Category Archives: Science-general

The Fact of the Matter

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George Will Officially Loses His Mind

More piling on Poor George, for his act of confusing political punditry with science and the acceptability within each discipline of just making stuff up to make a point. But within the arguments, Tom brings up another example that hasn’t been horribly contaminated with politicium:

To get a handle on this last point, leap out of politically (not scientifically) charged areas like the study of anthropogenic climate change. Sixteen years after Einstein had worked out the special theory of relativity, which eliminated the concept the ether as the medium within which light waves travelled, word came of an experiment that seemed to have detected an ether “wind” — the effect produced by the motion of the earth through an ether. Einstein responded with perhaps his most quoted aphorism: Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht – Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not!

Einstein was, of course, correct, and the reported experiment was wrong. The moral of the story, in this context, is that while it is true that a single contrary result is enough to demolish established theory — that result had better damn well hold up.

And that’s something that needs to be understood about the process. Support for a theory is a body of evidence, and if a contrary data point comes up, it is investigated to see if there’s really new science there, or if it’s the result of a statistical fluke, an experiment that lacks some rigor, or even fraud. One of the foundations of science is repeatability — scientists try and replicate results, and if nobody can do so, the result is suspect. A hundred years later there are still those who contort themselves to tear down relativity, but all they can point to is a handful of experiments that show questionable results, as compared to a vastly larger pile of experiments that confirm the theory. The beautiful theory can be slain by an ugly fact, but one has to actually confirm that it is indeed a fact that one has uncovered.

Verbing the Noun

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Tips on lab write-ups at Uncertain Principles

Lab Grading Macros

Not only were you able to [verb] the [noun], you did [verb] the [noun]. Say that directly.

My nit: when I was TA-ing it was a battle to disabuse them of the notion that “experimental error” is “the difference between our answer and the one in the book”

Modern Urawaza

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Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems

“In postwar Japan, the economy wasn’t doing so great, so you couldn’t get everyday-use items like household cleaners,” says Lisa Katayama, author of “Urawaza,” a book named after the Japanese term for clever lifestyle tips and tricks. “So people looked for ways to do with what they had.”

Popular urawaza include picking up broken glass from the kitchen floor with a slice of bread, or placing houseplants on a water-soaked diaper to keep them watered during a vacation trip.

Today, Americans are finding their own tips and tricks for fixing misbehaving gadgets with supplies as simple as paper and adhesive tape.

Why is Science Important?

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Why is Science Important?

I’ve started this film and blog project in which I want to ask the question “why is science important?” to people who feel the importance of science so deeply that they have dedicated their lives to it — working scientists, science writers and, of course, science teachers. I’m making a documentary, funded by The Wellcome Trust, and running this “collective blog” as I work on the film. Bits from the blog will appear in the film and bits of the film will appear on the blog. The idea is that the two will inform and enrich each other.

I’m hoping that this project will help me arrive at an answer to this question; an answer that speaks to readers of this blog, as well as my students, and convinces them that science is important. Furthermore, I want this project to reach people who don’t think science is important and convince them otherwise. I want it to demonstrate that science is absolutely crucial to the future wellbeing of our world, that its contribution to culture is as significant as that of music, art or literature and, most important of all, that a sound appreciation of science is vital to realising your potential as a human being. I want this project to make it far, far easier for any science teacher to be able to answer that inevitable question, ‘what’s the point of all this?”

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Science Laws

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Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs

The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court. It concludes that Congress should create a federal agency to guarantee the independence of the field, which has been dominated by law enforcement agencies, say forensic professionals, scholars and scientists who have seen review copies of the study. Early reviewers said the report was still subject to change.

The result of a two-year review, the report follows a series of widely publicized crime laboratory failures, including the case of Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer from Portland, Ore., and Muslim convert who was wrongly arrested in the 2004 terrorist train bombing in Madrid that killed 191 people and wounded 2,000.

And there’s some commentary, How to Bring Real Science Into the Courtroom

Law enforcement organizations have tried to derail the report nearly every step of the way, and with good reason. Police and prosecutors have been relying on bad science to get convictions for decades. It’s only recently, as the onset of DNA testing has begun uncovering a disturbing spate of wrongful convictions, that some of the criminal justice system’s cottage industry pseudo-sciences like “bite mark analysis” have been exposed for the quackery they are.

I agree with the skepticism that more government bureaucracy will fix the problem. I think it’s more that the standard of legal evidence is not the same as the standard of scientific evidence. In science, you need to take steps to rule out alternate explanations of a phenomenon, which we sometimes explain as “correlation does not prove causality.” If you watched the videos of why you should never talk to the police, you’d see that the legal system is not interested in ruling out alternate explanations — they leave that to the defense. But the prosecution and the science labs are part same system, so it’s a matter of whether they are asking all the questions, or if they stop when they get an answer they want.

Attack of the 50' Woman Science Blogger

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Women in Science: 50 Must Read Bloggers

Women have long played an important role in scientific developments and discourse, however, this role has historically received relatively less recognition and coverage as compared to their male counterparts. Over the last few years, however, blogging has opened up a way for leading women in science to bring to light the important improvements women have made, the struggles they still encounter, and the strategies they set up for their work to be recognized.

In this article, we highlight and recognize what we consider to be the 50 best blogs covering the vital roles played by women in science

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It's Warm on the Grassy Knoll

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Global-warming denialism as a conspiracy theory

One possible reason that global-warming denialism is more prevalent in the U.S. than elsewhere is that more Americans than Europeans are Biblical literalists. That involves believing that all biologists and paleontologists are either massively incompetent or deliberately trying to mislead the public about the central facts of their disciplines. [The alternative theory, held by some, is that the entire fossil record is a trick by Satan, intended to deceive those whose faith isn’t firm.] I haven’t seen any data on the overlap between global-warming denialism and creationism, but thinking about Sarah Palin and her fans you’d have to guess at a strong correlation between the two beliefs.

Global-warming denialism is a special case, of course: the policy implications of the facts about climate change threaten some very large economic interests and some dearly-held political beliefs. So global-warming-denialist brochures are printed on glossy paper. Other than that, though, it’s fairly standard-grade fringe pseudoscience, not much different from the folks who write endless papers full of gibberish proving that Einstein was wrong.

And yet the Washington Post continues to make op-ed space available for flat-earth climatology.

I think that you should take any science you read on the op-ed page with a huge grain of salt. But why is that? Why are the people writing and publishing these things thinking that they are opinion in the first place? One of the effects of scientific inquiry is to remove opinion from the analysis, and leave something that is objectively true. If you really think that there are multiple ways of interpreting the data, then you need to take a closer look at at the data you have, and possibly get more data. But in a lot of these cases, while more data is usually good, it isn’t what is required — the “alternative” interpretations don’t stand up to scrutiny. But this is the op-ed page, and making it up doesn’t seem to carry any penalty with it. On the contrary, one can lie to a large audience and then source amnesia takes over; nobody remembers that it was a lie or came from a disreputable source — all they remember is the claim. Which is a very different situation from scientific publishing, where publishing lies usually kills (or severely impedes) your career.

Do We?

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At Backreaction, Bee asks, “Do we need Science Journalists?”

I don’t think science blogs are ready to replace science journalism, or even if that will ever come to pass. This harkens back to the argument of what is the purpose of blogs; if the niche that a blog fills isn’t competing with traditional science journalism, then that blog isn’t likely to present much competition. And if a blogger doesn’t present their work in a way that’s an alternative to journalism, then so be it — I don’t think I’m going to run anyone out of business, and if I find something interesting, I’m an asset, because I’ll link to it. To the extent that science blogs do compete with science journalism, I think that good blogging will force science journalism to get better, because good blogs will be read at the expense of poor journalism, and bloggers tend to not be shy about pointing out crap. And that’s a Good Thing™ because we can always do with better material all around. There will always be a place for good science journalism; the question will be on the size of the niche.

Not Believing in Thermal Conduction

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Dismaying

[I]f someone tells you that they “don’t believe in” thermal conduction, it’s likely that they’re not so much saying they deny its existence as that they don’t understand what you mean when you say “thermal conduction.” For all their supposed disbelief, after all, they still avoid sitting on metal park benches in the winter.

Use of “belief” is a standard equivocation tactic. Any poll that asks about belief in a theory is fatally flawed, but then, I think most polls are a sham, anyway.