Tag Archives: science

Scientists call for more rules and regulations about data

Posted on by

There are a lot of academics and researchers collecting data on a variety of topics. Some scientists argue that we need more regulations about data so that researchers can work with and access data collected by others:

In 10 new articles, also published in Science, researchers in fields as diverse as paleontology and neuroscience say the lack of data libraries, insufficient support from federal research agencies, and the lack of academic credit for sharing data sets have created a situation in which money is wasted and information that could reveal better cancer treatments or the causes of climate change goes by the wayside…

A big problem is the many forms of data and the difficulty of comparing them. In neuroscience, for instance, researchers collect data on scales of time that range from nanoseconds, if they are looking at rates of neuron firing, to years, if they are looking at developmental changes. There are also difference in the kind of data that come from optical microscopes and those that come from electron microscopes, and data on a cellular scale and data from a whole organism…

He added that he was limited by how data are published. “When I see a figure in a paper, it’s just the tip of the iceberg to me. I want to see it in a different form in order to do a different kind of analysis.” But the data are not available in a public, searchable format.

Shared data libraries sound like they could be useful. Based on experience, however, even if data is made available, it still takes a good amount of time to download data, read the documentation, and reshape the data in a way that one can start to replicate findings from journal articles.

A humorous yet relevant comment from the scientific past: “Oh, well, nobody is perfect.”

Posted on by

When I look at sociology journal articles from the past, a few things strike me: the lack of high-powered statistics and a simplicity in explanation and research design. In the current world of publishing demands and the push for always high-quality, ground-breaking work, these earlier articles look like they were from a more innocent era.

I was reminded of this by a recent Wired post. In this case, a geology journal had published an article in the early 1960s and another scholar had responded in print to this article by pointing out a mistake on the part of the original authors. This is not uncommon. What does look particularly uncommon is the response by the original authors: “Oh, well, nobody is perfect.”

In a perfect world, isn’t this how science is supposed to work: just admit your mistakes, don’t repeat them, and move on? But I can’t imagine that many current scholars could give such a reply, perhaps in fear that their career or reputation would be in jeopardy. And in the world of scientific journals, is this sort of back and forth (with candidness) even possible much of the time?

I also infer a sense of humility on the part of the original authors. Instead of going on for pages about how their mistake was defensible or trying to pass the blame, a quick one-liner admits the mistake, diffuses the situation, and everyone can move on.

Where are the social scientists to explain the global warming debate?

Posted on by

Amidst all of the political discussions regarding climate change and global warming, one social scientist suggests a sociological analysis of this public issue has been lacking:

But something is missing: academic explanations of why people flout reams of scientific conclusions, bristle at the notion of cutting carbon and regard climate change as a sneaky liberal plot.

“The social sciences are glaringly missing,” says Andrew Hoffman, an expert on the sociological aspects of environmental policies at the University of Michigan, for which he’s researching climate denial. “That leaves out critical questions about the cultural dimensions of both defining the problem and finding solutions.”

He provides unvarnished reasons for that. One concerns his colleagues’ dismissal of the conservative movement. They deny the deniers, he seems to say, by tending to “ignore the far right.” More broadly, social scientists — like sociologists, psychologists and communication researchers — are generally disengaged from public policy debates.

The story goes on to suggest that some research suggests that this debate may be similar to the debate over abortion: both sides attempt to frame the issue and then influence enough lawmakers to make their side heard. This seems like easy pickings for sociologists interested in social problems. Notwithstanding the science, how have both the supporters and skeptics’ movement been formed, framed, and publicized?

If this social scientist is correct, this means there are some real opportunities for sociologists to provide some overarching analysis of this important public debate.

The globalization of scientific research

Posted on by

A recent report from the United Nations suggests that while the West (and the United States, in particular) still dominate scientific work, other countries are gaining ground. Here are some of the measures from the UNESCO report:

In 2007 Japan spent 3.4% of its GDP on R&D, America 2.7%, the European Union (EU) collectively 1.8% and China 1.4% (see chart 1). Many countries seeking to improve their global scientific standing want to increase these figures. China plans to push on to 2.5% and Barack Obama would like to nudge America up to 3%. The number of researchers has also grown everywhere. China is on the verge of overtaking both America and the EU in the quantity of its scientists. Each had roughly 1.5m researchers out of a global total of 7.2m in 2007…

One indicator of prowess is how much a country’s researchers publish. As an individual country, America still leads the world by some distance. Yet America’s share of world publications, at 28% in 2007, is slipping. In 2002 it was 31%. The EU’s collective share also fell, from 40% to 37%, whereas China’s has more than doubled to 10% and Brazil’s grew by 60%, from 1.7% of the world’s output to 2.7%…

UNESCO’s latest attempt to look at patents has therefore focused on the offices of America, Europe and Japan, as these are deemed of “high quality”. In these patent offices, America dominated, with 41.8% of the world’s patents in 2006, a share that had fallen only slightly over the previous our years. Japan had 27.9%, the EU 26.4%, South Korea 2.2% and China 0.5%.

Even though the United States still dominates a number of measures, UNESCO concluded Asia is the “dominant scientific continent in the coming years.”

A couple of things are interesting here:

1. Even if jobs have left the United States for cheaper locales, the US still has advantages in scientific research. How long this advantage holds up remains to be seen.

2. These are just three possible measures of scientific output. Other ones, such as journal citations, could be used but this seems fairly effective to quickly look at several measures.

3. It is interesting to think about how science itself will change based on increased research roles in non-Western nations.

h/t Instapundit

What cities are the most conducive to scientific research?

Posted on by

A new study in Nature examines which cities are the best for scientific research. The article cites some different measures to get at things like output and quality. Here are some of the findings:

-The top cities for number of articles produced: “Tokyo, London, Beijing, the San Francisco Bay Area, Paris and New York.”

-The top cities based on quality of research (measured as average citations of articles): “Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, come out on top — attracting more than twice as many citations per paper as the global average. US cities dominate the quality table, with only Cambridge, UK, breaking into the top 10. Cities with the most improved relative quality in the past decade include Austin, Texas, and Singapore City — which has moved from 15% below average to 22% above it. Beijing, however, is below par in the quality stakes: its papers in the five-year period ending 2008 attracted 63% of the global average-citation rate.”

-According to a sociologist, the three factors that lead to more research: “freedom, funding, and lifestyle.”

Several of the experts also caution that cities shouldn’t just throw money at research in the expectation that this will lead to significant wealth generated for the city.

I wonder how much of a role historical factors play in this. Once a city acquires a reputation for prestigious universities and research (think: Boston), how quickly could it lose its status if drastic things started to take place (such as the bankruptcy of Harvard and MIT)? It seems like certain cities gain a reputation or character and that character becomes an inertia that continues to attract new research facilities and scientists.

The curveball as optical illusion

Posted on by

It is amazing to me the amount of stories I’ve seen over the years about how the curveball works. According to new research, the “break” the batter sees may just all be an optical illusion:

Yet as the ball nears home plate, the batter observes a sudden jump in its trajectory, the notorious “break.” A new study in PLoS ONE argues that the discrepancy between the physics and the perception of the curveball may be all in the mind — or, more specifically, an optical illusion created by the batter’s eyes and brain.

The human visual system dedicates more of its resources to processing images in the center of our field of view than in our peripheral vision. Larger numbers of photoreceptors and retinal ganglion cells in the fovea — the center part of our eyes — help produce extremely high-res, three-dimensional static images. And as the images processed by our retinas head to the brain, larger numbers of neurons in the visual processing centers (lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex) are responsible for helping make sense of what we see when looking at something straight on as compared to out of the corner of our eye.

During a very small pilot study, Arthur Shapiro’s team created a computer simulation to determine how the motion of a curveball could create an optical illusion as it skates across our entire visual field. If the observers tracked a spinning gray disc while directly looking at the falling object, it moved as intended. But if people tracked the spinning disc out of the corner of their eye — in their peripheral vision — discs that dropped straight down appeared to fall at an angle, while discs that followed a smooth arc as they descended seemed to plunge straight down.

Fascinating. So how do baseball players hit a curveball – are they able to compensate for this optical illusion and still swing in the right place? Also, could there be players who are less affected by this optical illusion, thus explaining why some are better fastball vs. curveball hitters?

Sociologists study belief in paranormal activity

Posted on by

According to a new book (Paranormal America) written by three sociologists, many Americans believe in paranormal phenomenon. The authors claim this is the first random sample study of the topic and they link religiosity to paranormal beliefs:

“Roughly two-thirds of people believe in the possibility of one paranormal item, which includes astrology, UFOs, psychic abilities, Atlantis, Bigfoot, ghosts and haunted houses,” Bader said.

People from more conservative religious traditions tend to be less willing to believe in the paranormal than those from more moderate traditions, Mencken said.

“People who are more moderately religious tend to believe in the paranormal,” Bader said. “If you are not at all religious, or highly religious, it is not likely that you will believe. Someone who attends church once a month is much more likely to believe in the paranormal than someone who attends church on a weekly basis.”

It sounds like some religious involvement leads to more belief in the paranormal. Why exactly is this the case?

Also, it would be helpful to know how these figures compare to other historical periods. On one hand, we live in a technologically advanced age, one built on science which seems to leave little room for paranormal activity. And yet even with all of our complicated natural and social science methods, there are many people who still wonder about the paranormal.

Dealing with being wrong in science

Posted on by

A doctor who challenges the faulty research of his peers is profiled in the latest issue of Atlantic. His conclusion is that expectations about science, specifically reactions to being wrong, need to be changed:

We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.

Negative findings, typically meaning that an alternative hypothesis is rejected, tend to receive less attention. Yet they are still useful as they advance science by ruling out alternatives. Both positive and negative findings are needed to build science (and any of its disciplines in the natural or social sciences).

But this doctor also suggests that the incentive system for scientists needs to be changed. As long as breakthroughs and big findings are what are rewarded, that is what scientists will look for and claim to find.

Seeing Alzheimer’s as a social problem

Posted on by

The cover story in the current issue of Time is about Alzheimer’s research. The main story is set up in a typical way: the condition affects a lot of people and yet research into a cure is underfunded. What is interesting is that Time employs two statistics that suggest the cover story should really be about how people could make Alzheimer’s a social problem worthy of more attention.

The first statistic is an actual dollar amount: one expert says $500 million a year is spent on researching Alzheimer’s while $1 billion is spent on heart disease, and $5.6 billion on cancer. The second measure concerns public perception: 48% of Americans think “a great deal or some progress has been made in curing” the disease while 81% say the same about heart disease and 74% say the same about cancer. With these two statistics, Time suggests Alzheimer’s has a certain public image: it doesn’t attract the same kind of research dollars as other diseases and the public is pretty pessimistic about progress.

While the rest of the story concerns itself with the medical and scientific advances, perhaps it should be about how the public could be convinced that the disease deserves more attention. Some ways the public image could be enhanced: it needs more fund-raisers, more celebrity supporters, more support for research from public officials, and more stories that demonstrate how many people are affected by Alzheimer’s. Look at the public image of other conditions: diseases like breast cancer (where are those “edgy” Facebook campaigns for Alzheimer’s?) have effectively been cast as critical social problems that everyone should care about.

Perhaps this cover story is itself intended to help raise the profile of Alzheimer’s. While real medical progress is the true goal and it is what will ultimately benefit people, Alzheimer’s as a social problem is another important issue to be considered.

Honeybee solution takes new twist – possible financial interests

Posted on by

A recent story in the New York Times suggested that the cause of the major deaths of honeybees had been found. But a reporter from Fortune says the story is not so clear – in addition to some scientists suggesting the breakthrough wasn’t that much of a breakthrough, the reporter also says one of the key scientists has a major conflict of interest:

What the Times article did not explore — nor did the study disclose — was the relationship between the study’s lead author, Montana bee researcher Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, and Bayer Crop Science. In recent years Bromenshenk has received a significant research grant from Bayer to study bee pollination. Indeed, before receiving the Bayer funding, Bromenshenk was lined up on the opposite side: He had signed on to serve as an expert witness for beekeepers who brought a class-action lawsuit against Bayer in 2003. He then dropped out and received the grant.

Bromenshenk’s company, Bee Alert Technology, which is developing hand-held acoustic scanners that use sound to detect various bee ailments, will profit more from a finding that disease, and not pesticides, is harming bees. Two years ago Bromenshenk acknowledged as much to me when I was reporting on the possible neonicotinoid/CCD connection for Conde Nast Portfolio magazine, which folded before I completed my reporting.

Bromenshenk says this is not an issue and didn’t influence the results of the recent study. The scientific community will have to figure this out – one issue will be whether the scientific study actually solved or helped the honeybee issue and the other issue will be Bromenshenk’s past history.