Retrospection is great for soul-searching and big life decisions, but it works equally well for mundane things; like artistic tastes, or hobby preferences.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been carrying my camera around quite a bit. I’m not a great photographer, but I enjoy it. One of the most important steps in developing as a photographer is to figure out what you like taking pictures of. That understanding can later guide the inevitable expansion of your equipment: lenses, camera, lighting. For that, introspection and conversation are fine, but retrospection is best.

So, this is a slideshow of my favourite 11 pictures I’ve taken this year. I’ve tried to not over-process the images, for the most part leaving them the way they came out of the camera.

So what have I learned? I like photographs with a short focal length, that is, only a very narrow slice of the image is in focus.

I take close-ups. Probably too many close-ups. (It was hard to find any photos that weren’t.)

I like pictures with moody lighting, or shots that focus on something other than the obvious subject.

Also, apparently, I like taking pictures of animals.

Another year down, another batch of files archived in the development of a new hobby.

A female friend of mine, after reading the story, asked me

“Hey Colin, what was your response to this piece? I have a guy friend who isn’t responding well and I’m trying to explain it to him, but it might be helpful to have a male perspective.”

The only response I could come up with was to recount a story; a scene I’d seen play out in a coffee shop where I often spend my afternoons writing.

Credit: David Goehring

A few weeks ago, I watched an attractive university student get subtly harassed for over half an hour. Though, the man who was trying to catch her attention wasn’t actually doing anything wrong–per se.

The middle-aged man spoke briefly to the student while he was in line to get coffee and she was working on her laptop at a table near the counter. When he’d been served, she went back to work, and he went to sit down… at the table right next to her. What’s more, he had bought her a coffee. She awkwardly accepted it, went back to work, and he busied himself looking out the window.

The awkward silence lasted for about five minutes.

At this point, apparently annoyed his coffee hadn’t grabbed her attention, he started talking to her. Eyes locked on her computer, you could see her short, one-word answers from across the café. He backed down, only to try again five minutes later. Then again five minutes after that, again and again trying to strike up conversation. What he was doing wasn’t wrong per se. However, he did seem completely oblivious to how uncomfortable he was making her.

Throughout the ordeal, the student kept throwing glances around the shop, trying to catch the eyes of the other patrons. I know I, and a couple other people, gave her reassuring smiles, letting her know we were there if she needed us.

After around half an hour of this terse back-and-forth, seemingly frustrated his gentle advances weren’t working, the man leaned in, inches from her ear, and whispered. I have no idea what he said, but the shocked look on her face, and her silently mouthing, “What the fuck?” was a strong enough clue.

Regaining her composure, she looked at him and said nothing. A few minutes later, she packed her bags and left. A few minutes after that, he walked out the door. The entire coffee shop burst into activity: checking he hadn’t walked the same way as her, and analyzing how awkward the scene that had just played out had been.

Everyone in the café had been watching, everyone knew it was wrong, but no one had done anything. Why? Because the man’s actions weren’t wrong, per se. All he did was buy a cute young girl a coffee, and try to strike up a conversation.

But his actions were wrong. They were unwanted, they were unwarranted, and they were unacceptable. His pleasant-enough approach had disrupted her, made her visibly uncomfortable, and forced her to leave a place where, before his arrival, she had been working happily for over an hour.

I spend hours every day writing on my laptop in coffee shops. I’ve talked to strangers at coffee shops, I’ve made friends at coffee shops, I’ve asked girls out at coffee shops. Never once have I been forced to leave a coffee shop.

So if you don’t understand how the polite advances of a stranger, someone who seemingly only wants to talk, whether in a café or on the street, could be considered harassment, ask yourself: when was the last time you were forced to leave a place because someone made staying unbearable?

Sometimes you just want to get your work done.

Rather than being miffed with politics in general, this is a far more measurable sense of impending doom. It is hard to expect success from a project aiming for an impossible target.

From the Washington Post today,

International climate negotiators have pledged to keep the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels.

Granted, that goal sounds wonderful, as 2 degrees C has been paraded around as the upper bounds on “safe” climate change. There is only one problem–for all intents and purposes it is not possible.

Last year, I interviewed Brian O’Neil, a climate modeler with the National Center for Atmospheric Research after a Congressional briefing on global warming.

The full interview is interesting, but O’Neil’s key quote highlights the futility of COP17′s agenda. He said,

If we say, no, we’re not allowed to go above 2 degrees at any time, then we find that it is, in fact, today, not technically feasible to achieve the 2 degree target with 50% likelihood. If we did as much as we could, starting today and for the rest of the century, all technically feasible reduction options, we would have a 1 in 3 chance of staying below two degrees at all times. That’s what we found in our analysis.

While O’Neil’s understanding still leaves the slightest of windows of success (though I’d be interested to see how his appraisal has changed in the past year), a paper published earlier this year by scientists with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis knocks even that 33% out the window barring an absolutely overwhelming international effort.

The research summary I wrote  for Eos back when the study first came out reads,

When it comes to modeling climate change, researchers rely on the specification of plausible emissions scenarios to explore how climate will change over the coming century. Using a standardized set of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas scenarios allows researchers from different modeling centers to compare results and allows more methodical assessment of uncertainty in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. The set of emissions scenarios used in the past two IPCC reports were published in 2001 and need to be updated to take into account more recent socioeconomic modeling results.

In a new study, Arora et al. use a completely new set of scenarios, referred to as representative concentration pathways (RCPs). These will form the basis for new climate projections to be assessed in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (due out in 2014). Using an upgraded Earth system model—which takes into account carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, aerosols, land use change, and the flow of carbon between the atmosphere and the underlying ocean and land surface—the researchers are able to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions compatible with each RCP and, in particular, the emissions reductions required to meet certain levels of global warming.

The authors find that even under the lowest concentration scenario, global average temperature increases exceed the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) limit agreed to by various governments in the Copenhagen accord. The researchers note that limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 will require global carbon dioxide emissions to be reduced to zero over the next 50 years, followed by measures to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before the end of the century.

It is exceedingly difficult to anticipate success when the conference’s goal, at its most fundamental, is essentially a scientific impossibility.

Curse you, fluffy water!

This week marked the first snowfall of the season for my sleepy hometown of Brantford, Ontario. The advancing signs of winter, combined with the attacks by the tilted Earth axis and the purveyors of daylight savings time on the length of our day, drives pretty well everyone to become cold, cranky messes. But as I was sitting in a coffee shop, festering in my first world problems, a twitter conversation between Brian Romans and Matthew Garcia reminded me that it wasn’t always this way.

No, my friends. Brantford, it seems, used to be a lush, subtropical, coastal paradise. One where, if you were lucky, you might have seen the planet’s first tree, or the first steps of a timid tetrapod as it clawed its way to land.

Just 385, 000, 000 years ago, Brantford, Ontario was right……………………………………………………..

……………………………………….

...Here.

That white line in the centre of the image is the equator, and the happy red dot is where I could have been relaxing on the beach right now. The creator of this image, Ron Blakey of Colorado Plateau Geosystems Inc., was kind enough to leave the faint ghost of the current geography on the map, making it surprisingly fun to see where your home would have been way back in the day.

But as it turns out, that specific image, of Devonian paleogeography, was not the only such picture created by dear Dr. Blakey. Oh no, there are DOZENS of pictures of North America alone.

And what is the only reasonable course of action when presented with such beautiful scientific imagery? Why, set it to some sweet acoustic guitar, of course.

The images created by Dr. Blakey are not spaced at regular temporal intervals, but thanks to some simple math the animation should be a scientifically accurate representation of the changing face of our little blue planet.

This is where a freelancer's dreams normally end up. Credit: mugley

The following is the first of what I hope will become an ever more frequent series on this here blog. Below is a pitch I submitted to a magazine editor regarding a potential freelance story. My pitch was rejected (or, at least, it’s been a few weeks with no reply), but the most important thing to me is that I sent it in the first place. Even trying to step foot into the world of magazine writing is a daunting task, and one that I’ve for the most part avoided, largely due to timidity. I hope that by posting my rejected pitches here, I can: hang my dirty laundry out to dry, document the travails of a fledgling journalist, and maybe, just maybe, hear the critiques of other writers.

As for this pitch specifically, the story idea started as a pithy tweet. A positive response from an editor I respect turned into a brief 140-char discussion, and ended with a prompt that I send him an email. I suspect that this pitch, cobbled together in an hour or two, was both too abstract and too exhaustive. So here lies the pitch in its (almost) original form.

Exclusives and Review Scores 

Hi XXXXXX,

In modern journalism, the person with the product is the person who controls the press.

Politicians limit their availability, generally giving interviews only to “insiders.” Political journalists, as a result, are afraid to say anything too critical lest they lose their privileged access. In medical research, there is the unsurprising result that scientific studies funded by pharmaceutical companies tend to have positive results. The gaming press, too, has a special tie to its over-arching industry. After all, in order to do their jobs, games journalists need advanced review copies of new games, the opportunity to interview developers and artists, and behind the scenes access at press conferences and conventions.

You may think that I’m taking this issue a bit too seriously, and that for the video game press at least, it isn’t such a big deal. After all, elections and lives aren’t riding on a gaming journalist’s coverage.

Yet on the flip side, the video game industry is growing into a behemoth with a global value launching past $100 billion. Video game companies now represent one of the fasting growing sectors in the U.S. economy, expanding at a rate seven times that of the rest of the American economy. And while the industry booms, advertising spending by industry giants follow suit (Battlefield 3′s marketing budget reportedly sits near $50 million.) With this much leverage going into pulling your gaming dollars from your sweaty, power-leveled hands, the gaming press plays an important role in giving you their clear, unbiased take on a new game.

One of the most common ways in which the gaming industry guides the hand of the gaming press is through the use of embargoes, a practice where the developer/publisher sets a specific date and time when news outlets get to share their stories.

Edge Magazine does a great job explaining the two most common views on the value of embargoes. One the one hand, “embargoes are an intervention used by PRs to exert control over how information (read: journalists) behaves, how it flows from brand to audience, in order to make their marketing plans work.”

But on the other, “Embargoes actually represent an opportunity for journalism of a higher calibre. When information is commoditised, careful analysis and informed thought is surely how you create value, differentiate yourself, build a loyal readership – simply getting there early begins to lack potency. In light of this, embargoes are arguably not just of benefit to the marketer but the journalist too, giving them the time they need to perform this task.”

For those who dare to step out of line and “break” the embargo, developers/publishers can respond by giving the offending journalist and their publication a swift kick to the blacklist.

“More than anything, the blacklist is a surefire way for bigger companies to keep smaller press outlets in line. It’s a fear tactic that ensures a “working” relationship between the media contact and the PR for the company,” writes Gaming Blend’s William Usher.

But whatever you may think about the practice of embargoes, the whole debate flies right out the window when video game publishers and developers offer members of the gaming press an exclusive window in which to run their review of an upcoming game before the embargo lifts, all for nothing more than a *wink* fair review.

Now we’re not dumb, and it’s generally considered that these “exclusive early reviews” are anything but fair. After all, if a developer or publisher cuts a certain magazine a sweet deal (one that’s almost guaranteed to drive huge amounts of traffic) and the magazine gives them a crappy review, well, scratch them off the list for an exclusive look at next month’s big release.

Understandably this topic isn’t talked about much by the gaming press, for fear of getting hit with the banhammer themselves. But even if people don’t want to talk about something doesn’t mean we can’t investigate it, and here I propose a rather simple study that we (and your readers) can do together.

Starting whenever you want to run this story (or an edited version, or something completely different), we could start crowd-sourcing a database of the review scores put out by members of the gaming press. If we flag which reviews were released early (as pre-embargo-lift exclusives) as we go along, the project could culminate in what I feel would be a very high quality and interesting feature article about the potential bias in game reporting. As we discussed earlier, even if the review-bias is widely considered to exist, nothing starts a discussion like a nice scientifically-solid result. Another benefit of doing the story this way, working up to the major feature and involving the readers from the get-go, is you end up having a large built-in audience, anxious for your finished product. It may also potentially put you in the privileged position of being the driver of an industry-wide discussion.

As for making a statistically solid result, we would need to go through a couple of steps. We would need review scores from a consistent, and decently large, number of outlets. We would also need to keep track of which reviews are exclusives as we go along, as I know of no way to easily do this retroactively. Then all it comes down to is doing a couple of pretty simple calculations; figuring out the average result for each game, figuring out whether a specific publication tends to score above or below the average, and then figure out whether or not a review being an exclusive has an effect on the score.

Though I’m not a stats expert myself (I’m a science journalist, with a BSc and an MA in journalism), I know that I would be able to get help from a proper statistician to make sure everything checks out. Also, I would be more than happy to work with you to oversee the review score crowd-sourcing and the writing of the final feature story.

If this is something that interests you please let me know at your earliest convenience.

Thanks,

Colin Schultz

How the world’s water supplies will be affected by a progressively warming climate is, understandably, a major area of investigation. Because of its importance, I’ve recently pumped out (get it? Hydrology humour) a big pile of journal summaries covering a wide swath of water science. (Or, maybe it’s the fact that the AGU happens to have a journal called Water Resources Research.)

Water:

The shrinking Swiss Morteratsch Glacier, 1985 to 2007. Credit: J. Alean.

Shrinking Alpine glaciers spell trouble for Europe’s rivers – As I live in the lap of aqueous luxury, resting my head within a tank of gas of a quarter of the world’s fresh water, it’s easy to forget that many countries’ supplies are less abundant and less stable. In western Europe, a web of well-known and important rivers—like the Danube and the Rhine—draw some of their water from glaciers nestled in the Swiss Alps. The total volume of glacier water feeding the rivers was never very high, but some new research showed that what was particularly important was when the water seeped down from the mountains. Glacier melt peaks in the summer, exactly when other sources tend to dry up. The relative importance is only amplified when drought strikes the region. While this is nice to know on its own (who needs bottled glacier water when it’s right there in the river?), it becomes sort of scary when you realise that glacier run-off will all but disappear by the end of the century.

Groundwater depletion’s contribution to sea level rise increasing - Climate change is coming. We’re more-or-less locked in to 2°C of warming and the myriad consequences that entails. One of the easier effects of warming world to get your head around is sea level rise. Heat goes up, land-locked ice goes down, ocean goes up. Or, heat goes up, water expands, ocean goes up [but not much, see below]. But there is another important factor, and it goes like this: Farmer settles in the desert, massive quantities of groundwater are pumped up for irrigation, water makes its way to the oceans, oceans go up. In order to figure out exactly how tall the stilts should be on your beach-side cottage (you have one, right? Can I visit? I’ll bring candy.) we need to know how much each of these sources has contributed to the 17 centimeters of sea level rise we’ve already seen over the past 100 years. It turns out that groundwater depletion accounts for around 13 millimetres of it. But, the irrigation-driven part of the equation is ramping up rapidly. Between 2000 and 2008, we pumped a quarter of what we drew from the ground in the entire stretch from 1900 to 2000. This new study falls a bit under some previous estimates (which I wrote about here and here), and above some others.

Was ocean acidification responsible for history’s greatest extinction?- Another major water-related worry of climate change is the very really threat of ocean acidification. As the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide (which it will inevitably do as atmospheric levels rise), some

Pretty much exactly what ocean water will be like.

fancy chemistry will slowly drive down the ocean’s pH, and ramp up its hostility to cute little crustaceans, corrals, and anything else that relies on the water maintaining its current carbonate balance. As if to drive the point home, a new study suggests that the greatest extinction of all time may have been fuelled by ocean acidification.

Other water-related stories:

Thermal expansion not a major source of sea level rise

Refining the relationship between ocean color and salinity

New watershed classification based on distance to the drainage divide

Estimating adsorbed water film thickness in unsaturated soil

Earthquake-generated landslides are an important control of riverbed erosion

How ocean ridges affect large-scale ocean circulation

New watershed classification to make use of high-resolution data

The quandary of peat:

While water issues may be one of the most widely publicized dilemmas coupled to climate change, I’d say that the biggest wild card award goes to permafrost peatlands. These frozen-marsh-muck landscapes store absolutely massive quantities of carbon, enough to quadruple atmospheric carbon dioxide levels if it all got out. Northern peatlands might be just waiting to bust at the seams, or they could become a giant sink for greenhouse gases as mosses and shrubs colonize the newly-opened terrain. The problem is, we just don’t know what’s going to happen with them. Hence, wild card. Two studies came out recently, one trying to figure out how peatlands might react to climate change and one tracking how they’ve changed so far.

For more on northern peatlands, see this interview. Caution: Paywall :(

Other climate changey goodness (both past and future):

Reefs may have triggered a bout of global cooling

Potential solution to the Cool Tropics Paradox

The Last Glacial Maximum’s effect on the Walker Circulation

Climate model’s historical accuracy no guarantee of future success

Slowly but steadily, a stormier Europe

Weird things are cool:

Atmospheric waves break on the Moon’s shadow - This one is just plain cool. Apparently, when there is a solar eclipse and the Moon blocks out the Sun’s light, the atmosphere under the Moon’s shadow cools down just enough to trigger acoustic-gravity waves. Wait… what?

[An aside on gravity waves!

The Earth's atmosphere is separated into layers based on buoyancy. Now let's say that as a friendly air packet is casually moseying along above ocean, a small island just totally pops out of nowhere. With nothing else it can do, the air gets forced up over the island, pushing it into an atmospheric layer where it just doesn't belong. Trying to get the air packet back to its rightful home, gravity gets a little bit too eager, and pulls the little air packet into a lower layer where it also doesn't belong. Now buoyancy takes over, and the air packet rises up, again overshooting

Gravity waves looking totally sweet. Credit: NASA

its appropriate atmospheric layer. It’s like some messed up version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but if Goldilocks was on speed and kept running past the middle bowl, bouncing between the too-hot and too-cold porridge. So that’s one way that gravity waves can be formed, and when they happen to pass through clouds they can look really cool.

Acoustic-gravity waves are like regular gravity waves, but made of sound. No, I don’t get it either.]

The Moon's shadow blocks out Taiwan and southern China in a 2009 eclipse. Credit: WebGMS–MTSAT/GMS

So in the new study, the cooling effect of the Moon’s shadow sends these acoustic-gravity waves shooting out from the leading and trailing edges as the shadow traces its path over the surface of the Earth. But, because the waves move through the atmosphere more slowly than the Moon’s shadow passes over the surface of the Earth, the waves end up looking an awful lot like the bow waves and stern wake you get when a boat zips through the water. The researchers used the bow waves and stern wake to figure out that, were the Moon’s shadow a boat, it would be over 1700 kilometers long.

And, because I’m sick of writing little blurbs about studies for which I’ve already written little blurbs…:

High-resolution model reproduces heliospheric current sheet fold

Bedrock cracks affect landslide susceptibility

Putting bounds on the drivers of turbulence

Using an artificial brain to interpret Adriatic surface currents

Magnetic behavior changes identified in natural rock formations

Admit it. It *is* a sexy turtleneck.

I’ve done it. As an educated guess, I’d reckon you’ve done it too. Most recently, David DiSalvo at Forbes did it with his story,

“Why Scientists and Journalists Don’t Always Play Well Together.”

Next to lusting after Carl Sagan and pining for the Space Race, lamenting the woeful state of science writing is a favourite past time of science writers and scientists alike.

DiSalvo’s tale has been told many times, and the key ideas can be filtered out as,

Scientists mistrust journalists because the popular market for news can, and very often does, affect how stories are told.

And,

[T]he ambiguity surrounding many scientific findings doesn’t translate well to popular messaging.

In other words, through their act of converting complex science into broadsheet coverage science writers sometimes slip, over-dramatizing and over-simplifying. Or, in even more other words, bad science journalism is science journalists’ fault. As the last wall standing between the outside world and the edited page, this stance makes sense. But here’s a line you’ll never expect:

It’s not so simple.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m all for pointing fingers, particularly those extra-waggly self-deprecating ones. I just think that, sometimes, it can be nice to spread that blame around. Science journalists do not work in isolation, and sometimes errors start further—much further—up the chain. But this is no exploration of the extreme, villifying that lone, over-hyping researcher who bursts onto the scene in a blaze of press conference-induced glory. Rather, this is an investigation of the mundane; of the modest, common ways mistakes that make their way into the news.

Three studies in the past few years have challenged, or at least balanced, the view of the science writer as the source of scientific media misinformation. They all focus on medicine, but as health and medical news dominates popular science coverage (at 90% or more) this seems like a fair concession.

“Fat Gene” found! In a press release…

In their study, “Lost in Translation? A Comparison of Cancer-Genetics Reporting in the Press Release and Its Subsequent Coverage in the Press,” Jean Brechman, Chul-joo Lee and Josenph Cappella explore the differences in tone, story content and the level of “deterministic language” between 23 press releases and 71 related news stories.

Based on a narrow set of news stories from major U.S. newspapers between 2004 to 2007, the authors assessed articles which reported on new scientific research, referenced only one study at a time, and were driven by a press release.

The authors found that genetics stories were over-simplified and deterministic 67.5% of the time, answering DiSalvo when he claimed that, “What isn’t quite clear [is how] any given research study magically becomes ‘A + B = C’ in an article about the study.”

The authors focused on tracking the distortion of the research’s core claim, from: “B gene is associated with X, given Y” to “B causes X” to “B! X! Ahhhhhhhh!” They found that for press release-newspaper story pairs that made basically the same central point, the press release had more deterministic language 34.4% of the time, and the newspaper 33.1%.

Most important of all, however, the authors write,

While claims within popular press often lacked specificity and overinterpreted preliminary findings, other errors commonly attributed to science journalism, such as lack of qualifying details and use of oversimplified language (e.g., “fat gene”), were observed in press releases… Of the 10 cases using the “outcome gene” term, its usage originated in the press release 70% of the time.

Brechman et al. eventually decide that they, “find no evidence to support the claim that the process of language distortion occurs as scientific news is translated from the intermediate press release to coverage in the press.”

Point, science journalists.

It’s not just the ‘how?’ It’s also the ‘what?’

Brechman, Lee and Cappella showed that press releases can do a lot to set the tone of news coverage (Gay Gene! Math Gene!), but these discrepancies are but a pittance compared to the blame we science journalists can dodge thanks to the research of Steven Woloshin, Lisa Schwart, Samuel Casella, Abigail Kennedy and Robin Larson.

In their study, “Press Releases by Academic Medical Centers: Not So Academic?” Woloshin et al. analyzed 200 of the 989 press releases issued by ten major U.S. medical research institutions in 2005. They split the pile into two main groups: research that was grounded in human trials, and studies based on laboratory or animal testing.

Of the 113 studies focusing on people, only 17% were meta-analyses or randomized trials—the types of studies which give you a close-to-definitive answer to your medical question. The authors found that 40% of the studies were “inherently limited” based on small sample sizes or lack of a control group, and less than half of the press releases couched the medically marvellous statements with relevant caveats.

For the other set of press releases, those focused on mice, cell cultures or other tangential subjects, 64 out of 87 suggested that the study’s results were directly relevant to human health, with the majority saying nothing about how ridiculous this is. (Seriously. This is probably scientists’ and science journalists’ biggest pet peeve. Knock it off.)

Now remember, these press releases were written by the staff of major medical institutions. The kind who know what makes a good study. If they think the science is solid enough to go out into the world, why shouldn’t a journalist think it’s ready for the front page (of section D, let’s be serious)?

The authors also found that 12% of press releases were based on unpublished research. As a way forward, they write that,

The quickest strategy for improvement would be for centers to issue fewer releases about preliminary research, especially unpublished scientific meeting presentations, because findings often change substantially— or fail to hold up—as studies mature.

Of the modern scientist-journalist relationship, DiSalvo writes,

“Scientists, as sources to journalists in the maelstrom, have become increasingly fearful that the credibility of their findings is being stretched thin to grab readers’ attention.” But maybe it is time for the scientists to look a bit closer to home.

Perhaps these studies don’t go quite as far to protect the collective journalist ego as I would hope. After all, public releations staff, journalists, and science writers of every colour perform—from the scientist’s point of view—essentially the same function.

But wait… there’s more!

You! In the ivory tower! Yeah, you!*

By far my favourite of the bunch, Francois Gonon, Erwan Bezard and Thomas Boraud’s “Misrepresentation of Neuroscience Data Might Give Rise to Misleading Conclusions in the Media: The Case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.”

The authors were working away, collecting studies on their area of interest: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

“Whilst preparing our review on ADHD we noticed several types and cases of data misrepresentation,” they write. This apparently annoyed them so much that they decided to investigate it.

Here, we point out the misrepresentation of the neurobiological facts at its initial level, i.e. inside individual scientific articles.

The trio analyzed 360 neuroscience research articles and found that journal authors tend to stray from reality in three ways: disagreeing with their own results, over-inflating their results, or over-extending the value of their research.

In two cases, the authors suggest that Volkol et al. and Barbaresi et al.‘s conclusions, the ones which appeared in the studies’ abstracts, disagreed with their published results. Gonon et al. found that these two studies were collectively picked up by the media 61 times, with only one reporter highlighting the discrepancy. To make matters worse, these conflicting conclusions were picked up by other scientific researchers a few dozen times.

Gonon, Bezard and Boraud also found it to be incredibly common for a researcher to state their research finding firmly in the abstract, but that upon closer inspection, the studies’ own results often do not justify such a bold claim. As an example, the authors focused on studies which investigated the link between one specific gene, DRD4, and its effect on ADHD frequency. The important point for Gonon was that, while the link between DRD4 and ADHD is statistically strong, the risk associated with having a flawed version of the gene is relatively small. Of the 159 studies that looked at the link between DRD4 and ADHD, however, only 25 mentioned this fact which, in the eyes of this study’s authors, was a major over-simplification. Following up, they found that 82% of the news stories followed through which this over-simplified and often over-dramatized view of the relationship between DRD4 and ADHD.

Finally, “from our survey of 101 articles [based on animal models] we found that… 23 studies extrapolate to new therapeutic prospects.”

They say that researchers who, in their own research articles, make the leap from animal models to the potential for treatments that could change or save lines, they,

feed [the] illusory short-term hopes in patients and their families. For example, animal studies about cellular therapies for spinal cord injury have been put forward by for-profit institutions selling these therapies to unfortunate patients although these interventions are not yet proven safe and effective by properly conducted clinical trials.

(Interestingly, the tendency of research articles to over-reach from their furry findings to human health scaled with the impact factor of the publishing journal. Huh.)

But of the lowly journalist, they write,

Our examples of data misrepresentation in scientific reports seem to be correlated with similar misrepresentation in the lay media. Thus, we speculate that data misrepresentation in the scientific literature might play a part in the distortion of data into misleading conclusions in the media.

The blame is spread evenly—no one party is the source of scientific misinformation. Science communication is an interacting web, with each participant affecting the quality of those around them. As an optimistic glance to the future, DiSalvo nails it when he says,

If we are willing to extend some trust and work as partners trying to reach the same goal—thoughtful communication of important scientific findings to the public—then the science sandbox needn’t be such a treacherous place to play.

———————————————————————————————————————

*Thanks to Hadas Shema  for allerting me to this study.

References:

Brechman, J., Lee, C., & Cappella, J. (2009). Lost in Translation?: A Comparison of Cancer-Genetics Reporting in the Press Release and Its Subsequent Coverage in the Press Science Communication, 30 (4), 453-474 DOI: 10.1177/1075547009332649

Gonon F, Bezard E, & Boraud T (2011). Misrepresentation of neuroscience data might give rise to misleading conclusions in the media: the case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. PloS one, 6 (1) PMID: 21297951

Woloshin S, Schwartz LM, Casella SL, Kennedy AT, & Larson RJ (2009). Press releases by academic medical centers: not so academic? Annals of internal medicine, 150 (9), 613-8 PMID: 19414840

You can actually buy these. Credit: CafePress

Sitting alone, headphones blocking out the world in a booth at my local coffee shop, the above popped into my head. Representing far more than a desire to sneak lightly-masked political incorrectness into my daily affairs, the title of this post is a testament to one unwavering truth–my descent into geophysics dorkitude is reaching critical levels.

In the few months since I last updated this site, through my daily routine of drinking more coffee than can possibly be healthy and reading scientific research off a screen far too small, I have been repeatedly struck by one unassailable conclusion: the world is complicated, my ability to understand it declines daily, and I relish every moment of this descent into uncertainty.

It’s obviously hopefully not the case that I’m actually getting dumber with time (the effects of caffeine on memory are mixed.) Rather, the more I read about the nuances of the physical world, the more I realize my superficial grasp ain’t worth schist.

So what is it that has led me to be so self-degrading? The following stories (along with a video, magazine article, and an interview with a textbook author) represent the most important geophysical science research as selected by the editors of a handful of American Geophysical Union journals (where I am now a staff writer, yay!). The links lead to short journal summaries which, though brief, hopefully give the gist of the research.

Scientific research covered by the popular media usually falls into one of two camps, either: “This might kill you!” or, “This isn’t really that important, but it certainly is cool!” There is plenty of that below, but it’s also sprinkled with a dose of, “This is scientifically important!” You know, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Fires, floods, and other things that might kill you:

Cold snaps still a threat despite global warming

Next generation atmospheric model improves hurricane forecasting

Model gives 3 months warning of Amazonian forest fires

Model suggests path to ending the ongoing Haitian cholera epidemic

Three-dimensional ash cloud observations could help keep planes in the air

Determining the trigger of East Asian dust storms

Raarrrr. (Yes I know that's not East Asia) Credit: Avlxyz

The rain that drowned Pakistan could have been predicted

Deadly 2010 Russian heat wave not a consequence of climate change

The cause of the 2010 Russian heat wave was largely predictable

Improved model reproduces the 2003 European heat wave

Modeling monthlong slow slip earthquakes

High detail snapshots of rare gigantic jet lightning to the ionosphere

The changing Earth–past and future:

New emissions scenarios say 2°C warming may be unavoidable

Potential for resumption of East Pacific sea level rise after 30-year hiatus

Surge in North Atlantic hurricanes due to better detectors, not climate change

Australia's coast went from lush rainforest to... this. Credit: Imira

How Indonesian development destroyed Australia’s rainforest

Potential for Atlantic current collapse confirmed by global circulation model and observations

Carbon Sequestration and Its Role in the Global Carbon Cycle - An interview with Brian J. McPherson - “…[C]arbon capture and storage is something we can do now. We can tackle individual sources of CO2 emissions in a tangible way. While ocean and land uptake is something that happens naturally and continuously over relatively long time scales, carbon capture and subsurface storage can tackle massive quantities of CO2 quickly. Of course, that can only happen if a way to pay for it is realized. Unfortunately, the only country in the world right now that has an effective commercial carbon capture and storage program is Norway, which is facilitated through a carbon tax. In other countries where cap-and-trade systems are in place, commercial carbon capture and storage is still nonexistent. Nonetheless, the technology exists”

How North Atlantic cooling alters Southern Ocean wind and increases atmospheric carbon dioxide

Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica. Credit: James Wu

Ozone depletion leading force for Southern Ocean change

Explaining away El Niño Modoki

Constraining the trigger for an ancient warming episode

Ocean floor faulting explains differences in Central American lavas

New data refine the travels of Gondwana

Building an atlas of Arctic climate dynamics

H2Whoa, that’s a lot of hydrology:

The varying life expectancies of American reservoirs

Estimating contaminant spreading by subsurface water

The traveling rings of the North Brazil Current

Zooming in on aquatic denitrification hot spots

Antarctic coast. Credit: Samuel House

A new source of freshwater for Antarctica’s coastal waters

Seasonal anomalies in the Canary Current

Determining the underlying pattern of Arctic snowfall

Two eyes are better than one for measuring rain from space

The effect of sediment on mountain river erosion

Dual-dynamic approach improves soil water transport model

Determining a relevant measure of hydrologic connectivity

Bang. Zoom. Straight to the Moon! (and beyond):

Amino Acids from Interstellar Space

A coronal mass ejection. Scary schist. Credit: NASA

Space Weather Model Moves Into Prime Time - “[T]he model could bring quantitative analysis to a field dominated by history- and experience-based predictions. “Our forecasters would just watch pictures of the Sun,” said Pizzo. If they saw what appeared to be a [coronal mass ejection] heading toward the Earth, they would “make a wild guess, basically, about when it’s going to get here and how bad it’s going to be.”

Mapping the magnetic mayhem in the heliosheath

Lost in a fog on Mars

Miniature detector measures deep space radiation

How science happens. Or, the stuff that doesn’t really fit anywhere else, and no one wants a category with only one thing in it:

Fundamental issues of modeling in a climate of change

Identifying misbehaving models using baseline climate variance

Improving model estimates of gross primary production

Improving global estimates of land surface properties

Updated algorithms improve aerosol detection accuracy

I'm a bit of a hoarder....

I’ve always been captivated by science.

In my teens, I watched Daily Planet (a daily science news television show) after school nearly every day at my one of my friend’s houses. I read a lot of science magazines – my first subscription was Discover. I took every science class offered in highschool, and went to university for chemistry.

Half way through my undergraduate years, I started to lose interest as my education got ever more focused on methods and niche topics, training me to be a working scientist. The depth and specialization of modern science is incredibly important, but the narrow scope just wasn’t for me. I wanted to know everything (or almost everything), about everything.

My guidance counsellor at the University of Guelph suggested that a career in science journalism would better fit my style; forever learning, thinking, and questioning on a broad number of topics. She pulled some strings (thanks Linda!) and let me build a choose-your-own adventure degree: Honours Physical Science with a minor in Philosophy. I could take whatever science courses I wanted as long as they fell under the banner of physical science. My goal was to get the basics in every field, so that I could walk in to nearly any lab in the world and at least have a grasp of the basics.

Obviously my education wasn’t as far reaching as I’d planned (I still know next to nothing about psychology, for instance, and am happy to leave that to minds more suited), but I got a pretty good primer in ecology, chemistry, toxicology,  meteorology, hydrology, energy issues… and on it goes.

Whether my plan really worked out has yet to be determined, but I’m incredibly happy with my choice. Every day I get to learn about something completely new, and totally different from the day before. The stories I worked on this month are a testament to the quest for diversity that led me to switch programs.

As with the last time I did this, almost all of the stories were written for the American Geophysical Union and are either summaries/teasers for interesting studies selected by the journal editors, or Q&As with the authors of scientific books:

Arctic ice. Photo Credit: Patrick Kelley, U.S. Coast Guard

No tipping point for Arctic Ocean ice, study says – One of the many fears for those concerned with our persistently warming world is the threat of hitting a tipping point, a drastic shift in the behaviour of one part of the climate. One of the more prevalent concerns is about the loss of Arctic sea ice, especially with talk of impending ice-free Arctic summers. This new study says that even if we do see a complete melt, the various feedback systems will cause the ice to recover within two years. (Also, I think this marks my second appearance on Watts Up With That…)

Using microearthquakes to evaluate potential carbon sequestration sites – With the world starting to try to do something about increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, one of the proposed solutions is to pump it underground as a liquid and store it for thousands of years. This tactic has the benefit of being pretty well understood technically, and it’s not too politically sensitive. One of the barriers, however, is finding good storage sites that you know won’t leak. These researchers came up with a really clever tactic to use triggered microearthquakes – essentially really weak, low frequency earthquakes – to find fractures in the rock in three-dimensions. I really need to thank Matthew Garcia and Brian Romans, among others, for putting up with all my stupid questions while I worked through this study.

Political bias in water quality monitoring – Science is a pure, unfiltered intellectual pursuit, focused on nothing more than the acquisition of knowledge, right? Well… no. These folks tracked the development of the European water quality monitoring network to identify the influence of social, political and economic factors. Did you know that being an original member of the European Union is related to lower water quality monitoring standards? Now you do.

New model shows how tiny features influence large-scale flow through an aquifer – This study isn’t flashy, but it tries to deal with one of my absolute favourite scientific problems: scale issues in modelling. The researchers came up with a way to use large-scale observations to predict small-scale changes within an aquifer, which ultimately controlled the large-scale movement of a pollutant. This scale gap is common in every field, and it’s really cool to see someone find a work-around. Tracking the movement of pollutants through aquifers is really important, as any junk that gets down there could stick around for a long, long time, ruining an otherwise great source of freshwater. (Oh, and I have a thing for aquifers, no idea why.)

Norwegian mountains. NB: May not be the actual mountains in the study. Photo credit: Jesper Hauge

Improving estimates of water volume in mountain snowfall – Again with the scale issues. See? I told you. They’re everywhere. Here, the researchers want to use satellite images to spot where snow had fallen in a Norwegian mountain range to sort out how much water was locked up, and where it would go when it finally melted in the spring. This information can make a huge difference for flood preparations. Unfortunately, mountains are big, satellites are usually either high-resolution or cover a wide area, and the topography of the mountain can change significantly over a small area. They got around it by using a combined satellite-modelling approach. It will be really interesting if we can start applying this technique to other regions.

Trees are good, deforestation is bad. Extra bad, apparently. Photo Credit: Luc B

Changing atmospheric chemistry with the swing of an axe – Most animals give off pheromones, smelly chemical signals that they use to mark territory, warn of predators, or let others know it’s sexy time. Plants, too, give off gases for a variety of reasons, and some of these can be pumped out in big enough quantities that they might start to change the climate. Cutting down trees not only stops them from munching on carbon dioxide, it also prevents them from emitting a whole range of gases. These researchers think that deforestation and land use change will lead to increased ground-level ozone (bad), and increases in nitric oxide emissions (also bad).

In addition to the journal summaries, two book Q&As came out this month – both are unfortunately hidden behind a paywall:

Surface Ocean – Lower Atmosphere Processes – An interview with Corinne Le Quéré: “We know more about the impact of iron fertilization to stimulate growth of phytoplankton than any other geoengineering option proposed so far… What we don’t know is what happens after that; how much of that biomass is then eaten by zooplankton, how much of the biomass and carbon sinks to depth, what are the changes in the ecosystem, how much DMS is produced. All of these secondary reactions are very, very poorly known… There is a lot of talk about geoengineering, but the scientific knowledge is not ready to support the technical geoengineering implementation.”

Tubeworms on a hydrothermal vent on the East Pacific Rise. Photo Credit: NOAA

Diversity of Hydrothermal Systems on Slow Spreading Ocean Ridges – An interview with Peter Rona: “There is a lot of thermal and chemical energy produced at seafloor vents… Right now, there are no efficient ways to transport the energy from hydrothermal vents out in the ocean back to land, although the heat could be harnessed for in situ uses at or close to the hydrothermal systems on ocean ridges. We’re now at a stage when we’re developing more seafloor observatories, so energy from hydrothermal vents could facilitate that development. Chemical energy at hydrothermal vents fuels chemosynthesis in vent ecosystems on and beneath the seafloor. Development of that energy is open to the imagination.”

ScienceBlogs.com circa July, 2010

A modified version of this story is now live on Scientific American’s guest blog: You’ll believe anything you read online, won’t you?

In July, 2010, one corner of the blogosphere erupted with the seething, burning rage that online communities seem to have a unique ability to muster.

The spark that lit bloggers’ fuse was a decision by SEED Media Group decision-makers to allow a team of writers from PepsiCo Inc. to operate a blog about nutrition and global health on its popular ScienceBlogs.com blogging network. Many of ScienceBlogs’ other writers felt this choice had leapt across the ethical line. Some thought the Pepsi-authored blog wasn’t labelled clearly to let readers know what they felt it was – advertising in disguise. Some felt that by staying, their reputations, and their credibility, would be diminished.

While SEED did eventually reversed its plan, the damage had been done. The network began haemorrhaging writers, losing nearly a quarter of its roster before the week was out. Blogging as a platform flies on wings of trust, and it seemed that ScienceBlogs – one of the first, and certainly the most prominent science blogging network – had flown too high.

The fiasco – dubbed Pepsigate as the saga unfurled – revolved around two major issues: traditional notions of the advertising-editoral divide that have plagued publishing for ages, but also a new struggle stemming from a lack of understanding of how readers assess the credibility of blogs. Knowing how readers decide to believe a blog post could help make sense of Pepsigate, and whether or not giving a clearer biography of the Pepsi blog’s authors would have made any difference.

Seriously. Do it.

One recent study by Thomas Chesney and Daniel Su tried to dig in to the factors people use to judge blogs by focusing on pseudonymous* blogging and the impact it might have on perceived credibility.

Chesney and Su gave 269 undergraduate students – 182 in the UK, 87 in Malaysia – a fake story chronicling a blogger’s discovery of, and subsequent battle with, nail fungus (ew?). The posts were identical except for the blogger’s biographical information running along the top. Here, the researchers had three types of bio: 1) a pseudonym only 2) a pseudonym, age, and sex, or 3) the blogger’s “real” name, age, sex, email address and photograph.

The students rated the blogger’s perceived credibility, successfulness, trustworthiness, and reputation, along with whether they thought the writer had “an interest in important affairs,” integrity, and had “information of superior quality.” Each of these terms was judged out of seven and combined to give a one-number measure of the bloggers perceived credibility, with one being believable and seven being a skeezy dirtbag.

It turned out, much to the surprise of the researchers, that having a full set of biographical information, or having nothing but a nickname (KrystalKidd, or another similarly creative pseud) made absolutely no difference on how credible the students thought the blogger was.

“I wasn’t expecting that at all,” said Chesney, a researcher at the University of Nottingham. “I thought it would make difference, this idea of having not just a name but also a photograph, but it didn’t. There was no difference.”

Pseudonymous bloggers were rated with a 4.40 +/- 0.93, pseud, age and sex earned 4.28 +/- 0.79, and fully identifiable bloggers got 4.26 +/- 0.89. In other words, all three set-ups left the bloggers somewhere in the middle of the seven point scale.

“Whatever the reason,” said Chesney, “the implication of [the study] for bloggers is that, should they wish to publish anonymously, they can do so without a loss of credibility.”

But in my mind, this is only one possible way of looking at the results. Yes, it could be that people are sympathetic to anonymous bloggers. Or, maybe it’s just that the level of trust for blogs isn’t up for discussion. So it might not be that bloggers aren’t losing credibility by being anonymous, but rather that even by having a photo, an email address and all the rest, bloggers just aren’t capable of gaining any points. Chesney said he’s sympathetic to the two different interpretations.

“I think that’s exactly right. This study doesn’t shed any light on which of those it is, but it could be either,” he said.

Chesney said there is at least one strong reason why the results may not be perfectly applicable to blogging today, however. He said the research was conducted in around 2006, “before it became known in the mainstream that news organizations were willing to look at blogs, Flickr streams, and microblogs as valid information sources.”

He said that at the time, it might have been that, despite their growing prominence, “blogs perhaps were not seen as something worth attention.”

But, Chesney and Su’s findings seem to fit within previous research into the perceived credibility of websites in general. The pair wrote that in a study by Eysenbach and Köhler, which looked at how people get health information online, that “few participants were able to name the website where they had eventually found information, and none of them had checked any ‘disclaimer’ or ‘about us’ section of the websites they looked at.”

The research, along with a pinch of extrapolation, suggests editors, publishers and others working online professionally need to be particularly wary of who they’re putting behind a keyboard, as readers seem to not really care about the source of the information they are reading. And, as with learning bad science from movies, people quickly forget where they get a piece of information.

With the default credibility of blogs running so low, and there being little a blogger can do to improve it, they need to be especially protective of any gains they manage to make – a lesson SEED may have learned just a little too late.

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*The authors study refers to anonymous blogging throughout, but technically the study seems to refer to pseudonymous blogging – blogging under a nickname. Anonymous bloggers would be completely unidentified. For a discussion of some of the pros and cons of pseudonymous blogging, see this post by Scicurious.

Thanks to Psychasm at LabSpaces for pointing me to this study.

Thomas Chesney and Daniel K.S. Su (2010). The impact of anonymity on weblog credibility International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 68 (10), 710-718 : 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2010.06.001