Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Google AI algorithm masters ancient game of Go

  Deep-learning software defeats human professional for the first time.

  To interpret Go boards and to learn the best possible moves, the AlphaGo program applied deep learning in neural networks -- brain-inspired programs in which connections between layers of simulated neurons are strengthened through examples and experience. It first studied 30 million positions from expert games, gleaning abstract information on the state of play from board data, much as other programmes categorize images from pixels. Then it played against itself across 50 computers, improving with each iteration, a technique known as reinforcement learning.

  But also see Go, Marvin Minsky, and the Chasm that AI Hasn't Yet Crossed.

• Italian papers on genetically modified crops under investigation

  Work that describes harm from crops was cited in Italian Senate hearing.

  Papers that describe harmful effects to animals fed genetically modified (GM) crops are under scrutiny for alleged data manipulation. The leaked findings of an ongoing investigation at the University of Naples in Italy suggest that images in the papers may have been intentionally altered. The leader of the lab that carried out the work there says that there is no substance to this claim.
  
  The papers' findings run counter to those of numerous safety tests carried out by food and drug agencies around the world, which indicate that there are no dangers associated with eating GM food. But the work has been widely cited on anti-GM websites -- and results of the experiments that the papers describe were referenced in an Italian Senate hearing last July on whether the country should allow cultivation of safety-approved GM crops.

• Trump Supporters Appear To Be Misinformed, Not Uninformed

  FiveThirtyEight

  Political science research has shown that the behavior of misinformed citizens is different from those who are uninformed, and this difference may explain Trump's unusual staying power.
  ...
  Uninformed citizens don't have any information at all, while those who are misinformed have information that conflicts with the best evidence and expert opinion. As Kuklinski and his colleagues established, in the U.S., the most misinformed citizens tend to be the most confident in their views and are also the strongest partisans.

• The Republican myth of Ronald Reagan and the Iran hostages, debunked

  The problem with this story: Iran released the embassy hostages because of Carter's negotiations, not in spite of them

  The boring and emotionally unsatisfying truth is that the Carter administration secured the Americans' release through protracted negotiations -- and by releasing millions of dollars to the Iranian government.

• Opinion: Squirrels are bigger threat than hackers to US power grid

  While fresh reports of digital assaults on critical infrastructure facilities have stirred the cyberwar saber rattlers, it's worth remembering that squirrels cause far more destruction to the grid than rogue nation hackers.

  Yes, squirrels and other animals cause hundreds of power outages every year and yet the only confirmed infrastructure cyberattack that has resulted in physical damage that is publicly known is Stuxnet.

• Too good to be true: when overwhelming evidence fails to convince

  Imagine that as a court case drags on, witness after witness is called. Let us suppose thirteen witnesses have testified to having seen the defendant commit the crime. Witnesses may be notoriously unreliable, but the sheer magnitude of the testimony is apparently overwhelming. Anyone can make a misidentification but intuition tells us that, with each additional witness in agreement, the chance of them all being incorrect will approach zero. Thus one might naively believe that the weight of as many as thirteen unanimous confirmations leaves us beyond reasonable doubt.

  However, this is not necessarily the case and more confirmations can surprisingly disimprove our confidence that the defendant has been correctly identified as the perpetrator. This type of possibility was recognised intuitively in ancient times. Under ancient Jewish law, one could not be unanimously convicted of a capital crime -- it was held that the absence of even one dissenting opinion among the judges indicated that there must remain some form of undiscovered exculpatory evidence.
  ...
  We have analysed the behaviour of systems that are subject to systematic failure, and demonstrated that with relatively low failure rates, large sample sizes are not required in order that unanimous results start to become indicative of systematic failure. We have investigated the effect of this phenomenon upon identity parades, and shown that even with only a 1% rate of failure, confidence begins to decrease after only three unanimous identifications failing to reach even 95%.

• Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate

  Our first ideas, after all, are usually our most conventional. My senior thesis in college ended up replicating a bunch of existing ideas instead of introducing new ones. When you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik found that people had a better memory for incomplete tasks than for complete ones. When we finish a project, we file it away. But when it's in limbo, it stays active in our minds.

• The Math Gender Gap: The Role of Culture

  This paper explores the role of cultural attitudes towards women in determining math educational gender gaps using the epidemiological approach.
  ...
  The transmission of culture is higher among those in schools with a higher proportion of immigrants or in co-educational schools. Our results suggest that policies aimed at changing beliefs can prove effective in reducing the gender gap in mathematics.

Every year Edge.org invites top thinkers of the world to answer a question. For 2016 it is What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News? What Makes It ImportanT? Below are what most interests me from the 197 responses. Although this is long, it is only a small part of the original and I suggest reading it all.

• Steven Pinker: Human Progress Quantified

  Fortunately, as the bugs in human cognition have become common knowledge, the workaround--objective data--has become more prevalent, and in many spheres of life, observers are replacing gut feelings with quantitative analysis. Sports have been revolutionized by Moneyball, policy by Nudge, punditry by 538.com, forecasting by tournaments and prediction markets, philanthropy by effective altruism, the healing arts by evidence-based medicine.
  ...
  Among the other upward swoops are these. People are living longer and healthier lives, not just in the developed world but globally. A dozen infectious and parasitic diseases are extinct or moribund. Vastly more children are going to school and learning to read. Extreme poverty has fallen worldwide from 85 to 10 percent. Despite local setbacks, the world is more democratic than ever. Women are better educated, marrying later, earning more, and in more positions of power and influence. Racial prejudice and hate crimes have decreased since data were first recorded. The world is even getting smarter: In every country, IQ has been increasing by three points a decade.

• Matt Ridley: The Epidemic Of Absence

  In this respect, the new news from recent science that most intrigues me is that we may have a way to explain why certain diseases are getting worse as we get richer. We are defeating infectious diseases, slowing or managing many diseases of ageing like heart disease and cancer, but we are faced with a growing epidemic of allergy, auto-immunity, and things like autism. Some of it is due to more diagnosis, some of it is no doubt hypochondria, but there does seem to be a real increase in these kinds of problems.
  ...
  This makes perfect sense. In the arms race with parasites, immune systems evolved to "expect" to be down-regulated by parasites, so they over-react in their absence. A good balance is reached when parasites try down-regulating the immune system, but it turns rogue when there are no parasites.

• Noga Arikha: Neuro-news

  "In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist. The discovery could have profound implications for diseases from autism to Alzheimer's to multiple sclerosis."

• Nina Jablonski: Bugs R Us

  Since 2008, when the Human Microbiome Project officially started, hundreds of collaborating scientists have started to bring to light the nature and effects of the billions of bacteria that are part of our normal healthy bodies. There isn't one human microbiome, there are many: There is a microbiome in our hair, one up our nostrils, another in our vaginas, several lavishly differentiated on the vast real estate of our skin, and a veritable treasure trove in our gut, thanks to diligent subcontractors in the esophagus, stomach, and colon.
  
  This great menagerie undergoes changes as we age, so that some of the bacteria that were common and apparently harmless when we were young start to bother us when we're old, and vice versa. The taxonomic diversity and census of our resident bacteria are more than just subjects of scientific curiosity; they matter greatly to our health. The normal bacteria on our skin, for instance, are essential to maintaining the integrity of the skin's barrier functions. Many diseases, from psoriasis to obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, some cancers, and even cardiovascular disease, are associated with shifts in our microbiota.

• Judith Rich Harris: The Truthiness Of Scientific Research

  I think there are two reasons for the decline of truth and the rise of truthiness in scientific research. First, research is no longer something people do for fun, because they're curious. It has become something that people are required to do, if they want a career in the academic world. Whether they enjoy it or not, whether they are good at it or not, they've got to turn out papers every few months or their career is down the tubes. The rewards for publishing have become too great, relative to the rewards for doing other things, such as teaching. People are doing research for the wrong reasons: not to satisfy their curiosity but to satisfy their ambitions.
  ...
  The second thing that has gone awry is the vetting of research papers. Most journals send out submitted manuscripts for review. The reviewers are unpaid experts in the same field, who are expected to read the manuscript carefully, make judgments about the importance of the results and the validity of the procedures, and put aside any thoughts of how the publication of this paper might affect their own prospects. It's a hard job that has gotten harder over the years, as research has become more specialized and data analysis more complex. I propose that this job should be performed by paid experts--accredited specialists in the analysis of research. Perhaps this could provide an alternative path into academia for people who don't particularly enjoy the nitty-gritty of doing research but who love ferreting out the flaws and virtues in the research of others.

• S. Abbas Raza: r > g: Increasing Inequality Of Wealth And Income Is A Runaway Process

  The only solution to this growing problem, it seems, is the redistribution of the wealth concentrating within a tiny elite using instruments such as aggressive progressive taxation (such as exists in some European countries which show a much better distribution of wealth), but the difficulty in that is the obvious one that political policy-making is itself greatly affected by the level of inequality. This creates a vicious positive feedback loop which is making things even worse. It is clearly the case now in the United States that the rich are not only able to hugely influence government policy directly, but that elite forces are able to shape public opinion and affect election outcomes through large-scale propaganda efforts through media they own or can control. This double-edged sword is being used effectively to attack and shred democracy itself.

• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The En-Gendering Of Genius

  The hypothesis that Leslie and Cimpian tested is one I've rarely seen put on the table and surely not in a testable form. They call it the FAB hypothesis--for field-specific ability beliefs. It focuses on the belief as to whether success in a particular field requires pure innate brilliance, the kind of raw intellectual power that can't be taught and for which no amount of conscientious hard work is a substitute.
  ...
  And here's the second surprise: the strength of the FABs in a particular field predicts the percentage of women in that field more accurately than other leading hypotheses, including field-specific variation in work-life balance and reliance on skills for systematizing vs. empathizing. In other words, what Cimpian and Leslie found is that the more that success within a field was seen as a function of sheer intellectual firepower, with words such as "gifted" and "genius" not uncommon, the fewer the women. The FAB hypothesis cut cleanly across the STEM/non-STEM divide.

• Philip Tetlock: The Epistemic Trainwreck Of Soft-Side Psychology

  In our rushed quest to establish our scientific capacity to surprise smart outsiders plus help those who had long gotten the short end of the status stick, soft-siders had forgotten the normative formula that Robert Merton formulated in 1942 for successful social science, the CUDOS norms for protecting us from absurdities like Stalinist genetics and Aryan physics. The road to scientific hell is paved with political intentions, sometimes maniacally evil ones and sometimes profoundly well intentioned ones. If you value science as a purely epistemic game, the effects are equally corrosive. When you replace the pursuit of truth with the protection of dogma, you get politically-religiously tainted knowledge. Mertonian science imposes monastic discipline: it bars even flirting with ideologues.

• Aubrey de Grey: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics!

  1. Antibiotics are generally synthesised in nature by bacteria (or other microbes) as defences against each other.
  2. We have identified antibiotics in the lab, and thus necessarily only those made by bacterial species that we can grow in the lab.
  3. Almost all bacterial species cannot be grown in the lab using practical methods.
  4. That hasn't changed for decades.
  5. But those bacteria grow fine in the environment, typically the soil.
  6. So... can we isolate antibiotics from the soil?

• Paul Bloom: Science Itself

  The most exciting recent scientific news is about science itself: how it is funded, how scientists communicate with another, how findings get distributed to the public--and how it can go wrong. My own field of psychology has been Patient Zero here, with well-publicized cases of fraud, failures to replicate important studies, and a host of concerns, some of them well-founded, about how we do our experiments and analyze our results.

• David G. Myers: We Fear the Wrong Things

  Underlying our exaggerated fears is the "availability heuristic": We fear what's readily available in memory. Vivid, cognitively available images--a horrific air crash, a mass slaughter--distort our judgments of risk. Thus, we remember--and fear--disasters (tornadoes, air crashes, attacks) that kill people dramatically, in bunches, while fearing too little the threats that claim lives one by one. We hardly notice the half-million children quietly dying each year from rotavirus, Bill Gates once observed--the equivalent of four 747s full of children every day. And we discount the future (and its future weapon of mass destruction, climate change).

• Peter Turchin: Fatty Foods Are Good For Your Health

  In fact, there has never been any scientific evidence that cutting down total fat consumption has any positive effect on health; specifically, reduced risks of heart disease and diabetes. For years those who pointed this out were marginalized, but recently evidence debunking the supposed benefits of low-fat diets has reached a critical mass, so that a mainstream magazine such as Time could write in 2014: "Scientists labeled fat the enemy. Why they were wrong." And now the official Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee admits that much.

• N.J. Enfield: Pointing Is A Prerequisite For Language

  Comparative psychology finds that pointing (in its full-blown form) is unique to our species. Few non-human species appear to be able to comprehend pointing (notably, domestic dogs can follow pointing while our closest relatives among the great apes cannot), and there is little evidence of pointing occuring spontaneously between members of any species other than our own. It appears that only humans have the social-cognitive infrastructure needed to support the kind of cooperative and prosocial motivations that pointing gestures presuppose.

• Ellen Winner: Psychology's Crisis

  The field of psychology is experiencing a crisis. Our studies do not replicate. When Science published the results of attempts to replicate 100 studies, results were not confidence-inspiring, to say the least. The average effect sizes declined substantially, and while 97% of the original papers reported significant p values, only 36% of the replications did.

• Gary Klein: Blinded By Data

  The concept of a critical period for developing vision was based on studies that David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel performed on cats and monkeys. The results showed that without visual signals during a critical period of development, vision is impaired for life. For humans, this critical window closes tight by the time a child is eight years old. (For ethical reasons, no comparable studies were run on humans.) Hubel and Wiesel won a Nobel Prize for their work. And physicians around the world stopped performing cataract surgery on children older than 8 years. The data were clear. But they were wrong. The results of the cataract surgeries on Indian teenagers disprove the critical period data.
  ...
  Other fields have run into the same problem. A few years ago the journal Nature reported a finding that the majority of cancer studies selected for review could not be replicated. In October 2015, Nature devoted a special issue to exploring various ideas for reducing the number of non-reproducible findings. Many others have taken up the issue of how to reduce the chances of unreliable data.
  ...
  The bedrock bias encourages us to make extreme efforts to eliminate false positives, but that approach would slow progress. A better perspective is to give up the quest for certainty and accept the possibility that any datum may be wrong. After all, skepticism is a mainstay of the scientific enterprise.

• Bruce Hood: Biological Models of Mental Illness Reflect Essentialist Biases

  Ever since Emil Kraepelin at the end of the 19th century advocated that mental illnesses could be categorized into distinct disorders with specific biological causes, research and treatment has focused efforts on building classification systems of symptoms as a way of mapping the terrain for discovering the root biological problem and corresponding course of action. This medical model approach led to development of clinical nosology and the accompanying diagnostic manuals such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM)--the most recent fifth version published in 2013. However, that very same year, the National Institute of Mental Health announced that it would no longer be funding research projects that relied solely on the DSM criteria. This is because the medical model lacks validity.
  ...
  Approaches to mental illness are changing. It is not clear what will happen to the DSM as there are vested financial interests in maintaining the medical model, but in Europe there is a notable shift towards symptom-based approaches of treatment. It is also not in our nature to consider the complexity of humans other than with essentialist biases. We do this for race, age, gender, political persuasion, intelligence, humor and just about every dimension we use to describe someone--as if these attributes are at the core of who they are.

• Rodney A. Brooks: Artificial Intelligence

  My own opinions on these topics are counter to the popular narrative, and mostly I think everyone is getting way ahead of himself or herself. Arthur C. Clarke's third law was that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. All of these news stories, and the experts who are driving them, seem to me to be jumping so far ahead of the state of the art in Artificial Intelligence, that they talk about a magic future variety of it, and as soon as magic is involved any consequence one desires, or fears, can easily be derived.

• Steven R. Quartz: The State Of The World Isn't Nearly As Bad As You Think

  In reality, extreme poverty has nearly halved in the last twenty years-about a billion people have escaped it. Material wellbeing-income, declines in infant mortality, increases in life expectancy, educational access (particularly for females)-has increased at its greatest pace during the last few decades. The number of democracies in developing nations has tripled since the 1980s, while the number of people killed in armed conflicts has decreased by 75%. This isn't the place to delve into the details of how large-scale statistical datasets, and ones increasingly representative of the world's population, provide a more accurate, though deeply counter-intuitive, assessment of the state of the world.

• Douglas Rushkoff: The Rejection of Science Itself

  I'm most interested by the news that an increasing number of people are rejecting science, altogether. With 31% of Americans believing that human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning, and only 35% percent agreeing that evolution happened through natural processes, it's no wonder that parents reject immunization for their children and voters support candidates who value fervor over fact.

• Ara Norenzayan: Theodiversity

  One might think that religious denominations that have adapted to secular modernity the best are the ones that are thriving the most. But the evidence gleaned from the Pew report and other studies points in the exactly opposing direction. Moderate denominations are falling behind in the cultural marketplace. They are the losers caught between secular modernity and the fundamentalist strains of all major world religions, which are gaining steam as a result of conversion, higher fertility rates, or both.
  
  There are different types, shades, and intensities of disbelief. That's why the non-religious are another big ingredient of the world's astonishing and dynamically changing theodiversity. Combined, they would be the fourth largest "world religion." There are the atheists, but many nonbelievers instead are apatheists, who are indifferent towards but not opposed to religions. And there is the rising demographic tide of people who see themselves as "spiritual but not religious." This do-it-yourself, custom-made spirituality is filling the void that the retreat of organized religion is leaving behind in the secularizing countries. You can find it in yoga studios, meditation centers, the holistic health movement, and eco-spirituality.

• Nicholas Humphrey: Sub-Prime Science

  The reality is that science itself has always been affected by "this human interest stuff." Personal vendettas, political and religious biases, stubborn adherence to pet ideas have in the past led even some of the greatest scientists to massage experimental data and skew theoretical interpretations. Happily, the body of scientific knowledge has continued to live and grow despite such human aberrations. In general scientists continue to play by the rules.

• Gerd Gigerenzer: Fear Of Dread Risks

  Terrorism has indeed caused a huge death toll in countries such as Afghanistan, Syria, and Nigeria. But in Europe or North America a terrorist attack is not what will likely kill you. In a typical year, more Americans die from lightning than terrorism. A great many more die from second-hand smoke and "regular" gun violence. Even more likely, Americans can expect to lose their lives from preventable medical errors in hospitals, even in the best of them. The estimated number of unnecessary deaths has soared from up to 98,000 in 1999 to 440,000 annually, according to a recent study in the Journal of Patient Safety.
  ...
  Why are we scared of what most likely will not kill us? Psychology provides us with an answer. It is called fear of dread risks. This fear is elicited by a situation in which many people die within a short time. Note that the fear is not about dying, but about suddenly dying together with many others at one point of time. When as many--or more--people die distributed over the year, whether from gun violence, motorcycle accidents, or in hospital beds, it is hard to conjure up anxiety.

• Gregory Paul: Modernity Is Winning

  But the even more important news that hardly any know is that modernity is winning as theism retracts in the face of the prosperity made possible by modern science and technology.

• Joel Gold: The Thin Line Between Mental Illness And Mental Health

  There is clear evidence that large numbers of people who have no psychiatric diagnosis and are not in need of psychiatric treatment experience symptoms of psychosis, notably hallucinations and delusions.
  ...
  Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)--one of the most practiced forms of therapy--while commonly applied to mood, anxiety, and a host of other psychiatric disorders, also works with psychosis. This might seem to be inherently contradictory. By definition, a delusion is held tenaciously, despite evidence to the contrary. You aren't supposed to be able to talk someone out of a delusion. If you could, it wouldn't be a delusion, right? Surprisingly, this is not the case.

• Pamela Rosenkranz: Microbial Attractions

  Sterility is not considered healthy anymore. Medicine is shifting from an antibiotic towards a probiotic approach and the idea of hygiene is becoming an organization of contamination rather, as opposed to disinfection.
  ...
  Current research points to how certain bacterial cultures cause anxiety, depression, and even Alzheimers, while others might be able to help alleviate these ailments.

• Kate Jeffery: Memory Is a Labile Fabrication

  Very recently, it has been shown that memories aren't just fragile when they have been re-activated, they can actually be altered. Using some of the amazing new molecular genetic techniques that have been developed in the past three decades, it has become possible to identify which subset of neurons participated in the encoding of an event, and later experimentally re-activate only these specific neurons, so that the animal is forced (we believe) to recall the event. During this re-activation, scientists have been able to tinker with these memories so that they are different from the original ones.

• Eric R. Weinstein: Anthropic Capitalism And The New Gimmick Economy

  We have strong growth without wage increases. Using Orwellian terms like "Quantitative Easing" or "Troubled Asset Relief", central banks print money and transfer wealth to avoid the market's verdict. Advertising and privacy transfer (rather than user fees) have become the business model of last resort for the Internet corporate giants. Highly trained doctors squeezed between expert systems and no-frills providers are moving from secure professionals towards service sector-workers.

• Jonathan Schooler: The Infancy Of Meta-Science

  Meta-science, the science of science, attempts to use quantifiable scientific methodologies to elucidate how current scientific practices influence the veracity of scientific conclusions. This nascent endeavor is joining the agendas of a variety of fields including medicine, biology, and psychology--each seeking to understand why some initial findings fail to fully replicate.
  ...
  More generally, as we adopt a more meta-scientific perspective, researchers will hopefully increasingly appreciate that just as a single study cannot irrefutably demonstrate the existence of a phenomenon, neither can a single failure to replicate disprove it. Over time, scientists will likely become increasingly comfortable with meticulously documenting and (ideally) pre-registering all aspects of their research. They will see the replication of their work not as a threat to their integrity but rather as testament to their work's importance. They will recognize that replicating other findings is an important component of their scientific responsibilities. They will refine replication procedures to not only discern the robustness of findings, but to understand their boundary conditions, and the reasons why they sometimes (often?) decline in magnitude.

• Joichi Ito: Fecal Microbiota Transplantation

  Fecal Microbiota Transplantation, or FMTs, have been shown to cure Clostridium difficile infections in 90 percent of cases, a condition notoriously difficult to treat any other way. We don't know exactly how FMTs work, other than that the introduction of microbiota (poop) from a healthy individual somehow causes the gut of an afflicted patient to regain its microbial diversity and rein in the rampant Clostridium difficile.
  ...
  As we understand more and more about the genome, the epigenome, the brain, and the variety of complex systems that make us what we are, and the more I learn about the microbiome, the more it feels like maybe modern medicine is like the proverbial aliens trying to understand human motivation by only looking at the cars on the freeway through a telescope and that we have a long way to go before we will really understand what's going on.

• Hazel Rose Markus: The Platinum Rule: Dense, Heavy, But Worth It

  The variously attributed Platinum Rule holds that we should do unto others as they would have us do unto them.
  ...
  The challenge of holding to the Platinum Rule begins with the realization that it is not the Golden Rule--do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
  ...
  Yet built into the very foundation of the Golden Rule is that the assumption that what is good, desirable, just, respectful, and helpful for ME will also be good, desirable, just, respectful and helpful for YOU (or should be, and even it isn't right now, trust me, it will be eventually).

• Ed Regis: The Healthy Diet U-Turn

  To me, the most interesting bit of news in the last couple of years was the sea-change in attitude among nutritional scientists from an anti-fat, pro-carbohydrate set of dietary recommendations to the promotion of a lower-carbohydrate, selectively pro-fat dietary regime.
  ...
  A corollary of this about-face in dietary wisdom was the realization that much of so-called nutritional "science" was actually bad science to begin with. Many of the canonical studies of diet and nutrition were flawed by selective use of evidence, unrepresentative sampling, absence of adequate controls, and shifting clinical trial populations. Furthermore, some of the principal investigators were prone to selection bias, and were loath to confront their preconceived viewpoints with contrary evidence.

• Leo M. Chalupa: A Compelling Explanation For Science Misconduct

  The first of these is the apparent increase in the reported incidence of research findings that cannot be replicated. The causes for this are myriad. In some cases, this is simply because some vital piece of information, required to repeat a given experiment, has been inadvertently (or at times intentionally) omitted. More often, it is the result of sloppy work, such as poor experimental design, inappropriate statistical analysis, or lack of appropriate controls. But there is also evidence that scientific fraud is on the increase.
  ...
  A more compelling explanation is the fiercely competitive nature of science that has accelerated tremendously in recent years. Grants are much harder to get funded, so that even applications ranked by peer review as "very good" are no longer above the pay line.

• Stuart Firestein: Fundamentally Newsworthy

  All this attention on the possible uses and misuses of CRISPR/Cas9 has obscured the real news--which is, in a way, old news. CRISPR/Cas9 is the fruit of years of fundamental research conducted by a few dedicated researchers who were interested in the arcane field of bacterial immunity. Not immunity to bacteria as you might at first think, but how bacteria protect themselves against attack by viruses.

• Christian Keysers: Optogenetics

  Optogenetics is a surprising new field of biotechnology that gives us the means to transform brain activity into light and light into brain activity. It allows us to introduce fluorescent proteins into brain cells to make cells glow when they are active--thereby transforming neural activity into light. It also allows us to introduce photosensitive ion channels into neurons, so that shining light on the cells triggers activity or silences neurons at will--thereby transforming light into neural activity.

• Alexander Wissner-Gross: Datasets Over Algorithms

  A review of the timing of the most publicized AI advances over the past thirty years suggests a provocative explanation: perhaps many major AI breakthroughs have actually been constrained by the availability of high-quality training datasets, and not by algorithmic advances.
  ...
  Examining these advances collectively, the average elapsed time between key algorithm proposals and corresponding advances was about eighteen years, whereas the average elapsed time between key dataset availabilities and corresponding advances was less than three years, or about six times faster, suggesting that datasets might have been limiting factors in the advances.

• Steve Fuller: A Robust Challenge To The Value Of A University Education

  Just in time for the start of the 2015-16 academic year, the UK branch of one of the world's leading accounting firms, Ernst & Young, announced that it would no longer require a university degree as a condition of employment. Instead it would administer its own tests to prospective junior employees. In the future, this event will be seen as the tipping point towards the end of the university as an all-purpose credentials mill that feeds the "knowledge-based" economy.
  ...
  When one considers the massive public and, increasingly, private resources dedicated to funding universities, and the fact that both teaching and research at advanced levels can be--and have been--done more efficiently outside of universities, the social function of universities can no longer be taken for granted.

• Richard Nisbett: The Disillusionment Hypothesis And The Decline and Disaffection For Poor White Americans

  Over the past 15 years or so, the mortality rate for poorly educated middle-aged whites living in the South and West in the U.S. increased significantly. Mortality did not increase for middle-aged blacks, Hispanics or any other ethnic group, nor for whites in other regions of the country, nor for poorly educated whites in other rich countries. The death rates that are most elevated are those for suicide, cirrhosis of the liver, heroin overdose and other causes suggesting self-destructive behavior.
  ...
  The disillusionment hypothesis has the virtue of explaining why it is that the support for Donald Trump is greatest today among ill-educated whites in the poorer, less cosmopolitan regions of the country.