Who’s Afraid of Big Numbers?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Aiyana Green and Steven Strogatz at the New York Times: “Billions” and “trillions” seem to be an inescapable part of our conversations these days, whether the subject is Jeff Bezos’s net worth or President Biden’s proposed budget. Yet nearly everyone has trouble making sense of such big numbers. Is there any way to get a feel for them? As it turns out, there is. If we can relate big numbers to something familiar, they start to feel much more tangible, almost palpable.

For example, consider Senator Bernie Sanders’s signature reference to “millionaires and billionaires.” Politics aside, are these levels of wealth really comparable? Intellectually, we all know that billionaires have a lot more money than millionaires do, but intuitively it’s hard to feel the difference, because most of us haven’t experienced what it’s like to have that much money.

In contrast, everyone knows what the passage of time feels like. So consider how long it would take for a million seconds to tick by. Do the math, and you’ll find that a million seconds is about 12 days. And a billion seconds? That’s about 32 years. Suddenly the vastness of the gulf between a million and a billion becomes obvious. A million seconds is a brief vacation; a billion seconds is a major fraction of a lifetime.

Comparisons to ordinary distances provide another way to make sense of big numbers. Here in Ithaca, we have a scale model of the solar system known as the Sagan Walk, in which all the planets and the gaps between them are reduced by a factor of five billion. At that scale, the sun becomes the size of a serving plate, Earth is a small pea and Jupiter is a brussels sprout. To walk from Earth to the sun takes just a few dozen footsteps, whereas Pluto is a 15-minute hike across town. Strolling through the solar system, you gain a visceral understanding of astronomical distances that you don’t get from looking at a book or visiting a planetarium. Your body grasps it even if your mind cannot….(More)”.

Scientific publishing’s new weapon for the next crisis: the rapid correction

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and James Heathers at STATNews: “If evidence of errors does emerge, the process for correcting or withdrawing a paper tends to be alarmingly long. Late last year, for example, David Cox, the IBM director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, discovered that his name was included as an author on two papers he had never written. After he wrote to the journals involved, it took almost three months for them to remove his name and the papers themselves. In cases of large-scale research fraud, correction times can be measured in years.

Imagine now that the issue with a manuscript is not a simple matter of retracting a fraudulent paper, but a more complex methodological or statistical problem that undercuts the study’s conclusions. In this context, requests for clarification — or retraction — can languish for years. The process can outlast both the tenure of the responsible editor, resetting the clock on the entire ordeal, or the journal itself can cease publication, leaving an erroneous article in the public domain without oversight, forever….

This situation must change, and change quickly. Any crisis that requires scientific information in a hurry will produce hurried science, and hurried science often includes miscalculated analyses, poor experimental design, inappropriate statistical models, impossible numbers, or even fraud. Having the agility to produce and publicize work like this without having the ability to correct it just as quickly is a curiously persistent oversight in the global scientific enterprise. If corrections occur only long after the research has already been used to treat people across the world, what use are they at all?

There are some small steps in the right direction. The open-source website PubPeer aggregates formal scientific criticism, and when shoddy research makes it into the literature, hordes of critics may leave comments and questions on the site within hours. Twitter, likewise, is often abuzz with spectacular scientific critiques almost as soon as studies go up online.

But these volunteer efforts are not enough. Even when errors are glaring and obvious, the median response from academic journals is to deal with them grudgingly or not at all. Academia in general takes a faintly disapproving tone of crowd-sourced error correction, ignoring the fact that it is often the only mechanism that exists to do this vital work.

Scientific publishing needs to stop treating error-checking as a slightly inconvenient side note and make it a core part of academic research. In a perfect world, entire departmental sections would be dedicated to making sure that published research is correct and reliable. But even a few positions would be a fine start. Young researchers could be given kudos not just for every citation in their Google scholar profile but also for every post-publication review they undertake….(More)”

Examining the Intersection of Behavioral Science and Advocacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Collection of the Behavioral Scientist by Cintia Hinojosa and Evan Nesterak: “Over the past year, everyone’s lives have been touched by issues that intersect science and advocacy—the pandemic, climate change, police violence, voting, protests, the list goes on. 

These issues compel us, as a society and individuals, toward understanding. We collect new data, design experiments, test our theories. They also inspire us to examine our personal beliefs and values, our roles and responsibilities as individuals within society. 

Perhaps no one feels these forces more than social and behavioral scientists. As members of fields dedicated to the study of social and behavioral phenomena, they are in the unique position of understanding these issues from a scientific perspective, while also navigating their inevitable personal impact. This dynamic brings up questions about the role of scientists in a changing world. To what extent should they engage in advocacy or activism on social and political issues? Should they be impartial investigators, active advocates, something in between? 

t also raises other questions, like does taking a public stance on an issue affect scientific integrity? How should scientists interact with those setting policies? What happens when the lines between an evidence-based stance and a political position become blurred? What should scientists do when science itself becomes a partisan issue? 

To learn more about how social and behavioral scientists are navigating this terrain, we put out a call inviting them to share their ideas, observations, personal reflections, and the questions they’re grappling with. We gave them 100-250 words to share what was on their mind. Not easy for such a complex and consequential topic.

The responses, collected and curated below, revealed a number of themes, which we’ve organized into two parts….(More)”.

Is It Time for a U.S. Department of Science?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Essay by Anthony Mills: “The Biden administration made history earlier this year by elevating the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to a cabinet-level post. There have long been science advisory bodies within the White House, and there are a number of executive agencies that deal with science, some of them cabinet-level. But this will be the first time in U.S. history that the president’s science advisor will be part of his cabinet.

It is a welcome effort to restore the integrity of science, at a moment when science has been thrust onto the center-stage of public life — as something indispensable to political decision-making as well as a source of controversy and distrust. Some have urged the administration to go even further, calling for the creation of a new federal department of science. Such calls to centralize science have a long history, and have grown louder during the coronavirus pandemic, spurred by our government’s haphazard response.

But more centralization is not the way to restore the integrity of science. Centralization has its place, especially during national emergencies. Too much of it, however, is bad for science. As a rule, science flourishes in a decentralized research environment, which balances the need for public support, effective organization, and political accountability with scientific independence and institutional diversity. The Biden administration’s move is welcome. But there is risk in what it could lead to next: an American Ministry of Science. And there is an opportunity to create a needed alternative….(More)”.

The replication crisis won’t be solved with broad brushstrokes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


David Peterson at Nature: “Alarm about a ‘replication crisis’ launched a wave of projects that aimed to quantitatively evaluate scientific reproducibility: statistical analyses, mass replications and surveys. Such efforts, collectively called metascience, have grown into a social movement advocating broad reforms: open-science mandates, preregistration of experiments and new incentives for careful research. It has drawn attention to the need for improvements, and caused rancour.

Philosophers, historians and sociologists no longer accept a single, unified definition of science. Instead, they document how scientists in different fields have developed unique practices of producing, communicating and evaluating evidence, guided loosely by a set of shared values. However, this diversity and underlying scholarship are often overlooked by metascience activists.

Over the past three years, Aaron Panofsky, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and I have interviewed 60 senior biologists, chemists, geologists and physicists who are reviewing editors at Science, plus another 83 scientists seeking science-wide reforms. These highly recognized researchers saw growing interest in making science more open and robust — but also expressed scepticism.

Senior researchers bristled at the idea that their fields were in ‘crisis’, and suspected that activists were seeking recognition for themselves. A frustrated biologist argued that people running mass replication studies “were not motivated to find reproducibility” and benefited from finding it lacking. Others said metascientists dismissed replication work done to further a line of research rather than assess the state of the literature. Another saw data deposition as a frustrating, externally imposed mandate: “We’re already drowning in all the bureaucratic crap.”

Even those who acknowledged the potential value of reforms, such as those for data sharing, felt that there was no discussion about the costs. “If you add up all of the things that only take ten minutes, it’s a huge chunk of your day.”…(More)”.

Citizen science allows people to ‘really know’ their communities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UGAResearch: “Local populations understand their communities best. They’re familiar both with points of pride and with areas that could be improved. But determining the nature of those improvements from best practices, as well as achieving community consensus on implementation, can present a different set of challenges.

Jerry Shannon, associate professor of geography in the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences, worked with a team of researchers to introduce a citizen science approach in 11 communities across Georgia, from Rockmart to Monroe to Millen. This work combines local knowledge with emerging digital technologies to bolster community-driven efforts in multiple communities in rural Georgia. His research was detailed in a paper, “‘Really Knowing’ the Community: Citizen Science, VGI and Community Housing Assessments” published in December in the Journal of Planning Education and Research.

Shannon worked with the Georgia Initiative for Community Housing, managed out of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences (FACS), to create tools for communities to evaluate and launch plans to address their housing needs and revitalization. This citizen science effort resulted in a more diverse and inclusive body of data that incorporated local perspectives.

“Through this project, we hope to further support and extend these community-driven efforts to assure affordable, quality housing,” said Shannon. “Rural communities don’t have the resources internally to do this work themselves. We provide training and tools to these communities.”

As part of their participation in the GICH program, each Georgia community assembled a housing team consisting of elected officials, members of community organizations and housing professionals such as real estate agents. The team recruited volunteers from student groups and religious organizations to conduct so-called “windshield surveys,” where participants work from their vehicle or walk the neighborhoods….(More)”

The Constitution of Algorithms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book by By Florian Jaton: “A laboratory study that investigates how algorithms come into existence. Algorithms—often associated with the terms big data, machine learning, or artificial intelligence—underlie the technologies we use every day, and disputes over the consequences, actual or potential, of new algorithms arise regularly. In this book, Florian Jaton offers a new way to study computerized methods, providing an account of where algorithms come from and how they are constituted, investigating the practical activities by which algorithms are progressively assembled rather than what they may suggest or require once they are assembled.

Drawing on a four-year ethnographic study of a computer science laboratory that specialized in digital image processing, Jaton illuminates the invisible processes that are behind the development of algorithms. Tracing what he terms a set of intertwining courses of actions sharing common finalities, he describes the practical activity of creating algorithms through the lenses of ground-truthing, programming, and formulating. He first presents the building of ground truths, referential repositories that form the material basis for algorithms. Then, after considering programming’s resistance to ethnographic scrutiny, he describes programming courses of action he attended at the laboratory. Finally, he offers an account of courses of action that successfully formulated some of the relationships among the data of a ground-truth database, revealing the links between ground-truthing, programming, and formulating activities—entangled processes that lead to the shaping of algorithms. In practice, ground-truthing, programming, and formulating form a whirlwind process, an emergent and intertwined agency….(More)”.

A First Course in Network Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Filippo Menczer, Santo Fortunato, and Clayton A. Davis: “Networks are everywhere: networks of friends, transportation networks and the Web. Neurons in our brains and proteins within our bodies form networks that determine our intelligence and survival. This modern, accessible textbook introduces the basics of network science for a wide range of job sectors from management to marketing, from biology to engineering, and from neuroscience to the social sciences. Students will develop important, practical skills and learn to write code for using networks in their areas of interest – even as they are just learning to program with Python. Extensive sets of tutorials and homework problems provide plenty of hands-on practice and longer programming tutorials online further enhance students’ programming skills. This intuitive and direct approach makes the book ideal for a first course, aimed at a wide audience without a strong background in mathematics or computing but with a desire to learn the fundamentals and applications of network science….(More)”

Privacy and Data Protection in Academia

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Report by IAPP: “Today, demand for qualified privacy professionals is surging. Soon, societal, business and government needs for practitioners with expertise in the legal, technical and business underpinnings of data protection could far outstrip supply. To fill this gap, universities around the world are adding privacy curricula in their law, business and computer science schools. The IAPP’s Westin Research Center has catalogued these programs with the aim of promoting, catalyzing and supporting academia’s growing efforts to build an on-ramp to the privacy profession.

The information presented in our inaugural issue of “Privacy and Data Protection in Academia, A Global Guide to Curricula” represents the results of our publicly available survey. The programs included voluntarily completed the survey. The IAPP then organized the information provided and the designated contact at each institution verified the accu­racy of the information presented.

This is not a comprehen­sive list of colleges and universities offering privacy and data protection related curric­ula. We encourage higher education institu­tions interested in being included to com­plete the survey as the IAPP will periodically publish updates….(More)”.

Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Gillian Tett: “Amid severe digital disruption, economic upheaval, and political flux, how can we make sense of the world? Leaders today typically look for answers in economic models, Big Data, or artificial intelligence platforms. Gillian Tett points to anthropology—the study of human culture. Anthropologists train to get inside the minds of other people, helping them not only to understand other cultures but also to appraise their own environment with fresh perspective as an insider-outsider, gaining lateral vision.

Today, anthropologists are more likely to study Amazon warehouses than remote Amazon tribes; they have done research into institutions and companies such as General Motors, Nestlé, Intel, and more, shedding light on practical questions such as how internet users really define themselves; why corporate projects fail; why bank traders miscalculate losses; how companies sell products like pet food and pensions; why pandemic policies succeed (or not). Anthropology makes the familiar seem unfamiliar and vice versa, giving us badly needed three-dimensional perspective in a world where many executives are plagued by tunnel vision, especially in fields like finance and technology. Lively, lucid, and practical, Anthro-Vision offers a revolutionary new way for understanding the behavior of organizations, individuals, and markets in today’s ever-evolving world….(More)”