Paul Higgins: All for this, greater transparency means people have to be more open and true in what they do. Can only help the rigour of science and research.
If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be bunk.”
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
This is an interesting approach that maybe will force social scientists and others who are active in research disciplines masquerading as science to rethink and create a methodological foundation that fits their own area.
Future extraterrestrial rovers may be powered remotely by high-energy laser beams shot through miles of thin fiber-optic cables. This new technology could allow robotic probes to penetrate thick layers of ice to explore Antarctic lakes or the subterranean oceans on icy moons like Europa or Enceladus, and even power a new kind of rocket into space.
“Our modest goal over the next three years is to use a 5,000-watt laser to send a cryobot through up to 250 meters of ice,” inventor and explorer Bill Stone, who presented the new concept today at NASA’s Astrobiology Science Conference in Atlanta, told Wired. “All the data show there are no show-stoppers for doing that. But from my standpoint, this is child’s play compared to what we could do.”
LASERS drilling into SPACE?!
YES, THAT IS CHILD’S PLAY INDEED.
Chris Fraser creates dazzling light installations by turning a dark enclosed room into variation on a camera obscura. A precursor to the camera, the camera obscura is “a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved.”
Fraser on his project:
My light installations use the ‘camera obscura’ as a point of departure. They are immersive optical environments, idealized spaces with discreet openings. In translating the outside world into moving fields of light and color, the projections make an argument for unfixed notion of sight.
