Guest post by Quan-Hoang Vuong of Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research, Western University Hanoi, Vietnam

A growing awareness of the lack of reproducibility has undermined society’s trust and esteem in social sciences. In some cases, well-known results have been fabricated or the underlying data have turned out to have weak technical foundations.

{credit}Quan Hoang Vuong{/credit}

Many researchers have investigated the plausibility of findings in the social sciences and humanities. A typical example is the mysterious Critical Minimum Positivity Ratio 2.9013 by Fredrickson and Losada (2005), which claimed to show that there exists such a positivity ratio and that “an individual’s degree of flourishing could be predicted by that person’s ratio of positive to negative emotions over time”. This ratio had once been a well-known, highly influential and greatly admired psychological “constant” until it was shown by Brown, Sokal and Friedman (2013) to be an unfounded, arbitrary and meaningless number.

To address the plausibility problem, I suggest that a combination of open data, open peer-review and open community dialogue, could serve as a feasible option for the social sciences.

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Guest post by Steffen Fritz, Linda See & Ian McCallum of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria

{credit}Steffen Fritz, Linda See & Ian McCallum{/credit}

Citizen science, the collection or analysis of research data by the general public, has existed in one form or another for centuries, with contributions ranging from plant and animal observations to weather phenonmena¹. In the field of land cover and land use, however, its application is relatively new². Previously this was a task left largely to governments, research institutes and global bodies. With the recent availability of high resolution satellite imagery, this has changed, opening up new possibilities for citizen participation³. In our recent article in Nature Research’s Scientific Data⁴, we have made available a global dataset of crowdsourced land cover and land use reference data, containing the results of our first four citizen-science campaigns. Continue reading →

Guest post by Xi-Nian Zuo, Project Coordinator and Co-Founder of Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR), Professor of Psychology and Director of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center in the Institute of Psychology at Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.

{credit}Xi-Nian Zuo{/credit}

About a decade ago (2006), as a PhD student graduating from the School of Mathematics at Beijing Normal University, I stepped into the field of neuroimaging of the human brain by way of a short job interview offered by Dr. Yu-Feng Zang, my postdoc mentor in China. The most important thing that I learned and developed during my post doc training was how to question a study, an indication likely of my somewhat different background (mathematics versus brain sciences). Probability and statistics became my major tools in bridging new learning experiences with my existing knowledge, pushing me to further pursue research training offered by Dr. Michael Peter Milham at New York University. Ongoing work in his laboratory really interested me, particularly test-retest reliability of resting-state functional connectivity¹, the first study of test-retest reliability in the nascent field of functional connectivity. However, an obvious limitation existed to that study, and a series of test-retest reliability studies I carried out subsequently²; the small sample size. This directly motivated me to seek and build up a truly big data set for test-retest reliability in connectomics. Continue reading →

Guest post by Amy Yu and César A. Hidalgo, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Is fame superficial? Or can it be a signal of accomplishment?

In a world where many media outlets seem dominated by characters of inexplicable fame (such as the Kardashians), asking ourselves if our social reward systems are misfiring is both a fair question and a relevant one. The relevance of this question stems from the fact that humans are social learners – we are a species whose success depends on the ability of individuals to learn from others. But choosing whom to learn from, in a world populated by more people than we can meet, is not easy. To facilitate those choices, humans have evolved cognitive biases that nudge us to learn from those who demonstrate skill, accomplishments, and also, fame or prestige^[1]. Continue reading →

By Jane P. Messina, Senior Postdoctoral Epidemiologist, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is one of the most widely distributed tick-borne diseases in the world, ranging from southern Russia and the Black Sea region to the southern tip of Africa. It is caused by a virus which is transmitted to humans by ticks, and is considered as “emerging” across the globe, with countries such as Albania, Turkey, and Georgia reporting new infections in humans in recent decades. Human CCHF infection has also been recently reported after long periods of absence in some locations, for example in south-western Russia and Central Africa. The main genus of ticks that transmit CCHF to humans (Hyalomma ticks) are adapted to warmer and dry or semiarid environments, and are found in many parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe. In addition to humans these ticks feed on wild and domesticated animals, which can also become infected with CCHF virus but which do not show any disease symptoms. However, infection of these animals leads to further CCHF transmission to humans, as new ticks feed upon these animals and become infected. Continue reading →

by John Lenters, PhD, Scientist, LimnoTech, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

It is now widely recognized that global and regional climate change has important implications for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Recently published studies, for example, have revealed significant warming of lakes and reservoirs throughout the world. This has been evident not only in studies of individual lakes at specific sites (i.e., from “in situ” datasets), but especially in broader, satellite-based studies of lake surface temperature trends. Remarkably, these previous studies have also found that the observed rate of lake warming is sometimes greater than that of ambient air temperature. These rapid, unprecedented changes in lake temperature have profound implications for lake mixing, hydrology, productivity, and biotic communities. Continue reading →

by Joel D. Mainland PhD, Louise Slade Assistant Member at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia

Why is it that we all know that red, green, and blue are primary colors, but nobody knows a set of primary odors? Why is it that every smartphone user can now pull out their phone, take a picture, send it to a friend halfway across the world nearly instantaneously, archive it nearly indefinitely, and look at it repeatedly with no degradation using only a device connected to a power source, but none of this is currently possible in olfaction?
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