A Rough Guide to Types of Scientific Evidence Click to enlarge Today’s graphic looks at science in general, rather than just chemistry. It’s in a similar vein to the Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science posted last year, but this time looking at the hierarchy of different types of scientific evidence. You might think science is science, but some evidence is ranked higher in the scientific community than others, and having an awareness of this can help you sort the science from the pseudoscience when it comes to various internet claims. This graphic was inspired by a couple of things this week. There’ll be more on aspartame in a future post, but what I took away from this was that some people out there aren’t sure what counts as robust scientific evidence. The reason for this is perhaps that, in parts, they’re more complicated concepts, but they’re ones that are of great benefit to understand, even for those who aren’t destined for a scientific career. There are three main subcategories under the observational studies header.
Scientists Discover New Shape When Playing With Rubber Bands What do you yet when you cross a rubber band with an octopus? A whole new shape, it turns out, with perversions. The Harvard researchers who made the discovery were seeking to make springs. They glued two strips of uneven length together and stretched them out while clipped at each end with strings thin enough that the strips could rotate freely. As the force stretching the strips out decreased the strips started to wind up like a telephone cord (ask someone over 30). While the new shape resembles a double helix the team noticed it had what they call perversions (see image above). What was unexpected was that the bands developed not just one perversion, but as many as eleven. "Once you are able to fabricate these complex shapes and control them, the next step will be to see if they have unusual properties; for example, to look at their effect on the propagation of light," says Associate Professor Katia Bertoldi, one of the authors. Helices and hemihelices are common in nature.
Five Editor-Approved Tips for Media Literacy in Any Class In 2015, a year before murmurs of “fake news” became omnipresent, textbook publisher McGraw-Hill was under fire for a World Geography book illustration. The section, on patterns of immigration throughout American history, referred to a wave of “immigration” in which African “workers” arrived in the United States. Parents, students and teachers were outraged by the sugarcoated and outright false history of slavery being shared in classrooms across Texas. This was one incident of false information making its way into schools, but it was far from the first or last. Clickbait headlines and polarizing politics have made it a daunting challenge for teachers to find factual, reliable information inside and outside of the classroom. Fact-checking and looking for bias are no longer just skills needed in journalism class or at the school paper. Here are 5 editor-approved tips for teaching these skills to students across curriculum and subjects: Rule #1: Check Your Own Bias First
How to Spot Fake News: Lesson Plan for Grades 9-12 Concerns about the proliferation of "fake news" on social media surfaced as early as 2014 as adults and students increased their use of social media platforms for gaining information about current events. This lesson asks students to think critically by analyzing a news story and satire of the same event in order to explore how each can lead to different interpretation. Estimated Time: Two 45-minute class periods (extension assignments if desired) Activity #1: News Article: Facebook's Satire Tag Background Knowledge: "Satire is a technique employed by writers to expose and criticize foolishness and corruption of an individual or a society by using humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule. Procedure: 1. According to the disclaimer for Empire News: "Our website and social media content uses only fictional names, except in cases of public figure and celebrity parody or satirization." Excerpt from Washington Post article: What claims does the author make? 2. Procedure 1. 3. 4. Background Knowledge:
Clickbait is a winner: The most cited articles in top science journals turned out to be flops When it comes to scientific truths, even in top journals like Science and Nature, the more wrong it is, the more it gets cited. Even after other researchers have failed to repeat it, and been published saying so, the citations don’t slow down. Almost 9 out of 10 of the new citations keep citing it as if it were still correct. Who said science was self-correcting? It’s so bad that the junkier articles in Nature and Science that couldn’t be replicated were cited 300 times as often as the more boring papers that could be replicated. And it was all so predictable — with the fixation on “counting citations” as an inane substitute for analysis: we got what we didn’t think about. Science is a form of entertainment, not a search for the truth. A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more The authors added that journals may feel pressure to publish interesting findings, and so do academics. What a trap: Only 60% of Science and Nature papers could be replicated:
An index of unreliable news websites The lists we combined to create the index had 1,043 unique domain names. Of these, as of November 2018, 515 were still active and another 528 were inactive (51 percent) — either no longer online or no longer posting stories. We detected inactive sites programmatically by retrieving HTTP status codes (404s or 301s), using auto-generated screenshots and, in some cases, by visual inspection. We curated the resulting list, trimming it a bit, by removing several sites whose stories, though highly politicized, were mostly not fake: alternet.org, cato.org, heritage.org, nationalreview.com, thedailybeast.com, theintercept.com, thinkprogress.org, and weeklystandard.com. Several sites we reviewed had mostly false verdicts from fact-checking sites. Our Google spreadsheet has additional data: the year of domain registration and the number of scripts each site uses for advertising and tracking (thanks to BuiltWith). If you have additions or corrections, please use the form below to notify us.
Mantis Shrimp-Inspired Material is Stronger than Airplanes The mighty, mighty mantis shrimp is a colorful and fearsome predator that can smash its opponent (and aquariums walls) to pieces using its arms that are covered with hard exoskeleton. Researchers hoping to harness its power have now created a material that’s stronger than what’s used in airplane frames. Also known as a stomatopd (Odontodactylus scyllarus), the 4 to 6-inch long smashing predator has a fist-like “mineralized dactyl club” that can withstand thousands of high-velocity blows, which it delivers to its prey. Much of the impact resistance and shock absorbance is thanks to the spiraling (or helicoidal) arrangement of mineralized fiber layers on an area of the club called the endocuticle region. The new material did very well compared with the “quasi-isotropic” control -- the industry's standard structure, which has alternating layers stacked on each other. The work was published in Acta Biomaterialia this week. Images: Carlos Puma (top), UC Riverside (middle) Photo Gallery
IFLA -- How To Spot Fake News Critical thinking is a key skill in media and information literacy, and the mission of libraries is to educate and advocate its importance. Discussions about fake news has led to a new focus on media literacy more broadly, and the role of libraries and other education institutions in providing this. When Oxford Dictionaries announced post-truth was Word of the Year 2016, we as librarians realise action is needed to educate and advocate for critical thinking – a crucial skill when navigating the information society. IFLA has made this infographic with eight simple steps (based on FactCheck.org’s 2016 article How to Spot Fake News) to discover the verifiability of a given news-piece in front of you. Download the infographic Translations If you would like to translate the infographic into your language, please contact us.
YALSA Teen Literacies Toolkit Download the print version (PDF) or view the web version. Created by the Literacies Toolkit Resource Retreat Participants August 2017 About the Kit In this toolkit, we use the “fake news” phenomenon as an approach to addressing multiple literacies. Use and Reproduction of the Kit YALSA’s Teen Literacies Toolkit may be reproduced under “fair use” standards. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes the nature of the copyrighted work the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole Sample Citation Fargo, Hailley, et. al. For more information about acceptable use of YALSA’s toolkits and resources, please contact ALA’s Rights and Permission Manager at permissions@ala.org.
Evidence-Based Lies – Blake Gossard A fundamental tenet of science is that findings must be reproduced. One experiment does not establish new truths. The results have to be replicated by others using the methods described by the original investigators. Replication is key to ensuring that conclusions aren’t spurious. Nevertheless, science is currently plagued by hordes of irreproducible study results. “ More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.” Certainly, misidentification of cells is a major contributor to the replication crisis in basic biological science. The infamous P-value lies at the heart of the matter. The significance of the 5%, or .05, P-value is utterly arbitrary. A P-value of .05 implies that one result in 20 will be due to chance. Scientists working in academia must, as the saying goes, publish or perish.
*SIFT (The Four Moves) How can students get better at sorting truth from fiction from everything in between? At applying their attention to the things that matter? At amplifying better treatments of issues, and avoiding clickbait? Since 2017, we’ve been teaching students with something called the Four Moves. Our solution is to give students and others a short list of things to do when looking at a source, and hook each of those things to one or two highly effective web techniques. Stop The first move is the simplest. First, when you first hit a page or post and start to read it — STOP. Second, after you begin to use the other moves it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole, going off on tangents only distantly related to your original task. Please keep in mind that both sorts of investigations are equally useful. Investigate the source We’ll go into this move more on the next page. Now, you don’t have to do a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation into a source before you engage with it. Find better coverage
The Great Filter Sept. 15, 1998 by Robin Hanson Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we? Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Introduction Fermi, Dyson, Hart, Tipler, and others [Finney & Jones, Dyson 66, Hart 75, Tipler 80] have highlighted the relevance to SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) of the "The Great Silence" [Brin 83] (also known as the Fermi paradox), the fact that extraterrestrials haven't substantially colonized Earth yet. Life Will Colonize The Data Point The Great Filter