We invite applications for a research fellowship/postdoctoral research fellowship working with Dr. Alex Holcombe in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney. The research area is visual psychophysics, and the project involves the perception and attentive tracking of moving objects. One line of experiments will investigate the limits on judging the spatial relationship of moving objects.
Quodlibet is an obscure word that originally referred to a medieval event that included a debate. I haven’t been able to find much information about it, but here is a brief description from Graham (2007): I’m interested in this because I rue the lack of debates in modern science. Perhaps it’s only an accident of history that real debates aren’t happening much nowadays.
A new article in the New York Times regarding the allegations against Marc Hauser illustrate how difficult it is to determine whether one is guilty of scientific fraud. A main problem is that record-keeping standards are so lax. This is another reason why open science is important. Open science involves releasing original data and analyses, which is much easier if you have been keeping good records along the way.
This is open-access week. Most already know they should be publishing in open-access journals and/or self-archiving their papers. But moving science towards open access has been… slow. I was going to write that things have been moving at a glacial pace, thinking that would be an exaggeration; but nowadays I worry the world’s glaciers may be moving/melting fast enough to be gone before open access is the norm.
Richard Feynman, in his 1974 cargo-cult science commencement address: Unfortunately, the average scientific journal article doesn’t follow this principle. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the average article is just a sales job, but the emphasis is really on giving the information that favors the author’s theory.
When a scientific article is published, ideally the data behind the reported results should be made available. Anyone should be able to scrutinize the basis of scientific claims. While this has long been the ideal, it has rarely been practiced. But this has been changing, and momentum is building to actually require the posting of data in circumstances where it’s feasible.
Scientific theories are alive. They are debated and actively questioned. Scientists have differing views, strong and informed ones. However, the system of science tends to mask the debate. In the scientific literature, differences are aired, but rarely in a way that most people would recognize as a debate. ‘Debate’ evokes a vision of two parties concisely articulating their positions, disputing points, and rebutting each other.
How do you get on top of the literature associated with a controversial scientific topic? For many empirical issues, the science gives a conflicted picture. Like the role of sleep in memory consolidation, the effect of caffeine on cognitive function, or the best theory of a particular visual illusion. To form your own opinion, you’ll need to become familiar with many studies in the area.