More online resources

So it turns out that I have been put on yet another list of ‘blogs for X’, in this case a list of “100 excellent blogs for science teachers“. A number of other famous / infamous palaeobloggers are on there too, but the whole thing has quite a few good looking sites that are probably worthy of perusal if you have not seen them before.

Also while I’m on the subject of science communication, the evergreen (well, mostly orange) Ask A Biologist is still going strong three and half years in and 2100 questions later. Thanks to a bit of funding grubbing we also now have significant funds to revamp the whole site and that process is now well underway – expect a relaunch next year. We are as ever keen to recruit new academics to our ranks and to advertise our presence as widely as possible so do please link to us and send our address to any people you know who are keen on biology and science.

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Science by press release

Hot on the heels of my post the other day, this is a subject that has been raised before by many and is a multi-layered thing as there are lots of ways of giving the public the impression that there is a solid bit of science when in fact it is not there. This is obviously problematic as a pattern since those scientists who refuse to play such games (as they all should) can easily risk losing an argument before they know they are in one (and as far as I”m concerned public opinion and education are really important and should be engaged) or can plod through the mechanics of thrashing a poor paper in the literature to an unenthusiastic response from the media while the other side continue to champion their cause.

There are two main ways of doing this and both are in evidence if you compare actual research papers with media stories:

1. Bring out a paper and then use the press release to refer to things that are not in the paper. This can be wildly tangential or actually quite closely related but allows you to mention stuff that does not actually feature in the paper as part of your new study and of course you can take pot shots at other researchers / hypotheses with no-one to question you. Easy!

2. Base your press release around some unpublished work be it something that’s in review (or even rejected),  or a nice abstract. Since no-one knows what the as yet published paper actually *says* and there’s no data attached to the abstract you can say what you like and no-one can take you to task on it. Brilliant!

While both of these have (sadly) tried and tested histories, another possibility has now reared its head. Longtime Musings commenter Jerry Harris pointed me towards a paper on dinosaurs in the journal ‘Medical Hypotheses’ this week. Now I should point out that I have not read the paper in question and I am not specifically targeting it for criticism, merely using it as an example of what could happen. Medical Hypotheses as a journal is NOT peer-reviewed so basically things get published there with a certain and general lack of quality control over the content and style of the papers they publish, something that has allowed some highly-questionable-at-best-and-downright-terrible-at-worst papers to be published there (which is not a good start).

However, given that it seems that journalists are quite happy to publish all manner of questionable things that scientists say in interviews when exploiting the science-by-press-release loophole (and even distort the actual good science and quotes researchers do provide), it seems to me worryingly possible that the next thing for dishonest researchers to do will be to cram papers into this journal or those like it. They can then pretend they have a fully published and ‘proper’ paper and then go to town on the press front. Similarly as I noted yesterday this can act as a forum for people to splurge out hypotheses just to have them in print with their name on in an attempt to gain credit for ideas or concepts with some supposed credibility and support and dodgy taxonomists can slide in lots of new names in an archived library source.

In short, be wary. While this practice has gone on before, and thankfully remains rare, this is a possible avenue of future problems. Journalists must be more careful and actually read the papers they are quoting from – if the researchers are trying to play games then don’t let them. If the paper is ‘actually’ only an abstract, is in some non-reviewed or unrecognised journal then pick another source for your article, or speak to a few other researchers and find out what is going on. And finally, on a related note, since it is apparent that a dinosaur paper can get into Medical Hypotheses, I can’t wait for a paper on thorassic surgery to appear in Paleobiology. It seems only fair after all, or rather – why on Earth did they even take this? Has a journal ever published a paper with less in common with the journal’s official title?

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One last thing on science and the public

Since this has rather turned into science communication, allow me to present a little counter-point to yesterday’s essay by Neil Gostling. Namely this effort from the frankly often extreme and much derided UK daily, the Daily Mail. Read it if you dare / can and worry that, while this might be reactionary nonsense over the current uproar in the UK over the sacking of David Nutt, it was still written and one would assume actively liked by a serious number of readers of a National newspaper.

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A concern with internet discussions and academic honesty

In many ways this post is a continuation of the recent one on open access. This post is not intended as a criticism of online discussions (though there are some things that I think are more genuinely problematic) but merely an observation of a problem that is novel thanks to the internet and will I suspect cause problems for people in the future. Thus its discussion (ironically on the internet) and bringing the concept to light and into the glare of a public forum is I think a good thing.

I try to be as honest academically as possible which means that even if I have come up with an idea however small, and completely independently, if I am aware of this when writing a paper, I want to cite the other researcher who also noted this point. However, time was when the only discussion of most scientific concepts was done formally in the literature, or at conference meetings, or occasionally face to face. In other words it was limited to a fairly formal situation, engaged in only by academics, and only occurred to a limited degree.

Now thanks to the internet, there are hundreds of people conversing daily on blog comment threads, on message boards, on archived mailing lists and more. Lots and lots of ideas are being bandied about constantly, but all kinds of people and, importantly, these are archived and accessible online.

Therefore the question arises of how do act if I want to be scrupulously academically honest and make sure I’m giving someone else credit for an idea we both have had? (I’m talking here specifically about independent ideas, not using someone else’s ideas as a springboard for more research when a) you already know about it and b) it’s therefore easy and obvious thing to acknowledge).

I think it unreasonable to trawl through all those message boards and go looking for every comment anyone ever made to see what they said about ceratopsian horn function say. It’s practically impossible (even with online searches) and impractical in general. As much as anything it is obviously open to rampant abuse as you can fill every board with as much unfounded speculation as you like in great detail covering every possible angle and then claim you ‘thought of it first’ if anyone ever publishes any idea or general concept that overlaps with one of yours. But I am worried that this kind of thing may come to pass, not necessarily the dishonest approach of deliberately seeding ideas, but that of ‘accidental’ appropriation of ideas.

I would, I think understandably, be annoyed if I wrote a comment on a prominent site about say pterosaur flight and then saw words to that effect appear uncredited in a paper. But of course in their own way these comments are like conference abstracts, in that they are difficult to cite effectively or confidently. They are not reviewed, their documentation is uncertain (not all of this stuff is archived, some will disappear from the net etc.) and it’s often not clear in offhand comments and discussions if people making remarks are quoting other people, or even other papers when they put forward an idea, or if this is pure conjecture or based on any evidence (unpublished or otherwise).

In short, while genuine intellectual theft of ideas is and will remain rare, my concern is that some people will get upset that their ideas have been ‘stolen’. It could be hard if not impossible for someone to prove that they hadn’t read some comment or post online somewhere prominent. Back when scientific communities were smaller and communication was more limited and formal this pretty much could not be a problem, and while I’m not aware of any specific cases of this, I cannot help but suspect it’s only a matter of time. It is, I think, too easy to dismiss online discussions as un-citeable as this prevents credit from being given in cases where people have genuinely provided information or ideas that stimulated research. In any case unlike abstracts or papers, such ideas can really be cited regardless of a paper trail as personal communications from the person concerned (though these themselves are a little more uncertain now with the influx of extra people into the discussion).

I’ll leave things, there but as before this is something I think worthy of discussion since it is another aspect of modern science that needs to be adjusted to by a great many people quickly.

The effect of the media

Clearly I discuss the media on here a lot, and in general they don’t come out of it too well when it comes to science reporting. But the important thing is that it really does matter – the media has a marked and measurable effect on people’s perceptions of reality. Here (in PLoS 1, so free to read) a new study shows that even medical students can be lured into thinking some diseases are worse than others simply based on how much attention they get in the press:

“Undergraduate psychology and medical students were asked to rate the severity, future prevalence and disease status of both frequently reported diseases (e.g. avian flu) and infrequently reported diseases (e.g. yellow fever). Participants considered diseases that occur frequently in the media to be more serious, and have higher disease status than those that infrequently occur in the media, even when the low media frequency conditions were considered objectively ‘worse’ by a separate group of participants.”

The media IS important and it DOES have a real effect on how people react to science and so it IS critical that we engage with the media to help them do a better job and even make them do a better job.

 

The Role of Medical Language in Changing Public Perceptions of Illness

Meredith E. Young, Geoffrey R. Norman, and Karin R. Humphreys

PLoS ONE. 2008; 3(12): e3875.

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Science in the media, very nearly right

Yesterday evening I came across this article in the Guardian newspaper (well, their online version) on the trials of an HIV vaccine. The article is exceptionally clear and spells out what was done and why, and why the results are ambivalent. IT avoids jargon, but does explain some tricky concepts well. Overall it’s great, and the Guardian should be praised for publishing it.

But. There’s another issue here – this wasn’t written by journalists. It was written by a team from the British Medical Journal. Now the Guardian is still doing the right thing by giving people access to well written, informative and expert views on a tricky subject. My problem, perhaps inevitably with this, is that well, isn’t that what they employ the journalists to do? The best thing in the paper on science is not written by their own journalists. Oh.

Now as I have said before, I think that the Guardian has the best science section going in a major UK newspaper and anyone who gives Ben Goldace a platform is onto something good. But surely they can do better than this? There is another article on the same subject in the same section here, and it is less clear and certainly more emotive with stronger language (‘hope dashed’) and soem contradictions with the BMJ version. It’s certainly better than many I have seen, but still not great. I’ve long maintained that a great many researchers are great communicators (or at least capable of great communication) in addition to my regular potshots at many mainstream ’science’ journalists and this I think rather proves my point.

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Pterosaurs in the media

A while back I wrote this piece on  what I suggested my have been the worst media coverage of all time. However, Darwinopterus has ensured that everyone has jumped on the pterosaurs-are-cool bandwagon and most of them have, inevitably screwed up. However, there is one outstanding candidate for ‘getting as much wrong as it is possible to in the lest words while massively misrepresenting the science and introducing a ton of irrelevant nonsense that the researchers never commented on or mentioned at any point in order to try and ramp up the interest levels’.

If you can stomach the stupid, go here.

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Misquoted at best – science vs the media

I really do wish I didn’t have to write this kind of stuff. And in this case I don’t since Ben Goldacre wrote about this over at Bad Science and I am simply linking to it. It’s about the new cervical cancer vaccine and the supposed words of a doctor criticising it on ahuge front page splash on a UK national newspaper.

Quick version:

Their headline: “Jab ‘as deadly as the cancer’”.

They say: The cervical cancer vaccine may be riskier and more deadly than the cancer it is designed to prevent, a leading expert who developed the drug has warned. She also claimed the jab would do nothing to reduce the rates of cervical cancer in the UK.

The same expert says: “I did not say that Cervarix was as deadly as cervical cancer. I did not say that Cervarix could be riskier or more deadly than cervical cancer”.

Good work there. Could this actually be any more inaccurate? Actually yes, I’ve not included all that Goldacre notes is wrong with the article or that the expert said (and she herself has complained to the UK Press Complaints Commission), there is even more wrong with it. Nice. As I have said plenty of times before, there is only so much you can do to make some things clear to some journalists if this is the kind of result you are going to get. I think it would be very hard to get something this simple this wrong, but apparently it’s quite easy. Oh, and as a bonus, this was written by the ‘health journalist’ on the paper.

Tyrannosaurus is a tyrannosaur, but not all tyrannosaurs are Tyrannosaurus

The title of this post is perhaps blindingly obvious to the vast majority of the readers here – we all know that bongo are antelope, but not all antelope are bongo, mackerel are fish, but not all fish are mackerel and well, ad infinitum for the whole of biology really. Now, I do appreciate that with palaeontological names (and those in general without ‘common’, non-Latinised names) this can get trickier (so zebras are indeed within the genus Equus and are equids, though of course, not all equids / equines / equoids are in Equus!) and those little endings (-inae, -ines, -ids and more) complicate things but still, there does seem to be an annoying and unending confusion that somehow family etc. names are basically synonymous with species and generic names. This is no more obvious than with that most ubiquitous of dinosaurs in the media, Tyrannosaurus.

I really could not even begin to try and count how many times I see reports that refer to Tyrannosaurus, when they mean tyrannosaur. It is annoying as it can confuse things (tyrannosaurs have a good distribution in time and space, Tyrannosaurus does not, so saying you have an Asian Jurassic Tyrannosaurus is out). This for me (in terms of writing this piece) has come to a head with the reporting on Raptorex which for those who missed it is a new, small Asian tyrannosaur. In addition to the age old and very annoying ‘ancestor issue’ an unending stream of media reports called this animal “a new Tyrannosaurus” (italics and ‘rex’ are optional, see various reports for examples).

To go back to my well worn ‘rant hat’ and lay into the media once more, I really do understand that even many science journalists are not, and cannot, be experts in every field of science. However, this is absolutely basic biology and thus I think reasonable to expect them to get it right. I did the basic KPCOFGS stuff at school aged about 10, and while obviously taxonomy is more complex than that, journalists should be able to distinguish between a Latin binomial and an anglicised family name. They should be able to of course, but clearly almost none of them can. This is not hard and in the UK at least is taught as basic science to kids who are not yet teenagers. Getting it wrong therefore is pretty near inexcusable – if you can’t tell the difference between a species and a family, I’m not going to be brimming with confidence that you can tell an electron from an atom or a county from a country, let alone absorb, digest and accurately regurgitate the latest papers on quantum theory or cancer research.

Whether you are nodding in agreement at this point or shaking your head matters not as you can head here and listen to both sides in a debate on science journalism and its effects between Ben Goldacre of Bad Science and the UK minister of science, Lord Drayson. And in a similar vein, check out this handy little guide to reading and understanding media stories on health.

Guest Post: Writing a press release – a guide for researchers

My recent post on the media coveragea of my paper on theropod feeding generated a huge amount of interest. Of special note by some outside observers were the comments of Charles Q. Choi who had interviewed me for his article on my work, and later dropped into the comments thread to talk about communication between scientists and journalists.  Now Charles has kindly accepted my invitation to return to the Musings and work up his comments into a guest post on advice for researchers writing a press release for the media. Obviously what you want to communicate as a scientist is not always what they want or need to hear, so knowing what the other side consider useful and what is not is incredibly important. Charles is a freelance reporter who has written about science for Science, Nature, Scientific American and The New York Times, among others.

Knowledge and the application of knowledge

In some of my recent posts I was, it is fair to say, highly critical of people who leave comments on forums, online articles and the rest many of whom seem to think that they know far more than they actually do about science. There are two aspects of this misestimation of knowledge that are worth commenting on that are important, and for once do not overlap with each other to any great extent.

The first is that there seems to be a misunderstanding that science is purely about knowledge. Science (or the scientist) either knows something or does not. If they do not know it, they simply have to find it out and then it is known, or so the logic seems to run. However this itself misses two key points. First is that of course a great deal of scientific information is not in a state of known vs unknown (even if we know we know things, or know we don’t know things) but is the subject of debate. To pick an obvious candidate we do not know exactly what oviraptorosaurs were eating and this is not simply a case of not knowing, it’s pretty hard to find out and the subject is up for debate. We can discuss all manner of issues (shape of the beak, the claws on the hands, gastroliths, ancestry etc.) without really settling on an answer so while much is *known* the answer is *not* known with any great certainty even if we have lots of evidence and good clues.

In addition there is the idea that scientists simply acquire knowledge by just reading books or if something is new just somehow ‘finding out’. Science is not just about knowledge but also the application of knowledge. You could read every paper ever on tyrannosaurs next week and learn a colossal amount about them, but without an understanding of evolutionary theory, how bone strength metrics are calculated, stratigraphy, anatomy, population ecology and animal behaviour you might struggle to put any of it in context. Even if you could dot hat, if you wanted to find out more about them through actual research you would have to know how to get a grant / perform a palaeontological dig / collect the right data / analyses the data correctly / put this in context / write a paper etc. (and that hardly touches on which stats you should use etc.). In short, just *knowing* something is hardly the sum total of science. So to return to those kinds of ‘but I already kinda knew that’ comments – great. Who cares? Did you know what it *means* and what that can *tell* you as well and what you can *do* with it? If not, don’t bother.

The second major issue here is one I have touched on before but can be put forward more explicitly thanks to one of the most awesomely title papers of all time. Basically people who don’t know much don’t realise they don’t know much and don’t realise that people who do know a lot do know a lot. To put it another way, the less expert you are in a field or skill, the more you overestimate your ability *and* the worse a judge you are of the skills of others. This has actually been demonstrated in the fantastically titled paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (by Kruger & Dunning, 1999 if you are interested). Also very much worthy of note here is the fact that those who are *most* skilled actually tend to *underestimate* their abilities as well.

You can therefore have the situation that I largely hint at in my annoyance of these comments where the ignorant think they know it all and the expert is useless AND the expert thinks he is not quite as good as he actually is. It’s an understandable recipe for disaster (or at least conflict) and even when mediated (such as when ‘both sides’ are covered by a journalist or a chair in a debate) unless that mediator is an expert too, the situation is unlikely to improve as they will then miss what is and is not valid / right / good as well. One can see how in an especially technical field like science which is then watered down (and I don’t necessarily mean in a bad way) for a media report that a non-expert reading it thinks the expert has got it wrong and he knows better.

From a science communication perspective, sadly the solution to this problem would appear to be that either we have to train everyone in the world to our standards for any given subject for them to appreciate it effectively, or to patronise them horribly by pointing out that actually they are wrong and know nothing and they should just believe. There is a third (and less sarcastic) solution too of course: to carry on doing what we are doing – presenting the evidence as best to can to as wide an audience as possible and know that for every commenting idiot, there are people who understand and appreciate what is being done and respect the work and the commitment it takes to produce that work, and if they don’t understand will seek out further knowledge.

However, this is not to say that this idle slating of people is not valuable (apart from it providing further catharsis for me). The better knowledge and understanding you can have of the lack of understanding of others, the better it can be dealt with. Here I think are two critical issues to understanding science that are missed by a large part of the public – knowledge is not understanding and *your* knowledge and understanding is not *all* knowledge and understanding.

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Is this the worst media coverage of pterosaurs ever?

No, that’s not hyperbole. We really have a stinker here. Allow me to elaborate: as some of you may be aware, a paper came out this week covering a pterosaur trace fossil of an animal landing – in other words, it came into land after a flight and then walked off. I don’t often cover new papers on here, and don’t always cover even my own so no marks are lost for having missed it. Anyway, this got some coverage in the media and I was quoted in several stories about the paper. Here is one of the originals and it’s worth reading so that you can get some context for later.

Then I found this online. Oh dear. For all my recent complaints about the media, hopefully at least some of you will have noted that I did have some nice things to say about the stories in general and emphasised that while many are woefully bad, some stories are very good. This is genuinely one of the worst excesses I have seen of media screw-ups. I can only conclude that they read one of the original stories and then tried to change it so that it looked a bit different (since I wasn’t quoted on the press release they must have taken my quotes from a piece by Charles Choi, the only person I spoke to about this).

In doing so they fell for every classic error I complain about. They copy stuff indiscriminately, they get things wrong, they misattribute things and add errors and here, even contradictions. It really is horrendous, and, to cap it all, it was written by the sites science editor! Their only possible defence is that they are a software website, but for me this would be pitiful – if you report enough on science to require a titled editor you should get it right. Hell, if you are doing *anything* like this you should get it right (or very nearly right, everyone makes mistakes and you can’t always go into the detail you want). This is another level though, and allow me to elaborate more.

Let’s start with the title which includes ‘preferred’. Occasional anthropomorphism aside, this implies a choice was made – pterosaurs went for their runways as a matter of choice. Not true and not stated anywhere by anyone. Underneath it says “The conclusion belongs to a new scientific study” which to me is just poor English as well as being generally incorrect since the study doesn’t say this. In any case, how would you know? – this is the first example and you cannot extrapolate for a data point of one. Incidentally the English is dodgy throughout and I suspect the author is a non-native speaker and while this may not be his fault as such, if you are writing for an English-language website then I have little sympathy.

Next there is the top left with the image, one of Mark Witton’s that they have used without permission (so I understand) and certainly without credit (though I’ll admit I’m not sure why it was on Wikicommons). If you click on it there is a bit of text that says that pterosaurs only flew when they had to, though who knows where they got that from and that it is eating a lizard which is of course a sauropod.

The first word of the article is “Archaeologists”. This one AGAIN. Palaeontologists are not archaeologists. Not are they “Anthropologists” which also turns up later on. The word palaeontologist never turns up at all! Still in the same sentence we are told that pterosaurs are the ancestors of birds. No, no, no, no and no. And no. They then say that the track is very rare which should be obvious given that it is the first one ever discovered, good investigative journalism there. Still in the opening paragraph we get ‘proto-birds’ and then a horribly mangled sentence of “did not leave a massive imprint on the ground, such as the largest dinosaurs that ever roamed the Earth, the 50-tonne sauropods, did, LiveScience reports” horribly mangling my own quote while entertainingly revealing where they cribbed all this stuff from.

Moving on we are told that they have “two-foot-long feet” which will be a big surprise as the wingspan was probably only around 3 feet. Were they wearing skis? I think they mean the *track* is two feet long, but this is not what they say.

Now we get a stunning line where they seem to manage to think that the term pterosaur refers to a species (or think they are all the same size) while calling them flying lizards. So birds are pterosaurs which are lizards. Awesome! In the following ‘anthropologist’ sentence we are told that this track shows a take off and landing trace which is wrong, they only land. The original report they quote from even says that scientists now want to find a take-off trace as well which they clearly missed.

The next bit is fine, presumably because they copied it nearly wholesale and thus failed to screw anything up including lifting quotes directly. However, not to worry as in the last paragraph they manage to say that pterosaurs had great flight control and flight capabilities which rather contradicts their opening gambit that they only flew when necessary.

So there you have it, an absolute litany of crass basic errors that have been introduced for no apparent reason despite the whole thing being an obvious cut-and-paste hatchet job of an article which they even cite as the source. Quotes mangled, image appropriated, contradictions introduced and basic misunderstandings abound. This really is absolutely horrible. The only obvious thing I expect was the ‘pterosaurs are dinosaurs’ schtick which they avoided only by calling them birds and lizards. Genius. Good work lads, now, please never, ever write anything about science ever again. Because if you can’t even get this kind of stuff right, then I can only pray that you never have to cover string theory.

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