Premi per parassiti

Notizia per Gvdr. Molti bio-informatici, bio-statistici, bio-matematici si definiscono parassiti da quando i direttori del New England Journal of Medicine li hanno chiamati “parassiti  dei dati”. Hanno anche istituito un Junior award per debuttanti, un Sustained award per recidivi, che hanno analizzato dati raccolti da altri per pubblicare “really cool sh*t“.

For either award, submit an application by October 14, 2016 at 5PM HST (Hawaii Standard Time) to parasite.award@gmail.com. An application requires:

• A nomination letter describing how each selected paper meets the criteria for the award. Self nominations are encouraged, and all nominees must be aware that they have been nominated.
• Junior Parasite (aka the sporozoite): a PDF of one paper on which the application will be judged.
• Sustained Parasitism (aka the meroszoite): PDFs of three papers on which the application will be judged.

Selection criteria (both awards) for the work in question:

• The awardee must not have been involved the design of the experiments that generated the data. 
• The awardee published independently of the original investigators, and the original investigators are not authors of the secondary analyses but are appropriately credited in the manuscripts.
• The awardee may have extended, replicated or disproved what the original investigators had posited.
• The awardee has provided source code and intermediate or final results in a manner that enhances reproducibility.

Si vince un invito e un applauso al Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. (h/t Retraction Watch)

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Ho cominciato a leggere il saggio di Daniele Fanelli – un bio-evo-matematico  – sulla distinzione logica-matematica tra scienza e pseudoscienza. O meglio, è una sorta di teoria “quantizzata” (bit di sapere) delle conoscenze (K), le quali sono dotate di 3 proprietà:

Thev first property is Occam’s razor, which turns out to be implicit in our mathematization of knowledge. The second property is  K’s dependence upon accuracy, which is defined by the quantization of explanans and explanandum. We defined measurement error as the defining property of empirical knowledge, and it was shown that K  possesses a single optimal level of accuracy. The third property is K’s decline over time, measured as a distance between explanans and explanandum. This decline only occurs for empirical systems, and implies that knowledge of all empirical systems encounters a “chaos horizon”, beyond which
K  (Y; X) ~ ~ 0. Logico-deductive systems are different from empirical systems solely in not having measurement error and therefore no chaos horizon.

Uff… non so fare la doppia tilde. La pseudo-scienza è il contrario.

A functional connection between bias and pseudoscience, is apparent in all typical examples of pseudoscience, such as astrology, Freudian psychoanalysis, homeopathy, Intelligent Design and others. These activities differ from one another in many details,  but upon closer inspection reveal at least two common characteristics:
1-they appear to produce relevant amounts of knowledge only of explanatory kind – they provide, in other words, high “understanding”, but only of individual events;
2-their methodologies are at  odds with those of established sciences. Both these conditions, it will be shown below, match the conditions we identified for bias, to levels that are extreme enough to make K equal or lower than zero.

Dai miei calcoli, nelle “attività” promosse da 22 passi K è < 0, sarà perché secondo D. Passerini:

TUTTA la scienza  (e ribadisco TUTTA) è debitrice al lavoro di Freud e Jung, nonostante quello che Ocasapiens pensi e scriva (non facendo proprio una gran bella figura). Non riesco a dimenticare certe cose…

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O’s digest – Science

La direttrice confessa di aver “un rapporto di amore-odio” con Sci-Hub, il sito dal quale scaricare gratuitamente circa 40 milioni di paper, e sonda i lettori per sapere se lo fanno; sì, scrive John Bohannon, lo fanno tutti…

Edwin Cartlidge parla di Carlo Doglioni, il nuovo “boss” dell’INGV scelto dalla ministra Giannini, né sismologo né vulcanologo comunque meno contestato della coppia Gresta-Ghilardi:

Among the issues under scrutiny was a consultancy of €130,000 awarded by Ghilardi to a company based in Brescia, in northern Italy, where he was previously a town councilor. (A political colleague of his had reportedly worked as a consultant for a former incarnation of the company for 11 years.) In addition, Gresta came under fire from a group of senators for alleged “anomalies and lack of transparency” when laying out criteria for filling 200 new permanent positions at the institute; the senators suspected that the criteria were deliberately set to allow specific individuals to be hired…

“The dragon sleeps tonight” è una ricerca sulle onde cerebrali e l’evoluzione del sonno, non nei varani di Komodo che l’avrebbero presa male penso, ma nei più miti draghi barbuti Pogona vitticeps (foto)

 We implanted five lizards with either tetrode arrays or linear silicon probes inserted in the dorsal forebrain (in the cortex and the dorsal ventricular ridge, or DVR). After recovery from surgery and slow electrode advance, we recorded extracellular electrical activity [local field potential (LFP), multi- and single-unit activity] continuously over 18 to 20 hours centered on the middle of the night, usually combining behavioral monitoring with electrophysiology. Recordings from individual animals were repeated over days to weeks.

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the typical features of slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. 

The networks controlling SW-REM antagonism in amniotes may thus originate from a common, ancient oscillator circuit. Lizard SW dynamics closely resemble those observed in rodent hippocampal CA1, yet they originate from a brain area, the dorsal ventricular ridge, that has no obvious hodological similarity with the mammalian hippocampus.

Devo ancora guardare il supplemento sul microbiota.