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 underlies
How science goes wrong Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. [A] A simple idea underlies
admin
2017-12-08
24
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 In 2000-10, roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later withdrawn because of mistakes or improperness.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 fake 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.
"Publish or perish" has become the dominant rule over academic life now.
选项
答案
D
解析
本题涉及学术造假的环境因素,可知答案应在What a load of rubbish标题下的内容查找。由“Publish or perish”和rule可以定位到D段第5句。原文提到,由于竞争激烈,发表学术成果和论文在一个人的学术生涯中逐渐占据主导地位,从而导致了不发表就完蛋亡的现象,题干中的dominant rule对应原文的come to rule over…,故本题来源于D段。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/Hka7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
A、Becausethedesignwastoostrong.B、Becausethepaintinglookedlikeaphotograph.C、Becausethepaintingwastoosimple.D、B
A、Thinkabouthowtoconnectpeoplearoundtheworld.B、Toattractlargenumberofinternationaltalenttogether.C、Discusshow
Newresearchshowsthatchildrenbornafterunplannedpregnanciesdevelopmoreslowlythanchildrenwhoseparentshadplannedth
Newresearchshowsthatchildrenbornafterunplannedpregnanciesdevelopmoreslowlythanchildrenwhoseparentshadplannedth
Newresearchshowsthatchildrenbornafterunplannedpregnanciesdevelopmoreslowlythanchildrenwhoseparentshadplannedth
Newresearchshowsthatchildrenbornafterunplannedpregnanciesdevelopmoreslowlythanchildrenwhoseparentshadplannedth
Newresearchshowsthatchildrenbornafterunplannedpregnanciesdevelopmoreslowlythanchildrenwhoseparentshadplannedth
A、Theywillexchangerings.B、Theywillexchangepresents.C、Theywillexchangepromises.D、Theywillexchangeflowers.C细节题。听录音
A、Hehasdifficultiesgoingonwithhisresearch.B、Hedoesn’tunderstandtheworkplacefriendshipC、Hehasn’treadanyliteratu
随机试题
患者,女,28岁。已婚。平素月经周期错后,本次停经已有百日,心烦易怒,胸胁胀满,小腹微胀,胃脘痞满,头晕。舌苔厚腻,脉弦滑。本证最恰当的处理为
下列各种情况下,可使心输出量增加的是
A.水冲脉B.交替脉C.重搏脉D.奇脉E.无脉符合甲状腺功能亢进症的体征是
患者,张某,25岁。呕吐吞酸,嗳气频作,胸胁胀痛,每因情志不遂发作或加重,舌质红,苔薄腻,脉弦。根据上述病例,回答以下问题。该病人的证候属于()。
建设项目管理规划的主要内容包括()等。
菲律宾是一个多民族国家,现人口已突破1亿,成为世界上第()个人口过亿的国家。
《刑法》第270条规定:“将代为保管的他人财物非法占为己有,数额较大,拒不退还的,处二年以下有期徒刑、拘役或者罚金;数额巨大或者有其他严重情节的,处二年以上五年以下有期徒刑,并处罚金。将他人的遗忘物或者埋藏物非法占为己有,数额较大,拒不交出的,依
Therewasatimewhenwomenwereconsideredsmartiftheyplayeddumbtogetaman,andwomenwhowenttocollegeweremoreinte
有以下定义语句,编译时会出现编译错误的是
假定窗体的名称为fmTest,则把窗体的标题设置为“AccessTest”的语句是()。
最新回复
(
0
)