Front Ears of Science
Martian Chronicles
After several delays, the Phoenix Mars Lander finally tasted ice and recorded falling snow, then got its tongue stuck on a flagpole.
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Geometry Quiz
What three-dimensional figure has one face with two legs, a blond wig, and a great many birds? (answer after last item)
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Doctor of Redundancy
I have to ask you to pay close attention to the quote from biology professor Marlene Zuk prominently featured this week by Science News:
“All of us have a tendency to overgeneralize about the significance of results obtained from just a few species, such as Drosophila …or rats. Model systems are essential of course, but we have to remember that they don’t always represent all other species. If we spend too much time with studies that only use certain species, it’s easy to assume that the model systems are, in a sense, role models, so that we expect every other species to behave the same way.â€
Check me on this, but didn’t Dr. Zuk just repeat the same thought three times in three sentences? That’s roughly what we train lab rats to do in repeatedly negotiating a maze – but of course we don’t want to overgeneralize from that particular model.
Moral: Always be alert for problems when a paragraph begins, “All of us have a tendency to overgeneralize…â€
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Impersonation Watch
Our Front Ears investigative team loves to expose scientific fraud, and we think we’ve found a suspect. Until now, it was believed that the bacteriophage – a workhorse of the immune system – was discovered in 1915 by Frederick William Twort of Camberley, Surrey, U.K.
Twort? He was a Twort? Clearly, the bacteriologist was a bacteriophage himself, who no doubt had discovered his sister.
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Statistically Speaking, We’re Stupid
A problem that tends to be ignored 86.3% of the time is statistical illiteracy. In an interview with Bruce Bower of Science News, Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute gave an example of how costly this can be.
In 1995 the U.K. Committee on Safety of Medicines issued a warning on third generation oral contraceptive pills – that their risk of potentially fatal blood clots in the legs or lungs was 100% higher than in second generation pills. That was the big headline in all the British media, and use of the pills plummeted. This led to an estimated 13,000 additional abortions in the following year, increasing the risks to women and costing the National Health Service an extra $70 million.
What the news media didn’t figure out: The actual numerical difference between the two types of pills was that two women in 7,000 instead of one woman in 7,000 figured to develop blood clots. That’s a 100% increase. And both ladies may be doing fine; the clots are only “potentially†threatening.
How widespread is statistical illiteracy? Gigerenzer, the statistics guru, didn’t have any figures.
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The First Illegal Aliens
Asian migrants first reached Alaska much earlier than previously believed. About 40,000 years ago they moved into Beringia, a fertile lowland now covered by the Bering Strait.
Their southward migration then had to wait 20,000 years for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to finish processing their green cards and for the melting of an ice sheet covering Alaska.
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Apocrypha
We’re still checking on this report. It’s not from a peer-reviewed journal, but researchers claimed that when the adult human male is in the presence of a woman wearing a leather dress, his heart beats faster, his throat gets dry, and he tends to think irrationally.
Why? They think it’s because she smells like a new golf bag.
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Answer to Geometry Quiz: A Tippihedren
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The ‘blood clot’ story about mismanaged statistics illustrates a problem rampant in the business press. New start-ups issue sparkling press releases with dizzying claims of growth, all based on the same flaw … 500% year-over-year growth is easy when you go from 1 customer to 6. Going from losing your investors’ money to finally making a $20 Net Annual Profit is more than a gazillion percent improvement. This actually happened to me as CEO of the Greasefoot Messenger Service, Ltd., but our IPO went exactly nowhere. Go figure.
Comment by Mark — January 7, 2009 @ 4:23 pm
Ah, I remember it well! Greasefoot preceded — and set the blueprint for — Federal Express. As so often happens, the original innovator is not the one who ultimately gets rich on the innovation.
A near miss. As was your groundbreaking startup of the J. Penniless Company, inventor of the Build-A-Pencil kit. They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.
Comment by Al — January 7, 2009 @ 9:53 pm