tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5058312456398816342024-03-06T20:01:00.925+00:00Exploring Research Methods and Proposal WrtingDamian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-37256066008581450772015-08-29T00:03:00.003+01:002015-08-29T00:03:39.901+01:00Study delivers bleak verdict on validity of psychology experiment results by Ian Sample<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results?CMP=fb_gu">http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results?CMP=fb_gu</a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #767676; font-family: 'Guardian Egyptian Web', 'Guardian Text Egyptian Web', Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 22px;">Of 100 studies published in top-ranking journals in 2008, 75% of social psychology experiments and half of cognitive studies failed the replication test</span><br />
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<a class=" u-underline" data-component="in-standfirst-link" data-link-name="in standfirst link" href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/28/psychology-experiments-failing-replication-test-findings-science" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-bottom-color: rgb(220, 220, 220); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0.0625rem; color: #005689; cursor: pointer; font-family: 'Guardian Egyptian Web', 'Guardian Text Egyptian Web', Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 22px; text-decoration: none !important; transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out;">Psychology experiments are failing the replication test – for good reason</a><br />
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A major investigation into scores of claims made in psychology research journals has delivered a bleak verdict on the state of the science.</div>
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An international team of experts repeated 100 experiments published in top psychology journals and found that they could reproduce only 36% of original findings.</div>
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<a class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aac4716" style="background: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgb(220, 220, 220); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0.0625rem; color: #005689; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none !important; transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out;">The study</a>, which saw 270 scientists repeat experiments on five continents, was launched by psychologists in the US in response to rising concerns over the reliability of psychology research.</div>
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“There is no doubt that I would have loved for the effects to be more reproducible,” said <a class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://cacsprd.web.virginia.edu/Psych/Faculty/Profile/Brian-A-Nosek" style="background: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgb(220, 220, 220); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0.0625rem; color: #005689; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none !important; transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out;">Brian Nosek</a>, a professor of psychology who led the study at the University of Virgina. “I am disappointed, in the sense that I think we can do better.”</div>
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“The key caution that an average reader should take away is any one study is not going to be the last word,” he added. “Science is a process of uncertainty reduction, and no one study is almost ever a definitive result on its own.”</div>
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All of the experiments the scientists repeated appeared in top ranking journals in 2008 and fell into two broad categories, namely cognitive and social psychology. Cognitive psychology is concerned with basic operations of the mind, and studies tend to look at areas such as perception, attention and memory. Social psychology looks at more social issues, such as self esteem, identity, prejudice and how people interact.</div>
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In the investigation, a whopping 75% of the social psychology experiments were not replicated, meaning that the originally reported findings vanished when other scientists repeated the experiments. Half of the cognitive psychology studies failed the same test. Details are published in the journal Science.</div>
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Even when scientists could replicate original findings, the sizes of the effects they found were on average half as big as reported first time around. That could be due to scientists leaving out data that undermined their hypotheses, and by journals accepting only the strongest claims for publication.</div>
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Despite the grim findings, Nosek said the results presented an opportunity to understand and fix the problem. “Scepticism is a core part of science and we need to embrace it. If the evidence is tentative, you should be sceptical of your evidence. We should be our own worst critics,” he told the Guardian. One initiative now underway calls for psychologists to submit their research questions and proposed methods to probe them for review before they start their experiments.</div>
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<a class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/john-ioannidis?tab=publications" style="background: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgb(220, 220, 220); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0.0625rem; color: #005689; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none !important; transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out;">John Ioannidis</a>, professor of health research and policy at Stanford University, said the study was impressive and that its results had been eagerly awaited by the scientific community. “Sadly, the picture it paints - a 64% failure rate even among papers published in the best journals in the field - is not very nice about the current status of psychological science in general, and for fields like social psychology it is just devastating,” he said.</div>
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But he urged people to focus on the positives. The results, he hopes, will improve research practices in psychology and across the sciences more generally, where similar problems of reproducibility have been found before. In 2005, Ioannidis published a <a class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124" style="background: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgb(220, 220, 220); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0.0625rem; color: #005689; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none !important; transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out;">seminal study</a> that explained why most published research findings are false.</div>
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<a class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.bristol.ac.uk/expsych/people/marcus-r-munafo/overview.html" style="background: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgb(220, 220, 220); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0.0625rem; color: #005689; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none !important; transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out;">Marcus Munafo</a>, a co-author on the study and professor of psychology at Bristol University, said: “I think it’s a problem across the board, because wherever people have looked, they have found similar issues.” In 2013, he published <a class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/abs/nrn3475.html" style="background: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgb(220, 220, 220); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0.0625rem; color: #005689; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none !important; transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out;">a report</a> with Ioannidis that found serious statistical weaknesses were common in neuroscience studies.</div>
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Nosek’s study is unlikely to boost morale among psychologists, but the findings simply reflect how science works. In trying to understand how the world works, scientists must ask important questions and take risks in finding ways to try and answer them. Missteps are inevitable if scientists are not being complacent. As<a class=" u-underline" data-component="in-body-link" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/psychological-science-is-important" style="background: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgb(220, 220, 220); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0.0625rem; color: #005689; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none !important; transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out;">Alan Kraut</a> at the Association for Psychological Science puts it: “The only finding that will replicate 100% of the time is likely to be trite, boring and probably already known: yes, dead people can never be taught to read.”</div>
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There are many reasons why a study might not replicate. Scientists could use a slightly different method second time around, or perform the experiment under different conditions. They might fail to find the original effect by chance. None of these would negate the original finding. Another possibility is that the original result was a false positive.</div>
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Among the experiments that stood up was one that found people are equally adept at recognising pride in faces from different cultures. Another backed up a finding that revealed the brain regions activated when people were given fair offers in a financial game. One study that failed replication claimed that encouraging people to believe there was no such thing as free will made them cheat more.</div>
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Munafo said that the problem of poor reproducibility is exacerbated by the way modern science works. “If I want to get promoted or get a grant, I need to be writing lots of papers. But writing lots of papers and doing lots of small experiments isn’t the way to get one really robust right answer,” he said. “What it takes to be a successful academic is not necessarily that well aligned with what it takes to be a good scientist.”</div>
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Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-30427243325426538122015-08-12T13:35:00.003+01:002015-08-12T13:35:58.847+01:00Health Experts Say Coca-Cola is Funding its Own Science to Deliberately Mislead the Public by George Dvorsky<div class="first-text" data-textannotation-id="a94d4b607b719d4accb14f0dae89937d" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.25rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: auto; word-break: break-word;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://io9.com/health-experts-say-coca-cola-is-funding-its-own-science-1723404812">http://io9.com/health-experts-say-coca-cola-is-funding-its-own-science-1723404812</a></span></span></div>
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The Global Energy Balance Network— a research institute supported by Coca-Cola—is claiming that exercise, and not diet, is the best way to prevent weight gain. It’s a dubious and self-serving message that’s not going over well amongst diet and obesity experts.</div>
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“Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is that they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much, blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on,” claims Dr. Steve Blair at the <a href="http://www.sharewik.com/portfolio-items/the-global-energy-balance-getting-the-word-out/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Global Energy Balance Network</a> website. “And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that in fact is the cause. Those of us interested in science, public health, medicine, we have to learn how to get the right information out there.”</div>
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As <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/coca-cola-s-research-funding-criticized-by-obesity-expert-1.3186279" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">reported</a> at CBC News, Blair’s extraordinary claim, along with <a href="http://www.sharewik.com/portfolio-items/the-global-energy-balance-getting-the-word-out/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">an accompanying video</a>, recently caught the attention of Ottawa-based obesity expert Dr. Yoni Freedhoff. During his ensuing investigation to find the origin of these claims, he discovered that the network is receiving financial and logistical support from Coca-Cola, which isn’t something that was previously disclosed. Alarmed, Freedhoff contacted Anahad O’Connor from <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The New York Times</em> to get the word out.</div>
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In his ensuing article, “<a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-scientists-who-shift-blame-for-obesity-away-from-bad-diets/?_r=0" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Coca-Cola Funds Scientists Who Shift Blame for Obesity Away From Bad Diets</a>,” O’Connor writes:</div>
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<em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Health experts say this message is misleading and part of an effort by Coke to deflect criticism about the role sugary drinks have played in the spread of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. They contend that the company is using the new group to convince the public that physical activity can offset a bad diet despite evidence that </em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/upshot/to-lose-weight-eating-less-is-far-more-important-than-exercising-more.html" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">exercise has only minimal impact on weight</a><em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;"> compared with what people consume.</em></div>
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<em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">This clash over the science of obesity comes in a period of rising efforts to tax sugary drinks, remove them from schools and stop companies from marketing them to children. In the last two decades, consumption of full-calorie sodas by the average American </em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/upshot/americans-are-finally-eating-less.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">has dropped by 25 percent</a><em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">.</em></div>
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<em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">“Coca-Cola’s sales are slipping, and there’s this huge political and public backlash against soda, with every major city trying to do something to curb consumption,” said Michele Simon, a public health lawyer. “This is a direct response to the ways that the company is losing. They’re desperate to stop the bleeding.”</em></div>
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Over at <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Scientific American</em>, Dina Fine Maron spoke to diet and behavior expert Charlotte Markey <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-you-lose-weight-with-exercise-alone1/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">to learn if people can lose weight with exercise alone</a>. Here’s what Markey had to say:</div>
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<em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">I find everything going on here very troubling. In the</em><a href="http://www.sharewik.com/portfolio-items/the-global-energy-balance-getting-the-word-out/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;"> </em><em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">promotional video</em></a><em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;"> from Coke’s group, linked to by the NYT, exercise scientist Steve Blair says we don’t know what is causing obesity and we need more research. That message is oversimplified and terribly misleading. We actually know a great deal about what leads to obesity. It’s not a great mystery. People are eating too much and not exercising enough…that makes it inevitable that people will be obese. The group’s emphasis on physical activity is misleading based on what the data shows. There’s no data to support saying if you exercise for 30 minutes three times a week that this will take care of the problem. We have data refuting that.</em></div>
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<em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">In reality, we need people to stop drinking sugary beverages like soda. Soda is the one consumable beverage that is repeatedly cited as having the biggest impact on obesity rates. From a public health standpoint, we want soda out of schools and we want cities to really decrease intake of soda—and Coca-Cola knows this and knows they are being proactive and defensive against taxes on soda and other limitations.</em></div>
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Very disturbing. This issue bears a startling resemblance to the efforts of cigarette manufacturers to <a href="http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/16/6/1070.full" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">deliberately mislead the public about the health risks of smoking</a>.</div>
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Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-32389815465601804052015-03-29T20:06:00.000+01:002015-03-29T20:06:11.478+01:00Dozens Of Scientific Papers Withdrawn After Peer-Review Fraud Uncovered by Stephen Luntz<div style="background-color: white; margin-bottom: 1em;">
<span style="color: #424242; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Liberation Sans, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 19.6000003814697px;"><a href="http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/dozens-scientific-papers-withdrawn-probably-more-come">http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/dozens-scientific-papers-withdrawn-probably-more-come</a></span></span></div>
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Scientific Publisher <a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/" style="color: #666666;">BioMed Central</a> has <a href="http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2015/03/26/manipulation-peer-review/" style="color: #666666;">withdrawn 43 papers</a>, and is investigating many more, over what it calls the “fabrication” of peer reviews. Representatives of Journal editors have admitted the papers are the tip of a dangerous iceberg, and the scandal may to lead to an overhaul of how peer review is conducted.</div>
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Peer review is fundamental to science, a central part of the <a href="http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/failure-real-science-good-and-different-phony-controversies" style="color: #666666;">process of self-correction</a> that sets it aside from faith-based systems. True peer review <a href="http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37969/title/Post-Publication-Peer-Review-Mainstreamed/" style="color: #666666;">does not end</a> with publication;<a href="http://retractionwatch.com/" style="color: #666666;">plenty of scientific papers</a><strong> </strong>are published only to <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/08/26/mckitrick6/" style="color: #666666;">subsequently be shown</a> to have <a href="http://www.iflscience.com/space/cosmic-inflation-claims-take-hit" style="color: #666666;">major flaws</a>. However, the initial process whereby editors of scientific publications send work, usually anonymized, to other researchers for checking is meant to filter out the worst mistakes.</div>
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That failed for a number of the 277 journals BioMed Central publishes, with researchers finding ways to review their own papers, or those of friends. The problem may be far more widespread, and BioMed Central may be ahead of the curve in picking the issue up.</div>
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The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) <a href="http://publicationethics.org/news/cope-statement-inappropriate-manipulation-peer-review-processes" style="color: #666666;">issued a statement</a> saying they have, “become aware of systematic, inappropriate attempts to manipulate the peer review processes of several journals across different publishers.” <a href="http://publicationethics.org/about" style="color: #666666;">COPE</a> started out as an effort by a small group of medical journal editors to raise the standards of academic publication. It now has a membership of 9000 editors from across academic fields, and its growth is indicative of concerns about the challenges facing the peer review process.</div>
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According to the COPE release, “These manipulations appear to have been orchestrated by a number of third party agencies offering services to authors.”</div>
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This is <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1.16400" style="color: #666666;">not the first</a> example of a “peer review and citation ring”. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/10/scholarly-journal-retracts-60-articles-smashes-peer-review-ring/" style="color: #666666;">Sixty papers were withdrawn last year</a> as a result of a similar discovery. However, those papers were restricted to a single journal. This time the problem seems to be far more widespread.</div>
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So far all the papers withdrawn by BioMed Central have had authors based in China, often at leading institutions such as China Medical University, but BioMed Central's says the problem is an international one reflecting the pressure researchers are under to publish quickly.</div>
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Concerns about peer review have been growing for decades. Reviewers are almost always already struggling under the burden of their own research and teaching load. Few are paid for their efforts, and even fewer get credit from their employers for this vital contribution to the advancement of science. Many admit off the record to not giving papers the attention they deserve.</div>
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Although bad papers can send scientific research off down blind alleys, but bad work more often gets ignored by others in the field. However, authors can be rewarded with funding that should have gone to someone else. Media outlets, whether mainstream or science-specific, usually have no choice but to rely on publication in a peer reviewed journal as the test of whether work justifies publicity.</div>
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When fraud is exposed it can have <a href="http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1619" style="color: #666666;">devastating consequences</a> for innocent co-workers, and is fodder for science's enemies.</div>
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In these cases, since the research was medical-related, there is also the danger of treatments being approved for clinical use on the basis of flawed studies.</div>
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H/T <em><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/27/fabricated-peer-reviews-prompt-scientific-journal-to-retract-43-papers-systematic-scheme-may-affect-other-journals/?postshare=5031427452343393" style="color: #666666;">The Washington Post</a></em></div>
Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-24842522615824086532015-02-03T11:39:00.002+00:002015-02-03T11:39:30.476+00:00Dictionary of Research Concepts and Issues<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If any of your students would like an e-copy of this book please advise them to complete the form at<span style="color: #1f497d;"> </span><b><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: black;"><a href="http://tinyurl.com/researchdictionary" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/<wbr></wbr>researchdictionary</a></span></b><b><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"> </span></b>and e-mail it to us and a free e-copy of the book will be e-mailed to him or to her.</div>
Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-15691331910735281842015-02-01T19:31:00.002+00:002015-02-01T19:31:27.786+00:00Test shows big data text analysis inconsistent, inaccurate by Kevin Fogarty<a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2878080/test-shows-big-data-text-analysis-inconsistent-inaccurate.html">http://www.computerworld.com/article/2878080/test-shows-big-data-text-analysis-inconsistent-inaccurate.html</a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25.6000003814697px;">Big data analytic systems are reputed to be capable of finding a needle in a universe of haystacks without having to know what a needle looks like.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">Even the simplest part of that process – sorting all the data available into Haystacks and Not Haystacks so the analytics can at least work with data that is relevant – requires a topical analysis that uses the metadata accompanying each giant pile of data to classify each bit according to topic as well as source, format and other criteria.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">The very best ways to sort large databases of unstructured text is to use a technique called Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) – a</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"> </span><a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-a-good-explanation-of-Latent-Dirichlet-Allocation" style="color: #a31e22; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">modeling technique that identifies text within documents</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">as belonging to a limited number of still-unknown topics, groups them according to how likely it is that they refer to the same topic, then backtracks to identify what those topics actually are. (Here's the</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"> </span><a href="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/papers/BleiNgJordan2003.pdf" style="color: #a31e22; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">full explanation in the Journal of Machine Learning Research</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">; here's</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"> </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation" style="color: #a31e22; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">Wikipedia's</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">. )</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">LDA is "the state of the art in topic modeling, according to analysis published Thursday in the American Physical Society's</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"> </span><a href="https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.5.011007" style="color: #a31e22; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">journal Physical Review X</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">, which said that, in the 10 years since its introduction, LDA had become one of the most common ways to accomplish the computationally difficult problem of classifying specific parts of human language automatically into a context-appropriate category.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">Unfortunately, LDA is also inaccurate enough at some tasks that the results of any topic model created with it are essentially meaningless, according to</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"> </span><a href="http://amaral-lab.org/people/amaral/publications-by-date/" style="color: #a31e22; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">Luis Amaral</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">, a physicist whose specialty is the mathematical analysis of complex systems and networks in the real world and one of the senior researchers on the multidisciplinary team from Northwestern University that wrote the paper.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">The team tested LDA-based analysis with repeated analyses of the same set of unstructured data – 23,000 scientific papers and 1.2 million Wikipedia articles written in several different languages.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">Even worse than being inaccurate, the LDA analyses were inconsistent, returning the same results only 80 percent of the time even when using the same data and the same analytic configuration.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">Accuracy of 90 percent with 80 percent consistency sounds good, but the scores are "actually very poor, since they are for an exceedingly easy case," Amaral said in</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"> </span><a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-01/nu-btb012915.php" style="color: #a31e22; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">an announcement from Northwestern about the study.</a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">Applied to messy, inconsistently scrubbed data from many sources in many formats – the base of data for which big data is often praised for its ability to manage – the results would be far less accurate and far less reproducible, according to the paper.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">"Our systematic analysis clearly demonstrates that current implementations of LDA have low validity," the paper reports (full text PDF</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;"> </span><a href="http://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.5.011007" style="color: #a31e22; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">here</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">).</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.6rem;">The team created an alternative method called TopicMapping, which first breaks words down into bases (treating "stars" and "star" as the same word), then eliminates conjunctions, pronouns and other "stop words" that modify the meaning but not the topic, using a standardized list.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25.6000003814697px;">Then the algorithm builds a model identifying words that often appear together in the same document and use the proprietary Infomap natural-language processing software to assign those clusters of words into groups identified as a "community" that define the topic. Words could appear in more than one topic area.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25.6000003814697px;">The new approach delivered results that were 92 percent accurate and 98 percent reproducible, though, according to the paper, it only moderately improved the likelihood that any given result would be accurate.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25.6000003814697px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25.6000003814697px;">The real point was not to replace LDA with TopicMapping, but to demonstrate that the topic-analysis method that has become one of the most commonly used in big data analysis is far less accurate and far less consistent than previously believed.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25.6000003814697px;">The best way to improve those analyses, according to Amaral, is to apply techniques common in </span><a href="http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-04747-3_20" style="color: #a31e22; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25.6000003814697px;">community detection algorithms</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25.6000003814697px;"> – which identify connections among specific variables and use those to help categorize or verify the classification of those that aren't clearly in one group or another.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25.6000003814697px;">Without that kind of improvement – and real-world testing of the results of big data analyses – companies using LDA-based text analysis could be making decisions based on results whose accuracy they can't know for sure.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: museo-sans, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 25.6000003814697px;">"Companies that make products must show that their products work," Amaral said in the Northwestern release. "They must be certified. There is no such case for algorithms. We have a lot of uninformed consumers of big data algorithms that are using tools that haven't been tested for reproducibility and accuracy."</span>Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-35686766460515284012015-01-29T23:48:00.004+00:002015-01-29T23:50:46.142+00:00New algorithm can separate unstructured text into topics with high accuracy and reproducibility by Emily Ayshford<a href="http://phys.org/news/2015-01-algorithm-unstructured-text-topics-high.html">http://phys.org/news/2015-01-algorithm-unstructured-text-topics-high.html</a><br />
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Much of our reams of data sit in large databases of unstructured text. Finding insights among emails, text documents, and websites is extremely difficult unless we can search, characterize, and classify their text data in a meaningful way.<br />
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One of the leading big data algorithms for finding related topics within unstructured text (an area called topic modeling) is latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). But when Northwestern University professor Luis Amaral set out to test LDA, he found that it was neither as accurate nor reproducible as a leading topic modeling algorithm should be.<br />
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Using his network analysis background, Amaral, professor of chemical and biological engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, developed a new topic modeling algorithm that has shown very high accuracy and reproducibility during tests. His results, published with co-author Konrad Kording, associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, physiology, and applied mathematics at Northwestern, were published Jan. 29 in Physical Review X.<br />
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Topic modeling algorithms take unstructured text and find a set of topics that can be used to describe each document in the set. They are the workhorses of big data science, used as the foundation for recommendation systems, spam filtering, and digital image processing. The LDA topic modeling algorithm was developed in 2003 and has been widely used for academic research and for commercial applications, like search engines.<br />
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When Amaral explored how LDA worked, he found that the algorithm produced different results each time for the same set of data, and it often did so inaccurately. Amaral and his group tested LDA by running it on documents they created that were written in English, French, Spanish, and other languages. By doing this, they were able to prevent text overlap among documents.<br />
"In this simple case, the algorithm should be able to perform at 100 percent accuracy and reproducibility," he said. But when LDA was used, it separated these documents into similar groups with only 90 percent accuracy and 80 percent reproducibility. "While these numbers may appear to be good, they are actually very poor, since they are for an exceedingly easy case," Amaral said.<br />
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To create a better algorithm, Amaral took a network approach. The result, called TopicMapping, begins by preprocessing data to replace words with their stem (so "star" and "stars" would be considered the same word). It then builds a network of connecting words and identifies a "community" of related words (just as one could look for communities of people in Facebook). The words within a given community define a topic.<br />
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The algorithm was able to perfectly separate the documents according to language and was able to reproduce its results. It also had high accuracy and reproducibility when separating 23,000 scientific papers and 1.2 million Wikipedia articles by topic.<br />
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These results show the need for more testing of big data algorithms and more research into making them more accurate and reproducible, Amaral said.<br />
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"Companies that make products must show that their products work," he said. "They must be certified. There is no such case for algorithms. We have a lot of uninformed consumers of big data algorithms that are using tools that haven't been tested for reproducibility and accuracy."Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-37047431302831668322015-01-09T20:44:00.001+00:002015-01-09T20:44:11.482+00:00Top 10 Clever Google Search Tricks by Whitson Gordon<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://lifehacker.com/top-10-clever-google-search-tricks-1450186165">http://lifehacker.com/top-10-clever-google-search-tricks-1450186165</a></span><br />
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10. Use Google to Search Certain Sites</h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">If you really like a web site but its search tool isn't very good, fret not—Google almost always does a better job, and you can use it to </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/5714674/how-to-search-lifehackercom-using-google" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">search that site with a simple operator</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">. For example, if you want to find an old Lifehacker article, just type </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">site:lifehacker.com</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> before your search terms (e.g. </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">site:lifehacker.com hackintosh</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">). The same goes for your favorite forums, blogs, and even web services. In fact, it's actually really good for </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/5939022/score-free-audiobooks-from-audible-with-a-simple-google-search" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">finding free audiobooks</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, </span><a href="https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Areddit.com+free+%E2%80%9Cwordpress+templates%E2%80%9D" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">searching for free stuff without the spam</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, and more.</span></div>
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9. Find Product Names, Recipes, and More with Reverse Image Search</h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">Google's reverse image search is great if you're looking for the source of a photo, wallpaper, or more images like that. However, reverse image search is also great for </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/5994415/what-have-you-used-reverse-image-search-for" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">searching out information</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">—like finding out who makes the chair in this picture, or how do I make the meal in this photo. Just </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/clever-uses-for-reverse-image-search-473032092" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">punch in an image like you normally would</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, but look at Google's regular results instead of the image results—you'll probably find a lot.</span></div>
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8. Get "Wildcard" Suggestions Through Autocomplete</h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">A lot of advanced search engines let you put a * in the middle of your terms to denote "anything." </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/130814/google-school--wildcards" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">Google does too</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, but it doesn't always work the way you want. However, you can still get wildcard suggestions, of a sort, by typing in a full phrase in Google and then </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/5583436/get-wildcard-suggestions-in-google-autocomplete" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">deleting the word you want to replace</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">. For example, you can search for </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">how to jailbreak an iphone</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">and remove one word to see all the suggestions for </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">how to ____ an iphone</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">.</span></div>
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7. Find Free Downloads of Any Type</h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">Ever needed an old Android app but couldn't find the APK for what you were looking for? Or wanted an MP3 but couldn't find the right version? Google has a few search tools that, when used together, can unlock a plethora of downloads: </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">inurl</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">intitle</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, and </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">filetype</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">. For example, to find free Android APKs, you'd search for </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" apk</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> to see site indexes of stored APK files. You can use this to find </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/5692131/use-custom-google-searches-to-find-android-apk-installers-and-live-wallpapers" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">Android apps</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/207672/turn-google-into-your-own-personal-free-napster" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">music files</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/103617/how-to-find-ebooks-using-google" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">free ebooks</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/288472/find-free-comic-books" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">comic books</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, and more. Check out the linked posts for more information.</span></div>
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6. Discover Alternatives to Popular Sites, Apps, and Products</h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">You've probably searched for comparisons on Google before, like </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">roku vs apple tv</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">. But what if you don't know what you want to compare a product too, or you want to see what other competitors are out there? Just type in </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">roku vs</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> and </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/5944579/discover-popular-alternative-products-with-google-autocomplete" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">see what Google's autocomplete adds</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">. It'll most likely list the most popular competitors to the roku so you know what else to check out.</span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/260468/compare-items-with-google" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">You can also search</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> for </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">better than roku</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> to see alternatives, too.</span></div>
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5. Access Google Cache Directly from the Search Bar</h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">We all know Google Cache can be a great tool, but there's no need to search for the page and then hunt for that "Cached" link: just type </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">cache:</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> before that site's URL (e.g. </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">cache:http://lifehacker.com</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">). If Google has the site in its cache, </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/5983944/quickly-access-google-cached-pages-with-the-cache-search-operator" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">it'll pull it right up for you</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">. If you want to simplify the process even more, </span><a href="http://ostermiller.org/bookmarklets/cache.html" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">this bookmarklet</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> is handy to have around. It's great for seeing an old version of a page, </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/5957631/how-to-access-web-sites-when-theyre-down" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">accessing a site when it's down</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">, or </span><a href="http://www.maximumpc.com/article/how-tos/sopa_protests_how_use_google_cache_view_blacked-out_websites" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">getting past something like the SOPA blackout</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">.</span></div>
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4. Bypass Paywalls, Blocked Sites, and More with a Google Proxy</h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">You may already know that you can sometimes bypass paywalls, get around blocked sites, and download files by </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/access-blocked-sites-at-school-or-work-with-google-tran-1440764030" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">funneling a site through Google Translate</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> or Google Mobilizer. That's a clever search trick in and of itself, but just like Google Cache, you can make the process a lot faster by</span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/use-google-as-a-proxy-server-to-bypass-paywalls-and-oth-799030304" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">keeping a few URLs on hand</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">. Just add the URL you want to visit to the end of the Google URL (e.g. </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&u=http://example.com/</code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">and you're good to go. Check out the full list of proxies, along with bookmarklets to make them even easier, </span><a href="http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-proxy-server/28112/" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">.</span></div>
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3. Search for People on Google Images</h3>
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Some people's names are also real-world objects—like "Rose" or "Paris." If you're looking for a person and not a flower, just search for rose and add to <code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; padding: 0px 7px;">&imgtype=face</code>the end of your search URL, as shown above. Google will redo the search but return results that it recognizes as faces!</div>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">Update: Reader <a href="http://unclghost.kinja.com/" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">unclghost</a> kindly pointed out that we're working with outdated information here—this trick is now built into Google's UI! Just head to Search Tools > Type and you can choose from faces, photos, clip art, line drawings, and even animations. Thanks for the tip!</em></div>
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2. Get More Precise Time-Based Search Results</h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">You've probably seen the option in Google that lets you filter results by time, such as the past hour, day, or week. But if you want something more specific—like in the past 10 minutes—you can </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/5888012/get-real+time-search-results-from-google-with-a-url-tweak" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">do so with a URL hack</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">. Just add </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">&<strong style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">tbs=qdr:</strong></code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> to the end of the URL, along with the time you want to search (which can include </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">h5</strong></code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> for 5 hours, </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">n5</strong></code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> for 5 minutes, or </span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">s5</strong></code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> for 5 seconds (substituting any number you want). So, to search within th past 10 minutes, you'd add</span><code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; padding: 0px 7px;">&<strong style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">tbs=qdr:n10</strong></code><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">to your URL. It's handy for getting the most up-to-the-minute news.</span></div>
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1. Refine Your Search Terms with Advanced Operators</h3>
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Okay, so this isn't so much a "clever use" than it is a tool everyone should have in their pocket. For everything Google can do, so few of us actually use the tools at our disposal. You probably already know you can search multiple terms with AND or OR, but have you ever used AROUND? AROUND is a halfway point between regular search terms (like <code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; padding: 0px 7px;">white teeth</code>) and using quotes (like <code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; padding: 0px 7px;">"white teeth"</code>). AROUND(2), for example, ensures that the two words are close to each other, but not necessarily in a specific order. You can tweak the range with a higher or lower number in the parentheses.</div>
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Similarly, if you want to exclude a word entirely, you can add a dash before it—like <code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; padding: 0px 7px;">justin bieber -sucks</code> if you want sites that only speak of Justin Bieber in a positive light. You can also use this to exclude other parameters—like excluding a site you don't like (<code style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; display: inline-block; font-family: Courier, monospace; padding: 0px 7px;">troubleshooting mac -site:experts-exchange.com</code>). Check out <a href="http://lifehacker.com/5739284/the-best-ways-to-tweak-your-search-when-google-doesnt-give-you-what-you-want" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">our guide to tweaking your Google searches</a> for more of these tips, and you can also find a <a href="http://www.marcandangel.com/2007/07/25/7-clever-google-tricks-worth-knowing/" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">pretty solid list over at weblog Marc and Angel Hack Life</a>. Search on!</div>
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Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-29260760941414363712015-01-09T20:30:00.002+00:002015-01-09T21:02:27.978+00:00Find In-Depth Articles on Google with a URL Trick by Whitson Gordon (works in America only)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://lifehacker.com/find-in-depth-articles-on-google-with-a-url-trick-1678500306">http://lifehacker.com/find-in-depth-articles-on-google-with-a-url-trick-1678500306</a></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF_bOvmWPMnLPXhRnWkSfGlG8vaQuPFgbFEhqdqxQ6oTkvwpfd5FDjeeH9TT5MJNNIkh1wgRsYyUhbwf-vA2E2sTILczZXdAQfuVo9nUTz3XlT_XLIbfTOhbygZyX4EkC-peRn-Y0sD1Eh/s1600/vqbkprfnw9mozpbhcgeb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF_bOvmWPMnLPXhRnWkSfGlG8vaQuPFgbFEhqdqxQ6oTkvwpfd5FDjeeH9TT5MJNNIkh1wgRsYyUhbwf-vA2E2sTILczZXdAQfuVo9nUTz3XlT_XLIbfTOhbygZyX4EkC-peRn-Y0sD1Eh/s1600/vqbkprfnw9mozpbhcgeb.jpg" height="225" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">If </span><a href="http://lifehacker.com/top-10-clever-google-search-tricks-1450186165" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #709602; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; text-decoration: none;" x-inset="1">your Google search</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;"> just isn't returning the quality content you want, this little URL trick might find more in-depth articles on the subject you're searching for.</span><br />
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Alex Chitu at Google Operating System recently discovered that Google has a section for "in-depth articles", from which it features longer posts from sites like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Wired, The Economist, and more. It only seems to work in the US, and it only pops up sometimes—but you can manually bring it up by adding this to the end of your search URL:<span class="annotation-footnote-wrapper clearfix" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block;"></span><span class="annotateButton js_text-annotate text-annotation-button icon icon-plus-circle" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.1s linear; -webkit-user-select: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; font-family: KinjaIcons; font-size: 16px; height: 16px; left: auto; line-height: 16px; margin-left: 7px; opacity: 0; position: relative; text-align: center; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; transition: all 0.1s linear; vertical-align: middle; width: 16px;"></span></div>
<pre data-textannotation-id="21603a19a1b3b2aab74f952c8fce4e87" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.498039) 0px 0px 5px 0px inset; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-family: Courier, monospace; font-size: 0.9375rem; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 1.5rem; overflow: auto; padding: 1.125rem; width: auto; word-break: break-all;">&tbs=ida:1&gl=us</pre>
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It doesn't work all the time, and it's certainly a bit limiting, but it's worth a shot if Google just isn't giving you the kind of results you want. </div>
Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-60684345413479934182014-12-10T11:12:00.003+00:002014-12-10T11:12:38.243+00:00There is nothing new about the Knowledge Café or is there? by David Gurteen<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;"><span style="color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141208122315-343667-there-is-nothing-new-about-the-knowledge-caf%C3%A9-or-is-there">https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141208122315-343667-there-is-nothing-new-about-the-knowledge-caf%C3%A9-or-is-there</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">There is nothing new about the </span><a href="http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/kcafe" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 23.9999980926514px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Knowledge Café</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;"> or is there? </span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">When people say that something is not new, they usually mean that they are familiar with the concept and its in common practice. </span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">To my mind, when this objection is levelled at the Knowledge Cafe - it means that they do not fully understand it. </span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">When I look at how organizations operate and the behaviours of people in organizations - it is quite apparent that people are either not aware of the fundamental principles and the power of good conversation or they understand them but do not to change their way of doing things either out of habit, laziness or choice. </span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">Why in meetings and presentations are we still so dependent on Powerpoint? Why is the dominant format of a talk, a long presentation with lots of Powerpoint slides and a very short time for Q&A? Why is no time included for reflection and no time for conversations amongst the participants in order for them to engage with the topic or issue? Why do we insist on talking at each other rather than with each other. </span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">Why is the dominant layout of our meeting rooms: either lecture style or large tables, when we know from experience and observation that these layouts are not conducive to good conversation? The </span><a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.8.4348" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 23.9999980926514px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">research shows</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;"> that good conversations take place in small groups of 3 or 4 people sitting around a small round table or even no table at all. </span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">Why in meetings, especially those where the people do not know each other well, do we not allow time for </span><a href="http://spp.sagepub.com/content/2/3/253" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 23.9999980926514px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">socialisation and relationship building</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;"> before getting down to business when again the research shows that such socialisation improves people's cognitive skills. Why are circles rarely used in meeting's when the research and our own personal experience demonstrates their power? </span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">Why do managers and facilitators seek to control meetings so tightly and are afraid of negative talk or dissent. By surpressing people's fears, doubts and uncertainties - you do not eliminate them - you just drive them underground. </span><a href="http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/peter-block" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 23.9999980926514px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Peter Block</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;"> says "Yes" has no meaning if there is not the option to say "No". You need to bring people's doubts and fears out into the open and talk about them at length. </span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">And why when we know from </span><a href="http://advance.njit.edu/doc/Gender,%20Collaboration%20&%20Group%20Intelligence.pdf" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 23.9999980926514px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">research</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;"> that group intelligence relates to how members of a team talk to each other. That it depends on the social sensitivity of the group members and on the readiness of the group to allow members to take equal turns in the conversation. And that groups where one person dominates are less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns are more evenly distributed, do we allow the same old people to dominate the conversations in our meetings and do nothing to encourage the quieter ones to engage and speak up. </span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">The Knowledge Cafe may not be totally new but it addresses all these issues and more but as a conversational method is still sadly very poorly adopted. </span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">In fact in many organizations conversation is seen as wasting time. But slowly this is changing. More and more people are starting to understand the power of conversation and take a conversational approach to the way that they connect, relate and work with each other. They see themselves as </span><a href="http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/conversational-leadership" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #7b539d; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 23.9999980926514px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Conversational Leaders</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4f51; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: 23.9999980926514px;">.</span>Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-6758684090494069782014-11-12T20:27:00.000+00:002014-11-12T20:27:33.694+00:00The Most Hilarious Proofreading Mistake in a Scientific Paper Ever by George Dvorsky<a href="http://io9.com/the-most-hilarious-proofreading-mistake-in-a-scientific-1657839235">http://io9.com/the-most-hilarious-proofreading-mistake-in-a-scientific-1657839235</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcM52-x2Ny8zdWifvfD9zKqdsEYQsZr0ljqVgfobBSASRmjQq4hlw1ni1cVg6g9CZl-bdrNvidqlfl30zwtIQyNIHp8f2JVbNfk5RQd17U5ikbcPZ74hFXs1iHr4lvMDriDnQSfCRowQnJ/s1600/B2H0FfkCEAQXA2E.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcM52-x2Ny8zdWifvfD9zKqdsEYQsZr0ljqVgfobBSASRmjQq4hlw1ni1cVg6g9CZl-bdrNvidqlfl30zwtIQyNIHp8f2JVbNfk5RQd17U5ikbcPZ74hFXs1iHr4lvMDriDnQSfCRowQnJ/s400/B2H0FfkCEAQXA2E.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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This is an actual quote from a scientific paper, published recently — and apparently without editing. Apparently the authors didn't think much of one of the papers they were citing. And their publisher didn't bother to edit out their pre-publication snark.</div>
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Ugh, this is not the kind of thing you want to see in a scientific journal. It makes us lose faith in peer review, and by consequence, the scientific method itself.</div>
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Four months after being published, someone finally noticed that a fish mating paper in the journal <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">Ethology</em> — "<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eth.12282/abstract" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Variation in Melanism and Female Preference in Proximate but Ecologically Distinct Environments</a>" — contained a rather embarrassing passage that both the authors and the peer reviewers failed to notice.</div>
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As <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">Retraction Watch</em> <a href="http://retractionwatch.com/2014/11/11/overly-honest-references-should-we-cite-the-crappy-gabor-paper-here/" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">reported</a> yesterday, the journal quickly removed the paper after the issue was brought to light.</div>
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Later, corresponding author Zach Culumber told <em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">Retraction Watch</em>:</div>
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No, this was not intentional. It was added into the paper by a co-author during revision (after peer-review). It was unfortunately an oversight that became incorporated into the paper during the process of sending the manuscript back and forth between co-authors. The comment in question was not spotted during the proofing process with the journal. Neither myself nor any of the co-authors have any ill-will towards any other investigators, and I would never condone this sentiment towards another person or their work. We are working with the Journal now to correct the mistake. As the corresponding author, I apologize for the error.</div>
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Wiley says it's going to investigate the error and republish a corrected version as soon as possible, which now appears to have been done.</div>
Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-65896471257910671202014-11-09T09:42:00.001+00:002014-11-09T09:45:14.426+00:00Does Media Violence Predict Societal Violence? It Depends on What You Look at and When by Christopher J. Ferguson<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcom.12129/pdf"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcom.12129/pdf</b></span></a><br />
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<b>ABSTRACT:</b><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This article presents 2 studies of the association of media violence rates with societal violence rates. In the first study, movie violence and homicide rates are examined across the 20th century and into the 21st (1920–2005). Throughout the mid-20th century small-to-moderate correlational relationships can be observed between movie violence and homicide rates in the United States. This trend reversed in the early and latter 20th century, with movie violence rates inversely related to homicide rates. In the second study, videogame violence consumption is examined against youth violence rates in the previous 2 decades. Videogame consumption is associated with a decline in youth violence rates. Results suggest that societal consumption of media violence is not predictive of increased societal violence rates.</span>Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-90108714771307587572014-10-21T09:12:00.001+01:002014-10-21T09:12:28.486+01:00Popular Mechanics: 6 Warning Signs That a Scientific Study is Bogus<a href="http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/6-warning-signs-that-a-scientific-study-is-bogus-16674141">http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/6-warning-signs-that-a-scientific-study-is-bogus-16674141</a><br />
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<strong>Was the Paper Published in a Peer-Reviewed Journal?</strong></h3>
<br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">"If it wasn't, you have no reason to trust it," says Ivan Oransky, former executive editor at Reuters and cofounder of the blog Retraction Watch. "The peer-review system, as flawed as it is, stands between us and really poor science." Also, find out if the journal or its publisher is on Jeffrey Beall's list of questionable open-access journals, at </span><a href="http://www.scholarlyoa.com/" style="background-color: white; color: #1d84b8; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">scholarlyoa.com</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><br />
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<strong>What is the Journal's Impact Factor?</strong></h3>
<br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">The impact factor is the average number of times a journal's papers are cited by other researchers. You can usually find this information on the journal's home page or by searching "impact factor" along with its name. Check out the impact factor of other journals in that field of research to see how they compare.</span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"> </b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><br />
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<strong>Do the Researchers Cite Their Own Papers?</strong></h3>
<br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">If so, this is a red flag that they are promoting views that fall outside the scientific consensus. Citations are listed at the end of a paper. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><br />
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<strong>How Many Test Subjects Were Used?</strong></h3>
<br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">A large number of test subjects makes a study more robust and reduces the likelihood that the results are random. In general, the more questions a paper asks, the greater its sample size should be. Most reliable papers contain something called a </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">p</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">-value, which measures the probability (</span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">p</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">) that a study's results occurred by random chance. In science a </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">p</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">-value of 0.05 suggests the study's conclusions may be meaningful. Smaller </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">p</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">-values are better. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><br />
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<strong>Does it Rely on Correlation?</strong></h3>
<br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Cigarette smoking has declined dramatically in the U.S. in the past few decades, and so has the national homicide rate. But just because two events occur at the same time doesn't mean that one caused the other. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><br />
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<strong>Have the Results Been Reproduced?</strong></h3>
<br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">To find out, search the paper's name on Google Scholar and click on the Cited By link beneath the name. This will list other researchers who mention the paper in their own publications, and may also give you a clearer view of how other researchers critiqued the paper. </span>Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-12164229837005731382014-10-02T08:46:00.000+01:002014-10-02T08:46:11.973+01:00Jane Goodall On The Importance Of Empathy In Science<div style="text-align: center;">
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Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-85650571632482187442014-08-18T10:04:00.001+01:002014-08-18T10:04:20.704+01:00Surveys Can Make People Go Extreme by Esther Inglis-Arkell<a href="http://io9.com/surveys-can-make-people-go-extreme-1621840701"><span style="font-size: large;">http://io9.com/surveys-can-make-people-go-extreme-1621840701</span></a><br />
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There are all kinds of reasons why people don't tell the truth when asked questions. Sometimes they suddenly turn into fanatics. They hate, or love, anything. Here's how you catch people when they go extreme, or when they try to just get along.</div>
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We already know that people deliberately lie when given surveys on <a href="http://jezebel.com/everyones-still-lying-about-sex-510458747" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">sex </a>and <a href="http://io9.com/have-you-ever-gotten-high-on-derbisol-1520473039" sl-processed="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;">drugs</a>, but they also lie when given surveys about the importance of flossing and whether people should smoke in shopping malls. The difference is, many people don't even know that they're lying. People are driven to exaggerate (or even invent) their likes and dislikes, and so when they're asked to score, from one to five, their support for an issue or agreement with a statement, they avoid the middle and go right for one and for five.</div>
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This bias, called "extreme response bias" has annoyed many manufacturers, or politicians, who believed their targeted audience was passionately in favor of a new flavor of coke or a ban on littering, trotted the idea out, and gotten a lackluster response. Sometimes people are actually passionate about a subject, and sometimes they just want to be that way. Researchers took a look at separating out the two. They came up with a few guidelines to tell if people were inflating their opinions.</div>
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First of all, the more options you give a person, the more likely they are to go for the fringe opinion. A survey asking people to rate their experience on a scale of one to five will get far fewer extreme responses than a survey that asks people to rate their experience on a scale from one to ten. Individually, people with more education tend to be less extreme in their responses. The most telling variable, though, is another kind of bias.</div>
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Acquiescence bias is the tendency of a surveyed individual to go along with whatever the surveyor suggests. This is why researchers agonize over trying to make each question as neutral as possible. Ask people "don't you think smoking should be completely banned in malls," and they will tend to say yes. Ask them, "don't you think people should be allowed to smoke in public malls," and they will also tend to say yes. In order to be accurate, researchers can't tip their hands and let people know what answer they expect, or want. If, on the other hand, what the researchers want is to tell how many people responding to their questions are just going along with it, they can put out two surveys, one with a question that tips people one way, and one with a re-worded version of the question that tips people the other way.</div>
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Acquiescence bias tends to be a harbinger of extreme response. If people aren't going to be honest - either with the surveyors or themselves - they're at least going to be enthusiastically dishonest. So the more acquiescence everyone gets, the more extremity they should expect to see.</div>
Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-31129799701841725122014-07-25T16:12:00.003+01:002014-07-25T16:12:22.836+01:00New algorithm identifies data subsets that will yield the most reliable predictions by Larry Hardesty<a href="http://phys.org/news/2014-07-algorithm-subsets-yield-reliable.html#jCp" style="background-color: white; color: #313d57; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; outline: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">http://phys.org/news/2014-07-algorithm-subsets-yield-reliable.html#jCp</span></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Much artificial-intelligence research addresses the problem of making predictions based on large data sets. An obvious example is the recommendation engines at retail sites like Amazon and Netflix.</span><br />
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But some types of data are harder to collect than online click histories —information about geological formations thousands of feet underground, for instance. And in other applications—such as trying to predict the path of a storm—there may just not be enough time to crunch all the available data.</div>
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Dan Levine, an MIT graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics, and his advisor, Jonathan How, the Richard Cockburn Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, have developed a new technique that could help with both problems. For a range of common applications in which data is either difficult to collect or too time-consuming to process, the technique can identify the subset of data items that will yield the most reliable predictions. So geologists trying to assess the extent of underground petroleum deposits, or meteorologists trying to forecast the weather, can make do with just a few, targeted measurements, saving time and money.</div>
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Levine and How, who presented their work at the Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence conference this week, consider the special case in which something about the relationships between data items is known in advance. Weather prediction provides an intuitive example: Measurements of temperature, pressure, and wind velocity at one location tend to be good indicators of measurements at adjacent locations, or of measurements at the same location a short time later, but the correlation grows weaker the farther out you move either geographically or chronologically.</div>
Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-23571979598352265442014-07-22T11:56:00.002+01:002014-07-22T11:59:45.263+01:00Emotional Contagion on Facebook? More Like Bad Research Methods by JOHN M. GROHOL, PSY.D. <a href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/"><span style="font-size: large;">http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/</span></a><br />
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A study (Kramer et al., 2014) was recently published that showed something <em>astonishing</em> — people altered their emotions and moods based upon the presence or absence of other people’s positive (and negative) moods, as expressed on Facebook status updates. The researchers called this effect an “emotional contagion,” because they purported to show that our friends’ words on our Facebook news feed directly affected our own mood.<br />
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Nevermind that the researchers never actually measured anyone’s mood.<br />
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And nevermind that the study has a fatal flaw. One that other research has also overlooked — making all these researchers’ findings a bit suspect.<br />
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Putting aside the ridiculous language used in these kinds of studies (really, emotions spread like a “contagion”?), these kinds of studies often arrive at their findings by conducting <em>language analysis</em> on tiny bits of text. On Twitter, they’re really tiny — less than 140 characters. Facebook status updates are rarely more than a few sentences. The researchers don’t actually measure anybody’s mood.<br />
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So how do you conduct such language analysis, especially on 689,003 status updates? Many researchers turn to an automated tool for this, something called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count application (LIWC 2007). This software application is described by its authors as:<br />
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<i>The first LIWC application was developed as part of an exploratory study of language and disclosure (Francis, 1993; Pennebaker, 1993). As described below, the second version, LIWC2007, is an updated revision of the original application.</i></blockquote>
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Note those dates. Long before social networks were founded, the LIWC was created to analyze large bodies of text — like a book, article, scientific paper, an essay written in an experimental condition, blog entries, or a transcript of a <a href="http://psychcentral.com/psychotherapy/" style="color: #006688;" title="therapy">therapy</a> session. Note the one thing all of these share in common — they are of good length, at minimum 400 words.<br />
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Why would researchers use a tool not designed for short snippets of text to, well… analyze short snippets of text? Sadly, it’s because this is one of the few tools available that can process large amounts of text fairly quickly.<br />
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Who Cares How Long the Text is to Measure?</h3>
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You might be sitting there scratching your head, wondering why it matters how long the text it is you’re trying to analyze with this tool. One sentence, 140 characters, 140 pages… Why would length matter?<br />
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Length matters because the tool actually isn’t very good at analyzing text in the manner that Twitter and Facebook researchers have tasked it with. When you ask it to analyze positive or negative sentiment of a text, it simply counts negative and positive words within the text under study. For an article, essay or blog entry, this is fine — it’s going to give you a pretty accurate overall summary analysis of the article since most articles are more than 400 or 500 words long.</div>
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For a tweet or status update, however, this is a horrible analysis tool to use. That’s because it wasn’t designed to differentiate — and in fact, <em>can’t</em> differentiate — a negation word in a sentence.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#footnote_0_59624" id="identifier_0_59624" style="color: #006688;" title="This according to an inquiry to the LIWC developers who replied, "LIWC doesn’t currently look at whether there is a negation term near a positive or negative emotion term word in its scoring and it would be difficult to come up with an effective algorithm for this anyway."">1</a></sup><br />
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Let’s look at two hypothetical examples of why this is important. Here are two sample tweets (or status updates) that are not uncommon:</div>
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An independent rater or judge would rate these two tweets as negative — they’re clearly expressing a negative emotion. That would be +2 on the negative scale, and 0 on the positive scale.<br />
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But the LIWC 2007 tool doesn’t see it that way. Instead, it would rate these two tweets as scoring +2 for positive (because of the words “great” and “happy”) and +2 for negative (because of the word “not” in both texts).<br />
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That’s a huge difference if you’re interested in unbiased and accurate data collection and analysis.<br />
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And since much of human communication includes subtleties such as this — without even delving into sarcasm, short-hand abbreviations that act as negation words, phrases that negate the previous sentence, emojis, etc. — you can’t even tell how accurate or inaccurate the resulting analysis by these researchers is. Since the LIWC 2007 ignores these subtle realities of informal human communication,<em> so do the researchers</em>.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#footnote_1_59624" id="identifier_1_59624" style="color: #006688;" title="I could find no mention of the limitations of the use of the LIWC as a language analysis tool for purposes it was never designed or intended for in the present study, or other studies I've examined.">2</a></sup><br />
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Perhaps it’s because the researchers have no idea how bad the problem actually is. Because they’re simply sending all this “big data” into the language analysis engine, without actually understanding how the analysis engine is flawed. Is it 10 percent of all tweets that include a negation word? Or 50 percent? Researchers couldn’t tell you.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#footnote_2_59624" id="identifier_2_59624" style="color: #006688;" title="Well, they could tell you if they actually spent the time validating their method with a pilot study to compare against measuring people's actual moods. But these researchers failed to do this.">3</a></sup><br />
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Even if True, Research Shows Tiny Real World Effects</h3>
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Which is why I have to say that even if you believe this research at face value despite this <strong>huge methodological problem</strong>, you’re still left with research showing ridiculously small correlations that have little to no meaning to ordinary users.<br />
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For instance, Kramer et al. (2014) found a 0.07% — that’s not 7 percent, that’s 1/15th of one percent!! — decrease in negative words in people’s status updates when the number of negative posts on their Facebook news feed decreased. Do you know how many words you’d have to read or write before you’ve written one less negative word due to this effect? Probably thousands.</div>
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This isn’t an “effect” so much as a <strong>statistical blip</strong> that has no real-world meaning. The researchers themselves acknowledge as much, noting that their effect sizes were “small (as small as <em>d</em> = 0.001).” They go on to suggest it still matters because “small effects can have large aggregated consequences” citing a Facebook study on political voting motivation by one of the same researchers, and a 22 year old argument from a psychological journal.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#footnote_3_59624" id="identifier_3_59624" style="color: #006688;" title="There are some serious issues with the Facebook voting study, the least of which is attributing changes in voting behavior to one correlational variable, with a long list of assumptions the researchers made (and that you would have to agree with).">4</a></sup><br />
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But they contradict themselves in the sentence before, suggesting that emotion “is difficult to influence given the range of daily experiences that influence mood.” Which is it? Are Facebook status updates significantly impacting individual’s emotions, or are emotions not so easily influenced by simply reading other people’s status updates??<br />
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Despite all of these problems and limitations, none of it stops the researchers in the end from proclaiming, “These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#footnote_4_59624" id="identifier_4_59624" style="color: #006688;" title="A request for clarification and comment by the authors was not returned.">5</a></sup> Again, no matter that they didn’t actually measure a single person’s emotions or mood states, but instead relied on a flawed assessment measure to do so.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
What the Facebook researchers clearly show, in my opinion, is that they put too much faith in the tools they’re using without understanding — and discussing — the tools’ significant limitations.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#footnote_5_59624" id="identifier_5_59624" style="color: #006688;" title="This isn't a dig at the LIWC 2007, which can be an excellent research tool -- when used for the right purposes and in the right hands.">6</a></sup><br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<strong>Reference</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
Kramer, ADI, Guillory, JE, Hancock, JT. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. PNAS. <a href="http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1320040111">http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1320040111</a><br />
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 0.8em;"><strong>Footnotes:</strong></span></div>
<ol class="footnotes" style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 0.8em;">
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_0_59624" style="list-style-type: decimal; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">This according to an inquiry to the LIWC developers who replied, “LIWC doesn’t currently look at whether there is a negation term near a positive or negative emotion term word in its scoring and it would be difficult to come up with an effective algorithm for this anyway.” [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#identifier_0_59624" style="color: #006688;">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_1_59624" style="list-style-type: decimal; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">I could find no mention of the limitations of the use of the LIWC as a language analysis tool for purposes it was never designed or intended for in the present study, or other studies I’ve examined. [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#identifier_1_59624" style="color: #006688;">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_2_59624" style="list-style-type: decimal; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">Well, they could tell you if they actually spent the time validating their method with a pilot study to compare against measuring people’s actual moods. But these researchers failed to do this. [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#identifier_2_59624" style="color: #006688;">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_3_59624" style="list-style-type: decimal; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">There are some serious issues with the Facebook voting study, the least of which is attributing changes in voting behavior to one correlational variable, with a long list of assumptions the researchers made (and that you would have to agree with). [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#identifier_3_59624" style="color: #006688;">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_4_59624" style="list-style-type: decimal; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">A request for clarification and comment by the authors was not returned. [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#identifier_4_59624" style="color: #006688;">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_5_59624" style="list-style-type: decimal; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">This isn’t a dig at the LIWC 2007, which can be an excellent research tool — when used for the right purposes and in the right hands. [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/06/23/emotional-contagion-on-facebook-more-like-bad-research-methods/#identifier_5_59624" style="color: #006688;">↩</a>]</li>
</ol>
Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-59129148816477313562014-07-14T18:52:00.003+01:002014-07-14T18:52:23.528+01:00io9: Anti-Obamacare Ads Backfired, Says A New Statistical Analysis by Mark Strauss<div class="first-text" data-textannotation-id="052892efb37eedb32a0304595a714237" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 1.25rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://io9.com/anti-obamacare-ads-backfired-says-a-new-statistical-an-1604627451">http://io9.com/anti-obamacare-ads-backfired-says-a-new-statistical-an-1604627451</a></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqBirinyAxhyphenhyphenWCdNtVAIq68WFR-MCwjlTx668-qc0BJHVZad1Xms34tmCnic1HXXWldZA9b4tivnHsK-PG7curp8sMuCht-yi6tKn7EDUUqWGiCMOr5GgIuLiB9pWWUQ_-TJemTtzJnfYE/s1600/x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqBirinyAxhyphenhyphenWCdNtVAIq68WFR-MCwjlTx668-qc0BJHVZad1Xms34tmCnic1HXXWldZA9b4tivnHsK-PG7curp8sMuCht-yi6tKn7EDUUqWGiCMOr5GgIuLiB9pWWUQ_-TJemTtzJnfYE/s1600/x.jpg" height="253" width="400" /></a></div>
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Opponents of the Affordable Care Act have spent an estimated $450 million on political ads attacking the law, outspending supporters of Obamacare 15-to-1. But a state-by-state comparison of negative ads and enrollment figures suggests the attacks ads actually increased public awareness of the healthcare program.</div>
<div data-textannotation-id="8b7291aa25e3ae1b9190617d95dc4783" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 0.9375rem; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1.25rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">
Niam Yaraghi, a Brookings Institution expert on the economics of healthcare, based his analysis on <a href="http://mycmag.kantarmediana.com/misc/Anti-ACA_political_advertising.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">recently released data</a> (below) that tallies how much money was spent on anti-Obamacare ads in each state.</div>
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He then examined Affordable Care Act (ACA) data to determine enrollment ratios. Although more than 8 million Americans have signed-up to purchase health insurance through the marketplaces during the first open enrollment period, that number masks the tremendous variation in participation across states. For instance, while the enrollment percentage in Minnesota is slightly above 5%, in Vermont, close to 50%of all eligible individuals have signed up for Obamacare.</div>
<div data-textannotation-id="751fe88bd79785681471cb170ae7633c" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 0.9375rem; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 1.25rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">
Yataghi found that after controlling for other state characteristics such as low per capita income population and average insurance premiums, he observed a positive association between the anti-ACA spending and enrollment:</div>
<blockquote data-textannotation-id="c99b60063938330cf5b0d3454ac89022" style="background-color: whitesmoke; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.6; margin: 7px 0px 15px; overflow: visible; padding: 20px 25px; word-wrap: break-word;">
<div data-textannotation-id="7aaeeec37127cabcf93ea4d99d0763a8" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem; line-height: 1.6; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">
This implies that anti-ACA ads may unintentionally increase the public awareness about the existence of a governmentally subsidized service and its benefits for the uninsured. On the other hand, an individual's prediction about the chances of repealing the ACA may be associated with the volume of advertisements against it. In the states where more anti-ACA ads are aired, residents were on average more likely to believe that Congress will repeal the ACA in the near future. People who believe that subsidized health insurance may soon disappear could have a greater willingness to take advantage of this one time opportunity.</div>
</blockquote>
<div data-textannotation-id="a2ca8b1a2e9e406f7ac3e7b4c40aec99" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 0.9375rem; line-height: 1.6; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-break: break-word;">
[Sources: <a href="http://mycmag.kantarmediana.com/misc/Anti-ACA_political_advertising.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Kantar Media CMAG</a> and the <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/techtank/posts/2014/07/9-anti-aca-ads-backfire" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #c34b9e; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Brookings Institution</a>]</div>
Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-73707629345319972432014-04-10T10:55:00.001+01:002014-04-10T10:55:42.744+01:00How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists<strong>Before you begin: some general advice</strong><br />
Reading a scientific paper is a completely different process than
reading an article about science in a blog or newspaper. Not only do you
read the sections in a different order than they’re presented, but you
also have to take notes, read it multiple times, and probably go look up
other papers for some of the details. Reading a single paper may take
you a very long time at first. Be patient with yourself. The process
will go much faster as you gain experience.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://violentmetaphors.com/2013/08/25/how-to-read-and-understand-a-scientific-paper-2/">http://violentmetaphors.com/2013/08/25/how-to-read-and-understand-a-scientific-paper-2/</a> Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-60034912366596311222014-03-24T09:37:00.002+00:002014-03-24T09:37:35.878+00:00Use the "Triple Nod" in Interviews<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/vxIlhOI_yI8" width="560"></iframe></div>
<i><br /></i>
<i>The triple nod is the non-verbal equivalent of the ellipses. It is a
nonverbal cue for someone to keep talking. If you are introverted and
aren't great at making conversations, you want to encourage the person
you are speaking with to keep talking. Once they are done speaking and
pause, nod three times in quick succession and they will often continue.
If not, you can pick up where the conversation left off, but this is a
great way of showing engagement and lengthening a discussion.<span class="text-annotation-footnote-wrapper"></span></i>Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-80346933007168339522014-02-27T09:51:00.001+00:002014-02-27T09:51:54.087+00:00Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers by Richard Van Noorden<h2>
Conference proceedings removed from subscription databases after scientist reveals that they were computer-generated.</h2>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTGi4DHm8oRxg8VFvY_COJfvechClfmczQLoo7UxiMdRbxU89NSstyUK6qy-p1BzK1gN8quLIvf-C5VSzd0TNX4Hmra9V4PyTRrJdkoA_9Tn64FRZ0vBEX2GoHudWR-xxq2Szw8PaSDfxf/s1600/retraction-B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTGi4DHm8oRxg8VFvY_COJfvechClfmczQLoo7UxiMdRbxU89NSstyUK6qy-p1BzK1gN8quLIvf-C5VSzd0TNX4Hmra9V4PyTRrJdkoA_9Tn64FRZ0vBEX2GoHudWR-xxq2Szw8PaSDfxf/s1600/retraction-B.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers
from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered
that the works were computer-generated nonsense.<br />
<br />
Over
the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier
University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers
that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between
2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is
headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published
by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in
New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say
that they are now removing the papers.<br />
<br />
Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply*; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).<br />
<br />
<i>*Update: One of the named authors replied to Nature News on 25
February. He said that he first learned of the article when conference
organizers notified his university in December 2013; and that he does
not know why he was a listed co-author on the paper. "The matter is
being looked into by the related investigators," he said. </i><br />
<h2>
<b> </b></h2>
<h2>
<b>How to create a nonsense paper</b></h2>
Labbé
developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece
of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to
produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by
researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in
Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers —
and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement” (see ‘<a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7036/full/nature03653.html">Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper</a>’). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website <a href="http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/">arXiv vs. snarXiv</a>.
SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people
have done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen’s output has occasionally
popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense
papers and then revealed the trick.<br />
<br />
Labbé does
not know why the papers were submitted — or even if the authors were
aware of them. Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of
the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations. Labbé has
emailed editors and authors named in many of the papers and related
conferences but received scant replies; one editor said that he did not
work as a program chair at a particular conference, even though he was
named as doing so, and another author claimed his paper was submitted on
purpose to test out a conference, but did not respond on follow-up. <i>Nature</i> has not heard anything from a few enquiries. <br />
<br />
“I wasn’t aware of the scale of the problem, but I knew it definitely
happens. We do get occasional e-mails from good citizens letting us
know where SCIgen papers show up,” says Jeremy Stribling, who co-wrote
SCIgen when he was at MIT and now works at VMware, a software company in
Palo Alto, California.<br />
“The papers are quite easy to spot,” says Labbé, who has built a <a href="http://scigendetection.imag.fr/main.php">website</a> where users can test whether papers have been created using SCIgen. His detection technique, described in a study<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763#b1" id="ref-link-1" title="Labbé, C. & Labbé, D. Scientometrics 94, 379–396 (2013).">1</a></sup> published in <i>Scientometrics</i>
in 2012, involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by
SCIgen. Shortly before that paper was published, Labbé informed the IEEE
of 85 fake papers he had found. Monika Stickel, director of corporate
communications at IEEE, says that the publisher “took immediate action
to remove the papers” and “refined our processes to prevent papers not
meeting our standards from being published in the future”. In December
2013, Labbé informed the IEEE of another batch of apparent SCIgen
articles he had found. Last week, those were also taken down, but the
web pages for the removed articles give no explanation for their
absence.<br />
Ruth Francis, UK head of
communications at Springer, says that the company has contacted editors,
and is trying to contact authors, about the issues surrounding the
articles that are coming down. The relevant conference proceedings were
peer reviewed, she confirms — making it more mystifying that the papers
were accepted.<br />
The IEEE would not say,
however, whether it had contacted the authors or editors of the
suspected SCIgen papers, or whether submissions for the relevant
conferences were supposed to be peer reviewed. “We continue to follow
strict governance guidelines for evaluating IEEE conferences and
publications,” Stickel said.<br />
<h2>
<b> </b></h2>
<h2>
<b>A long history of fakes</b></h2>
Labbé
is no stranger to fake studies. In April 2010, he used SCIgen to
generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antkare [see <a href="http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/71/35/64/PDF/TechReportV2.pdf">pdf</a>]. Labbé showed how easy it was to add these fake papers to the Google Scholar database, boosting Ike Antkare’s <i>h</i>-index,
a measure of published output, to 94 — at the time, making Antkare the
world's 21st most highly cited scientist. Last year, researchers at the
University of Granada, Spain, added to Labbé’s work, boosting their own
citation scores in Google Scholar by uploading six fake papers with long
lists to their own previous work<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763#b2" id="ref-link-2" title="López-Cózar, E. D., Robinson-García, N. & Torres-Salinas, D. J. Assoc. Inform. Sci. Technol. 65, 446–454 (2014).">2</a></sup>.<br />
<br />
Labbé
says that the latest discovery is merely one symptom of a “spamming war
started at the heart of science” in which researchers feel pressured to
rush out papers to publish as much as possible.<br />
There
is a long history of journalists and researchers getting spoof papers
accepted in conferences or by journals to reveal weaknesses in academic
quality controls — from a fake paper published by physicist Alan Sokal
of New York University in the journal <i>Social Text</i> in 1996, to a sting operation by US reporter John Bohannon <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full">published in<i> Science</i></a> in 2013, in which he got more than 150 open-access journals to accept a deliberately flawed study for publication.<br />
<br />
Labbé
emphasizes that the nonsense computer science papers all appeared in
subscription offerings. In his view, there is little evidence that
open-access publishers — which charge fees to publish manuscripts —
necessarily have less stringent peer review than subscription
publishers.<br />
<br />
Labbé adds that the nonsense
papers were easy to detect using his tools, much like the plagiarism
checkers that many publishers already employ. But because he could not
automatically download all papers from the subscription databases, he
cannot be sure that he has spotted every SCIgen-generated paper.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763">http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763</a>Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-78280653439420586672014-01-26T13:27:00.000+00:002014-01-26T13:36:51.569+00:00The changing face of psychology<div class="block-elements">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEAj_dvhbWPnve0H7k8uCELGfoFKskBfI0vjio9pgzOnoRkBYiMLe-NBwhy8V2MRRSCaqW5rY3-z6sw49ejxNsMtaCrnF3ZH1LVmu0OuFh8oIdokq3xQD80xma9GuNQLf1TBK-OQ7R0STp/s1600/Xray-head.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEAj_dvhbWPnve0H7k8uCELGfoFKskBfI0vjio9pgzOnoRkBYiMLe-NBwhy8V2MRRSCaqW5rY3-z6sw49ejxNsMtaCrnF3ZH1LVmu0OuFh8oIdokq3xQD80xma9GuNQLf1TBK-OQ7R0STp/s1600/Xray-head.jpeg" height="240" width="400" /> </a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Psychology is championing important changes
to culture and practice, including a greater emphasis on transparency,
reliability, and adherence to the scientific method. Photograph:
Sebastian Kaulitzki/Alamy
</div>
</div>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jan/24/the-changing-face-of-psychology">http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jan/24/the-changing-face-of-psychology</a></span><br />
<br />
<b>After 50 years of stagnation in research practices, psychology is leading reforms that will benefit all life sciences.</b><br />
<br />
In 1959, an American researcher named Ted Sterling reported something
disturbing. Of 294 articles published across four major psychology journals,
286 had reported positive results – that is, a staggering 97% of published papers were
underpinned by statistically significant effects. Where, he wondered, were all
the negative results – the less exciting or less conclusive findings? Sterling labelled
this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias">publication bias</a>
a form of malpractice. After all, getting published in science should never depend on getting
the “right results”.<br />
<br />
You might think that Sterling’s discovery would have led the psychologists
of 1959 to sit up and take notice. Groups would be assembled to combat
the problem, ensuring that the scientific record reflected a balanced sum of
the evidence. Journal policies would be changed, incentives realigned.<br />
<br />
Sadly, that never happened. Thirty-six years later, in 1995, Sterling
took another look at the literature and <a href="http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Class/Psy391P/Josephs%20PDF%20files/Sterling%20et%20al..PDF">found
exactly the same problem</a> – negative results were still being censored. Fifteen
years after that, Daniele Fanelli from the University of Edinburgh <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010068">confirmed
it yet again</a>. Publication bias had turned out to be the ultimate bad car
smell, a prime example of how irrational research practices can linger on and on. <br />
<br />
Now, finally, the tide is turning. A
growing number of psychologists – particularly the younger generation – are fed
up with results that don’t replicate, journals that value story-telling over
truth, and an academic culture in which researchers treat data as their personal
property. Psychologists are realising that major scientific advances will require us to stamp
out malpractice, face our own weaknesses, and overcome the ego-driven ideals that
maintain the status quo.<br />
Here are five key developments to watch in 2014.<br />
<b> </b><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>1. Replication</b></span><br />
<br />
<b>The problem:</b> The
best evidence for a genuine discovery is showing that independent scientists can replicate
it using the same method. If it replicates repeatedly then we can use it to build better
theories. If it doesn't then it belongs in the trash bin of history. This simple
logic underpins all science – without replication we’d still believe in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory">phlogiston</a> and faster-than-light
neutrinos.<br />
<br />
In psychology, attempts to closely reproduce previous methods
are rarely attempted. Psychologists tend to see such work as boring, lacking in
intellectual prowess, and a waste of limited resources. Some of the most
prominent psychology journals even have explicit policies <i>against</i>
publishing replications, instead offering readers a
diet of fast food: results that are novel, eye catching, and even
counter-intuitive. Exciting results are fine provided they replicate.
The problem is that nobody bothers to try, which litters the field with
results of unknown (likely low) value.<br />
<br />
<b>How it’s changing:</b>
The new generation of psychologists understands that independent replication is
crucial for real advancement and to earn wider credibility in science. A
beautiful example of this drive is the <a href="http://osf.io/api/v1/project/wx7ck/files/download/ManyLabsManuscript.pdf/version/1/">Many
Labs project</a> led by <a href="http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/">Brian Nosek</a>
from the University of Virginia. Nosek and a team of 50 colleagues located in 36
labs worldwide sought to replicate 13 key findings in psychology, across a
sample of 6,344 participants. Ten of the effects replicated successfully. <br />
<br />
Journals
are also beginning to respect the importance of replication. The prominent
outlet <a href="http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/replication">Perspectives
on Psychological Science</a> recently launched an initiative that
specifically publishes direct replications of previous studies.
Meanwhile, journals such as <a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/2050-7283/1/2">BMC Psychology</a> and <a href="http://www.plosone.org/">PLOS ONE</a> officially disown the requirement for researchers to report novel, positive findings.
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>2. Open Access </b></span><br />
<br />
<b>The problem:</b> Strictly
speaking, most psychology research <a href="http://svpow.com/2012/10/16/publish-means-make-public-paywalls-are-the-opposite-of-publishing/">isn’t
really “published”</a> – it is printed within journals that expressly
deny access to the public (unless
you are willing to pay for a personal subscription or spend £30+ on a
single
article). Some might say this is no different to traditional book
publishing, so what's the problem? But remember that the public being
denied access to science is the very same public that already funds most
psychology research, including the subscription fees for universities.
So why, you might ask, is
taxpayer-funded research invisible to the taxpayers that funded it? The
answer is complicated enough to fill a <a href="http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/">140-page government report</a>, but the short version is that the government places the business interests of corporate publishers ahead
of the public interest in accessing science.<br />
<br />
<b>How it’s changing:</b>
The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access">open access movement</a>
is growing in size and influence. Since April 2013, all research funded by UK
research councils, including psychology, <a href="http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/outputs.aspx">must now be fully open
access</a> – freely viewable to the public. Charities such as
the <a href="http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Policy-and-position-statements/WTD002766.htm">Wellcome
Trust</a> have similar policies. These moves help alleviate the symptoms
of closed access but don’t address the root cause, which is market
dominance by traditional subscription publishers. Rather than requiring
journals to make articles publicly
available, the research councils and charities are merely subsidising
those
publishers, in some cases paying them extra for open access on top of
their
existing subscription fees. What other business in society is paid
twice for a
product that it didn’t produce in the first place? It remains a mystery
who, other than the
publishers themselves, would call this bizarre set of circumstances a
“solution”.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>3. Open Science</b></span><br />
<br />
<b>The problem:</b> Data
sharing is crucial for science but rare in psychology. Even though ethical
guidelines require authors to share data when requested, such requests <a href="http://openpsychologydata.metajnl.com/article/view/jopd.e1/1">are usually
ignored or denied</a>, even when coming from other psychologists. Failing to publicly
share data makes it harder to do meta-analysis and easier for unscrupulous
researchers to get away with fraud. The most serious fraud cases, such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel">Diederik Stapel</a>, would
have been caught years earlier if journals required the raw data to be published alongside research articles.<br />
<br />
<b>How it’s changing:</b>
Data sharing isn’t yet mandatory, but it is gradually becoming unacceptable for
psychologists not to share. Evidence shows that <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026828">studies which share data tend to be more accurate and less likely to make statistical
errors</a>. Public repositories such as Figshare and the Open Science Framework
now make the act of sharing easy, and new journals including the <a href="http://openpsychologydata.metajnl.com/article/view/jopd.e1/1">Journal of
Open Psychology Data</a> have been launched specifically to provide authors
with a way of publicising data sharing.<br />
<br />
Some existing journals are also introducing rewards to
encourage data sharing. Since 2014, authors who share data at the journal <a href="http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2013/november-13/whats-new-at-psychological-science.html">Psychological
Science</a> will earn an <a href="http://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki/view/">Open Data
badge</a>, printed at the top of the article. Coordinated data sharing
carries all kinds of other benefits too – for instance, it allows future
researchers to run meta-analysis on huge volumes of existing data, answering
questions that simply can’t be tackled with smaller datasets. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>4. Bigger Data</b></span><br />
<br />
<b>The problem:</b> We’ve
known for decades that psychology research <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2254513">is statistically underpowered</a>.
What this means is that even when genuine phenomena exist, most
experiments
don’t have sufficiently large samples to detect them. The curse of low
power cuts both ways: not only is an underpowered experiment likely to
miss finding water
in the desert, it’s also more likely to lead us to a mirage.<br />
<br />
<b>How it’s changing:</b>
Psychologists are beginning to develop innovative ways to acquire larger
samples. An exciting approach is Internet testing, which enables easy
data collection from
thousands of participants. One recent study managed to <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0057410">replicate
10 major effects in psychology using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk</a>. Psychologists
are also starting to work alongside organisations that already collect large
amounts of useful data (and no, I don’t mean GCHQ). A great example is collaborative research
with online gaming companies. Tom Stafford from the University of Sheffield
recently published <a href="http://www.tomstafford.staff.shef.ac.uk/?p=221">an extraordinary study</a> of learning patterns in over 850,000 people by working
with a <a href="http://axon.wellcomeapps.com/">game developer</a>.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>5. Limiting Researcher "Degrees of Freedom"</b></span><br />
<br />
<b>The problem:</b> In psychology,
discoveries tend to be statistical. This means that to test a
particular hypothesis, say, about motor actions, we might measure the
difference in reaction times or response accuracy between two experimental conditions. Because the
measurements contain noise (or “unexplained variability”), we rely on
statistical tests to provide us with a level of certainty in the outcome. This
is different to other sciences where discoveries are more black and white, like
finding a new rock layer or observing a supernova.<br />
<br />
Whenever experiments rely on inferences from statistics,
researchers can exploit “degrees of freedom” in the analyses to produce
desirable outcomes. This might involve trying different ways of removing
statistical outliers or the effect of different statistical models, and then only reporting the approach that
“worked” best in producing attractive results. Just as buying all the tickets in a raffle guarantees a win,
exploiting researcher degrees of freedom can guarantee a false
discovery.<br />
<br />
The reason we fall into this trap is because of incentives and human nature. As
Sterling showed in 1959, psychology journals select which studies to publish not based
on the methods but on the <i>results</i>: getting published in the most prominent, career-making journals requires researchers to obtain novel,
positive, statistically significant effects. And because statistical significance
is an arbitrary threshold (<i>p</i><.05), researchers have every incentive to tweak their analyses
until the results cross the line. These behaviours are common in psychology –
a <a href="http://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/MeasPrevalQuestTruthTelling.pdf">recent survey</a> led by Leslie John from Harvard University estimated
that at least 60% of psychologists selectively report analyses that “work”. In many cases such behaviour <a href="http://www.stat.columbia.edu/%7Egelman/research/unpublished/p_hacking.pdf">may even be unconscious</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>How it’s changing:</b>
The best cure for researcher degrees of freedom is to <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/jun/05/trust-in-science-study-pre-registration">pre-register</a>
the predictions and planned analyses of experiments before looking at
the data.
This approach is standard practice in medicine because it helps prevent
the desires of the researcher from influencing the outcome. Among the
basic life sciences, psychology is now leading
the way in advancing pre-registration. The journals <a href="http://cdn.elsevier.com/promis_misc/PROMIS%20pub_idt_CORTEX%20Guidelines_RR_29_04_2013.pdf">Cortex</a>,
<a href="http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/98/art%3A10.3758%2Fs13414-013-0502-5.pdf?auth66=1390695209_f911af4c98cb2a7c61c84d57baaffb8e&ext=.pdf">Attention
Perception & Psychophysics</a>, <a href="http://www.aimspress.com/home.jsp?journalID=39">AIMS Neuroscience</a>
and <a href="http://www.psycontent.com/content/l8631300u1u7r5h3/fulltext.pdf">Experimental
Psychology</a> offer pre-registered articles in which peer review
happens before experiments are conducted. Not only does pre-registration put the reins
on researcher degrees of freedom, it also prevents journals from selecting which papers to publish based on the results.<br />
<br />
Journals aren’t the only organisations embracing
pre-registration. The <a href="http://openscienceframework.org/">Open Science
Framework</a> invites psychologists to publish their protocols, and the <a href="http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/">2013 Declaration of
Helsinki</a> now requires public pre-registration of all human research
“before recruitment of the first subject”. Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-24210841186813411142014-01-10T13:36:00.001+00:002014-01-10T13:36:19.228+00:00 Feynman on Scientific Method<div style="text-align: center;">
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Now I'm going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process: first, we guess it, no, don’t laugh, that’s the truth. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we guessed is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.<br />
<br />
If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong! In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.<br />
<br />
It is therefore not unscientific to make a guess, although many people who are not in science think it is. For instance, I had a conversation about flying saucers, some years ago, with a layman — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said “I don’t think there are flying saucers”. So the other...my antagonist said, “Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it’s impossible?” “No, I can’t prove it’s impossible. It’s just very unlikely”. At that he said, “You are very unscientific. If you can’t prove it impossible then how can you say that it’s unlikely?” But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all, and it is a very good guess. And we always try to guess the most likely explanation, keeping in the back of our minds the fact that if it does not work, then we must discuss the other possiblities.<br />
<br />
There was, for instance, for a while, a phenomenon called super-conductivity, there still is the phenomenon, which is that metals conduct electricity without resistance at low temperatures and it was not at first obvious that this was a consequence of the known laws with these particles. Now that it has been thought through carefully enough, it is seen in fact to be fully explainable in terms of our present knowledge. <br />
<br />
There are other phenomena, such as extra-sensory perception, which cannot be explained by our knowledge of physics here. However, that phenomenon has not been well established, and we cannot guarantee that it is there. If it could be demonstrated, of course, that would prove that physics is incomplete, and it is therefore extremely interesting to physicists whether it is right or wrong. Many, many experiments exist which show that it doesn't work. The same goes for astrological influences. If it were true that the stars could affect the day that it was good to go to the dentist - in America we have that kind of astrology - then the physics theory would be wrong, because there is no mechanism understandable in principle from these things that would make it go. That is the reason that there is some scepticism among scientists with regard to those ideas. <br />
<br />
Now you see of course that with this method we can disprove any definite theory. We have a definite theory, a real guess, from which you can clearly compute consequences which could be compared to experiment and in principle we can get rid of any theory. You can always prove any definite theory wrong. Notice however that we never prove it right.<br />
<br />
Suppose you invent a good guess, calculate the consequences, and discover every time that the consequences you have calculated agree with experiment. The theory is then right? No, it is simply not proved wrong.<br />
<br />
Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong. If the guess that you make is poorly expressed and rather vague, and the method that you use for figuring out the consequences is a little vague —you are not sure, and you say, “I think everything’s right because it’s all due to so and so, and such and such do this and that more or less, and I can sort of explain how this works...” then you see that this theory is good, because it cannot be proved wrong! Also if the process of computing the consequences is indefinite, then with a little skill any experimental results can be made to look like the expected consequences. You are probably familiar with that in other fields. ‘A’ hates his mother. The reason is, of course, because she did not caress him or love him enough when he was a child. But if you investigate you find out that as a matter of fact she did love him very much, and everything was all right. Well then, it was because she was overindulgent when he was a child! By having a vague theory it is possible to get either result. The cure for this one is the following: if it were possible to state exactly, ahead of time, how much love is not enough, and how much love is over-indulgent, then there would be a perfectly legitimate theory against which you could make tests. It is usually said when this is pointed out--when you are dealing with psychological matters things can’t be defined so precisely. Yes, but then you cannot claim to know anything about it.Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-84461981670166492832014-01-10T12:59:00.004+00:002014-01-10T13:03:49.591+00:00 Leading Questions - Yes Prime Minister<div style="text-align: center;">
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<br />
Bernard Woolley: He's going to say something new and radical in the broadcast.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey: What, that silly Grand Design? Bernard, that was precisely what you had to avoid! How did this come about, I shall need a very good explanation.<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Well, he's very keen on it.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey: What's that got to do with it? Things don't happen just because Prime Ministers are very keen on them! Neville Chamberlain was very keen on peace. <br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: He thinks ... he thinks it’s a vote winner.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey: Ah, that’s more serious. Sit down. What makes him think that?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Well the party have had an opinion poll done and it seems all the voters are in favour of bringing back National Service.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey: Well have another opinion poll done to show that they’re against bringing back National Service.<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: They can’t be for and against<br />
…<br />
Sir Humphrey: Oh, of course they can Bernard! Have you ever been surveyed?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes, well not me actually, my house … Oh I see what you mean<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey: You know what happens: nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don’t want to look a fool, do you?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: No<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey: So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think there is lack of discipline in our Comprehensive Schools?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think they respond to a challenge?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Oh, well I suppose I might.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes or no?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes.<br />
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Sir Humphrey: Of course you
would, Bernard. After all you told you can’t say no to that. So they
don’t mention the first five questions and they publish the last one.
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Bernard Woolley: Is that really what they do?
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Sir Humphrey: Well, not the reputable ones, no, but there aren’t many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result.</div>
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Bernard Woolley: How?</div>
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Are you worried about the growth of armaments?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think there's a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think it's wrong to force people to take arms against their will?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?<br />
<br />
Bernard Woolley: Yes.<br />
<br />
Sir Humphrey Appleby: There you are, you see, Bernard. The perfect balanced sample. Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-91644653161389763872013-11-26T00:23:00.000+00:002013-11-26T00:23:07.912+00:00Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims by William J. Sutherland, David Spiegelhalter & Mark Burgman<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/policy-twenty-tips-for-interpreting-scientific-claims-1.14183">http://www.nature.com/news/policy-twenty-tips-for-interpreting-scientific-claims-1.14183</a><br />
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<b>Differences and chance cause variation.</b>
The real world varies unpredictably. Science is mostly about
discovering what causes the patterns we see. Why is it hotter this
decade than last? Why are there more birds in some areas than others?
There are many explanations for such trends, so the main challenge of
research is teasing apart the importance of the process of interest (for
example, the effect of climate change on bird populations) from the
innumerable other sources of variation (from widespread changes, such as
agricultural intensification and spread of invasive species, to
local-scale processes, such as the chance events that determine births
and deaths).<br />
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<b>No measurement is exact.</b>
Practically all measurements have some error. If the measurement
process were repeated, one might record a different result. In some
cases, the measurement error might be large compared with real
differences. Thus, if you are told that the economy grew by 0.13% last
month, there is a moderate chance that it may actually have shrunk.
Results should be presented with a precision that is appropriate for the
associated error, to avoid implying an unjustified degree of accuracy.<br />
<br />
<b>Bias is rife.</b>
Experimental design or measuring devices may produce atypical results
in a given direction. For example, determining voting behaviour by
asking people on the street, at home or through the Internet will sample
different proportions of the population, and all may give different
results. Because studies that report 'statistically significant' results
are more likely to be written up and published, the scientific
literature tends to give an exaggerated picture of the magnitude of
problems or the effectiveness of solutions. An experiment might be
biased by expectations: participants provided with a treatment might
assume that they will experience a difference and so might behave
differently or report an effect. Researchers collecting the results can
be influenced by knowing who received treatment. The ideal experiment is
double-blind: neither the participants nor those collecting the data
know who received what. This might be straightforward in drug trials,
but it is impossible for many social studies. Confirmation bias arises
when scientists find evidence for a favoured theory and then become
insufficiently critical of their own results, or cease searching for
contrary evidence.<br />
<br />
<b>Bigger is usually better for sample size.</b>
The average taken from a large number of observations will usually be
more informative than the average taken from a smaller number of
observations. That is, as we accumulate evidence, our knowledge
improves. This is especially important when studies are clouded by
substantial amounts of natural variation and measurement error. Thus,
the effectiveness of a drug treatment will vary naturally between
subjects. Its average efficacy can be more reliably and accurately
estimated from a trial with tens of thousands of participants than from
one with hundreds.<br />
<br />
<b>Correlation does not imply causation.</b>
It is tempting to assume that one pattern causes another. However, the
correlation might be coincidental, or it might be a result of both
patterns being caused by a third factor — a 'confounding' or 'lurking'
variable. For example, ecologists at one time believed that poisonous
algae were killing fish in estuaries; it turned out that the algae grew
where fish died. The algae did not cause the deaths<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/policy-twenty-tips-for-interpreting-scientific-claims-1.14183#b2" id="ref-link-2" title="Borsuk, M. E., Stow, C. A. & Reckhow, K. H. J. Water Res. Plan. Manage. 129, 271–282 (2003).">2</a></sup>.<br />
<br />
<b>Regression to the mean can mislead.</b>
Extreme patterns in data are likely to be, at least in part, anomalies
attributable to chance or error. The next count is likely to be less
extreme. For example, if speed cameras are placed where there has been a
spate of accidents, any reduction in the accident rate cannot be
attributed to the camera; a reduction would probably have happened
anyway.<br />
<br />
<b>Extrapolating beyond the data is risky.</b>
Patterns found within a given range do not necessarily apply outside
that range. Thus, it is very difficult to predict the response of
ecological systems to climate change, when the rate of change is faster
than has been experienced in the evolutionary history of existing
species, and when the weather extremes may be entirely new.<br />
<br />
<b>Beware the base-rate fallacy.</b>
The ability of an imperfect test to identify a condition depends upon
the likelihood of that condition occurring (the base rate). For example,
a person might have a blood test that is '99% accurate' for a rare
disease and test positive, yet they might be unlikely to have the
disease. If 10,001 people have the test, of whom just one has the
disease, that person will almost certainly have a positive test, but so
too will a further 100 people (1%) even though they do not have the
disease. This type of calculation is valuable when considering any
screening procedure, say for terrorists at airports.<br />
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<b>Controls are important.</b> A control
group is dealt with in exactly the same way as the experimental group,
except that the treatment is not applied. Without a control, it is
difficult to determine whether a given treatment really had an effect.
The control helps researchers to be reasonably sure that there are no
confounding variables affecting the results. Sometimes people in trials
report positive outcomes because of the context or the person providing
the treatment, or even the colour of a tablet<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/policy-twenty-tips-for-interpreting-scientific-claims-1.14183#b3" id="ref-link-3" title="Huskisson, E. C. Br. Med. J. 4, 196–200 (1974)">3</a></sup>.
This underlies the importance of comparing outcomes with a control,
such as a tablet without the active ingredient (a placebo).<br />
<br />
<b>Randomization avoids bias.</b>
Experiments should, wherever possible, allocate individuals or groups
to interventions randomly. Comparing the educational achievement of
children whose parents adopt a health programme with that of children of
parents who do not is likely to suffer from bias (for example,
better-educated families might be more likely to join the programme). A
well-designed experiment would randomly select some parents to receive
the programme while others do not.<br />
<br />
<b>Seek replication, not pseudoreplication.</b>
Results consistent across many studies, replicated on independent
populations, are more likely to be solid. The results of several such
experiments may be combined in a systematic review or a meta-analysis to
provide an overarching view of the topic with potentially much greater
statistical power than any of the individual studies. Applying an
intervention to several individuals in a group, say to a class of
children, might be misleading because the children will have many
features in common other than the intervention. The researchers might
make the mistake of 'pseudoreplication' if they generalize from these
children to a wider population that does not share the same
commonalities. Pseudoreplication leads to unwarranted faith in the
results. Pseudoreplication of studies on the abundance of cod in the
Grand Banks in Newfoundland, Canada, for example, contributed to the
collapse of what was once the largest cod fishery in the world<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/policy-twenty-tips-for-interpreting-scientific-claims-1.14183#b4" id="ref-link-4" title="Millar, R. B. & Anderson, M. J. Fish. Res. 70, 397–407 (2004).">4</a></sup>.<br />
<br />
<b>Scientists are human.</b>
Scientists have a vested interest in promoting their work, often for
status and further research funding, although sometimes for direct
financial gain. This can lead to selective reporting of results and
occasionally, exaggeration. Peer review is not infallible: journal
editors might favour positive findings and newsworthiness. Multiple,
independent sources of evidence and replication are much more
convincing.<br />
<br />
<b>Significance is significant.</b> Expressed as <i>P</i>, statistical significance is a measure of how likely a result is to occur by chance. Thus <i>P</i>
= 0.01 means there is a 1-in-100 probability that what looks like an
effect of the treatment could have occurred randomly, and in truth there
was no effect at all. Typically, scientists report results as
significant when the <i>P</i>-value of the test is less than 0.05 (1 in 20).<br />
<br />
<b>Separate no effect from non-significance.</b> The lack of a statistically significant result (say a <i>P</i>-value
> 0.05) does not mean that there was no underlying effect: it means
that no effect was detected. A small study may not have the power to
detect a real difference. For example, tests of cotton and potato crops
that were genetically modified to produce a toxin to protect them from
damaging insects suggested that there were no adverse effects on
beneficial insects such as pollinators. Yet none of the experiments had
large enough sample sizes to detect impacts on beneficial species had
there been any<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/policy-twenty-tips-for-interpreting-scientific-claims-1.14183#b5" id="ref-link-5" title="Marvier, M. Ecol. Appl. 12, 1119–1124 (2002).">5</a></sup>.<br />
<br />
<b>Effect size matters.</b>
Small responses are less likely to be detected. A study with many
replicates might result in a statistically significant result but have a
small effect size (and so, perhaps, be unimportant). The importance of
an effect size is a biological, physical or social question, and not a
statistical one. In the 1990s, the editor of the US journal <i>Epidemiology</i>
asked authors to stop using statistical significance in submitted
manuscripts because authors were routinely misinterpreting the meaning
of significance tests, resulting in ineffective or misguided
recommendations for public-health policy<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/policy-twenty-tips-for-interpreting-scientific-claims-1.14183#b6" id="ref-link-6" title="Fidler, F., Cumming, G., Burgman, M., Thomason, N. J. Socio-Economics 33, 615–630 (2004).">6</a></sup>.<br />
<br />
<b>Study relevance limits generalizations.</b>
The relevance of a study depends on how much the conditions under which
it is done resemble the conditions of the issue under consideration.
For example, there are limits to the generalizations that one can make
from animal or laboratory experiments to humans.<br />
<br />
<b>Feelings influence risk perception.</b>
Broadly, risk can be thought of as the likelihood of an event occurring
in some time frame, multiplied by the consequences should the event
occur. People's risk perception is influenced disproportionately by many
things, including the rarity of the event, how much control they
believe they have, the adverseness of the outcomes, and whether the risk
is voluntarily or not. For example, people in the United States
underestimate the risks associated with having a handgun at home by
100-fold, and overestimate the risks of living close to a nuclear
reactor by 10-fold<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/policy-twenty-tips-for-interpreting-scientific-claims-1.14183#b7" id="ref-link-7" title="Fischhoff, B., Slovic, P. & Lichtenstein, S. Am. Stat. 36, 240–255 (1982).">7</a></sup>.<br />
<br />
<b>Dependencies change the risks.</b>
It is possible to calculate the consequences of individual events, such
as an extreme tide, heavy rainfall and key workers being absent.
However, if the events are interrelated, (for example a storm causes a
high tide, or heavy rain prevents workers from accessing the site) then
the probability of their co-occurrence is much higher than might be
expected<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/policy-twenty-tips-for-interpreting-scientific-claims-1.14183#b8" id="ref-link-8" title="Billinton, R. & Allan, R. N. Reliability Evaluation of Power Systems (Plenum, 1984).">8</a></sup>.
The assurance by credit-rating agencies that groups of subprime
mortgages had an exceedingly low risk of defaulting together was a major
element in the 2008 collapse of the credit markets.<br />
<br />
<b>Data can be dredged or cherry picked.</b>
Evidence can be arranged to support one point of view. To interpret an
apparent association between consumption of yoghurt during pregnancy and
subsequent asthma in offspring<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/policy-twenty-tips-for-interpreting-scientific-claims-1.14183#b9" id="ref-link-9" title="Maslova, E., Halldorsson, T. I., Strøm, M., Olsen, S. F. J. Nutr. Sci. 1, e5 (2012).">9</a></sup>,
one would need to know whether the authors set out to test this sole
hypothesis, or happened across this finding in a huge data set. By
contrast, the evidence for the Higgs boson specifically accounted for
how hard researchers had to look for it — the 'look-elsewhere effect'.
The question to ask is: 'What am I not being told?'<br />
<br />
<b>Extreme measurements may mislead.</b>
Any collation of measures (the effectiveness of a given school, say)
will show variability owing to differences in innate ability (teacher
competence), plus sampling (children might by chance be an atypical
sample with complications), plus bias (the school might be in an area
where people are unusually unhealthy), plus measurement error (outcomes
might be measured in different ways for different schools). However, the
resulting variation is typically interpreted only as differences in
innate ability, ignoring the other sources. This becomes problematic
with statements describing an extreme outcome ('the pass rate doubled')
or comparing the magnitude of the extreme with the mean ('the pass rate
in school <i>x</i> is three times the national average') or the range ('there is an <i>x</i>-fold
difference between the highest- and lowest-performing schools'). League
tables, in particular, are rarely reliable summaries of performance.<br />
<dl class="citation"><dd>Nature 503<span>,</span> 335–337 (<time datetime="2013-11-21">21 November 2013</time>)</dd><dd class="doi"><abbr title="Digital Object Identifier"></abbr><br /></dd></dl>
<section>
<div class="section expanded" id="references">
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</section>Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-505831245639881634.post-61889638425932616812013-11-11T13:33:00.003+00:002013-11-11T13:33:57.877+00:00Small Sensors. Big Data.<iframe src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/26742785" width="425" height="355" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px" allowfullscreen> </iframe> <div style="margin-bottom:5px"> <strong> <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/bsmyth/small-sensorsbigdatabarrysmythria2013" title="Small sensors-big-data-barry-smyth-ria-2013" target="_blank">Small sensors-big-data-barry-smyth-ria-2013</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/bsmyth" target="_blank">Barry Smyth</a></strong> </div>Damian T. Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03429883455236432310noreply@blogger.com1