Posts Tagged ‘Science’

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Noted in Passing 19th January 2013

January 19, 2013

A weekly post on things that were interesting or which I would have liked to have blogged about …….

Engineering and Technology

A work of genius: Harry Beck's map of 1933

A work of genius: Harry Beck’s map of 1933

The London Underground is 150 years old and the iconic London Underground Map is a work of some genius – by an electrical draughtsman Harry Beck – in focusing on connections and ignoring geography.

Boeing is facing a torrid time with the 787 Dreamliner and has stopped all further aircraft deliveries. This is going to hurt their cash flow even before all the claims from the airlines come in for the grounding of their aircraft.

The advent of hydraulic fracturing and the consequent availability of shale gas means that new lines are drawn on the energy map of the world and many of the oldest and most stable geopolitical truths will be turned on their heads.

If graphene turns out to be the wonder material that it promises to be then it is time to invest in graphite.

Science and Behaviour

The dangers with blindly assuming that correlations represent a causal relationship is well demonstrated by this study on milk, chocolate and Nobel prizes. Derby Proctor believes that chimpanzees have a sense of fairness but her “ultimatum game” experiments were not strictly ultimate games at all and are not convincing.  Altruism among chimpanzees is – if it exists at all – strictly limited and only after basic needs are satisfied and restricted to a very few.

Matt Ridley joins the list and also dumps on Mark Lynas and green orthodoxy

The curious case of Zuma’s deputies deals with the intricacies of politics in South Africa and in the ANC today. An interesting post on the French need to be relevant in the world and Hollande’s adventures in Africa.

How much of the chatter on Twitter or postings on Facebook are real communication and how much is noise? Nandana Sengupta looks at the pluses and the minuses of the explosion of opinions via social media in India.

Having spent a lifetime with contracts I have always taken “terms” of “terms and conditions” to signify “limits of time” but terms and conditions have now converged in usage to be almost identical in meaning.

On where Tolkien may have found the word “hobbit”.

For Wodehouse fans and for the first time since Ralph Richardson as Lord Emsworth in 1967, BBC are showing a  new TV series centred around Blandings Castle. The reviews were not very kind:

“The performances weren’t bad exactly, but there was an impression that the cast had raided the charity shop and were merely having a spiffing time in vintage clothing.”

Bad Science

Michael Marotta describes four books on bad science.

The British Met Office makes yet another misstep and demonstrates that massaging science to get a desired result makes for bad science.

Climate models are hardly worth the paper they are printed on and they don’t seem to have any idea of how to handle the effect of clouds. Models – which are pushing the alarmist cause – generally assume they have a positive feedback on global warming but in reality the feedback is negative.

Professor Debora Weber-Wulff reports on Multiple Retractions of Articles by Computer Science Professor

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Noted in Passing 12th January 2013

January 12, 2013

My hope is to make “Noted in Passing” a regular, weekly post but I am not sure if I will have the discipline to maintain it. I shall try to confine myself to 3 topic areas: “Science and Behaviour”, “Engineering and Technology” and “Bad Science”. I’m trying to avoid politics as a topic in its own right but politics may well creep in under “Behaviour”.

Science and Behaviour

Polar bear numbers world-wide are up and here’s  a marvellous image of a polar bear in winter.

polar bear aurora_borealis_3-t2 free

Polar bear and the aurora borealis (from polar bear science)

Some people apparently believe that  too much genetic information could be a bad thing. Virginia Hughes disagrees strongly and I am inclined to agree with her. Genetic sequencing is here to stay and even if interpretation may lead to new challenges and new dilemmas, this genie cannot be stuffed back into the bottle.

Why did our fingers eveolve wrinkles? Was it perhaps to better be able to grip smooth objects?

John Hawks begins his descent through Darwin’s Descent of Man and has posted his “introduction” which is fascinating and – especially for a layman like me – eminently readable. “Experts” in my opinion are those who explain and not those who try to mystify (usually to inflate their own egos).

David McNeil believes that a gesture-speech unity lies at the origins of language but I am not convinced. When speech began – and that is a story in itself – gestures may well have added to man’s vocabulary but I am skeptical as to the role of gesture in the development of language and the grammar associated with language. But what seems obvious to me is that for the origins of speech as well as the origins of language we have to look to the increasing need for communication as the driving force.

In the meantime miR-941 is now being slated as a specific gene that contributed to how early humans developed tool use and language (in contrast to the FoxP2 gene which is thought to be a more general enabler). A study by psychologists claims that language learning begins before birth but I think they jump far too quickly from sound recognition to language learning and the study does not convince.

Recent excavations at an Australian site provides evidence of inhabitation ” certainly” at 41,230 years ago with the dating of charcoal found at the site. However the earliest inhabitation was much older since stone tools were found in deeper layers than the charcoal, but these have yet to be dated. This seems more consistent with the main human expansion Out of Africarabia first happening before Toba.

Even bloggers on the right are questioning the US love affair with semi-automatic weapons but I don’t expect any significant change to the gun laws in the US anytime soon.

Good grief! Greg Laden believes that summer in the Southern Hemisphere must be a sign of global warming. It’s -6°C outside my window right now and its been snowing in Jerusalem and the Lebanon, so I suppose the Northern Hemisphere must be entering a Little Ice Age.

The luminosity of our Sun varies just 0.1% over the course of its 11-year solar cycle. There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate. Tony Phillips from NASA comments on  “The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate”  issued by the National Research Council.

Engineering and Technology

The technology for drones that today are used to kill could have more peaceful purposes. A Dronenet for a human free package delivery service  is attractive and does not sound so absurd.

Livefist reports that Airbus has beaten out the Russians to win the Indian Air Force’s new generation of  mid-refuelling tankers while Boeing is still going through teething troubles with the 787 Dreamliner.

The pressures on the supply of neodymium, dysprosium, and other rare-earth metals for the manufacture of strong magnets is leading to a surge in the use of nanotechnology to find alternatives.

Bad Science:

  1. Another idiot study about how our fists evolved in response to fighting!  An excellent takedown by  T. Ryan Gregory. “The most impressive thing about this study is that it managed to gain so much attention with so little substance”. 
  2. ChemBark has this update on serial data fabricator Bengu Sezen who has been hired by the Gebze Institute of Technology.
  3. Simon Kuper has some sympathy for Diederik Stapel who now finds himself in an unforgiving Dutch society. His take on the Stapel affaire is in the FT.
  4. The American Psychiatric Association would seem to be in thrall to the pharmaceutical industry as DSM -5 is adjusted to sell more drugs.
  5. John Hawks has a scathing post about Mark Lynas as “someone who had never read a scientific study on the subject, purporting to be an advocate in the popular press, and having his ignorant statements printed widely by multimillion-dollar media organizations” and the shoe fits whether Lynas is pontificating about GMO or global warming.
  6. Further retractions of social psychology papers: “Fraud committed by any social psychologist diminishes all social psychologists” and reinforces the view that social psychology is mainly for headlines and is still a long way from being a science.
  7. Most junior scientists accept academic theft by their advisors as a way of life and only a very few decide to make any noise about it.

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Idle thoughts: Disciplines, sciences and pseudosciences

November 4, 2012

There is virtually nothing in the physical universe around us that is not worthy of study. Most study begins with observations. We can term any such area of study where observations are made and knowledge accumulated as being a “discipline”. The social “sciences”, environmentalism and even astrology and palmistry could be considered disciplines.

But when does a discipline become a science?

(more…)

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Posted in Philosophy, Science | 3 Comments »

Data fabrication by Hauser and Stapel strengthen the view that psychology is no science

December 23, 2011

That psychology is a discipline and a field of study is indisputable. That the study of human (or animal) behaviour is a worthy field and that experimentation and research are well worth pursuing is also obvious. But I am of the view that it is far from being a science.  Psychology can be considered to be a pre-science similar to alchemy. And the practitioners of psychology are similar to priests and shamans and witch-doctors and other practitioners of magic. Inevitably the field contains many charlatans.

During 2011 the high profile cases of Marc Hauser and Diederik Stapel  where data was faked (and no matter which way the pill is coated they both fabricated data to suit their theories) only reinforces my view that their behaviour was essentially narcissistic and not uncommon in the burgeoning fields of psychology. In both cases inflated egos led to the creation of their “signature” hypotheses followed by the fabrication of data to prove their conclusions – which had already been reached! I am inherently suspicious of psychologists who are supposed scientists but who are seduced by the fame and fortunes of press adulation or tenure or who become Agony Aunts on TV.

Charles Gross writes in The Nation about the Marc Hauser affair and concludes:

(more…)

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Climate change teaching to get back to science but High Priest Bob Ward wants the brainwashing to continue

June 13, 2011

The phenomenon of climate change will someday get back to science and leave the alarmist dogma behind. But we can expect that any moves in this direction will be resisted bitterly by the high priests of global warming and the carbon trading cabal.

The Guardian reports:

Climate change should be excluded from curriculum

Climate change should not be included in the national curriculum, the government adviser in charge of overhauling the school syllabus in England has said. 

Tim Oates, whose wide-ranging review of the curriculum for five- to 16-year-olds will be published later this year, said it should be up to schoolsto decide whether – and how – to teach climate change, and other topics about the effect scientific processes have on our lives. 

In an interview with the Guardian, Oates called for the national curriculum “to get back to the science in science”. “We have believed that we need to keep the national curriculum up to date with topical issues, but oxidation and gravity don’t date,” he said. “We are not taking it back 100 years; we are taking it back to the core stuff. The curriculum has become narrowly instrumentalist.”

But this is The Guardian and it must have been painful to report such a radical step!! Needless to say they provide ample space for global warming High Priest Bob Ward to voice his objections:

But Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, warned that Oates’ ideas might not be in pupils’ best interests and could make science less interesting for children.

“An emphasis on climate change in the curriculum connects the core scientific concepts to topical issues,” he said. “Certain politicians feel that they don’t like the concept of climate change. I hope this isn’t a sign of a political agenda being exercised.”

He said leaving climate change out of the national curriculum might encourage a teacher who was a climate change sceptic to abandon teaching the subject to their pupils. “This would not be in the best interests of pupils. It would be like a creationist teacher not teaching about evolution. Climate change is about science. If you remove the context of scientific concepts, you make it less interesting to children.”

But perhaps Bob Ward needs to be reminded that climate change has been happening for ever and will continue without caring very much about what our science purports to understand – or fails to understand. There is little science left in present day “climate science” – which has degenerated to be a dogma with the “consensus scientists” being little more than an advocacy group – and any return to science regarding the climate is welcome and long overdue.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Education, Politics, Science, UK | Comments Off on Climate change teaching to get back to science but High Priest Bob Ward wants the brainwashing to continue

Where Science gets done

November 12, 2010

(Reuters) – The United States still leads the world with its scientific clout, armed with highly respected universities and a big war chest of funding, but Europe and Asia are catching up, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Friday.

But U.S. influence is waning — not because the United States is doing less, but because other countries are doing more, Thomson’s Jonathan Adams and David Pendlebury found. “In 1981, U.S. scientists fielded nearly 40 percent of research papers in the most influential journals,” they wrote.

“By 2009, that figure was down to 29 percent. During the same period, European nations increased their share of research papers from 33 percent to 36 percent, while research contributed by nations in the Asia-Pacific region increased from 13 percent to 31 percent.” China is now the second-largest producer of scientific papers, after the United States, with nearly 11 percent of the world’s total. In 2008, Asian nations as a group passed the United States with $387 billion in research and development spending, compared with $384 billion in the United States and $280 billion in Europe.

Precisely half of U.S. research focuses on the biological sciences “just at the time when Asian nations are focusing on and investing substantial sums in engineering, physical sciences, and technology,” the report notes. In the United States, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology (MIT and Caltech) led in research, the report found. Outside the United States, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences lead.

Earlier this week the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, released a report showing similar findings. UNESCO said in 2002, almost 83 percent of research and development was carried out in developed countries but this dropped to 76 percent by 2007. It found China was leading the pack of emerging nations with 1.4 million researchers.

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Another Nature paper retracted by authors but lead author does not sign retraction

November 9, 2010

Retraction Watch reports on the retraction of a paper at Nature by the authors but where, once again, the lead author does not sign the retraction.

In this case the paper is:

The large-conductance Ca2+-activated K+channel is essential for innate immunity by Jatinder Ahluwalia, Andrew Tinker, Lucie H. Clapp, Michael R. Duchen, Andrey Y. Abramov, Simon Pope, Muriel Nobles & Anthony W. Segal, Nature 427, 853-858 (26 February 2004), doi:10.1038/nature02356; Received 18 July 2003; Accepted 20 January 2004.

The Retraction Notice reads

The authors wish to retract this Letter after the report of an inability to reproduce their results, later confirmed by another. The studies the authors then conducted led to an internal investigation by University College London, please see the accompanying Supplementary Information for details. The retraction has not been signed by Jatinder Ahluwalia.

The lead author is usually the researcher and the last name is usually that of the senior author. There have been a number of such cases recently where the authors retract a paper but where the lead author does not sign the retraction. The inference is that there has been some misconduct or alleged misconduct by the researcher which has been “discovered” by the other authors but where the alleged misconduct is not acknowledged by the lead author. (See the cases of Shane R Mayack and Hung-Shu Chang for example). Just the fact that some data can not be reproduced does not mean that misconduct has occurred. Experimental data can never be perfect. In addition to measurement errors and procedural errors, data may also be subject to errors of interpretation and analysis. In fact the scientific method requires the publication of such data – warts and all – which can then be tested by others and retraction would not be necessary or correct merely if different results were obtained later. Erroneous data does not have to be – and should not be – deleted from the record. A retraction – and especially by a multiplicity of contributing authors but not the lead author  – carries a strong inference of misconduct.

This raises once again the question of roles and responsibilities between the different contributing authors, the reviewers and the journal editor for a published paper. Perhaps the number of retractions is at an “acceptable” level, but I am sure that the number of retractions must follow the “Iceberg Principle” and what is finally made visible can only be the tip of what must be there. The senior author must bear some responsibility and have some accountability for such events.

It seems to me that senior authors (as supervisors of the research reported) get away too lightly and merely pass the responsibility onto the researcher’s failings or his misconduct. They abdicate their responsibility for quality and integrity rather too easily. I would like to see a statement by the senior author whenever such a retraction is made “at the request of the authors”.

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Posted in Behaviour, Ethics, Science, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »

“What the Green Movement got wrong” (cont’d)

November 6, 2010

A follow up to the post about the Channel 4 programme with environmentalists beating their breasts is this very succinct cartoon from Josh which encapsulates the whole story very nicely:

 

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The ongoing evolution of humans

October 23, 2010

DNA. image ichromatography.com

 

The Yoruba of West Africa have been exposed, historically, to the dry conditions of the Sahel on the edge of the Sahara desert. To find out whether they had evolved to cope, Andres Moreno at Stanford University in California and colleagues looked at the variation of a gene known to be involved in water retention in the kidney, called FOXI1, in DNA samples from 20 Europeans, 20 east Asians and 20 Yoruba.

(BMC Evolutionary Biology, DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-10-267).

The team found that 85 per cent of the Yoruba had an identical sequence of genetic information that was longer than it would have been if it was produced by random recombination and genetic shuffling. Instead, they suggest that it had been naturally selected.The length of the genetic signature suggests that the change occurred in the last 10,000 to 20,000 years, which could have coincided with the initial stages of the desertification of the Sahara. They also analysed a region of the gene in 971 samples from 39 human populations around the world, including the Yoruba, and found that the same genetic sequence was found at higher frequencies in lower latitudes. Since lower latitudes are more likely to be regions of water-stress, this suggests that the selection pressure was climate-related, says Moreno.

Humans are still evolving: the evidence

“Over the long term, if the Earth keeps warming, I would not be surprised to see genetic shifts,” says anthropological geneticist Anne Stone at Arizona State University in Tempe.

While we may look like the finished article, there is plenty of evidence that humans are still evolving. John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison even argues that population explosions and rapidly changing lifestyles are causing humans to evolve faster now than ever before. Evidence includes:

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Wagers paper (without Mayack) also questioned

October 21, 2010

(Thanks to Phil Score for pointing out the typos which have been fixed)

A few days ago the paper in Nature “Systemic signals regulate ageing and rejuvenation of blood stem cell niches” by Shane R. Mayack, Jennifer L. Shadrach, Francis S. Kim & Amy J. Wagers was retracted at the request of 3 of the authors. Then the Journal Blood issued a Notice of Concern regarding a second paper with Shane Mayack as the lead author and published with Amy Wagers.

In both of these cases, Shane Mayack who was the post-doctoral fellow at the Joslin Diabetes Center of Harvard Medical School was the lead author and the implication was that they could be something untoward with her work.

Now Retraction Watch reports that a  Scientist raised serious questions about 2008 Cell study by Amy Wagers. The questions were of a scientific and technical nature and in themselves carry no implications of impropriety.

Shane Mayack was not involved with this paper but since Amy Wagers led the team at the Joslin Diabetes Center, the question that arises is one of leadership and of the environment within which research is carried out. As I have posted earlier this atmosphere and the pressure of publication for the researchers may be leading to errors of judgement and misconduct. Professors and leaders of scientific teams cannot, I think, abdicate their responsibility for the environment in which their teams work especially where their names are included as co-authors of the resulting publications. The senior author on any published paper must be the first quality gate to be passed and must provide the final assurance of the integrity of the work being reported.


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