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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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George Dyson. Credit: edge.org

If you read about Big Data for very long, a quote from science historian George Dyson is sure to come up: "Big data is what happened when the cost of keeping information became less than the cost of throwing it away." 

That will be a platform to talk about the challenges, etc.

But there is a bigger problem that shows the challenges of Big Data - that isn't what Dyson said. But like with Einstein quotes about bees, in a Google world, where accuracy is measured by how often you are repeated and thus make it to the top of search engines, the Big Data problem is accuracy, not volume.
Years ago, when science media was generally in decline, both financially and content-wise, I held up Popular Science as the poster child for how to be successful: Appeal to your market and stay out of the culture wars.

Things have changed, and they have begun the slow, sad decline already experienced by their competitors, which got those companies sold for peanuts. Their editorial tone began to be called out in comments, leading to their online content editor to declare, in elitist tones that would make any cultural mullah proud, that "shrill, boorish specimens of the lower Internet phyla" had spoiled it for everyone and they were shutting off comments.


"Going Deep" With David Rees premieres tonight on National Geographic Channel and if you have little time to decide whether or not to watch it, you are in luck because I can be brief - it's a good show.

"Going Deep" is fun for all ages and levels of expertise because he starts into the concepts and then really goes deep, just like he says he will.

A recent review in the British Journal of Nutrition concluded that the nutritional quality and safety of organic food was higher than conventional food. Fruits, vegetables, and grains, organic versions were better in all ways than conventional farming, they determined.

Organic food had fewer pesticides, a much different result than other studies, and also had more important nutrients, also a much different result than other studies.


Not the JVC peer review ring, an actual
gambling ring. Credit: China Daily

It's something of a mild joke in science circles - you can figure out who is peer-reviewing your paper by looking for the common author in the citations you 'missed' in your submission.

It was only a matter of time before peer review cabals became an actual strategy somewhere.