måndag 30 maj 2016

What comes after innovation?

Over the centuries different things have been valued differently. It has been physical strength, art, religion and science. In our time it is innovation.

It should however be noted that innovation does not have any simple relation to science. Science focuses on what is true in some objective sense and on the method of structured reasoning. But this is not what matters to innovation, which puts sell-ability first.

Now the big question is: What will come next? I have no clear answer, but my bet is on something where the human is even more in the center than now. So it could be some bio-related stuff. For example nerve-connected people, viz artificial telepathy. It could also be something new in the arts. Or something connected to other lifeforms,  animals or AI.

fredag 27 maj 2016

Can RF radiation cause cancer?

This silly question just refuses to go away.
Finally after 11 years NTP released a report. And, waaah, they found something.

Really? What about scaling to humans, publication bias, statistical significance,  realism, ...

And also - of course it is cancerogenus. Seriously, I am sure it is. But what is not? If we would apply the same care with tobacco,  alcohol,  sugar,  fat, chemicals, fossil fuel residues, well, most things that are nice. Not much would be left. Isn't there better ways to spend $25M?

torsdag 19 maj 2016

In Python, -k/2 != -(k/2)

I just found an interesting fact about Python. The following C program:
#include

int main(int argc, char * argv[]){
int k = 11;
printf("k = %d\n", k);
printf("k/2 = %d\n", k/2);
printf("-k/2 = %d\n", -k/2);
printf("-(k/2) = %d\n", -(k/2));
}
will output:
k = 11
k/2 = 5
-k/2 = -5
-(k/2) = -5

However, the following Python program:
k = 11
print k
print k/2
print -k/2
print -(k/2)
will output:
11
5
-6
-5

I guess this is related to Pythons floor division, and has apparently been changed in Python 3.

torsdag 12 maj 2016

Wikimedia foundation the ideal publisher of free scientific papers

The issue of open science is a pressing one. The large publication houses, Elsiver, NPG and the others make huge profits publishing scientific papers. And the situation is actually absurd! The publishers really do nothing - they do not write the papers, perform the research, do the review, or the typesetting (ok, maybe thy do typesetting, but really it is to a minimal degree with the modern typesetting systems).
There is a slow drive for so called open access. However, this is something that even further increase publishers income since open access papers are funded by huge fees from the publishers to the authors.
So, we need some new actor stepping in and taking publishing responsibility, including review assignment, This is really the key problem that needs to be solved in true free science. How to manage the review process.
My suggestion is to have a process similar to how Wikipedia works. Maybe in combination with other elements such as a score system similar to Stack Exchange. And really Wikimedia is the ideal organisation to take on this task. It is the natural extension of their current operation, maybe in connection to Wikiversity. But a completely new project would probably be even better.