Author Archives: admin

The inevitable follow-up to the last breastfeeding post.

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I think after this one, we’ll be ready to move on to cow (or soy) milk and solids!
My last post on the breastfeeding issue pointed you to an academic examination of some of the claims being advanced in support of the superiority of breastfeeding. Joseph from Corpus Callosum left a detailed comment expressing some dissatisfaction with that examination. You really should read the whole comment, but his main points are roughly:

  1. You can find evidence that supporters of breastfeeding are biased, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t also biased.
  2. In a body of scientific literature, we ought to weigh not only how recent a study is, but also its quality. (So, for example, it may be fine to rely on an older study over a more recent one if the older one is better — where “better”, of course, would be judged by scientific criteria rather than on agreement with the result you were hoping the research would support.)
  3. It’s not enough to simply point out flaws with the scientific case that is being made to support breastfeeding if there exist reasonably rigorous studies that shed light on the issue (especially if they end up supporting the conclusion for which the shoddy case is being offered as support).

It’s hard to argue with Joseph’s points. The Goldin et al. didn’t give a comprehensive analysis of all the available literature. Then again, it seems like it was intended as a rapid response to a news item that was creating a buzz. As I noted in my last post, the scientific research is certainly suggestive that breastfeeding is a Very Good Thing as far as infant health is concerned. The contentious issue seems to be how big the risk of not exclusively breastfeeding. And here, I’m not sure I’m in complete agreement with Joseph’s take on things. He writes:

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Some stats on Sb/DonorsChoose bloggers challenges.

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Because I know some people in these parts like numbers, I thought I’d give you a few stats for the Sb/DonorsChoose bloggers challenges currently underway.
At last count, we’ve gotten $12,325.59 (not counting the $10,000 match from SEED) from 152 generous donors — that’s an average of $81.09 per donor. (Potential donors, don’t be put off — as little as $10 can make a big difference when you’re combining forces with other donors!)
You’ve heard by now that the Pharyngula challenge already wrapped up. Those unholy, soulless, pirate zombies dug deep and ended up funding 313% of PZ’s goal.
However, there are some metrics by which the Pharynguloid are not the most awesome people (or zombies) participating in the drive. For example, donors to the Stranger Fruit challenge top the charts on pledge size, with an average pledge of $132.64 per donor.
And, when we work out the awesomeness of our readers normalizing for traffic, we end up with top 5 lists that may surprise you:

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What are the real benefits of breastfeeding? Statisticians weigh in.

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A few days ago I pondered the ethical dimensions of breastfeeding given a recent article trumpeting its astounding benefits for infants and mothers. Those ethical considerations took as given that the claims trumpeting in the article were more or less true.
Today, I want to point you to an examination of those very claims by Rebecca Goldin (Director of Research, Statistical Assessment Service, Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences at George Mason University), Emer Smyth (Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at Univ. of Pennsylvania), and Andrea Foulkes (Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst). Will it surprise you that the data don’t seem to support the conclusion that breastmilk has miraculous powers?

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Indoor soccer: a few thoughts the morning after.

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In my last post, I mentioned that I was about to start a soccer class. It turns out “class” might not be quite the right designation for it, as there wasn’t any formal instruction, discussion of techniques, etc. (Not that I didn’t get schooled at various points in the evening.) Instead, we pretty much just played.
It’s worth noting that this was not soccer on a big, grassy field. It was indoor soccer — in a gymnasium with a smaller “field” surface, with sneakers squeaking against the floor and the ball slamming against walls. In lots of ways, this is a completely different game from the other kind of soccer.
Though I make no promise that they’re connected by any deeply significant common thread, here are my thoughts after the first night of indoor soccer:

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Bullets of material so rich I might just use it as a soil amendment.

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Lots of items kicking around in the blogosphere that deserve more attention than I have time to give them right now. (I’m off to start taking soccer classes in about an hour — hold a good thought for my knees, please!) But I wanted to share.

  • At Log base 2, Nick Barrowman considers the epistemic (and perhaps ethical) consequences of missing values in statistics. He writes:

    Missing values are a bit of a dirty secret in science. Because they are rarely mentioned in science education, it’s not surprising that they are often overlooked in practice. This is terribly damaging–regardless of whether it’s due to ignorance, dishonesty, or wishful thinking.

    Read the whole thing and learn how statistical and experimental methods work together in generating what we know — or don’t.

  • At nanopolitan, Abi looks at how worked up the editors of Nature are getting at the idea that researchers in South Korea could be offered cash incentives for academic publications. Abi points out that there are already extrinsic rewards for such publications:

    [I]t’s important to keep in mind that publications in high impact journals lead to many other rewards: better chance of funding for your future projects, awards and recognition (some of which come with cash prizes), and early promotion (with its built-in cash incentive). Thus, an explicit award for each publication just happens to extend this trend.

    As well, he detects a bit of sanctimony toward the scientific culture of South Korea in the wake of the stem cell scandal. While I think I may have more worries about what cash incentives do to the ethical environment of a scientific community than Abi here, I very much agree with his suggestion that if there’s a problem, it’s not just a South Korean problem — it’s one in which even the editors of Nature are up to their necks.

  • Via Pandagon: If a man passes a “domestic violence propensity test” with “flying colors”, and then he goes on to stab his wife to death, is it reasonable to conclude there might be something wrong with the test?
  • From three years ago on Kieran Healy’s weblog (people, I have a lot to read), this beautiful post on the continuing battle over whether (and which) social sciences are actually scientific. A taste:

    Informed answers to this question are rare. Instead, you tend to get half-baked ideas about predicability and falsifiability as the criteria for science being put into service shoring up one’s allegiance to a chosen tribe. If predictability looks like a shaky foundation (What? You’re telling me bright young economists don’t get hired on the basis of successful predictions?) the ground can be shifted to the existence of “basic shared premises within the field.” If these shared premises begin to look a bit too metaphysical, then we’ll move to a different criterion. Whatever it takes to preserve the phenomena. It’s easy and fun. All you have to do sacrifice is your consistency.

    If you don’t read the rest of the post, you’re living a lie.

More content soon, provided I don’t end up in one of those tragic head-on collisions with a soccer ball!

Being ethical — and being prudent — with pseudonymous blogging.

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I’m following up on my earlier post in the wake of the outing of dKos blogger Armando. At Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein had posted an interesting discussion of the issues around pseudonymous blogging, and whether it might sometimes be ethical to reveal the secret identity of a pseudonymous blogger. She raises lots of interesting issues about whether blogging is properly regarded as a species of journalism, and how the ethics of blogging might be related to the journalistic ethics of the “old media”. As well, Armando turns up in the comments to disagree with Lindsay’s analysis of the issues.
My read is that the disagreement between Armando and Lindsay arises from a conflation of a number of distinct questions:

  1. Are bloggers journalists, or are they something else?
  2. If bloggers are not journalists, what are their ethical obligations (e.g., to their readers)? Do they have a duty to disclose potential conflicts of interest?
  3. Do journalists have a duty to protect the secret identity of a blogger who wishes to blog pseudonymously?
  4. Does a blogger who wishes to blog pseudonymously have a right to have his or her secret identity protected (by journalists, bloggers, and others)?

There seem to be some important theoretical details to work out here, such as whether bloggers are journalists, and whether the ethics of blogging are different from traditional journalistic ethics. As well, though, there are important questions about what sorts of policies are prudent for a blogger who wishes to blog pseudonymously — regardless of the ethical obligations relevant others might have in the situation.

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News from Pledge Central.

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I swear I’m putting up a couple posts today that have nothing to do with the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive to fund science and math classrooms. However, there have been some developments since the last update, and I thought you ought to know about them.

  1. Although PZ Myers and his minions met the goal of the Pharyngula challenge days ago, it shambles on like a zombie, now at more than 250% of the challenge goal. Way to go, unholy army of the undead!
  2. ScienceBlogs readers have so far donated $10,307.86 to the drive. Among other things, this means we’ve secured the entire $10,000 that SEED put up in matching funds! So, the classrooms get $20,307.86 from us (so far). Way to bleed our hosts of funds!
  3. Sandra Porter of Discovering Biology in a Digital World has joined the fun with a challenge of her own. And, she has generously contributed some prizes: an Exploring DNA Structure CD-ROM, a Kissing DNA T-shirt, a Green Fluorescent Protein mug, and a pack of 10 Twirling Telomere magnets. (The updated list of fabulous prizes, in its entirety, below the fold.)

UPDATE: I’m sad to report that DonorsChoose is not set up to receive funds from outside the U.S. Believe me, if it was up to us we’d take your money (funny-colored though it might be). We appreciate your generosity, and we’ll make sure to work out a way to include our non-U.S. readers if/when we do something like this again.
Excellent start, people! Have a gander at the challenges that are still open, and let’s see if we can help some more kids get the kind of experiences with math and science that they deserve.

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We’re pro-truth.

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It’s not just a science thing, it’s also an ethics thing. The truth is good. Departures from it, more often than not, get you into trouble.
A couple examples:
The Guarantee of Medical Accuracy in Sex Education Act was recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. Wouldn’t you think that education would be premised on accurate information? What have we come to when it takes a law “to prohibit the federal government from providing assistance to any entity whose materials on human sexuality contain medically inaccurate information”?
Memo to the folks who are spinning this as an unwarranted attack on abstinence-only sex education: If abstinence-only education is not supported by medically accurate information, stop trying to sell it on the basis of medically inaccurate information. You can still try to sell it on the basis of its allignment with a moral standard, if that’s why you favor it, but don’t lie to sell it on the basis of advantages it doesn’t actually have.
Sheesh, if you have to use bad data to sell a view, can you really be certain it’s a good view? (And, even if you’re certain, should it surprise you that other people won’t be when they discover that some of the premises of your argument are false — and that you knew they were false as you repeated the argument?)
From the political to the personal, I want to pick up on a detail from First Year Teacher’s heart-breaking and angry-making letter of resignation (which I saw via A Blog Around the Clock).

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Two days in: DonorsChoose progress report.

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We kicked off the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive just over 50 hours ago. Since then:

  • ScienceBlogs readers have made donations totaling $8498.73
  • SEED is matching that $8498.73, and will match up to another $1501.27.
  • Doing the math, your donations plus SEED matches means at least $16, 997.46 will go to help teachers and students. But, we’re going until July 1, so I know we can do better than that!
  • Dave and Greta at Cognitive Daily are sweetening the pot even more — they’ll kick in their own money to add another 10% to any amount you donate to their challenge. (Don’t forget, that gets matched by SEED, too!)
  • The Pharyngula challenge hit — and exceeded — its goal. (Nothing exceeds like excess.) At this point, I leave it to PZ to advise his minions about which of the other bloggers’ challenges they ought to support.
  • Publish my haiku.
    Help teachers help their students.
    Hey, I can do both!
  • So far, exactly 17 readers who have made donations have forwarded their email confirmations from DonorsChoose to sb.donorschoose.bonanza@gmail.com to enter the drawing for fabulous prizes at the end of the drive. We have way more than 17 prizes to give away. Just thought you should know.
  • Speaking of the fabulous prizes, I must give a shout-out to editor extraordinaire Mark Taber who got us 10 copies of SAMS Teach Yourself Blogging in a Snap to offer as prizes gratis! Knowing the author, I was psyched that we’d be able to get the book at the “author’s copies” price for the drawing, but Mark decided free was better.

Keep up the good work, folks!

Slashdot: News for nerds, or merely sexist?

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Maybe this is a bad idea, but I’m unable to resist poking this particular hornets’ nest. (I’ve poked it before, after all.)
There’s a post on Slashdot reporting that GNOME got 181 applications for Google’s Summer of Code from men and zero applications from women. As a result, Google has seen fit to mount a Women’s Summer Outreach Program 2006.
But here’s the “value added” to this information by Slashdot:

Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background. Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?

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