Was will das Postdoc? (What does a postdoc want?)
Introduction. A couple of months ago, an interesting article by Jennifer Rohn on Nature prompted an explosive discussion on the interweb about the career perspectives of post doctoral researchers. Jennifer’s point in a nutshell was “we should give postdocs the chance to keep being postdocs forever and ever if they so wish” and was encountered [...]
Of scientists and entrepreneurs.
Prepare to jump. Jump. As my trusty 25 readers would know, a few months ago I made the big career jump and moved from being on the bench side of science to the desk side, becoming what is called a Principal Investigator (PI). As a matter of fact nothing really seems to have changed so [...]
What has changed in science and what must change.
I frequently have discussions about funding in Science (who doesn’t?) but I realized I never really formalized my ideas about it. It makes sense to do that here. A caveat before I start is that everything I write about concerns the field of bio and medical sciences because those are the ones I know. Other fields may work in different ways. YMMV.
Lots of smoke, hardly any gun. Do climatologists falsify data?
One of climate change denialists favorite arguments concerns the fact that not always can weather station temperature data be used as raw. Sometimes they need to be adjusted. Adjustments are necessary in order to compensate with changes the happened over time either to the station itself or to the way data were collected: if the [...]
Il surriscaldamento (globale) della blogosfera e il metodo scientifico.
Questo post nasce come commento al post di Aldo Rustichini su nFA, ma è troppo lungo e troppo articolato e sta meglio qui. Dice Aldo che alcuni eventi recenti suggeriscono che “un ripensamento sulla evidenza disponibile sul Global Warming e’ consigliabile”. Perché non sono affattto d’accordo.
L’influenza H1N1 del 2009
Si parla tanto di influenza e vaccini, ultimamente. Provo a farlo anche io, cercando di mettere enfasi sulle cose che raramente vengono dette in altre sedi. Parto con lo spiegare alcuni dei punti fondamentali della biologia dell’influenza, per capire (semplificando un po’). Siccome il fulcro principale di tutto il circo mediatico ruota attorno alla pericolosità del virus, mi soffermerò sui meccanismi che lo rendono pericoloso.
Post originariamente pubblicato su noisefromamerika.org; andare li’ per i commenti.
What I Think About When I Think About Manuscripts – I, Editor – Henry Gee’s blog on Nature Network
Perhaps what I am getting at is that scientific papers tend to be static. The best literature – of any kind – has a beginning, a middle and an end, in which the protagonists undertake some kind of journey, whether geographical or spiritual, and are changed by their experiences. In scientific papers, the results often [...]
Wikipedia, Citizendium, Frankenstein and the golem.
Everybody knows Wikipedia so no need for introduction. Let’s just say that of the many very different opinions I have heard about it – placeable everywhere in the range from most celebratory to destructive – there is a quote that I find very attractive: Wikipedia should not work, but it does! This quote, which I [...]
Gattaca’s time.
X PRIZE Foundation is a non-profit foundation based in Santa Monica, CA. They gained popularity few years ago when they listed and subsequently awarded the Ansari X Prize. They offered US$10mln to the first private institution that would be able to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. The price was [...]
What does it take to make a good Scientist?
I just saw something on the weekly edition of Nature Jobs that made me very happy. It is something that I was waiting to see since a long time. In May 2006 Georgia Chenevix-Trench felt like sharing some of her wisdom with the youngest public of the journal Nature. In the (often embarrassing) portion of [...]
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