I finished reading a very good philosophy book trying to figure out, what makes science in its way to acquire knowledge different from other approaches. “The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience” by Lee McIntyre is interesting making the point the difference is not the method, but the attitude how evidence is …
Category: Optinions
May 07
As boas universidades no Brasil custam pouco, caro mesmo é não saber criar conhecimento
I would like to share out an interesting article (in Portuguese) thinking a bit about the cost and befits of the public founded universities of Brazil. It is worth reading “Excelência acadêmica requer custeio público“, an articled found at the webpages of Unicamp.
Dec 06
Why the State of São Paulo is good in science and why it is important
The is a very nice article in Nature discussing, why the state of SP is so good in science. Indeed, the state alone is responsible for more than 50% of Brazilian science production and the leading place in South America. That this is of great importance for the country and the society is shown on …
Aug 03
Scientific publishing
A true comment from XKCD: Your manuscript “Don’t Pay $25 to Access Any of the Articles in this Journal: A Review of Preprint Repositories and Author Willingness to Email PDF Copies for Free” has also been rejected, but nice try. XKCD is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License at xkcd.org.
Jul 06
Do grades really serve the propose we want?
I read these days an interesting German article, questioning the future of grades as we give them today. Basically, he repeats a critic that we already discussed in our course in the EA2. The main points are: Grades are just a time snap of the moment. They do not tell you, what happened afterwards – …
Jul 03
Workshop on Epitaxy – LNNano
We had a very nice workshop at the LNNano at the 27. to 28. June bringing together the Brazilian community. Beside fruitful discussion and nice science, we had also the chance to socialize and re-enforce the community. Hope, this event will continue the next years as we are missing such a gathering in the last …
Oct 12
Correcting 1st prova of F329
Spending a lot of time, correcting the first test of F329. This made me think about, what and how we teach stuff. Which leads – in my case – unavoidably to think of a Terry Pratchett quote from the discworld cycle. “… therefore education at the (Unseen) University mostly worked by the age-old method of …
Sep 15
Last images of Cassini
Today Friday, NASA let the probe Cassini enter into the atmosphere of Saturn, where it burned. The probe was delivering nice images and a lot of scientific data for 13 years. Even so not nanotechnology, I always had a great interest in this kind of science as it teaches us a lot about the world, …
Jun 29
Beware the impact factor
I just read an interesting interview in a German Online magazine with Noble prize winner Randy Schekman. He warns to out to much value into the impact factor of magazines like “Science” and “Nature” – indeed he claims, they not helping science to progress, but give rise to fashionable and not-solid research. I agree with him: …
