With everything being done to women in some Islamic countries, the announcement that one of this year four winners of the highest distinction in the field of mathematics, the Fields medal, is not only the first woman to win it but also Iranian born should be celebrated first for her realization but also for the symbolic of it!
Details of her work can be found in Scientific American: Iranian Woman Nabs Highest Prize in Mathematics – Scientific American.
Yep, Facebook experimented with 700 000 of its users without their knowledge, and published their results in PNAS!
The general explanation: the users consent to anything and everything for the rest of their lives (Facebook lives) when they signed up to use the service. By that measure, every patient coming to our medical clinics agrees to be part of an experiment or trial and their data used for publication because they have agreed to be treated… OK, I am pushing the boundary a bit (maybe a lot) here but you get the picture and it is a bit absurd.
(* Cartoon from the Cagle Post by Arend van Dam)
However, this has lead to an interesting post on the concept of informed consent, which is at the heart of this kind of studies. It is an essential condition (but not the only one) to allow clinical or drug trials and robustly enforced by ethic committees, at least in the OCDE countries. While hospitals and physicians can use patient data for quality assurance purposes, publication of the said data cannot be made without the patient informed consent.
This could be a great general public education opportunity.
Traveling with colleagues and students to one of the major scientific meeting in our field.
Year after year, one word come to mind: exciting!
Recently saw a comment by a student about not being advised before hand that doing a PhD had many difficulties and challenges. However, my first reaction reading that text was to start laughing. Of course, all that was said was true. But the first thing that came to my mind was the famous warning when you ask for a sundae with nuts at a McDonald : you received (at least in North America) the nuts in a small, sealed separate bag (think allergies); this bag has a warning that reads (seriously): may contain nuts!
Doh!
Are journals like Science, Nature and the like giving too much importance to themselves to the point of distorting the scientific process? A Nobel prize winner seems to think so (from The Guardian)
Ruminating... 