Checking Claims in Science Reporting

In the Guardian on Saturday, Ben Goldacre's column was called "how to read a paper" and suggested three checks that you can do when presented with scientific claims. These are:

1. Check the numbers - If there is sufficient data in the article then you should redo the mathematics yourself, especially where statistics and chance are concerned because the subtleties in relating these areas of mathematics to the real world mean that these are the areas that most people get wrong most often.
2. Check the publications - The claims made should be supported by published, peer-reviewed research. If this is not the case then serious questions must be asked of the claims such as, is the claimant trying to sell me something? A lot of science is communicated to the general public not directly from the scientists but from the press offices of Universities or other research establishments either as a way to increase their esteem, to attract a better quality of researchers, or to provide buzz for a new spin-put venture. As a result, quite often the claims made via press release are quite divorced from the claims made in the underlying research. The reader must therefore go back to the underlying research publications to get a clear understanding of the claim and it's veracity. At this point I must make a plea for all science reporting to include citations to the academic literature where possible. That said, all university press releases should also include reference to underlying research as well.
3. Check the wider field - If there is an established concensus and the claims seek to overturn this concensus then there is a burden of proof associated with the new claims that has to be satisfied.

One problem with this approach is that checking claim one requires mathematical ability, and checking claims two and three requires the ability to read and understand academic writing. Reading academic papers is a skill that is not easy to pick up and generally takes most new Ph.D students their first year to really start getting the hang of. Partly this is due to the "academic style" that most papers are written in, and partly because scientific knowledge as gained from academic publications is more akin to a reef of information with each part supporting many other parts. To be able to read and completely understand one paper in a cutting edge area of science may necessitate the reading and understanding of tens or even hundreds of earlier papers that the current paper bullds upon. That said, science is not easy and most people are not scientists. This is not because they couldn't be, they just don't, as a rule, have the necessary background to verify scientific claims for themselves. Rather, the general public must trust the messenger. This is why trust is such an important aspect of science communication and why public engagement with science and scientists is so important. If the public are to take on trust what scientists say, so as to avoid that whole training in science so that they can do it themselves thing, then scientists must do what they can to build that trust. This can include research blogging or science blogging coming off campus once in a while and talking about what they do in normal everyday language with people who are at least sufficiently interested in finding out more to have turned up to a science centre or event.

It's an arms race

via renesys.com

The Renesys blog publicised that Egypt appears to be attempting to "leave the internet" mainly because protesters are using the internet to organise their protests and to avoid tactics used by the police to break the protests. In contrast to the Tunisian protests, where specific routes to Tunisian networks were blocked, nearly all routes to Egyptian networks appear to have been withdrawn from the global routing tables. Essentially this means that nobody outside of Egypt can access networks with Egypt.
This just demonstrates to me that whilst we consider the internet as a large, fairly robust network which will route packets of data from more or less any source to any destination, what it actually is is an infrastructure, owned and operated for the most part by those in power who have the ultimate sanction of just pulling the plug should they see the need. Additionally this network is brittle. It has a number of choke-points which if interrupted will either severely degrade the performance of the network or cut large chunks of it off entirely. In recent years we have seen this occur when undersea cables have been damaged variously cutting off large parts of Western Africa and the middle east.
So what are the defences? There are alternative ways to connect to the internet such as WiFi, cell phones, satellite, and radio. Each has advantages and disadvantages and for the moment, to get an emergency network up and running in a protest zone requires people with good technical skills. Although this presupposes that a network is a necessary part of active protests, communication yes, computer communication? Who knows? If the stakes are sufficiently high then you can, and should, resort to Moscow rules for communication. Then again, rapid communication between protesters allows them to find out about and avoid the tactics used by the security services, for example, finding out about road blocks or Kettling tactics.
So, where to go from here? To me there is an indication that we need more distribution and variety in the infrastructure provision of the internet. We also need to be aware of alternative communication mechanisms that can provide real time communication during emergencies.

The "don't want to disappoint" sales technique

Saw an interesting example of a persuasive technique used by salespeople on the second episode of Mary Portas Secret Shopper this evening. It is about 5 minutes into the episode where she is visiting various stores and getting the hard sell from various sales folk. The particular technique that interested me though was the one where the salesperson says (paraphrasing) "look, I can give your a good deal, but only today. Tell you what I'll go and start on the paperwork". This technique takes advantage of the reluctance of most people to not want to say "no" or to disappoint someone, even a stranger. It is even harder to say no when you perceive that someone has done some work on your behalf, so by disappearing to do the paperwork the salesperson is actually increasing their chances of making a sale because they are setting you up psychologically to not disappoint them once they return because they have already done something for you. Admittedly this is not going to make every interaction with a customer into a surefire sale, and if more customers are aware of the tactic then it is even less likely to work, but it work just enough to slightly increase the chances of a sale. Where there are high margins and big commissions on very few sales then this can be enough, expecially if it is a part of a whole arsenal of sale techniques.