Philosophy posts
- May 28, 2010
- 09:22 AM
- 633 views
Falling Child Mortality - Where we are on Millennium Development Goal 4
by Ryan in Upon*the.People
The release several days ago of revised estimates for global child mortality showing that mortality has fallen faster than we previously expected was a cause for celebration. As one of the eight targets of the Millennium Development Goals, child mortality is among the better indicators we have for the health status of a given population, and is, in the words of Michael Marmot, "the health outcome most sensitive to the effects of absolute material deprivation."[Children in Burma; The Irrawaddy]So where are we? The authors report that 7.7 million children will die in 2010, compared to 11.9 million in 1990. The reaction to this, of course, can be nothing but mixed - things are getting better, and at a faster rate than we previously supposed, but the number of deaths each year is still numbingly high. Note that the previous UN estimate (here, as of 5/27/10) was that, in 2008, 8.77 million children died, while the current study estimates the number at 7.95 million. It's hard to think of 800,000 children as a calculating error, but so it is.These new numbers are a 35% reduction since 1990, which is the reference year for the MDGs. The MDG for child mortality aims for a two-thirds reduction by 2015. So we've come about half of the way in 80% of the time... not stunning progress, but as the fall in mortality seems to be accelerating, the goal (which would comprise, according to the new study, 3.9 million child deaths in 2015) is not beyond reach.I want to comment here on the methodology used to estimate the number of deaths, as nearly every headline on the topic has highlighted the fact that these estimates are substantially lower than previous estimates (in the MSM's defense, the authors highlight the same issue in the discussion, as they should).It takes only a moment's consideration to realize the mind-boggling difficulty of getting an accurate count of the millions of children who die in a year. Anyone familiar with global health will know that there is a wide range of quality in the estimates put out by nations and international organizations. As a start towards classifying the quality of data, the authors grouped data sources into 10 types:Demographic and Health Surveys, World Fertility Surveys, Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, Pan Arab Project for Family Health Surveys, CDC Reproductive Health Surveys, census birth histories, complete vital regristration systems, incomplete vital and sample registration systems in low- and middle-income countries, complete vital and sample registration systems in low- and middle-income countries, and a category for all other sources.The basic approach is this. You assume that the function describing mortality in a country between 1990 and 2010 has a certain shape, but that we don't know what that shape is. Instead of assuming a particular function, such as linear or logistic, that describes the relationship, one can define a "function of functions" that describes the probability of a given function giving rise to the observed data (here, the various estimates of child mortality in a given country). This probability is also known as the likelihood (as in, the likelihood that this function would give rise to this data).The authors of the current paper used a technique called Gaussian Process Regression (GPR, or Kriging) to estimate the best function that would describe the child mortality curve for each country. Because GPR is an interpolation technique, it "fills in" the points between actual data points, which in this case are the individual estimates of child mortality. The term 'Gaussian Process' refers to what is more commonly known as a random walk. By assuming that the shape of the curve is a random walk between the observed points, the curve is allowed to obtain nearly any shape. The 'Regression' part comes in when the error is minimized - namely, the best Gaussian Process is the one described by the curve which would require the fewest random steps to fit the observed data points. The figure below shows a typical GPR; the green lines define the uncertainty, which increases as you get farther from an observed data point.[A Gaussian Process Regression; Wikipedia]This is all a gross simplification. The point is that GPR is a flexible interpolation technique that can be used when you don't know the "shape" your data should take, and you want to account for unknown deviations from a particular form (the authors give as a known example the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa, which caused an increase in child mortality).But back to child mortality. The authors employed this GPR technique to obtain country-by-country estimates, and then summed to derive their final predictions. This allows us to compare nations and regions on their child mortality statistics.Unfortunately, two regions may have had no reduction in child mortality between 1990 and 2010 - souther Sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Quite stunningly, the authors estimate that child mortality in Swaziland increased from 25.8 million to 38.3 million between 1990 and 2010.But the overall picture of global child mortality is, in the end, a bit brighter this week. We might meet MDG 4 after all. Global health infrastructure and social systems may be stronger than we previously supposed. Most importantly, fewer children are dying today than at any date in recent history.Reference:Rajaratnam, J., Marcus, J., Flaxman, A., Wang, H., Levin-Rector, A., Dwyer, L., Costa, M., Lopez, A., & Murray, C. (2010). Neonatal, postneonatal, childhood, and under-5 mortality for 187 countries, 1970–2010: a systematic analysis of progress towards Millennium Development Goal 4 The Lancet DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60703-9... Read more »
Rajaratnam, J., Marcus, J., Flaxman, A., Wang, H., Levin-Rector, A., Dwyer, L., Costa, M., Lopez, A., & Murray, C. (2010) Neonatal, postneonatal, childhood, and under-5 mortality for 187 countries, 1970–2010: a systematic analysis of progress towards Millennium Development Goal 4. The Lancet. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60703-9
- May 25, 2010
- 04:26 PM
- 590 views
Scientific Impotence: How to Reject Belief-Challenging Research
by Daniel Hawes in Ingenious Monkey | 20-two-5
There are several ways of responding to belief-threatening information. Discounting the ability of science to inform a particular domain of knowledge seems to be one that is used in the light of belief-threatening scientific evidence. Sadly, using the scientific impotence excuse in one domain seems to also increase the likelihood of applying it to science in general...... Read more »
Munro, G. (2010) The Scientific Impotence Excuse:�Discounting Belief-Threatening Scientific Abstracts. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40(3), 579-600. DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2010.00588.x
- May 21, 2010
- 12:09 PM
- 1,645 views
A non-post about Craig Venter’s new bug
by Iddo Friedberg in Byte Size Biology
In case you have been vacationing in a parallel universe in the past two days, you should have heard about the new synthetic bacterium created at the J Craig Venter Institute. In a nutshell, the scientific team synthesized an artificial chromosome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides and transferred it to another bacterium, Mycoplasma capricolum. The [...]... Read more »
Gibson, D., Glass, J., Lartigue, C., Noskov, V., Chuang, R., Algire, M., Benders, G., Montague, M., Ma, L., Moodie, M.... (2010) Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1190719
- May 17, 2010
- 05:22 AM
- 577 views
Intelligent Design Flaws: The Evidence for Natural Selection in Our DNA
by Darcy Cowan in Skepticon
Here in New Zealand the debate between religion and evolution is a muted affair, while news on the topic regularly makes headlines in the US, here it goes almost beneath notice. That is not to say the clash does not exist here, merely that it tends not to intrude into the public sphere. Over time [...]... Read more »
Avise, J. (2010) Colloquium Paper: Footprints of nonsentient design inside the human genome. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(Supplement_2), 8969-8976. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914609107
- May 17, 2010
- 05:22 AM
- 525 views
Intelligent Design Flaws: The Evidence for Natural Selection in Our DNA
by Darcy Cowan in Skepticon
Here in New Zealand the debate between religion and evolution is a muted affair, while news on the topic regularly makes headlines in the US, here it goes almost beneath notice. That is not to say the clash does not exist here, merely that it tends not to intrude into the public sphere. Over time [...]... Read more »
Avise, J. (2010) Colloquium Paper: Footprints of nonsentient design inside the human genome. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(Supplement_2), 8969-8976. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914609107
- May 10, 2010
- 03:40 AM
- 609 views
Freud and Penfield were wrong about memory and it leads to woo
by Barbara Drescher in ICBS Everywhere
Don’t get me wrong, Sigmund Freud and Wilder Penfield were far more intelligent and successful than I, but in hindsight we now have evidence that disconfirms their models of memory. The costs of having an inaccurate model of how memory works are immense. There are financial and opportunity costs to psychotherapy participants and on occasion [...]... Read more »
Goodman, G. (1994) Predictors of Accurate and Inaccurate Memories of Traumatic Events Experienced in Childhood. Consciousness and Cognition, 3(3-4), 269-294. DOI: 10.1006/ccog.1994.1016
Loftus EF, & Loftus GR. (1980) On the permanence of stored information in the human brain. The American psychologist, 35(5), 409-20. PMID: 7386971
McNally, N. (2003) Remembering Trauma. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. info:/
Quas JA, Goodman GS, Bidrose S, Pipe ME, Craw S, & Ablin DS. (1999) Emotion and memory: Children's long-term remembering, forgetting, and suggestibility. Journal of experimental child psychology, 72(4), 235-70. PMID: 10074380
- April 29, 2010
- 06:09 PM
- 690 views
I Know What I Mean but Only See How You Act
by Darcy Cowan in Skepticon
When I’m writing one of these posts it is difficult to edit them in such a way as to convey my meaning clearly to those without the background I share. I’m not talking about scientific or technical background though, I mean the background that allows me access to my own thoughts. When I re-read my [...]... Read more »
Pronin E. (2008) How we see ourselves and how we see others. Science (New York, N.Y.), 320(5880), 1177-80. PMID: 18511681
- April 23, 2010
- 06:01 AM
- 637 views
Can we ever read articles of the opposite political persuasion? An alternative model
by scritic in Cognitive Science and Human Activity
Sean A. Munson, & Paul Resnick (2010). Presenting diverse political opinions: how and how much Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems : http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753543Can we ever be convinced by someone we usually disagree with completely? Can we even manage to read regularly people whose views are antithetical to our own? These are fascinating questions, I think. First, because they are political questions; conversations and debates matter very much for any kind of open, democratic society. But I find them fascinating because they also bring up questions about the nature of knowledge: is knowledge just a matter of true and false propositions? Or is it something different, a mangle of practices, propositions and institutions, and in some way inherently inarticulable?I bring all this up because of a talk I attended at CHI 2010 -- a presentation of a paper by Sean Munson and Paul Resnick at the University of Michigan -- that explored their very preliminary results of getting people to read articles with opposite political persuasions. Here's the abstract:Is a polarized society inevitable, where people choose to be exposed to only political news and commentary that reinforces their existing viewpoints? We examine the relationship between the numbers of supporting and challenging items in a collection of political opinion items and readers' satisfaction, and then evaluate whether simple presentation techniques such as highlighting agreeable items or showing them first can increase satisfaction when fewer agreeable items are present. We find individual differences: some people are diversity-seeking while others are challenge-averse. For challenge-averse readers, highlighting appears to make satisfaction with sets of mostly agreeable items more extreme, but does not increase satisfaction overall, and sorting agreeable content first appears to decrease satisfaction rather than increasing it. These findings have important implications for builders of websites that aggregate content reflecting different positions. [pdf]Remember this was a CHI paper so there was a lot of emphasis on how to "present" diverse views so as to make people read them. The results were disappointing -- people don't really seem to want to read the opposite side -- but since not everything has been tried yet, and the web still has a lot to evolve, we shouldn't really lose hope.I want to speculate on a different sort of model in this blog-post. I am going to take for granted that people of opposite political persuasions need to talk to each other in a liberal democracy*. But if it is important for Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning (or as they are called in the US, liberal and conservative) voters to talk to each other, is it a good way to rank news articles and people on a sliding scale from liberal to conservative and then mix and match them up? Or do we need to classify people (and articles) on some other orthogonal parameter? I.e. a parameter that doesn't correlate with being Democratic or Republican-leaning.In what follows, I am going to propose two such parameters. This is by no means a very systematic analysis, just some thoughts that I've been playing around with, based on my own personal experiences. Most important, I have absolutely no idea how I would go about implementing such a system computationally and frankly, it may be wrong and not even work in practice. With all those caveats in mind, here goes.The first parameter maps the content of an article. The content of an article spans the spectrum from "uncertain" to "certain". An "uncertain" article sounds unsure of itself, has many caveats in it, has a respectful tone perhaps, even if it does have definite conclusions. A "certain" article is more sure of itself, perhaps more dogmatic, even snarky. One point though. If an article is uncertain, does that mean that its author is non-ideological? Not at all. All it means is that he chooses to express himself in a certain way that seems uncertain even though the article itself may end up endorsing a very specific ideological point.The second parameter maps the disposition of the reader. The disposition of the reader spans from "prefers interesting" to "prefers true". This is not a straight-forward spectrum and its terms need some explanation.The terms are based on the expression "I prefer saying something interesting to something true". E.g. most philosophers**, you see, would rather write something interesting and therefore be read by generations, than solve a problem definitively and thus not be discussed at all in a few decades. In the same vein, a reader who prefers something interesting likes intricate arguments even if sometimes they lead to conclusions he does not agree with. Note that this does NOT mean that this sort of reader does not have an ideology or that he is an "independent." Nothing of the sort is required, just that he likes to read clever things.Since no ideology has a monopoly on clever things to say so this reader probably reads a lot of clever things that come out of his own camp. A reader who prefers "true" things is the opposite. He prefers "truth" to "play", has no use for "play" and would rather prefer to say it as it is. When I say truth, I don't really mean truth-as-it-exists. I mean things that the reader believes to be true. Note that most readers will fall somewhere in between these two positions.If indeed, in an ideal world, these metrics i.e. the certainty of an article, and the disposition of the reader could be computed with some degree of accuracy, and if we also knew the ideology of the reader as well as the ideology of the article, this is what I would do in order to get people to read articles with opposite points of view:The flowchart is clearly a little vague and is not meant to represent some definite algorithm. The heuristic that it depends on is that those readers with a taste for the interesting will find at least some of the uncertain articles that are however in the opposite ideological camp thought-provoking to read.At this point, it also seems appropriate to explain the theory of knowledge that underwrites this model:I assume that a person's ideology gets fixed pretty early in life. A person has an ideology by the time he or she reaches the mid-twenties. Ideology however does not mean a voting preference. It means a way of looking at the world, a preference for ... Read more »
Sean A. Munson, & Paul Resnick. (2010) Presenting diverse political opinions: how and how much. Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems. info:/http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753543
- April 21, 2010
- 11:37 AM
- 1,004 views
New Study: Some Sciences Really Are Better Than Others
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
If you want to rile up a biologist and have no pointed stick handy, try this: Tell her that chemistry or physics are "harder," more fundamentally "sciencey" sciences than hers. "You can't use the standards of one science to judge another," she might say. "Physics is different from biology, not better." Not so, you answer: There must be standards common to all the sciences, which some meet better than others do. You're now set up for a seemingly unresolvable philosophical debate. Most working scientists I know would rather face the pointiest of sticks.
In this paper, published earlier this month, Daniele Fanelli tries to take the issue out of the realm of philosophy. He argues that there is indeed a "hierarchy of sciences" from hard and rigorous down to soft and fuzzy. And that this is not a philosophical position, but an objective fact, quantified by scientific methods.
Irritating as it is to unphilosophical scientists, the issue is unavoidably important. Science is supposed to describe reality, after all. And a reality in which all sciences are equal is different from a reality in which some are better than others.
To see why, consider not what scientists know, but what they don't know. What's the nature of these gaps in their knowledge? To put it roughly, answers fall into two camps.
I'll call one Camp Give-Us-Time. Here, science is a bit like a commuter waiting for a bus: He does not know when the bus will arrive, but that's only because of where he happens to be standing at the moment. The bus's arrival time is certainly knowable, just not known today. All ignorance is temporary. Just Give Us Time, we'll make scientific knowledge complete. "There is intrinsically only one class of explanation," E.O. Wilson wrote in the Bible of Camp Give-Us-Time, Consilience. "It traverses the scales of space, time and complexity to unite the disparate facts of the disciplines by consilience, the perception of a seamless web of cause and effect."
I'll call the other side Camp Incommensurate. Over here, science is like a IT worker trying to understand behavior on a computer network, where millions of users, machines, lines of code and pieces of hardware all interact. Knowing the code doesn't tell you anything about what's happening with the hardware or that clumsy user's coffee cup that tilted onto his keyboard. So, faced with a question like "Why did we crash that one time on Tuesday?" she uses programming skills to look at the code and hardware tools to examine the machines and social skills to look at the users. It may not work, though, because when software, hardware and people interact, things happen that could not be predicted by knowing each part separately. That means some questions cannot be answered, ever. Rather than a consequence of lack of money or brains or time, ignorance is a fact about reality itself.
I call this side Camp Incommensurate because of what follows from acceptance that knowledge is fragmented: These campers don't expect different parts of science to fit together. Different fields are incommensurate, in that they don't line up into a coherent whole. Why should psychology's concepts, theories and methods be expressed as biology? And why imagine that you can break biology down into chemistry? We have psychology precisely because biology can't account for the soul; we have biology because there are aspects of life that chemistry cannot grasp. The philosopher Jerry Fodor didn't think much of the consilience idea for this reason: "In fact, there are very few examples so far in which it has turned out that the explanatory apparatus of a higher-level science can be paraphrased in the vocabulary of some science further down," he wrote. Instead, as he put it, our heterogeneous fragments of knowledge might arise from "the heterogeneity of levels at which the world is organized, and both might well prove irreducible."
Things are different back at Camp Give-Us-Time. There, they hold that psychology is too a subset of biology, which is a subset of biology, which is a subset of chemistry, which is a piece of physics. That means there is (to put it roughly) a single "right" way to do science—or, at least, a single standard against which to judge all research. The "hierarchy of sciences" follows from this assumption that knowledge is a coherent, reflecting a completely intelligible universe.
So I see Fanelli's paper, published this month in the journal PLoS One, a bold raid by Camp Give-Us-Time on their opponents.
Here is his argument: If there is indeed a hierarchy of sciences from "hard," rigorous disciplines down to "soft" ones, he says, then "researchers in 'softer' sciences should have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases, and therefore report more positive outcomes." According to his analysis of 2,434 papers from the Essential Science Indicators database, that hypothesis was confirmed: "the odds of reporting a positive result were around 5 times higher among papers in the disciplines of Psychology and Psychiatry and Economics and Business compared to Space Science, 2.3 times higher in the domain of social sciences compared to the physical sciences, and 3.4 times higher in studies applying behavioral and social methodologies on people compared to physical and chemical studies on non-biological material." (Yet there were more positive results in chemistry and physics than in papers published under the rubric of Social Science, so maybe the hierarchy needs some surprising revisions.)
At least the softer sciences can console themselves with the thought that they're doing it right, according to Fanelli's analysis: "On the other hand, these results support the scientific status of the social sciences against claims that they are completely subjective, by showing that, when they adopt a scientific approach to discovery, they differ from the natural sciences only by a matter of degree." Perhaps he means it benignly, but I suspect that over in Camp Incommensurate, them's fightin' words.
Fanelli, D. (2010). “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences PLoS ONE, 5 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010068
Topics:... Read more »
Fanelli, D. (2010) “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences. PLoS ONE, 5(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010068
- April 15, 2010
- 07:06 AM
- 1,380 views
What Is Beauty? Your Kids' Newest Art Critic
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
Do animals create art? So far, this seems a uniquely human ability.
But do animals have a sense of the aesthetically pleasing? What about the ability to judge and critique art? Can an animal decide if a given work of art is beautiful or ugly? What is beauty in the first place? All good questions.
Shigeru Watanabe of Keio University in Tokyo wanted to investigate the questions, with pigeons. Did he introduce them to the works of Picasso? Or Rembrandt? Romero Britto? No. He used art created by children.
Figure 1: Your kid's newest art critic.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »
Watanabe, S. (2009) Pigeons can discriminate “good” and “bad” paintings by children. Animal Cognition, 13(1), 75-85. DOI: 10.1007/s10071-009-0246-8
- April 9, 2010
- 12:05 AM
- 968 views
Should journalists report on unpublished research?
by Michael Slezak in Good, Bad, and Bogus
I was recently commissioned to write a short news story about a some unpublished research. Should journalists be writing about research that hasn’t undergone peer review?
The research was about the Mpemba effect — where hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold water — and was published online on arXiv. It is quite poorly written but [...]... Read more »
James D. Brownridge. (2010) A search for the Mpemba effect: When hot water freezes faster then cold water. arXiv. arXiv: 1003.3185v1
- April 8, 2010
- 11:00 PM
- 608 views
The Language of Science – it’s “just a theory”
by S.C. Kavassalis in The Language of Bad Physics
Anyone who has seriously studied an empirical or mathematical science knows there is something very special about how those studies affect the way we view the world. There is something very profound feeling in the way our minds works after we’ve been exposed to logical and testable systems, and it enters into almost [...]... Read more »
Leshner, A. (2005) Redefining Science. Science, 309(5732), 221-221. DOI: 10.1126/science.1116621
Steinhardt, P. (2002) A Cyclic Model of the Universe. Science, 296(5572), 1436-1439. DOI: 10.1126/science.1070462
- April 7, 2010
- 08:48 AM
- 718 views
Why Do We Dream?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic
A few months ago, I asked Why Do We Sleep?That post was about sleep researcher Jerry Siegel, who argues that sleep evolved as a state of "adaptive inactivity". According to this idea, animals sleep because otherwise we'd always be active, and constant activity is a waste of energy. Sleeping for a proportion of the time conserves calories, and also keeps us safe from nocturnal predators etc.Siegel's theory in what we might call minimalist. That's in contrast to other hypotheses which claim that sleep serves some kind of vital restorative biological function, or that it's important for memory formation, or whatever. It's a hotly debated topic.But Siegel wasn't the first sleep minimalist. J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley created a storm in 1977 with The Brain As A Dream State Generator; I read somewhere that it provoked more letters to the Editor in the American Journal of Psychiatry than any other paper in that journal.Hobson and McCarley's article was so controversial because they argued that dreams are essentially side-effects of brain activation. This was a direct attack on the Freudian view that we dream as a result of our subconscious desires, and that dreams have hidden meanings. Freudian psychoanalysis was incredibly influential in American psychiatry in the 1970s.Freud believed that dreams exist to fulfil our fantasies, often though not always sexual ones. We dream about what we'd like to do - except we don't dream about it directly, because we find much of our desires shameful, so our minds disguise the wishes behind layers of metaphor etc. "Steep inclines, ladders and stairs, and going up or down them, are symbolic representations of the sexual act..." Interpreting the symbolism of dreams can therefore shed light on the depths of the mind.Hobson and McCarley argued that during REM sleep, our brains are active in a similar way to when we are awake; many of the systems responsible for alertness are switched on, unlike during deep, dreamless, non-REM sleep. But of course during REM there is no sensory input (our eyes are closed), and also, we are paralysed: an inhibitory pathway blocks the spinal cord, preventing us from moving, except for our eyes - hence why it's Rapid Eye Movement sleep.Dreams are simply a result of the "awake-like" forebrain - the "higher" perceptual, cognitive and emotional areas - trying to make sense of the input that it's receiving as a result of waves of activation arising from the brainstem. A dream is the forebrain's "best guess" at making a meaningful story out of the assortment of sensations (mostly visual) and concepts activated by these periodic waves. There's no attempt to disguise the shameful parts; the bizarreness of dreams simply reflects the fact that the input is pretty much random.Hobson and McCarley proposed a complex physiological model in which the activation is driven by the giant cells of the pontine tegmentum. These cells fire in bursts according to a genetically hard-wired rhythm of excitation and inhibition.The details of this model are rather less important than the fact that it reduces dreaming to a neurological side effect. This doesn't mean that the REM state has no function; maybe it does, but whatever it is, the subjective experience of dreams serves no purpose.A lot has changed since 1977, but Hobson seems to have stuck by the basic tenets of this theory. A good recent review came out in Nature Neuroscience last year, REM sleep and dreaming. In this paper Hobson proposes that the function of REM sleep is to act as a kind of training system for the developing brain.The internally-generated signals that arise from the brainstem (now called PGO waves) during REM help the forebrain to learn how to process information. This explains why we spend more time in REM early in life; newborns have much more REM than adults; in the womb, we are in REM almost all the time. However, these are not dreams per se because children don't start reporting experiencing dreams until about the age of 5.Protoconscious REM sleep could therefore provide a virtual world model, complete with an emergent imaginary agent (the protoself) that moves (via fixed action patterns) through a fictive space (the internally engendered environment) and experiences strong emotion as it does so.This is a fascinating hypothesis, although very difficult to test, and it begs the question of how useful "training" based on random, meaningless input is.While Hobson's theory is minimalist in that it reduces dreams, at any rate in adulthood, to the status of a by-product, it doesn't leave them uninteresting. Freudian dream re-interpretation is probably ruled out ("That train represents your penis and that cat was your mother", etc.), but if dreams are our brains processing random noise, then they still provide an insight into how our brains process information. Dreams are our brains working away on their own, with the real world temporarily removed.Of course most dreams are not going to give up life-changing insights. A few months back I had a dream which was essentially a scene-for-scene replay of the horror movie Cloverfield. It was a good dream, scarier than the movie itself, because I didn't know it was a movie. But I think all it tells me is that I was paying attention when I watched Cloverfield.On the other hand, I have had several dreams that have made me realize important things about myself and my situation at the time. By paying attention to your dreams, you can work out how you really think, and feel, about things, what your preconceptions and preoccupations are. Sometimes.Hobson JA, & McCarley RW (1977). The brain as a dream state generator: an activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process. The American journal of psychiatry, 134 (12), 1335-48 PMID: 21570Hobson, J. (2009). REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10 (11), 803-813 DOI: 10.1038/nrn2716... Read more »
Hobson JA, & McCarley RW. (1977) The brain as a dream state generator: an activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process. The American journal of psychiatry, 134(12), 1335-48. PMID: 21570
Hobson, J. (2009) REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(11), 803-813. DOI: 10.1038/nrn2716
- April 1, 2010
- 06:01 PM
- 1,143 views
How do researchers perceive peer review?
by Janet D. Stemwedel in Adventures in Ethics and Science (Sb)
You don't have to look far to find mutterings about the peer review system, especially about the ways in which anonymous reviewers might hold up your paper or harm your career. On the other hand, there are plenty of champions of the status quo who argue that anonymous peer review is the essential mechanism by which reports of scientific findings are certified as scientific knowledge.
So how do scientists feel about anonymous peer review? A 2008 paper in Science and Engineering Ethics by David B. Resnik, Christina Guiterrez-Ford, and Shyamal Peddada, titled "Perceptions of Ethical Problems with Scientific Journal Peer Review: An Exploratory Study", attempts to get a preliminary handle on that question. They write: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »
Resnik, D., Gutierrez-Ford, C., & Peddada, S. (2008) Perceptions of Ethical Problems with Scientific Journal Peer Review: An Exploratory Study. Science and Engineering Ethics, 14(3), 305-310. DOI: 10.1007/s11948-008-9059-4
- March 31, 2010
- 04:58 PM
- 1,282 views
Preventing Plagiarism.
by Janet D. Stemwedel in Adventures in Ethics and Science (Sb)
Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won't go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it is our duty to smack it down.
Is there any effective way to deliver a preemptive smackdown to student plagiarists? That's the question posed by a piece of research, "Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?" by Lidija Bilic-Zulle, Josip Azman, Vedran Frkovic, and Mladen Petrovecki, published in 2008 in Science and Engineering Ethics.
To introduce their research, the authors write:
Academic plagiarism is a complex issue, which arises from ignorance, opportunity, technology, ethical values, competition, and lack of clear rules and consequences. ... The cultural characteristics of academic setting strongly influence students' behavior. In societies where plagiarism is implicitly or even explicitly tolerated (e.g. authoritarian regimes and post-communist countries), a high rate of plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct may be expected. However, even in societies that officially disapprove of such behavior (e.g. western democracies), its prevalence is disturbing. (140)
Here, there is some suggestion of potentially relevant cultural factors that may make plagiarism attractive -- and not the cultural factors I tend to hear about here in California, on the Pacific Rim. But maybe we can extend Tolstoy's observation about how each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way to recognize the variety of cultural contexts that spawn dishonest students.
And this is not just a matter of the interactions between students and teachers. Bilic-Zulle et al. point to plagiarism in school as something like a gateway drug for unethical behavior in one's professional life -- so potentially, reducing academic dishonesty could have important consequences beyond saving professors headaches.
In any case, the big question the researchers take on is how to reduce the prevalence. Is it effective to emphasize the importance of academic integrity, or to threaten harsh penalties if plagiarism is detected?
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Bilic-Zulle, L., Azman, J., Frkovic, V., & Petrovecki, M. (2007) Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?. Science and Engineering Ethics, 14(1), 139-147. DOI: 10.1007/s11948-007-9037-2
- March 29, 2010
- 11:39 PM
- 1,000 views
Climate change and philosophy of science: Does climate science aim at truth?
by Michael Slezak in Good, Bad, and Bogus
A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting exchange in The Guardian between George Monbiot and Nicholas Maxwell, a philosopher of science from University College London. In his piece, Monbiot presents an excellent, if overly pessimistic, analysis of the psychology behind climate change denial. In his response, Maxwell draws on some interesting results from the philosophy [...]... Read more »
Cartwright, Nancy. (2004) Do the laws of physics state the facts?. Readings on the Laws of Nature. info:/
Kitcher, P. (1981) Explanatory Unification. Philosophy of Science, 48(4), 507. DOI: 10.1086/289019
- March 29, 2010
- 07:39 PM
- 1,121 views
What causes scientifc misconduct?
by Janet D. Stemwedel in Adventures in Ethics and Science (Sb)
In the last post, we looked at a piece of research on how easy it is to clean up the scientific literature in the wake of retractions or corrections prompted by researcher misconduct in published articles. Not surprisingly, in the comments on that post there was some speculation about what prompts researchers to commit scientific misconduct in the first place.
As it happens, I've been reading a paper by Mark S. Davis, Michelle Riske-Morris, and Sebastian R. Diaz, titled "Causal Factors Implicated in Research Misconduct: Evidence from ORI Case Files", that tries to get a handle on that very question.
The authors open by making a pitch for serious empirical work on the subject of misconduct:
[P]olicies intended to prevent and control research misconduct would be more effective if informed by a more thorough understanding of the problem's etiology. (396)
If you know what causes X, you ought to have a better chance of being able to create conditions that block X from being caused. This seems pretty sensible to me.
Yet, the authors note, scientists, policy makers, and others seem perfectly comfortable speculating on the causes of scientific misconduct despite the lack of a well-characterized body of relevant empirical evidence about these causes. We have plenty of anecdata, but that's not quite what we'd like to have to ground our knowledge claims. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »
Davis, M., Riske-Morris, M., & Diaz, S. (2007) Causal Factors Implicated in Research Misconduct: Evidence from ORI Case Files. Science and Engineering Ethics, 13(4), 395-414. DOI: 10.1007/s11948-007-9045-2
- March 27, 2010
- 10:15 PM
- 1,178 views
How hard is it to clean up the scientific literature?
by Janet D. Stemwedel in Adventures in Ethics and Science (Sb)
Science is supposed to be a project centered on building a body of reliable knowledge about the universe and how various pieces of it work. This means that the researchers contributing to this body of knowledge -- for example, by submitting manuscripts to peer reviewed scientific journals -- are supposed to be honest and accurate in what they report. They are not supposed to make up their data, or adjust it to fit the conclusion they were hoping the data would support. Without this commitment, science turns into creative writing with more graphs and less character development.
Because the goal is supposed to be a body of reliable knowledge upon which the whole scientific community can draw to build more knowledge, it's especially problematic when particular pieces of the scientific literature turn out to be dishonest or misleading. Fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are varieties of dishonesty that members of the scientific community look upon as high crimes. Indeed, they are activities that are defined as scientific misconduct and (at least in theory) prosecuted vigorously.
You would hope that one consequence of identifying scientists who have made dishonest contributions to the scientific literature would be that those dishonest contributions would be removed from that literature. But whether that hope is realized is an empirical question -- one taken up by Anne Victoria Neale, Justin Northrup, Rhonda Dailey, Ellen Marks, and Judith Abrams in an article titled "Correction and use of biomedical literature affected by scientific misconduct" published in 2007 in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics. Here's how Neale et al. frame their research:
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Anne Victoria Neale, Justin Northrup, Rhonda Dailey, Ellen Marks, & Judith Abrams. (2007) Correction and use of biomedical literature affected by scientific misconduct . Science and Engineering Ethics, 5-24. info:/10.1007/s11948-006-0003-1
- March 25, 2010
- 11:05 AM
- 789 views
Poverty of Stimulus and Ecological Laws
by Andrew Wilson in Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
The first critique of Gibson's perceptual psychology came from noted cognitive scientists Fodor & Pylyshyn (1981). The critique was simply that Gibsonian information is an empty concept; however, this critique is ably addressed by Turvey, Shaw, Reed & Mace in the 'ecological laws' paper.... Read more »
Fodor, J., . (1981) How direct is visual perception?: Some reflections on Gibson's “ecological approach”. Cognition, 9(2), 139-196. DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(81)90009-3
Turvey, M. T., Shaw, R. E., Reed, E. S., . (1981) Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981). Cognition, 9(3), 237-304. DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(81)90002-0
- March 20, 2010
- 01:36 AM
- 868 views
Neural correlates of conscious access: implications for autism/psychosis
by sandygautam in The Mouse Trap
Image via Wikipedia
There is a recent article in New Scientist about consciousness and its neural correlates and the article focuses on work of Stanislas Deheane and his colleagues and how they are trying to get evidence and proof for the Global workspace theory of consciousness as proposed by Beranrd Baars.
That led me to this excellent More >Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
Related posts:Living on the edge of chaos; implications for autism and psychosis Image via Wikipedia I serendipitously came cross this article today...
The first 30 seconds: Trustworthiness, Dominance and their neural correlates A lot has already been written in the blogosphre regarding...
Neural correlates of trust This is the title of a new paper in PNAS...
... Read more »
Gaillard, R., Dehaene, S., Adam, C., Clémenceau, S., Hasboun, D., Baulac, M., Cohen, L., & Naccache, L. (2009) Converging Intracranial Markers of Conscious Access. PLoS Biology, 7(3). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000061
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