A Second Look At Science

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Carl Zimmer praises Retro Report as a source of science journalism:

These videos remind us forcefully that the real meaning of stories about science takes time to unfold. That is very hard to remember, because there’s something intoxicating about a new science story. Suddenly some great truth about the world seems to be unveiled. That truth can be terrifying, or elating. I can’t count all the emails I’ve gotten when I’ve written a story about some very preliminary research on a disease, from people who suffer from the disease and want to know where they can go to get cured.

In reality, a lot of science-related conclusions fall apart or have to be revised in later years. Science itself is starting to grapple with its flaws, with papers like “Most Published Research Findings Are False.” On the other hand, some findings gain strength over the years, as more and more evidence supports them. But those studies pile up like sand grains, and so it’s easy for journalists to overlook them, even after they’ve grown into a mountain.

Zimmer recommends the above video on Biosphere 2, “the sealed building that was supposed to become self-sufficient and instead went wrong in a fascinating way.” Previous Dish on Retro Report here.

Decreasing Our Chances For Cheating

James M. Lang argues that classroom cheating has less to do with the students and more to do with the structure of coursework:

[C]heating levels are fairly high, but they have always been so. The better question to ask is why. Duke University researcher Dan Ariely and his colleagues have conducted dozens of experiments designed to see what makes people willing to engage in acts of cheating and dishonesty in their everyday lives. Their findings have been remarkably consistent: most people, under the right circumstances, are willing to engage in small acts of dishonesty. This seems to be a part of our human nature.  With enough incentives in front of us, most of will cheat at least a little bit.

Fortunately, Ariely’s formulation has a happy corollary:

Since most people are willing to cheat under the right circumstances, our best approach to reducing cheating will be to change those circumstances. If we open our minds to this possibility, we will have to reconsider the nature of the learning environments we are presenting to our students at both the high school and college level.  When we do so, we might find that a significant portion of college and university courses feature precisely the types of circumstances that induce cheating.

Daniel Luzer gets specific:

If you make students write papers by proposing ideas, submitting multiple drafts, they won’t cheat on the papers. Likewise, if you give examinations that are based on answers to essay questions (rather than Scantron multiple choice tests), students can’t cheat.

This isn’t to say students aren’t 100 percent responsible for the moral error of cheating, but if you want them to learn that requires more effort on the part of the teachers. This higher quality examination strategy is not just good for preventing cheating; it’s also a better way for students to learn.

Previous Dish on cheating here and here.

Letting Sunlight Through The Bars

Lex Berko explores ways to reduce inmate suicides:

According to the World Health Organization, hanging is the most common form of inmate suicide, a fact that guides most prisoner suicide prevention policies. Rooms should contain no protrusions to which a noose can be tied. That includes doorknobs, clothing hangers, and light fixtures. Items that can be used as nooses or ligatures should also be removed from cells. A seemingly harmless laundry bag cord can become fatal in the hands of someone intent on suicide. …

But what is also interesting are more subtle touches that Hayes lays out.

Housing placement should be based on increasing interaction with staff, “not on decisions that heighten depersonalizing aspects of confinement“. All cells should have a view of the outside world to connect inmates to the larger world. “The ability to identify time of day via sunlight helps re-establish perception and natural thinking while minimizing disorientation,” says Hayes’ checklist. So while it should be obvious, preventing inmate suicide is not just about confiscating the materials necessary to successfully kill oneself, but also about ensuring the general mental stability of those under correctional facility care. Sunlight makes humans feel human, something that can be elusive in the confines of a prison cell.

Ready For The Next Government Shutdown?

With Republicans threatening an end to federal operations unless Democrats gut Obamacare, Scheiber expects a shutdown in October, since “neither side has an incentive to back down”:

In 2011, Obama was willing to give on his demand that revenue increases accompany spending cuts because he understood the apocalyptic consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling. In late 2012, Republicans knew that the alternative to a small tax increase was for taxes to rise automatically by a much larger amount. This time, on the other hand, every party to the negotiation has reason to welcome the government shutdown that would result if they can’t reach a deal.

He thinks a shutdown will be “a good thing,” since it “gives everyone a chance to sober up before we take on the substantially higher-stakes proposition of avoiding a debt default.” Elias Isquith is skeptical of this logic:

[W]hat I don’t understand is why we believe these Tea Party folks will be more susceptible to reason after a shutdown than they are now? We seem to be putting a lot of faith behind the power of public opinion — yet at the same time it’s well understood that many Republicans only fear a primary challenge from their right, and that top-line public opinion doesn’t sway them.

Quote For The Day

“I’m addicted to working. I mean, I have a list of 100 countries I want to play in. I’m basically killing myself by travelling so much, for no reason whatsoever. As you know, I can’t have one pair of shoes, I can’t have one CD, I can’t have one bunch of flowers, one car, one ornament, I mean, that’s my mindset. It’s like, if I do 120 shows in a year, I want to do 130 the next year. I’m very proud of doing over 200 flights a year. Why are you so proud? It’s fucking killing you. After I was ill, I sat down with David and had to admit to my addiction: ‘David, I can’t stop working,'” – Elton John, at 66.

A Real “Critique Of Pure Reason”

In which a Russian is shot in a dispute over Immanuel Kant:

A police spokeswoman in Rostov-on Don, Viktoria Safarova, said two men in their 20s were discussing Kant as they stood in line to buy beer at a small store on Sunday. The discussion deteriorated into a fistfight and one participant pulled out a small nonlethal pistol and fired repeatedly.

Not Monty Python, alas.

The Invisible Hand Of Censorship

Harvard political scientists designed a bogus social network in China and observed how it became blocked:

What they found was that the service providers and software firms provide a huge variety of choice in censorship methods, ranging from blocking certain keywords, to delaying publication on posts until they can be reviewed, to blocking certain users by IP address, to filtering out posts based on length. In other words, there isn’t a centralized set of guidelines banning any mention of Ai Weiwei, Tibet, or Tiananmen Square, companies are instituting their own guidelines in hopes of avoiding the government’s periodic crackdowns. As the MIT Technology Review put it, the experiment suggests that “China has created a kind of competitive market in censorship… Companies are free to run their censorship operations mostly as they wish, as long as they don’t allow the wrong kind of speech to flourish.”

Jeffery Wasserstrom adds:

[M]any know that Beijing uses a “Great Firewall” to try to keep the web free of things it dislikes. What fewer appreciate is how much energy the Chinese government puts into trying to flood the Internet with things it likes. People can earn small payments, on a post-by-post basis, for adding pro-government comments to sites. Bloggers mock this piece-rate system: those benefiting from it, they say, have joined the “Fifty-Cent Party” that props up the Communist Party.