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posted by mrpg on Monday April 09 2018, @01:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the that-word-again dept.

The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.

The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little "computation" contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.

The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it's contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you've actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.

Source: The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete


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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday April 09 2018, @02:40PM (3 children)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Monday April 09 2018, @02:40PM (#664452)

    FTFA

    > I did get straight-out blunt comments from many, many colleagues, and from senior people and mentors who said:
    > Stop doing this, you’re wasting your career, you’re wasting your talent

    This is completely not my experience of modern science. While hardware is a worthwhile endeavour, all papers that I can think of have a significant computational element and most have data analysis (done by computer!) as a main effort of the paper.

    There is a reactionary movement against software, but its mostly based around graduate students who run computer programs and say "this is true because the computer program says it is true" - without understanding what the computer program does or how; or because people who write software tend to over-promote their models, without basing things in reality or dealing with the icky bits (e.g. misalignments, imperfections, etc) which are hard to handle correctly. The reaction is reasonable and a correct moderating influence.

    I didn't really understand what Jupyter was. It sounds interesting. Needs javascript running I think. I struggle to imagine how it can handle analyses that are CPU or data intensive, which describes everything that I, and colleagues, do.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by physicsmajor on Monday April 09 2018, @05:36PM (2 children)

    by physicsmajor (1471) on Monday April 09 2018, @05:36PM (#664561)

    Python Dev here.

    Jupyter uses the browser exclusively as a beautiful frontend to command line environments, allowing annotations as well as execution in an arbitrary order. The entire notebook can display plotted data and be saved. It runs as a localhost web server.

    It was initially designed to run on top of Python, but the framework now supports almost any language/environment. The recently released JupyterLab takes this even further and runs an entire IDE in the browser.

    It's worth your time to try out.

    • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday April 09 2018, @05:54PM (1 child)

      by PiMuNu (3823) on Monday April 09 2018, @05:54PM (#664568)

      I still don't understand. So its a plotting package?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @06:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @06:26PM (#664584)

        it's a mathematica-like environment, rewritten using python as the backend (but you can apparently use other languages), and a web server as the frontend.
        it's pretty neat.