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In the idealized version of how science is done, facts about the world are waiting to be observed and collected by objective researchers who use the scientific method to carry out their work. But in the everyday practice of science, discovery frequently follows an ambiguous and complicated route. We aim to be objective, but we cannot escape the context of our unique life experience. Prior knowledge and interest influence what we experience, what we think our experiences mean, and the subsequent action we take. Opportunities for misinterpretation, error, and self-deception abound.

Consequently, discovery claims should be thought of as protoscience. Similar to newly staked mining claims, they are full o

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A deal is a deal---except , apparently, when Entergy is involved. The company, a major energy supplier in New England, provoked justified outraged in Vermont last week when it announced it was reneging on a longstanding commitment to abide by the strict nuclear regulations.

Instead, the company has done precisely what it had long promised it would not: challenge the constitutionality of Vermont’s rules in the federal court, as part of a desperate effort to keep its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant running. It’s a stunning move.

The conflict has been surfacing since 2002, when t

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Come on-Everybody’s doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and half forcing, is what most of us think of when we hear the words peer pressure. It usually leads to no good-drinking, drugs and casual sex. But in his new book Join the Club Tina Rosenberg contends that peer pressure can also be a positive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizations and officials use the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve their lives and possibly the world.

Rosenberg, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of examples of the social cure in action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called Rage Against the Haze sets out to make cigarettes

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It’s no surprise that Jennifer Senior’s insightful, provocation magazine cover story, “I love My Children, I Hate My Life,” is arousing much chatter----nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that “the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight.”

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When Liam McGee departed as president of Bank of American in August, his explanation was surprisingly straight up. Rather than cloaking his exit in the usual vague excuses, he came right out and said he was leaving “to pursue my goal of running a company.” Broadcasting his ambition was “vey much my decision,” McGee says. Within two weeks, he was talking for the first time with the board of Hartford Financial Services Group, which named him CEO and chairman on September 29.

McGee says leaving without a position lined up gave him time to reflect on what kind of company he wanted to run. It also sent a clear message to the outside world about his aspirations. And McGee isn’t alone. In recent weeks the No.2 executives at Avon and Ameri

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The decision of the New York Philharmonic to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director has been the talk of the classical-music world ever sine the sudden announcement of his appointment in 2009. For the most part, the response has been favorable, to say the least.  “Hooray! At last!” wrote Anthony Tommasini, a sober-sided calssical-music critic.

One of the reason why the appointment came as such surprise, however, is that Gilbert is comparatively little known. Even Tommasini, who had advocated Gilbert’s appointment in the Times, calls him “an unpretentious musician with no air of the formidable conductor about him.” As a description of the next music director of an orchestra that has hitherto been

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Bankers have been blaming themselves for their troubles in public. Behind the scenes, they have been taking aim at someone else: the accounting standard-setters. Their rules, moan the banks, have forced them to report enormous loss, and it’s just not fair. These rules say they must value some assets at the price a third party would pay, not the price managers and regulators would like them to fetch.

Unfortunately, banks’ lobbying now seems to be working. The details may be unknowable, but the independence of standard-setters, essential to the proper functioning of capital markets, is being compromised. And, unless banks carry toxic assets at prices that attract buyers, reviving the banking system will be difficult.

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In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argue that “social epidemics” are driven in large part by the action of a tiny of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusually informed, persuasive, or well connected. The idea is intuitively compelling, but it doesn’t explain how ideas actually spread.

The supposed importance of influentials drives from a plausible-sounding but largely untested theory called the “two-step flow of communication”: Information flows from the media to the influentials and from them to everyone else. Marketers have embraced the two-step flow because it suggests that if they can just find and influence the influentials, those select people will do most of the work for them. The

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Over the past decade, thousands of patents have been granted for what are called business methods. Amazon.com received one for its “one-click” online payment system. Merrill Lynch got legal protection for an asset allocation strategy. One inventor patented a technique for lifting a box.

Now the nation’s top patent court appears completely ready to scale back on business-method patent, which have been controversial ever since they were first authorized 10 years ago. In a move that has intellectual-property lawyers abuzz, the U.S. court of Appeals for the federal circuit said it would use a particular case to conduct a broad review of business-mothed patents. In re Biliski, as the case is known, is a “very big deal”, says Denn

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Of all the changes that have taken palce in English-language newspapers during the past quarter-century, perhaps the most far-reaching has been the inexorable decline in the scope and seriousness of their arts coverage.

It is difficult to the point of impossibility for the aveage reader under the age of forty to imagine a time when high-quality arts criticism could be found in most big-city newspapers. Yet a considerable number of the most siginificant collections of criticism published in the 20th century consisted in large part of newpaper reviews. To read such book today is to marvel at the fact that their leaned contents were once deemed suitable for publication in general-circulation dailies.