By Kevin Van Aelst.

Which, of course, is a cover of Kid A from the CD Kid A. Thom Yorke, years ago, reportedly left the following message on a radiohead message board:

POSTED BY Thom ON JULY 30, 2000 AT 23:39:21:
IN REPLY TO: Thom, why Kid A?
dedicated to the first human clone.
i bet it has already happened.

From Fake Science.

Image by Malachi Ward.

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

With all of the various notions of the scientific method in mind, it’s also good to access how the general public might view science information and hence gauge its level of science literacy. Here, it is probably obvious that the public’s knowledge of science tends to forget or even ignore the various nuances behind the philosophy of science. For example, how often do you think a person considers the slow meanderings and convoluted interplay between hypotheses and evidence when reading about the latest discovery? All the more understandable, when one acknowledges that most individuals obtain their science news through rapid collections of soundbites, a reality that is now normalized in the culture of media. And so, to explore this a little more, we need to take a look at this image:

Yes, that is one kick-ass inflatable pool, and here, a little context might help.

In the summer of 2009, my hometown of Vancouver experienced a small heat wave. It was very hot and humid, and my two young kids were quite miserable about the whole thing. Consequently, I had the brilliant idea of getting an inflatable pool for our backyard. This was genius; the entire household was fully on board; and to Hannah and Ben, I suddenly seemed like the best Dad in the world! Before we knew it, we were going hunting for inflatable pools, which naturally led us to a local toy store, where lo and behold, marketing geniuses that they are, the store had conveniently placed all of their inflatable pools front and centre.

In this selection, we saw the pool that you see in the picture above. It looked, quite frankly, awesome, and, if you can believe it, was priced at only twenty dollars. Needless to say, we bought it immediately and full of excitement, took it home to set up. It was here that something odd happened. In essence, when the pool was inflated it looked a little different from the box. In fact, this is how it turned out.

Of course, being a scientist and all, my rational mind was racing and trying its hardest to come up with hypotheses that could explain what was going on. Why does the pool look so tiny? It is because my children are massive? Was the photograph on the box taken in a land of hobbit-like youth? Did I not inflate my pool enough? It was all very bizarre, but at the end of the day, the explanation was simple: in that in the world of advertising, it was sometimes permissible to use misleading images as long as the text for dimensions is clearly printed on the box, and as long as a fallback statement, such as “object in box may not be as appears in image,” is included.

For us, however, the purpose of this story is to highlight how science tends to be viewed by the public. What one finds, is that what you see, hear and read tends to be a modified version of reality. In other words, science reporting is often not altogether right, with a tendency to be exaggerated or sensationalized. Occasionally, it can even be downright false, as any example of pseudoscience can attest to. However, when you look at how media works and the caveats it has in place, it’s really not that surprising that this is happening.

Firstly, as mentioned before, in the arena of media, time is of the essence. The soundbite is key. This means that in the world of audio and video, something that is quick and attention grabbing is paramount to attracting your audience. In the world of writing, this means that an over indulgence in space or word count is often frowned upon. Furthermore, strong loud voices are coveted. Unfortunately, when you think about it, how scientific research is done is neither quick nor even generally attention grabbing. Science moves at a pace that is at best unpredictable, and at worst very very slow. As well, most of the research is punctuated by things that aren’t necessarily exciting to the average person – it’s not at all loud – and yet those elements are often key to fully understanding and appreciating the merits and fallacies of a particular discovery. It’s like what Sir Isaasc Newton would say: “You are standing on the shoulders of giants…” and we cannot place limits on how many shoulders we overindulge in.

Another thing that makes media and science different, is that one prefers to have obvious endings, where the other technically never really ends. Media prefers to express itself in friendly and familiar structures – like a story. Perhaps this is why we read about science in ways that suggest a finality. We see so many headlines like “Cancer Cured!” that we begin to wonder whether to believe in such proclamations and indeed even trust in the science behind it. The thing is: the scientific method is akin to a cycle, where attaining of information continually progresses. Consequently, forcing an ending to acts of discovery doesn’t really work and presents an inaccurate picture of what is actually going on.

Then, there is the issue of validity. With science you have the awesome power of expert peer review in your corner. It’s not perfect, it can be slow, it can influenced by various pressures, it might not even reach a consensus; but overall, there’s probably not a better way to figure out whether a piece of knowledge is valid or not.

In media, things are very different. With “good” media, where journalistic integrity and ethics is upheld, the writer doesn’t always get it right. This is not necessarily the fault of the writer: they have deadlines, they have other beats to cover, they have an audience they need to satisfy, and they may not yet have the experience to fully consider how science culture itself is part of the narrative of that science discovery. Furthermore, objectivity is key in journalism: you always try to present “both sides of the story.” However, this can also translate to equal billing for viewpoints that expert peer review would normally consider marginal, inconsequential or even discredited.

In other types of “less good” media, you run into the issue where the communicator has lots of clout (as in numbers of readers or viewers) but frankly no credibility. This lack of credibility could be due to the individual not having the appropriate background knowledge to fully understand what they’re talking about, or in a more cynical take, it could be the individual talking in a certain way because of influences that deliberately distort the facts. Examples of this can be seen in some celebrity endorsements or in the rantings of an influential but biased blogger.

Finally, we can also address the paradigm thing. It’s not that unusual for people to take a viewpoint that maybe we’ve got it wrong all along, and that perhaps, at the end of the day, we’ll discover something that will ultimately completely change what we know of a particular topic. You see this in climate change, evolution, earth origins debates – what if all the scientists are wrong? Here, the mentality is essentially feeding off the idea of paradigm shifts. However, what people tend to forget is that a paradigm shift in science is really very very rare and very very special. It is truly a remarkable thing, so remarkable that there are many who feel that the word “paradigm” has been used so frequently in popular culture that its strength has been greatly diminished.

Unfortunately, all of these considerations simply mean that it’s worth being careful about how you take your media. In the end, I think it’s really important to remember that there is this disconnect between how science is done and how it is represented. In fact, in many ways, it is wariness of this distinction that truly differentiates a sciencegeek from a non-sciencegeek.

(1st draft)

Paper (link to first page pdf)

How they won Rugby World Cup through height, mass and collective experience. Adrien Sedeaud, Andy Marc, Julien Schipman, Muriel Tafflet, Jean-Philippe Hager, Jean-François Toussaint. Br J Sports Med doi:10.1136/bjsports-2011-090506

Abstract
Objectives To investigate the evolution of anthropometric characteristics in World Cup rugby players and identify elements associated with performance.

Design Age, weight and height were collected for 2692 World Cup rugby players as well as rankings in each World Cup, and collective experience of winners, finalists, semifinalists and quarter finalists in comparison to the rest of the competitors. Anthropometric parameters were compared according to age and position (back and forwards).

Results From 1987 to 2007, forwards and backs have become heavier by 6.63 and 6.68 kg and taller by 0.61 and 1.09 cm, respectively. The collective experience of the forwards’ pack is a value increasing with the final ranking attained, as well as the weight of forwards and the height of backs.

Conclusions For all Rugby World Cups, the highest performing teams have the tallest backs and heaviest forwards with the highest percentage of collective experience.

Via io9.

Via Futility Closet.

Since submarines began roaming the depths in World War I, sailors and oceanographers, who use sonar technology to map seafloor topography and identify ocean life, have regularly run into “acoustic ghosts”—inexplicable bodies of movable mass that sometimes rivaled the size of a city—writes ocean engineering professor Nicholas Makris in IEEE Spectrum(Aug. 2011). Affectionately called UFOs (unidentified floating objects), these sonar readings were blamed on factors as various as deep-ocean mountains and changes in water temperature. Every time a theory emerged to explain the phenomenon, however, it was quickly shot down.

In 2003 Makris and fellow scientists aboard a research vessel just south of Long Island, New York, discovered that the UFOs were composed of hundreds of millions of fish—massive gatherings on a scale never before documented.

Image by Wayne Levin. Article at UTNE.

Specifically, this stuff by Chris Sasaki. Chris if you’re reading, check out the Phylo project – a Pixar-ish deck would be very very cool.