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+27 +1
Ohio State revokes Arizona professor's Ph.D., questioning her findings on video games
U of Arizona professor's Ph.D. is revoked after her findings on violent video games are questioned. Some wonder if her mentor and co-author is also to blame.
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+18 +1
It's Gonna Get a Lot Easier to Break Science Journal Paywalls
Scientific search engines are the Napster of academic papers—and they're only getting more powerful.
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+28 +1
People are “consistently inconsistent” in how they reason about controversial scientific topics
There are various issues on which there is a scientific consensus but great public controversy, such as anthropogenic climate change and the safety of vaccines. One previously popular explanation for this mismatch was that an information deficit among the public is to blame. Give people all the facts and then, according to this perspective, the public will catch up with the scientists. Yet time and again, that simply hasn’t happened.
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+3 +1
Correction to climate change study highlights flaws in peer-review process
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Scientists and journalists alike were reminded of that oft-quoted phrase by famed cosmologist Carl Sagan when authors of a study published in Nature admitted this week that they needed to issue a correction. The study was widely covered by outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC and Scientific American. While the correction, which has yet to appear, may provide fodder for climate change skeptics, many in the scientific community are praising the authors...
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+31 +1
Are scientists less prone to motivated reasoning?
A new study lays out a bit of a conundrum in its opening paragraphs. It notes that scientific progress depends on the ability to update what ideas are considered acceptable in light of new evidence. But science itself has produced no shortage of evidence that people are terrible at updating their beliefs and suffer from issues like confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Since scientists are, in fact, people, the problems with updating beliefs should severely limit science's ability to progress.
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