Sloppy science
The world of economics was shaken two weeks ago with the report that a key paper and accompanying book in the field of macroeconomics (which have been cited by Paul Ryan and by other politicians internationally in their calls for austerity and debt reduction) is in error, the result of a faulty Excel spreadsheet and other mistakes, all of which could have been found had the authors simply been more open with their data.
Yet, experimental error and lack of reproducibility have dogged scientific research for decades. Recall the case of N-rays (supposedly a new form of radiation)
Continue reading Fraud, foolishness and error in scientific research
Harvard faculty Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are two of the most respected and influential academic economists active today.
On April 16, 2013, doctoral student Thomas Herndon and professors Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, released the results of their analysis of two 2010 papers by Reinhard and Rogoff, papers that also provided much of the grist for their 2011 best seller Next Time Is Different. The Reinhart-Rogoff papers had analyzed economic growth rates spanning nearly two centuries, in numerous different nations, and concluded that when the ratio of
Continue reading Reliability, reproducibility and the Reinhart-Rogoff error
E.O. Wilson is truly one of the great scientists of our time. In addition to his very extensive portfolio of important and painstaking academic publications, he has won two Pulitzer prizes for general nonfiction. Wilson has fearlessly ventured into arenas such as sociobiology (applications of evolutionary biology to social behavior) and the boundary between religion and science, areas where others often fear to tread.
But Wilson is deeply mistaken when he claims that great scientific discoveries emerge from ideas without needing much training in mathematics.
For many young people who aspire to be scientists, the great bugbear is mathematics. Without
Continue reading Why E.O. Wilson is wrong
Ever since the dawn of mathematics (e.g., in ancient Greece, c. 250 BC) and decimal computation (e.g., in India, c. 200 AD), people have wondered whether the digits of the number we call pi (= 3.1415926535…) are “random.” Answering, or at least studying this question spurred mathematicians from Archimedes, who rigorously showed 223/71 < pi <22/7, and Aryabhata, who computed pi to 4 decimal digits in 499 AD, to Shanks, who computed 707 digits in 1874 (alas, only 527 were correct; the error was only found after WW2), and on through the computer age to the present day. The current
Continue reading Are the digits of pi random?
DNA evidence in forensics
On March 18, 2013, a Florida man was found guilty of burglary and criminal damage to property, in an attempt to steal an ATM machine from a store. But the burglar had dropped his hat, and subsequent analysis of DNA in the hat matched that of a suspect. Based on this evidence, the jury quickly reached a guilty verdict.
DNA evidence works the other way too. On January 30, 2013, a former Akron, Ohio police captain, who had been convicted of murdering his wife in 1997, was cleared of the crime and released from prison, because
Continue reading Criminology, sports drug testing and evolution
The saga of Hiroo Onoda
March 2013 is the 39th anniversary of a curious milestone of 20th century military history: On March 9, 1974, nearly 29 years after World War II supposedly ended with the Japanese surrender, Hiroo Onoda, the last Japanese holdout, turned over his sword and rifle to his commanding officer and ceased his para-military campaign on Lubang Island in the Philippine Islands.
Onoda had landed on Lubang Island in December 1944, where he was given orders to do all that he could to disrupt Allied activities on the island, but under no circumstances was he to surrender
Continue reading The last Japanese WWII holdout: A lesson for creationists
Higgs at last
On March 15, 2013, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) finally confirmed that the new particle discovered last summer is indeed the Higgs boson, a particle predicted purely by mathematical reasoning back in 1964.
Initial measurements announced in July 2012 confirmed that it was a boson, and that its mass was about 126 GeV. Both of these findings strongly suggested that it was the long-sought Higgs particle, which is thought to endow particles with mass among other things. Bosons belong to one of two basic particle classes; the others are known as fermions. Both
Continue reading The Higgs boson: What does it mean?
Introduction
On February 21, 2013, the city council of Sebastopol, California (a small suburb north of San Francisco) adopted a resolution attempting to ban the installation of smart meters by Pacific Gas and Electric, claiming that the devices pose “potential risks to the health, safety and welfare of Sebastopol residents.” In taking this measure, Sebastpol officials followed the lead of Marin County (hardly a traditional bastion of conservative pseudoscience), which in 2011 passed a similar resolution. To date, PG&E has ignored both, claiming that only California’s Public Utilities Commission has jurisdiction in the matter, but debate continues at several levels.
Continue reading Smart meters, dumb science
Assessing risk is something everyone must do every day. Yet very few receive any formal training in the requisite mathematics and statistics, and, partly as a result, many poor decisions are being made, both by individuals and governmental bodies. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggests that we may be neurologically ill-equipped to make the sort of decisions called for by modern society. Nobel prize-winning behavioural economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman makes it clear in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that making careful (slow) judgements is a very complicated mental process.
For example, many have presumed that in the wake of
Continue reading Scientific nonsense and relative risk
It has been conventional wisdom that computing is the “third leg” of the stool of modern science, complementing theory and experiment. But that metaphor is no longer accurate. Instead, computing now pervades all of science, including theory and experiment. Nowadays massive computation is required just to reduce and analyze experimental data, and simulations and computational explorations are employed in fields as diverse as climate modeling and research mathematics.
Unfortunately, the culture of scientific computing has not kept pace with its rapidly ascending pre-eminence in the broad domain of scientific research. In experimental research work, researchers are taught early the importance
Continue reading Set the default to “open”: Reproducible science in the computer age
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