Here’s the problem. You are a scientist, working on measuring the levels of aragonite in ocean water. It’s not very sexy and nobody beyond a small cadre seems to care. But it’s grant time and you and your team are “figuring out how to make the issue more potent” so that you can bring in the bucks.
How do you do it?
The first thing you should immediately consider these days is “turning up the heat on the issue through the media.” However, convening a press conference on “The Importance of Aragonite in Ocean Water” is unlikely to interest even the New York Times.
You need to be clever. Your job in “expanding awareness” has to start with a snappier moniker. You need a term that is “easy to comprehend” and, if you’re lucky, sounds “alarming.”
Renaming is thus “a critical step.”
So you ponder. Then you recall that aragonite levels are related to the amount of diffused carbon dioxide in ocean water. Some chemistry helps: when CO2 dissolves in water it lowers that water’s pH. And what is lowering pH sometimes called? Acidification!
Success! Not only is this a fantastically frightening term, it drives “home the idea that carbon dioxide [i]s a pollutant.”
Your next step is to find a PR firm whose specialty is to “link researchers with policy-makers and the media.” The good news is that there are no shortage of such places.
Of course, you have to be honest about “the” science and the uncertainties (as you understand them). But if you’re lucky, even the possibility, no matter how small, of risk will be enough to frighten Congress into action.
I think we can agree “the acidification story provides a model of how to get science on the congressional agenda.”
A fuller account of this fascinating and inspirational story may be found here.
July 4th, 2008
Nature magazine reports this headline: Condemned to single-sex life by climate change.
They are talking about a species of lizards called tuatara that live “on about 30 small islands in New Zealand’s north.” The disgusting, scaly creatures are in exile on those islands because they have everywhere else been “wiped out by predators.” No word on who or what these predators are or why the predators cannot follow the tuatara to the islands and thus continue their campaign of herpetological genocide.
Anyway, the lizards are about to go extinct and it’s all your fault. It seems that when the weather is hot, more male tuatara lizards are born than female lizards. And we all know what happens when there are more boy than girl lizards. It becomes impossible to get a date and procreate.
This “doomsday prediction”, we are told by researchers, is assured because of (what else?) global warming.
How do the researchers know this? Why, a computer told them so.
Previous computers did not tell them so, which forced the researchers to reprogram them, this time incorporating in their models “physics of heat transfer with terrain data.” Well, that is impressive. The researchers then “simulated climate change and then monitored its effect on specific points across the island.”
What they found was shocking: Rampant maleness, which naturally carries with it the consequence of enforced bachelorhood.
For those of you who are not as computer savvy as I, let me summarize. Researchers programmed a computer to show that when the temperature rises, fewer female lizards are born. They then told the computer that temperatures were in fact rising. The computer then said “fewer female lizards are born.”
The researchers pored over this result and came to the conclusion that “warmer temperatures caused by global warming imply fewer female lizards will be born.” They wrote this in a paper which was duly summarized at Nature. Science in action!
All might not be lost because, the researchers suggest, the lizards might be “translocated” ( = moved) to cooler climes. I just hope that those mysterious predators aren’t in the new translocations.
July 2nd, 2008
Another piece of data is in that shows money does not correlate with intelligence.
“Artist” Martin Creed (pictured above) created a “work” called 850, which he will exhibit at the well-known Tate Britain art gallery starting today.
The “work” consists of having joggers, once every thirty seconds, trot through the museum.
Yes, you read that right. Joggers, wearing shorts and looking like they came from the park, will run lightly through a hall or two in the name of “art.”
Guardian writer Adrian Searle claims that the wonderful thing about this “art” is “that it is gloriously pointless.” It’s not surprising the paper should feel that way, since much of its reporting falls into this category. Searle argues that people should not try to decide whether 850 is “art” but “whether the work captures the imagination, whether it gives pleasure and makes people think.”
So, on this theory, I could put a certain piece of Mr Searle’s anatomy in a vice and start to twist, an act which is certainly imaginative and would give me some pleasure. It would also cause Searle to do some serious thinking. But would he call it art?
People should not feel anger or despair over the sort of idiocy like 850, now common in the “art” world. They should instead view it as a chance to raise their income bracket. Since rich people—those people that run galleries and buy and sell “art”—are now utterly incapable of judging quality, and are dead scared of admitting their ignorance, the door is wide open for any “artist” to sell them anything. The only key seems to be that the “work” has to be completely asinine, childish, devoid of any value, and, of course, politically correct.
It also cannot be cheap. The more exhorbitantly priced your excrescense, the better chance it has to sell. For you must understand that the sole purpose of this “art” is to allow its owner to boast that he owns it. Or, in the case of the Tate, to claim that it is unique.
July 1st, 2008
Chris Anderson, over at Wired magazine, has written an article called The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.
Anderson, whose thesis is that we no longer need to think because computers filled with petabytes of data will do that for us, doesn’t appear to be arguing serious—he’s merely jerking people’s chains to see if he can get a rise out of them. It worked in my case.
Most of the paper was written, I am supposing, with the assistance of Google’s PR department. For example:
Google’s founding philosophy is that we don’t know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.
He also quotes Peter Norvig, Google’s research director, who said, “All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.”
Lastly,
The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses….The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works…But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.
Part of what is wrong with this argument is a simple misconception of what the word “model” means. Google’s use of page links as indicators of popularity is a model. Somebody thought of it, tested it, found it made reasonable predictions (as judged by us visitors who repeatedly return to Google because we find its link suggestions useful), and thus became ensconced as the backbone of its rating model. It did not spring into existence simply by collecting a massive amount of data. A human still had to interact with that data and make sense of it.
Norvig’s statement, which is false, is typical of the sort of hyperbole commonly found among computer scientists. Whatever they are currently working on is just what is needed to save the world. For example, probability theory was relabeled “fuzzy logic” when computer scientists discovered that some things are more certain than others, and nonlinear regression were re-cast as mysterious “neural networks,” which aren’t merely “fit” with data, as happens in statistical models, instead they learn (cue the spooky music).
I will admit, though, that their marketing department is the best among the sciences. “Fuzzy logic” is absolutely a cool sounding name which beats the hell out of anything other fields have come up with. But maybe they do too well because computer scientists often fall into the trap of believing their own press. They seem to believe, along with most civilians, that because a prediction is made by a computer it is somehow better than if some guy made it. They are always forgetting that some guy had to first tell the computer what to say.
Telling the computer what to say, my dear readers, is called—drum roll—modeling. In other words, you cannot mix together data to find unknown relationships without creating some sort of scheme or algorithm, which are just fancy names for models.
Very well—there will always be models and some will be useful. But blind reliance on “sophisticated and powerful” algorithms is certain to lead to trouble. This is because these models are based upon classical statistical methods, like correlation (not always linear), where it is easy to show that it becomes certain to find spurious relationships in data as the size of that data grows. It is also true that the number of these false-signals grow at a fast clip. In other words, the more data you have, the easier it becomes to fool yourself.
Modern statistical methods, no matter how clever the algorithm, will not being salvation either. The simple fact is that increasing the size of the data increases the chance of making a mistake. No matter what, then, a human will always have to judge the result, not only in and of itself, but how it fits in with what is known in other areas.
Incidentally, Anderson begins his article with the hackneyed, and false, paraphrase from George Box “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” It is easy to see that this statement is false. If I give you only this evidence: I will throw a die which has six sides, and just one side labeled ‘6′, the probability I see a ‘6′ is 1/6. That probability is a model of the outcome. Further, it is the correct model.
July 1st, 2008
The Institute of Mathematical Statistics (I am a member) has issued a report on the wide-spread misuse of Citation Statistics.
The full report may be found here.
The non-surprising main findings are:
- Statistics are not more accurate when they are improperly used; statistics can mislead when they are misused or misunderstood.
- The objectivity of citations is illusory because the meaning of citations is not well-understood. A citation’s meaning can be very far from “impact”.
- While having a single number to judge quality is indeed simple, it can lead to a shallow understanding of something as complicated as research. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgments.
The last point is not just relevant to citation statistics, but applies equally well to many areas, such as (thanks to Bernie for reminding me of this) trying to quantify “climate sensitivity” with just one number.
More findings from the report:
- For journals, the impact factor is most often used for ranking. This is a simple average derived from the distribution of citations for a collection of articles in the journal. The average captures only a small amount of information about that distribution, and it is a rather crude statistic. In addition, there are many confounding factors when judging journals by citations, and any comparison of journals requires caution when using impact factors. Using the impact factor alone to judge a journal is like using weight alone to judge a person’s health.
- For papers, instead of relying on the actual count of citations to compare individual papers, people frequently substitute the impact factor of the journals in which the papers appear. They believe that higher impact factors must mean higher citation counts. But this is often not the case! This is a pervasive misuse of statistics that needs to be challenged whenever and wherever it occurs.
- For individual scientists, complete citation records can be difficult to compare. As a consequence, there have been attempts to find simple statistics that capture the full complexity of a scientist’s citation record with a single number. The most notable of these is the h‐index, which seems to be gaining in popularity. But even a casual inspection of the h‐index and its variants shows that these are naive attempts to understand complicated citation records. While they capture a small amount of information about the distribution of a scientist’s citations, they lose crucial information that is essential for the assessment of research.
I can report that many in medicine fixate and are enthralled by a journal’s “impact factor”, which is, as the report says, a horrible statistic—with an awful sounding name. The “h index” is “the largest n for which he/she has published n articles, each with at least n citations.”
Naturally, now that we statisticians have weighed in on the matter, we can expect a complete stoppage in the usage of citation statistics.
June 30th, 2008
We, dear readers, have earlier dealt with the nonsensical argument, of which an Enlightened few are excessively fond, “There is no truth.” This is an argument often employed by those who embrace the idea that “all cultures are of equal value.” It is also commonly found, if sometimes not expressly stated, in academia in the “humanities”.
But the argument is ridiculously absurd and paradoxical, and in the same class as the 2600 year-old Epimenides paradox (Epimenides was a Cretan who said, “All Cretans are liars.”). A paradox, incidentally, is a man-made creation that stands in the way of a man-made theory gaining full acceptance. When a paradox arises, it implies, logically, that the theory that gave rise to it is flawed and should be modified or abandoned. But, usually, the theory is so beautiful or desirable that every possible effort is made to do away with the paradox (typically by calling it a “Problem” or ignoring it). The philosopher David Stove has brilliantly written about this in his book The Rationality of Induction.
Now, if we rationally believe the argument “There is no truth”, it must mean the argument is true. And if the argument is true, then the statement “there is no truth” is false because we at least believe the argument is true. Which of course means there is truth, so the argument is fallacious. Or nonsensical, actually. In other words, anybody who makes the argument and is convinced by it is making a grievous error or acting foolishly. This is bad news for those who theorize that human thought creates truth, or “truth” as they normally write it. From Stove again: writing “true” does not mean true, but only “believed to be true by so and so”, a definition as far from true as you can get.
Very well. Few actually utter the exact words “There is no truth”, probably because some internal B.S. detector senses something has gone awry. But there are, in common parlance, phrases which are entirely equivalent to “There is no truth.” Let’s look at one of them.
“Don’t be all judgmental”, is a phrase often heard immediately after you have pointed out that some behavior on the part of another was wrong or mistaken. Or it can be found in a simple example like this: you walk by a booth selling tie-dyed shirts and you say, “Those shirts are hideously ugly” and the booth owner says “Some people are so judgmental” which carries the implication that “being judgmental is wrong.”
The presupposition is that passing judgment on somebody’s “lifestyle” (for those who do not speak psychobabble, this means the English word behaviors) is an activity which is forbidden. It follows immediately that when the person says to you “Don’t be all judgmental” they are in fact passing judgment on your behavior. In other words, they are “being all judgmental.” It is, therefore, impossible not to pass judgment. I do not mean “impossible” in the colloquial sense of “unlikely”, but in the logical sense of “certainly cannot be no matter what.”
[UPDATE–thanks Nick!:] This is true whether tie-dyed shirts really are hideous or whether my comment was solicited (it was) or not, or whether the thought remains a thought and is forever unspoken. It might be, of course, that offering an unsolicited comment aloud is in poor taste, but it might also be that it is useful in the sense of discouraging aberrant behavior, such as that displayed by street vendors hawking ridiculous looking clothing.
So the next time somebody says to you “Don’t be all judgmental” you ask them “Aren’t you passing judgment on me?” Then get ready for a blank stare.
June 24th, 2008
The Ithaca Hours, mentioned in the previous post, quantify a barter system, trading “hours worked” at one task for equivalent “hours worked” at another. For example, you might trade one “hour” of “Cranio-sacral therapy, energy healing” for 10 hours of “Speaking & consulting on non-violent symbolic action.” Most services on offer are on the order of “Gentle Reiki energy sessions for health and growth” and ” movement coaching.” Some ordinary retail shops accept hours, but only for a small percentage of your overall bill. The Hours themselves have the logo “In Ithaca We Trust”, an expression the egotism of which I trust is obvious enough. The hours are, naturally, printed on hemp paper.
As I understand it, and here I might be off, trade, even though conducted in “Hours”, must still be ultimately accounted for in green-backs for tax purpose. “Hours” received are treated as ordinary income. Which, if true, makes the system truly worthless. But enlightened, and certainly enjoyable because, as their website says, it’s “fun to get and use something other than dollars (remember how much you enjoyed or still enjoy using monopoly money).” Thus, spending “Hours” is a form of play, though I find it odd that they would tout the game Monopoly, which is a game that teaches and celebrates capitalism.
The Ithaca Festival was this weekend on the Commons. This is a typical summer outdoor festival with arts & crafts and music. I counted not less than four booths that featured tie-dyed clothing, perhaps the ugliest form of body covering ever invented.
I went into a t-shirt shop (to find for my number two son a shirt emblazoned with “Ithaca Gun”, a now-defunct company that was justly famous for their shotguns) and some middle-aged ladies were discussing the upcoming election. “I’d vote for a dog before I’d vote for a republican!” said one. “I’d vote for a parakeet before I’d vote for McCain,” said another. “I can’t see why anybody would ever vote for a republican,” quipped the last.
The only thing strange about these commonplace comments is that they imply that the democrat party, lacking candidates of substance, will soon nominate animals to their tickets.
June 23rd, 2008
I am in Ithaca, New York, teaching a short course at Cornell University. Have you ever visited Ithaca? It was once voted the “most enlightened city in America” by the far-left magazine Utne Reader. Plenty of Volvos with “Impeach Bush” bumper stickers on them, a score of Tibetan bead shops in a desolate downtown area called the Commons, a own home-grown currency called “Hours” which is supposed to be more politically correct than greenbacks, and so on.
I was in a popular bar called the Chapter House (fantastic beer selection) and met a gentleman from England who was at Cornell taking a course from a well-known labor educator. This gentleman’s flight back home was canceled because of a thunderstorm. He is a union organizer for the Transit Workers in London. We had a nice chat over a few beers.
The bartender found out that my new friend was from England and asked him, “You must hate us over there.” By “us” he meant “Americana.” My friend said “No, we generally like Americans.” The bartender refused to accept this. “But you must hate us. Look at everything we have done!” My friend’s reply: “I was happy to come here. America is a great place.”
(By “we”, I assume the bartender did not include himself.)
This went back and forth a few times, my friend even describing a trip to Walmart to buy inexpensive jeans. The bartender lost heart and gave up. I felt sorry for him. There was nobody around to confirm his feelings of inferiority or to show him that he was not hated as he hoped he would be.
So the next time you are in Ithaca, please stop and tell somebody how much you dislike them. It will be sure to cheer them up.
June 21st, 2008
You will have by now heard that some are advocating the use of “instant replay” in baseball. The, for lack of a better word, entities pushing for this realize its nefarious implications, and so suggest the video tape be referenced only for disputed home run calls.
Please, God, do not let them do it.
I used to enjoy watching American football when I was boy. Two things destroyed my pleasure in this sport. The first, and most obvious, is the increasing non-stop blather from the sportscasters, now crammed three or four to a booth. These guys never know when to shut up. Worse, broadcast colleagues in baseball thought that they should get in on the act and not just call the game, but to analyze every triviality. No, instead of great announcers like Ernie Harwell and Phil Rizzuto—gentlemen who knew when to shut up and let us hear the relaxing sounds of the ballpark—we have corporate types with “communications degrees” endlessly uttering profundities like “This game isn’t over, Jim.”
This would have been tolerable in football if it weren’t for the second degrading change: The instant replay. Games now drag by as referees, doubtless worried their calls might be challenged, gather at the end of nearly every play to have a little chat about what just happened. And then there is the ridiculous spectacle of a coach prancing up to the sidelines to delicately toss a little red flag on the field when he feels piqued. It is a pathetic thing to see.
I predict that not too many years from now, the game of football will have evolved so that each team’s rosters are supplemented by attorneys (both offensive and defensive ones, naturally). At the conclusion of each play, the lawyers will charge the field to dispute the play—challenging the outcome on the grounds of insanity, income disparity, etc.—to be settled by a jury of tennis fans (who presumably will not prejudice the outcome). Some plays will be so contentious that they will end up in court. It will eventually take years to finish a “season” as the courts become backlogged with cases.
Please do not let this happen to baseball. Umpires, like MBA business executives who think of things like instant replay, make mistakes, but so what. You will get over a bad call. The instant replay some say makes good “business sense” because “so much is at stake.” Nonsense. It is only a game and it is meant to be entertaining.
It will suck the life out of baseball, interrupt the natural flow, and make watching the games more of a chore than a pleasure.
June 17th, 2008
Nothing is true unless it has been demonstrated and published in a peer-reviewed journal. For example, until last week, many people suspected that when men look at nearly or completely naked women, they tend to be distracted. Anybody who believed that was foolish to do so because it had never been “scientifically” proven.
If they did believe it, they probably did so based on their academically-discredited intuitions. Amateurs.
But scientific researchers Bram Van den Bergh, Siegfried Dewitte,and Luk Warlop have finally leant scientific credibility to the popular belief, which we are now free to label as “scientific.” These researchers published their stunning findings in the June 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. The journal article was summarized in a newspaper report here.
The title of their article is “Bikinis Instigate Generalized Impatience in Intertemporal Choice.” Their abstract follows
Neuroscientific studies demonstrate that erotic stimuli activate the reward circuitry processing monetary and drug rewards. Theoretically, a general reward system may give rise to nonspecific effects: exposure to “hot stimuli” from one domain may thus affect decisions in a different domain. We show that exposure to sexy cues leads to more impatience in intertemporal choice between monetary rewards. Highlighting the role of a general reward circuitry, we demonstrate that individuals with a sensitive reward system are more susceptible to the effect of sex cues, that the effect generalizes to nonmonetary rewards, and that satiation attenuates the effect.
In you cannot read this, do not worry, for it is not written in English, but in academese, a language which frequently borrows English words, but changes their meanings and which otherwise has no similarity to plain English. Luckily for you, dear reader, I have been trained in academese and can translate the abstract for you:
When men look at naked women, their brains get excited and they have thoughts of getting lucky. When men see naked women, they get distracted and cannot concentrate on the tasks at hand. When we showed a group of men pictures of nearly naked women, they lost patience with a betting game we tried playing with them. The hornier the men were the less they were interested in our game, and in anything else we had to say. After a while, the men got bored of looking at the same women and wanted to move on.
As I said, this is ground-breaking research as it brings to light relationships of men to naked women never before suspected.
Rumor has it the three researchers, who are from Belgium, plan on studying the effects of increasing dosages of the C2H4OH molecule on men’s perception of female attractiveness. I for one, cannot wait to find out.
June 12th, 2008
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