A lot of heat is going into the ocean

by gnews pics

Scientists Find 20 Years of Deep Water Warming Leading to Sea Level Rise
[Via NOAA News Releases]

Scientists analyzing measurements taken in the deep ocean around the globe over the past two decades find a warming trend that contributes to sea level rise, especially around Antarctica. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, cause heating of the Earth. Over the past few decades, at least 80 percent of this heat energy has gone into the ocean, warming it in the process.

[More]

Everyone looks at air temperatures, since we live on land, but the ocean has been picking up most of the increasing heat being trapped on the planet. Luckily for us. If that heat had stayed in the atmosphere, it would be rising at over 5 °F a decade.

But this increased heat, especially in the deep ocean, not only raises sea level by thermal expansion but also has the real potential for disrupting the underwater rivers that move cold, deep water to the surface, and warm, shallow water to the deep.

Warmer deep waters means that it can take a long time to blow off the heat effects in the atmosphere. The human race may have to start learning pretty quick how to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Another denialist’s work debunked

Wegman Report’s “abysmal scholarship” revealed
[Via Hot Topic]

A detailed investigation into the genesis of the 2006 Wegman Report — much beloved of climate sceptics because it was critical of the “hockey stick” paleoclimate reconstructions of Michael Mann (et al) — has shown it to be deeply flawed, stuffed with poorly-executed plagiarism, and very far from the “independent, impartial, expert” effort it was presented as to Congress. The new 250 page study, Strange scholarship in the Wegman Report (exec summary, full report) by John Mashey (with considerable assistance from Canadian blogger Deep Climate) finds that:

• a third of the Wegman Report was plagiarised from other sources, without attribution
• half of the references in the bibliography are not cited in the main text, and one reference is to “a fringe technology publication by a writer of pseudoscience”
• a graph of central England temperatures from the first IPCC report was distorted and misrepresented
• the supposedly impartial Wegman team were fed papers and references by a member of Republican Congressman Joe Barton’s staff
• Wegman’s social network analysis of the authorship of “hockey team” papers was poor, and did not support the claims made of problems with peer-review in the field

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This seems to happen a lot. If a scientist plagiarized so much of their work, they would not be doing science for much longer. But I expect the denialist community to still give the Wegman report all the respect they think it delivers.

Smart meters will not work by themselves

Smart meters need smart consumers – Education as well as technology is key to realizing benefits
[Via Climate Progress]

This cross-post is by CAP’s Richard W. Caperton.

Twenty years from now your relationship with your electric utility likely will be fundamentally different from today. Currently you use electricity whenever you want, pay a flat rate for all of the energy you use, and the only real service you expect from your utility is to keep the lights on. Consumers in 2030, however, will have houses that are optimized to use energy when it’s most efficient, pay rates more closely related to the power’s cost, and expect their utility to be much more of a service provider.

At the heart of this change is information: information about the energy we use, how we use it, and the real value of that power. Data will flow in a two-way conversation between homeowners using electricity—and maybe even producing it, too—and the energy companies managing the electricity grid.

The smart meter is a key to managing all these information flows, and new research shows that smart meters are technically up to the challenges of the future. Consumers now have to learn how to benefit from this new technology.

[More]

Change will not happen purely because of technology. Technology by itself will not be effective. People will have to change but they need the best data and a firm understanding of how it is derived.

Smart meters are an important tool but without useful information to create the knowledge needed to make good decisions, they lose much of their value.

People need diverse approaches

by tentwo.teneight

Blog Post: Questioning brainstorming
[Via Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

By David Gurteen

When I was in corporate life, many things were inflicted on me that I either hated or felt very uncomfortable with. Brainstorming was one of them. I can’t recall one where I felt anything useful resulted from them other than a pile of flip-chart paper.

It just never jelled with the way my mind works. I always felt the process far to controlling. I wanted to have conversations but that wasn’t allowed. So I would accept and go along with brainstorming as no one else seemed to question it.

So I am so pleased to see in this Newsweek article (via an interesting post by Johnnie Moore) that people are questioning the method.

And take a look here Brainstorming wont bring you good ideas.

This to me, sums it up: “Ideas come out of relationships, they come out of conversations.” and “good ideas are more likely to be the product of rambling conversations than brainstorming.” Oh and yet another post from Johnnie Moore: Where (and when) ideas happen – “people simplify their ideas as solitary, Eureka moments, whereas ideas often happen in social environments.”

There are some other good points made in the article too. “That people are attracted to the idea that complex things can be explained by a simple formula, or achieved by a step-by-step process. In this way, personalities are reduced to a number of types (such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) and pathways to success are promoted with the packaging of a number of rules.”

How many times have I been asked for ten simple steps to implement KM? The world is too complex for that! And those of you who have seen Dave Snowden speak know his views on Myers-Briggs.

There is a lot of fundamental things that we have long taken for granted that need questioning.

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Not everyone learns the same way and not everyone comes up with ideas the same way. Believing that they do – that a bunch of flip charts will allow new ideas to come up – will not be successful.

New ideas come about through social interaction, through the friction that comes from different views and different approaches. Removing that diversity by saying only one approach will be used hampers real creativity.

Creativity and innovation can be simplified in only one way – making it easy for humans to interact and transfer information in a diverse environment with plenty of useful data. You do that and an emergent property will be great ideas.

I took part in some management training that used the Myers-Briggs testing. As a tool to put people into boxes, it is bunk. It simplifies complex human behavior too much to make the sorts of personnel decisions HR people need to make.

But, it is a wonderful tool to gain insight into the different approaches people use to solve problems and get through their lives. As I scientist I was really skeptical. I was the only ENFP in the class while almost every other scientist was ISTJ.

But I saw how different the world looks when everyone has the same viewpoint. The picture above demonstrates what happens when the Sensing people are grouped together and the Intuition people are grouped together. Each are given the same mix of Legos and asked to to build a structure.

Quite a difference. In the class I took, we split up into N/S groups, we were asked to describe a marker pen. The S group wrote down specific descriptions of what the pen looked like and what was written on it. It is black with white letters. It smells like turpentine.

The two of us in the N group wrote down things the pen could represent. iIt looks like a rocket or a hot dog.

Each group had very different ways of seeing the world. Neither was necessarily right all the time nor wrong all the time. But the wrong viewpoint at the wrong time could result in failure.

The best way to prevent this is to make sure there is a diversity of views, approaches and ways of learning. Then you also need to make sure you provide for each.

Some people need to talk to think but they can dominate those who can only think in silence.

Simplifications such as Myers-Briggs can be a useful tool for some limited uses but should never become dogma. Because, people can change their behavior to fit and will if their job depends on it.

But as a tool to help make sure a working group has the diversity it needs to be successful. It helps make explicit what we all pretty much know anyway – Richard talks a lot while Sue does not. Sam has lots of ideas but many are not worthwhile. Bob is really good at taking someone else’s ideas and reducing them to practice.

That is where successful ideas come from.

His stalker-like antics have gotten him banned from the University’s campus

Mich Ass’t Attorney General cyberbullies gay student body president
[Via Boing Boing]

Michigan Assistant Attorney General Andrew Shirvell has become so fixated on a particular gay University of Michigan student that he runs a blog about the student called “Chris Armstrong Watch.”

[More]

How in the world can a state employee get away with intimidating a student this way and keep his job? Doesn’t he have a boss to reign him in? Guess not. His boss says he is free to do whatever he wants to on his own time. So I assume stalking a student is okay. Makes you wonder just how strongly this state’s Justice department would prosecute the death of a gay student?

Of course, it turns out that Shirvell has served as an assistant campaign manager for the State’s Attorney General, so the AG certainly knows the views of this guy.

As the Washington Post stated:

He may be doing this on his own time, but it raises issues of fairness and security. How can the gay men and lesbians of Michigan trust a lawyer for the state when he spends every waking hour out of the office denigrating who they are?

Obviously, this guy would not be able to be involved at all in any of these prosecutions, but even the boss seems to have tainted himself.

Shirvell has come onto campus to specifically target the activities of this student. He called the student’s employer trying to get him fired. His disruptive efforts on the campus against the student got him an anti-tresspass order and the student is nowtrying to get a restraining order against the Shirvell. The guy has showed up at 1:30 am at the student’s house. The student had to ask police to provide protection for him to leave his house.

Shirvell has a blog where he only discusses his maniacal ravings about this one student. The guy is an obnoxious bully who is trying to use the ‘power’ he has to intimidate a private citizen. The goal is to not only attack this student but to prevent any other person from standing up, because he might make their life hell.

Why would an average person want to put themselves through such harassment? This is how bullies have always worked and it really stinks that a member of the justice system is so obviously one.

I really hate bullies. A lawyer for the state goes on the personal attack of a student. And that is okay because of the First Amendment? It is political speech that is protected. You can not just intimidate someone else and call it First amendment.

But then the same guy has been on an anti-gay tirade for some time. He tried to get a Catholic parish in the area to boycott a pizza place in 2005 because it had a rainbow sticker in the window.

He also helped organize protests that threatened to disrupt a Catholic confirmation ceremony because he did not like the former State Senator that was speaking nearby. He compared her to the KKK because she was pro-choice, even though the presentation was on how to register to vote.

He has been doing this for years, being a graduate of the Ave Maria Law School, an institution apparently started to produce lunatic lawyers. He does not want people he disagrees with to have any visibility in public life. What a bully.

How can any private citizen get away with such intimidating tactics, much less a state official? Watch the video and you will get some idea of what a loon this guy is.

But a loon that can make the decision on whether someone goes to Federal prison for years or simply gets to walk. I think that a good defense lawyer could have quite a fun time tainting any cases done by this guy, especially if the client was gay.

Being forced to deal with change

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

by doortoriver

Feature: There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly
[Via Ars Technica]

Twenty years ago, the fastest Internet backbone links were 1.5Mbps. Today we argue whether that’s a fast enough minimum to connect home users. In 1993, 1.3 million machines were connected to the Internet. By this past summer, that number had risen to 769 million— and this only counts systems that have DNS names. The notion of a computer that is not connected to the Internet is patently absurd these days.

But all of this rapid progress is going to slow in the next few years. The Internet will soon be sailing in very rough seas, as it’s about to run out of addresses, needing to be gutted and reconfigured for continued growth in the second half of the 2010s and beyond. Originally, the idea was that this upgrade would happen quietly in the background, but over the past few years, it has become clear that the change from the current Internet Protocol version 4, which is quickly running out of addresses, to the new version 6 will be quite a messy affair.

[More]

While somewhat technological babble, the problems seen with running out of Internet addresses are very similar to ones we will continue to face over the coming years – having to make massive changes at the last moment because we did not do a good job thinking about the transition.

Like climate change, redoing the Internet’s addressing protocol will happen whether we want it or are prepared for it. And like climate change, we have wasted 20 years dithering.

And the transition may end up costing money, as older devices have to be replaced because they no longer work properly.

So, the next few years might be a nice demonstration of just how adaptive and resilient many organizations are. And not isolated organizations but almost all of them. One failure along the route can remove access for many.

We will be forced into a new regime where we have no experience and no real way to test possible solutions. Instead of one organization dropped in the deep end to sink or swim, imagine 50 all tied together, so if one goes down, the others may be dragged down also.

I figure we will muddle through like we have but a lot of productivity may be lost for some time as we make the transition that everyone knew we were going to have to make 20 years ago.

It does not give much hope that we will be any different with other complex problems facing us unless we change the way we do things.

The 5th paragraph did me in

R.I.P. Sally Menke, Editor for Quentin Tarantino
[Via Daring Fireball]

Died while hiking. She’d worked with Tarantino on all of his feature films.

[More]

It was hard to read about a heat-related death, particularly when it is almost October. It hit 111° F on Monday in Los Angeles. As I was reading, I was thinking “I wonder if they found her dog?”

Then the fifth paragraph – her dog had stayed close to her even as the heat was harming it…it seems certain that if they had found her body later, they might very well have found the lifeless body of her dog.

Not many things is your life like a loyal dog. Nor, unfortunately, in your death.

Here is a video that displays how some of the people who worked with her felt. As said at Daring Fireball – Funny then, heartbreaking now.

Discussing why Apple is not conventional

by Gonzalo Baeza Hernández

Apple’s segmentation strategy, and the folly of conventional wisdom
[Via O'Reilly Radar]

There is a myth, more of a meme actually, about the ‘inevitability’ of commoditization. It is a view of the world that sees things linearly, in terms of singularities, and the so-called “one right path.”

In this realm, where commoditization is God, horizontal orientation (versus vertical integration) rules the roost. How else to define consumers, not in flesh and blood terms, not as spirits that aspire to specific outcomes, but rather, as a composite set of loosely-coupled attributes.

This mindset is compelling because it is simple and familiar, but it also leads to blind obsequiousness.

Historical edifices are held as indelible fact. “It’s Microsoft v. Apple all over again.” “There has to be one absolute, dominant leader.” “Open will always prevail — and should prevail — over proprietary systems.” “Market share matters above all else. Even profits.”

There is one small fly in the ointment to this ethos, however, and its name is Apple. (For a historical perspective on tech industry architectural orientation, check out “Waves of Power” by David Moschella.)

Apple’s gaudy performance relative to its industry peers

The following inconvenient facts must be an affront to the horizontal, commoditized, open, market share zealots. Apple has launched three major new product lines since 2001 : the iPod (October, 2001); the iPhone (July, 2008); and the iPad (April, 2010).

The company’s stock is up 3,000 percent since the launch of iPod, 60 percent since the launch of iPhone, and 20 percent since the launch of iPad.

In that same time period, the major devotees of the loosely coupled model — Microsoft, Google, Intel and Dell — have been, at best, outpaced by Apple 6X (in the case of Google dating back to the launch of iPod) and at worst, either been wiped out (in the case of Dell) or treaded water (in the cases of Microsoft and Intel) in every comparison period.

[More]

This is one of the best articles detailing how Apple is not like a conventional company and that conventional wisdom does not hold. As it states:

Therein, lies the problem with conventional wisdom. Namely, that it’s conventional. It doesn’t think outside the box in terms of strategic imperatives, like building differentiation, growing margins or defensibility.

Apple is playing chess while the others are playing checkers – a great metaphor from the article. Apple does what the customer wants and leads them to their products. Other companies follow without having a real understanding of why things are popular.

In this regard, Apple’s product strategy is a study in market segmentation. Versus merely trying to stuff a product, burrito-style, with as many different features as possible, they target specific user experiences, and build the product around that accordingly.

Putting in all sorts of things because they can, not because they are useful. The hardest thing in most any endeavor is what to leave out. But Apple does a great job of making most people desire so much what is present that they do not mind what is missing. Like the AppleTV, which I may very well get because it will give me simple access to what I want for less money. Who cares whether it has a DVD or hard drive. I’ll be able to stream the content from devices that do have those.

ANother insight from the article is how Apple reboots successful products, not failed ones, as many companies do. So the iPod nano is completely different with some new features that make it worth buying, while Apple completely stops building the old one, no mater how popular it was.

The article has a great chart showing all of Apple’s mobile devices. Each has a decided niche that does not impact any of the other devices. Apple knows the exact purpose of each one and makes each one a compelling choice. So, where are the other wearable devices? How about wearable with touch interface?

One thing people forget when they say that these devices will cannibalize computer sales is that each of them must be synched to a computer. Whether you have an iPad, iPhone or shuffle, you want to connect them every so often to a computer of some kind running iTunes. Because of that, there is also an incentive to buy a Mac computer, since you are going to have to have one anyway. I wonder how many people are buying Mac laptops on their next purchase just to make using iTunes easier?

So all the iOS mobile devices would drive sales of Mac computers.

No one else has the devices nor can they drive the same strategy the makes all of this work seamlessly.

Why is every iPad competitor a 7 inch?

by viagallery.com

Dell to launch 7-inch tablet in ‘next few weeks’ to challenge iPad
[Via AppleInsider]

U.S. computer maker Dell reportedly plans to take on Apple’s iPad with a smaller, 7-inch device set to launch in a matter of weeks, as well as a 10-inch touchscreen device planned to debut in the next year.

As noted Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, the president of Dell in Greater China revealed that the 7-inch tablet, shown off briefly last week by CEO Michael Dell, will launch “within the next few weeks.” The device will run Google’s Android mobile operating system.

[More]

All the big competitors coming out in the short term is a 7 inch tablet And a full size one will come out later.

I first thought this different form factor was to differentiate them from an iPad. But I wonder if it is due to the parts they can get.

One of the comments mentioned that APple has soaked up half of the world’s supply of suitable memory for these sorts of devices. I wonder if something similar is going on with 10 inch screen. So lot of 7 inches available and that is why we see them now.

Of course, Apple is expanding the manufacturing capacity for iPads and may continue to put pressure on the availability of supply for others for some time.

If so, it is an example of keeping competitors out of the market because they can not get the parts they need. An INteresting approach.

If the government can use a backdoor, than so can anyone else

Feds Pushing For New Legally Required Wiretap Backdoor To All Internet Communications
[Via Techdirt]

The unfortunate, if not surprising, news story making the rounds today is that the feds in the US are looking to pass new laws to legally require a wiretap backdoor in every kind of internet communication offering. Yes, you read that right. If there’s any way to communicate online, the US government is demanding the right to be able to wiretap it. Any company that doesn’t comply will face fines. This despite the long history of the US government massively abusing its wiretapping privileges repeatedly throughout history.

And, yes, this would supposedly apply to non-US communications services as well:

Foreign-based providers that do business inside the United States must install a domestic office capable of performing intercepts.

Yeah, that’ll go over well. It’s difficult to see how this is any different than foreign governments demanding access to others’ communications as well. It’s pretty ridiculous for President Obama to talk about open internet principles to the UN, while cooking this up at the same time. Pushing for this also means that the US will have no excuse when the governments of Iran, China and elsewhere also demand backdoors into all US-based communications.

And, really, that’s the biggest problem with this law. Beyond the inevitable privacy violations by the feds, putting backdoors into communications technologies guarantees that those backdoors will be used by others (outside of the federal government) to snoop on communications. The FBI and the NSA (who are pushing for this) are being totally and completely naive if they think that they’re the only ones who will use this. We’ve pointed out in the past how large scale surveillance systems mean large scale security risks, and this is no different. We showed how a similar surveillance system in Greece was hacked into to spy on government officials. US officials should be aware that they’re opening themselves up to these same potential risks.

And, the simple fact is: this won’t help and it won’t matter. The people who really want to communicate secretly will still use tools to communicate secretly. The feds are (once again) being naive to think that such tools won’t exist and won’t be widely known and widely utilized. Instead, all this will do is open up everyone else to abuse of the system by other governments, organized crime, people with malicious intent and (of course) the US government.

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Besides the obvious abuses by the government, it also means that bad guys will be able to get access to any corporation’s online communications. Do they really want to hamper these sorts of communications?

And, since anyone can also use encryption to prevent eavesdropping, how will this really do much against the bad guys? It’ll get used against regular people who happen to join a political group the government does not like, even if that group has done nothing wrong, in violation of our Constitution.

Franklin is again correct. How much essential liberty will we give up? especially since it does not really make us safer just more exposed to abuses by the government.

Hope it goes to committee to die

U.S. Senate Poised to Vote on Internet Blacklist
[Via Daring Fireball]

Aaron Swartz has started a campaign to stop COICA, proposed legislation to create an Internet blacklist in the U.S. From the fact sheet:

What exactly does it do?

The bill creates two blacklists of Internet domain names. The first can be added to by a court, the second by the Attorney General. Internet service providers (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the first list. They would also receive immunity (and presumably the government’s gratitude) for blocking domains on the second list.

Don’t make me quote Ben Franklin again.

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Giving the government the ability to blacklist people and blocking websites because of the material present on those sites seems unconstitutional to me. It is a pure sop to big media and otther corporations, with no benefits for real people.

We do need to make sure this never makes it out of committee.

‘We need more than 3 mice for this to work’

Paul Krugman: Downhill With the G.O.P.
[Via Economist's View]

Republicans have thoroughly embraced the Irving Kristol strategy for political effectiveness: “say whatever it takes to gain power”:

Downhill With the G.O.P., by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

I’ve always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America’s two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. … And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.

Banana republic, here we come.

On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which … would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid… No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

The “pledge,” then, is nonsense. … So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn’t even trying to make sense?

[More]

Looks like the GOP is trying to do the experiment with less than 3 mice. Perhaps they should have asked a statistician.

I wrote about the futility of this earlier in the year. Getting rid of any ‘waste’ still leaves us with a huge deficit. We had a $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009. The total amount of discretionary spending that is not defense related is $437 billion. We could completely do away with ALL of that and still be left with $1 billion still to remove.

And things do not get better as we go forward. Deficits begin rising fairly fast 5 years from now unless revenues are substantially increased.

Cutting revenue without specific cuts in spending is simply pandering.

We can not make this work with only 3 mice. There has to be some effort to make some hard decisions and to make the numbers match some sort of reality. The Pledge does no such thing. It would have been better for them to point people to some of the simulations online and let them see the hard choices that have to be made.

Because there are not very many good choices from here on out. Anyone who leads you to believe that there are not any is trying to do the experiment with 3 mice. They will not succeed.

How the ethics of human experimentation have changed

by courtneyBolton

The further adventures of Thomas Edison, asshat
[Via Boing Boing]

Say you were curious about what happened when a human brain came into prolonged contact with a strong magnetic field. To find an answer, you might learn more about the nature of magnetism and the biology of the brain and make some hypotheses. Later, you’d run some experiments using dead tissue, or perhaps live animal models. This is because you are a good person.

If you were Thomas Edison, on the other hand, you’d find the nearest street urchin and keep him inside a giant electromagnet. It’s OK, though, science writers would later say, because there turned out not to be much of an effect, and, anyway, the boy liked it.

Many years ago, Mr. Thomas Edison made the following interesting experiment in his laboratory. Wishing to see what, if any, influence is produced by the passage of strong magnetic flux through the brain, he kept a boy for a long time inside a huge electro-magnet with his head placed between the poles so that the flux passed directly through his brain. If now a magnet is capable of producing any effect whatever on the body it should certainly have done it in this case. But as far as could be seen no effect whatever was felt by the boy. When asked privately how he felt he replied confidentially, “The experiment is bully. I am all right in the magnet. I like to be here for I do not have to work while the experiment is going on and I can take a nap occasionally. But don’t tell Mr. Edison. I hope he will keep me here for a long time.”

[More]

I’d love to hear his conversation with the biostatistician. ‘Can I do this experiment with one human? My grant is due tomorrow.’ How does one experiment with one human prove anything? It really does not.

I wonder what he would have done if the poor kid’s head exploded? Sometimes we just forget why we have well vetted clinical trials backed by good animal data, with rigorous statistics.

Seat of the pants experiments such as Edison’s really reveal little at all.

When science parody becomes reality does it remain parody?

by Husky

The science media make my head hurt
[Via Pharyngula]

First, read this parody of science journalism. It’s the template for just about every science story you’ll find in a newspaper, and it’s so depressing.

Second, imagine something even worse. Hint: it’s the media’s coverage of every scientific “controversy” you might think of. It takes a few of the tropes mentioned in the parody, like “shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist” and “quotes from some fringe special interest group of people who, though having no apparent understanding of the subject, help to give the impression that genuine public ‘controversy’ exists.” and “Special interest group linked to for balance” and expand those to fill the allotted space. There is no possibility that a journalist will actually examine the evidence and show which side is clearly bonkers.

For an example of this phenomenon in action, examine this article about a teacher in Modesto, Mark Ferrante, declaring that he will teach intelligent design in biology classes. It’s a moist sopping wallow in the so-called middle ground, getting quotes from teachers on both sides of the issue, and making special care to include a theist teacher mumbling platitudes about “Let science tell us what and how. Let religion tell us who and why.”

And of course, they go to the Discovery Institute for their story about ID, and set them against the NCSE, as if these two groups have an equal investment in the scientific truth. They do not. Intelligent Design has no credibility, no empirical support, and no reasonable proposals for scientific investigation. When will the media wake up and realize that their constant pushing of a false equivalency is a major factor in feeding this pseudo-controversy?

[More]

The parody is excellent, exactly demonstrating some of the things I recently discussed.

But then to be juxtaposed with a real article displaying almost all of the same items from the parody? Nan Austin of the Modesto Bee displayed little journalism when she just checked off many of the points from the template provided in the parody.

1. Pun in the sentence. Check.
2. ‘Some trustees and other science teachers say.’ Check.
3. Soundbite quotations. Check.
4. Subheadings that only attempt to add context. Check.
5. Padding out with useless, irrelevant facts. Check.
6. Last paragraph demonstrating how nothing as really changed. Check.

A true test of whether a piece of writing is hackwork or not is whether it can be reduced to a check list. Looks like a lot of science journalism fits. But then, as Sturgeon’s Law supports, a lot of normal journalism is crap also.

So, the parody may not be really funny anymore but perhaps it can now actually be used as a guide to help identify the 10% of science journalists who are not hacks.

If it can not be reduced to a checklist, then it is most likely not hackwork. I expect that it would likely no be possible to make a parody of good writing.

Lab humor – it is funny because it is true

How not to consult your biostatistician before doing an experiment
[Via Science-Based Medicine]

A friend of mine at work sent this video to me in great amusement.

I just hope he wasn’t making a comment on my behavior when it comes to dealing with our biostatisticians. I have, of course, seen investigators approach biostatistians this late in the game. Not that I’ve ever flirted with this sort of behavior, of course. At least the researcher in the video above actually consulted the biostatistician before doing the experiment, rather than after doing an experiment with inadequate statistical power to answer the question asked. On the other hand, I guess it doesn’t matter if the researcher doesn’t listen, does it?

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Many people go into biology because the math requirements are lower. So, their understanding of statistics and probability may be rudimentary. Of course, this causes a problem since so much of biology is based upon random or stochastic events.

Thus, placing two identical mice into the same cage and treating them with the same drugs can result in very different results. So we try and define the range of possible results that occur so that 95% of the time, the actual results fall in that range.

So, in a simple case, I guess we could examine a hundred mice and make the range fit 95% of them. But for ethical reasons we want to experiment on the fewest number of animals as possible. It is cheaper, faster and less destructive to the animals to use few animals. We need statistical rigor to be able to get similar results by using much fewer mice.

Of course, the drive to reduce the number of mice results in the plea to use only 3 mice. But think of those 100 mice. If you chose 3 of them, what are the chances that those 3 would encompass the entire range of ‘real’ results? Not very likely unless the range was very, very small – something seldom seen in biology.

Now three mice might be useful in a pilot study in order to just get an idea of the variability. But in a comparison study between two regimens, three will most likely not provide any real information. Thus all the mice will have been wasted.

But, and this is so true, when writing a grant, you spend a lot of effort making sure the work can actually get done in the budgeted amount. Making sure you have covered all the details is what can take so long. Months.

And then, a friend reviewing the draft of the grant asks the dreaded question “Are three mice enough to get good data?” and you realize that if it is not, you will have to rework the budget, the budget that you spent weeks mashing around to get to fit.

And you know that will be one of the questions a real reviewer will have abd the answer can determine whether you get a grant or not.

So you shop around for a biostatistician who will sign off on the 3 mice study because you really have no time to rework the budget.

And that is when a biostatistician comes in and provides a real object lesson. A humorous one also.