Posts by Bart Janssen
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Good question Russell.
Although I suspect that economists believe they are practicing a science - they even get a nobel for it!
cheers
Bart -
I do not want this to become a flame war so I guess we are just going to disagree on some things. Couple of comments though
81st asked
Nonetheless I am confused when you say science “is what it is”.
That isn't what I said, I said reading science is what it is. I don't believe reading science is "like" anything else. That's not saying science is an enigma. I think the point of your analogy is that the expert is always going to understand the science better than the lay reader. But my point is that the lay reader can get good understanding from the science too. You might think that it isn't "good enough" but there we disagree, that's fine.
Riddley commented rightly that without assessment of the methodology you can't judge the quality of the data. But the whole point of the peer reviewed journals is that the peer reviewers who are experts should have already assessed the quality of the data. So a lay reader should not need to repeat that assessment and should be able to trust the reviewers and editors.
Sometimes that trust is misplaced - when that occurs you sometimes even hear about it in the mainstream media. But the vast majority of published data is good quality.
cheers
Bart -
Ah thanks for the clarification David, I should have remembered the remarkable similarity between Winnie and JC.
Of course in this day I would have thought he'd have used some fancy new tech. If they can teleport a photon then John should be a breeze especially since I think hes lost weight lately hasn't he?
However I was thinking he might have tried cloning this being the century of biology and all.
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Must be the other John Campbell
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The 81st column rolled in with this and some other points
In some ways saying that you can understand research without having a grasp of stats and methodology is a bit like suggesting you should just kick the tyres before buying a car. Yep you can do it, but don’t be surprised if what you get is unreliable.
While I agree with much of what you said regarding the influence of prior knowledge on what questions get asked and the interpretation of results - on two points I differ. First in most cases the data is good. It is the exception that data is distorted not the rule.
The second area I disagree with is the quote above. I really really dislike it when folks in and out of science intimate that the general public cannot understand the science. It just isn't true.
Your analogy is false, reading journal papers without truely understanding methods and stats is NOT like kicking tyres on a car. It is what it is and isn't really "like" anything else. Reading the background and conclusions presented in refereed journals allows the lay reader (most times) to get a reasonable idea of what the author and the reviewers believe is the current state of knowledge. To suggest that folks shouldn't try because they don't have the years of training needed to understand the methods in details is just the kind of arrogance that I display (and am ashamed of) all too often.cheers
Bart -
Sorry Hadyn! I should have checked you name.
As for figuring out who to trust. You know the 7 degrees of separation thing... well it also applies to experts. My guess is you are no more than 3 or 4 people away from someone who really does know the specilaist field for any subject.
If you want written sources, the scientific journals for any field are mostly available online free 6-12 months after print and while most of you are going "argh no I could possibly understand a scientific journal" most times there are reviews that often have mostly readible introductions that will give you most of what you want to know.
In plant biology and medicine I use Pubmed at the NCBI. It takes a bit of practice refining searches and clicking on the related links but usually I can find some good info on things way outside my field like Autism genetics of which I only read the dozen lines or so :).
I'm not sure about other fields but google scholar is surprisingly useful.
Be careful of choosing real journals as opposed to magazines, check dates (some info gets out of date fast) and look at the citations, those are articles that refer to an article. An article that is cited a lot is often more useful
You don't have to understand every word and you don't have to read the whole paper to get an idea of the current scientific thinking in a field.
But honestly talking to scientists is much better than reading their writing.
cheers
Bart
Apologies again -
In Todays The Scientist (subscription required) is a link to a paper in the magazine Science looking at the link between copy number variations (CNV) and sporadic autism. Essentially the authors looked for changes in the chromosomes at a larger level. Looking for deletions or duplications of chuncks of the DNA.
Sebat and his colleagues analyzed the DNA from 264 families using either blood, immortalized B-cells, or both. They used ROMA, a type of microarray that relies on comparative genomic hybridization, to compare the children's genomes to the parents'. Each potential copy number variation, or CNV, was re-tested with a fresh blood sample from the same person for confirmation.
The study found that 10% of children (12 out of 118) with sporadic autism had de novo copy number variations, whereas only 1% of controls (2 out of 196), who had no history of autism, showed CNVs. Among families with multiple autistic children, only 2% (2 out of 77) autistic children showed differences in copy number from their parents.
The frequency of de novo mutations in children with sporadic autism "is high," said Charles Lee of Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School, who did not participate in the research. Lee has surveyed CNVs in the general population and found rates of de novo mutation in the general population on the order of 0.2%.
Most of the mutations seen in the autistic children overall were deletions, whereas the two CNV cases in the control group were gene duplications. The finding isn't necessarily surprising, said Sebat, who said that human bodies are "less tolerant" of deletions. "When you're down to only your back-up copy for a gene, you're at greater risk for whatever minor defects may exist in that that gene."
The method they used means they can't get to the genes of interest very easily but more interesting is the frequency which is perhapss higher than one might expect. Probably indicating that many genes are involved in the brain development important in developing the social skills that are affected in the autistic spectrum.
sorry bit biology jargon rich
cheers
Bart -
Ok a couple of comments
Russell you wrote
It would be kind of cool to have an adult education course offering a rough guide to key principles. With drinks afterwards, ...
You don't need to. There is a much easier way. Any time you want to know stuff from relevant scientists you can ask them, there are a bunch who read your blog and there are Universities full of them. They mostly are happy to chat with folks about science over coffee or alternate beverages, in fact it's usually hard to get them to stop talking about science. Bring paper to scribble on and patience and there aren't many concepts that can't be explained in lay terms.
We're not that scary and most of us would love to talk about our work with someone who was interested.
Several people have mentioned
"the debate"
about climate change. As if scientists are forming debating teams and arguing about stuff. It doesn't work that way.
What happens in science and at scientific meetings is that data is presented. Sometimes the methods used to collect the data are questioned regarding accuracy but in the main, data is data, there is nothing to debate.Then data is incorporated into a model or a hypothesesis. It is at this point that scientists challenge and question, often suggesting alternate hypotheses or models. But that isn't debating an issue it's about getting ideas on the table in order to suggest possible experiments or observations that might disprove one or other model. Then people go away and try and carry out experiments or make observations.
Meanwhile ....
Some models are quite scary in climate change, the scientists know these models aren't perfect but the implications are important for the public.
SO
the models are presented to the public and politicians and they say "IF this is correct then we have a problem".
Then you get debate in the public and politics about what actions should be taken and because scientists are members of the public too they sometimes get involved in that debate. But that's a debate about possible actions/solutions/polotics. It is not a debate about data and it is not the same as the discussion about merits of hypotheses.Yes scientists frequently disagree about which is the best hypotheses to explain the data but the solution in science is NOT debate - it is experimentation/observation.
Hayden commented about the "I'm no expert but" line. For me there is a worse line - it's the "as an MD my opinion on GE is...." (or eqivalent) that one makes me really angry because I know how little I know about modern surgical techniques so I know that my opinion about surgery is worthless (even though I have a PhD in plant mol bio) so what gives some MD the right to trade on his doctorate in an unrelated field....experts are expert in their own field and as ignorant as anyone outside that field, I know I am grrrrrr
cheers
Bart -
Tony wrote
I think maybe scientists need to do a better job explaining to the general public why they truly do believe ...
Heh As someone involved in the GE debate I can say fairly confidently that communication is only part of the answer. Some folks don't want to listen to scientists, some folks think they aren't smart enough to listen to scientists (generaly not true) and some scientists struggle to find the words to communicate ideas.
That latter isn't surprising since some of the ideas have required many years of study for the scientists to understand so to expect an easy description to a lay person is a tough ask. That's nothing to do with intelligence but simply to do with the large amount specialist knowledge required to understand some subjects.
Finally how do us scientists get the chance to communicate? The media are very reluctant to spend more than 30 seconds of news time, the print media are reluctant to spend column-inches to difficult subjects (although eventually the NZ media did do that in the GE debate).
If I want my friends eyes to glaze over I can talk about the latest cool stuff in plant molecular biology and I bet it's the same for climate scientists. So asking scientists to communicate better is an easy thing to ask but harder to achieve.
cheers
Bart -
Hi Andrew
I should probably read to the bottom of the thread to see if any others have replied but I can't help myself.
What you've forgotten is turbulence.
Yes CO2 is heavier that Nitrogen or oxygen the major components of the atmosphere, so yes if air is completely undisturbed the CO2 will settle to the bottom.
BUT even the heat at room temperature creates enough movement to completely mix the CO2 into the air. So if you had a jar of CO2 N2 and O2 in layers, then after a period of time they would become thoroughly mixed.
In the atmosphere the wind currents alone create so much mixing that it simply isn't possible for the "heavy" CO2 to settle.
cheers
Bart