I did again what I shouldn't do, namely, read the "Comments" section on an article in the Yahoo! news.
The article, a fun little piece that came out day before yesterday, describes how engineers at MIT have figured out how cats drink. Originally, it was thought that they curled the ends of their tongues to form a ladle (which is evidently how dogs do it). But using high-speed photography, the MIT researchers figured out that this isn't what they're doing at all -- they're darting their tongues so fast (the cats, not the engineers) that it creates an upward-flowing column of liquid held together by cohesion. The tongue is apparently moving at exactly the optimal speed to create an upward flow without the column breaking up.
So, I was reading this, thinking what a charming piece of research this is, with applications both to engineering and to evolutionary biology, and feeling pretty happy. Then I scrolled down and started reading the comments. Here is a sampler for your perusal. Spelling and grammar are left intact, so you can get the full effect.
"This is what these scientists are spending there government funding on? Cut em off and make em start working for there money like everyone else."
"How much of our tax dollars funded this research."
"Wait a minute. China is holding the worlds purse strings... and researchers at our best college are studying cats drinking habits? WTF?"
"its only money goverments love to waste it aslong they get there share line there pockets
so its no odds at all do it all the time nomatter who gets in they will always steal from the public pursemisuse taxpayers money"
Okay, enough. You get the picture. Now, for my response. The more sensitive members of the studio audience may want to avert their eyes.
WILL YOU CRETINOUS, IGNORANT, ANTI-INTELLECTUAL MORONS PLEASE JUST RETURN TO THE CAVES FROM WHENCE YOU CAME, AND STOP PRETENDING YOU HAVE THE BRAINS TO COMMENT ON ANYTHING MORE COMPLEX THAN WHAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT ON "JERSEY SHORE?"
First: no tax dollars whatsoever were "wasted" on this research. MIT's engineering research lab is funded by a private endowment.
Second: knowledge of how the world works is important in and of itself. This kind of knowledge is called "science."
Third: the people who engage in this kind of commentary, despite the fact that they seem to have a single Froot Loop where most people have a brain, fail to take into account how many practical applications have come from pure research that seemed, at first, to have no connection to the "real world." Here are just a few:
1) Two researchers, George Beadle and Edward Tatum, were studying nutrition in a mold called Neurospora, and were particularly interested in why some strains of Neurospora starved to death even when given adequate amounts of food. Their research generated the concept of "one gene-one protein" -- the basis of our understanding of how genes control traits.
2) Charles Richet was studying how the toxin of a rare species of jellyfish affects the body. His research led to the discovery of how anaphylactic shock works -- and led to the development of the epi pen, saving countless lives from death because of bee sting allergies.
3) Wilhelm Roentgen was researching the newly-invented cathode-ray tube, which at that point had no practical applications whatsoever. That is, he was playing around. He noticed that when he activated the tube, even though it was completely covered, some fluorescent papers at the other end of the room began to glow in the dark. He had just discovered x-rays.
4) Alexander Fleming was something of a ne'er-do-well in the scientific world. He did a lot of raising of bacteria on plates, and his favorite hobby was to take brightly-colored species of bacteria and paint them on agar media to make pictures. One day, a mold spore blew in and landed on one of his picture-cultures and spoiled it. His further messing-about with how the mold spoiled the culture led to the discovery of the first antibiotic, penicillin.
5) Roy Plunkett was working with gases that could be used to quickly cool vessels in scientific experiments, and after one failure he found that the vessel was left coated with a slick substance. He eventually named it "Teflon."
And so forth.
I think the problem, honestly, is that far too many people have an erroneous idea of how science works -- that scientists clock in at 8 AM, and consult their Scientific Method Rules List, and proceed to make discoveries, then clock out at 5 PM and go home to their wives and 2.5 children. Very little science actually works this way, going in a straight line from A to B. Much more of it is just inquiry into a little bit of the world that strikes the researchers' curiosity -- and this is everything from the oddball experiments that never have any practical applications whatsoever to the pure research that ends up saving lives or transforming society. Most of the best science comes from the curious, agile minds of men and women who are pursuing research to explain things they wonder about, and shedding a little light on one small piece of the universe about which we were ignorant. The rest of us common folk should be thankful that these people are doing what they're doing, because you know what? Every piece of technology, every medical advance, all the things that make modern society possible, were developed by scientists.
And toward that end, I do wish that the Yahoo! posters would either educate themselves, or else simply do what I do when I am ignorant on a topic -- namely, shut the hell up.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
The law of small numbers
Yesterday, I had a perfectly dreadful day.
The events varied from the truly tragic (receiving news that a former student had been killed in an automobile accident) to the awful but mundane (finding out that my son was not getting $2000 of financial aid we counted on, because the financial aid office screwed up and sent the papers to the wrong address) to the "I'll-probably-laugh-about-this-later-but-right-now-I'm-not" (finding out that my dog, Grendel, has figured out how to climb our chain-link fence, and so now has to be escorted outside on a leash every time he wants to go potty) to the completely banal (a school meeting that left me feeling like I'm ready to find another career).
All of this brought to mind the idea of streaks of bad (or good) luck -- something that you find people so completely convinced of that it's nearly impossible to get them to break their conviction that it sometimes happens. We've all had days when everything seems to go wrong -- when we have what my dad used to call "the reverse Midas touch -- everything you touch turns to crap." There are also, regrettably fewer, days when we seem to have inordinately good fortune. My question of the day is: is there something to this?
Of course, regular readers of this blog are already anticipating that I'll answer "no." There are actually three reasons to discount this phenomenon. Two have already been the subjects of previous blog posts, so I'll only mention them in brief.
One is the fact that the human brain is wired to detect patterns. We tend to take whatever we perceive and try to fit it into an understandable whole. So when several things go wrong in a row -- even when, as with my experiences yesterday, they are entirely unrelated occurrences -- we try to make them into a pattern.
The second is confirmation bias -- the tendency of humans to use insignificant pieces of evidence to support what we already believe to be true, and to ignore much bigger pieces of evidence to the contrary. I had four bad things, of varying degrees of unpleasantness, occur yesterday. By mid-day I had already decided, "this is going to be a bad day." So any further events -- the school meeting, for example -- only reinforced my assessment that "this day is going to suck." Good things -- like the fact that my classes actually went rather well, like the fact that lovely wife brought me a glass of red wine last night after dinner -- get submerged under the unshakable conviction that the day was a lost cause.
It's the third one I want to consider more carefully.
I call it the Law of Small Numbers. Simply put: in any sufficiently small data sample, you will find anomalous, and completely meaningless, patterns.
To take a simple model: let's consider flipping a fair coin. You would expect that if you flip said coin 1000 times, you will find somewhere near 500 heads and 500 tails. On the other hand, what if you look at any particular run of, say, six flips?
In any six-flip run, the statisticians tell us, all possible combinations are equally likely; a pattern of HTTHTH has exactly the same likelihood of showing up as does HHHHHH -- namely, 1/64. The problem is that the second looks like a pattern, and the first doesn't. And so if the second sequence is the one that actually emerges, we become progressively more amazed as head after head turns up -- because somehow, it doesn't fit our concept of the way statistics should work. In reality, if the second pattern amazes us, the first should as well -- when the fifth coin comes up tails, we should be shouting, "omigod, this is so weird" -- but of course, the human mind doesn't work that way, so it's only the second run that seems odd.
All of this brings up how surprisingly hard it is for statisticians to model true randomness. If a sequence of numbers (for example) is truly random, all possible combinations of two numbers, three numbers, four numbers, and so on should be equally likely. So, if you have a truly random list of (say) ten million one-digit numbers, there is a possibility that somewhere on that list there are ten zeroes in a row. It would look like a meaningful pattern -- but it isn't.
This is part of what makes it hard to create truly randomized multiple-choice tests. As a science teacher, I frequently give my classes multiple-choice quizzes, and I try to make sure that the correct answers are placed fairly randomly. But apparently, there's a tendency for test writers to stick the correct answer in the middle of the list -- thus the high school student's rule of thumb, which is, "if you don't know the answer, guess 'c'."
Randomness, it would seem, is harder to detect (and create) than most people think. And given our tendency to see patterns where there are none, we should be hesitant to decide that the stars are against us on certain days. In fact, we should expect days where there are strings of bad (or unusually good) occurrences. It's bound to happen. It's just that we notice it when several bad things happen on the same day, and don't tend to notice when they're spread out, because that, somehow, "seems more random" -- when, in reality, both distributions are random.
I keep telling myself that. But it is hard to quell what my mind keeps responding -- "thank heaven it's a new day - it's bound to be better than yesterday was."
Well, maybe. I do agree with what my dad used to tell me: "I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right." I'm just hoping that the statisticians don't show up and burst my bubble.
The events varied from the truly tragic (receiving news that a former student had been killed in an automobile accident) to the awful but mundane (finding out that my son was not getting $2000 of financial aid we counted on, because the financial aid office screwed up and sent the papers to the wrong address) to the "I'll-probably-laugh-about-this-later-but-right-now-I'm-not" (finding out that my dog, Grendel, has figured out how to climb our chain-link fence, and so now has to be escorted outside on a leash every time he wants to go potty) to the completely banal (a school meeting that left me feeling like I'm ready to find another career).
All of this brought to mind the idea of streaks of bad (or good) luck -- something that you find people so completely convinced of that it's nearly impossible to get them to break their conviction that it sometimes happens. We've all had days when everything seems to go wrong -- when we have what my dad used to call "the reverse Midas touch -- everything you touch turns to crap." There are also, regrettably fewer, days when we seem to have inordinately good fortune. My question of the day is: is there something to this?
Of course, regular readers of this blog are already anticipating that I'll answer "no." There are actually three reasons to discount this phenomenon. Two have already been the subjects of previous blog posts, so I'll only mention them in brief.
One is the fact that the human brain is wired to detect patterns. We tend to take whatever we perceive and try to fit it into an understandable whole. So when several things go wrong in a row -- even when, as with my experiences yesterday, they are entirely unrelated occurrences -- we try to make them into a pattern.
The second is confirmation bias -- the tendency of humans to use insignificant pieces of evidence to support what we already believe to be true, and to ignore much bigger pieces of evidence to the contrary. I had four bad things, of varying degrees of unpleasantness, occur yesterday. By mid-day I had already decided, "this is going to be a bad day." So any further events -- the school meeting, for example -- only reinforced my assessment that "this day is going to suck." Good things -- like the fact that my classes actually went rather well, like the fact that lovely wife brought me a glass of red wine last night after dinner -- get submerged under the unshakable conviction that the day was a lost cause.
It's the third one I want to consider more carefully.
I call it the Law of Small Numbers. Simply put: in any sufficiently small data sample, you will find anomalous, and completely meaningless, patterns.
To take a simple model: let's consider flipping a fair coin. You would expect that if you flip said coin 1000 times, you will find somewhere near 500 heads and 500 tails. On the other hand, what if you look at any particular run of, say, six flips?
In any six-flip run, the statisticians tell us, all possible combinations are equally likely; a pattern of HTTHTH has exactly the same likelihood of showing up as does HHHHHH -- namely, 1/64. The problem is that the second looks like a pattern, and the first doesn't. And so if the second sequence is the one that actually emerges, we become progressively more amazed as head after head turns up -- because somehow, it doesn't fit our concept of the way statistics should work. In reality, if the second pattern amazes us, the first should as well -- when the fifth coin comes up tails, we should be shouting, "omigod, this is so weird" -- but of course, the human mind doesn't work that way, so it's only the second run that seems odd.
All of this brings up how surprisingly hard it is for statisticians to model true randomness. If a sequence of numbers (for example) is truly random, all possible combinations of two numbers, three numbers, four numbers, and so on should be equally likely. So, if you have a truly random list of (say) ten million one-digit numbers, there is a possibility that somewhere on that list there are ten zeroes in a row. It would look like a meaningful pattern -- but it isn't.
This is part of what makes it hard to create truly randomized multiple-choice tests. As a science teacher, I frequently give my classes multiple-choice quizzes, and I try to make sure that the correct answers are placed fairly randomly. But apparently, there's a tendency for test writers to stick the correct answer in the middle of the list -- thus the high school student's rule of thumb, which is, "if you don't know the answer, guess 'c'."
Randomness, it would seem, is harder to detect (and create) than most people think. And given our tendency to see patterns where there are none, we should be hesitant to decide that the stars are against us on certain days. In fact, we should expect days where there are strings of bad (or unusually good) occurrences. It's bound to happen. It's just that we notice it when several bad things happen on the same day, and don't tend to notice when they're spread out, because that, somehow, "seems more random" -- when, in reality, both distributions are random.
I keep telling myself that. But it is hard to quell what my mind keeps responding -- "thank heaven it's a new day - it's bound to be better than yesterday was."
Well, maybe. I do agree with what my dad used to tell me: "I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right." I'm just hoping that the statisticians don't show up and burst my bubble.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
The world's biggest leak
Very few figures in the news lately have been as polarizing as Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Assange and the other senior members of WikiLeaks have, as their stated goal, the publication of secret government documents. Their justification for this is that in their view, covert activities are inherently evil -- that any time a group of people is allowed to work under the cover of secrecy, it will always result in immoral acts. Assange and his people are working to "remove the shroud of secrecy" from governmental dealings, and toward that end, they have published tens of thousands of pages worth of leaked government documents. My friend, that is not a leak, that is a gusher.
Assange is not, apparently, limiting his targets to those on American soil; his next goal, by his own words, is to "out Russia." Assange told reporters for a Moscow newspaper, "We have [compromising materials] about Russia, about your government and businessmen. But not as much as we'd like ... We will publish these materials soon."
Assange's actions bring up a variety of questions. First of all, is his premise correct -- that a government (or any agency) working in secrecy is bound to commit immoral acts? This seems to me to be an overgeneralization -- although I will admit that secrecy does lend itself to bringing out the worst in humans (witness the actions of the "40 Group" and its covert operations in Chile to prevent duly elected president Salvador Allende from taking office in 1970 -- the results of which were not public knowledge until many years later).
On the other hand, are there some things that a government should keep secret from its people? I believe the answer to be yes; if an informant tells the CIA about the location of a bomb hidden in the middle of an American city, it would be idiotic to then make the name of the informant publicly known. Of course, like many things, it's a fine line -- it's hard to tell when secrecy to protect legitimate government interests in the safety of its people crosses into secrecy as its own raison d'être. And since the very people who are engaging in the covert acts are often the ones who are making the decisions about what the people "need to know," it does lead to the possibility of abuses.
Myself, I tend to think that unless there is a pressing and immediate reason to the contrary, openness is better than secrecy. And while I think that Assange's wholesale outing of top-secret documents is foolhardy at best, and treasonous at worst (Assange himself refuses to set foot on American soil for fear of being arrested and charged with espionage), I think that someone needs to keep tabs on the government other than people in the government. I'm glad that I live in the United States, but I'm also not fool enough to think that our government always does the right thing. "My country, right or wrong" -- but let's man up and admit it when we're wrong, okay?
Lastly, you simply have to admire Assange's guts. The guy, to put it bluntly, has brass balls. Some people have criticized him, saying that his actions aren't the selfless crusade against big government that he claims, but are the actions of a petty, narcissistic egotist who simply wants to be the center of the world's attention. I find this a little hard to believe -- the kind of attention he's getting is definitely not the kind that most of us crave. In fact, if I were him, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night for fear that some Secret Service operative had his sniper rifle sights trained on my sorry ass. (And now, of course, he also has the Russians to worry about. I hope for his sake that he doesn't take on the Israelis -- they'll take him out. Those Mossad dudes are some mean mofos.)
In any case, keep your eye on Assange and his crew. Whatever you think of his actions, or his motives, he never fails to provide interesting news.
Assange and the other senior members of WikiLeaks have, as their stated goal, the publication of secret government documents. Their justification for this is that in their view, covert activities are inherently evil -- that any time a group of people is allowed to work under the cover of secrecy, it will always result in immoral acts. Assange and his people are working to "remove the shroud of secrecy" from governmental dealings, and toward that end, they have published tens of thousands of pages worth of leaked government documents. My friend, that is not a leak, that is a gusher.
Assange is not, apparently, limiting his targets to those on American soil; his next goal, by his own words, is to "out Russia." Assange told reporters for a Moscow newspaper, "We have [compromising materials] about Russia, about your government and businessmen. But not as much as we'd like ... We will publish these materials soon."
Assange's actions bring up a variety of questions. First of all, is his premise correct -- that a government (or any agency) working in secrecy is bound to commit immoral acts? This seems to me to be an overgeneralization -- although I will admit that secrecy does lend itself to bringing out the worst in humans (witness the actions of the "40 Group" and its covert operations in Chile to prevent duly elected president Salvador Allende from taking office in 1970 -- the results of which were not public knowledge until many years later).
On the other hand, are there some things that a government should keep secret from its people? I believe the answer to be yes; if an informant tells the CIA about the location of a bomb hidden in the middle of an American city, it would be idiotic to then make the name of the informant publicly known. Of course, like many things, it's a fine line -- it's hard to tell when secrecy to protect legitimate government interests in the safety of its people crosses into secrecy as its own raison d'être. And since the very people who are engaging in the covert acts are often the ones who are making the decisions about what the people "need to know," it does lead to the possibility of abuses.
Myself, I tend to think that unless there is a pressing and immediate reason to the contrary, openness is better than secrecy. And while I think that Assange's wholesale outing of top-secret documents is foolhardy at best, and treasonous at worst (Assange himself refuses to set foot on American soil for fear of being arrested and charged with espionage), I think that someone needs to keep tabs on the government other than people in the government. I'm glad that I live in the United States, but I'm also not fool enough to think that our government always does the right thing. "My country, right or wrong" -- but let's man up and admit it when we're wrong, okay?
Lastly, you simply have to admire Assange's guts. The guy, to put it bluntly, has brass balls. Some people have criticized him, saying that his actions aren't the selfless crusade against big government that he claims, but are the actions of a petty, narcissistic egotist who simply wants to be the center of the world's attention. I find this a little hard to believe -- the kind of attention he's getting is definitely not the kind that most of us crave. In fact, if I were him, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night for fear that some Secret Service operative had his sniper rifle sights trained on my sorry ass. (And now, of course, he also has the Russians to worry about. I hope for his sake that he doesn't take on the Israelis -- they'll take him out. Those Mossad dudes are some mean mofos.)
In any case, keep your eye on Assange and his crew. Whatever you think of his actions, or his motives, he never fails to provide interesting news.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
The fallback plan
This weekend (actually, at 2 AM on Sunday), most of the United States will return from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time. My general response is, "Yippee." (You will have to imagine my sarcastic tone, here, as I realize that it doesn't carry well in print.)
Daylight Saving Time began during World War I, and was devised both to save on the fuel required to power indoor lighting, and to allow farmers longer to work their fields during the summer. (Why the farmers would have cared what the clock said, I have no idea -- it's not as if most farmers punch a time card.) We spring forward by an hour in March, then fall back in November, except for Arizona, which doesn't observe Daylight Saving Time at all (which makes for serious confusion in the Mountain Time Zone, in which Arizona has the same time for half the year and is an hour different for half the year. This is probably done to discourage illegal immigrants, who will not know how to set their watches and then will fail to show up for the interviews for all of the millions of lucrative jobs they are attempting to steal from tax-paying American citizens.).
There has recently been a push to eliminate Standard Time (i.e., to stay on Daylight Saving Time for the entire year). I, for one, am all for it. I live in the frozen north, where the winter days are all too short, and by December I am going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark. If we stayed on Daylight Saving Time, at least I'd have a half-hour of light (if you can dignify the gray, washed out stuff upstate New York sees in the winter with the name "light") after I got home. It would also eliminate the jerking around of people's sleep schedules, which plays hell with their health. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (here) found that the incidence of heart attacks nearly doubles in the first three days after switching the clocks; a 2008 Australian study (here) found that the three-week period following going onto Daylight Saving Time has the highest incidence of suicides; and the number of traffic accidents in northern areas jumps by 8% (Canada) to 11% (Sweden) immediately after the time change.
Besides the hard scientific facts, there remains the much more trenchant reason to eliminate the time shifting; it's simply a stupid idea. It may or may not have been a stupid idea when it was conceived -- I don't know enough about early 20th century economics to make an assessment. However, it's a stupid idea now. My mother used to get pissed off by it every year, mostly because we had about twenty clocks, all of which had to be set manually when the time shift came. It was especially bad in fall, because several of these clocks were of the old-fashioned, pendulum clock variety, which would break if you turned the hands backwards, so instead of simply twisting the minute hand 360 degrees counterclockwise, you had to turn them eleven full circles forward. In the case of two of them, which had a gong that rang every half hour, you had to pause while the gong chimed before you proceeded on to the next half-hour mark.
You can see why she was pissed off.
"It's such a ridiculous idea," I recall her saying. "It's like cutting the top off a blanket, and sewing the piece onto the bottom to make it longer."
My mom and I often disagreed, but this is one case where I think she was spot on. If you ask most people why we still have the bi-annual time shift, they'd probably say, "Because that's the way it's always been done." I'm sorry, that's just not a good enough answer. My wife has a poster in her office, showing a guy running away from the bulls in Pamplona. The caption reads: "Just because it's always been done that way doesn't mean it's not a really stupid idea."
Exactly. So, while I'll be forced to fall back with the rest of the United States (except for Arizona; don't tell the illegals), I don't have to be happy about it. I promise not to commit suicide, and I'll do my best not to have a heart attack or a car accident, but I rather expect that we're in for a grumpy few days next week. Be forewarned.
Daylight Saving Time began during World War I, and was devised both to save on the fuel required to power indoor lighting, and to allow farmers longer to work their fields during the summer. (Why the farmers would have cared what the clock said, I have no idea -- it's not as if most farmers punch a time card.) We spring forward by an hour in March, then fall back in November, except for Arizona, which doesn't observe Daylight Saving Time at all (which makes for serious confusion in the Mountain Time Zone, in which Arizona has the same time for half the year and is an hour different for half the year. This is probably done to discourage illegal immigrants, who will not know how to set their watches and then will fail to show up for the interviews for all of the millions of lucrative jobs they are attempting to steal from tax-paying American citizens.).
There has recently been a push to eliminate Standard Time (i.e., to stay on Daylight Saving Time for the entire year). I, for one, am all for it. I live in the frozen north, where the winter days are all too short, and by December I am going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark. If we stayed on Daylight Saving Time, at least I'd have a half-hour of light (if you can dignify the gray, washed out stuff upstate New York sees in the winter with the name "light") after I got home. It would also eliminate the jerking around of people's sleep schedules, which plays hell with their health. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (here) found that the incidence of heart attacks nearly doubles in the first three days after switching the clocks; a 2008 Australian study (here) found that the three-week period following going onto Daylight Saving Time has the highest incidence of suicides; and the number of traffic accidents in northern areas jumps by 8% (Canada) to 11% (Sweden) immediately after the time change.
Besides the hard scientific facts, there remains the much more trenchant reason to eliminate the time shifting; it's simply a stupid idea. It may or may not have been a stupid idea when it was conceived -- I don't know enough about early 20th century economics to make an assessment. However, it's a stupid idea now. My mother used to get pissed off by it every year, mostly because we had about twenty clocks, all of which had to be set manually when the time shift came. It was especially bad in fall, because several of these clocks were of the old-fashioned, pendulum clock variety, which would break if you turned the hands backwards, so instead of simply twisting the minute hand 360 degrees counterclockwise, you had to turn them eleven full circles forward. In the case of two of them, which had a gong that rang every half hour, you had to pause while the gong chimed before you proceeded on to the next half-hour mark.
You can see why she was pissed off.
"It's such a ridiculous idea," I recall her saying. "It's like cutting the top off a blanket, and sewing the piece onto the bottom to make it longer."
My mom and I often disagreed, but this is one case where I think she was spot on. If you ask most people why we still have the bi-annual time shift, they'd probably say, "Because that's the way it's always been done." I'm sorry, that's just not a good enough answer. My wife has a poster in her office, showing a guy running away from the bulls in Pamplona. The caption reads: "Just because it's always been done that way doesn't mean it's not a really stupid idea."
Exactly. So, while I'll be forced to fall back with the rest of the United States (except for Arizona; don't tell the illegals), I don't have to be happy about it. I promise not to commit suicide, and I'll do my best not to have a heart attack or a car accident, but I rather expect that we're in for a grumpy few days next week. Be forewarned.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Nine out of ten doctors recommend this blog!
According to a new study, alcohol is worse than heroin.
At least that's what the headline says. (Read the original story here.) Of course, when you read the actual story, you find out that that's in fact not what the study says -- or at least, is far enough away from what the study says to create a distinctly false impression.
What the study (originally published in the highly respected journal Lancet) did was to rank various legal and illegal drugs (and it correctly classified alcohol and tobacco as drugs) in order of the overall harm done to society. In terms of sheer numbers, alcohol came out the clear favorite -- considering all of the deaths due to drunk driving, to heart and liver disease from overconsumption of alcohol, to loss of careers, marriages and friendships from alcoholism, no drug has the impact on society that alcohol does.
I'm not disputing the above facts at all. However, what I object to -- as usual -- is the way the media, in their typical sound-byte fashion, has created a mistaken impression.
Re-read the headline. If you read that -- and nothing else -- what would you think? I don't know about you, but what I would take away from that is that to an individual it is worse to drink alcohol than to take heroin.
I know that the article's contents then go on to correct that impression, and I also agree with the statement that anyone who only reads the headline of an article deserves, on some level, to be misinformed. But what I object to is that in order to sell subscriptions, or obtain readers, the members of the media will craft eyecatching, and often misleading, headlines -- and the public leaves with seriously erroneous information.
Consider, for example, the headlines when it was discovered that altering the levels of a single enzyme, telomerase, could extend the lives of roundworms by a factor of ten. This is pretty impressive -- equivalent to a human living to be 800. Of course, the article detailed that (1) the effect had yet to be demonstrated in humans, and (2) elevated levels of telomerase are thought to predispose tissue to becoming cancerous (cancer cells being, for all intents and purposes, immortal). But what did the headline read? "FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH ENZYME DISCOVERED."
I realize that a headline that said, "We found something that makes roundworms live longer" would not sell magazines. But still, in the interest of not taking advantage of the credulous public, it seems to me that it would be better to err on the side of caution.
Back to the alcohol vs. heroin debate. My main problem with this one is that people, in general, don't understand the concept of risk in the first place -- witness the number of people who are afraid of flying as compared to the number of people who are afraid of driving, and then compare the actual risk (number of people killed in the activity divided by the number of people who participate in the activity). It reminds me of the comment by economist Dan Gilbert -- he showed a photograph of an airplane crash, a terrorist attack, a burning building, and a swimming pool, and asked which didn't belong. "It's the swimming pool," he said. "It's the only one up there which has a significant risk of killing you."
The misassessment of risk (and its partner, the misassessment of gain) is, for example, why people play the lottery and visit casinos. It's why people accept high but familiar risks (driving) but refuse to take small but dramatic risks (flying).
It's also why I find the alcohol/heroin headline appalling. While the overall damage done by alcohol to society is clearly greater than that done by heroin, compare the actual risk (percent likelihood of harm) of consuming alcohol as compared to taking heroin. The likelihood of any given individual coming to harm from drinking is actually quite small, whereas everyone who takes heroin comes to harm from it. Let me repeat that: the risk for alcohol is small (but non-zero); the risk for heroin is 100%. Is that the impression that this headline gives? Of course not.
I realize that it's not the media's fault if their readers are too ignorant to understand the subtleties of a particular story; their job is to inform the already-reasonably-well-educated, not to educate the foolish. But that said, I think it's also incumbent upon them not to take advantage of the gullibility of the public when it comes to the types of thinking that almost everyone is bad at -- e.g., understanding risk. The danger, to me, is not just that people leave misinformed -- it's that they sense that on some level they're being lied to, and end up distrusting not the sensationalism of the media, but the source of the study itself, i.e., the scientists. The scientists themselves were clear about what their study did and did not accomplish; if the media garbles that, either accidentally or through a deliberate desire to misrepresent, it's hardly the scientists' faults.
It's always important to read the news with a critical eye -- as I always say to my classes, there's no such thing as unbiased media. Even what stories they decide to cover implies a bias, in that they are making the decision of what warrants coverage and what does not. But beyond that, the misrepresentation, and misunderstanding, of statistics is so common that it behooves us all to read a little more carefully when we see the word "data" -- whatever the headline of the article might have claimed.
At least that's what the headline says. (Read the original story here.) Of course, when you read the actual story, you find out that that's in fact not what the study says -- or at least, is far enough away from what the study says to create a distinctly false impression.
What the study (originally published in the highly respected journal Lancet) did was to rank various legal and illegal drugs (and it correctly classified alcohol and tobacco as drugs) in order of the overall harm done to society. In terms of sheer numbers, alcohol came out the clear favorite -- considering all of the deaths due to drunk driving, to heart and liver disease from overconsumption of alcohol, to loss of careers, marriages and friendships from alcoholism, no drug has the impact on society that alcohol does.
I'm not disputing the above facts at all. However, what I object to -- as usual -- is the way the media, in their typical sound-byte fashion, has created a mistaken impression.
Re-read the headline. If you read that -- and nothing else -- what would you think? I don't know about you, but what I would take away from that is that to an individual it is worse to drink alcohol than to take heroin.
I know that the article's contents then go on to correct that impression, and I also agree with the statement that anyone who only reads the headline of an article deserves, on some level, to be misinformed. But what I object to is that in order to sell subscriptions, or obtain readers, the members of the media will craft eyecatching, and often misleading, headlines -- and the public leaves with seriously erroneous information.
Consider, for example, the headlines when it was discovered that altering the levels of a single enzyme, telomerase, could extend the lives of roundworms by a factor of ten. This is pretty impressive -- equivalent to a human living to be 800. Of course, the article detailed that (1) the effect had yet to be demonstrated in humans, and (2) elevated levels of telomerase are thought to predispose tissue to becoming cancerous (cancer cells being, for all intents and purposes, immortal). But what did the headline read? "FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH ENZYME DISCOVERED."
I realize that a headline that said, "We found something that makes roundworms live longer" would not sell magazines. But still, in the interest of not taking advantage of the credulous public, it seems to me that it would be better to err on the side of caution.
Back to the alcohol vs. heroin debate. My main problem with this one is that people, in general, don't understand the concept of risk in the first place -- witness the number of people who are afraid of flying as compared to the number of people who are afraid of driving, and then compare the actual risk (number of people killed in the activity divided by the number of people who participate in the activity). It reminds me of the comment by economist Dan Gilbert -- he showed a photograph of an airplane crash, a terrorist attack, a burning building, and a swimming pool, and asked which didn't belong. "It's the swimming pool," he said. "It's the only one up there which has a significant risk of killing you."
The misassessment of risk (and its partner, the misassessment of gain) is, for example, why people play the lottery and visit casinos. It's why people accept high but familiar risks (driving) but refuse to take small but dramatic risks (flying).
It's also why I find the alcohol/heroin headline appalling. While the overall damage done by alcohol to society is clearly greater than that done by heroin, compare the actual risk (percent likelihood of harm) of consuming alcohol as compared to taking heroin. The likelihood of any given individual coming to harm from drinking is actually quite small, whereas everyone who takes heroin comes to harm from it. Let me repeat that: the risk for alcohol is small (but non-zero); the risk for heroin is 100%. Is that the impression that this headline gives? Of course not.
I realize that it's not the media's fault if their readers are too ignorant to understand the subtleties of a particular story; their job is to inform the already-reasonably-well-educated, not to educate the foolish. But that said, I think it's also incumbent upon them not to take advantage of the gullibility of the public when it comes to the types of thinking that almost everyone is bad at -- e.g., understanding risk. The danger, to me, is not just that people leave misinformed -- it's that they sense that on some level they're being lied to, and end up distrusting not the sensationalism of the media, but the source of the study itself, i.e., the scientists. The scientists themselves were clear about what their study did and did not accomplish; if the media garbles that, either accidentally or through a deliberate desire to misrepresent, it's hardly the scientists' faults.
It's always important to read the news with a critical eye -- as I always say to my classes, there's no such thing as unbiased media. Even what stories they decide to cover implies a bias, in that they are making the decision of what warrants coverage and what does not. But beyond that, the misrepresentation, and misunderstanding, of statistics is so common that it behooves us all to read a little more carefully when we see the word "data" -- whatever the headline of the article might have claimed.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Ghosts, and vampires, and were-weasels (oh my!)
Halloween, of course, always brings out our deeply buried, most primitive fears. With its millenium-old history of development from the Celtic festival of Samhain, the time of year when the natural rules that governed the world were overturned and the spirits of evil roamed free, Halloween appeals to the part of all of us that loves a good scare.
It also appeals to the part of all of us that believes in outlandish crap.
Witness the South Jersey Ghost Research Group. (Visit their website here.) This group states, as its primary mission, "using the latest scientific methods" to "conduct discreet investigations, assist people in need, educate the public, conduct field research, and promote the learning and understanding of ghosts and other psychic phenomena." It also, apparently, is an official 501(3)(c) tax-exempt non-profit. In their link "Ghosthunting 101," they give a few important tips, including scouting the place in the daylight (so as to avoid obstacles you might not see in the dark), bringing along a photo ID (for when you're stopped by the police), and advising that the hours between 9 PM and 6 AM are the "psychic hours" and therefore are the best for ghost hunting, and especially, for taking photos.
This is one of the many things about ghost hunting I've never understood. Why would being dead mean that you'd only walk around at night? It seems to me that if you were a ghost, it wouldn't matter. The two reasons you hear of why ghosts walk at a place is because they've got a message to deliver to their relatives and friends, or because they have some level of ill will toward people who are still living. Either way, wouldn't it be more effective to appear in broad daylight, when there are lots of people around? I know that's what I would do, if I were a ghost.
Of course, when talking about Halloween-related themes, we mustn't forget the Church of Bio-Energy Vampirism (here). They are, according to their mission statement, "not an affiliated religious organization" (and here I would recommend that they grab a Webster's and look up the definition of the word "church"), and "do not honor the portrayal of vampirism in the romantic and power-driven films made by the movie industry." (From this, I'm concluding that if you attend one of their meetings, you shouldn't say, "Hey! Why aren't any of you people SPARKLING?") They believe that you can draw psychic energy from others, with or without the actual removal and consumption of blood, in order to boost your own psychic energy levels, but that "forceful psychic attacks" on others are "completely unacceptable."
My favorite page on the website for the Church of Bio-Energy Vampirism is the one that is called, "How Can I Tell If I'm a Real Vampire?" Myself, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard, given the whole sharp teeth, drinking blood, and sleeping in a coffin thing, but apparently, you can "never be 100% positive" because "there is no test for vampirism." It then goes on to recommend seeing a doctor "to rule out other possibilities, such as cancer or a slight vitamin deficiency" before concluding that you are, indeed, a vampire.
You will at this point think that either (1) I am making this up, or (2) that this is a spoof site. Tragically, neither is true. I think these people are serious.
Also serious is this site, All About Werewolves (here). I was particularly interested in the page on "How to Become a Werewolf," wherein it lists a variety of ways, including making a pact with the devil, being cursed, being bitten by a werewolf, or "eating lycanthropous flowers." (I was hoping that the site would tell you the actual kind of flower, so I could try it out, but all it says is that it is a white flower that "grows in swamps in the Balkans" and "has the sickly smell of death." I'm curious about this, but not curious enough to go wading around in some godforsaken marsh in Bulgaria.) I was also interested to find out that not everyone becomes a wolf; there are also "werecats." (Why stop there, I wonder? Could we have wereweasels? Werewombats? Werepandas?)
In any case, I hasten to state that despite my skeptical attitude, I rather enjoy this time of year, and the whole costuming thing, and (especially) the scary aspects of it. But here's to hoping that we all keep a firm grip on our prefrontal cortices tonight, and remember that it's all fun and games until someone actually starts believing it's real. That said, I'll end by wishing you all a spooky and fun-filled Halloween.
It also appeals to the part of all of us that believes in outlandish crap.
Witness the South Jersey Ghost Research Group. (Visit their website here.) This group states, as its primary mission, "using the latest scientific methods" to "conduct discreet investigations, assist people in need, educate the public, conduct field research, and promote the learning and understanding of ghosts and other psychic phenomena." It also, apparently, is an official 501(3)(c) tax-exempt non-profit. In their link "Ghosthunting 101," they give a few important tips, including scouting the place in the daylight (so as to avoid obstacles you might not see in the dark), bringing along a photo ID (for when you're stopped by the police), and advising that the hours between 9 PM and 6 AM are the "psychic hours" and therefore are the best for ghost hunting, and especially, for taking photos.
This is one of the many things about ghost hunting I've never understood. Why would being dead mean that you'd only walk around at night? It seems to me that if you were a ghost, it wouldn't matter. The two reasons you hear of why ghosts walk at a place is because they've got a message to deliver to their relatives and friends, or because they have some level of ill will toward people who are still living. Either way, wouldn't it be more effective to appear in broad daylight, when there are lots of people around? I know that's what I would do, if I were a ghost.
Of course, when talking about Halloween-related themes, we mustn't forget the Church of Bio-Energy Vampirism (here). They are, according to their mission statement, "not an affiliated religious organization" (and here I would recommend that they grab a Webster's and look up the definition of the word "church"), and "do not honor the portrayal of vampirism in the romantic and power-driven films made by the movie industry." (From this, I'm concluding that if you attend one of their meetings, you shouldn't say, "Hey! Why aren't any of you people SPARKLING?") They believe that you can draw psychic energy from others, with or without the actual removal and consumption of blood, in order to boost your own psychic energy levels, but that "forceful psychic attacks" on others are "completely unacceptable."
My favorite page on the website for the Church of Bio-Energy Vampirism is the one that is called, "How Can I Tell If I'm a Real Vampire?" Myself, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard, given the whole sharp teeth, drinking blood, and sleeping in a coffin thing, but apparently, you can "never be 100% positive" because "there is no test for vampirism." It then goes on to recommend seeing a doctor "to rule out other possibilities, such as cancer or a slight vitamin deficiency" before concluding that you are, indeed, a vampire.
You will at this point think that either (1) I am making this up, or (2) that this is a spoof site. Tragically, neither is true. I think these people are serious.
Also serious is this site, All About Werewolves (here). I was particularly interested in the page on "How to Become a Werewolf," wherein it lists a variety of ways, including making a pact with the devil, being cursed, being bitten by a werewolf, or "eating lycanthropous flowers." (I was hoping that the site would tell you the actual kind of flower, so I could try it out, but all it says is that it is a white flower that "grows in swamps in the Balkans" and "has the sickly smell of death." I'm curious about this, but not curious enough to go wading around in some godforsaken marsh in Bulgaria.) I was also interested to find out that not everyone becomes a wolf; there are also "werecats." (Why stop there, I wonder? Could we have wereweasels? Werewombats? Werepandas?)
In any case, I hasten to state that despite my skeptical attitude, I rather enjoy this time of year, and the whole costuming thing, and (especially) the scary aspects of it. But here's to hoping that we all keep a firm grip on our prefrontal cortices tonight, and remember that it's all fun and games until someone actually starts believing it's real. That said, I'll end by wishing you all a spooky and fun-filled Halloween.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Cell phones, Charlie Chaplin, and time travelers
So now all the woo-woos of the world are celebrating the "smoking gun" which finally proves that time travelers are real -- that people from the future are coming back to observe today's society. Those wily time bandits have tried hard to blend in, but by gum, we caught 'em at their game this time!
The evidence, if I can dignify it with that word, that is giving the back-to-the-future crowd multiple orgasms is a clip from a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film (watch the clip here) which shows, in the background, a woman walking along with her left hand against the side of her face. As she passes, she smiles a little, and seems to say something.
The only possible conclusion, of course, is that she's talking into a cell phone. But wait -- this was filmed in 1928! There were no cell phones in 1928! Therefore -- she must have been a time traveler! Alert the papers!
Predictably, my reaction is to grind my teeth and say something that is unprintable, at least if I want to maintain the "all ages appropriate" rating on my blog.
One of many problems with this claim is that the woman doesn't, as far as I can tell, have anything in her hand. To me, it more looks like she's trying to partially cover her face, in the manner of someone doing the perp walk in front of a bunch of reporters. Maybe she didn't want to be filmed, who knows? Or maybe her ear itched. There are a great many other reasons for having your left hand to your face other than talking into a cell phone.
Another problem, of course, is that even if we accept (for the moment, but don't get your hopes up that it'll last) that she was talking on a cell phone, who was she talking to? In order to talk on a cell phone, there generally has to be someone on the other end of the conversation (although admittedly I've known people who could have talked on the phone for twenty minutes before noticing that the line, or perhaps the person they were talking to, was actually dead). Okay, the woo-woos may reply, maybe there were other time-travelers around who had also brought their cell phones. But don't you need other stuff, too -- like cell phone towers and satellites and the like -- to make it work?
Wait a moment, though. Perhaps I'm assuming that communications technology from the future works like today's phones; maybe the future people have perfected some kind of small, Star-Trek-communicator-style telephone, and that was what she was using. To talk to her other fellow time travelers, who were safely away from Charlie Chaplin at the time. Okay, I have to admit that that's a plausible explanation, if by "plausible" you mean "something that even Shirley MacLaine would have a hard time swallowing." To the people who think that this constitutes convincing evidence of time travel, I can only say: you really believe that a five-second clip of a woman with her hand to her face is better explained by time travel than it is by her being... a woman with her hand to her face? Really?
Of course, the answer that some are giving is, "yeah. Really." I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; it's an appealing idea, time travel. Consider how popular a theme it is in movies and television. Where would Geordi LaForge have been without his periodically having to deal with a temporal distortion in the space-time continuum? Where would Marty McFly have been without Doc's time-bending DeLorean? Wouldn't we all like to go back into the past, whether to try and change something or simply to observe?
I know I would, but wishin' don't make it so, as has been so often observed. And as I and others have also often observed, if you are expecting the skeptical-minded to believe in an extraordinary claim, you'd better have some pretty extraordinary evidence to support it. And unfortunately, a blurry five-second clip of a woman in 1928 with her hand to her face is just not doing it for me.
The evidence, if I can dignify it with that word, that is giving the back-to-the-future crowd multiple orgasms is a clip from a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film (watch the clip here) which shows, in the background, a woman walking along with her left hand against the side of her face. As she passes, she smiles a little, and seems to say something.
The only possible conclusion, of course, is that she's talking into a cell phone. But wait -- this was filmed in 1928! There were no cell phones in 1928! Therefore -- she must have been a time traveler! Alert the papers!
Predictably, my reaction is to grind my teeth and say something that is unprintable, at least if I want to maintain the "all ages appropriate" rating on my blog.
One of many problems with this claim is that the woman doesn't, as far as I can tell, have anything in her hand. To me, it more looks like she's trying to partially cover her face, in the manner of someone doing the perp walk in front of a bunch of reporters. Maybe she didn't want to be filmed, who knows? Or maybe her ear itched. There are a great many other reasons for having your left hand to your face other than talking into a cell phone.
Another problem, of course, is that even if we accept (for the moment, but don't get your hopes up that it'll last) that she was talking on a cell phone, who was she talking to? In order to talk on a cell phone, there generally has to be someone on the other end of the conversation (although admittedly I've known people who could have talked on the phone for twenty minutes before noticing that the line, or perhaps the person they were talking to, was actually dead). Okay, the woo-woos may reply, maybe there were other time-travelers around who had also brought their cell phones. But don't you need other stuff, too -- like cell phone towers and satellites and the like -- to make it work?
Wait a moment, though. Perhaps I'm assuming that communications technology from the future works like today's phones; maybe the future people have perfected some kind of small, Star-Trek-communicator-style telephone, and that was what she was using. To talk to her other fellow time travelers, who were safely away from Charlie Chaplin at the time. Okay, I have to admit that that's a plausible explanation, if by "plausible" you mean "something that even Shirley MacLaine would have a hard time swallowing." To the people who think that this constitutes convincing evidence of time travel, I can only say: you really believe that a five-second clip of a woman with her hand to her face is better explained by time travel than it is by her being... a woman with her hand to her face? Really?
Of course, the answer that some are giving is, "yeah. Really." I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; it's an appealing idea, time travel. Consider how popular a theme it is in movies and television. Where would Geordi LaForge have been without his periodically having to deal with a temporal distortion in the space-time continuum? Where would Marty McFly have been without Doc's time-bending DeLorean? Wouldn't we all like to go back into the past, whether to try and change something or simply to observe?
I know I would, but wishin' don't make it so, as has been so often observed. And as I and others have also often observed, if you are expecting the skeptical-minded to believe in an extraordinary claim, you'd better have some pretty extraordinary evidence to support it. And unfortunately, a blurry five-second clip of a woman in 1928 with her hand to her face is just not doing it for me.
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