The quality of entries in the world's largest open-access online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, depends on how authors collaborate, a study by University of Arizona researchers has found.

The research, they say, is the first to explain why some articles on the site are of much better quality than others.

Wikipedia has an internal quality rating system for entries, with featured articles at the top, followed by A, B, and C-level entries. The team randomly collected 400 articles at each quality level and applied a data provenance model they developed in an earlier paper.

Mother Earth Cycles To Work


Anthropogenic global warming.

AGW

Human-caused warming.

Call it what you will: is it real?

In short: can humans modify Earth's climate?

There are two major views on this question:

1 - human emissions of CO2 cause global warming.

2 - global warming is part of a natural cycle.


I suggest that neither view is sufficiently correct because the underlying suppositions and simplifications are false.

The Earth's dynamic systems are many.  They are complex in and of themselves.  They do not act in isolation, but interact amongst themselves.

Accordingly, one might ask:

Bad habits of ineffective science: Trends in Biochemical Sciences has a piece on Mental inertia in the biological sciences. I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but the piece does contain some interesting thoughts on hot topics vs. important topics:

Almost any scientist wants to work on solving an important problem, but at any given moment, it can be difficult to distinguish the topics that are ‘important’ from those that are ‘hot’. Often the scientific community does not immediately recognize the true significance of the work, and it can remain obscure for many years...

The Place Where Forever Ends


The idea of living forever has held great fascination for many great minds,
but just like the pursuit of a perpetual motion machine it is an impossible dream,
and for the same reasons.


Image source: Wikemedia, public domain.


Here are some basic logical requirements of living forever. 


In order to live forever one must first be alive.

A study in the March edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, senior-authored by Jerome C. Wakefield, empirically challenges the effectiveness of psychiatrists' official diagnostic manual in preventing mistaken, false-positive diagnoses of depression. This isn't the first time that Wakefield has challenged the DSM criteria for diagnosing depression. His first assault caused such controversy that the criteria were slightly tightened, but DSM-V is on the horizon and I suspect psychiatrists are busy pushing their particular niche obsessions.