science.
Download or read book Science Today written by and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Science Be Dammed written by Eric Kuhn and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science Be Dammed is an alarming reminder of the high stakes in the management—and perils in the mismanagement—of water in the western United States. It seems deceptively simple: even when clear evidence was available that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning by decision-makers throughout the twentieth century, river planners and political operatives irresponsibly made the least sustainable and most dangerous long-term decisions. Arguing that the science of the early twentieth century can shed new light on the mistakes at the heart of the over-allocation of the Colorado River, authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck delve into rarely reported early studies, showing that scientists warned as early as the 1920s that there was not enough water for the farms and cities boosters wanted to build. Contrary to a common myth that the authors of the Colorado River Compact did the best they could with limited information, Kuhn and Fleck show that development boosters selectively chose the information needed to support their dreams, ignoring inconvenient science that suggested a more cautious approach. Today water managers are struggling to come to terms with the mistakes of the past. Focused on both science and policy, Kuhn and Fleck unravel the tangled web that has constructed the current crisis. With key decisions being made now, including negotiations for rules governing how the Colorado River water will be used after 2026, Science Be Dammed offers a clear-eyed path forward by looking back. Understanding how mistakes were made is crucial to understanding our contemporary problems. Science Be Dammed offers important lessons in the age of climate change about the necessity of seeking out the best science to support the decisions we make.
Download or read book The Problem of Alzheimer s written by Jason Karlawish and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive and compelling book on one of today's most prevalent illnesses. In 2020, an estimated 5.8 million Americans had Alzheimer’s, and more than half a million died because of the disease and its devastating complications. 16 million caregivers are responsible for paying as much as half of the $226 billion annual costs of their care. As more people live beyond their seventies and eighties, the number of patients will rise to an estimated 13.8 million by 2050. Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, The Problem of Alzheimer's traces Alzheimer’s from its beginnings to its recognition as a crisis. While it is an unambiguous account of decades of missed opportunities and our health care systems’ failures to take action, it tells the story of the biomedical breakthroughs that may allow Alzheimer’s to finally be prevented and treated by medicine and also presents an argument for how we can live with dementia: the ways patients can reclaim their autonomy and redefine their sense of self, how families can support their loved ones, and the innovative reforms we can make as a society that would give caregivers and patients better quality of life. Rich in science, history, and characters, The Problem of Alzheimer's takes us inside laboratories, patients' homes, caregivers’ support groups, progressive care communities, and Jason Karlawish's own practice at the Penn Memory Center.
Download or read book Science in Chains written by Mark Popovskiĭ and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 1980 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Blind Spot written by William Byers and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-28 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why absolute certainty is impossible in science In today's unpredictable and chaotic world, we look to science to provide certainty and answers—and often blame it when things go wrong. The Blind Spot reveals why our faith in scientific certainty is a dangerous illusion, and how only by embracing science's inherent ambiguities and paradoxes can we truly appreciate its beauty and harness its potential. Crackling with insights into our most perplexing contemporary dilemmas, from climate change to the global financial meltdown, this book challenges our most sacredly held beliefs about science, technology, and progress. At the same time, it shows how the secret to better science can be found where we least expect it—in the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the inevitably unpredictable. William Byers explains why the subjective element in scientific inquiry is in fact what makes it so dynamic, and deftly balances the need for certainty and rigor in science with the equally important need for creativity, freedom, and downright wonder. Drawing on an array of fascinating examples—from Wall Street's overreliance on algorithms to provide certainty in uncertain markets, to undecidable problems in mathematics and computer science, to Georg Cantor's paradoxical but true assertion about infinity—Byers demonstrates how we can and must learn from the existence of blind spots in our scientific and mathematical understanding. The Blind Spot offers an entirely new way of thinking about science, one that highlights its strengths and limitations, its unrealized promise, and, above all, its unavoidable ambiguity. It also points to a more sophisticated approach to the most intractable problems of our time.
Download or read book The Creativity Crisis written by Roberta Ness and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every day we hear about some fascinating new discovery. Yet anemic progress toward addressing the greatest risks to humankind -- clean energy, emerging infections, and cancer -- warns us that science may not be meeting its potential. Indeed, there is evidence that advances are slowing. Science is costly and can hurt people; thus it must be pursued with caution. Yet, excessive caution stifles the very thing that powers inventiveness: creation. In her boldest book yet, Roberta Ness argues that the system of funding agencies, universities, and industries designed to promote innovation has come to impede it. The Creativity Crisis strips away the scientific enterprise's veil of mystique to reveal the gritty underbelly of university research. America's economic belt-tightening discourages long-term, risky investments in revolutionary advances and elevates short-term projects with assured outcomes. The pursuit of basic research insights, with the greatest power to transform but little ability to enrich, is being abandoned. The social nature of academia today also contributes to the descent of revolutionary discovery. In academia, which tends to be insular, hierarchical, and tradition-bound, research ideas are "owned" and the owners gain enormous clout to decide what is accepted. Communalism is antithetical to idea ownership. Thus science has not embraced the Web-based democratic sharing of ideas called crowdsourcing, one of the greatest tools for creativity and social change in our age. A final battleground between creation and caution is within the sphere of ethics. Scientists are typically altruistic but sometimes have all-too-human inclinations toward avarice and conceit. The most original thinkers are most likely to flout convention. This tendency can pull them across the lines of acceptable behavior. Caution is a necessary check on the destructive potential of amoral creation. Yet, when every individual and institution is considered a priori to be a threat, adventuresome invention is squelched. Creation and caution in science should be in balance, but they are not. For possibilities to unlock, the ecosystem in which science is done must be fundamentally rebalanced.
Download or read book Bernoulli s Fallacy written by Aubrey Clayton and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: it underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines. In an increasingly statistics-reliant society, this same deeply rooted error shapes decisions in medicine, law, and public policy with profound consequences. The foundation of the problem is a misunderstanding of probability and its role in making inferences from observations. Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the seventeenth-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it. He highlights how influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures developed a statistical methodology they claimed was purely objective in order to silence critics of their political agendas, including eugenics. Clayton provides a clear account of the mathematics and logic of probability, conveying complex concepts accessibly for readers interested in the statistical methods that frame our understanding of the world. He contends that we need to take a Bayesian approach—that is, to incorporate prior knowledge when reasoning with incomplete information—in order to resolve the crisis. Ranging across math, philosophy, and culture, Bernoulli’s Fallacy explains why something has gone wrong with how we use data—and how to fix it.
Download or read book Understanding Society and Natural Resources written by Michael J. Manfredo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this edited open access book leading scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds wrestle with social science integration opportunities and challenges. This book explores the growing concern of how best to achieve effective integration of the social science disciplines as a means for furthering natural resource social science and environmental problem solving. The chapters provide an overview of the history, vision, advances, examples and methods that could lead to integration. The quest for integration among the social sciences is not new. Some argue that the social sciences have lagged in their advancements and contributions to society due to their inability to address integration related issues. Integration merits debate for a number of reasons. First, natural resource issues are complex and are affected by multiple proximate driving social factors. Single disciplinary studies focused at one level are unlikely to provide explanations that represent this complexity and are limited in their ability to inform policy recommendations. Complex problems are best explored across disciplines that examine social-ecological phenomenon from different scales. Second, multi-disciplinary initiatives such as those with physical and biological scientists are necessary to understand the scope of the social sciences. Too frequently there is a belief that one social scientist on a multi-disciplinary team provides adequate social science representation. Third, more complete models of human behavior will be achieved through a synthesis of diverse social science perspectives.
Download or read book The Crisis of Expertise written by Gil Eyal and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change, and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the “death of expertise,” or is the handwringing about an “assault on science” merely the hysterical reaction of threatened elites? In this new book, Gil Eyal argues that what needs to be explained is not a one-sided “mistrust of experts” but the two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance on science and expertise, on the one hand, coupled with increased skepticism and dismissal of scientific findings and expert opinion, on the other. The current mistrust of experts is best understood as one more spiral in an on-going, recursive crisis of legitimacy. The “scientization of politics,” of which critics warned in the 1960s, has brought about a politicization of science, and the two processes reinforce one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture. This timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and to anyone concerned about the political uses of, and attacks on, scientific knowledge and expertise.
Download or read book Lost in Math written by Sabine Hossenfelder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this "provocative" book (New York Times), a contrarian physicist argues that her field's modern obsession with beauty has given us wonderful math but bad science. Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these "too good to not be true" theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink their methods. Only by embracing reality as it is can science discover the truth.
Download or read book Science in an Age of Unreason written by John Staddon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science is undergoing an identity crisis! A renown psychologist and biologist diagnoses our age of wishful, magical thinking and blasts out a clarion call for a return to reason and the search for objective knowledge and truth. Fans of Matt Ridley and Nicholas Wade will adore this trenchant meditation and call to action. Science is in trouble. Real questions in desperate need of answers—especially those surrounding ethnicity, gender, climate change, and almost anything related to ‘health and safety’—are swiftly buckling to the fiery societal demands of what ought to be rather than what is. These foregone conclusions may be comforting, but each capitulation to modernity’s whims threatens the integrity of scientific inquiry. Can true, fact-based discovery be redeemed? In Science in an Age of Unreason, legendary professor of psychology and biology, John Staddon, unveils the identity crisis afflicting today’s scientific community, and provides an actionable path to recovery. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Staddon answers pressing questions, including: Is science, especially the science of evolution, a religion? Can ethics be derived from science at all? How sound is social science, particularly surrounding today’s most controversial topics? How can passions be separated from facts? Informed by decades of expertise, Science in an Age of Unreason is a clarion call to rebirth academia as a beacon of reason and truth in a society demanding its unconditional submission.
Download or read book Science Fictions written by Stuart Ritchie and published by Arrow. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Climate in Motion written by Deborah R. Coen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. She argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a patchwork of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Led by Julius Hann in Vienna, Habsburg scientists were the first to investigate precisely how local winds and storms might be related to the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Coen grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization. Climate in Motion presents the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world. In this way, it offers a critical historical perspective on the concepts of scale that structure thinking about the climate crisis today and the range of possibilities for responding to it.
Download or read book Science in the New Russia written by Loren R. Graham and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-28 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This analysis of Russian science shows how the Russian science establishment was one of the largest in the world boasting a world-leading space programme and Nobel prizes. However, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the financial supports for the community were eliminated resulting in a 'brain drain'.
