Talk:1574: Trouble for Science

Sentence case, or down style, is one method, preferred by many print and online publications and recommended by the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. The only two rules are the two rules mentioned above: Capitalize the first word and all proper nouns. Everything else is in lowercase. http://www.dailywritingtips.com/rules-for-capitalization-in-titles/ 173.245.50.154 12:30, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Problems with the p-value as an indicator of significance

The p-value alone can never be an indicator of significance. However, it is still often used as the only indicator, because a full set of parameters (including sample size, test setup, etc.) can't easily be packed into a single number. There's a nice article in nature about this problem: [1] I can also recommend story about (ab-)using hacked p-values to get maximum publicity. I hope this helps :-) --141.101.105.183 12:41, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

In this section, I really want to reword the p-valye explanation that "one can assume that the event observed 'exists'." Except where it's an event indirectly observed through a chained effect (unseeable gas molecules observed through brownian motion, unstable particles through detection of their decay particles, prehistoric meteorite impact through a geological/chemical fingerprint, etc) I think it should be more that "this (directly observed) event was directly linked to the presumed cause rather than spontaneous and random, at least w.r.t. the presumed cause being tested". But writing it better than I did just now. 141.101.99.114 19:36, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I think the joke is that these newspapers are talking about how bad science is, and yet they manage to come up with a stupid story about Bunsen burners, presumably being too scientifically illiterate to know the problem. Timband (talk) 12:55, 7 September 2015 (UTC) Although reading the other comments, it's a much better joke if the Bunsen Burner story is actually true, because that makes all of them about journalists not realising that they are highlighting their own ignorance. Timband (talk) 16:05, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

See Significant for another comic on p-values.--Henke37 (talk) 14:22, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Controlled trials show Bunsen burners make things colder

Actually, I can easily imagine a way to use a Bunsen burner to make something colder. Involving an unlit Bunsen burner that has been placed in the freezer for a couple hours, for example. Nowhere in the headline is there any mention of a flame. --Svenman (talk) 12:59, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually, there was a (badly formatted and badly placed, probably therefore now removed) comment on the explanation page earlier which pointed out that feeding a Bunsen burner from a propane bottle will cause the pressure, and therefore the temperature, in the bottle to decrease. That is a lot less contrived than my original idea. --Svenman (talk) 13:37, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

That was me. Trying to get my 2 cents in on my phone before I forgot. http://www.propane101.com/propaneregulatorfreezing.htm as an example. Mattiep (talk) 13:45, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Correct me if i'm wrong here, but doesn't burning flame from a Bunsen burner cause the temperatures of the flame and the target object to equalize? Sure in most cases that results in a temperature increase in the target object, but I don't see why that would be true in all high temperature cases. The comment about "reducing the rate of heat loss in 2000K+ temp objects" would only be true if the gas (assuming any atmosphere at all) surrounding the target object was cooler than the flame from the bunsen burner. This gets worse in a perfect vacuum. If a 5000K object was in a perfect vacuum and somebody set a lit bunsen burner (assuming the tip had an Oxygen source) to spray across the target object, then the Flame would get hotter as it touched the hotter object and the object would cool as the two temperatures attempted to equalize. No reduction of heat loss would happen. Can we remove the comment about "reducing the rate of heat loss in 2000K+ temp objects" ? Harodotus (talk) 22:20, 7 September 2015 (UTC).

Found an article backing up my previous comment and lacking any objection for several hours, reveresed the note in the article.[2] Harodotus (talk) 23:58, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Bunsen burners hasten the heat death of the universe, making things colder generally. Showing that in "controlled trials" seems like a challenge for a type 2 civilization, though. 198.41.241.73 08:30, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I think the joke is in the wording of the headlines. The fact that a replication study fails to reproduce can be seen as a contradiction. Overfeeding rodents leads to fat rodents. This compromises their ability to function als animal (runway) models. I haven't figured out the other ones yet. But that's çause I'm dumb :-). Alva. 141.101.104.80 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

It's way simpler than that - The joke is that people outside of sciences (with no understanding really of how to science) will report basically anything that sounds shocking or exciting, especially if it proves those nerdy, scary scientists wrong! So Randall gives us a bunch of possibly headlines that to a layman read like real, scary news about science, but to scientists this is stuff that is generally well known and understood. The last one is just taking it a step further for credulous news editors - They've been lying to us all this time! 13:33, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I think it's even simpler than that: the title is "Trouble for Science" and it shows a series of misleading headlines about misleading (i.e.: invalidated) scientific studies. The implication is "Trouble for Journalism".173.245.54.87 14:21, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree. All of the titles are poorly written. All immunoassays are antibody-based, so saying many commercial antibody-based immunoassays are unreliable is redundant, implying they have no idea what an immunoassay is. Problems with the p-value as an indicator of significance implies that there is some significant error in the use of a tool to measure significance of error, which leads one to wonder how they figured that out. If you don't know what a p-test is, the title is paradoxical. The last title would make someone assume that the controlled trials are using turned on bunsen burners to make things colder, but could mean almost anything, such as a bunsen burner being turned off the entire time, or a bunsen burner placed inside of a freezer, or even that people consider using bunsen burners in an experiment makes the experiment cool (or sweet or groovy or whatever). 173.245.56.155 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I would appreciate someone adding info about what an immunoassay is. Teleksterling (talk) 22:53, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I generally agree, but would say if you DO know what a p-test is, the title is paradoxical. If you don't know what a p-test is, the title is meaningless. Miamiclay (talk) 07:05, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

This comic may be in reference to Monsanto's latest ailments. 173.245.52.112 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Replication study fails to reproduce many published results

Upon reading that specific headline, the rational behavior would be to question the veracity of all the other headlines before and after. I could see a paper picking up on that sensationalist-looking headline and ignoring the fact it casts doubt on whatever else they published. Ralfoide (talk) 14:56, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what is the irony in the first headline? Djbrasier (talk) 00:54, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

From [3]: "When a substance undergoes a phase transition (changes from one state of matter to another) it usually either takes up or releases energy. For example, when water evaporates, the kinetic energy expended as the evaporating molecules escape the attractive forces of the liquid is reflected in a decrease in temperature. The amount of energy required to induce the transition is more than the amount required to heat the water from room temperature to just short of boiling temperature, which is why evaporation is useful for cooling. " That could explain the Bunsen burner making things colder (i.e. having less kinetic energy)

About gaussian irregularities. Using a computer and floating point numbers, someone would see irregularities on a gaussian distribution. That amounts to sampling the curve with a small but finite precision. Computing the value a any given point could lead to rounding errors and would be seen as irregularities.