VinnieK

To be fair to Feynmann, the article was intended for a general audience so precise measurements for comparitive purposes would probably just interfere with what he's trying to do, that being to give a sense of scale. Compared with the distance used in the analogy, the difference between the diameter of a strand of hair and something close to a milimetre is negligible as far as trying to impress a sense of whats going on up is concerned (and it at least has some kind of rigour in that the order of magnitude is the same)!

I could be wrong, but I don't think Feynman's talking about the accuracy of the theory relative to measurement, but the accuracy of both relative to the actual Dirac number (since he talks of the accuracy of these numbers), in this case +/- 4 X 10^(-11) for measurement, and +/- 2 X 10^(-10) for the theory.

When applied to the distance analogy, this gives +/- 1.6 X 10^(-4) and +/- 7.9 X 10^(-4) respectively, which is at least the right order of magnitude (which is what a lot of scientists mean when they talk about accuracy on a small or large scale).

Sure, and I agree largely with that, but I do get the feeling that it's gone beyond now. I mean Dawkins for instance is a full participant in the culture wars now, and a lot of the discussion, such as that which appears on blogs by the likes of Meyrs and Coyns is beginning to go beyond a mere defence of science and turn into a fully fledged attack on religion in general including other scientists and those who don't toe the official line of atheism's new gods.

That doesn't surprise me! I haven't met many academics who are are that happy about citation analysis or its possible use as a basis for whatever will take the RAE's place (which was already far from perfect). One particular danger is that it's going to send us even further down the route of the "publish or perish" model that's been in vogue in the US for the past couple of decades or so, only without the generally higher levels of funding and resources they have there.

Well, your terms are certainly a lot better than the blatantly charged 'accomodationalists', which combined with the idea of this being "soft on faith", starts to resemble soviet style stigma through nomenclature!

I wonder why it is usually biologists of a certain age that get so publicly het up about atheism/theism.

It's fun, certainly! Though it has to be said that such citation metrics are often regarded with suspicion when it comes to how they claim to measure significance and communication in the sciences.

For instance, the analysis only covers eight years, which is a relatively short time frame over which to analyse citations. Many papers will continue to accumulate citations long after such a period (for example, one paper I'm looking at cites publications dating back to the 70's), and it's not unheard of for entire subdisciplines to only gain widespread recognition and garner citations years after their initial development (examples being homological algebra and combinatorial geometry).

Also, a lot of the communication of science is effectively hidden by the graphic. For instance, say an algebraicist comes up with paper X, which two physicists find useful and cite accordingly. Then suppose that twelve chemists go on to write papers using material from the phycisists' work. Now, they will cite the physicist, but might not cite the algebraicist, though their work is indirectly dependent on his or her's - the next round of citations may ignore the physicist as well, and so on. In a sense this process is represented in the diagram you include: it's notable that molecular and cellular biology and medicine are two of the biggest citation "hubs", given that these disciplines are not only vastly applicable, but, having a broad scientific basis, could also be seen as "hiding" the true degree of contributions from other disciplines. A fair example of this would be the current efforts to unify quantum mechanics with gravity, or understanding the connections between thermodynamics and gravity. Both are thought to be highly dependent upon the development of something called quantum group theory and the insights this discipline offers. Now, should such efforts prove fruitful, the papers that result will surely be justly celebrated and receive numerous citations, many more in fact that the underlying theory which is so crucial to the process - in other words, citation metrics spanning differently disciplines typically fail to convey any meaningful measure of significance (despite them often being used to this effect!) of what it seeks to represent.

I haven't read the article itself, but this seems to make no sense. To say that the small team of experts fund the treatments is misleading - they merely decide how existing resources should be redistributed.

For this scheme to work, funding would have to be taken from the Primary Health Care trusts and given to this centralised organization. This rehuffling does nothing to address scarcity of resources, and indeed could make the current situation worse by establishing another costly layer of bureaucracy to process and document claims and assessments. Furthermore, it does nothing to address the ethical issues involved in bypassing the existing method of testing and licensing medicines, possibly diverting resources from the provision of existing licensed medicines to those who can benefit from them.

Ultimately, the question of resource allocation and the organisation of health care is much larger than the Herceptin issue, or that of providing any given emerging medicine. Indeed, these are merely a few symptoms, examples, and special cases of a far more general problem involving funding and the question of provision. As such, any proposed method of dealing with such a narrow strand of the problem can't be taken to be anything more than a temporary 'patch' designed to appease popular demand more than address the fundamental questions and problems that need to be dealt with.

Secondly, although I'm a great fan of learning from debates and examples elsewhere in the world, I'm not sure that this is a case where such a method is truly applicable. After all, don't we already have the kind of largely centralised health care service that the article suggests is a solution to this particular problem?