If you're interested in red hair, as who among us is not, you should check out this post on Pharyngula.
It considers the problems with this particular coloring--mainly outrageous but understandable jealousy among the less-fortunate, and I guess also "making red hair actually depletes the body of a protective substance, and has the side-effect of producing carcinogens"--and of why, in light of this disadvantage, red hair has survived as a trait at all.
My theory is, pure awesomeness, but there's also some discussion of a new paper hypothesizing that it might be associated with a lower risk of certain diseases. Those associated with excess cysteine, to be exact, and I'm sure I need hardly mention that these include rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, and systemic lupus erythematosus.
There's no actual evidence that this is true, but I think enormous quantities of funding should immediately be dumped into research on the question.
Showing posts with label old fashioned article summaries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label old fashioned article summaries. Show all posts
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Unnoticed Errors
Interesting article in the latest Journal of the Medical Library Association: "The effectiveness of the practice of correction and republication in the biomedical literature" (PDF here).
As you might suspect from the title, it's about a study done to see how effectively corrected versions of papers "take over" from the flawed original version, looking at how often each tends to be cited by later papers.
Discouragingly, it appears that corrections don't have any sort of universal power--the originals (which, by definition, contained some error of fact) tend to continue to be cited after the correction is published, with original and corrected versions seeing roughly similar citation rates.
So basically, a lot of researchers aren't aware of the fact that a correction has been made. Presumably anytime a researcher does know about a correction, she or he will use the corrected version (unless making a point specifically about the error, I suppose), but it's not as if we can retrospectively tag every article that has a correction with a scarlet C to call peoples' attention to the fact (although Amazon's brush with automatically updating the books on your Kindle makes one think).
And how many people, while busily searching for useful articles, will also busily double-check to make sure all of the articles they find are the very latest version? Especially since usually there won't be any correction to find; most of the time, if you do that double-checking, you've spent precious time and found nothing.
I imagine that even if the flawed version is cited later, it's probably not always a disaster--there could be an error in the transcription of some figures, say, that would not necessarily have any bearing on the conclusions of the paper (which would have been based on the correct figures). If some later researcher is only citing the conclusions, not the actual figures, they're basically fine.
Obviously, if that later researcher (or a researcher citing that later researcher!) tried to replicate the work in the original paper, or to in any way rely on the actual figures, then the error would be a problem, so I'm all for correcting things just in case, but it may not always come up right away.
The article suggests that a database of corrected papers would be helpful--a sort of TurnItIn for citations, so you could go to one place and check all the papers you wanted to use.
I could indeed see this being handy, especially if it worked with your bibliographic citation management software. You could just send it your bibliography (or even your entire collection of citations!) and it would check them against its list of officially published corrections, and tell you if there were any matches.
It would be especially handy if it could also pinpoint for you the precise correction that was made, so you could see whether or not your own conclusions would be affected. As I said, I assume you'd always want to cite the corrected version, but this sort of program could alert you as to whether you just needed to swap out a citation in your bibliography, or would need to actually rewrite part of your paper.
So we're going to need cooperation from publishers, a powerful database program that recognizes citation management software, development geniuses, time and money for building the thing, a massive publicity push to let everyone know that this new tool exists, and we'll be good to go!
.
As you might suspect from the title, it's about a study done to see how effectively corrected versions of papers "take over" from the flawed original version, looking at how often each tends to be cited by later papers.
Discouragingly, it appears that corrections don't have any sort of universal power--the originals (which, by definition, contained some error of fact) tend to continue to be cited after the correction is published, with original and corrected versions seeing roughly similar citation rates.
So basically, a lot of researchers aren't aware of the fact that a correction has been made. Presumably anytime a researcher does know about a correction, she or he will use the corrected version (unless making a point specifically about the error, I suppose), but it's not as if we can retrospectively tag every article that has a correction with a scarlet C to call peoples' attention to the fact (although Amazon's brush with automatically updating the books on your Kindle makes one think).
And how many people, while busily searching for useful articles, will also busily double-check to make sure all of the articles they find are the very latest version? Especially since usually there won't be any correction to find; most of the time, if you do that double-checking, you've spent precious time and found nothing.
I imagine that even if the flawed version is cited later, it's probably not always a disaster--there could be an error in the transcription of some figures, say, that would not necessarily have any bearing on the conclusions of the paper (which would have been based on the correct figures). If some later researcher is only citing the conclusions, not the actual figures, they're basically fine.
Obviously, if that later researcher (or a researcher citing that later researcher!) tried to replicate the work in the original paper, or to in any way rely on the actual figures, then the error would be a problem, so I'm all for correcting things just in case, but it may not always come up right away.
The article suggests that a database of corrected papers would be helpful--a sort of TurnItIn for citations, so you could go to one place and check all the papers you wanted to use.
I could indeed see this being handy, especially if it worked with your bibliographic citation management software. You could just send it your bibliography (or even your entire collection of citations!) and it would check them against its list of officially published corrections, and tell you if there were any matches.
It would be especially handy if it could also pinpoint for you the precise correction that was made, so you could see whether or not your own conclusions would be affected. As I said, I assume you'd always want to cite the corrected version, but this sort of program could alert you as to whether you just needed to swap out a citation in your bibliography, or would need to actually rewrite part of your paper.
So we're going to need cooperation from publishers, a powerful database program that recognizes citation management software, development geniuses, time and money for building the thing, a massive publicity push to let everyone know that this new tool exists, and we'll be good to go!
.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Sorry, CSI-Watchers
I just got called for jury duty (although due to a reschedule, not until April, which is far enough away to not actually exist), so I'm intrigued by court-related things at the moment.
I found this interesting article in Annual Reviews (subscription required) on Failed Forensics: How Forensic Science Lost Its Way and How It Might Yet Find It.
It talks about the "nonscience forensic sciences" that underlie a lot of the evidence presented in court cases, explaining that techniques of 'individualization' (or precisely determining that a single finger, bullet, shoe, set of teeth, etc. and no other in the world was responsible for a mark) are not actually very closely related to the testable, falsifiable theories that we think of as science.
The article more than once links forensic techniques with religious ritual, as well as with discredited sciences like phrenology. It seems that handwriting identification and other forensic techniques are based on subjective judgments and personal interpretations more than on any testable theories, and are admitted in court more because they have been admitted in the past than because they are objectively good sources of information.
It says that forensic fields often claim the possibility of providing an error rate of zero; that there is no chance that the results could be mistaken. Obviously we want to keep the chance of mistaken identification as low as possible, but I don't know, claiming infallibility seems a little bold.
The article talks about how the science of forensic identification has been shaped by the needs of the courts, as well as by the objective attempt to narrow down a pool of potential suspects. Plaintiffs need doubt, and prosecutors need certainty, and everyone is interested in convicting criminals, so there's a lot of interesting potential for pressure.
Another concern is that lawyers and judges, like many of us, are not particularly well versed in the scientific method, and lack the understanding of statistics, error rates, and other things that would allow them to distinguish science from impressive nonscience. It's therefore easy to see how things might be allowed as evidence despite not actually being well grounded in the scientific method.
I don't have any say over what's admitted as evidence, but I'll try to remember that things like fingerprint analysis, which we tend to assume are pretty soundly scientific, may not be as ironclad as we think.
Failed Forensics: How Forensic Science Lost Its Way and How It Might Yet Find It
Annual Review of Law and Social Science
Vol. 4: 149-171 (Volume publication date December 2008)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.4.110707.172303)
First published online as a Review in Advance on July 8, 2008
I found this interesting article in Annual Reviews (subscription required) on Failed Forensics: How Forensic Science Lost Its Way and How It Might Yet Find It.
It talks about the "nonscience forensic sciences" that underlie a lot of the evidence presented in court cases, explaining that techniques of 'individualization' (or precisely determining that a single finger, bullet, shoe, set of teeth, etc. and no other in the world was responsible for a mark) are not actually very closely related to the testable, falsifiable theories that we think of as science.
The article more than once links forensic techniques with religious ritual, as well as with discredited sciences like phrenology. It seems that handwriting identification and other forensic techniques are based on subjective judgments and personal interpretations more than on any testable theories, and are admitted in court more because they have been admitted in the past than because they are objectively good sources of information.
It says that forensic fields often claim the possibility of providing an error rate of zero; that there is no chance that the results could be mistaken. Obviously we want to keep the chance of mistaken identification as low as possible, but I don't know, claiming infallibility seems a little bold.
The article talks about how the science of forensic identification has been shaped by the needs of the courts, as well as by the objective attempt to narrow down a pool of potential suspects. Plaintiffs need doubt, and prosecutors need certainty, and everyone is interested in convicting criminals, so there's a lot of interesting potential for pressure.
Another concern is that lawyers and judges, like many of us, are not particularly well versed in the scientific method, and lack the understanding of statistics, error rates, and other things that would allow them to distinguish science from impressive nonscience. It's therefore easy to see how things might be allowed as evidence despite not actually being well grounded in the scientific method.
I don't have any say over what's admitted as evidence, but I'll try to remember that things like fingerprint analysis, which we tend to assume are pretty soundly scientific, may not be as ironclad as we think.
Failed Forensics: How Forensic Science Lost Its Way and How It Might Yet Find It
Annual Review of Law and Social Science
Vol. 4: 149-171 (Volume publication date December 2008)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.4.110707.172303)
First published online as a Review in Advance on July 8, 2008
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Let Us Once More Consider Facebook
I don't even spend that much time on Facebook (I swear! six or seven hours a day, tops!), but I do seem to frequently find other people talking about it and want to chip in.
This time, librarian.net recommended a paper called "Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy," and said paper proved very interesting.
The author, James Grimmelmann, offers some good background information on social networking, and a solid discussion of the ways that interactions with other people and use of applications on Facebook can build up a fairly detailed picture of who you are.
Your name and location, who you know and their names and locations, any additional personal details you care to post, the kinds of relationships you have with the people you know (do you often 'poke' certain people, exchange 'gifts' with others, play games with others?), can all be seen through your profile and actions.
The kinds of things you think are interesting, and thus, in a sense, who you are, will also show up in the status messages you post, the kinds of games you choose to play, the gift-images and poke-messages you send, the 'Cause' pages you subscribe to and the institutions you declare yourself a fan of, and so on.
He talks about the fact that this picture of you is not entirely under your control as a Facebook user, since even if you keep your own privacy controls set to high, other people can leave their profiles open (or make them public at any time without consulting you), including any statements you've written on their 'wall,' pictures tagged as you on other peoples' pages, comments about you, etc.
I liked the discussion about peoples' motivations for giving away so much information on these sorts of sites. The article says that there's a natural interest in being able to control the way that other people see you: people want to look good to others, and being able to present yourself on a site with a personal profile of carefully chosen details and images is an appealingly straightforward way to do this.
It's plainly also true that social networking sites are good for, well, networking socially: keeping in touch with friends, making new connections, getting to know more about acquaintances.
There's strong presentation of the idea that the value of social networking depends on people sharing information: you need buy-in, you need people to be on the site, using its tools and playing with its applications, or else there's no point. These sites are interesting and can be fun and useful, and that value depends on having a mass of users willing to put in the time and share the information.
But there are also real concerns about sharing too much information, making too much available about yourself or someone else. The article suggests that we tend to assume much more privacy than we really have: we think we're posting pictures and comments for our friends, and don't really keep in mind the fact that things posted on the internet can be rapidly disseminated much more widely.
Similarly, we assume that something we send to another person will be received the way we meant it ("clearly, that comment about Betty was just between you and me!"), while in fact, without the clues of expression and tone that we get in face to face conversation, the person may take the message to be public, or neutral, and see nothing wrong with passing it on.
We've all heard stories about people who were refused jobs because their potential employers saw pictures of them mixing martinis for children or whatever, and a lot of the users of these sites are surely not much concerned with whether such-and-such personnel manager for a company they'll want to work for in ten years but haven't heard of yet is going to think their profiles are as amusing as they seem right now.
This made me think about the idea that the web is 'small-town-izing' the world: that in a small town (and potentially in a highly web-enabled world) everyone knows everyone's embarrassing youthful (or otherwise) exploits, but you all just live with it and go about your business anyway. I mean, what else can you do?
And, not to present questions without suggestions for answers, the article also presents some thoughts about policies and tools that probably won't help to protect privacy on social networking sites (anything that makes it harder to connect with other users, since that's what people are there to do), as well as some that might (education of users, as well as policies implemented by the sites).
There's a lot more in the article, but I've already rambled on long enough. In any case, I'm not really doing it justice, but do recommend it as an interesting look at an interesting piece of the web.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Reflections on Search
Stephen's Lighthouse recommended The Google Dilemma several days ago. I finally got around to reading it, and heartily concur with the recommendation.
James Grimmelmann writes a very readable, interesting piece about some of the issues associated with how search engines organize the web for us, looking at some examples, including:
- Google bombing (getting enough people to link to a page using a specific phrase that it becomes one of the top results for that term) and whether these results are legitimate
- Controversial sites and whether they should be allowed to stay on results pages even if they get there through these types of link manipulation (the 'yes' argument is summed up as "the computer did it"---the algorithm that ranks results should not be interfered with, and if enough people are linking with certain terms, Google isn't going to mess with the rankings)
- Link farming, the ways that it can mess up search results, and whether it therefore makes sense for Google to interfere with the rankings in these cases (after all, these are not real people linking to sites)
- How OK we are with it if some sites are kept off results pages in certain countries due to local laws (is it understandable or repellent and cowardly that Google's Chinese site censors search results according to China's laws?)
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