10,000 Brilliant Ideas

Researchers never share. They want everyone else to share with them, but they never share. Well, they do want to share eventually (weee publish!), they just really don't want to be scooped. How do you fix this perverse situation of smart people? (full disclosure: I think I really don't like the whole archaic publishing process of current day academia. Maybe I'll find something down the road, but I feel like it's been long enough and I still don't really like it. (a)) - Create some incentive to reveal early what you're up to. Some kind of notoriety. Or, more excitingly - Create a news site that hunts down things investigative journalism style. As soon as someone starts a trial or anything scientific they're posted in the papers. Of course researchers could 'turn themselves in', which is what they'd start doing if the journalists were good at sniffing them out anyway. (a) Reasons I don't like the process. - It's gatekept by establishe...

Donate your living body to research! That's what the banner ad will say on your facebook page. What it means simply is that you are willing to give access to your full facebook and other social site history to researchers who can use it under certain conditions (guarantee of anonymity for example). I'm not talking about research of social media which is already plentiful. I'm talking about traditional research that needs to have you remember something about your past. For example, a study trying to determine if yo-yo dieting leads to diabetes. The researcher could contact you, pay you the nominal fee as is done in research studies, test you for diabetes, and then look in your facebook history to see how many times you mentioned being on a diet. Currently these studies suffer from recall bias because it's hard to remember what you did 5 years ago, much less what you ate. But if you're one of those facebook people who posts every time you eat a hamburger, well the...