A Synthetic What? Lady Who Won Lotteries Is Statistician, More

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Last big travel day. Off to the blue crammed into motorized sardine cans. I’ll begin looking at comments and email tomorrow.

Medical Science Advances On Bottoms

Turns out that I was wrong yesterday and that papers are getting better. At least if the one put out in Gastroenterology by some Wake Forest docs is any indication.

Seems they wielded their beakers and petri dishes in just the right way and were able to brew up a synthetic sphincter.

Yes, just when you thought there were too many in the world already, especially down DC way, Khalil Bitar and pals found a method to grow artificial sphincters on mice. Once fully developed, these can be cut off and grafted onto human, non-mice personages in an operation that can only be described as delicate.

Those not up on your Gray’s might be interested to know this: “There are actually two sphincters at the anus — one internal and one external.” So there’s double the need for artificial you-know-whats.

Encounter Books Puts Up Link

Roger Kimball over at Encounter Books, which issued David Stove’s posthumous What’s Wrong With Benevolence? linked to my review of the same on their home page, which I consider quite an honor.

If you have not yet read the review, do so now. And if you have not yet bought the book, what are you waiting for? Also highly, hugely recommended are Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution and especially Against the Idols of the Age.

If you enjoy the material on this blog at all, you will like Stove’s much more.

Next Stop Vegas

In what cannot be a coincidence, and instead must be an event deeply laden with significance—statistical, cosmological, and certainly theological–last year this same time I was also off into the skies and wrote about the lady who won the lottery four times.

I did a back-of-the-envelope and surmised that the probability at least one person wins four lotteries (of the type the mystery lady won) was about 1 in 100, which isn’t so small.

Now, thanks to the many readers who alerted me to the follow-up story, we learn that the lady who won is a—are you ready?—she is a statistician! Her name is Joan R. Ginther, 63, and she is formally from Stanford.

Speculation has run amok. Do statisticians actually have an algorithm that predicts lottery numbers? Are we gifted with random prescience that allows us to amass riches?

Being a member of the guild, I cannot tell you. But I can say that one of my flights stops in Las Vegas, in which I will have a two-and-a-half-hour layover. Do not thus be surprised if the “Hire Me!” link disappears from this website tomorrow.

Update My attempts to parlay my grub stake ($1) into a retirement-inducing fortune with the Las Vegas airport slot machines failed. I will thus still be accepting job offers.

Are Scientific Papers Becoming Worse?

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The United States Football League began in 1983 with twelve cities, many of which already had an NFL team. The level of play was decidedly inferior to the “senior” league because, of course, the better men were already in the NFL. Still, the organizers thought that more football was wanted, even though the quality would not be on par with what fans had come to expect.

But people failed to love the expansion league, and it never did well enough to be able to pay top talent. It only lasted three years, folding in 1985.

This is a familiar story in sports. With a given population and infrastructure, there’s only so much top talent to go around. You can’t expand indefinitely and expect consistent quality.

The same must be so of professors at universities. There are only so many great brains to go around. It’s true that as the population grows there are more potential recruits into the white-coat leagues. And when training in the youth associations—i.e., math clubs, science fairs, band—is functioning well, there is a better chance that prospects will be recruited.

But again, you can’t expand indefinitely and expect consistent quality. And the professoriate has certainly expanded and is continuing to expand. It’s college for all! regardless whether most can handle the rigors.

It’s natural to wonder how much the swelling of the ranks and the dilution of talent accounts for the Wall Street Journal’s findings in “Mistakes in Scientific Studies Surge.”

Seems retractions by journals have gone from near none ten years ago to well over 300 the past two years. Some of these retractions are from the authors of the papers themselves, after they conscientiously notice their mistakes, but many others are from the editorial boards of the journals after they identify various shenanigans of the authors.

The growth in shoddy work has been so explosive that the blog Retraction Watch has popped up to document the flood. First two headlines: “A quick Physical Review Letters retraction after author realizes analysis was ‘performed incorrectly’” and “Cal Poly Pomona education researcher leaves post after rampant plagiarism is revealed.” What a depressing site!

What’s going on? Expansion, as we saw. The number of journals in every field has exploded. The Far East, Lower Southern Half, Asian Journal of Research Studies: Part D, and so on. Why? Half of what earns a professor tenure is raw paper count. Quality is important, but only at the top schools. At most places, the only determination is weight: the more papers the better. Considering that most professors in the sciences have only one or maybe two good ideas in their entire lives, yet they must publish half a dozen or more papers a year, it is no surprise that much of which makes its way into print is of no or little value. Or even of positive harm, as the WSJ article argues.

The more journals there are, the more papers, and the more papers, the more bad ones. Not just sloppy or ridiculous papers, which regular readers of this site know are rampant, but fraudulent ones, too. Corners cut, numbers fudged, bandwagons jumped on and rode into the dust. This isn’t just in medicine, where there are many multitudes—as in thousands—of papers appearing monthly, but also in research into “climate effects.” It’s not unusual to see, in the same journal even, one paper which “proves”, “Fruit Bats Numbers To Decline When Climate Change Hits” and another which “shows”, “Fruit Bats To Increase Without Number, New Plague, When Climate Change Hits.”

And let’s not forget money—money is what’s going on, and lots of it. Research dollars from governments have flooded the system, making it easier for professors to set up little fiefdoms. The more money a professor brings in, the higher the rewards from the university bureaucracy (corollary: the more money, the larger this bureaucracy grows). Now, the only way to bring in the bucks is by publishing in sexy fields. Better publish quickly and in bulk, too, because you have a dozen guys breathing over your shoulder, itching to increase their “impact” scores ahead of yours.

The temptations here are enormous and, increasingly, they are not resisted. According to the WSJ: “‘The stakes are so high,’ said the Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton. ‘A single paper in Lancet and you get your chair and you get your money. It’s your passport to success.’”

Solution? There isn’t one. Among the race of people are liars, cheats, thieves, slobs, connivers, enthusiasts, zealots. And scientists, you may be surprised to learn, are people. Just because you know how to solve the equations of motion does not mean you are gifted with higher morals than the common man.

The only way to reduce fraud and mistakes are to reduce the number of papers. And since paper counting will never go away, the only way to reduce the number of papers is to reduce the number of professors. And that doesn’t seem likely to happen.

The Saga Of The Stones

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Still on the road…

I had just finished hauling the sand away from under a now-dismantled porch. It had been made of stone and wood, but not well. My dad wanted it out so that he could push forward the living room and add a large window for a better view of Otsego lake. This was 1978. Rocks

The sand was carted, wheelbarrow full by wheelbarrow full, across the yard, through the driveway, over the dirt road, and onto the land adjacent the railroad tracks, which separated our road from Old 27. The railroad owned this strip of land, but as long as nobody inteferred with the tracks themselves or impeded the view, the company was tolerant about its use. We even had a small garden, as others did.

My dad figured nobody at the railroad would notice the sand, because I had spread it out thin. The rain would smooth over any lumpiness.

The broken stones, though, gave my dad a great idea. He would build a cracked-stone chimeny and fireplace. But to do that required an enormous amount of stone. Buying them was out of the question, so we began scouring the county for boulders of head- to half-body size.

We quarried a bunch from a plot owned by a farmer who wanted them gone. Others we collected from the sides of roads. One beauty, about the size of a watermelon, I found down by Al’s Market. Now, Al’s was 1.1 miles from home. I know this because there was coincidentally a sign at the store giving the distance to the State Park, which was at the entrance of our road.

I couldn’t carry a watermelon-sized rock that far. But I hunted around and scored a rope. It was about seven or eight feet long and must have fallen off of one of the railroad cars. I tied the rope around the rock and drug the damn thing home. I was very proud.

Soon we had an enormous pile of stones. We began the tedious process of swinging a 15-pound sledge hammer on top of their heads, attempting to crack them, hoping to expose an interesting patten inside the rock. Some looked acceptable, many did not. These were added to the junk pile, which soon outgrew the backyard.

The fireplace and chimeny were eventually completed. It was beautiful. But there was still the pile of unused stone and fragements. What to do with them? We couldn’t put them back from whence they had some, of course. That would be littering.

I suggested dumping them by the railroad tracks. My dad put the kibosh on that idea, saying that the railroad was sure to notice such a humongous pile of stone. So he had the brilliant idea of me digging a pit out behind the garage. Into the pit would go the rocks, forever hidden from view!

It took me two weeks to dig that hole. I wore through one shovel and took the viriginity of a second. At times, I had to use a pick axe to break up the clay. It was finally deep enough, however, and in went the stones. I began covering them with the dirt from the hole.

Most of that dirt did not fit back, naturally, because the room formally occupied by the dirt was now nestled with rocks.

What to do with all the leftover dirt?

A puzzler. Finally, my dad hit upon the idea of me carting the dirt to the railroad tracks, and putting in the same spot I was going to put the rocks. Thus another large fraction of my summer was spent pushing a wheelbarrow back and forth until the dirt pile was moved from one place to another.

At the end, the pile of dirt was substantial and, of course, easily visible from the tracks. But my dad reasoned that this was dirt, see, and not rocks, and that therefore the railroad company would not care.

I can only guess he was right, because we never heard any complaints from them. That pile is still there, but overgrown with trees.

Epilogue:

We didn’t stay long to enjoy the fireplace because my dad had a building bug and wanted to put together a house from scratch—which we did.

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Global Warming Beliefs, New Poll

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I’m still on the road this week, with my access to the internet sporadic. Email or phone is the best way to find me.

Rasmussen reports that, “69% Say It’s Likely Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming Research.” The meat is in this quotation:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults shows that 69% say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs, including 40% who say this is Very Likely. Twenty-two percent (22%) don’t think it’s likely some scientists have falsified global warming data, including just six percent (6%) say it’s Not At All Likely. Another 10% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here .)

The question that corresponds to that answer is, “In order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, how likely is it that some scientists have falsified research data?”

This is plain enough, but it is still a leading question, perhaps with the effect of influencing opinions in the direction of agreement. I say this because further into the survey we learn that “While 40% believe Americans should take immediate action to stop global warming, 42% suggest waiting a few years.”

And this: “But 47% now believe the media makes global warming appear to be worse than it really is, down from 54% in February 2009.”

You’d expect that if 70% of people really did think climatologists were liars and cheats, that a roughly equal percentage would say that global warming isn’t a problem.

I caution readers that these survey results have no bearing whatsoever on whether climatologists really have lied. If any of them have, they’re a fraction of a minority of working scientists.

Thanks to Nate Winchester for bringing this survey to our attention.