Immature Science Research Articles

Soil Health: What We Know—and Don’t Know

AbstractSoil health has long been recognized as important. There are many proven practices known to build and maintain soil health, but there are other practices that are suspect. Measuring soil health is happening, but it is an immature science. Will we find that the existing soil health tests are meaningful? Will new methods be developed? What will the collective efforts of those implementing the aforementioned practices be upon yields? Crop quality? Carbon sequestration equilibrium? Soil and environment sustainability? And, of vital importance, what is the financial sustainability for growers and society? Earn 1 CEU in Soil & Water Management by reading the article and taking the quiz at https://web.sciencesocieties.org/Learning‐Center/Courses.

Heterotopia as a Reconstruction of the History of Ideas

This paper proposes an analysis of the work The order of things by Michel Foucault, based on the notion of heterotopia, to demonstrate that the author develops there an original procedure of re-reading the history of ideas, which consists of the rearrangement of elements canonized by historiography, creating new relations between them, as well as in the insertion of unusual or heterodox elements. We then show how Ian Hacking reappropriates this heterotopic procedure in The emergence of probability and how it influences the heart of the author’s philosophical project, whose unique reading of archaeology brings it back to epistemology, either through the idea of “immature science” or through his notion of “styles of scientific reasoning.” Understanding the conditions for the formation of our ideas denaturalizes our current ways of thinking, opening new possibilities for thought and action. The relevance and potential that this heterotopic procedure has for contemporary epistemology are thus evident.

Noninvasive Ventilation and Exogenous Surfactant in Times of Ever Decreasing Gestational Age: How Do We Make the Most of These Tools?

Noninvasive Ventilation and Exogenous Surfactant in Times of Ever Decreasing Gestational Age: How Do We Make the Most of These Tools?

Closing the Gap Between Emerging Initiatives and Integrated Strategies to Strengthen Science Diplomacy in Latin America.

Science diplomacy is a fast-growing field of research, policy, and practice dedicated to understanding and reinforcing the connections between science and international affairs to tackle national, regional, and global issues. By aligning science and diplomacy, countries can attract talent, strengthen their national research ecosystems, provide avenues for participation of scientists in policy, and coordinate integrated solutions to challenges with technical dimensions. While Latin America has a long tradition of bilateral and regional cooperation, science still plays a marginal role in foreign policy, as has become evidenced by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With few exceptions, Latin American nations have a relatively immature science, technology, and innovation ecosystem, compounded by low public and private investments in research, coexisting with profound socio-economic inequalities, and large vulnerable populations. Such challenging conditions have created barriers to a fluid relationship between science and diplomacy, fundamentally characterized by inefficient communication between scientists and policymakers, weak collaboration channels, and duplicated roles, which altogether perpetuate siloed mentalities and a lack of trust between the two communities. Over the last decade, a first influential wave of Latin American scientists, diplomats, and other professionals, including five of the co-authors, have undertaken science diplomacy training provided by specialized organizations. Through these experiences, we recognized the need to elevate awareness and build capacities in science diplomacy in our respective countries and overall, across Latin America. Here, we describe emerging efforts and mechanisms to bridge the gap between scientists and policymakers at the national and regional level. Furthermore, we offer recommendations to amplify the impact of those pioneering initiatives toward consolidating a robust science diplomacy practice across the region. The national experiences described from Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama can serve as a roadmap for other Latin American nations in the early process of developing a science diplomacy strategy, so they can also align themselves to a collective pathway. Most critically, we propose a way forward so that Latin America can leapfrog beyond disjointed training of individuals into integrated institutional strategies that can harness the tools of science diplomacy to enhance science-informed multilateral cooperation and enable more effective science-informed policymaking.

An Immature Science: Intensive Care for Infants Born at ≤23 Weeks of Gestation

The gestational age boundary separating infants considered too immature for intensive care from infants who may benefit has shifted dramatically during the past 50 years. In 1971, a widely used neonatology textbook stated that “The lower limit of viability is probably around 28 weeks, at which time most infants weigh two pounds, four ounces (1000 g).” 1 Schaffer A. Avery M.E. Diseases of the newborn. Saunders, Philadelphia (PA)1971: 23 Google Scholar Today, the most immature infants routinely cared for by neonatologists in some parts of the world are born at 22 or 23 weeks of gestation, with many weighing less than a pound. 2 Backes C.H. Rivera B.K. Pavlek L. Beer L.J. Ball M.K. Zettler E.T. et al. Proactive neonatal treatment at 22 weeks of gestation: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2021; 224: 158-174 Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (4) Google Scholar

The arrogance of teratology: A brief chronology of attitudes throughout history.

While the discipline of Teratology has existed for about 60 years, there has been a deep interest in the causes of human malformations for millennia. Absent the scientific method and acting on fervent beliefs that made sense to ancient/medieval populations, “mechanisms” were described and prognostications of future events were assigned to terata resulting in tragic (and unwarranted) sequelae. This article examines the collective beliefs and thinking within various eras in the hope of providing lessons to inform future behavior. The eugenics movement is an informative, recent example. Science of the 19th century had unraveled some of the mysteries of development and the role of genetics in determining birth outcomes. There was, however, a deep misunderstanding about the enormous amount of information that had yet to be uncovered. Based on immature science and faulty assumptions, it was suggested that “unfit” individuals be euthanized and their parents sterilized. Such “solutions” would be considered deplorable today. Surprisingly, such a reprehensible program was supported (at least in part) by many intelligent and highly regarded individuals. Today, it is imperative that we enter into the era of molecular biology and gene editing cautiously and perspicaciously. The history of teratology has elucidated our inability to understand where our new technologies and actions might take us and how unintended consequences could disrupt even our most carefully thought‐out plans.

Been there, done that, so what's next for arm and hand rehabilitation in stroke?

The extraordinary advances in technology such as body-worn sensors, health information technologies, technological advances in neuroimaging, and computational approaches to predictive modelling using biomarkers offers considerable promise to literally transform our thinking, our approach to the problem, and the design of future clinical trials about arm and hand rehabilitation after stroke. To provide a focused review that considers the past, present and future of arm and hand rehabilitation in stroke. We organized this perspective into three parts: 1) Past- we summarize the past decade of the clinical trial enterprise in neurorehabilitation, 2) Present- we provide a brief review of three research areas where mechanistic studies that rely on uniquely human neural circuits provide a basis for promising intervention tools, and 3) Future-we highlight three unique research domains that are likely to provide the biggest impact on the future of post-stroke arm and hand recovery. The past has not been a complete failure- in particular, the EXCITE RCT put arm and hand rehabilitation on the map. Unfortunately, the majority of clinical trials that followed were based on an immature science of neurorehabilitation. We got drawn in by the seductive preclinical animal model work which suggested that dose and intensity of task-oriented training was the most important ingredient for fostering recovery in humans. While dose, and intensity are clearly important, they are of little value unless the stroke survivor is engaged, motivated, and the neural infrastructure provides enough resource to allow the recovery process. Recently, we noticed an increase in mechanistic and theory-driven studies, findings from which will not only advance our understanding of critical brain-behavior mechanisms, but will provide a more mature science moving into the future. The good news is that there is evidence that we learned from the past and have invented a future that appears to be much more exciting and promising than the past.

Thoughts About the Negative Results of Clinical Trials in Rehabilitation Medicine

The last decade has witnessed an increase in the number of moderate to large-scale nonpharmacologic stroke recovery trials. While a majority, having tested the superiority of a particular evidence-based intervention, returned negative findings, the rehabilitation research community has gained an important perspective for future efforts. We offer our interpretation first, on why most of the past decade’s trials failed in the sense of not supporting the primary superiority hypothesis, and, second, we provide our perspective on how to solve this problem and thereby inform the next generation of neurorehabilitation clinical trials. The first large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) ever conducted in neurorehabilitation was the Extremity Constraint Induced Movement Therapy Evaluation (EXCITE) trial. The majority of stroke recovery trials that followed were based on a prevailing, but as yet immature science of brain-behavior mechanisms for recovery and limited practical know-how about how to select the most meaningful outcomes. The research community had been seduced by a set of preclinical studies, ignited by the 1990’s revolution in neuroscience and an oversimplified premise that high doses of task-oriented training was the most important ingredient to foster recovery. Here, we highlight recent qualitative and quantitative evidence, both mechanistic and theory-driven, that integrates crucial social and personal factors to inform a more mature science better suited for the next generation of recovery-supportive rehabilitation clinical trials.

What Is an Immature Science?

ABSTRACTCognitive and social sciences such as psychology and sociology are often described as immature sciences. But what is immaturity? According to the received view, immaturity is disunity, where disunity can usefully be cashed out in terms of having a plurality of disunified frameworks in play, where these frameworks consist of concepts, theories, goals, practices, methods, criteria for what counts as a good explanation, etc. However, there are some reasons to think that the cognitive and social sciences should be disunified in this sense. If that is right, either these sciences should remain immature, or we need a new account of immaturity. The former option is unappealing. I therefore provide an alternative account of immaturity, based on Dudley Shapere’s work on the internal/external distinction. I then go on to use this account to argue against the imposition of unification on the cognitive and social sciences. Acceptance of disunity may be the route to maturity, rather than a sign of immaturity.

Forgetting the Past and Neglecting the Future. Commentary: A Crisis in Comparative Psychology: Where Have All the Undergraduates Gone?

Forgetting the Past and Neglecting the Future. Commentary: A Crisis in Comparative Psychology: Where Have All the Undergraduates Gone?

Honouring the value of people in public health: a different kind of p-value.

Honouring the value of people in public health: a different kind of p-value.

National Assessment and Critiques of State-and-Transition Models: The Baby with the Bathwater

On the Ground Ecological site descriptions and state-and-transition models are national-level tools for organizing and delivering information about landscape dynamics and management. Recent papers criticized state-and-transition models because they overemphasize grazing, are inconsistently presented, and do not address climate change. I argue that the analysis of Twidwell et al. does not support an overemphasis on grazing, that inconsistent presentation is a necessary consequence of early model development efforts and immature science concepts, and that climate change effects should not be addressed in site-level models without evidence. Improving these important tools requires fair critique, but also the strong commitment of scientists and funders.

Pedagogy: An Immature Science on the basis of System Science

The scientificity of pedagogy has been bothering pedagogy scholars since its beginning. The reason of debate about scientificity or nonscientificity for more than two hundred years exists in the different understandings of science. The development of science is historical and dynamic. It goes through four complicated transformations: knowledge hierarchy, social activities, community organization and modern system science, which demonstrates the breadth and depth of its changes. It goes without saying that pedagogy is a science from the perspective of traditional science. At the same time, pedagogy owns the features of system science under the perspective of modern science: globality, nonlinearity, randomness, self-organization, and feedback. Introducing system science into pedagogy will form a huge pedagogical view and complex thinking. However, the recognition to system science is at the superficial and primary stage, regardless of theory and practice as in the unsystematic study of contents and methods, low quality of study and superficial level of application. Therefore, in the sense, pedagogy is an immature science.

Creativity - Lost in Simplification?

A B S T R A C T The target article claims that creativity research is in crisis, which is associated with the excessive oversimplification employed in quantitative creativity research. We oppose this view by showing that lab measures of creative cognitive po- tential are valid with respect to real-life creativity and hence represent a valuable means of empirical creativity research. Neuroscientific research in particular, which is often viewed as a considerably artificial paradigm for the study of creativi- ty, is a powerful complemental method to unveil basic cogni- tive mechanisms (e.g., attention and memory processes) involved in creative thought and to extend our understanding of the creating brain. Conceptual clarity and methodological rigor necessarily go along with simplification in natural sci- ence, which does not generally forfeit validity but rather facil- itates the cumulative gain of dependable knowledge. This is particularly important for creativity research, a discipline that risks being seen as an immature science when it attempts to explain more than it actually can.

Sifting disease-causing signal from genomic noise

Recent advances in DNA sequencing technology are transforming our understanding of the genetic basis of rare human diseases. It is now possible to rapidly and cost-effectively interrogate the majority of protein-coding bases in the human genome (known collectively as the exome), finding mutations that would have been difficult if not impossible to discover with the traditional approaches of linkage and candidate gene sequencing. However, unambiguously identifying the disease-causing mutations in a patient's exome remains challenging. Next-generation sequencing, while powerful, still requires careful filtering to remove errors and is underpowered for discovery of larger insertions/deletions (indels) and complex variants; coverage of genes is incomplete due to biases in DNA capture and sequencing; and predicting the likely functional impact of observed variants is still an immature science. Importantly, existing catalogues both of normal variation in reference populations and of reported disease-causing mutations are incomplete and biased. Finally, methods for communicating the results of large-scale sequencing to key target audiences - clinicians, patients and researchers from other fields - remain poorly developed. In this presentation I describe recent advances in variant-calling from next-generation sequencing technology, and their application to exome data from over 15,000 individuals from multiple different disease-specific studies. Functional annotation of sequence variants across these large samples illustrates the surprising degree of putatively functional genetic variation even in apparently healthy individuals. However, the existence of a very large and accurately called reference panel of exomes provides a powerful resource for interpreting the probability of disease causation for variants observed in rare disease samples. I also discuss new approaches to analyzing and presenting the results from family-based studies of protein-coding mutations in rare disease patients.

Karl Popper on Physical Cosmologies

The eminent Austrian-British philosopher Karl Raimund Popper (1902-94) is one of very few modern philosophers who is known by most and whose views have influenced course of science. to his famous demarcation criterion, first stated in 1933, a scientific theory must be falsifiable, that is, result in predictions of such a kind that they, should they disagree with observations, refute theory.1 Popper presented his falsificationist philosophy of science in Logik der Forschung from 1934, but it became generally known only with enlarged English translation of 1959, The logic of scientific discovery. The ideas in this book, and demarcation criterion in particular, played important role in cosmological controversy that raged from 1948 to about 1965 and in which new steady state theory confronted evolution cosmology based on Einstein's general theory of relativity.2 The leading steady state protagonist, Hermann Bondi, was fascinated by Popper's philosophy which he thought proved methodological superiority of steady state model over big bang models. 'The steady-state theory is far more testable than any other, he wrote in 1966, one year after discovery of cosmic microwave background. According to Popper and other philosophers of science, this makes it clearly preferable to alternative theories.3It may be less well known that Popper's views of science continue to play a role in modern astronomy and cosmology, and are widely accepted by practitioners of these sciences.4 Recently these views have become involved in another cosmological controversy, one concerned with multiverse proposal of numerous other universes in addition to one we live in.5 In so-called landscape version defended by Leonard Susskind and some other physicists, multiverse theory is incompatible with Popperian standards of testability. This has caused Susskind to dismiss falsifiability criterion and generally views of Popperazi. On other hand, Lee Smolin and other critics of multiverse cosmology emphasize necessity of Popperian methodology. Referring to Popper, Smolin suggests that scientists have ethical imperative to consider only falsifiable theories as possible explanations of natural phenomena.6In light of how influential Popper's philosophy has been in modern astronomy and cosmology, it is remarkable that he had very little to say about these sciences. Only on a few occasions did he refer to physical cosmology, a topic that does not appear in any of his major publications. While debate over steady state theory involved several philosophers (including Adolf Grunbaum, Milton Munitz, and Rom Harre), Popper remained silent. Yet he had interest in cosmology, which he called the most philosophically important of all sciences.7 From various scattered remarks in his books and papers it appears that he considered cosmology, although philosophically important, a somewhat immature science, and also that he had little confidence in victorious big bang model of universe.We learn more about Popper's attitude to physical cosmology from a letter he wrote me on 10 June 1994, just a few months before he passed away. The letter, covering seven handwritten pages, was a reply to some questions I had asked him in preparation of my book Cosmology and controversy. It is a source of considerable interest, both from perspective of history of cosmology and from perspective of history of philosophy. I can only quote from it now, after it has been deposited at Karl Popper Library in Klagenfurt, Austria,8 and copyright questions have been clarified.In his younger days, so Popper says in letter, he was an ardent admirer of Friedmann's suggestion, a reference to Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann who in 1922 had shown that there are expanding and other dynamical solutions to Einstein's cosmologica! …

Provisional Clinical Opinion

Provisional Clinical Opinion

Provisional Clinical Opinion

Provisional Clinical Opinion

Challenges for Disaster Research: Recommendations for Planning and Implementing Disaster Mental Health Studies

Disaster research has evolved from an immature science to one where more complex questions need to be asked. Theoretically sophisticated research to help answer critical questions is needed. Contemporary disaster research is often instigated with a sense of emergency in response to the tragedy of specific events. This article provides an in-depth discussion of several relevant factors to consider when developing research programs in the aftermath of disaster. This is not a review of the entire literature on disaster recovery. The material presented is intended to help influence the types of questions asked, the research approaches taken, and the analytic techniques considered.

Is political correctness damaging science?

Science is hardly unique in relying on peer review to determine merit and success. But for science, the reliance on peers to referee both submissions for publication and applications for grants involves greater dangers than in some other disciplines. It brings the triple risk of conformity, cronyism and plagiarism, which together can smother innovation. At a broader level, there is a tendency for researchers to fall in line with a particular point of view, especially in the more politically charged branches of science such as ecology or climatology. Those who oppose the prevailing orthodoxy risk being branded ‘flat earthers’ and cast into a wilderness where funding and publications are hard to obtain. According to Bruce Beutler, professor of immunology at the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA, USA), peer pressure in its various forms is a particular problem for science. “It is not unique to research, but in science it goes very much against the grain of what's trying to be accomplished,” he said. Yet scientists themselves must take some of the blame for perpetuating a system that can stifle original thinking, Beutler contends. “Scientists like to present an image to the outside world as being very iconoclastic and sceptical. Yet they have a complete conformity of opinion on certain things, and they do victimize people who differ from them.” By way of example, Beutler cited the atmosphere surrounding the recent US presidential election, in which any scientist who argued in favour of George W. Bush attracted severe ridicule. More worryingly though, such political correctness can distort research, with consequences not just for scientific direction but also for public matters such as health policy. “I think the best example of conformity of science is the influenza vaccine,” said Tom Jefferson, an independent researcher in the UK who specializes in immunology. …