Weekend Links

1) Dengue vaccine approved

2) Gangs of New York (Revised edition)

3) "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole"

4) On text analysis and violence

5) An applied view of the perils of percentile estimation

6) The microbial origins of trade

7) Major breakthrough on the graph isomorphism problem (via Sarah Brodksy)

8) Altimetric rounds up their Top 100 articles of 2015 

9) Meanwhile, in partisan data visualization (via Johannes Urpelainen)

10) Machine learning works great mathematicians just don't know why  (via Simon Osindero)

11) An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development

12) "Latin America is now the region that has the highest percentage of children born out of wedlock." 

#ParisAgreement

If you're looking for a place to catch up on the weekend's momentous climate treaty announcement, The Daily Climate's COP 2015 overview page is a good place to start. Tyler Cowen has a few responses from the economists' side, Johannes Urpelainen has his own from the political science side, and 350.org's live blog a few more from the activists' side. Eric Holthaus provides another good rundown at Slate , and Carbon Brief has an overview of newspaper editorial reactions around the world. Lastly, realclimate's COP21 open thread yields a bit more gold for those inclined to search.

Weekend links

1) David Evans provides another excellent conference roundup, this time for NEUDC 2015

2) No, Monsanto is not going on trial for crimes against humanity

3) Louisiana is losing a football field of land every 48 minutes

4) "China creates an economy the size of Greece every month", among many other gems

5) Chris Blattman on ISIS recruitment and European labor market exclusion 

6) Toxic workers aren't worth it

7) Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't care what you think about climate change

8) Hyperloop's new North Las Vegas facility will test a linear electric motor at speeds up to 335 mph, (half expected speed at full-scale)

9) "Like many moral practices, such as standing up for what is right or telling the truth, it can be very upsetting to commit violence, and even require special training and social support"

10) "In a sense, monetary easing has a narcotic aspect."

11) Greenpeace exposes sceptics hired to cast doubt on climate science (related)

12) GEB meets QED

13) Growing, fast and slow

14) Niño 3.4 Hit All-Time Record Strength for a 1-Week Period in November

15) Meanwhile, at the forefronts of contract theory

Choosing experiments to accelerate collective discovery

How efficient are research agendas?

Abstract: A scientist’s choice of research problem affects his or her personal career trajectory. Scientists’ combined choices affect the direction and efficiency of scientific discovery as a whole. In this paper, we infer preferences that shape problem selection from patterns of published findings and then quantify their efficiency. We represent research problems as links between scientific entities in a knowledge network. We then build a generative model of discovery informed by qualitative research on scientific problem selection. We map salient features from this literature to key network properties: an entity’s importance corresponds to its degree centrality, and a problem’s difficulty corresponds to the network distance it spans. Drawing on millions of papers and patents published over 30 years, we use this model to infer the typical research strategy used to explore chemical relationships in biomedicine. This strategy generates conservative research choices focused on building up knowledge around important molecules. These choices become more conservative over time. The observed strategy is efficient for initial exploration of the network and supports scientific careers that require steady output, but is inefficient for science as a whole. Through supercomputer experiments on a sample of the network, we study thousands of alternatives and identify strategies much more efficient at exploring mature knowledge networks. We find that increased risk-taking and the publication of experimental failures would substantially improve the speed of discovery. We consider institutional shifts in grant making, evaluation, and publication that would help realize these efficiencies.

The paper is Rzhetsky et al.'s 2015 - Choosing experiments to accelerate collective discovery. (via Shanee)