More sloppy thinking on DOD-funded research
I’m sure that Matt Yglesias has forgotten more economics in the past hour than I will ever know. And yet, he believes that “if spending on military ...
Category: Basic Research
Sloppy thinking on DOD-funded research
Several liberal bloggers protested the Times suggestion that cutting the Defense budget will reduce innovation. While some of their points are well-taken (the D...
Scientists and the economic crisis, ctd.
Via the Jack Stilgoe post I just discussed, Colin Macilwain exhorts scientists to deal with a world in crisis: Those involved in science policy sometimes seem t...
The fuzzy boundary between science and technology
Over at Front Porch Republic, Nikos Salingaros (via Jerry Salyer) draws an unnecessarily sharp boundary between science and technology: James Kalb has recently ...
Unclogging the drug pipeline
David Bornstein reports on a promising approach to increase the number of drugs produced by medical research: Researchers in the foundation’s four partner labs ...
Discovery is not a synonym for innovation
My last post discussed Lehrer’s column on the increased difficulty of making scientific discoveries. Lehrer should have stuck with that topic alone instea...
The slowdown of meaningful discovery
Jonah Lehrer has again written a provacative piece, arguing that growing collaboration and teamwork among scientists is a response to “all the low-hanging...
Is academia even supposed to be useful?
If you’re wondering why I keep harping on basic research, it’s because I want to write an essay on the topic and I’m using this venue to hash ...
Maybe politicians and policymakers are smarter than scientists
To continue with the basic research meme, here’s Lewis Branscomb distinguishing the goals of research with how it’s conducted (emphasis added): I be...
Why can’t we just say what we think about basic research?
The second important flaw in the usual antithesis is that these two widespread and ancient modes of thinking about science, pure versus applied, have tended to ...