The Onion: Researchers Quietly Chuckling At Placebo Group
Although the trial is expected to run for two more months, Rodriguez told reporters that he almost could not wait to analyze the data, compile the results, publish the findings, and see the looks on their stupid faces.
To test your knowledge of scientific concepts and recent scientific findings and events, we invite you to take this 12-question science knowledge quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with the 1,005 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions. You’ll also be able to compare your Science IQ with the average scores of men and women; with college graduates as well as those who didn’t attend college; with people who are your age as well as with younger and older Americans.
I got 12/12, but I’d expect anyone with a science degree to do pretty well — this is targeted to a lay audience. And it sets the bar pretty low; numerous bloggers have discussed the poll results and implications. The poll is reasonable, I think, with two exceptions. One is a question that is not so much science as current events, and another is the type which becomes harder to justify when you know more about the topic. Look at the quiz first, though.
Uncertain Principles: This Is My Job
Somewhere in the last fifty-odd years, though, we’ve picked up the notion that it’s somehow unseemly for Real Scientists to speak to a general audience– that, as “Jon” writes, the only job of a scientist is to hunker down and do research that will be read and used by other scientists. The messy business of dumbing things down for the person on the street is best left to English majors who couldn’t hack calculus.
It’s no coincidence that the public prestige and influence of science has decreased significantly over that period. As scientists have lost interest in communicating science to the public, the public has lost interest in science.
Innovation — science and engineering — is the key to a sustainable economy.
Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters. Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.
“Filming in the lab” is the recent theme at PhD comics, and this one grabs the essence. (Or you can start at the beginning, if you’re one of the type that needs to do that.)
I’ve been filmed in the lab and interviewed on TV once, and I’ve observed my colleagues being filmed and interviewed. There’s a pattern to it. They sit you down in front of one of your impressive-looking pieces of lab apparatus and ask questions for a while. For every 15 minutes of interview, approximately 5 seconds will make it to air time in the final story (my data point, at least). Next, they will want some “action” shots of you, which for an atomic physics/optics lab usually means adjusting some mirrors or twiddling a knob on a piece of electronics and looking at an oscilloscope with a serious expression on your face. If there are two of you in the shot, one of you will need to be pointing at the oscilloscope, as if to say, “Here is where the WOW signal would be, if we had a signal. But we don’t, because we can’t run our experiment with these floodlights on.” Obviously “action shot” here does not the mean same thing as in an episode of some detective series — this is no Magnum, Principle Investigator. A third component that is sometimes used is of one of the interviewee walking down a corridor or sidewalk, so that the reporter can do a voice-over. Alternately they will just get shots of the equipment, especially if it whirs and moves about, for that segment.
Then they mash it all together and if you’re lucky they won’t have gotten the science horribly wrong.
John Hodgman at Radio & TV Correspondents’ Dinner
weird things: surprise, surprise! everything is just a theory
Want to make a scientist groan? Listen to a lecture about cutting edge research in his or her area of expertise, then say the five dreaded words: “it’s all just a theory.”
Fingerprints and Grip – Wrong vs Incomplete
I saw the headline to one version of the linked story (Fingerprint grip theory rejected) a few days back. I didn’t delve too deeply into it, and this thought had not occurred to me:
What struck me, and what the article did not mention, is that glass is a very artificial material. It is unlikely that our ancestors would have encountered such smooth material often in their day-to-day lives. Therefore there would not have been much selective pressure to develop a good grip on glass or similarly smooth material. Tree branches, rocks, fur, bones, and other materials that might find their way into the grasp of a hominid or ape are much rougher than glass.
Clearly follow up research is needed. How do fingerprints behave when applied to other materials, and how does wetness affect their utility?
What did pique my interest was a different version of the story (or headline, at least): Urban Myth Disproved: Fingerprints Do Not Improve Grip Friction. I had not considered that this was an “urban myth.” If it hadn’t been tested, then it was an hypothesis, and in need of testing. I don’t really hang with the “what good are fingerprints” crowd, so I don’t really have a grip —ridge-augmented or not — on how this viewpoint was being advertised. In any case, though, I agree that the process has been mischaracterized — the media has sensationalized the discovery by casting the results as some sort of paradigm shift rather than an incremental additional of knowledge.
What interested me most about this story is how the media channels science news stories into a few themes with which they feel comfortable. Debunking a commonly held myth is one of those themes. While this story hold a kernel of that theme – it is more accurate to say, in my opinion, not that the grip hypothesis is wrong but that the story is more complex.
That is a much more useful theme for science reporting – because the story is almost always more complex – more complex than the typical publish understanding, and even of our previous scientific understanding.
Likewise, it is more meaningful in many cases to portray our prior models and theories not as “wrong” but as incomplete. Sometimes they are wrong, but that needs to be distinguished from ideas that are oversimplified and therefore incomplete, but not wrong.