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Scientific debate is an important and inevitable component of the development of scientific knowledge, and consideration of its dynamics is illuminating. Historically, and to some degree nowadays, only a small fraction of the population was scientifically trained (or scientifically literate), and the relevant discourse was accordingly restricted. Not everyone who might have benefited from such knowledge knew everything. (Curiously, a completely different view was quite widespread in market economics: the so-called ‘equilibrium theory’ was based on perfectly rational behaviour that assumed that a very rapid diffusion of knowledge of the ‘true’ values of goods that led to their appropriate pricing in the marketplace – a view that one might now recognise as generally falsified by observations of the facts, and indeed a major cause of the present economic downturn. A book I am presently reading – Eric Beinhocker’s “The origin of wealth” – discusses lucidly a rather more accurate view of real economic systems, and I shall blog about this anon.)
Continue reading: How do we come to ‘know’ what we believe? – the genesis and diffusion of scientific knowledge
As already mentioned in my first blog, an increasing number of means now exist for putting out messages to selected (and especially self-selected) audiences. We already make our press releases and other material available via RSS feeds, as well as via the website. A comparatively recent innovation, which seems well suited for some of these purposes, is twitter. For those not already in the twitterverse, twitter allows brief 140-character ‘tweets’ (posts) that can be viewed by those who have chosen (signed up) to do so. BBSRC is @BBSRC and I am @dbkell. In its simplest form, the ramblings of other tweeters are seen by any tweeter only if they have signed up to follow them, so twittering can involve more of a fractured monologue than a dialogue. It does however allow all recipients to see the discourse ‘instantaneously’ and thereby capture the zeitgeist (for literature citations this has been called the citegeist…), possibly assisting the generation of the supposed Wisdom of Crowds (and at least access to one’s readership).
Continue reading: Getting the word out
We arguably recognise three main approaches to generating new knowledge: experimental and theoretical research are classically the first two, while more recently computer simulations of natural phenomena (and of engineering artefacts) have contributed a third. Now Bell, Hey and Szalay have proposed a fourth – data-intensive science.
Continue reading: The fourth paradigm of scientific knowledge generation – data-intensive science
One of the fruits of the systematic sequencing of the human genome was the recognition (by bioinformatic sequence gazing) that there were a great many membrane-located receptors that had previously been unrecognized, and whose ‘natural’ roles and ligands were therefore unknown. These were and are known as orphan receptors (and G-protein-coupled receptors – GPCRs – represent a particularly rich class of such molecules, with several hundred members). Classically, receptors are recognized on the basis of binding studies (often of potent antagonists discovered in the natural world), and of physiological responses to candidate ligands. Clearly, with thousands of candidate endogenous small (metabolite) molecules (many probably as yet unknown, and some, possibly including DMT, derived from exogenous substances) it is not easy to test them all experimentally. How then to make progress?
Continue reading: Finding natural ligands for orphan receptors via cheminformatics
The introduction to most scientific papers will probably contain something along the lines of “It is widely accepted that….”, followed by the citation of a few more or less recent reviews of the topic. Last week’s blog noted the frequency of mis-citation, and this leads, surprisingly naturally, into asking the question ‘which reviews or papers might one then cite to bolster a view of present-day knowledge on a subject, and on what basis are these chosen?’ A partial linkage between these two issues (mis-citation and choice of material to cite) comes via what Merton (1968) (with a follow-up in 1988) called the Matthew Effect, on the basis of the lines in Matthew’s Gospel (25:29) that read “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”.
Continue reading: The Matthew effect in Science – citing the most cited
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