Scientific Etiquette

In addition to operating by the Scienfitic Method or a variant thereof, scientists also follow an unwritten but well-known code of ethics. Some aspects of this code are familiar to all (the Hippocratic Oath, that doctors should help their patients), some are legally codified (human participants in studies have to be adequately informed of all risks), and there's even some borderline or as-yet-undecided ethics cases / topics that are policed by citizen watchgroups (animal testing, stem cell research).

One aspect of the scientific ethos is that of proprietary rights to data, especially important when related to pharmaceuticals and private funding. If one research group (under the auspices of an individual called the PI, principal1 investigator) is working on a certain drug, their data is private and no one else can legally access it without express written permission. Another group may be working on the same project independently, but the two are likely not allowed to collaborate, and thus it is simply a race against time to see whose work pays out, and who just wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of work.

In astronomy, the best telescopes are majority-owned/-funded by the (US) government, and so the rules are different. Anything produced by our government or government funded is public domain -- eventually. Typically the researchers are granted proprietary rights ("ownership") to the data for a year, giving them a significant head start in analyzing the data and therefore publication. If they choose to publish sooner, as often happens, I believe only the things they put in the paper are publicly usable. After the year deadline has passed, any US citizen (and in practice, anyone in the world with computer access) may freely download and use the data as they see fit. This is why high resolution gorgeous Hubble Space Telescope images are freely available on the web. The data (images) were originally taken for some other purpose, but after the year was up, the HST publicity team cleaned them up and put them out there for anyone to see.

BUT, as your high school English teacher taught you, proper credit must always been given. The worst breach of etiquette physically possible is plagiarism, which can be anything ranging from unintentionally forgetting to list an author in your bibliography, to misleading others into thinking you did work that someone else did, to hacking into someone's computer and stealing their data.

As Dr. Michael Brown (Caltech) is accusing Dr. Jose-Luis Ortiz (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Granada), according to the New York Times. Ortiz's group is currently credited with discovering the outer solar system body known as 2003 EL61. (The object's fame was eclipsed by that of so-called "Xena," which actually is bigger than Pluto, so don't be surprised that you haven't heard of it.) Brown's group claims their three-month earlier discovery was digitally snooped on by Ortiz's group -- computers belonging to Ortiz, et al., surfed the web to a page listing where the Caltech telescope was pointed at on the key nights.

The accusation is that Ortiz (or his grad student) looked at those records of where Brown (or his grad student) had been looking, then Ortiz looked at his telescope's records and found images of the appropriate region of the sky in its history. Knowing that something special was there, and knowing that Brown worked on minor planet discoveries, Ortiz/grad student found the same object in their own images, but only because of the head's up from Brown's observations. 24 hours later Ortiz announces he's found the object now known as 2003 EL61. Soon after, Brown accuses Ortiz of failure to cite sources and demands he be stripped of discoverer status, and it be rightfully granted to Brown.

Ortiz counters with his own accusation of academic dishonesty by Brown. In the minor-planet-discovering community, there is a well known protocol for when you spot something new: you inform the International Astronomical Union's (IAU's) Minor Planet Center (MPC).

The MPC is the worldwide clearinghouse for planets, asteroids, comets, Kuiper Belt objects, Trans-Neptunian objects, Oort Cloud objects, 10th planets, and Planet X-es. If it's up there, in our Solar System, it isn't the Sun or man-made, and someone discovers it, the MPC is who you should tell. This is especially important for what's known as NEAs or NEOs: Near Earth Asteroids / Objects. Those are asteroids and other stuff that *might* *someday* have a chance of smacking the Earth, or (much more likely) having a near miss. This is one thing that Deep Impact got relatively right.

Say an astronomer discovers a new asteroid, comet, minor planet, whatever. Call that Night 1. He (or sometimes she) reports it to the MPC, along with details of when he saw it where. This can happen anywhere from Night 1 to Night 30 if he's lazy. I'll call it Night 2. By the end of the day, or sometimes the hour, the MPC calculates a rough orbit for it, and determines where it should be visible in the sky in the future. When they calculate the rough orbit, red flags go up if it's an NEA. In this case, emails IMMEDIATELY go out to major observatories and astronomers (both professional and amateur) who've elected to be on the list. This also happens if it's not an NEA, but without the red flags. Night 3 dozens to hundreds of telescopes point to the expected location in the sky, and the media catches wind of the story and it runs on front pages. Day 3 - Night 4, resulting data is sent back to the MPC. Sometimes it was a bogus detection of an object and nothing is found Night 3, and the search is called off. More often, the MPC refines its calculations and repeats the request for observations. By the end of Night 5 someone has found archived images from five or ten years ago that had the object in it, but no one realized at the time. Around a week after the initial detection, the orbit has been refined enough to know that the asteroid isn't going to hit the earth in 3 weeks, or a million years, whatever the original worry was. Papers are published by a few astronomers within a few months.

Brown didn't do this. He didn't send the initial detection to the MPC because he didn't want some other group scooping his story. Which happened anyway. But if he had told the MPC, then Ortiz wouldn't've had a leg to stand on. But if Brown had then anyone could've published on it by now. But it's Brown's tendency to be secretive that prompted Ortiz to commit the information theft. If he did. Or his grad student.

Conclusions:
1) Bad blood begets more bad blood.
2) Shit, I thought astro was free of this sorta crap.

Falsafiabilty

Science is based upon a process known as the Scientific Method. All science uses a modified form of this.

1.Obersvation / Question - the scientist observes (notices) something s/he wants to learn more about, or comes up with a question he wants answered. For example, it rains on cloudy days. Why does it rain on cloudy days?

2.Hypothesis - a guess as to the reason behind what he observes. The clouds are made of Super Crows, and when they shit it rains.

3.Prediction - subtly different from hypothesis, it is the testable results expected if your hypothesis is true. If I look at a cloud with a telescope, I should be able to see the Super Crows.

4.Experiment - carrying out the test implied by your predictions

5.Conclusion - assessing whether you were right, how good the experiment was, etc. I didn't see any Super Crows, but I accidentally left the cap on the telescope, so I think that's why, and I need to try again.

You'll note that the key to this whole process is the ability to perform a test, experiment, or observation that can verify or deny your hypothesis. Some things are impossible to test, or impossible to prove false. There is a pink elephant somewhere on Earth. It's really damned hard to go everywhere on the Earth, and even if you could and you missed him, maybe he snuck to Nepal while you were in Japan, and then snuck back to Japan when you left for Antarctica. Johnny's got a crush on Melissa. You ask him if he's got a crush on her. If he says yes, you've proven your hypothesis true. If he says no, he's in denial to himself, or isn't admitting it to you, proving your hypothesis true. It's impossible to prove your hypothesis false.

Either of these cases are unfalsifiable - impossible to prove false through an experiment. A whole class of things that fall under "unfalsifiable" are the supernatural, including any higher powers and their effects, such as God, Creationism, and Intelligent Design (ID). I'm not saying ID is wrong, I'm saying it's untestable. There is nothing we can do to determine whether God created Adam and Eve, or just helped evolution along, or even only started the ball rolling with the Big Bang and then took a seat in the sidelines (sometimes called the Clockmaker Hypothesis).

•Science requires the process of testing.

•ID is impossible to test.

•Logical conclusion: ID has no place in science.

Once again, just to make sure you get it, science does not say Intelligent Design is wrong, science says it is unable to say anything about it. Science admits a total failure to address the issue of God, and leaves it to the churches, the atheists, and the ACLU to duke out.

Assumptions: a practical guide

Late last week I noticed a few harmless yellowjackets on the inside of my office window screen. Today I was stung by one of the insects in the process of leaving my office. Which leads me to evaluate the assumptions in my initial statement, "harmless yellowjackets." Either (a) yellowjackets were/are not harmless, and/or (b) they were not yellowjackets, but hornets or wasps. Sometimes it's hard to determine what assumptions you have made until something proves you painfully wrong. I'd been told since childhood by my family that yellowjackets are harmless, and I've never been afraid of them.

There IS a difference between the three bugs, yellowjackets, hornets, and wasps, not that I understand insects or species classification well enough to know the difference, and Wikipedia is little help as they all have different tables (you'll see my comments requesting that be fixed in their discussion sections w/in a few mintues of this posting), but all three sting. Even so, I am unable to identify the bug now, as it was crippled by my hand crushing it on the doorknob and put out of its misery by the retributive depths of my sole, and there were not enough remains for a thorough autopsy.

The next thing I got to test in this encounter after my assumptions, was my allergies. In my childhood I was allergic to bee stings. Most stings would merely result in massive swelling and occasional puffy eyes. If the stinger remained in my skin, I would start having difficulty breathing until the stinger were removed with tweezers. Since then, I have developed asthma (though mild), but simultaneously my allergies have weakened. Additionally, I have never been stung by a wasp/hornet/yellowjacket. This of course means that I had WAY too many independent variables (asthma, allergies, age, type of bug) of which I was simaltaneously testing the effect on the dependent variable (my ability to breathe), and no good control. I still stand by my reported results (survival, no reaction other than the normal one of PAIN), but I must repeat the experiment in a more controlled environment (allergy tests) to determine causality of survival and estimate future mortality rate.

Question Everything

Especially if it comes to you in email. Skepticism is thoroughly scientific, despite Fox Mulder's questioning the wrong things. ;)

•Have you seen gorgeous pictures of hurricane Katrina approaching a town in Mississippi? Did you notice that the ground's all farmland? And that the "eye" area is much too small for the typical "clear, calm, and sunny"? If so, you've got the key points that

•Did you know that in September of 2005 Mars is going to approach so close that it'll be bigger than the Moon? Did you notice that the same email went out in 2003? Did you stop and think that if Mars were actually close enough to the Earth that it were as big as the Moon, that its gravity would probably be stronger than the Moon's and we'd have killer tides worse than the December 2004 tsunami or August 2005 hurricane Katrina? Did you read the explanation that it's a recycled email with a typo in the original?

•Fwd: Fw: virus alert - WORST VIRUS EVER ---CNN ANNOUNCED -- PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST !! Aw man, there's more of these than I can list... Read my post on it for a summary of how to know if it's a real virus or a hoax, and how to best prevent yourself from getting virii all around.

Here's what I do when I get a forwarded email that seems a bit sneaky.

1.Go to Google and look up keywords in the email. Examples for the three above might be "Katrina hurricane photos", "Mars moon telescope", and "virus alert 'card for you' ".

2.Google will give you many hits; look for sites that you personally believe to be reliable. I trust CNN, BBC, the NY Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post for news; Sophos, Symantec, MacAfee, Norton for virus; Snopes for general urban legends.

3.Read or skim at least two or three of your "trustworthy" hits. If they agree with each other, then I will consider them all true.

4.Compose a well-reasoned reply/rebuttal to the individual explaining why the forwarded email is faulty. I am sure to include the references I used so they can independently verify it. Suggest they follow a similar line of attack next time they receive an email like that one.

5.If the person CC'd others, I also CC them on my reply, and ask that they put me on BCC (blind carbon-copy) for mass emails when applicable, so that spammers don't find my email address in the future, and so that when one of the others does receive a virus they don't have me in their address book. (If they don't know enough to avoid hoaxes, they probably don't know enough to avoid real viruses.)

6.Send. Delete original. Rant. Repeat as necessary.

Have you been taken in by an email hoax? Or is there one you didn't understand the explanation of? Let me know!

Most distant gamma ray burst detected

The Swift telescope has detected - and studied - the most distant gamma ray burst ever. Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are currently believed to be created when a massive star collapses into a black hole. I'm not sure what's the difference between this and a star going supernova, so I'll be researching that on Wikipedia next.

It has a so-called "redshift" of 6.29, which translates to a distance of about 13 billion light years from Earth. ... "This burst smashes the old distance record by 500 million light years," said Dr Daniel Reichart of the University of North Carolina, who has been leading the measurement of its distance.
How do we know it's the farthest? Determining the distance to astronomical objects was one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century. Edwin Hubble (after whom the Hubble Space Telescope is named) discovered that galaxies that are farther away from us (based upon earlier measurements of distance) are also moving away from us faster (greater speed). The speed is directly measured by the Doppler Effect / Shift - the same thing that makes the siren of an abulance driving past change in pitch. In GRBs and other things in the sky, we measure how the color of the light changes and use this to determine the velocity, which cosmologists translate into redshift. The velocity to redshift conversion is exact; the redshift or velocity to distance conversion is still under debate. The current best guess is 71±4 (km/s)/Mpc.

The Swift telescope used in this study can actually detect GRBs even farther away than that, if they happen. Light takes a while to get here, so when you look at objects far away, you're looking at long ago in the past. Think about sending letters by snail mail. If you send one in the same town, it might get there the same day, so if you get a letter from the same town, the person probably wrote it about the day before. If you get a letter from a few states away, the letter's a few days old. A letter from the other side of the country might be a week old, and any news it has will be that long out of date. Even farther away, a letter from Europe would take a couple weeks.

Swift can see very dim objects, dim = far away = long ago = soon after the Big Bang (200 million years after, they guess). We don't yet know how soon after the Big Bang stars started to form. If there were no stars, then none of them would've been dying and forming GRBs! Can you imagine a universe that hasn't yet formed stars?

Modern Cars

As I'm sure we're all sick of hearing by now, the last time gas cost this much (adjusted for inflation) was in 1981. At the time, cars got 21 mpg. Today, the average car gets 21 mpg. No, that's not a typo. Despite all the wonders of technology, today's cars have the same fuel efficiency as they did 24 years ago. Why is that? SUVs. The increased weight (and probably air resistance too) make up for the best the automotive industry decided to dish out in fuel efficienct technolgy.

Despite making that good point, the article upon which I based this post goes on to throw meaningless numbers at the reader.

Light trucks, a category that includes SUVs and minivans, now account for 50 percent of passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. That's more than double their share in 1981.1
...
Large SUV sales are 11.2 percent lower than they were at this time last year, according to AutoData.2
...
Top speed has also increased from 112 miles per hour in 1981 to 136 mph today.3
...
Overall, the basic 5.7 liter Hemi V8 engine is about 10 percent more efficient than the engine it replaced. The addition of "multi-displacement" technology, which shuts off four cylinders when their power is not added, as in steady highway cruising, boosted efficiency by another 10 percent.4

1.Do they mean double the percentage from 1981, or double the raw number from 1981? The former is more meaniningful, as simple increase in purchasing will change the latter without showing if people prefer SUVs or cars.

2.Ditto, but more so: percent of vehicles sold, number of vehicles sold, percent of dollars spent, amount of dollars spent? Amount of dollars spent would decrease if they simply decreased the price of SUVs.

3.From context, they mean average top speed, not top top speed, but still, who really drives their cars at top speed?

4.Hey wait a sec, they just said it increased by 10% overall, and then they said it was an additional 10% on top of that? That's not even a mistake I'll let my developmental math kids get away with. On the other hand, maybe they meant that the engine just by itself is 10% more efficent, and the "multi-displacement technology" makes it 10% more efficient on top of that. If so, it's even more a case of sloppy reporting - the description didn't really say that, and for that second 10%, 10% of what?, the original engine or the modified engine? (Though it doesn't matter order-of-magnitude, science reporters rarely understand that concept.)

This isn't even a science article, it's a cars article, and the little evidence they throw in to try and make it more scientific goes away.

"Modern Science" launches!

Welcome to yet another blog... This one's going to be about science today: new discoveries, debunking pseudoscience, and controversies. If you have a question about something in science, leave a comment and I'll try to address it. I encourage debate in the comments section - but no name-calling!
To start the ball rolling, I'd like to draw your attention to the tendancy of poor reporting on science in the media. The Guardian recently ran a good article discussing it. This article was brought to my attention by sclerotic rings, where I mentioned that I recently saw a CNN article on a computer virus that'd taken down the station, and their own slow response to fix it. In the very same article criticizing their own reactions, they interviewed MANY newscasters and behind-the-scenes people laughing and joking about not knowing what a worm is. "Hah hah, it's okay to not have a clue what's going on!"

           I think this eroding of science in the media is leading to a general disrespect for the method and results of science in the general public in the US, thus allowing non-scientific ideas to take root, such as astrology, the Moon Landing Hoax conspiracy theory, and Intelligent Design (ID).

Discuss.
Expect me to say "prove it."