Methodology
jstemwedel | January 8, 2009There's an interesting story on The New Republic website at the moment, "Going Under" by Jason Zengerle, that relates the sad story of a young anesthesiologist's descent into addiction. What I find interesting about it is the larger questions it raises about why this particular anesthesiologist's story is not so unusual. Indeed, the article offers an:
Observation: Anesthesiologists seem to suffer from addiction in greater numbers than physicians in other specialties.
And, it lays out
Three hypotheses as to why this might be so:
H1: Anesthesiologists have greater access to the addictive…
jstemwedel | December 17, 2008Do scientists see themselves, like Isaac Newton, building new knowledge by standing on the shoulders of giants? Or are they most interested in securing their own position in the scientific conversation by stepping on the feet, backs, and heads of other scientists in their community? Indeed, are some of them willfully ignorant about the extent to which their knowledge is build on someone else's foundations?
That's a question raised in a post from November 25, 2008 on The Scientist NewsBlog. The post examines objections raised by a number of scientists to a recent article in the journal Cell…
jstemwedel | December 9, 2008Back in November, at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Pittsburgh, I heard a really interesting talk by Jeremy Howick of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University about the challenges of double-blind trials in medical research. I'm not going to reconstruct his talk here (since it's his research, not mine), but I wanted to give him the credit for bringing some tantalizing details to my attention before I share them with you here.
First, he noted that "blinding" might not be as apt a description of what actually happens in medical trials as "masking". A double…
jstemwedel | October 16, 2008Over at Effect Measure, Revere takes issue with a science educator's hand-wringing over what science students (and scientists) don't know. In a piece at The Scientist, James Williams (the science educator in question) writes:
Graduates, from a range of science disciplines and from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, have a poor grasp of the meaning of simple terms and are unable to provide appropriate definitions of key scientific terminology. So how can these hopeful young trainees possibly teach science to children so that they become scientifically literate? How…
jstemwedel | October 1, 2008Paul A. Offit, M.D., Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. Columbia University Press, 2008.
Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure examines the ways that uncertainties about autism's causes have played out in the spheres of medical treatment, liability lawsuits, political hearings, and media coverage. Offit's introduction describes the lay of the land in 1916, as polio epidemics raged. That lay of the land, with public fear and willingness to pursue strange, expensive, and dangerous treatments, evokes a…
jstemwedel | September 18, 2008Back in June, I wrote a post examining the Hellinga retractions. That post, which drew upon the Chemical & Engineering News article by Celia Henry Arnaud (May 5, 2008) [1], focused on the ways scientists engage with each other's work in the published literature, and how they engage with each other more directly in trying to build on this published work. This kind of engagement is where you're most likely to see one group of scientists reproduce the results of another -- or to see their attempts to reproduce these results fail. Given that reproducibilty of results is part of what…
jstemwedel | September 17, 2008There's a neat article [1] in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist (although sadly, this particular article seems not to be online) in which Brian Hayes discusses the Monty Hall problem and people's strong resistance to the official solution to it.
Now, folks like Jason have discussed the actual puzzle about probabilities in great detail (on numerous occasions). It's a cool problem, I believe the official solution, and I'm not personally inclined to raise skeptical doubts about it. What I really like about Hayes's article is how he connects it to the larger ongoing…
jstemwedel | August 12, 2008As a follow-up to my last post, it looks like I should offer a more detailed explanation of why exactly scientific activity is a group activity -- not simply as a matter of convenience, but as a matter of necessity. Helen E. Longino has already made this case very persuasively in her book Science as Social Knowledge (specifically the chapter called "Values and Objectivity"), so I'm going to use this post to give a sketch of her argument.
The upshot of the argument is that objective knowledge requires the involvement of other people in the building. All by yourself, there is no way to move…
jstemwedel | August 12, 2008Chad Orzel takes a commenter to task for fetishizing peer review:
Saying that only peer-reviewed articles (or peer-reviewable articles) count as science only reinforces the already pervasive notion that science is something beyond the reach of "normal" people. In essence, it's saying that only scientists can do science, and that science is the exclusive province of geeks and nerds.
That attitude is, I think, actively harmful to our society. It's part of why we have a hard time getting students to study math and science, and finding people to teach math and science. We shouldn't be…
jstemwedel | July 4, 2008Blogging has been a bit light lately, in part because I was persuaded to teach half of a graduate seminar during the summer session. The first half of the seminar looked at philosophical approaches to epistemology (basically, a set of issues around what counts as knowledge and what could count as reasonable ways to build knowledge). The second half, which I am teaching, shifts the focus to what scientists seem to be doing when they build knowledge (or knowledge claims, or theories, or tentative findings).
In the course of our reading for this week, I came upon a couple passages in a chapter…
jstemwedel | June 3, 2008Because Abi asked me to, I'm going to discuss the fascinating case of the Hellinga retractions. Since this is another case where there is a lot to talk about, I'm going to take it in two parts. In the first part, working from the Chemical & Engineering News article by Celia Henry Arnaud (May 5, 2008) [1], I'll focus on the common scientific activity of trying to build on a piece of published work. What happens when the real results seem not to fit with the published results? What should happen?
In part 2, drawing from the Nature news feature by Erika Check Hayden (May 15, 2008) [2], I…
jstemwedel | May 29, 2008In today's Chronicle of Higher Education there's an article about the methods journal publishers are deploying to detect doctored images in scientific manuscripts. From the article:
As computer programs make images easier than ever to manipulate, editors at a growing number of scientific publications are turning into image detectives, examining figures to test their authenticity.
And the level of tampering they find is alarming. "The magnitude of the fraud is phenomenal," says Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with journal editors to help…
jstemwedel | March 24, 2008Given that in my last post I identified myself as playing for Team Science, this seems to be as good a time as any to note that not everyone on the team agrees about every little thing. Indeed, there are some big disagreements -- but I don't think these undermine our shared commitment to scientific methodology as a really good way of understanding our world.
I'm jumping into the fray of one of the big disagreements with this repost of an essay I wrote for the dear departed WAAGNFNP blog.
There's a rumor afoot that serious scientists must abandon what, in the common parlance, is referred to…
jstemwedel | February 23, 2008There's another development in Aetogate, which you'll recall saw paleontologists William Parker, Jerzy Dzik, and Jeff Martz alleging that Spencer Lucas and his colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) were making use of their work or fossil resources without giving them proper credit. Since I last posted on the situation, NMMNHS decided to convene an ethics panel to consider the allegations. This ought to be good news, right?
It probably depends on what one means by "consider".
On Thursday, February 21, the Albuquerque Journal reported that this ethics…
jstemwedel | November 24, 2007This New York Times op-ed, to be precise. My questions for Paul Davies can be boiled down to these two:
What kinds of explanations, precisely, are you asking science to deliver to you?
Just why do you think it is the job of science to provide such explanations?
Let's back up a little and look at some of what Davies writes in his op-ed:
... science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly…
jstemwedel | September 18, 2007Via Ed Cone I found one of those stories that makes me love the Wall Street Journal: "In the Philippines, Ex-Judge Consults Three Wee Friends":
As a trial-court judge, Florentino V. Floro Jr. acknowledged that he regularly sought the counsel of three elves only he could see. The Supreme Court deemed him unfit to serve and fired him last year. ...
Helping him, he says, are his three invisible companions. "Angel" is the neutral force, he says. "Armand" is a benign influence. "Luis," whom Mr. Floro describes as the "king of kings," is an avenger.
Oh my.
While it's not common in these parts for…
jstemwedel | July 18, 2007One of the strengths of science is its systematic approach to getting reliable information about the world by comparing outcomes of experiments where one parameter is varied while the others are held constant. This experimental approach comes satisfyingly close to letting us compare different ways the world could be -- at least on many occasions.
There are some questions, though, where good experimental design requires more cunning.
A couple years ago, the local media in the San Francisco Bay Area ran a series of stories examining "the [human] body's burden" of synthetic chemicals. The…