{"id":225,"date":"2006-05-02T10:50:52","date_gmt":"2006-05-02T10:50:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/02\/science-of-the-times\/"},"modified":"2006-05-02T10:50:52","modified_gmt":"2006-05-02T10:50:52","slug":"science-of-the-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/02\/science-of-the-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Science of the Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of good science stories in today’s New York Times<\/cite>:<\/p>\n

First, an article on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)<\/a>. The current news hook, weirdly, appears to be a recent calculation of the expected magnitude of the signal resulting from the collision and merger of two black holes. Why this merits a long article, I’m not sure– I was under the impression that they already had a decent idea of the expected signal sizes– but it’s a decent article.<\/p>\n

The other story will probably get more play, as it’s about the deathless topic of problems with peer review<\/a>. As others have noted<\/a>, peer review isn’t the problem. It’s working about as well as can be expected– all you can really do when refereeing a paper is catch really transparently idiotic problems with the writing and presentation of the data. If you could easily reproduce the calculations in a theory paper, it wouldn’t be worth publishing, and as for the duplication of experimental results, forget it, at least before publication.<\/p>\n

In the longer term, of course, results do need to be reproducible, and that’s how the frauds we know of have been caught. That’s the really important part of the system of modern science– not the pre-publication review, but the post-publication replication of the results by other groups. Pre-publication review is important, but it’s never going to be foolproof, and we shouldn’t be too worried about its occasional failures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of good science stories in today’s New York Times: First, an article on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The current news hook, weirdly, appears to be a recent calculation of the expected magnitude of the signal resulting from the collision and merger of two black holes. Why this merits a long article,… Continue reading Science of the Times<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,33,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-in_the_news","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}