Slashdot Mirror
Scientific Research That Could Have Been Avoided
indian_rediff writes "An article from Friday's Wall Street Journal (reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) details how some of the research being done by scientists ends up simply stating the obvious. Their observations make for some interesting and hilarious reading." From the article: "Want job satisfaction? A 'careful choice of career is the key,' researchers concluded in a paper this spring in the Journal of Economic Psychology. Choosing a career based on a well-lubricated encounter at a bar, it turns out, may not be the most promising route to career satisfaction. People who choose their jobs carefully are more likely to be satisfied with them than those who take a flying leap into the great unknown."
It gives someone the oppurtunity to look at the scientist and state: "THANK YOU CAPTAIN OBVIOUS!"
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
They do the research, and if they find nothing interesting to say, they say something that isn't interesting. That is how they get more money to do more research.
Scientific research shows that scientific research could have been avoided.
Ugh, now my head hurts. I have to go lie down.
Sometimes, science advances by asking questions about things that, on the surface, seem "obvious." For instance, at one time, everyone "knew" that:
...etc. Perhaps the problem is, too much attention is paid when these questions come back with the expected answer, rather than the fact that these questions are being asked.
* The Earth was flat;
* Objects slowly came to a stop unless a force was exerted on them;
* Matter and energy were always conserved;
* Time was a universal constant;
Question everything, but sometimes the answer is "yes, that's correct."
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Scientists do the same thing over and over again to see if they get a different result
Talking to geeks is like eating jello with a chainsaw, interesting, but painful.
People who choose their jobs carefully are more likely to be satisfied with them than those who take a flying leap into the great unknown
Unless you want a job as a professional skydiver, that is...
Perhaps these "scientists" chose their careers after a well-lubricated encounter at a bar?
do you have shinyfeet?
/. readers don't RTFAs. I know I just skimmed over it but most don't bother even with that. /. often posts dupes.
--
--
noone really cares
--
life is short
--
all of the above are depressing research topics but they are funny because they are true.
--
I should stop.
You can't handle the truth.
"According to Phillip Laplante, associate professor of software engineering at Penn State Great Valley, the answer as to why spam is omnipresent is two-fold: it's easy to create and distribute, and it's economically advantageous for those who send it."
Why can't someone pay me to prove something like 'People don't like being burned' or some other research like that...
Thankfully, in this market, the employee should not have a problem finding job satisfaction. There is no reason you can't take a few months or years off to find that perfect job. And considering how there are so many unfilled high-paying, enjoyable jobs in this industry, any employer will be thrilled to have your interest.
Most fortunate of all, the employee has all the power as they do not have any necessary expenses and there is always an employer willing to pay more than the current offer. Employers care about your satisfaction, too. The last thing they would ever want to do is upset your job satisfaction by outsourcing your entire team, division or city to an offsore center for cheaper wages and expenses.
Yes, my friends, glory in the simplicity of overwhelming demand for technical expetise and the underwhelming presence of employables.
Observations about the quality of science from someone who clearly can't distinguish science from handwaving ...
...
That's really, really useful.
Jeez
Ha ha. Funny stuff. What a waste.
Let's not forget the billions and billions poured into bogus Star Wars missile defense technology R&D over the last 20 years. It doesn't work. It never did work. It never will work. Ande even if it DID work it's easily defeated. Not to mention that it could never be tested in any realistic scenario. Most of this absolutely wasted money was spent as part of classified budgets so nobody really knows exactly how much of a boondoggle it really is. When all you hear about are the much publicized tests - virtually all of which end in failure - you know there's a lot more that never sees the light of day.
BREAKING NEWS: A scientific study has now found a direct correlation between people who read Slashdot and people who type "www.slashdot.com" into their browsers.
. . .researchers at an American Heart Association conference proclaim that if you work full time and watch television, play videogames or surf the Internet in your off hours, then you are probably not engaging in as much heart-healthy physical activity as full-timers who spend no time with TV, videogames and the computer.
On my job I walk between 10 and 15 miles per day OUTSIDE, year round, uphill and downhill! I dare say that very few, if any, employees of the American Heart Assoc. get anywhere NEAR as much exercise as I get. If I want to sack out after I get off from work, I don't think it's going to affect my health.
Seeing as how they didn't link to or even cite any of these studies, I think I'll reserve judgment. Half the time the problem with "stupid science" is really stupid journalism. You'll have this perfectly good biology research that looks at how a specific enzyme facilitates a particular aspect of the metabolic system that wasn't completely understood before, and is a good step in the direction of understanding how our bodies work. And how does the news report on it? - "eating fat makes you gain weight". Well no duh. It wasn't that that was interesting, it is the details of how it causes you to gain weight that were meaningfull.
Furthermore, "common sense" can be used to explain all sorts of conflicting ideas. If the study had come out the other way, everyone would be saying that it's obvious that people are happier if they jump in and try out all sorts of things before settling on what you really want to do - "life is a journey", "you need time to find yourself". Psychology is the study of scientifically testing what common sense ideas about ourselves actually are true, to what extent, and in what situations. Of course some psychologists are better than others, but just because you could have guessed the answer doesn't mean it's not worth finding out for sure.
There is also a problem with papers written for the sole purpose of getting published, and I don't like that. I wish that more universities would wise up to the fact that knowledge is becoming more and more in-depth and specialized, and therefore it will take longer till someone is far enough along in thier specialty that they can begin doing research that is new and meaningfull. If you force people to write thesis earlier, 90% of them will be rediscovering somthing that has already been discovered.
But I stand by my statement that stupid jounalism is more of the problem than stupid research, and that knowing something is better than thinking it.
Tell me about Scientific Research That Could Have Been Avoided. Is it good or is it whack?
mtfdxrt
"Want job satisfaction? A 'careful choice of career is the key"
Personally, from a human point of view, I think this's not true.
Satisfaction comes when you like what you do, and when you get satisfaction, you want more. So, the conclusion is that nobody can get satisfaction.
ajf
Why are we commenting on an article by Post-Gazette?
They wouldn't recognize Science if it were shoved up their asses wrapped in a stuffed hedgeghog.
The article is total drivel, and has nothing to do with scientists and everything to do with charlatans and other asssorted low life.
Repeat after me: social "science" is not Science.
This isn't news.
Slashdot stories that could have been avoided?
"Ordinary people marvel at extraordinary things. Extraordinary people marvel at ordinary things." -Confucius
Why in cog. sci? Let's think about seeing the color black for a minute. Pretty ordinary. If I told you that I did my Ph.D. on our ability to see the color black, what would you think? "For this you got a Ph.D.?" If I stopped there, you could probably write a short, shallow article about how scientists wasted time and money doing research on things that's mundane. But let's think about it for a minute. How do we see? Light entering our eyes. What color is a projector screen? White. So how is it that we are able to see black on a movie screen during a movie? If we see because of lights entering our eyes, where is the black coming from? The projector shines light, the white screen reflects it back, the portions that we see as black has no light, how do we end up seeing black on a white screen? Maybe not everything we see comes from the outside world. In fact, black is something our brain creates, which then really makes you wonder about shadows. Don't believe me? Check this out.
So we've gone from something that seems really ordinary to a startling discovery. In fact, it's usually the deeper truth behind ordinary things that surprise us and make us go "wow" and inspires us. Stars from the ground are nothing more than specks of light. I guess we can call astronomy look at specks of light through glass and mirrors. Sounds pretty boring too.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
isnt it obvious
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
If I'd never made the big leaps into the unknown, I wouldn't have moved between two cities within Australia, winding up having a blast in the bigger one I moved to. Then I wouldn't have taken the opportunity to relocate to the USA, having an incredible time in the process. Then I may not have come back to Australia and certainly wouldn't have gone to Argentina, having yet another great time and learning so much about life, etc.
:)
Finally, I'm taking leaps into the Unknown by concentrating more on working with aircraft than with computers.
Sure, I may not have a big house, great car or a cushy position in an office. But I have seen large chunks of the world, met some wonderful people, experienced things well over half the world never will and got some great stories to tell.
My son is only 7 and he's travelled around the world almost three times now (travelling to visit family and friends in various countries) plus he's flown in light aircraft, helicopters and even balloons.
So yeah, I vote *1* for taking the big leap into the Unknown. It's been pretty damned wild so far and I wouldn't have missed it for the world
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
rtfa;
this is an editorial piece, nothing scientific about it. there are no references to the supposed studies they quote, there are not even second opinions from authors or other scientific researchers. pure speculation.
and many those research problems cited are *not* obvious, but the author belittles the studies they quote to make the research questions sound more obvious than they really are.
* on a finding that men over 55 are a high risk group for digit loss due to power tools... this requires good statistics to know, its *not* obvious.
* that workers are less efficient in a cold environment... again, not obvious, and many workplaces (imho) keep the thermostat too low.
* that asthma and smoking aggregate worse than either, again not obvious... many people falsely believe this is not true.
* that doctor-patient communication is critical for reducing harmful effects of mixing drugs, also not obvious -- now we know that communication skills are an important part of medical training.
granted, many of the studies conclude with obvious recommendations, e.g., "be careful with power tools", and the author makes great fun of these "obvious conclusions" when in fact, they are not the substantiative conclusion (i.e., factual finding) of the research, just a recommendation for how to interpret the finding.
This IS the WSJ. I wouldn't be too surprised if they're trying to cast doubt on science in general, with things like global warming.
Three and a half years ago I was laid off. Two years ago the job market was still in the toilet. At that time, my 18 months of research concluded that in a bad economy, you should take what you can get. Now that the economy is looking better, I think it makes sense to look for the right job, especially if you're already employed. If you're still unemployed, I think you should take what you can get for the next few months or move into your mom's house. :)
I used to think that Star Wars was a big waste of money that nothing came out of. That isn't true at all - plenty of horrific new technologies have come out of it. Missiles are brought down by hi-power lasers (they fry the management of the missile). Plasma guns, microwave weapons all came out of Star Wars.
Google for 'hole punch clouds' to see some very worrying pictures that are not properly explained at all.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
You have to do science to be a scientist. The gathering and publishing of facts and observations is not science and those that do it are not scientists. Even a statistical analysis of a bunch of facts isn't science either as it can be done with little thought or consideration.
Explaining how these facts can, or can not, be integrated into our existing body of knowledge in a systematic, consistent and coherent fashion is science. It's about understanding and not just knowledge. That's the difference.
The problem is, as usual, that few people can distinguish between what is science, what is technology and what is nonsense. Those that merely state the obvious (i.e. well known facts) are not scientists.
"A few months in the lab can save you hours of research time in the library."
"Want job satisfaction? A 'careful choice of career is the key,' researchers concluded in a paper this spring in the Journal of Economic Psychology. Choosing a career based on a well-lubricated encounter at a bar, it turns out, may not be the most promising route to career satisfaction. People who choose their jobs carefully are more likely to be satisfied with them than those who take a flying leap into the great unknown." Psychology isn't science, at least not an experiment science, which is what is implied when people use the word "science." It's a "social science" and when people refer to "sciences" in everyday speech they don't mean "social sciences." When I tell people I majored in science, they think of Physics, Biology Chemistry... not "Political Science" and "Linguistics."
Just from reading the article excerpt, I now know not to choose a career when I'm blasted! Just at the end of my college career too!
I think the common man should get in on a little piece of it.
Let's see, next I plan my research into how beer drinking causes inebriation, then onto my later study on the subtle properties of internet pron.
Some have made the argument that the "obvious is not always so obvious" -- I call bullshit. Of course we can always find some grain of something new in a 200-page research paper. The point is whether those research funds were being spent as well as possible. Either you have NO RULES and set loose smart people to study underwater nose-picking if they like it, or you have to ask for somebody to maximize the return for OUR investment. Right now, the system seems geared to "publish or perish" and not "produce value or die" -- there is a subtle difference. Academics tend to be a little on the wimpy side and not ambitious enough to amount for squat. But that's just me.
You, parent, and the whole /. counterpoint cabal need to relax. You don't have to provide b.s. counterpoints to every popular thread just for the sake of being a contrarian...
You and parent are also wrong.
And like the parent poster says, you can't just go around saying "Why research that? It's obvious?" We get proved wrong on "obvious" shit all the time.
There IS a such thing as stupid research. For example, from TFA:
In what its sponsors called a "landmark study," scientists found that when your fingers are numb and turning that lovely robin's-egg blue, you make more typing effors. Er, errors. "When employees get chilly," the scientists concluded, "they are not working to their full potential."
Can you tell me one logical reason why anyone might think that people with stiff, cold fingers would not make more typing errors than people with normal fingers? That's the point of the whole thing: only an idiot would need to test that hypothesis. That's like testing to decide if people who read non-fiction often like non-fiction.
There are some things that do not need to be tested with methodology to be agreed as true. You don't need a study to find out that shooting yourself in the head will hurt you.
Wait, maybe you should test out that hypothesis...
Thank you Dave Raggett
One of the clear conclusions of 20th century physics and psychology is that commonsense is very limited when dealing with the physical world. Just because something seems obvious that doesn't mean it is true.
A glaring example of this was a series of experiments done with freshman physics students to test their physical intuition. One of the questions involved something like the following: a bomber (plane) is coming over a target at such and such a speed show on the diagram where it should release the bombs. A huge percentage (the majority) don't remember the exact number, stated that the bombs should be released directly over the target. These are people who think they know about momentum but their intuition still works on the idea that the bomb will drop without any horizontal component. When I was a kid I tried using a sling (like the traditional type)j but couldn't work out why the stone came out at right angles to where I wanted it to go ... I had to think about it before I realised. But my instincts were wrong. So much for commonsense. And if you want the definitive example of this then look no further than Special Relativity or even better Quantum Mechanics.
Bitter and proud of it.
FTA: In April, scientists reported in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research that college students tend to drink much more alcohol than they think.
Is this really amusing and obvious? And, as opposed to the "choose your career wisely" conclusion, this has some pretty serious consequences. People engaging in potentially abusive behavior who are under-reporting it to themselves are much less likely to ever think there might be a problem brewing.
You obviously think too much of yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
Ah, come on. Psychology is not a real science, so how can psychological research be generalized to science and scientists in general??
"A few months in the lab can save you a few hours in the library."
Just kidding!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
that when there is no real news, Journalists write up the latest Obvious news item from fark.com.
I landed on a well lubricated bar... and couldn't be happier despite the limp.
... People who choose their jobs carefully are more likely to be satisfied with them than those who take a flying leap into the great unknown."
.
Those "scientists" are actually sociologists... basically people who go around and sum up the obvious. All they do is study correlations between human interactions and other events... the obvious
My sociology professor even admitted it, and he has a PhD in the damn field.
It has seemed obvious that lowering the legal BAC limit would decrease alcohol related automobile accidents. Except that it doesn't. It seems obvious that protein synthesis is catalyzed by proteins, as nearly every other biochemical reaction is. Except that it isn't, it's a ribozyme. In fact, the point about college kids drinking more than they think they do, that is actually very much up for debate. There are studies that show college kids perceptions of how much their peers drink is quite wrong on the overestimation side.
It is not difficult to rationalize observations after the fact, even reducing them to cliches. Problem is there are rationalizations and cliches that are simple, obvious, and completely opposite. Do opposite's attract, or do birds of a feather flock together?
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
HEY! That's the job of the /. editors. At least the scientists aren't accused of dupes.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
some of the research being done by scientists ends up simply stating the obvious
... I could go on for days...
I don't see anything wrong with that alone. Why shouldn't scientists be allowed to do useless things every once in a while? Everbody else does it!
And in some cases doing research on obvious things might even result in great scientific achievments. Don't forget about all the things that were considered obvious in the past: the earth is flat, the earth is the center of the universe, women are physically not able to drive cars, windows is the best operating system,
Of course there might still be a problem, but only in one case: When scientists intentially do pointless research.
...its irresponsible to ommit the "obvious" recommendations. Simple as that. Where does a paper on the risks of power tool use stand on not saying one should be careful in their handling? The problem is some journalist idiot turns round and says, heh, they did this research into power tool usage and didn't even bother to mention you should be careful with them, how irresponsible. Given that the author of the article shows no understanding of what science is about and for, frankly one can't trust people like that not to think omission of a point isn't a rejection of it.
The most irresponsible writing is that article anyway. Given that in some states popular wisdom is creationism and the presence of extra-terrestrials its foolhardy to make the case that popular wisdom shouldn't be challenged.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
...that links Viagra usage with blindness. It's obvious a couple of folks will poke themselves in the eyes.
My Karma is so low that even my own postings are beyond my current threshold
Is reading Slashdot considered research?
File that under shit I already know.
this is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
In undergrad classes, research is commonly assigned by the professors. In postgrad classes, students are often required to come up with a research topic of their own. To make matters worse, it has to be something new. So, consider a sociology student working towards a PhD. What area of sociology hasn't been researched over and over and over? How about job satisfaction!
I am not attempting to claim that some areas of study are worse than others because they aren't always on the breaking edge of new research. I'm also not attempting to claim that postgrads shouldn't be pushed to perform new research. I am only stating that in some fields, students just don't have much to choose from. So, they end up doing what we would call worthless research. In reality, it isn't worthless. It is specifically designed to get them a degree so they can (hopefully) make a lot more money.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Some time ago some people managed to show that birds in appropriate conditions (e.g., skinner box type things) could following training on a set of paintings by two painters distinguish between novel paintings as to which of the two painters had painted them. This was roundly mocked in the press as a waste of money, ludicrous idea, waste of money etc. What good is a bird that recognise Monet?
Of course the aim of the work was actually to measure the mechanisms of learning, generalisation and action in response to complex visual stimuli in avian 'models' of various neurological conditions that impair such processes of learning and generalisation. Paintings by certain artists were simply useful stimuli for their purposes. Reading the papers its bloody obvious what the real agenda was but either the journalists couldn't understand them or just didn't bother. Instead they held them up to public ridicule for a news cycle or two, something that I don't doubt impacts on decision makers, politicians and so on.
Of course, once you have the model and you can demonstrate the behavior you can do things to the brain, test the effects of drugs, therapies etc. Of course the press is then full of talk of the end products of that research but have never to my knowledge had the decency to explain their bad reporting of the antecedent research that it was all based upon.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
... to buy low and sell high.
Is referring to what gets reported in the "Journal of Economic Psychology" as "science."
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
The title of this article almost sounds like a Photoshop Phriday over on SA.
BytesTemplar.com
Just because something seems obvious it doesn't mean that people will do it. If it takes the occasional scientific study to point out the obvious, well that's ok. Maybe someone will pay attention. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen though. For instance, there are many programs designed to change people's behaviour by pointing out the obvious to them. For example, we have a course that teaches study skills to our first year students. They never use what they learn in that class in spite of the fact that it is 'obvious'.
So, if the stuff about career choice is so obvious, why don't more people make better choices than they do?
Actually, I recommend a book, "The Luck Factor" by Richard Wiseman. His research points out a lot of 'obvious' things. It also clearly shows that most people don't act on the 'obvious'. If people follow his advice, they will have much happier lives. My guess is that he won't change many lives with his advice.
Bah humbug!
Then again, "90% of everything is crud." That being the case, it follows that 90% of research will be utter BS by definition.
Or to put it more scientifically, research, along with many other things both in nature and man-made will follow the 1/f power scaling law. So it is rather ironic -- and gratifing -- to note that research itself does not escape the deep laws of nature it hopes to uncover!!!!
Chew on that one over the holiday...
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
But as someone that has done photography and digital video in an amature setting, I'm not seeing anything here that we didn't already know. The brain and eye calibrate themselves to lighting conditions? Duh. That's the major problem with photography. Your brain will adjust for abnormalities in a situation, a camera has much greater trouble doing that.
One of the simplest tricks I like to do is with monitor white points. You change it from whatever it is and it looks wrong, either too red or too blue. Wait awhile and change it back, and now that looks wrong. Your brain adjusts to that white point and considers it to be white.
Now without seeing your research I won't render any real judgements, but if the discovery is that "we percieve darker areas as black" I'm saying that IS fairly obvious to anyone who has had to deal with capturing images. Now if you have a psychological explination as to how the mechanism works, that would be something I'd be interested in knowing about.
The article is about psychology.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Common sense isn't always right. It's good to have scientific research to backup what seems "Obvious". Some times, what's "obvious" isn't always true.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It tries to point out the useless junk studies, but fails to explain the phenomenon.
Many respectable universities require (mandate) their profesors to submit (bi-)yearly research papers for collegiate journals. As a consequence, every discipline is littered with useless studies, surveys, theses, and research papers, which state the obvious and expend ink for no other reason but justification of private/public grants or retention of one's job.
In this respect, two of the most abused fields are Philosophy and Sociology. You'd have to browse few dozen journals to find couple of good research papers which are not engaged in aimless mental masturbation.
This also plays a factor in some professor's choices to teach at junior colleges or even at high schools to avoid such tasks, sometimes forgoing some pay, just to be relieved from the obligation of contributing lenghty papers to journals.
Choosing a career based on a well-lubricated encounter at a bar, it turns out, may not be the most promising route to career satisfaction.
No, but it's a great way to have fun while getting paid for doing research! ("Just water for me tonight, I'm the designated-control.")One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
http://www.improbable.com/ Annals of Improbable Research...their monthly newsletter can be subscribed to ..it is enlightening to read....everytime
Isaac Asimov once wrote an excellent essay on scientific progress named "The Relativity of Wrong". He wrote on the ever evolving precision on the shape of the Earth.
It went something like: There was a time when people thought the Earth was flat. In those times the error in measuring the true curvature of the Earth was "x". Then people thought that the Earth was spherical. The error in measuring the true curvature of the Earth was "y". Then people realized that the Earth was an oblate spheroid. The error in measuring the true curvature of the Earth was "z". After launching satellites in space and measuring the perturbations in their orbit caused by the Earth's shape, scientists have been refining the model for tha shape of the Earth more and more.
But the error in measuring the true curvature of the Earth has been ever decreasing, from flat to sphere to oblate spheroid to tri-axial ellipsoid to arbitrary shape. The difference from an oblate spheroid to the true shape of the Earth is several orders of magnitude smaller than the difference from a sphere to an oblate spheroid.
That's where science makes a difference. Sicence is cumulative. The knowledge that you learn through sicence may be improved, but not disproved.
Much more valuable than the sound bite at the end of the day is the data just underneath the tawdry summary. "Typing with cold fingers makes you less productive," isn't something you'd scream "Eureka!" about, but finding out that saving $40,000 on your heating bill is causing approximately $740,000 in lost productivity is.
The papers themselves contain a lot more of the assumptions and statistics - and those maintain their validity over time. Trace "sodium is bad for you" back to the studies, and you may realize that the sample set is of people who are prone to hypertension. That's often why the pronouncements, which journalists promulgate (but make no mistake about it, scientists are also eager to summarize their work into a rule-of-thumb-for-everyone) can end up reversing or partly-reversing themselves every 5-25 years (fat is bad, fat is good, this kind of fat is good and this is not, the good kind of fat is only good if it's not trans...), but the research itself is not invalidated.
Another thing to look out for in the announcements are things like "students at Cornell University have found...". How many graduate students actually get to do groundbreaking research? Especially pre-PhD level? Student work has got to be pardoned from the 'obvious question' process.
To complain about science because the summary is obvious is cheap and tawdry.
-- Ritchie
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
that scientists are doing far too much 'unnecessary' and 'worthless' research.
I read a new scientist article about people modelling money transfers in society (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7107) .
One of the teams models produced the striking conclusion that "if you save more you are more likely to end up rich".
Try fitting your head up your arse. Just because it's extremely unlikely you'll succeed doesn't make it pointless to try.
Hey you did it!
You win the "Idiot Of The Day" award.
You can't take the sky from me...
It might be interesting (or vital) for those in said situation to know what their expected error rates or potentials are.
Ok, I'll grant you that there *might* be SOME situation were this information would be necessary, but from TFA, we aren't talking about something like antarctic helicopter pilots, the study was for office drones.
Tell me why this study was necessary to find out common sense information...ie, what temp. to keep a workplace.
Assuming you can't, I'll tell you something else, my main problem with the idea that this science is legit. is corporate wastefulness and backwards thinking. Is this a smart use of science? Study something more relevant. All you need is the sense God gave the common dog to know when a workplace is too cold and making it harder for employees to do their job. Studies like these are an outgrowth of the counter-intuitive, wasteful thinking that is rampant in corporate America.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Maybe they should give the money on training kids to do research that would actually help society...
Are you sitting down? When residents (i.e., at a hospital) work 65 hours a week instead of 80, they get more sleep, and make fewer mistakes. Surprise!
But wait, there's more! When interns work shifts of 24 hours or more, they get into lots more auto accidents. Who'd a thunk it?
grumpyrichard.com a daily chronicle of honest medicine
For example, somebody was saying the other day that he knew all along that Iraq didn't have WMDs. Um, no, he didn't. He hadn't ever even been to Iraq. Heh.
I was reading the Times back in the 90's, and it discussed Iraq's inflatable fake weapons, used to fool long-distance information gathering by being indistinguishable in a satellite picture from an actual missile, plane or tank.
Sometimes it's worth it just to refine the testing process.
Verily.
You can't take the sky from me...
Faster than a speeding bullet!
More powerful than a locomotive!
Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!
Look! Up in the sky...
It's Captain Obvious...
It's Captain Obvious...
No... it's Captain Obvious!
Researchers get funding by the number of papers they write and by the number of times they get cited, not by whether they do anything new. For this reason, scientists who do things that are new are rarely cited and tend to live in poverty, those who do things that are certain to be referenced get the big grants. Even if the only ones citing them are psychologists studying academics who write useless papers.
In consequence, you EXPECT most papers to be highly quotable - the academic version of the "soundbite" - rather than obscure stuff that nobody will find a way to even reference for another hundred years.
Over the past hundred years, scientists have discovered that making revolutionary, staggering and phenomenal discoveries that will reshape humankind are largely ignored. I bet very few on Slashdot can even name the person who discovered the laser, or even in which decade. (Clue: It was a long time before anyone could find a use for it.)
You will even find colour photographs of Russia in the Library of Congress. Dated 1916 and earlier. A little before Kodak's time! The ancient Greeks even had a working theory of robotics, 2000 years before anyone had the technology to build one.
Pure research (ie: stuff with no known markettable value) and appliable research for which applications can't yet be profitably built is all a dead-end, these days. The stuff with the high market value - which is also the stuff with the great soundbites - is also the stuff that is "obvious", very close to what the consumer already wants and is willing to pay for, and is the stuff corporations will foot the bill to carry out.
No, I don't think this can be blamed on journalism. This is the fault of a commodity-driven private-sector R&D machine, where science in the public interest means science the public can be made interested in, NOT science that may actually benefit said public by advancing our understanding of the world.
Understanding doesn't sell nearly as well as ignorance.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://www.bash.org/?82105 [captain obvious strikes again]
In 1993, the American Government funded a study to see why the head of a
man's penis was larger than the shaft. After one year and $180,000.00,
they concluded that the reason the head was larger than the shaft was to give
the man more pleasure during sex.
After the US published the study, Germany decided to do their own study.
After $250,000.00, and 3 years of research, they concluded that the reason
was to give the woman more pleasure during sex.
Poland, unsatisfied with these findings, conducted their own study. After
2 weeks and a cost of around $75.46, they concluded that it was to keep a
man's hand from flying off and hitting him in the forehead.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
could we please stop bringing this untrue point up? hullo, vedic literature, which is almost 5,000 years old, clearly has definitions of the atom, and other planets. just because the europeans thought the earth was flat, DIDNT MEAN THE REST OF HUMANITY DID. kthxdie.
At least part of this article is particularly disreputable. It says:
The phrase quoted by the writer ("the human visual system starts to lose small details") never appears anywhere in the journal article. (Why is it easier to identify someone close than far away? by Geoffrey Loftus, University of Washington, and Erin M. Harley, University of California). In fact, the first sentence of the article, not the conclusion, is "It is a matter of common sense that a person is easier to recognize when close than when far away."
The researchers were concerned with assessing the ability of an eyewitness to a crime to identify a suspect seen at a distance. The research shows why at certain distances it is impossible and it is not simply because the face is very small.
do people discover such wonderful things as the Bistromathic Drive?
or informative ;)
these "expose" type funny science ha ha bull shit.
Sometimes the obvious questions give suprising answers... sometimes the obvious questions need research before people listen (e.g. the research about side effects in drugs, you have to have something like that if you are going to argue that all medical students are trained to give this advice to their patients and not assume).
I always remember one of the first "dumb science" things I ever heard when I was a kid. How stupid science had studied the sex life of the tse tse fly. How stupid! And with little babies to feed in the world!
What a stupid thing to study? Who cares if tse tse flies can get it up... or what sex toys they prefer.
Oh, but there is malaria.
-pyrrho
Which is an inexact science. Much of this type of science can easily be concluded from common sense, unlike more quantitative or 'fundamental' sciences.
please stop posting.
just kidding... fascinating subject.
-pyrrho
that is one of the most amazing optical illusions I've ever seen... and I've seen many.
thanks a lot.
-pyrrho
How many graduate students actually get to do groundbreaking research?
Quite a few actually - but you are right - if it is groundbreaking research you can be sure the supervisor's name will be all over it...
For example, somebody was saying the other day that he knew all along that Iraq didn't have WMDs. Um, no, he didn't. He hadn't ever even been to Iraq.
I've never been to Mars, but I know there are not any apple trees there.
Most things we "know" we have no direct evidence of.
paintball
Seriously, did you just completely make up everything you wrote? Seriously, "the wrong units?" I think not.
Many years at Newsweek, WSJ - won awards for being able to convey complex ideas in everyday language. And this person seems to have risen to the top of her field without a true understanding of what she is writing about. I don't mean the details where a few errors are understandable, but the actual underpinnings and ideas. This article is proof in point. Yes there are obvious questions and bad science but someone who understands science would pick examples that repeated previous studies, or were based on bad data, or badly interpreted data rather than experiments which confirms "common" sense.
To be fair, maybe she does understand all of this but had a deadline to meet for the next issue. In any case, this is very poor science reporting even for a mainstream publication like the WSJ...
Why dont they come up with examples from real(hard) sciences like astronomy, physics, geology,biology? Most examples are from clinical studies or studies similar to clinical studies. Although some medical investigations are real science, some of them are not. That is why most real scientists consider that medicine is a profession, not a science. Remember, MD and JD are professional, not scientific degrees, that is, lawyers and physicians are professionals, not scientists.
I was always rather fond of Einstein's alleged quote:
...which is a nice way of basically saying "question everything", Decartes 'cogito ergo sum' style, which is the basis of scientific thinking, as far as i am concerned.
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
Scientific research by it's very nature is early. Nothing is ever discovered before it is learned.
Actually, there was a study somewhere that concluded that the shape we have is more effective than many other shapes at removing another man's semen from the vagina. The thrusting head sort of acts like a pump.
> Seeing as how they didn't link to or even cite any of these studies, I think I'll reserve judgment.
Right. No refs combined with an absolutely dumb-downed and/or misinterpreted conclusion to show a whole swath of "stupid" science. As someone entering life in science (the neuro variety), this makes me pretty mad.
I looked into the Psychonomic Bulletin article and it turns out someone I'm collaborating with published in that same issue (Kahana and Howard, "Spacing and lag effects in free recall of pure lists", pp. 159-164). It's not the top psychology journal out there, but it is respectable. The article mentioned in the TFA is:
I wonder why the TFA author didn't choose another paper in the same issue to ridicule: "What makes working memory spans so predictive of high-level cognition?". Hmm, maybe because it sounds more intelligent and less stupidly obvious than the Loftus paper, even though it has a silly title-as-question.
The first sentence in the *abstract* of the Loftus paper is:
Ok, the authors know this is common sense. Let's proceed to the second sentence:
Ah, so their very first assumption, their starting point for the research reported in the paper, is that perceptual processing sucks for things that are far away (i.e., are smaller in the visual field and thus are characterized by high spatial frequencies). The TFA author ridiculed this as the CONCLUSION of the entire work.
In fact, if you know anything about perceptual cognition, you know that human perception of faces is a very specialized process. So the questions of WHY and HOW perceptual face recognition change with distance may be quite complicated and certainly non-obvious from the start. It's (a priori) a very different question than visual recognition of fruit or plants or car parts or random stimuli.
I don't have access to the full article, but the abstract suggests these findings: demonstrated equivalent performance at equivalent information content (that is, equating low-pass filtering and visual field extension for information) and found evidence for two distinct spatial filters in the visual system (operating at a quantified relative factor) for different perceptual tasks. The discussion relates this to possible models of face perception and real-world applications (eyewitness situations primarily, since they *quantified* where face recognition/perception becomes unreliable).
Now this is the description from TFA:
The Wall Street Journal has clearly taken up a strong anti-scientific stance with work like this, and I hope that it doesn't continue. It's abominable. And that was just one of the studies menti^H^H^H^H^Habused.
This is what you get when almost every institution of higher education is run by the government.
Scientists have now discovered the secret to why blondes have more fun.
:-]
It may not be as sexy as the rare eureka moments enjoyed by a lucky few, but it embodies the corner stone of the scientific method. Would we prefer the diametric opposite: taking an established belief for granted as true? Which would be the more foolish?
Engineers certainly couldn't achieve much without quantification, and it often leads to new insight when interacting systems do not agree at a given level of detail.
I would be wary of people with another agenda attempting to ridicule science.
There are thousands of examples of studies that state the obvious, and people generally are so sheep like in their thinking they will not believe what they already intuitively know to be true until a "study" comes out to confirm it. But what gets me more are political agendas mascarading as hard science, such as the hysteria over global warming and second-hand smoke, the grossly overstated risk of heterosexual HIV, and the garbage taught at the sociology departments of universities that boys act like boys and girls act like and girls because boys are given guns and girls are given teasets. All of the above are the leftist equivalents of Torah law and are not to be challenged. To clarify, it's a common mistake to believe leftism is the absence of religion when the reality is that leftism is no less a religion than Christianity, Judiasm, or Islam. When the president of Harvard addressed why more men than women pursue engineering, he suggested there might be an inate difference between men and women that accounted for this. Now, if the modern univerisity were an institution of learning (which it stopped being a long time ago) someone would've said "that's an intersting theory, let's put it to the scientific method." Instead this poor guy was practically ridden out of town by radical feminist professors and like minded individuals for making such a statement. Why? HE INTRODUCTED A NON-CONFORMING IDEA INTO THE CHURCH. The sad irony is that institutions of learning are becoming centers of anti-intellectualism. I think I am justified in having skepticism in any sentence that starts with "Studies show...".
"College is purely a financial investment...pay X to get a return of Y. Don't expect to find wisdom there." -JK
Research causes cancer in rats.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The telemetry would have probably gone something like this:
COLUMBUS:"Purple Mountains! Fruited Plains! Arrrhg!!"
Mission control: Damn. Chute failed to open. Did we install the accelerometers up the right way?
Far be it from me to belittle research on forensic science, since I have written about the importance of questioning such conventional wisdom as the reliability of fingerprint evidence and the credibility of confessions.
..the practice of selecting a part of statement and omitting other parts that would clarify the previous statement. Some people react to statements that challenge their own knowledge by considering them laughable and belittling them so that they appear less fearsome to them, some WSJ journalist knows that and throws his integrity outta the window (assuming he had one to begin with) hoping to please his masters and amuse his readers.
:-) they're too busy stacking piles of "hard earned" money.
Whoot no sweat ! You work for a bunch of people who would do anything to prove freedom to monopolize profits is being endangered by some science (sshh don't tell people about fingerprint, we'll steal their goods)..hell those people would even support creationist theory or satanism if that gave them some way to have more monetary
profits or to make people work for less.
But surely we can do better than a February study in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review that concluded that it's easier to identify someone close to you than someone more than a football-field-length away. At 450 feet, the scientist concludes, "the human visual system starts to lose small details."
That's know as "selective quoting"
One wonders in what are WSJ owners benefitting from that article...oh wait, the owners don't even read their own journal maybe
the use of "collect" make a double meaning, the mind does end up with information.
The point is just that the color black proves that the information is deduced. You don't really collect it in a strict sense, you deduce it from lack of collection. And all vision is deduced that that amazing optical illusion illustrates.
I have decided the whole image is fully a deduction and reconstruction of what is around us because of the fact that each eye collects a 2D image but we feel as though we "percieve" a very 3D world around us. Or the way the mind creates an illusion to fill the optic nerve spot on the back of the eye. It's great stuff.
-pyrrho
you scared the shit out of me.
I thought you had gone insane... and right after I had deified you.
I'm thinking of going into cogsci now but not until after I change my fucking pants.
btw, I just checked the image myself because I masked it with my hand and it still looked different, but the Gimp proved the proof in the image.
-pyrrho
Asking the obvious questions is how you progress. If every scientist just accepted the wisdom of the current times we'd still believe that the earth was the center of the universe.
is all the obvious stuff begging for some science that is ignored!
For example, there is this common saying that "opposites attract", meaning that people are sexually/romantically attracted to people that are the opposites of themselves in some respects (e.g. length, tidyness, aggressiveness or whatnot). On the other hand, you also hear that "same seeks same" - meaning more or less the opposite of the first saying.
Both of these sayings are perfectly acceptable common sense. For people who believe in common sense. In scientific reality, the question of who attracts who is of course infinitely more complex than that, and we need many more "obvious studies" and "academic disputes" before we come to something even resembling a conclusion.
Regarding the example:
To really know what a job is like you really have to do it.
This is a problem because there are an infinate number of jobs out there. The best you can do is shadow for a bit. But even then you have to take a leap into the unknown.
Any comments on finding what a job is really like before deciding on spending resources on choosing it?
A blog I run for the wealth
Choosing a career based on a well-lubricated encounter at a bar, it turns out, may not be the most promising route to career satisfaction
Well, you see, at my company...
In point of fact, much of the empirical research on job satisfaction is limited by the hypothesis and the experimental design. As it turns out, I just completed my thesis on this area and discovered a new way of thinking about intrinsic motivation that changes the conception of roles we play in the workplace, and hence the whole notion of job satisfaction.
What this means is that the choice of what you do is less important than the environment in which you do it, relative to overall, and sustainable, job satisfaction. (Note the simplistic "headline" conclusion that emerges from more detailed and intricate findings that are in the work itself.)
Part of the job of the grad student is to look at what has been done, and what the conventional thinking is in a particular discipline (or across multiple disciplines), and find the structural opportunities to create new paths to knowledge, that is, new ways of knowing. The conventional scientific method introduces its own biases that, paradoxically, limit our ability to know and discover.
(If there are any publishers out there who might be interested in a popular market treatment of this topic, let me know, as my work is going on the market by the end of the summer.)
Of course, "prove" means something different in science than in mathematics. However, Einstein did prove (in the mathematical sense) that a mathematical description of space-time is not internally consistent if time is considered to be an absolute quantity.
Quantum mechanics is only "proven" in the physical sense: it is capable of making quantitative predictions that cannot be made with the same accuracy with any known alternatives.
Anyway, if you want to go nitpicking on whether a proof is a real proof or just circumstantial evindence: even in mathematics you cannot prove anything without using assumptions from outside, as was proven by Gödel.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
You can't take the sky from me...
Tell me about studies of obvious things, when someone asks you for a reference for the fact that united states declaration of independence was ratified in 4th of July 1776. Or anyother thing we all consider truths but for science there must be a reference pointing a study that declares that this is a fact and not just a fiction. You mention something as a fact in your study then reference a paper proving that fact, or do the study yourself and put the proof in the paper.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Slashdot edited out my rho symbol. I'll write it out as text
V_t= sqrt(2mg / C_d * rho * A)
Vt is the terminal velocity,
m is the mass of the falling object,
g is gravitational acceleration,
Cd is the drag coefficient,
rho is the density of the fluid the object is falling through, and
A is the object's cross-sectional area.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
you want more grant money or something?
Weight has nothing to do with how fast an object falls in either air or water (disregarding the obvious effects of density).
Your statement basically says "weight has nothing to do with anything except... oh yeah... it does."
Consider the equation for terminal velocity
Mathematically, terminal velocity is described by the equation
V_t= sqrt(2mg / Cd * rho * A)
where
Vt is the terminal velocity,
m is the mass of the falling object,
g is gravitational acceleration,
Cd is the drag coefficient,
rho is the density of the fluid the object is falling through, and
A is the object's cross-sectional area.
Notice that when an atmosphere is involved, increasing the mass increases the object's terminal velocity.
Weight is related to how fast an object falls in air or water.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
What do you think will faster in air: a pound of feathers all tied together with dental floss, or a 1-inch ball bearing?
Assuming wind resistance is held constant and is non-zero, increasing mass increases the rate at which an object falls. See my other post on terminal velocity for more detail.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I also find it amusing that the "circle of the earth" passage was used to support the flat earth argument rather than dispute it. Yes, in three dimensions the term is "globe", but our audience is average unscientific Joachims here, not today's scientifically enlightened *snicker* masses who might know what a sphere is.
The page I linked you demonstrate that they had the vocabulary to distinguish between a circle and a sphere, with supporting quotes from the bible you so cherish. But rather than accept that you are wrong, you choose to believe that people in the past were too stupid/ignorant to know the difference between a circle and a ball, even when the bible proves they did.
That is a very dishonest thing to do.
I tried to educate you, but I can only lead a horse to water, I can't make it drink... so keep your blinders on.
You can't take the sky from me...
"Scientific Research That Could Have Been Avoided"
"Scientists research questions few would ask"
I disagree with the supposition insinuated by the titles of the slashdot post and the article itself. How, pray tell, could this research have been avoided? By guessing? Or perhaps through the "application" of common sense? As science is the systematic investigation of physically observable and testable phenomena, pure guess work or common sense without observation and testability is no substitute for scientific research. You may not like the idea of the strict requirement of testability and observation, but that is the nature of science. You may still have common sense, but without this testability and observation, common sense is not science, thus cannot be a substitute for science.
"Scientists research questions few would ask"
This title somehow made it through the irony editor at the post-gazette. So who is captain obvious now? Is it the scientists who are analyzing physically observable and testable phenomena regardless of the obscurity of that phenomena, which is their job, or is it the author of this article who wrote an entire article about this nature, without realizing it?
~Kevin
Look around for example, you see a pretty flat earth. Science is about figuring out what we know and what we just think we know. Proving what "everyone knows" is just as important, because often it brings up some really nasty surprises, like Einteinian physics.
Since there are very very few people who believe it is immoral to wait for marriage, that is what sex ed should teach.
:)
Everyone once in a while, someone says something to me that makes me realize how differently I view the world from most people. If someone had asked me yesterday, "do you think waiting until marriage is immoral", I would of course have responded "hell no!", like pretty much most everyone.
The way you phrased it though, made me realize: this is precisely what I believe, and why I think North Americans (and humanity in general) is so fucked up about sex. Earlier tonight while flipping channels, I saw some vapid show about Jessica Simpson and how she waited for marriage. Her justification was something along the lines of "every girl dreams about being at the wedding reception, and whispering into her new husband's ear: 'I can't wait until later tonight'".
Let's see now. We have years of build up, anticipation, waiting for this supposedly awesome and special thing. Then you pick the person, and have months of even more intense build up. Finally, a single day where for most people you can't think of anything else.
Topped off by pain and usually some minor bleeding. And 30 seconds later, the man zips up and wonders what's next. I can't think of a more anticipated moment, turned into such a disappointment. The geek side of me wonders if this is why Episode 1 was so poorly received
When I look at things this way, it's no wonder it seems like everyone else can't keep a steady relationship going, and is so messed up about their sex life. Yes, I at least would go so far as to say that waiting until marriage is immoral. To me, marriage should be a hell of a lot more important than "the night we get to have sex for the first time" - in fact, the entire sex issue is such a distraction from what it actually is about.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Regular guys prefer brunettes, gentlemen prefer blondes, but guys like me only accept red.
The Chicken of the Sea thing blew it for them. No blonde kids coming from any future wife of mine--not after that.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.