Best Space Pictures of 2010: Odd Aurora, Ring of Fire, More
Bonus: photos from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2010 contest
Category Archives: Science-general
Voting on Science
The Youcut Citizen Review of Government
We are launching an experiment – the first YouCut Citizen Review of a government agency. Together, we will identify wasteful spending that should be cut and begin to hold agencies accountable for how they are spending your money.
A really horrible idea: have lay people suggest research to cut by looking for “questionable” grants. Based on what? The scientific illiteracy possessed and cherished by a large fraction of the populace? Given the kind of ridicule that politicians themselves display toward science (in particular, anything remotely related to evolution or genetics), I would expect a parade of suggestions based solely on ideology, cutting anything related not only to evolution, but also global warming and any behavioral studies that want to look at conduct that doesn’t mirror that of the Cunninghams from Happy Days.
The site uses as an example “$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players.” Of course, it turns out that it’s more than that. There is no reference to the grant (or grants), but someone has already tracked this down. The project was an effort to objectively measure individuals’ performance, and soccer was used in the preliminary work, but an application was for workers in a business setting. As far as I can tell, the soccer model was only part of the work funded by the grant. You can’t build a complex model from scratch, so you work your way up using a system that’s more easily investigated. This isn’t really all that subtle a notion, in the scheme of things scientific, but it’s lost here.
If these politicians can’t grasp that, there isn’t much hope that they would grasp the concept of funding a lot of basic research, because most of it ends up not panning out. It’s research. It means investigating the unknown, where there can be no guarantee of success. But as our representatives in government, it really is their job to know this. Pandering like this is just an example of abandoning their responsibilities. It’s sickening.
Science-Talky Stuff
Why effective scientific communication is crucial, and sometimes lacking
Isn’t it true, she asked, that it’s better to appear ‘formal’ and intelligent in the eyes of the audience than to ensure that the audience understands clearly? I was surprised that she’d asked this, but I was more surprised that other students in the audience were either in agreement with her or silent. In fact, the point this student made was the exact opposite of the truth. The first priority is conveying an understanding of the points involved. Overly florid writing may seem more formal, but it’s also more pretentious, less clear, and much less accessible to the audience.
A reminder that what is obvious to one person is not obvious to another. If your goal is to appear smart and intimidate people with your intelligence, then talking over their heads will probably accomplish that goal. But that’s not such a great tactic if you wish to actually communicate. It shouldn’t need to be pointed out, but there you go.
New Rule, Kinda the Same as the Old Rule
SMBC: New rule for Science Journalism
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the observation before. Yes, and even more so, it has a name: Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. But do you think the media will follow “If the product has no innate value, don’t produce it?” What would happen to paparazzi shows and “reality” TV?
Read This, Even Though My Data are Faked
Did you know that 73.4% of statistics are made up?
I’ve run across several posts all referencing a recent journal article, Retractions in the scientific literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud?, which parrot (and possibly distort) the information in the abstract — that US researchers are the worst purveyors of fraud, such as this article: US Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research, Study Finds
I wanted to check on that, because it’s not an unknown phenomenon for a article to incorrectly summarize research and so I looked at the article, linked above, to see the abstract
All 788 English language research papers retracted from the PubMed database between 2000 and 2010 were evaluated.
Well, that’s a bit of bias, since people in the US are more likely to publish in English-language journals, but that’s not necessarily true for countries where English is not the native language. It also assumes all fraud is caught and results in a retraction. But beyond that I wanted numbers to look at, since I know there are a lot of articles published in the US, and if they are simply saying that there are more fraudulent articles published in the US, it is pretty meaningless. While I don’t have access to the journal, it turns out that an analysis has already been done. US scientists “more prone” to fake research? No., with some followup in Rates of Scientific Fraud Retractions
The likelihood of a given paper being retracted as fraudulent is higher for China and India than for the US, and significantly so. The finding that the fraud rate is higher is higher-impact journals may be due to having more scrutiny and that we’re simply missing fraud in journals that are not widely read.
I think it’s also important to note (as the paper’s author does) that the overall rate of fraud is low. Using these criteria, it is less than 200 cases out of more than six million papers, or 0.0032%. In other words, for every 31,000 journal articles you read (from all sources), on average one of them will be fraudulent. If you limit yourself to US authors, the number drops to one in only 21,600.
Scientists: More Kirk than Spock
But if the history of chemistry lays only dubious claim to being the greatest adventure in all of history, it certainly is an adventure: quite different from the nerdy stereotype of the history of science, and much more like Captain Kirk than Science Officer Spock. Such is the lesson of Patrick Coffey’s lively survey, Cathedrals of Science. The men (mostly) and women (more every year) who make this history fight for jobs and recognition just like ballplayers, doctors, artists, actors, and accountants who strive to reach the top of their profession. Along the way, they prefer their friends, sabotage their enemies, and tilt playing fields the world assumes are level. Those of us who work in a place that bestows awards and collects oral histories know that every sort of personality can be a great scientist: the bold, the shy, the plodding, the brilliant, the generous, the spiteful, the humble, and those with more self-assurance than a shark in a minnow tank.
Luuucy!
What Should Be Explained Better?
What is the one concept in science that you really think should be explained better to a wide audience?
I imagine the tweet got a similar spectrum of responses. And that spectrum, I think, is interesting. It ranges from very general concepts (science asks “how” and “why,” Occam’s Razor and the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, empiricism, science doesn’t prove things, etc.) to general subjects (QM, E&M, evolution) to specific topics within those (decoherence, speciation, spin-1/2 systems, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).
Anyone who has read this blog for a while probably knows I have a spin-1/2 particle up my, um, other spin-1/2 particle about how quantum entanglement and teleportation are presented in the press, but I wouldn’t offer that up as an example, simply because it’s too limited. It’s a symptom of a larger problem, and you don’t usually cure the problem by attacking one symptom.
So I would go with some meta-explanation about science and how it works: how we, as scientists, know what we know. That is, the reminder that what we know and find out in science does not exist in a vacuum, but is built up from accumulated knowledge, and couple this with the explanation about the process — that we try and figure out how nature works by rigorously testing hypotheses and that we are skeptics (real skeptics).
Uncommon Sense
Pseudoscience, common sense, and the problem of scale
Fundamentally, this is a problem of scale. What is common sense? It is a body of knowledge derived from common experience. Even toddlers know that objects always fall down not up and objects that are out of sight still exist. These rudimentary scientific observations form the bedrock of common sense. But for something to be common sense, it must take place on a level we can appreciate with our senses. Simply put, common sense can only tell us about events that are common to human experience.
Life in Free Fall
Life aboard the International Space Station
The space station has a permanent crew of six, so the arrival of new faces is a cause for celebration. That said, even the most welcome visitors can cause havoc if they are inexperienced. There is a subtle art to moving around without crashing into anything – or, more annoyingly, others – knocking computers, equipment and other objects off the walls to which they are attached with Velcro pads. One serving shuttle pilot confessed to leaving a wake of laptops and other vital belongings behind him the first time he tried to fly from one room to another. “When you first turn up, you are like a bull in a china shop,” he said. “I had no idea where to put any of it back.”
In time, people hone the skill and can fly down the length of the station, straight as an arrow, without touching anything, except with their fingertips. People sit in mid air, tapping away at a computer, with only a toe hooked under a wall strap to anchor themselves. Then, with a flick of the hand, they’ll float up to another computer and carry on typing there. Getting from one place to another is all the more difficult because up and down (and so left and right) have no absolute meaning. The ability to form a mental map of the space station – and then rotate it in 3D to suit your perspective – is a priceless skill for an astronaut.
Buffalo Springfielded
slacktivist: Climate change facts, for what that’s worth
This is a duty, telling the truth. It is the first duty we owe to the truth itself and to every neighbor we meet who is trapped in a lie. Facts matter.
But do not always expect facts to convince. Someone who has arrived at their current stance due to something other than facts will not likely be persuaded to budge from it due to the facts. Some small percentage, some few, are honestly misinformed, and for them facts and information will be persuasive and liberating. They will be grateful for the link. But for most the problem is not simply one of a lack of accurate information. For them, finding their way back to the truth will require retracing the steps that led them away from it — a path that had little to do with information or facts.
Regarding the facts of climate change — and also any other similarly oft-rejected set of facts that cannot reasonably be denied — the denialists can be grouped into three broad categories: 1. The honestly uninformed or misinformed; 2. The liars; and, 3. The deluded.
The facts presented on that NASA site will be persuasive to those who fall into the first category. For them, a clear presentation of accurate facts will be necessary and sufficient.
For those who fall in the latter two categories, a clear presentation of accurate facts will be necessary, but it will not be sufficient.