Survey results: Where do you get your science news

The last poll asked people where they get their science news. Most folks reported that they get science news from blogs, which isn't surprising, since they were reading this blog. Interestingly, less than 10% reported getting science news from newspapers. This fits my own experience; once I discovered science blogs, I stopped reading science news in newspapers altogether.

I would report the exact numbers for the poll, but Blogger ate them. I can tell that it still has all the data (it remembers that I voted), but is reporting 0s for every category. I'll be switching to Google Forms for the next survey.

Findings: Which of my posts do you like best?

It will surprise nobody that I like data. By extension, it should surprise nobody that what I like about blogging is getting instant feedback on whether people found a post interesting and relevant or not. This is in contrast to writing a journal article, where you will wait minimally a year or two before anyone starts citing you (if they ever do).

How I feel about data.

Sometimes the results are surprising. I expected my posts on the suspicious data underlying recent graduate school rankings to make a splash, but the two posts together got a grand total of 2 comments and 16 tweets (some of which are automatically generated by FieldofScience). I didn't expect posts on my recent findings regarding pronoun processing to generate that much interest, but they got 6 comments and 26 tweets, putting them among the most popular, at least as far as Twitter is concerned.

To get a sense of which topics you, dear readers, find the most interesting, I compiled the statistics from all my posts from the fall semester and tabulated those data according to the posts' tags. Tags are imperfect, as they reflect only how I decided to categorize the post, but they're a good starting point.

Here are the results, sorted by average number of retweets:

label	#Posts...	Tweets_Ave...	Reddit_Ave...	Comments_Ave...
findings	2	13	0	3
publication	3	13	5	5
peer review	4	12	13	10
universal grammar	5	10	2	8
pronouns	3	10	0	2
GamesWithWords.org	2	9	0	1
scientific methods	7	8	7	7
neuroscience	1	8	0	5
overheard	1	7	0	1
language development	2	7	0	7
Web-based research	6	7	0	1
science and society	3	6	1	6
language	6	6	1	3
education	2	6	0	1
journalism	2	6	18	9
politics	7	6	0	2
science blogging	2	6	1	2
language acquisition	1	5	0	0
recession	2	5	1	3
the future	1	5	0	0
vision	1	5	0	1
graduate school	4	5	0	3
science in the media	3	5	12	7
method maven	2	5	18	10
media	3	4	0	1
psychology career path	1	4	0	2
lab notebook	3	3	0	1
none	4	3	0	0

Since we all know correlation = causation, if I want to make a really popular post, I should label it "findings, publication, peer review". If I want to ensure it is ignored, I shouldn't give it a label at all.

At this point, I'd like to turn it over the crowd. Are these the posts you want to see? If not, what do you want to read more about? Or if you think about your favorite blogs, what topics do you enjoy seeing on those blogs?

Question: What are sisters good for?

Answer: increasing your score on a 13-question test of happiness by 1 unit on one of the 13 questions.

A recent study of the effect of sisters on happiness has been getting a lot of press since it was featured on at the New York Times. It's just started hitting my corner of the blogosphere, since Mark Liberman filing an entry at Language Log early in the evening. On the whole, he was unimpressed. The paper didn't report data in sufficient detail to really get a sense of what was going on, so he tried to extrapolate based on what was in fact reported. His best estimate was that having a sister accounted for 0.4% of the variance in people's happiness.

This is a long way from the statement that "Adolescents with sisters feel less lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious and fearful", which is how ABC News characterized the study's findings, or "Statistical analyses showed that having a sister protected adolescents form feeling lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious and fearful", which is what the BUY press release said ... Such statements are true if you take "A's are X-er than B's" to mean simply that a statistical analysis showed that the mean value of a sample of X's was higher than the mean value of a sample of Y's, by an amount that was unlikely to be the result of sampling error.

Only an hour later, the ever wide-eyed Jonah Lehrer wrote

There's a surprisingly robust literature on the emotional benefits of having sisters. It turns out that having at least one female sibling makes us happier and less prone to depression...

I think this demonstrates nicely the added value of blogging, particularly science blogging. Journalists (like Lehrer) are rarely in a position to pick apart the methods of a study, whereas scientist bloggers can. I know many people miss the old media world, but the new one is exciting.

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For more thoughts on science blogging, check this and this.

Words and non-words

"...the modern non-word 'blogger'..." -- Dr. Royce Murray, editor of the journal Analytic Chemistry.

"209,000,000 results (0.21 seconds)" -- Google search for the "non-word" blogger.


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There has been a lot of discussion about Royce Murray's bizzarre attack on blogging in the latest JAC editorial (the key sentence: I believe that the current phenomenon of "bloggers" should be of serious concern to scientists).

Dr. Isis has posted a nice take-down of the piece focusing on the age old testy relationship between scientists and journalists. My bigger concern with the editorial is that it is clear that Murray has no idea what a blog is, yet feels justified in writing an article about blogging. Here's a telling sentence:

Bloggers are entrepreneurs who sell “news” (more properly, opinion) to mass media: internet, radio, TV, and to some extent print news. In former days, these individuals would be referred to as “freelance writers”, which they still are; the creation of the modern non-word “blogger” does not change the purveyor.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! A freelance writer does sell articles to established media entities. Bloggers mostly write for their own blog (hence the "non-word" blog-ger). There are of course those who are hired to blog for major media outlets like Scientific American or Wired, but then they are essentially columnists (in fact, many of the columnists at The New York Times have NYTimes blogs at the request of the newspaper).

This magnifies, for the lay reader, the dual problems in assessing credibility: a) not having a single stable employer (like a newspaper, which can insist on credentials and/or education background) frees the blogger from the requirement of consistent information reliability ... Who are the fact-checkers now?

Wait, newspapers don't insist on credentials and don't fact-check the stories they get from freelancers? Why is Murray complaining about bloggers, then? In any case, it's not like journals like Analytic Chemistry do a good job of fact-checking what they publish or that they stop publishing papers by people whose results never replicate. Journal editors living in glass houses...

This focus on credentials is a bit odd -- I thought truth was the only credential a scientist needed -- and in any case seriously misplaced. I challenge Murray to find a popular science blog written by someone who is neither a fully-credentialed scientist writing about his/her area of expertise, nor a well-established science journalist working for a major media outlet.

Are there crack-pot bloggers out there? Sure. But most don't have much of an audience (certainly, their audience is smaller than the fact-checked, establishment media-approved Glenn Beck). Instead, we have a network of scientists and science enthusiasts discussing, analyzing and presenting science. What's to hate about that?

Anonymity

It seems that most science bloggers use pseudonyms. To an extent, I do this, though it's trivial for anyone who is checking to figure out who I am (I know, since I get emails sent to my work account from people who read the blog). This was a conscious choice, and I have my reasons.

1. I suppose one would choose anonymity just in case one's blogging pissed off people who are in a position to hurt you. That would be mostly people in your own field. Honestly, I doubt it would take anyone in my field long to figure out what university I was at. Like anyone, I write most about the topics my friends and colleagues are discussing, and that's a function of who my friends and colleagues are.

(In fact, a few years ago, someone I knew was able to guess what class I was taking, based on my blog topics.)

2. I write a lot about the field, graduate school, and the job market. But within academia, every field is different. For that matter, even if you just wanted to discuss graduate student admission policy within psychology, the fact is that there is a huge amount of variation from department to department. So I can really only write about my experiences. For you to be able to use that information, you have a have a sense of what kind of school I'm at (a large, private research university) and in what field (psychology).

I read a number of bloggers who write about research as an institution, about the job market, etc., but who refuse to say what field they're in. This makes it extremely difficult to know what to make of what they say.

For instance, take my recent disagreement with Prodigal Academic. Prodigal and some other bloggers were discussing the fact that few people considering graduate school in science know how low the odds of getting a tenure-track job are. I suggested that actually they aren't misinformed about academia per se, but about the difference between a top-tier school and even a mid-tier school. I point out that at a top-tier psychology program, just about everybody who graduates goes on to get a tenure-track job. Prodigal says that in her field, at least, that's not true (and she suspects it's not true in my field, either).

The difference is that you can actually go to the websites of top psychology programs and check that I'm right. We can't do the same for Prodigal, because we have no idea what field she's in. We just have to take her word for it.

3. I suspect many people choose pseudonyms because they don't want to censor what they say. They don't want to piss anybody off. I think that to maintain my anonymity, I would have to censor a great deal of what I say. For one thing, I couldn't blog about the one thing I know best: my own work.

There is the risk of pissing people off. And trust me, I worry about it. But being careful about not pissing people off is probably a good thing, whether you're anonymous or know. Angry people rarely change their minds, and presumably we anger people precisely when we disagree with them.

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So why don't I actually blog under my name? I want people who Google me by name to find my academic website and my professional work first, not the blog.

Honestly, Research Blogging, Get over yourself

A few years ago, science blog posts started decorating themselves with a simple green logo. This logo was meant to credential the blog post as being one about peer-reviewed research, and is supplied by Research Blogging. As ResearchBlogging.org explains:

ResearchBlogging.org is a system for identifying the best, most thoughtful blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Since many blogs combine serious posts with more personal or frivolous posts, our site offers away to find only the most carefully-crafted about cutting-edge research, often written by experts in their respective fields.

That's a good goal and one I support. If you read further down, you see that this primarily amounts to the following: if the post is about a peer-reviewed paper, it's admitted to the network. If it's not, it isn't. I guess the assumption is that the latter is not carefully-crafted or about cutting-edge research. And that's where I get off the bus.

Peer Review is Not Magic

One result of the culture wars is that scientists have needed a way of distinguishing real data from fantasy. If you look around the Internet, no doubt half or even more than half of what is written suggests there's no global warming, that vaccines cause autism, etc. Luckily, fanatics rarely publish in peer-reviewed journals, so once we restrict the debate to what is in peer-reviewed journals, pretty much all the evidence suggests global warming, no autism-vaccine link, etc. So pointing to peer-review is a useful rhetorical strategy.

That, at least, is what I assume has motivated all the stink about peer-review in recent years, and ResearchBlogging.org's methods. But it's out of place in the realm of science blogs. It's useful to think about what peer review is.

A reviewer for a paper reads the paper. The reviewer does not (usually) attempt to replicate the experiment. The reviewer does not have access to the data and can't check that the analyses were done correctly. At best, the reviewer evaluates the conclusions the authors draw, and maybe even criticizes  the experimental protocol or the statistical analyses used (assuming the reviewers understand statistics, which in my field is certainly not always the case). But the reviewer doesn't can't check that the data  weren't made up, that the experimental protocol was actually followed, that there were no errors in data analysis, etc.

In other words, the reviewer can do only and exactly what a good science blogger does. So good science blogging is, at its essence, a kind of peer review.

Drawbacks

Now, you might worry about the fact that the blogger could be anyone. There's something to that. Of course, ResearchBlogging.org has the same problem. Just because someone is blogging about peer-reviewed paper doesn't mean they understand it (or that they aren't lying about it, which happens surprisingly often with the fluoride fanatics).

So while peer review might be a useful way of vetting the paper, it won't help us vet the blog. We still have to do that ourselves (and science bloggers seem to do a good job of vetting).

A weakness

Ultimately, I think it's risky to put all our cards on peer review. It's a good system, but its possible to circumvent. We know that some set of scientists read the paper and thought it was worth publishing (with the caveats mentioned above). Of course, those scientists could be anybody, too -- it's up to the editor. So there's nothing really stopping autism-vaccine fanatics from establishing their own peer-reviewed journal, with reviewers who are all themselves autism-vaccine fanatics.

To an extent, that already happens. As long as there's a critical mass of scientists who think a particular way, they can establish their own journal, submit largely to that journal and review each other's submissions. Thus, papers that couldn't have gotten published at a more mainstream journal can get a home. I think anyone who has done a literature search recently knows there are a lot of bad papers out there (in my field, anyway, though I imagine the same is true in others).

Peer review is a helpful vetting process, and it does make papers better. But it doesn't determine fact. That is something we still have to find for ourselves.

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Observant readers will have noticed that I use ResearchBlogging.org myself for it's citation system. What can I say? It's useful.

Science blogging and the law

The Kennedy School at Harvard had a conference on science journalism. Among the issues discussed were legal pitfalls science bloggers can run into. Check out this blog post at the Citizen Media Law Project.

Where else to read the Cognition and Language Lab blog

Dear coglanglab.blogspot.com readers.

As many of you know, I have what amounts to a mirror of this blog running over at scienceblog.com. I maintain this one because it has some great features, like good archiving, better formatting, and the ability to save drafts of posts.

However, almost all the traffic is over at the other site. This means that while those posts get a number of comments, the ones here do not. So if you like reading comments or enjoy the give-and-take of a conversation in comments, you might prefer to read the other site.

This has gotten even easier now that scienceblog.com has added my own RSS feed, which you can find here. The purveyor of scienceblog.com promises to add some of that extra functionality eventually, but until he does, I will continue posting here as well, so if you prefer this site, you should be able to continue reading it for some time.

The Best Language Site on the Web

News junkies might start up their web browser day any number of ways. There are those who prefer the Post to the Times. Those with a business mind might start with the Journal. On the West Coast, there are those who swear by LA's daily. I myself start with Slate.

However, I can state with little fear of correction, that the website of record for die-hard language buffs is the Language Log. The Language Log, I admit, is not for the faint of heart. The bloggers are linguists, and they like nothing better than parsing syntax. This is not William Safire.

What makes the Language Log great is that the writers really know what they are talking about. Growing up, I went to a chamber music camp several summers in a row (I played viola). One of my friends who attended the camp was a singer. One year, a violinist in her ensemble decided that, rather than play the violin part, she wanted do the voice part for one movement of a piece. I never heard them perform, but I am assured she was awful. My friend complained:

"If you haven't studied the violin, you wouldn't try to perform a difficult piece for an audience of trained musicians. You'd barely be able to get a single note in tune, and you'd know it. Everybody can open their mouths and make sound come out, which means they think they can sing."

The world of language is afflicted with a similar problem. Everybody speaks a language, and many people believe they are experts in language (here, here, here). A great deal of what is written about language is embarrasing. To make matters worse, the field is packed with urban legends about all the (they have less than a half-dozen, approximately the same number as we have in English). Here is an urban legend the Language Log uncovered about the Irish not having a word for sex.

Language is one of the most complicated things in existence, and even the professionals understand remarkably little. The bloggers at the Language Log do a great job of giving even the casual reader a feel for what language is really about. They also spend a considerable portion of their time debunking fallacies and myths. If you read only one blog about language, LL would be my choice. If you read two, then you might consider reading my blog as well:)

Mirroring

For a while I've also been writing a blog about CLL for scienceblogs.com, so as to reach a more targeted audience. That's a lot of work, so from here on out, I'll probably just mirror the two blogs.

Again, why have two blogs with the same material? A lot of the traffic that a blog at blogspot or scienceblogs gets is via the general site feed. At blogspot, the readers are a broad spectrum of people interested in a wide variety of things. At scienceblogs, it's limited to people who would be interested in a bunch of science blogs. There are advantages to both types of audiences.

Please feel free to leave comments in you have anything to say about this strategy.