Ask HN: Where do you get your science? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do you get your science?

9 pointsirollboozers9 comments

Where do ya'll consume your science? I know it's no longer the case of tv, radio, or newspaper headlines for this crowd, but I am curious to know what websites, blogs, or social networks you all use to keep up to date. Or do you even consciously keep up to date at all, or is the headline method of learning about science just changing?

Reddit (/r/science, /r/askscience), Scienceblogs, viral Twitter news, and maybe here are some of the venues for myself personally. These tend to be pop-sci and general in topic.

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Reddit (/r/science, /r/askscience), Scienceblogs, viral Twitter news, and maybe here are some of the venues for myself personally. These tend to be pop-sci and general in topic.

Yep, I like more serious stuff myself. When I really want to research a subject in depth, I go straight to the academic libraries of my alma mater university across town (now often via its extensive subscriptions to databases that I can access from home with user authentication I gain through an affiliation with that university). For articles to look at for submission to Hacker News, I

1) make sure to have a science section in my Google News set-up, and additionally use Google News and Google Scholar keyword searches to check submissions by other users to HN,

2) follow the recommendations of certain key Facebook friends of mine who are either professional scientists, science writers, or science educators,

3) daily read Science-Based Medicine

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

(I don't submit to HN from Science-Based Medicine every day, but I have found some GREAT articles there over the years)

4) daily read Why Evolution Is True

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/

(which sometimes has personal posts by the site owner but also has EXCELLENT posts by him and by guest posters on cutting-edge science issues, some of which I post directly and some of which lead to professional journal articles I post directly)

5) daily read Skeptic Blog

http://www.skepticblog.org/

(which goes from very ordinary to EXCELLENT in quality in unpredictable fashion, and has several very thoughtful co-bloggers contributing)

6) daily read Respectful Insolence

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/

(which has had some EXCELLENT posts about the methods of research over the years)

7) receive specific suggestions of research articles to read on human intelligence and human behavioral genetics either by request or by researcher nomination from the Minnesota Twin Family Study researchers with whom I discuss issues in a journal club during the school year

8) occasionally look at Pharyngula

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/

(which is going through a dry spell right now while its author finishes writing a book that I am very eager to read, but which in the past has had some great posts on topics of much interest to HN participants)

and

9) generally prowl the Web and recommendations I see anywhere else in cyberspace for good articles on science.

I test most articles I see submitted anywhere with the checklist from Peter Norvig (Google's director of research)'s article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation,"

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

which is my all-time favorite link to share in discussions on Hacker News.

By the way, a while ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about which sources NOT to submit here, and I collected some links after that discussion.

PhysOrg appears to have been banned as a site to submit from by Reddit. ScienceDaily is just a press release recycling service, nothing more. Users here on HN think there are better sites to submit from.

Comments about PhysOrg:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077869

"Yes Physorg definitely has some of the worst articles on the internet."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198249

"Straight from the European Space Agency, cutting out the physorg blogspam:

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/ (press release),

http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/ (video),

http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/scien... (paper).

"PhysOrg: just say no."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3611888

"The physorg article summary is wrong, I think."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108857

"Phys.org is vacuous and often flat wrong."

Comments about ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206

"Blogspam.

"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):

http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dn...

"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...

"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:

http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603

"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."

Comments about both PhysOrg and ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689185

"Why hasn't sciencedaily.com or physorg been banned from HN yet?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875529

"Original source:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole-asymmetry...

"What ScienceDaily has added to this: (1) They've removed one of the figures. (2) They've removed links to the Hinode and SOHO websites. (3) They've added lots of largely irrelevant links of their own, all of course to their own site(s).

"Please, everyone: stop linking to ScienceDaily and PhysOrg."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867361

"Those sources don't have RSS feeds, and ScienceDaily and PhysOrg have a bad habit of not linking to such things."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766

"Added value in PhysOrg article: zero.

"Please, everyone, stop submitting links from PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. I have never ever ever seen anything on those sites that isn't either (1) bullshit or (2) a recycled press release with zero (or often negative) added value. (Sometimes it's both at once.) It only takes ten seconds' googling to find the original source."

Aren't aggregators like ScienceDaily and PhysOrg doing a service by filtering though?

Most journalistic news is 2nd, 3rd degree regurgitation.

For me, only a miniscule amount of 'my science' (say, 5-10%) comes from latest papers, and when it is - it's through relatively mainstream media (HN; BBC; New Scientist, etc.). Instead, 90-95% of my science consumption comes from learning fundamnetals (OCW.MIT.edu is great for this!).

For me, this is because advancing science is an inch-by-inch process, where to really grasp the significance of each paper you have to come from the same background as the researcher themselves. So only the mainstream stuff is super-exciting for me.

I generally just ask friends, I spent 4 years in academia after getting my PhD in applied mathematics, I used to work with equations from magnetohydrodynamics. I got a couple of friends in academia in fields as diverse as oncology, economics, history and physics.

Generally I'm not interested in new papers or new findings, I'm generally just try to master the basis of a new science every couple of months to understand the more stuff complicated stuff and this my friends always can provide.

RE: the argument that the scientific process forces headlines to be better aggregated than delivered immediately, because it takes a long time for the public to digest and analyze the findings of a paper.

I x-posted this question on 4chan:

"Science news articles and headlines don't really exist. I mean, you can always subscribe to Science or Nature or what have you and get your news that way, or through some other peer-reviewed journal's online offerings, but because of the nature of scientific publications, "Oh fuck some new things is out", followed a month later by, "Those fucks didn't do their experiment correctly", you'll generally get better and more accurate information by following news aggregators.

The only reason I'd recommend following the as-it-happens scientific literature is if you're a PhD in the field and can understand the pedantry that they'll discuss at length, all while trying to find where they fucked up. If you just want to see the occassional bit of cool shit, just subscribe to /r/science or something on reddit"

My response on 4chan:

"two contradictions:

1) higgs boson one of the most live streamed events ever, and hugely viral outside of the physics community. people were streaming directly into the presentation at cern.

2) mars curiosity arguably the largest scientific event to have happened on the internet. people were watching a livestream at NASA, and also watching a direct simulation of the landing. twitter hashtags and facebook shares, galore.

other events like the lunar eclipse are showing that the general public want to be in on the scientific action, as-it-happens."

Aside from the top news sites, I browse and read 6 or so scientific journals at the local university library.

Doesn't solve the problem how to find the gold nuggets, but if you want all the details: http://arXiv.org has the real preprints/articles. At least in the fields covered there, most articles appear here first.

I mostly read books. There's enough material for the whole life.

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