As the Spring semester rolls around, in this short space between the winter holiday extravaganza and the start of my second semester in Missouri’s library and information science program, I though I’d share some thoughts on a few recent pieces on research. Often positioned as a final boss in education and the thing that keeps people in the academy once basic skill and efforts to cultivate them are exhausted, research can be vexing when done well. When done poorly though whether through negligence or malice it can be catastrophic though interesting.

The first published at Ars Technica concerns a case of problematic interpretation. The setup seems very innovative, the results seem interesting, and then the investigator offers his interpretation involving an outmoded Lamarkian view of evolutionary biology. He devised an apparatus that allowed E. coli to be cultured over a gradient of differing concentrations of nutrients and antibiotics while being able to travel between these cells and observed rapid acquisition of resistance to ciprofloxacin, on the order of ten hours. And then he interprets his results through a pre-Darwinian lens. Presentation abstract available here.

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