The European People’s Party (EPP) and the liberals (ALDE) have blocked climate change activist Greta Thunberg from speaking in the European Parliament because “kids belong in schools”, according to the chief of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Udo Bullmann.
Speaking at the “Shaping our society – Time for another future” event organised by the (S&D) group of the European Parliament, Bullmann said the progressive political forces (socialists, greens and leftists) had invited the 16-year old Swede because they were keen to hear young people and have them join the dialogue.
But the EPP and ALDE blocked the initiative to invite her as a speaker in the EU House, he said. The leaders of EPP and ALDE and ECR (European Conservatives and Reformists) rejected the proposal during a conference of presidents (leaders of all parliamentary groups), saying “kids belong to schools on Fridays”.
Thunberg is a Swedish activist who leads a movement of young people to stop global warming and climate change.
The progressive forces ultimately invited Thunberg and 70 other young people in their own group and held discussions.
Why has science got so much more expensive without commensurate gains in understanding?
This blog considers two recent papers on the dynamics of scientific research: one in Nature and one by the brilliant physicist, Michael Nielsen, and the brilliant founder of Stripe, Patrick Collison, who is a very unusual CEO. These findings are very important to the question: how can we make economies more productive and what is the relationship between basic science and productivity? The papers are also interesting for those interested in the general question of high performance teams.
These issues are also crucial to the debate about what on earth Britain focuses on now the 2016 referendum has destroyed the Insiders’ preferred national strategy of ‘influencing the EU project’.
For as long as I have watched British politics carefully (sporadically since about 1998) these issues about science, technology and productivity have been almost totally ignored in the Insider debate because the incentives + culture of Westminster programs this behaviour: people with power are not incentivised to optimise for ‘improve science research and productivity’. E.g Everything Vote Leave said about funding science research during the referendum (including cooperation with EU programs) was treated as somewhere between eccentric, irrelevant and pointless by Insiders.
This recent Nature paper gives evidence that a) small teams are more disruptive in science research and b) solo researchers/small teams are significantly underfunded.
‘One of the most universal trends in science and technology today is the growth of large teams in all areas, as solitary researchers and small teams diminish in prevalence . Increases in team size have been attributed to the specialization of scientific activities, improvements in communication technology, or the complexity of modern problems that require interdisciplinary solutions. This shift in team size raises the question of whether and how the character of the science and technology produced by large teams differs from that of small teams. Here we analyse more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014, and demonstrate that across this period smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones. Work from larger teams builds on more recent and popular developments, and attention to their work comes immediately. By contrast, contributions by smaller teams search more deeply into the past, are viewed as disruptive to science and technology and succeed further into the future — if at all. Observed differences between small and large teams are magnified for higher impact work, with small teams known for disruptive work and large teams for developing work. Differences in topic and research design account for a small part of the relationship between team size and disruption; most of the effect occurs at the level of the individual, as people move between smaller and larger teams. These results demonstrate that both small and large teams are essential to a flourishing ecology of science and technology, and suggest that, to achieve this, science policies should aim to support a diversity of team sizes…
‘Although much has been demonstrated about the professional and career benefits of team size for team members, there is little evidence that supports the notion that larger teams are optimized for knowledge discovery and technological invention. Experimental and observational research on groups reveals that individuals in large groups… generate fewer ideas, recall less learned information, reject external perspectives more often and tend to neutralize each other’s viewpoints…
‘Small teams disrupt science and technology by exploring and amplifying promising ideas from older and less-popular work. Large teams develop recent successes, by solving acknowledged problems and refining common designs. Some of this difference results from the substance of science and technology that small versus large teams tackle, but the larger part appears to emerge as a consequence of team size itself. Certain types of research require the resources of large teams, but large teams demand an ongoing stream of funding and success to ‘pay the bills’, which makes them more sensitive to the loss of reputation and support that comes from failure. Our findings are consistent with field research on teams in other domains, which demonstrate that small groups with more to gain and less to lose are more likely to undertake new and untested opportunities that have the potential for high growth and failure…
‘In contrast to Nobel Prize papers, which have an average disruption among the top 2% of all contemporary papers, funded papers rank near the bottom 31%. This could result from a conservative review process, proposals designed to anticipate such a process or a planning effect whereby small teams lock themselves into large-team inertia by remaining accountable to a funded proposal. When we compare two major policy incentives for science (funding versus awards), we find that Nobel-prize-winning articles significantly oversample small disruptive teams, whereas those that acknowledge US National Science Foundation funding oversample large developmental teams. Regardless of the dominant driver, these results paint a unified portrait of underfunded solo investigators and small teams who disrupt science and technology by generating new directions on the basis of deeper and wider information search. These results suggest the need for government, industry and non-profit funders of science and technology to investigate the critical role that small teams appear to have in expanding the frontiers of knowledge, even as large teams rapidly develop them.’
‘are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding [for increased investment]? Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress?
They explored, inter alia, ‘how scientists think the quality of Nobel Prize–winning discoveries has changed over the decades.’
They conclude:
‘The picture this survey paints is bleak: Over the past century, we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgement, we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient.’
It’s also interesting that:
‘In fact, just three [physics] discoveries made since 1990 have been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn’t survey those prizes. However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip, and instead award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don’t look so good, that’s bad news for physics.’
Trump is vindicated. The Russia collusion excuse was Fake News.
Dragged out for two years of hate, denigration and abuse in the media, in the end the Muller inquiry found no collusion. How many journalists predicted this. How many even wrote as though it was possible? Matt Taibbi gets credit for the headline
Mueller report into collusion a stunning victory for Donald Trump, by Cameron Stewart, The Australian.
The summary of the Mueller report issued today by Attorney General William Barr clears the president and his aides of any collusion with Russia and says there is no legal case to support obstruction of justice charges against him. …
It is a devastating defeat for the Democrats and for much of the US media who had hoped, prayed and frankly expected that Mueller would somehow find a silver bullet to end or at least cripple Trump’s presidency.
Matt Taibbi on Russiagate: ‘Death Blow for the Reputation of the American News Media’
By Tim Graham, Newsbusters
It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD
Taibbi began with a dramatic announcement: “Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home […]
Guest easy by Larry Hamlin In a spectacular climate alarmist policy failure the EU dumped its “carbon neutrality by 2050” commitment and targets driven by the sacred but highly arbitrary and unsubstantiated 1.5 degree C global temperature “limit” and ended its Brussels summit with no climate commitments or targets for year 2050. The EU heavy…
Iowa Climate Science Education 