I went to a 125th anniversary lecture day organised by Nature and I still remember it (25 years later) as an outstanding day. Speakers included Richard Dawkins, Stephen J Gould and Carl Sagan, who used his 'pale blue dot' lines in his talk. A truly stunning array of the great luminaries of the day. It's great to see Nature continuing.
One of the more amusing moments was when one of the speakers - describing mankind vs the environment (or something, I don't precisely recollect now) - finished by saying something like "...and so you see, Nature will always defeat Science", referring of course to Nature the journal's rival journal. Unfortunately someone in the audience didn't make that connection, and tried debating with the speaker about the primacy of science and technology. Oh well.
I subscribed to both Science and Nature for a while but dropped my Nature subscription about 2 years ago. They constantly spin off specialty titles and limit archive access to 1997 and later. They were also adding a lot of sponsored content that wasn't clearly marked. For a comparable cost, Science allows full archive access and the publishing group has fewer titles. I'm more likely to find articles in a field I haven't heard of before. Science's sponsored content, and it does have it, is easier to spot and ignore.
Re:150 Years of Nature
by spodek on Saturday November 09, 2019 @01:05PM
(#21493074)
Science to me means observing and experimenting with nature, then honestly reporting the results.
With the science around the environment so conclusive and the timeline for preventing suffering so short, I consider the most important task of a scientist to make the results usable -- not just understandable and meaningful, but clear in what to do. That means living sustainably ourselves. When Greta gave scientific results to the US Congress, they still didn't know what to do with it.
Since few leaders will learn science, scientists learning to lead will make a difference. Fact, figures, doom, gloom, and such, however correct, aren't leadership. Nor is telling people what to do, which generally motivates people to keep doing what they were.
Individual action isn't widespread change, but scientists who don't follow their advice undermine that advice and lead others also not to follow it, which is why sites like https://noflyclimatesci.org are so important.
It's not the only solution, but until we make scientists who live unsustainably go the way of a surgeon general who smokes, all our results will become like the Library of Alexandria after nature corrects our population.
Re:150 Years of Nature
by briga on Saturday November 09, 2019 @11:39AM
(#21492485)
Love the little videos Nature puts out, you can find a bunch more on their YouTube channel. I'd be interested in seeing a similar map based on some measure of semantic/vocabulary similarity rather than just citations. There are probably a lot of connections between papers that aren't captured by citations
Re:150 Years of Nature
by xkcd-sucks on Saturday November 09, 2019 @02:12PM
(#21493594)
The lab that did it actually got the full text archives of Nature, but the NLP was tricky so they fell back to a citation network to finish the project in time. BTW internally they call the vertical individual-papers plots "carrots"
One of the more amusing moments was when one of the speakers - describing mankind vs the environment (or something, I don't precisely recollect now) - finished by saying something like "...and so you see, Nature will always defeat Science", referring of course to Nature the journal's rival journal. Unfortunately someone in the audience didn't make that connection, and tried debating with the speaker about the primacy of science and technology. Oh well.
With the science around the environment so conclusive and the timeline for preventing suffering so short, I consider the most important task of a scientist to make the results usable -- not just understandable and meaningful, but clear in what to do. That means living sustainably ourselves. When Greta gave scientific results to the US Congress, they still didn't know what to do with it.
Since few leaders will learn science, scientists learning to lead will make a difference. Fact, figures, doom, gloom, and such, however correct, aren't leadership. Nor is telling people what to do, which generally motivates people to keep doing what they were.
Individual action isn't widespread change, but scientists who don't follow their advice undermine that advice and lead others also not to follow it, which is why sites like https://noflyclimatesci.org are so important.
It's not the only solution, but until we make scientists who live unsustainably go the way of a surgeon general who smokes, all our results will become like the Library of Alexandria after nature corrects our population.
Then what is the relation between computer science and nature?
Sidenote: Today was Starbucks 150 year too