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22 votes
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Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks
3 votes -
7% of Americans don't use the internet
18 votes -
Rise of the 'robo-plants', as scientists fuse nature with tech
6 votes -
GambleAware publishes new gaming and gambling research
8 votes -
Greta Thunberg has mocked climate change deniers by citing research that claims human penises are getting smaller because of increased pollution
6 votes -
Scientists grow mouse embryos in a mechanical womb
5 votes -
OpenHW Group and Mitacs announce a $22.5M research program for open-source processors
4 votes -
Joanna Harper’s new research shows why trans athletes should be able to compete in women’s sports
10 votes -
Breakthrough male contraceptive pill derived from Chinese medicine
17 votes -
Scientists discover massive 'pipeline' in the cosmic web connecting the universe
7 votes -
More trees do not always create a cooler planet (and in some places deforestation cools more)
4 votes -
When scientists become allergic to their research
10 votes -
Powerpaste ‘goo’ stores ten times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries
19 votes -
Experimental compound revives memory in Alzheimer’s disease mice
11 votes -
Hurricanes and typhoons moving 30km closer to coasts every decade for the last forty years
6 votes -
Federal officials have misused a fund intended for vaccine research to pay for unrelated expenses since at least 2010, the US Office of Special Counsel has alleged
7 votes -
Identical twins aren’t perfect clones, research shows
8 votes -
BOTI Science: Best of interval compilations, suggestions? Supporting trends identification
Discussions of progress or collapse often get mired in the question of significant discoveries and inventions. After wrestling with several organisational cencepts for various catalogues, and...
Discussions of progress or collapse often get mired in the question of significant discoveries and inventions. After wrestling with several organisational cencepts for various catalogues, and running into the Ever Growing List dilemma, I hit on what I call BOTI, or Best of the Interval (day, week, month, year, decade, century, etc.). It's similar to the tickler file 43 folder perpetual filing system of GTD. For technical types, a round-robin database or circular buffer.
(As with my bullet journal experiments, the effort is uneven but recoverable, which is its core strength.)
By setting up a cascade of buffers --- day of month, (optionally week or weekdays), month of year, year of decade, decade of century, century of millennium, millennium of 10kyr, a progressively larger scale record (roughly order-of-magnitude based), with a resolution of day but a maximum retention of (here) 10,000 years but only 83 record bins. How much you choose to put in each bin is up to you, but the idea is that only to most significant information is carried forward. Yes, some information is lost but total data storage requirements are known once the bin size and count are established.
Another problem BOTI addresses is finite attention. If you limit yourself to a finite set of items per year, say ten to one hundred (about what a moderately motivated individual could be aware of), BOTI is a form of noise-filtering. Items which seemed urgent or captivating in the moment often fade in significance with time, and often overlooked element rise in significance with time and context. 'Let it settle with time" is a good cure to FOMO.
There's the question of revisiting context. I'd argue that significance might be substantially revised years, decades, possibly centuries after a discovery or inventiion. So an end-of-period purge of all but the top items isn't what we're looking for. Gut a gradual forgetting / pruning seems the general idea.
Back to science and technology: It's hard to assess significance in the moment, and day-to-day reports of science and technology advances are noisy. I've been looking for possible sources to use and am finding little that's satisfactory. I'd like suggestions.
- Many newspapers and magazines run annual "best of" features. These typically include books, but not science (or at least not regularly). Some of the books are science- or technonolgy-related, though.
- There are the Nobel prizes, notably in physics, chemistry, and medicine, with lists at Wikipedia (linked). The Fields Medal in maths. Other fields have their awards, of which lists might prove useful...
- I'm having trouble finding something like a yearbook of science or technology, though some titles match, e.g., McGraw-Hill yearbook of science and technology. On closer look, this might answer my question, at least for yearbooks.
- Wikipedia has some promising but either inconsistent or untidily organised pages or collections, including the List of years in science, Timeline of historic inventions, Timeline of scientific discoveries, Timeline of scientific thought, among numerous other timelines. Compilations are useful but aren't themselves rankings. See also "never ending list" above.
There is a goal here: trends over time. I've a few senses of directions of research and progress, possibly also of biases in awards. Looking at, for example, Nobels in physics, chemistry, and medicine from, say, 1901--1960 vs. 1961--2020, there seems to be a marked shift, though categorising that might be difficult. The breakpoint isn't necessarily 1960 either --- 1950 or 1940 might be argued for.
There is the question of how to measure significance of scientific discoveries or technological inventions. I'm not going to get into that though several standard measures (e.g., counting patents issued) strike me as highly problematic, despite being common in research. Discussion might be interesting.
Mostly, though, I'm looking for data sources.
5 votes -
Global increase in major tropical cyclone exceedance probability over the past four decades
5 votes -
It’s time to restore scientific integrity
11 votes -
Stephen Krashen on Second Language Acquisition (SLA), reading and research
5 votes -
New evidence for cyclic universe claimed by Roger Penrose and colleagues
6 votes -
K: The overlooked variable that's driving the pandemic
6 votes -
Bradykinin storms are the hottest new hypothesis for why Covid-19 can wreak havoc on the body
12 votes -
Dark hair was common among Vikings – research reveals they were a genetically diverse group and not purely Scandinavian
14 votes -
What sexual and gender minority people want researchers to know about sexual orientation and gender identity questions: A qualitative study
4 votes -
University of North Carolina researchers were potentially exposed to lab-created coronaviruses in several incidents since 2015, highlighting the risks even in respected research facilities
8 votes -
Lab mice have a chill, and that may be messing up study results
2 votes -
Bisexuality exists: Bisexual attraction study upends decades of flawed research
27 votes -
New techniques are helping medical researchers develop new anti-cancer drugs and gain a better understanding of how existing ones work
5 votes -
The United States has abruptly ordered China to close its consulate in Houston, accusing diplomats of aiding economic espionage and the attempted theft of scientific research
7 votes -
SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls
12 votes -
UK, US, and Canada accuse Russia of trying to steal information from coronavirus vaccine researchers
15 votes -
Hello Robot's Stretch wants to reinvent how mobile manipulators perform tasks in home environments
4 votes -
Study finds hydroxychloroquine may have boosted survival, but other researchers have doubts
5 votes -
The girl who turned to bone
6 votes -
The rapid sharing of pandemic research shows there is a better way to filter good science from bad
7 votes -
COVID-19 may have been in Italy as early as December 2019, according to new research of sewage samples
8 votes -
Coronaviruses are extremely widespread in wild animals bred for food in Vietnam, with the wildlife supply chain quickly spreading those viruses to uninfected animals, preliminary research shows
6 votes -
Where’s airborne plastic? Everywhere, scientists find
3 votes -
The tiny data firm at the center of the hydroxychloroquine storm
8 votes -
A mysterious company’s coronavirus papers in top medical journals may be unraveling
15 votes -
Researchers claim new internet speed record of 44.2 Tbps over a standard optical fiber cable, using a single integrated chip
9 votes -
America’s deadly obsession with intellectual property: Privatizing life-saving technology like vaccines and clean energy is bad both for the coronavirus and the climate crisis
9 votes -
Building a mouse squad against Covid-19
6 votes -
Elisabeth Bik quit her job to spot errors in research papers — and has become the public face of image sleuthing
9 votes -
Research reveals possible active tectonic system on the moon
8 votes -
How the virus-stricken USS Theodore Roosevelt may help coronavirus researchers
6 votes -
Opinion: Stop private speculation in COVID-19 research
5 votes