Funders must not coerce scientists

To Coerce or Not to Coerce: A Corpus-based Exploration of Some Complement Coercion Verbs in Chinese

This study takes a corpus-based approach to examine twenty Chinese verbs that have been found to coerce their NP complements into an event type (cf. Lin et al. 2009), with an aim of creating a coercion profile for each verb. A cluster analysis is further conducted on the coercion profiles. The resulting clusters in our analysis show a bi-directional distribution: the verbs in Cluster 1 are foun...

How to Avoid Spreading Error Scientists Must Search for Corrections

In 1954 Conway Zirkle reviewed the fascinating history of the patterns and context of citations to the falsified scientific experiments published by Viennese zoologist Paul Kammerer. Using two types of salamanders and the male of the midwife toad, Kammerer claimed in the 1920s to have shown that acquired characteristics were inherited. But, as Zirkle recounts, “the acquired characters ... turne...

Some Things Must Not Change.

The past three months have been a season of tremendous change, and many of us have been surprised by the political events that have taken place. January heralds a change in administration for the United States, and the future seems uncertain. I sense that change is going to be the new normal, and we have to be able to cope with it-and with each other-for a long time. What I want to talk about i...

Does the Individual Mandate Coerce?

Validating Evolving Simulations in COERCE

We seek to increase user confidence in simulations as they are adapted to meet new requirements. Our approach includes formal representation of uncertainty, lightweight validation, and novel techniques for exploring emergent behavior. Uncertainty representation, using formalisms such as Dempster-Shafer theory, can capture designer insight about uncertainty, enabling formal analysis and improvin...