In Australia, a common structure for an undergraduate science honours degree was to replicate a few experiments from recently published research. This gave the student practice in the key skills required for running a successful research experiment. There used to be Australian journals that specialised in publishing this type of replication research. Sure, they weren’t top tier journals, so they didn’t count for much in terms of getting tenure or winning grants, but they were respected as an important part of the process of doing science, so getting one of your honours experiments published there would definitely help in recruiting a good PhD supervisor. Also, those who did publish completely new findings would eagerly monitor the replication journals for confirmation of their results.
Unfortunately, in Australia there is also a sizeable disparity in the level of government funding between undergraduate and postgraduate students, so starting about 2010 some universities discontinued their (one year full-time) undergraduate honours programs, replacing them by (two year full-time) research masters degrees. Initially at least, the masters versions did not seem to keeping the replication model, though I lost touch with that area soon after it started, so I don’t know if that changed.
Mixed results. For instance, the third defenestration of Prague didn’t kill the defenestrated,1) but sorta kinda kicked off the Thirty Years’ War.
1) One of them, Philip Fabricius, was later ennobled by the Emperor for his troubles and granted the title Baron von Hohenfall - literally ‘Baron of Highfall’.
One of these days I should write an essay on how building codes influenced history and vice versa.
That’s what our 1910 home’s windows are like. They’re also rather wider than the typical 19th century ones we see in another historic neighborhood nearby, which is convenient when someone’s…um, uh, I mean it’s great for letting in more light. Yeah. More light. That’s it. Yeah. That’s what I meant to type.
Incidentally, about the boingBoing shop – it’s important in publishing to have a wall between editorial (content) & advertising (money). I’d be more disturbed if ads conformed to content, & content were being used to sell ads.
Brief tangent:
I’ve loved your avatar since first seeing it, but I only noted its source tonight, and I love that, too.
The artist, author, and publisher Pamela Colman Smith, who created the paintings for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, spent some time in Jamaica, and collected J’can folk tales in books she also illustrated. It sounds like they’re wonderful, too.
“Yes there’s research linking smoking to lung cancer, but it was conducted by Nazis so we should ignore it. What’s that noise? Oh, just Werner von Braun launching one of his rockets.”
The Nazis were fairly anti-smoking because Hitler was a non-smoker. They did some epidemiological research which indicated a higher rate of lung cancer in smokers. There have been suggestions that the research was deprecated in the west because of fears of giving credence to Nazi ideals or policies. However, it was the first medical research into smoking. The more research was done the more the ill effects were discovered, while the industry worked hard to suppress everything. There is a similar pattern of behaviour with fossil fuels and climate change.
