The Baloney Detection Kit: A 10-Point Checklist for Science Literacy

In fact, brainpickings.org has a lot of good posts about books, creativity, life, and writing. Enjoy surfing!

Republicans cited the wrong font size on the title of the petitions circulated by Stand Up For Democracy, a coalition of groups that launched the petition campaign, as the reason for not approving the initiative for the ballot. Opponents gathered 203,238 signatures, roughly 40,000 more than needed to get a repeal question on the ballot.

…

John Pirich, an attorney representing Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility, which opposed the petitions, disagreed with Thomas’ statement that the board’s standard should be whether the petition “substantially complies” with the rules. He noted that the statute says petitions “shall” use specified type sizes and adhere to other technical requirements.

“‘Shall,’ in legal parlance, is a mandatory term,” Pirich said. “It didn’t say ‘get in the ball park,’ it said it ‘shall.’

“We believe the petition is fatally flawed in that regard.”

Sanders noted several Court of Appeals petition cases where the court used a standard of “substantial compliance” to determine a petition’s validity.

“All doubts as to (the validity of the petitions) are resolved in favor of allowing the people to vote and express their will,” Sanders said, eliciting applause and hoots of approval from the crowd. “The statutory language should be liberally construed and all disputes should be resolved in favor of allowing the people to vote.

Sanders testified there are several complicated formulas for determining font size, saying it’s impossible to determine if headline type met the 14 point requirement simply by using a ruler.

“If we are wrong, then the scientifically accepted formula for determining font size is wrong, if we are wrong then the Court of Appeals is wrong … if we are wrong then democracy is wrong,” Sanders said.

Printer Bruce Hack of Inland Press said he certified the type size met legal requirements before printing the petitions.

“There is no way that you can just measure a capital letter and determine what the type size is,” Hack said.

This is how democracy ends. Font size.

(Image by nextround.net)

Observed composite reflectivity (from the WSI NOWrad product) at 2315 UTC 16 Feb 2007.

Schumacher, R. S., D. M. Schultz, and J. A. Knox, 2010: Convective snowbands downstream of the Rocky Mountains in an environment with conditional, dry symmetric, and inertial instabilities. Mon. Wea. Rev., 138, 4416-4438. [HTML] [PDF]

Schultz, D. M., and J. A. Knox, 2006: Banded convection caused by frontogenesis in a conditionally, symmetrically, and inertially unstable environment. Mon. Wea. Rev., 135, 2095-2110. [HTML] [PDF]

Because Russ has a collection of these types of bands, the question arose how many different case studies do we need to present to make our point about how these bands form and evolve?

I argued that if we had one good set of simulations of this 16 Feb 2007 event, comprising a control case and some model sensitivity experiments, then we have enough material for a publishable paper. If we had run simulations on a different event and found out that the results were similar to the 16 Feb 2007 event, then we could say in our discussion section that we had performed the same simulations on a different event and came to the same conclusions. Although not definitive, because we got the same answer on two different events showing similar structures and evolutions to the bands, then we should have some faith that our results have some generality beyond a single event.  

I tend to view papers that present multiple cases to demonstrate the same point as tedious. As a reader, if I read through the development of a case and got the idea that the author was trying to communicate, then a second case doesn’t drive the point home any more clearly. I am bored.  

One big exception to my belief that one complete case is usually enough is if the authors are using two cases to contrast two different evolutions. A nice example of how you might do that is the following paper.  

Schultz, D. M., 2004: Cold fronts with and without prefrontal wind shifts in the central United States. Mon. Wea. Rev., 132, 2040-2053. [HTML] [PDF]

In the part of that paper containing the case studies, the focus was on comparing two cases: one cold front with a prefrontal trough and one without.  I felt it was an effective way to use multiple cases in the same paper.

Another situation where you might want to include multiple cases is a situation like Schumacher et al. (2010) where we were first calling attention to the existence of these bands. At the end of the paper, we presented a figure with three different cases illustrating that these banded structures occur more than once. In fact, they occur relatively frequently (a few times a year). So, some snapshots of the bands and brief descriptions of these events, comparing and contrasting them, help add some weight to our arguments that these are features worthy of study without adding the weight of much additional and unnecessary text.

To summarize, if a case study is clearly presented to illustrate a point that you as an author want to make, then I believe this is an effective means for using case studies.

For more on effective case studies in meteorology, read:

Schultz, D. M., 2010: How to research and write effective case studies in meteorology. Electronic J. Severe Storms Meteor., 5 (2), 1-18. [EJSSM]

Image source: http://vadlo.com/cartoons.php

I had been trying to track down this paper for several years. Finally, I was able to get my hands on it. Like many papers you get, they turn out to tell you something different than what you were hoping to hear. In this case, it was a pleasant surprise.

The principal result is that articles in four out of five journals had the number of coauthors being positively correlated with the number of significant words in their titles. That was interesting in of itself, but the implications that the author raised were the following:

…papers with longer titles will be retrieved more often than would be expected from a consideration only of their occurrence in the file they occupy. They will be “over-retrieved,” and papers with shorter titles will be “under-retrieved.” From the results reported here, it also follows that multi-author papers will be retrieved out of proportion to their share of the bibliographic data base in question.

Thus, the implication is that if you are hoping for your article to be found more frequently by search engines, then add more authors.

Kuch, T. D. C., 1978: Relation of title length to number of authors in journal articles. Journal of American Society for Information Science, 29 (4), 200–202.

(Image source: http://vadlo.com/cartoons.php)

(Image from http://ohinternet.com/Clippy)

“Just get words down on the page, because you can always sort it out later.“

The rationale?

Because the process of “sorting it out”, or editing, is 99% of the whole exercise!

If you leave clarifying your thoughts till last, you’ll end up will thousands and thousands of words, in “rough form”, but it’ll be unusable. You won’t have anything finished. And you’ll end up in a horrible situation of trying to edit your writing, working with stream-of-consciousness mess of a structure having forgotten what it was you were originally trying to say.

Instead, do it this way…

Edit as you write

The aim of your writing is to get an idea out of your head and onto the page in a way that will make sense to the reader.

The aim should always be clarity, but you need to clarify the idea in your own head before you can communicate it effectively to someone else.

When you write, the words will usually come out in a bit of a jumble because you’re thinking and clarifying ideas at the same time.

So the first version of a sentence will need some revision before it’s good enough to use.

…

When you’re explaining a complex idea, you must take the time to clarify your thought on the page, while it is still fresh in your head.

Give the thought the time and care it deserves. You must stop and edit the sentence to express yourself clearly before moving on, because if you just fill pages and come back to edit days or weeks later, the thought will be gone and it will be incredibly hard to sort out the mess of writing.

The author then gives an example:

The first version of a sentence will rarely be very good. But knowing that frees you from the pressures of perfectionism. You can write that sentence knowing that it’s just a first attempt.

Whatever you want to say, there are a huge number of ways you could write it. A huge number of possible solutions to the problem of communication:

* The cat sat on the mat
* The cat was sitting on the mat
* The mat had the cat sitting on it
* The cat was on the mat, sitting
* Sitting on the mat was the cat

And that’s just a single sentence describing one simple idea. So there are always alternatives, just by moving a couple of things around.

I disagree with this post because, for someone with writer’s block, for someone who is afraid to get started, or for someone who is a perfectionist, getting the words down on the page (subject to some constraints) is the ideal medicine to get moving on your thesis. If you are hobbled by these issues, then writing more and writing smartly is what is needed.

My response to this post was the following.

I appreciate what you are saying, but I think there are some nuances that need to be considered.

First, not all projects or people will write all their documents the same. I’ve published over 90 peer-reviewed articles and I don’t have a fixed style for writing. Some are meticulously outlined and organized from the start, and others are organized well in my head and flow easily out onto the paper. But, most result from me just jumping in and writing down my thoughts. Initially I do more writing than editing until the manuscript starts to take form, then I get to a point where I do more editing than writing. So, yes, editing is an important part of the writing process, but there is a point where writing dominates editing.

Second, sometimes the stream of consciousness writing can help open the floodgates that an author needs to get writing and get writing well. When I was writing my book Eloquent Science, it often took an hour or so to get into the mood to write after sitting in front of the keyboard. The first hour may not have produced much usable text, but it served the purpose of getting my ass in the chair and my brain in the right gear to produce more usable text later. If I worried about every little bit of text that I was creating and obsessed about its quality, I wouldn’t have been as productive. What I got out of 8 hours of effort was 7 hours of useful text and the first hour of warm-up text.

Third, a concept I talk about in my book is the writing/editing funnel. At the top of the funnel is the largest-scale issues: organization (chapters and sections). This is the first aspect to the document that an author needs to get in place. There’s no sense writing the perfect chapter of your thesis if it doesn’t fit into the framework that you’ve set for it. Then, going down the funnel, the writer should next focus on the paragraphs. Do all the paragraphs flow in order from one to the next? Do they make sense on the paragraph-scale? Then going down the funnel, you get to the sentences and then words, then small-scale stuff like grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

The idea of the funnel is to get authors to focus on the big picture first. Again, there’s no sense spending an hour crafting the perfect paragraph, if there is no place for it in the structure of the paper.

When in editing mode, it’s the same thing. No sense on fixing grammar and typos if the whole structure of the section of the thesis is rubbish. Fix the big issues at the top of the funnel first, then delve down to fix the little stuff.

So, when you say that you must ignore the advice to “just get it down on the page”, I think you need to qualify that. I guess it depends on the level of detail that you consider editing. In your example about the cat on the mat, the idea is down on paper. All of those examples would suffice for me to construct my argument through the stream-of-consciousness writing that often generates the greatest volume of text in our scientific papers. If after 70-90% of the manuscript is written, I didn’t like the first sentence, then I could change it one of the other sentences. It doesn’t bother me that it’s not perfectly crafted because the idea is serving a great placeholder for the eventual way I wish to say it.

UPDATE: James at 3monththesis.com has added a part 2 to clarify our discussion.

(Image from writebynight.net)

From Steven Colbert’s Twitter feed @StephenAtHome and #igotthetweetslikegrassley.

complex.

“Earthquakes are a complex problem.”

“Titan has a complex methane distribution over the Tropics.”

“To pin down the many complexities and feedbacks involved in jet stream blocking may prove to be difficult.”

“Governments and international research bodies alike must put money into funding research projects in the polar regions in order to heighten our understanding of these complex geological areas.”

These four examples are weak sentences. Saying that the issues are complex doesn’t tell me anything.

• For example, what about earthquakes makes it a complex problem? Is it that they cannot be predicted? Is it that much of the structure of the fault lies buried, and so only indirect means can be used to understand them?
• Rather than saying that Titan has a complex methane distribution, describe what this distribution looks like with height. Show a graph to illustrate the complexity of the distribution.
• Although we may not totally understand what causes and maintains blocking patterns in the atmosphere, it is a tractable problem, and the author has given us no insight into why there are “complexities” (whatever they are) that prevent us from understanding their mechanisms.
• In the last example, the word “complex” seems to be just thrown out there, to add importance to what is being said. It’s a weak argument, like coming out to support motherhood.

I’m not saying that all uses of the word complex be banned from scientific writing. Far from it, in fact, there are even degree programs in Complexity Science, studying complex systems that are composed of many parts. But there, the term is well defined and used for a specific meaning.

I don’t believe it is our job as scientists to say something is complex. I believe it is our job to make order out of the complexity that we don’t understand.

(Image from chewychunks.wordpress.com)

Among the writing guides I have read (and there have been several), I would rate this book at the top. It would be well suited for a writing course or as a guide for a young researcher writing his first paper, though experienced writers will also find many gems for improving their writing. Initially I wondered if it would bother me that all examples are related to atmospheric science. But it did not: in fact, because I was not familiar with the jargon, it was clear to me how much improved the revised examples were.

You can download the whole review here for free (p. 156).

I discovered the following article a while ago, yet only have gotten around to writing about it now.

Alon, U., 2009: How to choose a good scientific problem. Molecular Cell, 35, 726-728. [PDF] [HTML]

Why the paper resonated with me is that it brought me back to choosing my research topic for my PhD. I knew the topic I wanted to work on for my PhD, and I had a good sense of what the answer was when I started in 1991, but I didn’t know how to go about proving my hypothesis was true. My advisors let me wander for two years before gently nudging me toward the methods that I would finally adopt in my PhD thesis, completed in 1996. Their valuable advice to just “go look at the weather maps and see what you see” is now being applied to a new generation of my students and postdocs.

I enjoyed scanning through Uri Alon’s Web site on nurturing young scientists here.