Related papers: The Science Wars: a pox on both their houses
Science is built on the scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, we identify…
Have you ever wondered why we have never heard of psychics and palm readers winning millions of dollars in state or local lotteries or becoming Wall Street wolfs? Neither have I. Yet we are constantly bombarded by tabloid news on how…
COVID-19 represents the most severe global crisis to date whose public conversation can be studied in real time. To do so, we use a data set of over 350 million tweets and retweets posted by over 26 million English speaking Twitter users…
This whitepaper was written in response to the open-to-public writing prompt hosted by the US Army Training & Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Mad Scientist Initiative. The 2024 Mad Scientist Writing Prompt called for a predictive discussion or…
Book Review for: "A New Kind of Science", by Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, Inc. Champaign IL 2002).
In recent years, the international scientific community has been rocked by a number of serious cases of research misconduct. In one of these, Woo Suk Hwang, a Korean stem cell researcher published two articles on research with…
Professor Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. However, in his most famous work he displays misunderstandings of science and mathematics at a basic level.
Today scientists are drowned in information and have no time for reading all publications even in a specific area. The information is sifted and only a small fraction of articles is being read. Under circumstances, scientific articles have…
Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…
This report seeks to inform policy makers on the nature and the merit of the arguments for and against the concerns associated with a potential technological singularity. Part I describes the lessons learned from our investigation of the…
Scientific information expresses human understanding of nature. This knowledge is largely disseminated in different forms of text, including scientific papers, news articles, and discourse among people on social media. While important for…
We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Specifically, we explore how the structure of interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective attention, as…
Peer review is an integral component of contemporary science. While peer review focuses attention on promising and interesting science, it also encourages scientists to pursue some questions at the expense of others. Here, we use ideas from…
Numerous studies have revealed biases within the scientific communication system and across all scientific fields. For example, already prominent researchers receive disproportional credit compared to their (almost) equally qualified…
Fake news emerged as an apparent global problem during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Addressing it requires a multidisciplinary effort to define the nature and extent of the problem, detect fake news in real time, and mitigate its…
Climate change and political polarisation are two of the 21st century's critical socio-political issues. Here, we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the UN Conference of The Parties on Climate Change (COP)…
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
Institutions and their aggregates are not the right units of analysis for developing a science policy with cognitive goals in view. Institutions, however, can be compared in terms of their performance with reference to their previous…
In their recent book Merchants of Doubt [New York:Bloomsbury 2010], Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe the "tobacco strategy", which was used by the tobacco industry to influence policy makers regarding the health risks of tobacco…
The contradiction between physical and economical sciences concerning the growth of the production/consumption mechanism is analyzed. It is then shown that if one wishes to keep the security level stable or to enhance it in a growing…