Guest Post: The Trajectory of the Sting

By: | June 5, 2015

chocolatefaceWho doesn’t love hijinks? Last week, science journalist John Bohannon brought the hijinks. He wrote on io9.com about how he joined a sting operation designed to reveal the lightning-quick path from bad science – about fad diets – to big headlines. Here’s the short version. They ran a short clinical trial on 16 volunteers, collected some data, and a statistician abused the data until a statistically significant result popped out.  It was juicy: Eating chocolate can accelerate weight loss! Science says so!

The finding was sensational, counterintuitive, and flashy. They’d followed what Bohannon calls “recipe for false positives,” and found a zinger. In short order, the tricksters published their findings. They whipped up a press release and let the hijinks unfold. The first few lines of Bohannon’s story tell us that the subsequent reportage was an unequivocal triumph: “It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages.” He told NPR: “My goal was to show that scientists who do a bad job and get their work published can end up making headlines because it’s us — journalists like you and me — who are failing.”

When I first clicked on the story, I didn’t read it very closely. Continue reading →

The Simplest Answer

By: | June 4, 2015

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about an old friend of mine named William of Occam. You know the guy I’m talking about, right? Skinny little kid in the monk’s robe who doesn’t say much. Sure you do. Some guys call him “Sharp Willy” or “Billy the Knife.” I’m not sure why, I assume it has something to do with the fact that he’s so skinny.

If you don’t know him, man, you’ve missed out. He’s quiet guy, keeps to himself unless he’s drunk. But once he gets going he’s hilarious. “Why say something if silence will accomplish the same thing?” he used to say to me. He was full of those kinds of quotes, which were awesome once you got him to stop saying them in Latin.

Anyway, in college Will and I would go drinking together and shoot pool every Thursday. I remember he was careful and fastidious – a real Type A, you know? He hated wasting anything. Time, words, pool cue chalk, all of it had to be just so. No more, no less. Continue reading →

Poo Detective

By: | June 3, 2015
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I don’t remember where I heard this story. A mincey woman and her Very Small Dog were walking through an airport when the dog dropped a No. 2. The woman pulled a tissue out of her bag, crouched down… and wiped the dog’s butt. The twosome clacked off, leaving the little brown pile (and the tissue) to its fate.

Few people are that brazen. But the streets and parks of London speak for themselves: when no one’s looking, plenty of dog owners are abdicating their doody.

Not for long! If the borough of Barking gets its way, soon concerned citizens might start carrying little test tubes around to collect the lawn sausages. Barking wants to do “paternity tests” on street poo so they can send the dog’s parents the bill. This breed of forensic scatology has worked elsewhere, but can it take on London?  Continue reading →

Wolves at the Door

By: | June 2, 2015

shutterstock_187834049Four years ago when I had a powerful encounter with a healthy wolf pack just meters from my home, I knew it was a quintessentially Northern experience. The million-odd square kilometers of the Northwest Territories are so sparsely populated by humans and so well-stocked with wolf prey that wild canids have fewer problems than their brethren to the south in Alberta. There, habitat loss is part of the issue, as with any threatened species, but the main determinant of wolf survival is whether or not we want them dead.

It’s a question we still can’t seem to decide on. Ranchers around the Rockies successfully wiped out wolves near Banff at the turn of the century and to this day, anyone can shoot a wolf in Alberta if it’s within 8km of their property. At one point, 80% of the province’s wolves were exterminated by a strychnine campaign aimed at rabid skunks and foxes. In Yellowstone, the birthplace of the national park idea, conventional wisdom included regular predator culls under the bottom-up theory of ecosystem regulation. Continue reading →

Where the Wind Has No Name

By: | June 1, 2015

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Of all the evocative place words humans have come up with, the words for local winds may be the most varied and most charming. There’s the Albrohos of Portugal, the Gilavar and the Khazri of Azerbaijan, and the Shamal of Iraq. There’s the Cape Doctor of South Africa, the Hawk of Chicago, and the Wreckhouse winds of Newfoundland.

I live in the Columbia River Gorge, a place famous for its wind. The wind blows mostly from the east in winter and mostly from the west in summer, and every spring it lifts the boarders’ bright polyester kites above the water like so many tropical birds.

What do we call this glorious force of nature? We call it … the wind. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 30, 2015

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May 25 – 29, 2015

Ann’s Uncle Bundy had the kind of raw competence that solves problems with elegant ingenuity. We revisit him on Memorial Day.

Helen sings songs about songbirds in Washington, D.C. and in so doing brings a piece of the English countryside to America.

LWON alumnus Heather says the slave trade has a centuries-long history along the Nigeria-Cameroon border, and Boko Haram is only its latest incarnation.

Bees, individually, are insects. Collectively, however, they are basically mammals. So saith Jenny.

Story telling is hardwired and serves as the conduit of history in oral cultures. Ann investigates the designated historians, the listeners and the cultural mnemonists.

 

Image: CSIRO [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Storia

By: | May 29, 2015

10497964754_807bd9d499_kSometimes friends will be over, everybody talking, and one of the little kids will get antsy so I’ll pick up a book and start reading, quietly so as not to disturb conversation. But pretty soon nobody is talking any more, everybody’s listening to Winnie the Pooh and Piglet track the Heffalump.  I’ll bet you can sit in any small coffee shop, open a book, start reading aloud “Once upon a time,” and by the third paragraph, the whole coffee shop will be dead silent.

Stories.  I’ve always thought of them as addictive entertainment for which – for some reason – we happen to be hardwired.  Continue reading →

Bees Are Us

By: | May 28, 2015

1024px-Bienenschwarm_17cEarly the other morning, I woke up to a strange humming noise. My first thought was the ceiling fan motor was petering out, but it turned out the sound was coming from outside. So I stepped out onto my little balcony for a look, and listen. The hum hummed louder. It took a minute before I could focus on what was in front of me, but then suddenly I saw them. Bees. Thousands of bees. Maybe tens of thousands. The massive swarm hovered just there, not terribly far from my face, a full-on cyclone of insects.

It was an awesome thing. Continue reading →