De Wetenschap


Waiting on tables, mending puppets: the first jobs that shaped researchers’ careers

Jop de Vrieze

Many scientists credit teenage jobs and university or summer side roles for imparting important transferable skills and valuable life experiences. Nature When Vijay Ravikumar was in secondary school, he would go on long evening walks with his best friend, exploring the city they lived in: Chicago, Illinois. One night in 2000, they passed a rundown shopfront. In the window, many puppets were on display, and a sign read: “Apprentice wanted”. Ravikumar, now a mathematician, had no particular affinity for puppets,

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What science reporters should know about meta-analyses before covering them

Jop de Vrieze

As science journalists who take our job seriously, we’ve learned a couple of rules by heart: never present a correlation as a causation, always check whether a sample is representative and never rely on a single study. As the expression goes: one swallow doesn’t make a summer. These are all good starting points. But they are far from making us unimpeachable in our reporting. As a result of the third principle, we tend to rely on review studies. More specifically:

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