Daniel Lemire's blog

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Science and Technology links (March 14th 2020)

    1. Mothers, but not fathers, possess gender-related implicit biases about emotion expression in children.
    2. Chinese researchers used to be offered cash rewards for publishing research articles. The Chinese government has banned such rewards. Increasingly, we are collectively realizing that a single-minded focus on publication numbers ensures systemic waste and failure. This is not unique to the business of research. You do not want to assess programmers by counting the number of lines of code they write, or writers by how many books they have published. The naive application of simple metrics can lead to disastrous results.
    3. A patient’s lung was removed, cleaned from cancer and put back.
    4. Many major American universities have moved classes online for the rest of the term due to the ongoing pandemic.
    5. Medical doctors keep on practicing many inefficient or harmful therapies, against all scientific evidence. For example, stents are frequently put into people at risk of cardiovascular disease, even though it is virtually useless.