Despite reassuring comments that researchers read scientific papers for their ideas, isn’t it a worry that over half are probably wrong?
problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true
Or perhaps the author of this study got it wrong as well?
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Really interesting and unusually balanced debate on The Register about the Creative Commons license that is designed to provide a third way between existing copyright law and a free-for-all on content.
Typically, it takes a pop at the geeks but the debate broadens into a discussion about the adoption of technology:
…we techies are already frustrated that the world doesn’t get its act together and offer us this wonderful networked future here and now. What we don’t realise is that it takes time for the world to get its act together. It takes time to build the infrastructure, agree on the protocols, and most importantly, figure out how and who to pay for the privilege.
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Hilarious blog from a public librarian in the US about:
Taking notes on all the moronic things that are asked of me, all the lame excuses I receive and filing them all away to make fun of them later.
What’s amazing though is the length of the blogs. She must get a lot of moronic requests and lame excuses but how demanding can a job be if you’ve still got time to blog 1500 words a day and it provides such entertainment? Given the predicted shortfall in public librarians, it looks like a tempting career.
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Unusual research findings make news so can be great for generating PR but it has to stand up to scrutiny. A survey on behalf of a company specialising in ‘threat management’ is reported to show that workplace violence has gone up dramatically in the last year and militant employees are out of control. Of organisations with 500-900 employees:
- 23% have had intentional or malicious downloading of virus’ (how do they know it was intentional? does this qualify as violence?)
- 65% have had verbal assaults to senior management (65%? what kind of verbal assault?)
- 36% have had electronic assault/ death threats to senior management (aren’t these offences in different leagues?)
Given the coincidence of ‘findings reveal overwhelming threat’ and ’sponsor offers threat management solutions’ there should be a bit more rigour. The survey is criticised here by the very practical edbott.
A further irritation of mine is the use in this survey of decimals in %s, ie 13.6% have reported assualts on other employees (another bizarre finding). Compounding the error of a self-selecting, unrepresentative sample, the tenths of a percentage are intended to make the findings look highly accurate. They don’t.
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The University of Texas undergraduate library is taking the predicted but radical step of removing all its books and becoming an ‘Academic Center’. There, students can gather together and get their information online. Other libraries are following suit as librarians struggle to engage with users. However, like the “paperless” office which has often been predicted but yet to materialise, paperless libraries will still offer books.
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On a more personal note, I’ve just returned from completing the the Ironman Triathlon in Sherbourne, Dorset. It began with a 2.4 mile swim in a lake, was followed by a far too hilly 112 mile cycle ride and ended with a run of 26 miles. About 1,220 of us began the chaotic and really quite brutal swim together and 1,134 made it all the way around (I came 794th).
The last 5 or 6 miles of the run were incredibly tough as all thoughts telescoped on the finish line. As one painful step followed another, time stretched on and the final hour seemed to take as long as the previous three but after a total of 13 hours and 44 minutes, I finally earned the right to call myself an Ironman.
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From Open Access to Peer-to-Peer file sharing, longstanding intellectual property rights are being challenged and debated.
Some “owner’s” are getting heavy-handed. The International Olympics Committee wants to protect their sponsors by, amongst other stringent conditions, making it illegal for other advertisers to combine the words “games”, “medals”, “gold”, “2012″, “sponsor” or “summer” in any advertising.
At the other end of the debate, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner who held senior positions under Clinton and in the World Bank, has weighed in against patent law and argues persuasively that it is stifling innovation.
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Here’s a nice twist on peer-to-peer networking. Using the net we can buy paper books, buy electronic books and catch books in the wild. Now we can share them. My Book Your Book is an online UK library whose books sit on readers’ shelves around the country. Sign up to offer 10 of your own books and for £10 a year all you need to do is send an stamped envelope to get the book you have chosen.
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Building on a long-term trend, UK school-leavers’ A-level results are predicted to produce even more top grades this year.
This contrasts with survey findings released from the Forum of Private Businesses that have branded them a “dismal failure in the workplace”. Even though their survey appears unrepresentative and self-selecting, this raises serious questions about how well-prepared the future generation is if so many employers are rating recruits’ basic skills so poorly.
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This article from HP labs clearly describes the recent phenomenon of collaborative tagging – essentially the labelling of interesting web content with keywords and sharing that on sites such as del.icio.us – and goes on to analyse how it is being used.
By categorising with tags, web content can be organised in ways that make sense to the readers. Think of bookmarks as referencing the site and tags as describing them. Sharing these descriptions offers the potential for other readers to learn about new content and how it is interpreted. While this has led to idiosyncratic and rambling categorisations, the paper concludes that there is also a lot of consistency in the tags used.
For example, readers may tag this post with all or any of ‘tagging’, ‘del.ico.us’, ‘researcher’, ‘blog’, ‘expert_insight’, or ‘drivel’ but they are likely to agree on one or two tags, others will be able to see how it is tagged and look at it themselves.
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