Via the Knight Science Journalism Tracker comes Sharon Begley’s story in Newsweek entitled “Sorting Out Good Science From Bad” (7 May issue, strangely enough). It runs under the sub-heading, “Just Say No — To Bad Science.” The content shouldn’t surprise anyone who grew up with Darrell Huff’s fascinating little book, How To Lie With Statistics (1954, reissued 1993). In a chatty two pages, Begley’s piece looks at one particular trick: selection bias.
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Monthly Archives: April 2007
Hi, Mom.
(She asked if I was alive and well, OK?)
Those of you who have read as far as the tagline of this site have probably noticed our fondness for neologisms and malapropisms and just downright silliness. Since anyone who visits Science After Sunclipse has certainly wasted at least one afternoon reading through the xkcd archive, you must already know the ultimate origin of our favorite malaprops:
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Dear Internet:
There was a fourth Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie? It came out a month ago? And I never heard?
Seriously, Internet, you’re letting me down.
Oh. They never mentioned it on ScienceBlogs — that would explain a few things.
Not only do I feel betrayed by the Blagnet, but I also feel like I missed what could have been a deeply personal experience with resonances of happy times in my past. Back in high school, my friends all dressed up as the Turtles for Senior Ambition Day. I could have had some serious, only partially ironic enjoyment.
Curse you, perfidious Network!
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James Barlow asked a good question down in the comments, which I thought was worth promoting to the top level.
Anyone got any ideas for completing this Foxworthy-esque statement:
You’re probably shilling for the Discovery Institute if. . .
Some suggestions:
- You say the words “specified complexity” with a straight face.
- You believe that a “Darwinist conspiracy” is keeping Intelligent Design out of the peer-reviewed journals.
- Every claim you make has already been dissected at Talk Origins.
Further completions welcome!
According to Thomas Hobbes, in the state of nature all men have equal power. Smarts, sticks and stones allow us to compensate for our physical differences and achieve parity. His Leviathan has its flaws, but it’s nice to see the process he described at work today, and in such an important environment as our schools. Via Orac comes the reassuring news that students continue to outsmart their teachers and administrators while learning valuable life skills:
Devices including iPods and Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say.
“It doesn’t take long to get out of the loop with teenagers,” said Mountain View High School Principal Aaron Maybon. “They come up with new and creative ways to cheat pretty fast.”
Mountain View recently enacted a ban on digital media players after school officials realized some students were downloading formulas and other material onto the players.
Furthermore, the administrators’ grasp of statistics and evidence-based reasoning — essential for citizens of the Enlightenment — continues at its all-time high:
Shana Kemp, spokeswoman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said she does not have hard statistics on the phenomenon but said it is not unusual for schools to ban digital media players.
“I think it is becoming a national trend,” she said. “We hope that each district will have a policy in place for technology — it keeps a lot of the problems down.”
Look, NASSP, you’ve got your priorities all backwards. Learning at a tender age how to follow prompting from a concealed “wire” is invaluable training for those of America’s youth who wish to enter politics!
To people (including Orac and Rob Knop) wondering why those darn kids are so willing to put energy into cheating when they could get good grades legitimately by putting the same effort into their studies. . . well, I should say that if you’re familiar with the tools you have, then using them isn’t much effort at all. If you have to memorize a lot of random whoosywhatsits, and you know you have a machine which can remember everything, what you do with it is a pretty simple deduction. Moreover, if you have no reason to suspect that what you’re told to memorize will ever be useful to you ever again, then you definitely burden the machine with it!
It’s really a Chinese Room problem. The student doesn’t understand the material, but the combined system student + iPod does. As long as they’re never separated from their iPod ever again, it’s fine! In fact, I believe this marks the first step on our species’ road to cyberization, a procedure which will have many benefits indeed. We should take pride in our nation’s youth and their pioneering spirit!
I slept uneasily, my dreams full of ticking clocks, of racing the dawn, of improbable clouds just before sunsight and obscure preparations against the day. I dreamed that I could fly by selecting parts of a petroglyph body in my Firefox window and indenting them to high speed. When I tried, I fell up a Blade Runner hill, careening over an empty freeway as slick as Teflon.
I woke up to an insistently beeping cellphone alarm and got dressed to the Lola Rennt soundtrack. Clutching a bottle of soda which I knew I shouldn’t drink since, like mental illness, diabetes runs in my family (but unlike mental illness, only on one side), I stepped out into a beautiful morning slightly too cold for my tweed eigenjacket and slightly too warm for my black leather trenchcoat. (I guess it’s never springtime in the Matrix.) Forty minutes of strolling later, with a song in my heart — specifically, Infected Mushroom’s “Cities of the Future” — I arrived at Darwin’s, a sandwich, coffee and pastry place near Harvard Square. It was five minutes till eight; I was early, but PZ Myers was earlier.
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I just came back from breakfast with PZ Myers, one of the Reveres and friends to find that the 59th Skeptic’s Circle is online at Pooflingers Anonymous. We here at Sunclipse are represented by “Michael Egnor: Manipulative Liar” and “All the News that Fits, We Print“.
There’s lots of good stuff, it appears. Head on over to Confessions of an Anonymous Coward to spot the flaw in a “disproof” of relativity, and an interesting speculation on why people try to “debunk” relativity so often. Those who enjoyed my comments on science journalism should also appreciate Junk Food Science‘s treatment of “Salt Shaking News“.
And if the Skeptic’s Circle isn’t enough, Carl Zimmer just put up a metric armful of articles he’s written since 2001. His story archive looks like a fantastic time sink.
Finally, of course, we should all welcome Phil Plait into the League of Moral Ambiguity, for while he’s still vacillating between superhero and supervillain attributes, he’s definitely in a comic book!
UPDATE: Welcome, fellow Pharyngulans!
And now, we return (momentarily) to Earth, where Warren Ellis has found a particularly inane screed from the Science Fiction Writers of America’s current vice-president. Quoting just a little bit:
I’m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.
The comments on Ellis’s site are, for the most part, scathing (although one person already wonders if it’s all a joke). Snide remarks about “webscabs” are just the sort of thing which make me want to give words away for free. Unfortunately, I don’t have too much science fiction sitting around in such a state that I would call it ready for release. . . .
One SF vignette follows below the fold. Nothing serious — just some text with which one can play “Count the Allusions.”
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I was just hopping over to Bad Astronomy to check out Phil Plait’s site layout. Focusing on the margin widths, I didn’t see the text for several heartbeats. When I did, my heart stopped.
The European Southern Observatory has let forth a yawp over the rooftops of the world, announcing the most Earthlike extrasolar planet yet discovered. It’s about five times the Earth’s mass, it orbits the red dwarf Gliese 581 once every thirteen days. . . and it just might have liquid water on its surface.
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Guess the speakers!
A: Ah, that’s different. If it helps you that’s great. That doesn’t mean it’s true.
B: Well, it’s true for me. See, I believe —
A: You mean true for you is different from true for anybody else?
B: Yeah, absolutely —
Is B a hippie stoner full of Good Vibrations or, worse yet, a literature major?
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Just a reminder:
This evening at 17 o’clock, or shortly thereafter, we will be meeting in Boston University mathematics territory to discuss group theory. Ben will be leading the discussion, poking us to consider the various transformations of the type
[tex] f: \mathbb{R}^2 \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^2. [/tex]
What are the different structures of interest which these mappings can preserve? What types of maps preserve distances, angles, areas, orientation (chirality), or topological properties? Notes for past group-theory sessions are available in PDF format, or as a gzipped tarball for those who wish to play with the original LaTeX source.
(Don’t forget your stat-mech homework!)
shnood: (roughly) an imposter; a person oblivious to just how trivial or wrong his ideas are.
“Were there any interesting speakers at the conference?â€
“No, just a bunch of shnoods.â€â€œThe magazine New Scientist loves to feature shnoods on the cover.â€
Note: someone who’s utterly contemptible would not be a shnood, but rather a schmuck.
— Scott Aaronson (27 May 2006)
Those of you interested in the way the Wobosphere functions as a disputation arena (“We Can Fact-Check Yo’ Ass!”) may be interested in the following sordid tale of intrigue and skullduggery. I originally wrote most of this last October, in a lengthy comment on David Brin’s blog. The moral of the story, insofar as I can find one, is this: if you say that you can move your car forward by bouncing a soccer ball back and forth inside it fifty thousand times, you’ll get a quizzical look (at best). If you say the same thing but with “microwave photons” instead of soccer balls, you’re reporting on cutting-edge science!
Back in September, New Scientist magazine published an article on the “EmDrive”, a machine purportedly able to propel itself using microwaves bouncing inside a box. Those of us who remember the Dean drive and umpty-ump other wonder machines have no trouble recognizing this as the same old stuff: like all the wonder-powered spacedrives before it, it can only putter forward by violating the conservation of momentum. New Scientist‘s reportage provoked science-fiction writer Greg Egan to write an open letter saying he was “gobsmacked by the level of scientific illiteracy” the magazine showed.
So it goes, as they say on Tralfamadore. Claims of exotic spacedrives fuelled by violations of fundamental physics are, sadly but understandably, about twopence a dozen. The aspect of the affair which Egan found truly disturbing — indeed, reprehensible — was the way New Scientist glibly provided a “news” piece full of pseudoscientific gibberish purely to justify how the EmDrive might work. (Their argument really pushed the limits of the absurd, too: Einstein’s relativity has momentum conservation built into its mathematical structure, so you can’t use relativity jargon like “reference frames” to sidestep the conservation law.)
Egan posted his letter to the moderated Usenet group sci.physics.research, and the physicist John Baez put a copy on the blog he co-hosts, The n-Category Café. This spurred enough people to write New Scientist that the magazine opened a blog thread to discuss the issue, opening with a self-exusing note from the editor, Jeremy Webb. (Said note, as far as I can tell, satisfied nobody.)
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I have a theory about science journalism.
Well, perhaps “model” or “hypothesis” would be a better word. Also, the basic idea isn’t original with me, but I think I can pull together pertinent evidence from a wider variety of stories than most writing-watchers have done, thereby casting (I hope) a little more light.
I don’t know how many of my skeptical blago-friends are in the habit of reading Mind Hacks, so I figured I’d convey along this post by Vaughan about “electronic smog”.
The Independent on Sunday has the dubious honour of publishing one of the worst pieces of science journalism I have ever read on today’s front cover — claiming to ‘reveal’ that children are at risk from Wi-Fi computer networks because of their developing nervous systems.
The headlines include “Children at risk from electronic smog”, “Revealed: radiation threat from new wireless computer networks”, “Fears rise over health threat to children from wifi networks” and “Danger on the airwaves”.
This is despite the fact that not one single study has found a health risk for wifi networks.
Gotta love those extra letters in funny foreign words like honour.
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Anybody drive a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution? If so, you’re aiding and abetting the forces of Satan, as Arnold Zwicky patiently explains:
The Lancer Evolution is, according to the Wikipedia page, “Mitsubishi’s flagship sports car”, in production since 1992 and now up to 2007 model X (that’s a Roman numeral, not an unknown quantity). The name “Evolution” was probably chosen to suggest progress, but it occurred to Swarthmore biologist Colin Purrington a little while back to wonder whether the name might be a drawback in parts of the U.S. where creationist, rather than Darwinian evolutionist, ideas have considerable currency — places where, you might say, “evolution” is a dirty word. Being a scientist, Purrington collected some data (from Mitsubishi) and assembled a nifty graph, headed “‘Evolution’ car dissed by Red States”:
According to its Flickr page, Purrington has released this graph under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. He comments:
The quote is from the official marketing web site. There are no plans to release a “Lancer Creation” version, as far as I know. Las Vegas is probably driving the odd sales data for Nevada (it was a filming location for the Evolution-featurin’ flick, “Too Fast Too Furious”, I think). Not sure what is up for Maine. I probably need to rerun the statistics using “18-44 males” to get a more accurate estimate of the underlying car-buying population that favors Rally and NASCAR models. And, to be fair, I should include a control car (e.g., Galant) from Mitsubishi, just in case the red states have a tendency of “buying American”, which probably plays a part in these data.
Zwicky corrects, “Ah, not “2 Fast 2 Furious” (2003), which was set in Miami and filmed in various Floridian locations, but “Redline” (2007); both movies destroyed a lot of cars and were not well received by critics, so it would be easy to confuse them.” One should probably also run a comparison to control for general economic well-being, which I’m sure affects car-buying habits. According to the manufacturer’s horrendously Flash-drenched wobsite, the 2006 Lancer Evolution will dent your wallet to a depth varying from $29,774 (“Rally Special” trim) to $36,924 (“the ultimate”). Comparing to other cars, foreign and domestic, in the same price range would be necessary in order to lock down all the variables.
Still, it’s a funny graph.
And when you’re tooling out in your MR Lancer Evolution to pick up your sultry atheist babe, be sure to give her a bottle of DNA perfume, in its spunky triple-helix bottle officially approved by the Ig Nobel Prize Committee.
IN OTHER NEWS: John Armstrong, whose taste in music is quite respectable, has said positive things about William Shatner. Cue the Four Horsemen and the Seven Seals.
Please find the stat mech problem set here:
http://web.mit.edu/edown/www/statmech_pset.pdf
This covers the microcanonical and canonical ensembles. You should definitely be able to finish all of I and II by Monday 30th. Part III becomes more and more difficult as one progresses. I would expect everyone to have no problems completing A and B. C is not that hard if you’re willing to play with it. D is a bit more involved but should be within reach.
Let me know if you have any questions. eric
I seem to have some kind of dopaminergic reward pathway established for blog commenting. Every time I see a new post, I know I’ll either be happy because I agree with it, or I’ll get that little surge from disagreeing vocally! Any time I see a remark about “framing,” I’m either gonna like you or hate your guts, and my natural argumentative streak gives me a positive brain-boost either way.
Trying to find a simple principle which completely covers a complex and heterogeneous set of overlapping problems in which our pious platitudes frequently conflict with one another is, as Sean Carroll says, a mistake. Complex problems, regrettably, often demand complex solutions. If this discussion had, from the beginning, focused on specific and concrete examples, I believe we would have seen much more agreement — and much more productive disagreement!
Blogs are the enkephalins of the masses.
Enough of this. It doesn’t make a difference.
May I remind everyone that Michael Egnor is still saying ridiculous things?
