In the world as we understand it, based on Einstein, nothing can go faster than light. This prediction based on the general theory of relativity has proven itself countless times in empirical research. And now, lo and behold, a group at CERN has observed neutrino’s racing through earth from France/Switzerland to Italy at the World-record breaking speed of slightly above light-speed! This finding has received a lot of coverage in the media. Why is this so interesting?

Of course this research finding has given rise to wild speculations, including the possibility of time travel (would Richard Branson be willing to start a company on this one?). Various wild theories have already been formulated that possibly explain how both Einstein and the CERN-researchers can be right. It could be the case that further replications will show that in fact neutrino’s cannot exceed light speed. And finally it could eventually turn out that Einstein was wrong.

The observation of these speeding neutrino’s contradicts our best understanding of physical reality. We simply cannot explain these observations. What I find the most interesting about this all, are the huge efforts of scholars really trying to understand and especially to replicate these highly counterintuitive observations. The group at CERN has done its own replications, accounting for some of the criticism on the original approach, and calls for other groups to do the same. This response to conflicts between theory and empirical reality is to me a sign of a healthy scientific practice.

The social sciences do not deal with neutrino’s, but can learn a lot from this scientific practice. Recently the Dutch science community was stirred up by a very serious case of fraud in social-psychology research, with a prime investigator faking experimental data. Enough has been said about this, and there is no need to discuss it all over again here. A comment by one of his non-fraudulent co-authors, however, was very interesting. This co-author was given a table with the results of analyses on a new set of data (that eventually turned out to be made up completely, but she did not know that at the time), and used that information to test their hypotheses. The results supported the hypotheses, as a result of which, she argued, she didn’t question the validity of the data as much as she should have.

Now we know how unfortunate that turned out. But there is a point in this: people, including scientists, tend to be less critical when what we observe aligns with what we know. In the social sciences this all too often results in a tendency to find support for theories. And while any theory needs some level of support, the consequence of this practice is that all too often many theories are formulated on a specific phenomenon that are intrinsically different, while no tests are performed which of the theories actually performs best. Factors such as this confirmation bias, but also other factors such as the theory-ladenness of observations, the unmeasured variable problem, our tendency to downgrade the perceived importance of exceptions, and our mind that is trained to immediately formulate ad-hoc explanations for observations, dictate that we cannot simply base a scientific discipline on confirmation and illustration.

So, in line with the response to the speeding neutrino’s, social science could benefit from more replications, more attempts to reject theories, fewer attempts to ‘prove’ theories by finding supportive evidence, and especially more attention to observations that do not fit a theory. Instead of yet another confirmation, solving puzzles, contradictions, and paradoxes should be the principal task of the social sciences.

The OPERA Collaboraton: T. Adam et al. (2011). Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam Arxiv arXiv: 1109.4897v2

Check out this new science blogging aggregator: ScienceSeeker.org.

From their website:

There are thousands of science blogs around the world, written by active scientists, journalists, professors, students, and interested laypeople. But until now, there hasn’t been a good way for readers to sort through all of them. There are dozens of blog collectives, many sites that organize some of the information in the blogs, but none that attempt to encompass the entire range of science reporting, analysis, and discussion taking place at an astonishing pace, worldwide.

ScienceSeeker is our effort to fill that void. We have collected hundreds of blogs in one place, and invite you to submit even more. Our goal is to be the world’s most comprehensive aggregator of science discussions, all organized by topic.

Unfortunately, I.B. Cohen’s Triumph of Numbers ended quite abruptly with a description of Florence Nightingale. It felt unfinished. But the use of numbers has evolved since, and quite substantially so.

How much our use of numerical data has evolved, and to what extent is has invaded our daily lives (without many of us knowing it!), is convincingly described by Ian Ayers, in his magnificent book ‘Super Crunchers’ (2007).

Companies know more and more (and more!) about you: you buy products online, you speak with the customer relations department (with a person behind a computer), you gain discounts with customer cards, and of course you are careful to make sure you receive you frequent flyer miles. Right? If not, you may have bought it all using a credit card, the transactions of which are stored anyway.

So, the companies from whom you buy, know all this, because they have learned to store all this precious information. And using this information – and believe me, we’re dealing with massive amounts of data – each of these companies crunches the data and is able to very exactly predict what each of its’ customers will do next. Groceries successfully predict what to buy the next summer, based on what they sold months or weeks ago. Casino’s know how to predict how much money each individual customer is willing to lose before leaving (it’s actually called the ‘pain point’). You can be sure that if a gambler reaches this pain point, an employee of the casino steps forward to offer him/her an incentive to stay (i.e. a free drink or meal). Airlines predict when you will be unsatisfied by their service (i.e. they lost your baggage too often), and will upgrade your seat (for free) just before you’ll start flying with another company.

The list of excellent examples goes on and on. But, the general – and possibly frightening – conclusion drawn by Ian Ayres is, that if a company starts giving you gifts, you probably have paid too much.

Can bad science lead us to draw wrong conclusions about the world we live in? “Of course it can“, we are inclined to think. And if so, can this have real-life consequences? Investigating these meta-questions is not as easy as it might seem, for it would require an exact manner to distinguish the good from the bad science, and it would require a subject that has been thoroughly investigated in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ ways to compare the outcomes.

One such subject would be the vast amount of research done on the psychological consequences of undergoing an induced abortion. This heavily researched (and heavily debated!) subject focusses primarily on the questions whether or not a women has a higher chance of suffering from anxiety, feeling of guilt, depression, or (other) mental disorders caused by undergoing an induced abortion. The conclusions drawn in the vast literature on this basic question vary form an abortion having no consequences, to an abortion having a negative impact on the psychological well-being of a woman.

Charles, Polis, Sridhara and Blum (2008) did a systematic review of this literature. Interestingly, they did not only classify the findings, but also derived a set of guidelines by which to evaluate the methodological quality of each research paper.

Analytical studies were rated on a scale from Excellent to Very Poor using five major criteria: (1) use of an appropriate comparison group; (2) use of valid mental health measures; (3) control for preexisting mental health status; (4) control for confounders; and
(5) whether there was comprehensive exploration of the research question. (p. 437)

Trained researchers would find it difficult to disagree with these ‘five guidelines for quality research’. However, hardly any of the studies they evaluated did comply with all of them. Try to imagine what the consequences of failing to comply with any of these guidelines might be. For instance, it is known that mental health status relates to the chance of becoming pregnant unintendedly, and subsequently it relates to the decision whether or not to keep the baby. Not taking that into account would attribute the difference in mental health between women who have had an abortion, and women who did not, to the abortion, whereas these differences in fact were already present before the abortion. A similar argument goes for taking into account differences regarding age, educational level, and religious conviction: these characteristics all relate to both mental health and the odds of having an unintended pregnancy and / or an abortion. As a last example, the groups of women that are compared should be as equivalent as possible, except for having had an abortion. However, studies compared women having had an abortion with, for example, the general population, or just with women having carried out their pregnancy. This practice does not allow for causal inference, for it cannot exclude the effects of pregnancy intentions.

In total, Charles et al. evaluated 21 studies, the methodological quality of which varied widely, as did their conclusions on the consequences of an abortion. Their most fascinating finding was that a relation exists between the methodological quality of a study and the conclusions drawn in it: the better studies hardly found any consequences from undergoing an abortion, whereas the poorer quality studies did find negative consequences of an abortion. In other words: bad science tends to overestimate the consequences of an induced abortion.
Generally, these differences are due to the fact that the studies with poor methodology did not take into account differences between women prior to the abortion, thereby attributing differences between women in mental health to having had an abortion, whereas in fact these differences were pre-existing.

There we have it: bad science distinguished from good science, and different outcomes. So, yes, bad science indeed leads to wrong outcomes and in real life, this can have consequences. In the policy-discussions on induced abortion, the possibility of negative consequences of an abortion plays an important role. It would depend on which research papers the policy makers turn to, what their stand on the issue would be.

The question that remains is now: can we trust policy makers to distinguish the good from the bad (science)?

V CHARLES, C POLIS, S SRIDHARA, R BLUM (2008). Abortion and long-term mental health outcomes: a systematic review of the evidence Contraception, 78 (6), 436-450 DOI: 10.1016/j.contraception.2008.07.005

This has had all to do with personal circumstances. The tag-line of my blog states that the extra-ordinary lies within the curve of normality. While this is the case in general, this year both ends of this curve have been sincerely over-represented in my personal life. The negative part(s) took place in my personal life, whereas interesting new developments and opportunities emerged in my academic life. Regarding the latter (I don’t blog all too much about the former), I was approached to co-write a research proposal, which to my liking looks quite promising even after we submitted it. Let’s keep our worldwide fingers crossed

But enough about my year and back to science!

Fëanor send in an excellent blog about a book on jokes during the repression of Romanian communism. Science of jokes? It reminded me of a story I heard, about a man in a concentration camp, who by walking one step out of phase during forced marches. Nobody would know, but it helped him to retain his identity and his sanity. Similarly, people perhaps make jokes about their situation, even if discussing that situation would not be allowed. A Romanian engineer Stefanescu made notes of all the jokes he heard between 1979 and 1989.

He could justify himself if they were to demand of him why he didn’t protest and take to the streets against the dictatorship. The book became his outcry.

Read the entry by Fëanor to see how this data has been analyzed, and perhaps even suggest a hypotheses or two how this quantitative data on jokes might relate to the conditions under which people live.

That was it. The next edition will be held the first of February. Hopefully, I will be up and running strong by then, so that I can advertise it to get some more entries again, like last month. Hope to see you all stop by again and send in your articles!

Secondly, statistics aficionado Stijn Ruiter writes on his blog ‘Your Sixth Degree’ about the advanced use of statistics. In his post on the presidential elections and the so-called Bradley-effect, he does however show that without asking the right question, advanced statstics does bring you nowhere. The election of Barack Obama denies this Bradley-effect, which “basically refers to the idea that a black American would not get elected because in the election booth voters would decide against what they said in the polls.” However, research should perhaps have a more detailed starting point: “The Bradley effect hypothesis is rather general, and as it is generally described (as above), it does not really specify who the voters are and what characteristics they (should) have. It only specifies whom to choose from, a black candidate or a white candidate. But there are two sides to the voting equation, namely voters and candidates. […] So, the question becomes who votes for whom.” ((Also see Gary King’s note on a paper investgating the (decline) of the Bradley effect.))

Such a detailed perspective was also taken up in an article on the educational achievement of migrants’ children, which I described myself a while ago. “The authors of the article — recently published in American Sociological Review — were able to take into account influences from both (characteristics of) country of origin, country of destination, and the migrant community in the country of origin.” Doing so, has led to some interesting findings, which would remain unclear if not this level of detail was maintained. “Counter-intuitively, immigrant children from countries with lower levels of economic development have better scholastic performance than comparable children who emigrate from countries with higher levels of economic development.”

Also focused on educational attainment of migrants’ children, in relation with integration in the host society, Fëanor on ‘Just a Mon’ discusses a ‘natural experiment’. This natural experiment entails that after Indonesian independence thousands Moluccans were allowed to settle in various Dutch municipalities. The socio-economic backgrounds of these people were rather similar, which allowed the the researchers to compare their children on educational achievement, and cross-tabulate this with measures of integration. They found that “children from Moluccan fathers and native mothers have a higher educational attainment than children from ethnic homogeneous Moluccan couples or children from a Moluccan mother and a native father.”

Finally, a `natural experiment’ is nice, but what about the holy grail of scientific rigourness: a real experiment? Often difficult to achieve in the social sciences, but it has been done. Ed Yong on ‘Not exactly Rocket Science’ discusses an experimental test of the ‘broken windows theory’, “which suggests that signs of petty crimes, like broken windows, serve as a trigger for yet more criminal behaviour”. The science-published article describes how simple experiments were conducted, such as measuring ‘littering’ when a wall was severely tainted by graffiti, or when it was completely painted over. A very interesting article, and Ed Yong gives a thorough summary. “All in all, the suite of experiments, all in a realistic setting, provide powerful evidence that the Broken Windows Theory is valid and all of Keiser’s results were statistically significant”

That’s it for today. No more entries for this first edition of the Curving Normality blog carnival. I would like to thank all those having submitted their entries. It was very nice to read all your blogs and to tie it all together in this editorial. The next edition will be published on the first day of 2009, so please submit your next article in the comments below as soon as it’s ready!

Not only blogs can inspire scientists, but podcasts can do too. I regularly listen to some science podcasts, and will start a short series on Curving Normality to introduce these to you. Probably the most fun science podcast I listen to is ‘The Naked Scientists‘, the science show that ‘boldly goes where no science show has gone before‘.

The show is hosted by Cambridge University’s Dr. Chris Smith. Clearly having fun, he interviews top scientists and ‘catches up with the latest top science news stories’, focused to a large exten on medicine, technology, and biology. The interviews are accessible for people not familiar with the specific discipline, and the findings are always placed into a wider context.

Several co-hosts have their own feature on the show. Diana O’Carroll hosts the question of the week, whereas Dave Ansell and Ben Valsler do their share of kitchen science experiments. It’s fascinating to listen to excellent scientists explain the principles of the Large Hadron Collider with just a tennis ball, a length of rope, and two soda bottles. Or, a week later, to create a rocket from hydrogen peroxide and liver! Don’t try that at home!

My favourite episode of all times must be the one that aired on August 3rds, 2008. In this special summer edition, Chris Smith drifted down the river Cam on a Punt, picking up key scientists ‘en route’. The show has some interesting science stories, but stands out because of the good atmosphere and the guide that tells stories about the scenery through which they navigate.

The Naked Scientists provide a high quality weekly show, that is fun to listen to. I’d say: go to their site and enjoy!

Science changes, as does the way scientists report on their work. Reading a 1971 article in Science, on attitudes towards induced abortion, I was truly amazed by the sheer amount of apparent activism that might have influenced the interpretation of the findings. Let’s have a look.

The research

First I must say, that the actual research seems pretty solid, as might be expected when reading an article published in Science. Perhaps the only serious criticism would be that several different surveys were used to be able to investigate a trend analysis. Nevertheless, since this is an article already 37 years of age, is provided valuable insights in how processes of public opinion evolved relatively long ago. Often, this is difficult to assess with the survey data available to present-day researchers.

As the title indicates, the focus of the research is on the development of attitudes towards abortion in the ’60-’70 decade in the United States. During those years, American women in various states had different levels of access to legal abortion. Using data from Gallup Polls primarily, she investigates to what extent people will allow a women to have an abortion, under different circumstances. Legalised abortion is most strongly supported by non-Catholics and the higher educated. Also, Blake found that levels of support have increased rather sharply in the ’60-’70 decade.

Also men seem to hold more liberal attitudes on this subject, for which she gives a fascinating explanation: men, especially in the higher social strata, would like to uphold their sexually liberal lifestyle, and see the possibility of women having an abortion as a safeguard for the woman having a child for which they should care at least financially. In other words: these high-SES men anticipate on the (potential) benefit they might gain from women being able to have an abortion. Although Blake does not actually test this conception, I think the general notion of people founding their opinions on their own personal situation is an interesting one that deserves further investigation.

The political involvement

I was more intrigued, though, by the way Blake positions the abortion debate as a debate of personal liberty: “In Western countries as well as elsewhere the history of population policy has, with few exceptions, been a chronicle of government efforts to repress birth limitation and reward reproduction.” She is clearly anticipating on an abortion-case dealt with by the U.S. supreme court, for she argues that despite the high levels of disapproval also other issues were changed by the Supreme Court that also faced high levels of disapproval in the general public:

If we consider just two of these — the insistence of the Supreme Court on the disestablishment of religion in public schools, and on rapid school integration — we have a more objective and realistic standard against which to judge the relationship between public opinion and abortion legislation.

To this she adds that for social change to occur, especially the powerful groups are of importance. So, instead of the aggregate overall disapproval in United States society, she argues that change might very well be expected when we only look at the higher levels of approval amongst the higher educated and those with higher income.

Conclusion

One must admit that history proves Blake right: only two years after this research has been published state-level abortion legislation was banned by the Supreme Court. From 1973 onwards, all women in the United States were able to have a legal abortion if they decided needing one.

Nevertheless, I do feel that it was Blakes’ political commitment speaking, rather than a strong empirical basis, when she made her predictions. Two examples of a court case that contradicted general levels of public opinion do not allow a generalisation of other issues (other than the argument that it is possible under certain circumstances). More importantly, where she rightfully argued not to look at the general levels of approval, but at approval amongst powerful groups, she did not do so in her comparison of the abortion issue with other court rulings where she only mentions general levels of approval.

So, all in all, I do feel that this is a well performed, valuable study as long as it comes to the empirically based findings. Also, though untested, she provides an interesting new hypothesis. But, I cannot help but feel that nowadays this study, with the sheer amount of apparent activism influencing the interpretation of the findings, would not be published easily. Not in Science.

Reference

J. Blake (1971). Abortion and Public Opinion: The 1960-1970 Decade Science, 171 (3971), 540-549 DOI: 10.1126/science.171.3971.540

Researchblogging.org is a non-profit initiative, and provides in a web-based gathering of posts from weblogs on science. Not all posts are gathered (‘aggregated’) though, only the ones that explicitly address research that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In that, it distinguishes itself clearly from similar (collections of) scientists’ blogs, for everything else but the research itself is left out. This is achieved by having bloggers to administer their posts on the researchblogging.org website manually, after which some PHP-code is provided. This code is added to the blog-post, resulting in a bibliographic reference to the article that is discussed, as well as the aggregation of the article to the researchblogging database.

For me, this results in a very interesting collection of blog-posts, that are nicely categorised and stored in a searchable database accessible though the web. And this is where the new version of researchblogging.org becomes really interesting, because next to a visual update, new features have been added. Bloggers now can categorise their posts manually, making them easier to find by prospective readers.

More importantly, though, is the ability to ‘flag’ posts by readers. I find this very important, for not all posts are that great, to my opinion. That is, they are very nice to read at times, but without a strong focus on peer-reviewed research. An often encountered format is someone writing about a topic, and then adding a reference to an article loosely related to that topic to get it aggregated. In my opinion, posts on peer-reviewed research should explicitly discuss the findings and the quality of the research design. Sure, good journalism requires the author to add some context to the article, or even a little pun, but the thoroughness of the critical review should not be lost. So, I think it is a good development that readers can now more easily whether posts on researchblogging.org truly address peer-reviewed publications in a critical manner.

Personally, I have been writing for researchblogging.org for a few months now, which has resulted in a modest number of articles (find a selection here). Every time, I have found it a challenge to critically think about the research I like and to detail that on my blog. This way, I have found a new way to discuss the quality of work, and to bring to attention work that I appreciate to be especially valuable. Incidentally, these posts are among the best read on my blog, so apparently the effort pays of. I cannot remember writing about research I completely disliked, although once I wrote about a completely horrendous research design, and contrasted it with one I did like. It is more difficult to do justice to articles that have been written and researched very well, than to break down the ones that did a very bad job, so evidently I’m taking the more difficult approach.

Blogging on blogging on peer reviewed research

So, all in all, how serious should we all be about blogging on peer-reviewed research? No new findings will be found on blogs, or it should be on the web-sites of journals who pre-publish a high profile publication. New insight on existing articles may be found though, and I did so myself a couple of times. Academic mores being what they are, the really important new findings, insights, and perhaps criticism will not be written down on a blog, but send to a peer reviewed journal.

But then again, there will always be a minor, but inherently social aspect to science. From that perspective, reading blogs about science is an easy way to read about what is going on in the journals you don’t normally read, or even in disciplines other than your own. Personally, as a sociologist-to-be I very much love to read about evolutionary biology, the developments regarding CERN and the search for the Higgs-particle; all things I don’t read about in the ‘real’ journals. You’ll never know in what way some insight may come in handy in one of your own future projects.

I don’t think that science ‘needs’ a site like researchblogging.org, but I do feel that it is just another way for science to open up, both to other scientists, but also to non-scientists who are interested in cutting-edge knowledge. The registered blogs are (generally) open to all readers, unlike the actual journal articles that are reviewed. In that sense, it is a form of bringing science to the masses.

Accompanied by interpretation, that is, which might seem to be a problem for some. Researchblogging.org is not only open for readers, but also relatively open to those who want to participate. Are all blogs true representations of the body of knowledge accumulated in the annals of science journals? Of course not, but how far do we want to go in restricting bloggers’ access to Researchblogging.org? Or, in other words, how open should the system be?

On researchblogging.org there is quality control when you apply to join the initiative. Your blogs needs to be in existence for a while, and some posts should already be present. Also, there have been some discussions on the forum about the appropriateness of some posts. I already discussed my disliking a specific type of posts, but some sort of solution has already been implemented in the new version. Also, one of the conditions to participate on researchblogging.org is that your blog should accept comments from readers. In this way, readers can share opinions, and discuss interpretations and conclusions. So, this system is not as closed as peer-reviewed journals are, nor is the quality control as strict, but I think this is rather good: in this way we have an semi-organized way of discussion the quality, interpretations, and merits of articles published elsewhere.

Conclusion

I think that Researchblogging.org provides many with excellent means of sharing ones’ thoughts on scientifically published journal articles. The quality of the contributions is generally high, as is the degree of representation of various disciplines. For me, this helps me in finding out about interesting articles or even interesting (sub)disciplines I wouldn’t be aware of otherwise. I hope its’ popularity will only increase with the new version, as to be able to find even more interesting posts on interesting articles.

Do you blog about peer-reviewed research? Sign up, start writing, and I’ll read you there!

It was often argued that it is inherent to women in general to have a stronger will and desire than men to reach the goals they set for themselves. This might very well be, but that cannot explain the relative success of Dutch women over Dutch men, unless this stronger feminine willpower is a phenomenon exclusive to the Dutch. Otherwise, the strong will-powered Dutch women just compete against other strong will-powered women from other countries, and the weakly will-powered Dutch male athletes compete with other rather weak opponents. Clearly, this did not seem to be the case …

In general, the analysts shouldn’t have argued about differences between men and women in general, but about differences between the relative strength of Dutch women over other women, compared with the relative strength of Dutch men over other men.

Unequal women empowerment?

What might be an explanation then? We might find one by looking at the position that women have in their society. Traditionally, sports in the world have been dominated by men, but due to their increasingly equal opportunities in society, their participation in sports increased as well. If indeed a relationship exists between women empowerment and their results on the sports fields, we might not only expect better results over the years, but also smaller differences between the results of men and women.

To test this, I made some plots. Below, the results needed to win the Gold Medal on Javelin throwing on the Olympics, 100 meters running on the Olympics, and 500 meters speed skating on the World Championships, are shown. The red dots show the results of the men, the blue dots those of the women. The grey lines represent the general tendency of the lines, and in all three graphs, it is clear that the two lines tend to converge. Don’t be mislead by the small decrease of the differences between men and women: the initial differences were already very small, so a small absolute decrease is rather large on a relative scale.

Golden

Does this tell us anything about why Dutch women performed so much better than Dutch men did? No, of course not, for I did not take into account the Beijing Olympics, nor nationality. Nevertheless, if we accept that the increasingly strong position of women in society (in general) indeed leads to their achieving better sports results, we might also want to compare the position of Dutch women in Dutch society with that of women in many other countries. Compared to many other countries, Dutch women have a strong position in society. Perhaps, the Dutch think more seriously about women sports than is done in other countries.

If this is the case, the sport results of Dutch women is due to their empowerment in Dutch society. Perhaps women sports will increasingly receive more attention in other countries as well. Wouldn’t that be golden?