What a cool journal name

Online poker study: The more hands you win, the more money you lose:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

A new Cornell study of online poker seems counterintuitive: The more hands players win, the less money they’re likely to collect – especially when it comes to novice players.

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The Journal of Gambling Studies. Nice name. Interesting study, also.

Wining a lot of small hands means you are more likely to bet big and lose. People overestimate their chances of winning and seem to feel that if they have won a lot of ands, they are likely to win more.

As is typical, the press release does not link to the article. They want $34 dollars to download the article but the abstract is free. This says it all:

Smaller-stakes players also have more difficulty appropriately weighting incentive structures with frequent small gains and occasional large losses. Consequently, the relationship between winning a large proportion of hands and profitability is negative, and is strongest in small-stakes games

Big-stakes players seem to have a better understanding of risk-reward and do a better job of mentally accounting for all the factors needed to win.

Well, at least to win more often than small-stakes players.

Technorati Tags: Science

Another example of citizen science

Citizen Science: all fun and no data? ScienceOnline 2010:
[Via Discovering Biology in a Digital World]

Do citizen science efforts ever go beyond “feel good” contributions? Do the data get published in peer-reviewed journals?

In an earlier post, I started a list of citizen science projects that allow students to make a contribution. Many commentors are graciously adding to that list and I thank you all! I’m glad to learn there are so many interesting projects and ways for people to get involved. Science is so empowering!

My question today concerns things like outcomes and deliverables. We’d like to assume that good things are coming from citizen science because people are involved, but I don’t know if that’s really true and being a scientist, I want to avoid over-doing the assumptions.

Does the research from citizen science ever get published?

Last Wednesday, at the University of Washington, I learned about one such study. If you know of others, I’d love to see citations in the comments.

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I’m on the Board of a Foundation that has supported the Reef Environmental Education Foundation. They train scuba divers to identify species seen during a dive. They also have created easy ways for this data to be input, creating databases that have been used for many scientific publications.

You can read the details of the volunteer program and access the database. Besides the publications, the trained divers were some of the first to identify invasive species in the Hood Canal area. Observations of the aquatic environments are critically important for our understanding of the world around us. REEF helps us do that.

Citizens help us do that also.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Very odd

by Rebecca L. Daily
L&C, GRL, comments on peer review and peer-reviewed comments:
[Via RealClimate]

I said on Friday that I didn’t think that Lindzen and Choi (2009) was obviously nonsense. Well, a number of people have disagreed with me, and in doing so, have presented some of the back story on the how the response was handled. I think this deserves to be more widely known in the hope that it will generate some discussion in the community for how such situations might be dealt with in the future.

From Chris O’Dell:

Given the large number of comments on the peer-review process in general and in the LC09 case in particular, it is probably worthwhile to give a bit more backstory to our Trenberth et al. paper. On my first reading of LC09, I was quite amazed and thought if the results were true, it would be incredible (and, in fact, a good thing!) and hence warranted independent checking. Very simple attempts to reproduce the LC09 numbers simply didn’t work out and revealed some flaws in their process. To find out more, I contacted Dr. Takmeng Wong at NASA Langley, a member of the CERES and ERBE science teams (and major player in the ERBE data set) and found out to my surprise that no one on these teams was a reviewer of LC09. Dr. Wong was doing his own verification of LC09 and so we decided to team up.

After some further checking, I came across a paper very similar to LC09 but written 3 years earlier – Forster & Gregory (2006) , hereafter FG06. FG06, however, came to essentially opposite conclusions from LC09, namely that the data implied an overall positive feedback to the earth’s climate system, though the results were somewhat uncertain for various reasons as described in the paper (they attempted a proper error analysis). The big question of course was, how is it that LC09 did not even bother to reference FG06, let alone explain the major differences in their results? Maybe Lindzen & Choi didn’t know about the existence of FG06, but certainly at least one reviewer should have. And if they also didn’t, well then, a very poor choice of reviewers was made.

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It is very strange when a paper does not reference a previous work that examines similar things examined in the present paper, particularly when the results are diametrically opposed. As O’Dell stated even if the authors were not aware of the previous work, a good reviewer should have. The fact that none of this happened may demonstrate one of the possible holes in peer review – the author can suggest very favorable reviewers that will not rock the boat.

The response of the editors to these events is not very encouraging. Luckily for them, the reviewers are anonymous so their poor approach toward performing their jobs to review the paper can not be linked to anyone specific. But the editors are known and will have to stand by their work.

This episode does indicate the power of the Scientific Method. It does not matter what the reasons were for ignoring prior art – scientists can examine the approach and replicate it to see how robust the work is and what assumptions, right or wrong, were made.

Here they appear to have shown that the work was not very robust and that others will find very different results when they try to reproduce the research. It was a case where the original authors were probably not well served by the peer review process. Stronger reviewers would have caught these problems before publication and allowed the authors to make their own changes, rather than having other scientists do it for them.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Why Fox may not where you should get news about the climate!

FoxNews, WattsUpWithThat push falsehood-filled Daily Mail article on global cooling that utterly misquotes, misrepresents work of Mojib Latif and NSIDC:
[Via Climate Progress]

30 Years of Global Cooling Are Coming, Leading Scientist Says

Latif … says we’re in for 30 years of cooler temperatures

Memo to media and anti-science disinformers (again): If your “global cooling” piece revolves around Dr. Latif, you probably have the entire story backwards. But, at least for the disinformers, that is the goal. And that goes double if the piece involves the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

In an interview back on October 1, Dr. Latif told me “we don’t trust our forecast beyond 2015″ and “it is just as likely you’ll see accelerated warming” after then. Indeed, in his published research, rapid warming is all-but-inevitable over the next two decades. He told me, “you can’t miss the long-term warming trend” in the temperature record, which is “driven by the evolution of greenhouse gases.” Finally, he pointed out “Our work does not allow one to make any inferences about global warming.”

In an interview today, he confirmed with me — as he will with anyone who talks to him — that he accepts the IPCC’s finding that most of the warming in the past century was very likely due to human causes — “definitely,” he said.

He remains puzzled and dismayed by articles like those in the Daily Mail, “Could we be in for 30 years of global COOLING?” that purport to be based on his work, that supposedly quote him directly, but in fact just make stuff up. Of course, the Daily Mail made up a lot stuff for this article, like this whopper about the NSIDC’s work:

As NSIDC Director wrote me, This is completely false. NSIDC has never made such a statement and we were never contacted by anyone from the Daily Mail. We hope that this is simply a case of very lazy journalism and nothing more.”

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The true sign of denialists – they lie. And FoxNews is part of this. apparently making up direct quotes and writing misleading words about what a researcher wrote:

And that leads to the FoxNews story quoted up top, “30 Years of Global Cooling Are Coming, Leading Scientist Says,” based solely on this game of telephone with Latif’s work. And of course The Swift Boat smearer and would-be Climate Killers excerpts this mangled and/or made up quote by the Daily Mail:

Shock Admission: UN IPCC’s Prof. Latif: ‘The warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles (ocean) – perhaps as much as 50%”

Not. Call Dr. Latif up and ask him if accepts the IPCC’s finding that, as he put it, most of the warming in the past century was very likely due to human causes. He had me reread the quotes attributed to him a number of times, asking twice, “those are direct quotes?” After I did, he said to me: “I don’t know what to do. They just make these things up.” I suggested asking reporters to read quotes back to him.

This is why FoxNews is not a legitimate source of news on the climate. They are perfectly willing to spread unsubstantiated lies and misleading quotes of people that are shocked to find out that words they never spoke are being spread.

Because Latif has told everyone, in person and in his writing, that his ‘predicition’ can not be valid past 2015! So anyone who uses this data to discuss a decades-long cold spell is simply blowing smoke.

It is so easy to find the facts on the Web. Relying on Fox for facts instead of actually checking out the data seems like a sure way to get things wrong.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science