首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
How science goes wrong Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. A)A simple idea underli
How science goes wrong Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. A)A simple idea underli
admin
2016-04-26
41
问题
How science goes wrong
Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself.
A)A simple idea underlies science: "trust, but verify". Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed extreme self-satisfaction. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying, damaging the whole of science, and of humanity. B)Too many of the findings are the result of cheap experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated(复制). Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 "milestone" studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist worries that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are nonsense. In 2000-10, roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later withdrawn because of mistakes or improperness.
What a load of rubbish
C)Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it blows money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds. The opportunity costs of hindered progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.
D)One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the Second World War, it was still a rarefied(小众的)pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled to 6m -7m active researchers on the latest account, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to "publish or perish(消亡)" has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs strive for every academic post. Nowadays verification(the replication of other people’s results)does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, uncertain findings live on to mislead.
E)Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the choose-the-most-profitable of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has polished a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results based on his instinct, And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, it is more likely that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a nut of the statistical noise. Such lake correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.
F)Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis(假设)are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. "Negative results" now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
G)The holy process of peer review is not all it is praised to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.
If it’s broke, fix it
H)All this makes a shaky foundation for an enterprise dedicated to discovering the truth about the world. What might be done to shore it up? One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that screen through untold crowds of data looking for patterns. Geneticists have done this, and turned an early stream of deceptive results from genome sequencing(基因组测序)into a flow of truly significant ones.
I)Ideally, research protocols(草案)should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to manipulate the experiment’s design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are.(It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs.)
Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.
J)The most enlightened journals are already showing less dislike of tedious papers. Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which give out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication. And growing numbers of scientists, especially young ones, understand statistics. But these trends need to go much further. Journals should allocate space for "uninteresting" work, and grant-givers should set- aside money to pay for it. Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules.
K)Science still commands enormous—if sometimes perplexed—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by cheap research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding.
Modern science began in the 17th century.
选项
答案
A
解析
本题涉及描述学术问题之前对现代科学的概述,由题目中的began in the 17th century可定位至A段。本题是对A段第3句的Since its birth in the 17th century的改写。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/10e7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
GettingThin—forGoodA)Justabouteveryonehasbeenonadietatonetimeoranother,andmillionsofushavelearnedthatthe
Lookingforanewweightlossplan?Trylivingontopofamountain.Mountainaircontainslessoxygenthanairatloweraltitud
Yearsago,doctorsoftensaidthatpainwasanormalpartoflife.Inparticular,whenolderpatients【C1】______ofpain,theywer
Consumersarebeingconfusedandmisledbythehodge-podge(大杂烩)ofenvironmentalclaimsmadebyhouseholdproducts,accordingto
Itishardtopredicthowscienceisgoingtoturnout,andifitisreallygoodscience,itisimpossibletopredict.Iftheth
TheuseofdeferentiallanguageissymbolicoftheConfucianidealofthewoman,whichdominatesconservativegendernormsinJa
TheuseofdeferentiallanguageissymbolicoftheConfucianidealofthewoman,whichdominatesconservativegendernormsinJa
A、Washingplates.B、Clearingtables.C、Shiningshoes.D、Sweepingthefloor.C细节题。短文中提到,6岁时thespeaker的第一份工作是给客人擦鞋(shiningshoes
A、Havesomeflowerssenttosomeone.B、Deliverapackagetothehospital.C、Arrangesomeflowers.D、Talktoadoctor.A男士说他想买些花,
A、Amovie.B、Alecture.C、Aplay.D、Aspeech.C细节题。女士认为一些人不懂得欣赏戏剧表演。可见他们谈论的话题是戏剧。
随机试题
关于肌肉的描述错误的是
患者,女.30岁。发热胸痛5天。见发热,胸痛,咳吐腥臭脓血痰,舌红苔腻。宜选主药为
A.玄麦甘桔含片B.复方鱼腥草片C.冰硼散D.桂林西瓜霜E.耳聋左慈丸具有清热解毒,消肿止痛之功,可以治疗风热上攻、肺胃热盛所致乳蛾、喉痹、口糜的中成药是()。
如果雇主拟替换工程师,则应当在预计替换的日期之前的()天,将打算任用的工程师的名称、地址和相关经验告知承包商。
长江中游某河段航道整治工程,在施工图设计没有完成之前,业主通过招标选择了一家承包单位承包该工程的施工任务。由于设计工作尚未完成,承包范围内待实施的工程虽性质明确,但工程量还难以确定,双方商定拟采用总价合同形式签订施工合同,以减少双方的风险。双方草签的施工合
企事业单位的承包、承租经营所得必要费用的扣除是指( )。
某办公室有三位工作人员:刘明、庄嫣和文虎。他们三人中,一人是博士,一人是硕士,还有一人是本科毕业生。已知博士比刘明大两岁;庄嫣与本科毕业生同岁,但是月份稍大;本科毕业生的年龄最小。由此,可以推出()。
一、注意事项1.本卷总分100分,限时150分钟,其中阅读给定资料参考时限为40分钟。2.请仔细阅读给定的资料内容,然后按照后面提出的“作答要求”作答。二、给定资料1.2009年3月22日至25日,中共中央政治局委员、中央书记处
请在“答题”菜单中选择相应的命令,并按照题目要求完成下面的操作。注意:以下的文件必须保存在考生文件夹下。某出版社的编辑小刘手中有一篇有关财务软件应用的书稿“Word_素材.docx”,请按下列要求完成书稿编排工作。按下列要求进行页面
Aninvestigationofthecirculationofbloodintheeyesofdiverhasproducedthestrongestevidencethattissuedamagecaused
最新回复
(
0
)