In this particular paper there is not enough information to replicate the results. As per other posts in here.
The paper gives you the intensity and irradiation schedule that cause the sleep disturbances and tells you that the experiment was conducted under double-blind conditions. They even give you a photograph of the experimental setup. What additional relevant information do you believe you need to reproduce those results? I can't think of anything.
The next step would be for you to repeat their experiment and see whether you get the same results. The fact that your experimental setup will differ from theirs is a good thing, because none of the details they leave out ought to be relevant. If you can't reproduce their results, then you contact them and you try to figure out jointly why.
Note the data is still publishable, just not unsupported conclusions.
The paper has exactly one conclusion: "Our results suggest that RF exposure under these conditions is associated with adverse effects on sleep quality within certain sleep stages." In what way is that conclusion not supported by the data?
You seem to be projecting your own conclusions onto the paper and then complaining that the paper doesn't support your conclusions. It doesn't have to support your conclusions, it only has to support its conclusions, and its conclusions are quite modest.
Your argument of deliberate X11 incompatibilities is nice (though difficult to accept at face value), but ignores the fact that 90% of my rant centered around the craptactular development environment that is shipped as "Mono".
Mono isn't a development environment, it's a runtime and a compiler. The development environment for Mono is called MonoDevelop, and in my experience, people have a much easier time getting started with it than XCode, Eclipse, or NetBeans.
On a system where Java is installed, [blah blah blah Java is wonderful blah blah blah]
So, why do you think people are using Mono? I'll tell you: just about every Mono developer knows Java and found it wanting. That's why people are developing in Mono in the first place. Maybe Mono isn't going to "win", but there's no going back to Java for many people; personally, I'd rather program in plain C.
At best, it's an alternative development environment for Linux/Unix that just happens to be based on the ECMA-334 and ECMA-335 standards.
That is exactly what it is.
Mono is junk that gives people a false impression that.NET is portable. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth, and that's OK. The fact that support.NET as part of Mono is hard and ongoing doesn't make Mono a "piece of crap". In fact, most Mono users don't even bother installing.NET compatibility libraries.
So I downloaded the Mono for OS X package
That's your mistake: Mono doesn't work well on OS X because Apple is playing their own games with deliberate incompatibilities. For example, Apple deliberately keeps X11 on OS X broken in order to force people to port to their crappy native libraries.
better stamped than not stamped
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
·
· Score: 1
I'd rather have a rubber stamped version of Microsoft's office formats than no version at all: pathetic as ECMA may be, ECMA does force some additional disclosures and documentation, and it fixes a version for a while.
Of course, people need to keep in mind that an ECMA rubber stamp isn't the same as a traditional ISO/ANSI standard and it doesn't make the format "open". But with that caveat in mind, it's still better than nothing.
Unfortunately, a large number of Web technologies (HTML, Javascript, Java, Ruby, Rails, Perl, Apache,...) were created to address short-term needs, but the people who created them were learning as they went along and the technologies got hyped up and picked up far too early.
Good technology needs a balance between practicality and theoretical soundness. Unfortunately, in pursuit of dot-com riches, a lot of technologies have been commercialized and frozen far too quickly.
There is very little evidence that micro-facial expressions actually work for this purpose. Unfortunately, the US government and law enforcement seem to be rather prone to this kind of snake oil. Lie detectors are another example.
I do know that this paper didn't contribute much to answering that question.
Of course it didn't. It's not supposed to. The paper is published in an on-line letter journal that reports on on-going research. The flaw here is simply that you and most other Slashdot geeks are so scientifically illiterate that you don't understand what that means.
Many journals require that there is enough details to independently replicate the results from the paper and references.
As well they should. That's not what I said, though. What I said was:
There are almost never enough details in any experimental scientific paper to know whether the experimenters handled the experiment properly or not.
Those are very different criteria.
Note that this publication doesn't even require reproducibility (it reports on on-going research), but the paper actually pretty much tells you everything you need to reproduce the experiment anyway (frequency and duration of exposure, measured effect, geometry, double-blind conditions).
Calling bad science bad is justified and claiming that its OK because thats the way its done is bunk.
And you are more qualified than the peer reviewers to call this paper "bad science" because... what?
Your posts are all through this thread, basically saying "if it's been peer-reviewed, then it must be true,"
Quite to the contrary: many peer reviewed papers are wrong. This paper may be wrong as well. But whether it is right or wrong is something for the scientific community that it is targeted at to determine, in more peer reviewed articles.
Barring that, the appropriate response to this paper is skepticism and concern over poorly described methodology.
No, that is not the appropriate response for you because, unless you are an expert in the field, you have no idea even what "poorly described methodology" would be, let alone engage in a scientific debate about its merits or conclusions.
I can't decide if you're a very clever troll, a very credulous scientist, a hero-worshipping layman, or a defensive author
I'm a critical scientist, actually. The problem here is that you don't understand the purpose of on-line letter journals, the purpose of peer review, or the fallibility of scientific publications. You are so scientifically naive that you actually think it's worth remarking that a peer-reviewed paper might be wrong. And you're so arrogant that you think that a bunch of Slashdot geeks with no experience in sleep research or biology can spot methodological problems better than the peer reviewers.
Again, the discussion isn't about whether they're right, but about whether they controlled for the specific points of the poster four levels up.
People on Slashdot can dream up all sorts of hare-brained objections to papers that don't fit into their world view, but that has about as much importance as creationists making up arguments against evolution.
If you want more information about the experiments, contact the authors; that's why papers have contact information.
If you have a valid reason to doubt an experimental result, send a letter to the editor or publish your own paper, and if your objections are convincing, they will get published.
your assertion that their claims of "double blind" are valid and infallible
No, it's not. I'm not saying that the authors are right, I'm saying that they have done what they are required to do for scientific publishing.
If they overlooked something subtle, yet perceptible, then they would still honestly think they were conducting it double-blind, even though the weren't.
That's a very real possibility, but you aren't going to find it by analyzing "an enumeration of the steps taken to make the study double blind", you are going to find it by reproducing the experiment, and they have given you a sufficient level of detail for that.
Peer review and all that?
Yes, and this paper appears in a peer reviewed publication, which tells you that the reviewers were satisfied with the level of detail in the paper. Who are you to second-guess them?
. It is the job of the publishing author to convince the community that they are right, and so they must present sufficient evidence (and sufficient experimental detail) to make their case adequately.
Yes, and since this paper appears in a peer-reviewed publication, the combination of reputation, explanation, detail, and terminology of the authors is evidently sufficient for its community. That's what we have peer review for.
As a practicing scientist, I can honestly say that this isn't how it works. [...] However, no scientist will read a paper and glibly assume that the experimenters "did everything properly"
As a "practicing scientist", you'd do well to learn quickly that it's unacceptable to fabricate quotations. What I wrote means something completely different from what you falsely quoted me as writing.
The experimental description and discussion of results are so terse that they are barely informative. There are not enough details to know whether they handled the experiment properly or not.
There are almost never enough details in any experimental scientific paper to know whether the experimenters handled the experiment properly or not.
I'm hesitant to ascribe any significance to this finding just yet
Of course, this result needs to be reproduced and strengthened; that's often the case with results like this.
However, your specific objections against this paper are unwarranted: you're basically accusing the researchers of either gross incompetence or scientific fraud, and there is no justification for that.
the paper doesn't list any of the things that would have been required for it to be "carefully controlled"
They say they performed a "double blind controlled laboratory study" (2007 is a continuation of the 2006 work). That excludes all the possibilities you raise.
The paper is only 3 pages long, and doesn't include enough detail to reproduce the experiment precisely,
It doesn't have to; the authors have given you what they believe is the relevant detail. You'd need to find out additional details only if you can't reproduce their results with the details they have given you.
I don't see any detailed description of how they did the placebo business. I don't see any description of how they tested for cheating. If there are two rooms, one for placebo and one for RF, or if the RF generator was in the same room, obviously the whole experiment is bogus.
None of those things need to be in the paper; the presumption in scientific papers is that the authors are familiar with the basic tools and methods of their research area. Unless you have a specific cause to doubt that, you have no justification for questioning their results because they did not include those details.
These are just a few of the questions that pop up in any thorough analysis of this experiment.
A "thorough analysis" of an experiment begins with actually reading the paper!
The original paper is linked to at the top of the page, in PDF format. You'll find your questions answered there. Basically, the study is carefully controlled.
If you have some ideological dislike of the results (as you seem to), perhaps you should try to repeat the experiment yourself and present your results. See, reproducing experimental result is another cornerstone of science.
Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
It's funny that Jaron is using iPhone as the example of innovation in closed source. iPhone runs OS X, a blend of UNIX, Smalltalk, and C, all 1970's technologies and none of them invented by Apple. Much of the software on the iPhone is derived from open source software (BSD, Mach, GNU C, KHTML, etc.). iPhone's model of mobile computing is what Palm and Handspring pioneered a decade ago, with graphics copied from Siggraph demos of a decade ago. The iPhone is a very nicely designed phone, but the only innovation is that it sucks less than other phones in the US market.
Actual innovations in mobile computing have recently come from OLPC and Android. While they are also based on Linux and Java, they have genuinely new ideas in user interfaces, networking, and software architecture. Oh, and both happen to be open source as well.
Go look at a dictionary. To "ding" someone means to give someone a minor bitching about something, especially something trivial. "I was dinged for having a messy desk." [dictionary.com]. If you don't want people to get annoyed at you, don't "ding" them.
Slashdot Mirror
In this particular paper there is not enough information to replicate the results. As per other posts in here.
The paper gives you the intensity and irradiation schedule that cause the sleep disturbances and tells you that the experiment was conducted under double-blind conditions. They even give you a photograph of the experimental setup. What additional relevant information do you believe you need to reproduce those results? I can't think of anything.
The next step would be for you to repeat their experiment and see whether you get the same results. The fact that your experimental setup will differ from theirs is a good thing, because none of the details they leave out ought to be relevant. If you can't reproduce their results, then you contact them and you try to figure out jointly why.
Note the data is still publishable, just not unsupported conclusions.
The paper has exactly one conclusion: "Our results suggest that RF exposure under these conditions is associated with adverse effects on sleep quality within certain sleep stages." In what way is that conclusion not supported by the data?
You seem to be projecting your own conclusions onto the paper and then complaining that the paper doesn't support your conclusions. It doesn't have to support your conclusions, it only has to support its conclusions, and its conclusions are quite modest.
Your argument of deliberate X11 incompatibilities is nice (though difficult to accept at face value), but ignores the fact that 90% of my rant centered around the craptactular development environment that is shipped as "Mono".
Mono isn't a development environment, it's a runtime and a compiler. The development environment for Mono is called MonoDevelop, and in my experience, people have a much easier time getting started with it than XCode, Eclipse, or NetBeans.
On a system where Java is installed, [blah blah blah Java is wonderful blah blah blah]
So, why do you think people are using Mono? I'll tell you: just about every Mono developer knows Java and found it wanting. That's why people are developing in Mono in the first place. Maybe Mono isn't going to "win", but there's no going back to Java for many people; personally, I'd rather program in plain C.
Mono? Isn't that the UNFINISHED implementation of Microsoft's current .net version
.NET implementation; very few applications use it. It's mostly intended for .NET-based web apps.
Mono is a mature CLR-based platform with full access to the Linux desktop APIs. There are dozens of applications written in it now.
One of the packages you can get for Mono is a partial
At best, it's an alternative development environment for Linux/Unix that just happens to be based on the ECMA-334 and ECMA-335 standards.
.NET is portable. Nothing could be further from the truth.
.NET as part of Mono is hard and ongoing doesn't make Mono a "piece of crap". In fact, most Mono users don't even bother installing .NET compatibility libraries.
That is exactly what it is.
Mono is junk that gives people a false impression that
Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth, and that's OK. The fact that support
So I downloaded the Mono for OS X package
That's your mistake: Mono doesn't work well on OS X because Apple is playing their own games with deliberate incompatibilities. For example, Apple deliberately keeps X11 on OS X broken in order to force people to port to their crappy native libraries.
I'd rather have a rubber stamped version of Microsoft's office formats than no version at all: pathetic as ECMA may be, ECMA does force some additional disclosures and documentation, and it fixes a version for a while.
Of course, people need to keep in mind that an ECMA rubber stamp isn't the same as a traditional ISO/ANSI standard and it doesn't make the format "open". But with that caveat in mind, it's still better than nothing.
Unfortunately, a large number of Web technologies (HTML, Javascript, Java, Ruby, Rails, Perl, Apache, ...) were created to address short-term needs, but the people who created them were learning as they went along and the technologies got hyped up and picked up far too early.
Good technology needs a balance between practicality and theoretical soundness. Unfortunately, in pursuit of dot-com riches, a lot of technologies have been commercialized and frozen far too quickly.
There is very little evidence that micro-facial expressions actually work for this purpose. Unfortunately, the US government and law enforcement seem to be rather prone to this kind of snake oil. Lie detectors are another example.
I do know that this paper didn't contribute much to answering that question.
Of course it didn't. It's not supposed to. The paper is published in an on-line letter journal that reports on on-going research. The flaw here is simply that you and most other Slashdot geeks are so scientifically illiterate that you don't understand what that means.
I sorry but you are wrong here
I'm sorry, but you are a sloppy reader.
Many journals require that there is enough details to independently replicate the results from the paper and references.
As well they should. That's not what I said, though. What I said was:
There are almost never enough details in any experimental scientific paper to know whether the experimenters handled the experiment properly or not.
Those are very different criteria.
Note that this publication doesn't even require reproducibility (it reports on on-going research), but the paper actually pretty much tells you everything you need to reproduce the experiment anyway (frequency and duration of exposure, measured effect, geometry, double-blind conditions).
Calling bad science bad is justified and claiming that its OK because thats the way its done is bunk.
And you are more qualified than the peer reviewers to call this paper "bad science" because... what?
Your posts are all through this thread, basically saying "if it's been peer-reviewed, then it must be true,"
Quite to the contrary: many peer reviewed papers are wrong. This paper may be wrong as well. But whether it is right or wrong is something for the scientific community that it is targeted at to determine, in more peer reviewed articles.
Barring that, the appropriate response to this paper is skepticism and concern over poorly described methodology.
No, that is not the appropriate response for you because, unless you are an expert in the field, you have no idea even what "poorly described methodology" would be, let alone engage in a scientific debate about its merits or conclusions.
I can't decide if you're a very clever troll, a very credulous scientist, a hero-worshipping layman, or a defensive author
I'm a critical scientist, actually. The problem here is that you don't understand the purpose of on-line letter journals, the purpose of peer review, or the fallibility of scientific publications. You are so scientifically naive that you actually think it's worth remarking that a peer-reviewed paper might be wrong. And you're so arrogant that you think that a bunch of Slashdot geeks with no experience in sleep research or biology can spot methodological problems better than the peer reviewers.
Again, the discussion isn't about whether they're right, but about whether they controlled for the specific points of the poster four levels up.
People on Slashdot can dream up all sorts of hare-brained objections to papers that don't fit into their world view, but that has about as much importance as creationists making up arguments against evolution.
If you want more information about the experiments, contact the authors; that's why papers have contact information.
If you have a valid reason to doubt an experimental result, send a letter to the editor or publish your own paper, and if your objections are convincing, they will get published.
your assertion that their claims of "double blind" are valid and infallible
I made no such assertion.
That's an appeal to authority
No, it's not. I'm not saying that the authors are right, I'm saying that they have done what they are required to do for scientific publishing.
If they overlooked something subtle, yet perceptible, then they would still honestly think they were conducting it double-blind, even though the weren't.
That's a very real possibility, but you aren't going to find it by analyzing "an enumeration of the steps taken to make the study double blind", you are going to find it by reproducing the experiment, and they have given you a sufficient level of detail for that.
Peer review and all that?
Yes, and this paper appears in a peer reviewed publication, which tells you that the reviewers were satisfied with the level of detail in the paper. Who are you to second-guess them?
. It is the job of the publishing author to convince the community that they are right, and so they must present sufficient evidence (and sufficient experimental detail) to make their case adequately.
Yes, and since this paper appears in a peer-reviewed publication, the combination of reputation, explanation, detail, and terminology of the authors is evidently sufficient for its community. That's what we have peer review for.
As a practicing scientist, I can honestly say that this isn't how it works. [...] However, no scientist will read a paper and glibly assume that the experimenters "did everything properly"
As a "practicing scientist", you'd do well to learn quickly that it's unacceptable to fabricate quotations. What I wrote means something completely different from what you falsely quoted me as writing.
Here, try the fast version; it will be over quicker. :-)
The experimental description and discussion of results are so terse that they are barely informative. There are not enough details to know whether they handled the experiment properly or not.
There are almost never enough details in any experimental scientific paper to know whether the experimenters handled the experiment properly or not.
I'm hesitant to ascribe any significance to this finding just yet
Of course, this result needs to be reproduced and strengthened; that's often the case with results like this.
However, your specific objections against this paper are unwarranted: you're basically accusing the researchers of either gross incompetence or scientific fraud, and there is no justification for that.
the paper doesn't list any of the things that would have been required for it to be "carefully controlled"
They say they performed a "double blind controlled laboratory study" (2007 is a continuation of the 2006 work). That excludes all the possibilities you raise.
The paper is only 3 pages long, and doesn't include enough detail to reproduce the experiment precisely,
It doesn't have to; the authors have given you what they believe is the relevant detail. You'd need to find out additional details only if you can't reproduce their results with the details they have given you.
Uh, no. I don't see the words "double blind".
Then you need to look a bit more carefully.
I don't see any detailed description of how they did the placebo business. I don't see any description of how they tested for cheating. If there are two rooms, one for placebo and one for RF, or if the RF generator was in the same room, obviously the whole experiment is bogus.
None of those things need to be in the paper; the presumption in scientific papers is that the authors are familiar with the basic tools and methods of their research area. Unless you have a specific cause to doubt that, you have no justification for questioning their results because they did not include those details.
The exposure refers to the standard way in which cell phone exposure is defined:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_radiation_and_health
Basically, you compute the average over small cubes of tissue, and the maximum of all those averages is 1.4mW/g.
Maybe it's just the warming (microwave-effect) that affects sleep?
Maybe it is, but that in itself is news.
That does not prove there's anything harmfull in radiowaves, or that humans have any "not-yet-found" ability to sense radiowaves directly.
They aren't trying to prove that. They are just proving that there is a significant biological effect at all, something many people have been denying.
However, alteration of sleep patterns is certainly something medically significant, no matter what the mechanism.
No, it means more than "exposed to nothing"; it means "exposed to nothing, but the subject can't tell".
These are just a few of the questions that pop up in any thorough analysis of this experiment.
A "thorough analysis" of an experiment begins with actually reading the paper!
The original paper is linked to at the top of the page, in PDF format. You'll find your questions answered there. Basically, the study is carefully controlled.
If you have some ideological dislike of the results (as you seem to), perhaps you should try to repeat the experiment yourself and present your results. See, reproducing experimental result is another cornerstone of science.
Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
It's funny that Jaron is using iPhone as the example of innovation in closed source. iPhone runs OS X, a blend of UNIX, Smalltalk, and C, all 1970's technologies and none of them invented by Apple. Much of the software on the iPhone is derived from open source software (BSD, Mach, GNU C, KHTML, etc.). iPhone's model of mobile computing is what Palm and Handspring pioneered a decade ago, with graphics copied from Siggraph demos of a decade ago. The iPhone is a very nicely designed phone, but the only innovation is that it sucks less than other phones in the US market.
Actual innovations in mobile computing have recently come from OLPC and Android. While they are also based on Linux and Java, they have genuinely new ideas in user interfaces, networking, and software architecture. Oh, and both happen to be open source as well.
lists it as having an onomatopoeia variant
Well, genius, where do you think the negative meaning comes from?
Just remember this: "dinging" someone is rude and insulting--don't do it again. End of story.
Go look at a dictionary. To "ding" someone means to give someone a minor bitching about something, especially something trivial. "I was dinged for having a messy desk." [dictionary.com]. If you don't want people to get annoyed at you, don't "ding" them.