Fostering the connection between science funding and economic growth needs to be based on thoughtful measurement, says Julia Lane.

The US Congress and European funding bodies increasingly require science agencies and universities to document the potential impact of research on economic activity.  But science agencies, whose job it is to identify and fund the best research, are not the right institutions to unpack the links between research and innovation.

Their often well-meaning attempts to count what can be counted — largely, publications or patent activity — have created perverse incentives for researchers and are not credible.

More emphasis on publications means that early-career researchers have become replaceable (and often unemployable) cogs in a paper-production machine, while the amount of unread and irreproducible research and patents has exploded.

Better incentives, and science, can be established through thoughtful measurement. Countries should think before measuring by drawing on the social and economic sciences and applying standard approaches to evaluation: building testable hypotheses based on theory of change, identifying and measuring inputs and outputs, establishing appropriate comparison groups¹, and collecting data and estimating the empirical relationships.

Biologists, engineers and physicists might be good at decoding the human genome, expanding our understanding of materials science, and building better models of the origins of the Universe, but they lack the statistical and analytical expertise to evaluate innovation. Although there are enormous hurdles to overcome, more carefully considered approaches will make results more credible and lead to better incentives.

The resulting measurement would move the focus away from counting documents and towards tracing what scientists do and how this transitions to economic activity. The measure would focus on the ways in which finding steers scientists into particular research fields, and then the way those scientists transfer ideas. It would use automated approaches to collect data on both funded and non-funded fields of research, rather than relying on manual, burdensome and unreliable self-reports.

Let’s consider how this approach of thinking, then measuring, might work in the real world to inform links between research and economic growth, and to improve incentives. Take the current imperative from both the US Congress and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) that grants should measure their “impact”. A thinking-first strategy would suggest that grants should be seen as a set of investments that constitute a portfolio, rather than a set of unrelated projects. Evaluating every grant’s success would be replaced by a risk-balanced portfolio approach.

As such, some grants would surely fail. The results of these failures would be published and valued. The incentives would change from rewarding the publication of positive (and sometimes irreproducible) results to encouraging the publication of failures, and science would gain from the identification of ‘dry’ research holes². As US inventor Thomas Edison liked to say, he didn’t fail, he just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.

The intense focus on publications as a way to measure scientific output has led to three suboptimal outcomes. First, researchers hoard knowledge in order to be the first to publish new findings. Second, institutional structures incentivize lower-risk, incremental research². And third, too many graduate students are produced who are then put into the academic holding tank of postdoctoral fellowships.

But the best way to transmit knowledge is through people³. Science would move forward more effectively by tracing the activities of people rather than publications, particularly if the focus is on regional economic development⁴. Treating the placement and earnings of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows as key outputs of investment, and their education as crucial for the adoption of new ideas, would result in their training being treated as valuable in its own right.

An excellent example of this type of investment is Cofactor Genomics, which was founded by graduate scientists working on the Human Genome Project at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Rather than pursue an academic career, they used their expertise to create a company that uses genomics to develop RNA-based disease diagnostics and hired people they had met through grant-funded research. They saw that the technology had great commercial potential, which would have been difficult to pursue in an academic environment. The correct measure of this project’s success was not the number of published articles it spawned, but the strength and vibrancy of the networks of human connections that it helped to create.

Establishing institutes is standard practice in many scientific domains — examples include the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory, in physical sciences, and the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge in social science. To the credit of the US academic community, cooperatives have led to the establishment of the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A partnership between IRIS and the US Census Bureau is, for the first time, building links between funding, the scientists it supports and subsequent entrepreneurship. Teams of scientists from 11 universities are beginning to develop the thoughtful approach to measurement that is urgently required.

Alas, similar institutes have not been established in Europe, Australia or New Zealand, despite researchers putting the building blocks together. Given that changing incentives is imperative for any country aiming to foster economy-driving innovation, I hope that this gap is quickly closed.

It looks like a calm, orderly lab experiment at first glance. But in fact this incredible video shows the solar wind as it leave’s the sun’s surface – in stark contrast to the gusty and turbulent wind as it approaches Earth.

Ever since the 1950s discovery of the solar wind – the constant flow of charged particles from the sun – there’s been a stark disconnect between this outpouring and the sun itself. Near the sun where it originates, this wind is structured in distinct rays, much like a child’s simple drawing of the sun, researchers found.

Nasa’s Juno spacecraft has sent back the first-ever images of Jupiter’s poles, taken during the spacecraft’s first flyby of the planet with its instruments switched on.

The incredible images show storm systems and weather activity ‘unlike anything previously seen’. They reveal stormy conditions, high clouds and a strange blue hue on the planet.

Climbers have encountered deep snow on Britain’s highest mountain while assisting in a scientific project on the peak. It is not unusual for Ben Nevis to have coverings of snow all year.

However, snow expert Iain Cameron has described the depth of the white stuff on the mountain’s North Face as “astonishing”.

Photographs of the snow, which could be more than 15m deep in places, were taken by Highland Mountain Company. The images were taken on Monday.

Coastal areas around the world are expanding in the face of projections that global warming-induced sea level rise will wipe out coastal cities.

But a recent study by the Dutch Deltares Research Institute found coastal areas had grown, on net, 13,000 square miles over the last 30 years.  In total, the study found 67,000 square miles of water was converted into land, and 44,000 square miles of land was covered by water.

“We expected that the coast would start to retreat due to sea level rise, but the most surprising thing is that the coasts are growing all over the world,” Fedor Baart, the study’s lead author, told BBC News. “We’re were able to create more land than sea level rise was taking.”

Rising carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will create a greener world and prevent the worst parts of global warming, according to a new scientific study.

Researchers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine found plants use water more efficiently when exposed to higher concentrations of CO2, meaning any droughts caused by global warming would be much less severe than previous estimates.

“This is something that everybody who has studied plant physiology and CO2 has known for decades” Dr. Pat Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the libertarian Cato Institute who was not involved with the study, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Millions of years ago plants there was a lot more CO2 on Earth than there is today,” he said. “Plants grown in high CO2 levels change their optimal temperature for conducting photosynthesis, they’re pre-adapted to a much warmer world with much more CO2 in the air.”

According to the IPCC (2013),  global sea levels rose by less than two-tenths of a meter (0.19 m) between 1901 and 2010.  Considering the scientific record of long-term sea level trends from locations across the globe, this small <0.2 m change in sea levels over the course of the last 110 years does not even fall outside the range of natural variability.

Sea levels have commonly risen and fallen at amplitudes much greater than two-tenths of a meter.   As Harris et al. (2015)  confirm, “relative sea-level variations of ∼1 m were common throughout the Holocene.”

This was inspired from a comment by “richardengland”:

“Lets make it really simple: once the hot water has left the kettle can this hot water be made hotter without going back into the kettle and its heating coil?  Yes or no.”

And I think that that is actually precisely it, with a slight modification:

Will putting your tea back into the kettle make the kettle hotter than when it poured your tea?  That is exactly what they’re claiming when they say that “backradiation” from the atmosphere can heat the warmer surface, the warmer surface from where the thermal energy came from in the first place.

Gavin Schmidt at NASA says that Earth is warming at the fastest pace in 1,000 years.

Nasa: Earth is warming at a pace ‘unprecedented in 1,000 years’ | Environment | The Guardian

Gavin’s own data set shows earth cooling over the past five months at the fastest rate since 1917.

www.woodfortrees.org/data/gistemp

Satellites show the Earth cooling for almost 20 years.

We must now look at Roy Spencer’s simple model of the greenhouse effect to see what he’s actually doing with it and what he actually thinks about it.

I have updated his current model but also have a copy from some time he did this before using a sphere with concentric shell as an example – they’re both updated with “reality” sheets and “Spencer” sheets.

We now get to see exactly what Roy thinks about backradiation, independent of all of the usual obfuscatory language, because we can refer directly to his mathematics.

Despite claims about settled science there is still much to learn about how electrical charges in Earth’s atmosphere impact weather, and especially in the ionosphere. 

In this article we explore further the ideas of Edsel Chromie who insists modern meteorology fails to account for the full role of electrical forces on the Jet Stream. Meteorologists do appreciate there exists a global atmospheric electrical circuit and while some traces of it are found less than a meter above the land and water surfaces much is evidenced at very great heights.

Roy Spencer postulated and then performed a “simple” experiment which he thought demonstrates the greenhouse effect.  This is actually trivial to debunk so we’ll keep this short.

First I’ll point out a deceptive little trick employed by Roy which he used to blunder his point.  To quote him:

RS: “The Wikipedia entry for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics includes the following statement from Rudolph Clausius, who formulated one of the necessary consequences of the 2nd Law (emphasis added):

““Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.”

“The statement by Clausius uses the concept of ‘passage of heat’. As is usual in thermodynamic discussions, this means ‘net transfer of energy as heat’, and does not refer to contributory transfers one way and the other.”

The italicized words are important, and have been ignored by my critics: while it is true that the net flow of heat must be from higher temperature to lower temperature, this does not mean that the lower temperature object cannot (for example) emit radiant energy in the direction of the warmer object, and thus increase the temperature of the warmer object above what it would otherwise be.”

Whereas, Roy left out a the final paragraph in the Wiki quote on the Clausius statement.

Antarctica has confounded scientists, defying the dire predictions of scientists the South Pole would shrink and exacerbate sea level rise in the coming decades. 

Climate models predicted Antarctic sea ice would shrink as the world warmed, and that warming would boost snowfall over the southern continent. Neither of those predictions have panned out, and now scientists say “natural variability” is overwhelming human-induced warming.

“Truth is, the science is complex, and that in most places and with most events, natural variability still plays a dominant role, and undoubtedly will continue to do so,” Chip Knappenberger, a climate scientist with the libertarian Cato Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“This applies to goings-on in Antarctica as well as in Louisiana,” Knappenberger said, referring to the recent flooding in Louisiana activists have already blamed global warming for.

Last October, the New York Times published this dire op-ed on ocean acidification, supposedly authored by NOAA chief Richard Spinrad and his UK counterpart Ian Boyd.

Curious, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to NOAA for the e-mail related to the development and publication of the op-ed. I received 443 pages of e-mail in return.

First, the op-ed was actually written by NOAA staff Madelyn Applebaum, not Spinrad or Boyd. The purpose was to tout NOAA not inform the public about ocean acidification.

“The Greenhouse Conspiracy” is a documentary film broadcast by Channel 4 in the United Kingdom on 12 August 1990, as part of the Equinox series, which criticised the theory of global warming and asserted that scientists critical of global warming theory were denied funding.