if you're a senior scientist wanting to set up a lab in another institution, the first question you're going to ask is whether you're going to have good students (who of course do all the actual lab work). Unfortunately, Singapore seems to do a very good job of exporting its best students. They're sent overseas on fully-funded, prestigious scholarships to foreign institutions.

Science Research Community Singapore Scholarship

Bias is an inescapable element of research, especially in fields such as biomedicine that strive to isolate cause–effect relations in complex systems in which relevant variables and phenomena can never be fully identified or characterized. Yet if biases were random, then multiple studies ought to converge on truth. Evidence is mounting that biases are not random. A Comment in Nature in March reported that researchers at Amgen were able to confirm the results of only six of 53 'landmark studies' in preclinical cancer research (C. G. Begley & L. M. Ellis Nature 483, 531–533; 2012). For more than a decade, and with increasing frequency, scientists and journalists have pointed out similar problems.

Science Publication Selection Bias Research Academic Journal Academic Research

Two NGOs for shark conservation, Shark Savers and Project: FIN, protested against Singapore’s unwillingness to ban shark fin products, at the Animal Welfare Symposium last Saturday. 
Project: FIN founder Jennifer Lee quoting a WildAid letter in her question to Minister K Shanmugam and the panel at the end of the symposium, protested against trade interests behind the ‘marine life experts’ Hank Jenkins and Dr. Giam Choo Hoo, exposing their conflicts of interest with wildlife trade.

Sharks Finning Funding Activism Research Sustainability

One of the arguments for special government support of manufacturing is that manufacturing is a key to industrial R&D throughout the US economy (e.g., here). The data above comes from BEA and NSF and shows that as manufacturing declined as a portion of GDP from 2002 to 2007, industry R&D nonetheless increased (note: NSF data goes to 2007).

Manufacturing Industry Research Economics

Does “soft power” matter in international relations? Specifically, when the U.S. seeks cooperation from countries around the world, do the views of their publics about U.S. foreign policy affect the actual foreign policy behavior of these countries? We examine this question using multinational surveys covering 58 countries, combined with information about their foreign policy decisions in 2003, a critical year for the U.S. We draw our basic conceptual framework from Joseph Nye, who uses various indicators of opinion about the U.S. to assess U.S. soft power. But we argue that his theory lacks the specificity needed for falsifiable testing. We refine it by focusing on foreign public opinion about U.S. foreign policy, an under-emphasized element of Nye’s approach. Our regression analysis shows that it has a significant and large effect on troop commitments to the war in Iraq, even after controlling for various hard power factors. It also has significant, albeit small, effects on policies towards the International Criminal Court, and on voting decisions in the U.N. General Assembly. These results support our refined theoretical argument about soft-power: Public opinion about U.S. foreign policy in foreign countries does affect their policies towards the U.S., but this effect is conditional on the salience of an issue for mass publics.

Soft Power Power Foreign Policy Research

On pure vs. applied science: the best research is “pure” research, often with no practical goal in mind.

Science Research Methodology Consequentialism

Two groups of scientists who carried out highly controversial studies with the avian influenza virus H5N1 have reluctantly agreed to strike certain details from manuscripts describing their work after having been asked to do so by a U.S. biosecurity council. The as-yet unpublished papers, which are under review at Nature and Science, will be changed to minimize the risks that they could be misused by would-be bioterrorists.

But the stricken details may still be made available to influenza scientists who have a legitimate interest in knowing them under a new system the journals and U.S. government officials have been actively debating for some time.

The two papers have both been reviewed at length by the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSSAB), and both have been the subject of intense global media attention the past 2 months. They have also triggered debates among scientists, security experts, and officials within various branches of the U.S. government.

Research Publication Selection Censorship Terrorism

At first glance, Robert Kirshner took the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU's campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI's) list of highly cited researchers.

Academia Ranking Research

The idea of reflective equilibrium was introduced by Nelson Goodman in his book “Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.” Goodman was not concerned with morality, but with the validity of one’s thinking. Goodman’s suggestion was that we justify our rules of reasoning based on how those rules fare when confronted with a range of instances of what we believe are correct inferences. If an inferential rule yields unacceptable results, we may decided to discard that rule no matter how it may have seemed like a good idea at the start.

Reflective Equilibrium Philosophy Science Theory Research

Research Methodology Interview Plagiarism Journalism

Ever wondered why we get disgusted by things that taste bad and also by things that are morally outrageous? Well, it seems that they really are connected in a very deep way - moral disgust seems to have evolved as an extension of physical disgust.

And that means you can play a neat trick: you can measure moral disgust indirectly by looking to see how it affects our physical sense of disgust.

Research Methodology Religion Morality

Getting honest answers about behaviour that is illegal or frowned-upon – such as taking drugs or visiting prostitutes – is notoriously difficult. But survey researchers have devised a neat way to get people comfortable with revealing their indiscretions.

Each time the researcher asks the respondent a question, the respondent throws dice before answering – crucially, the researcher cannot see what numbers come up. The rules of the game will be something like this: the respondent will always answer "yes" if they throw a six and "no" when a one comes up, but should tell the truth otherwise.

Because a "yes" doesn't necessarily mean that the respondent actually committed the undesirable behaviour, people seem to open up. The forced "yes" and "no" answers introduce some "noise" into the results, but overall this "randomised response technique" (RRT) gives better answers. For instance, RRT questions get much closer than conventional surveys to the actual incidence of drug use that is revealed by screening tests on hair

Research Methodolatry

When scientists violate moral taboos, we expect horrific consequences. It’s a trope in our storytelling that goes back at least to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: However well-intentioned our fictional scientists may be, their disregard for ethical boundaries will produce not a peer-reviewed paper in Science but rather a new race of subhuman killers, a sucking wormhole in space-time, or a profusion of malevolent goo.

In the real world, though, matters aren’t so simple. Most scientists will assure you that ethical rules never hinder good research—that there’s always a virtuous path to testing any important hypothesis. But ask them in private, perhaps after a drink or three, and they’ll confess that the dark side does have its appeal. Bend the rules and some of our deepest scientific conundrums could be elucidated or even resolved: nature versus nurture, the causes of mental illness, even the mystery of how humans evolved from monkeys. These discoveries are just sitting out there, waiting for us to find them, if only we were willing to lose our souls.

What follows are seven creepy experiments—thought experiments, really—that show how contemporary science might advance if it were to toss away the moral compass that guides it. Don’t try these at home—or anywhere, for that matter. But also don’t pretend you wouldn’t like to learn the secrets that these experiments would reveal.

Experiment Research Ethics

you can always “find research to support” anything you like, and I commented to that effect. Indeed, that is exactly how I used to work, before I knew better. Probably until at least 2005, I was still much more of a massage therapist than a science writer. (I quit massage more than a year ago.) I thought like a therapist, had therapist thoughts, and therapist theories. I would bring those ideas to my desk and look for scientific papers in PubMed that backed me up — pretty much the definition of “cherry picking” — and then (groan) fancy myself to be quite the smarty pants. I really hadn’t the faintest clue that scientific papers could be so incredibly misleading, or how trivial a single experimental result was — the sound of one hand clapping.

Research Science Cherry-picking

in the middle of this golden age of behavioral research, there is a bill working through Congress that would eliminate the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This is exactly how budgets should not be balanced — by cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits.

Society Social Sciences Funding Academia Research Scarcity Psychology

Academia Academic Research Data Education Social Media

Data is everywhere, but use of data is not. So many of our efforts are centered around making money or getting people to buy more things, and this is understandable; however, there are neglected areas that could actually have a huge impact on the way we live. Jake Porway, a data scientist at The New York Times, has a proposition for you, tentatively called Data Without Borders.
[T]here are lots of NGOs and non-profits out there doing wonderful things for the world, from rehabilitating criminals, to battling hunger, to providing clean drinking water. However, they’re increasingly finding themselves with more and more data about their practices, their clients, and their missions that they don’t have the resources or budgets to analyze. At the same time, the data/dev communities love hacking together weekend projects where we play with new datasets or build helpful scripts, but they usually just culminate in a blog post or some Twitter buzz. Wouldn’t it be rad if we could get these two sides together?

Data Open Source Collaboration NGO Research Methodology

It was 1946 and orphans in Guatemala City, along with prisoners, military conscripts and prostitutes, had been selected for a medical experiment which would torment many, and remain secret, for more than six decades.

The US, worried about GIs returning home with sexual diseases, infected an estimated 1,500 Guatemalans with syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid to test an early antibiotic, penicillin.

Research Ethics Academic Research

Information is more easily accessible now than ever before, and smart, motivated people can sidestep traditional routes to obtain knowledge and disseminate it.

Information Internet Education Knowledge Censorship Research

Religion Sex Abuse Research