The problem with scientific research is that we can extrapolate trends moderately well, but we aren’t very good at specifics. We can confidently state that the world is getting hotter, on average, year by year and that it’s because of us, but we can’t accurately predict what form that warming will take: sometimes there are surprises.

In this case, some predicted the Gulf Stream would be diverted and that would plunge the UK into freezing cold winters: they were wrong. It now looks very unlikely that the Gulf Stream will be “switched off” but, instead, cold air displaced from the pole has… plunged the UK into freezing cold winters. That doesn’t change the fact that the average temperature has gone up, because those cold spots are more than cancelled out by unusually hot spots elsewhere.

The failure of scientists to accurately predict this particular effect doesn’t disprove global warming. Even when we’re surprised by an effect, we can still observe it and find the explanation, and every time we do, it always comes back to global warming caused by CO2.

The most worrying thing is that, every time something like this happens, we find out that, not only is our polluting to blame, but that’s it’s happening faster and more significantly than we predicted.

Frightened? You should be.

We may not like it, but this isn’t going anywhere and the sooner we get used to making the myriad small changes that add up to a big impact, the less painful it will be when the crunch comes and we no longer have the choice.

Here are some small things you can do to make a difference:

• Stop drinking bottled drinks, especially water. The bottled water industry is a huge polluter and you only think you want it because they’ve told you you do!
• Turn down the radiator and put on a jumper and some wooly socks.
• Choose products with less packaging.
• Turn off the lights when you aren’t in the room and switch the TV and video off at the wall (that digital clock and the standby mode may not cost as much as we were once told, but it costs something, and every little helps)
• Don’t leave your phone charger plugged in if it isn’t charging – some transformers (anything with a very bulky plug or some sort of bulky box somewhere along the cable) continue to draw power even when they aren’t in use, if yours feels warm when it isn’t in use, it’s a culprit.
• If you’re buying new white goods, buy energy efficient ones.
• Sign this petition right now and save our forests. Now more than ever we need to protect our trees!

The above image from Neuroskeptic details the nine circles of scientific hell with the punishments the author deems reasonable. Neuroskeptic makes the point that in Dante’s original poem there was space for all men in Hell because even good people sin and, similarly, there is a place for all scientists in Neuroskeptic’s nine circles; for the sins I have committed, see the title of this post.

It may seem odd to outsiders that I would so readily confess to what may look like quite serious examples of malpractice and the reason I do so so easily is because the whole scientific edifice is riddled with these issues. I doubt any scientist could honestly claim never to have commited one of these sins, in fact, I’d stake a fairly large sum on the fact that if any scientist did try to abide by the implied rules, they would rapidly find their career failing.

The currant grant application process is so competitive that, to win funds, you must be proposing something exciting. Science is rarely very exciting, but the gradual buildup of tiny pieces of information that low level researchers make day in day out is very important. Seldom do we bound forward yelling “eureka!”; it is steady fairy footsteps that drive society forward. Researchers know this, and so we are faced with a choice: do we spin a little here, enthuse slightly more than a result deserves there and get the funds we need; or do we tell the truth, fail in our attempts to win grants, lose our careers and see the unexciting but important work we are engaged in flounder? No-one likes it, but we all do it because those who don’t will fall. On the whole, the system still works – this isn’t published data and everyone applies a little spin so we end up cancelling each other out – but Neuroskeptic’s first and second circles are full: the second with the scientists who do the dance and the first with the funding bodies and government’s who play the tune.

The third circle, that of post-hoc story telling is, to my mind, less of an issue. It is more a case of weaving an attractive narrative to make your paper more readable than one of data manipulation. After all, who cares why you did what you did as long as what you did works? It too, however, comes about as a result of the system: the success of a scientist’s career is, in large part, judged by their publication record and number of citations. Well written papers with an attractive narrative will get published in better journals and will get greater levels citations and so, again, the system rewards those who commit this sin and punishes those who don’t. And Neuroskeptic’s third circle is filled with penitents.

The next two circles (P-value fishing and creative outliers) are a different kettle of fish – here we see the abuse of statistical tools to change results. For the vast majority of researchers, the data are sacrosanct: you may not like what it says but you Never. Ever. alter it.  So much of our time is spent fighting our own failings and checking and rechecking to make sure what we are recording is real and not a result of our own innate preconceptions that, for most people, deliberately skewing data is unthinkable. But, as ever, in a high pressure environment there will be people for whom the line between “playing the game” and “making up data” lies beyond a bit of statistical fiddling: those people can be found here.

As we get past half way, the last four circles become more serious. Six and Nine deal with outright theft and making stuff up, very few people would describe those as “playing the game” and I doubt they have many residents, but Seven and Eight deserve a bit more examination.

Forgive my tackling these out of order, but I’d like to dispatch Eight first. Partial publication is predominantly a sin of the medical research establishment. It describes the practice of conducting a study on a large group of people and then proclaiming that your new drug works incredibly effectively for a small subset of that group. If you toss a coin 100 times, you will probably get a run of heads at some point, say between flips 36 and 44 and, if you then only look at the results between 35 and 45 it’s easy to claim your coin was weighted. If your study group is large enough, there will always be a subset for whom the drug appeared to work. This practice is wide-spread, dishonest and deservedly low down in Neuroskeptic’s pit.

And so we come to Seven: the worst sin to which I have confessed. At first, I thought Neuroskeptic was being a bit harsh putting non-publication of data so far down in the pit of hell, after all, we all do it, don’t we? But then, as a potential denizen, I would say that wouldn’t I?

I strongly suspect that there will be more people down here than in the preceding three circles, the main reason for that being that Four, Five and Six deal with active dishonesty whereas Six is the passive failure to mention something. The courts see no difference between active or passive dishonesty and, when we stop to think about it, nor do most scientists. Yet, the lie by omission is an easier sin to commit and is, potentially, more harmful: a few positive results in a sea of negatives will get given prominence far in excess of what they deserve and whole edifices of apparently sound reasoning can be built on the wobbly foundations of dodgy theories that have passed unchallenged into the the realm of established fact*.

Everyone does it because the system forces us to: negative results are simply virtually impossible to get published. In fact, everyone can leave negative data unreported in a desk draw, but not everyone can use post-hoc reasoning to improve the readability of their manuscript or skilfully spin data to win a grant, so I would be unsurprised to find this circle the most populous of all.  With all of that in mind, I think Neuroskeptic is right to place this sin so deep – the impact and potential damage these omissions cause and the scale of this problem make it very serious indeed.

Reading this, you might be left with the impression that modern science is rotten to the core. But you are reading it on a product of modern science, and the fact that you are here to read it all, as healthy and as vigorous as you are, will also, in many cases, be a direct result of the hard work of generations of scientists honing their skills, so we can’t be getting it too badly wrong.

The way we conduct research is itself evolving over time, and the rapid influx of new technology has affected scientists as it has affected us all. The practices listed above are rightly excoriated by Neuroskeptic, but most researchers are aware of them, aware of the pitfalls they create and are actively seeking ways to avoid them. I don’t know if we will ever find a way to fix the funding issue (after all, we can’t fund everything and we have to find a way to choose) but we have made some steps towards closing some of the other circles. Drug trials are now registered so disinterested researchers can go back and check the raw data for themselves and call out any examples of statistical fiddling or partial publication; meanwhile, online journals such as PLoS ONE will publish any article, regardless of apparent importance, interest or positivity of results, as long as it is both readable and scientifically rigorous.

There are still a lot of residents of Neuroskeptic’s Inferno, but perhaps there is hope?

*Always beware established facts.

http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/other/541/

George Osbourne has just announced the results of the new Government’s spending review and, as well as the excellent news that science funding will not be cut (phew!), he mentioned that people like me will continue to have to pay more for our courses but that the money saved will be used to fund apprenticeships.

I am, of course, gutted that my dream course remains so very far out of my financial reach. However, I stand by what I said in my earlier post when I stated that, if you could convince me the money saved would be used effectively helping people, then I would be behind it. Well. It REALLY hurts me to say it, but I have to support taking money away from ELQs as long as it is being used sensibly, and it looks like it is.

Now, what crazy things/promises can I sell on ebay to fund my future dreams?!

W.B Yeats

I submitted my first ever independent grant proposal yesterday – it’s quite ridiculously competitive with virtually the entire Japanese research community squabbling over a very small number of grants, so I don’t really stand much of a chance.  All the same, here’s hoping the reviewers tread softly on my dreams.

Yesterday Vince Cable gave a speech at the Queen Mary BioEnterprises Innovation Centre in London. It has been reported as “a strategy to cut science funding“, but it was more of a long-winded attempt to convince us that, while the cuts will be deep and painful, Uncle Vince knows what he’s doing and has our best interests at heart.

The press have focused on one quite small aspect of the speech, and at first so did I. Vince suggested that, rather than apply the same cuts equally across the board, they should be focused on the areas that are less productive or useful.  That’s a wonderful idea on paper, or if your training is in economics (even if you did start out doing Natural Science and switch), but it fails to grasp an idea that is fundamental to academic research – you simply cannot tell what research is going to be useful until you have done it.

In the 60′s a young Japanese researcher name Osamu Shimomura arrived at Princeton University and began researching what made a certain jellyfish glow green. He had no interest in the potential applications of whatever he might discover, he was simply interested in bioluminescence and wanted to know more. He found Green Fluorescent Protein, or GFP, and his discovery is now used in thousands of labs all over the world as a fluorescent tag and it (and it’s spectrum of offspring) have driven forward research in an unimaginable number of diverse areas. In 2008, he and two other researchers shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the parts they played in the discovery and development of GFP.

If you were responsible for prioritising which research should go ahead in 1960, when Osamu Shimomura started his, how high on your list would you have placed one man’s interest in the bioluminescence of an obscure jellyfish species?

Having read some articles on Vince’s speech, I vented my spleen at Evan Harris[1] and Julian Huppert[2] and received the chastening reply that I should “read the speech, not just the coverage.” Well. Fair enough! So I did read the speech, and what I found was that the coverage seemed to fit fairly well with my interpretation of it. Sure, the pundits ignored a lot of the stuff where Vince Cable tried to show he understands the importance of blue-skies[3] research and other economic aspects of science funding, but there were also his statements that:

“Another approach superficially more attractive would be to specialise, to say there are certain branches of science and technology that we should do or not do. My response to this is two-fold.

First, we should not politicise choices of this kind. Treasury and BIS ministers and officials, working under pressures of time as well as money, are not the people who should be making arbitrary, far-reaching decisions such as whether Britain should or should not ‘do’ nanotechnology or space research.

Moreover, many of the suggested choices are not choices at all … innovation depends on lateral thinking between apparently different disciplines.

And:

There is however a strong case for identifying broad problems. For example, the challenges thrown up by an ageing population – the increased prevalence of Alzheimer’s for example – need people working across biology, medicine, biochemistry and the social sciences in order to better address needs. So too for environmental challenges, such as providing clean water or alternative energy sources, pooling different disciplines to get a better understanding of low carbon.

And that:

There is also a case for identifying and building up the areas where the UK truly is a world leader. This includes stem cells and regenerative medicine, plastic electronics, satellite communications, fuel cells, advanced manufacturing, composite materials and many more.”

In other words: “we should only fund research that is aimed at solving today’s pressing problems, and we should only do it with the techniques we are already good at (don’t worry though, I understand that you scientists should get to pick what those are, we politicians don’t have a clue).”[4][5]

So far, so… gah!

But I concede two points:

1. Vince may well be saying what his position in the coalition requires him to say. Just because the speech demonstrates that the Government as a whole doesn’t really grasp how science works, that doesn’t mean Vince himself doesn’t, and it is possible he is fighting hard behind the scenes for what concessions he can get. Evan and Julian certainly still seem to believe he’s fighting for the Nation’s scientists.

2. Cuts must be made somehow[6], if not by focusing only on research that seems to solve today’s most pressing problems, then how?

There is one short, almost throw away, line in the speech that I keep coming back to in my mind. Vince says:

The lazy, traditional way to make spending cuts is to shave a bit of everything: salami slicing. This produces less for less: a shrinkage of quantity and quality – I have no intention of going there.

Hmmm, what does that actually mean? Obviously it means he’s against shaving a bit from everything, but why? What does “this produces less for less” mean? Surely if you fund less, you will get less, especially in an area such as research where waste is already pretty minimal. Getting more for less is a pipe dream, even getting the same for less cannot be done right now, although I’m sure we’ll try, just as researchers did under the last Tory government. Certainly it’s hard to see how Vince’s solution can deliver anything other than “less for less”. Colour me confused.

In search of a better argument, I canvassed Julian and Evan.

Julian said “90% of lots of probs less useful than solving 90% of probs”, which sounds great, but doesn’t really work in this context because research is never ending. You can’t choose which problems to solve, you can only choose which areas to study and hope some problems get solved along the way. It would be great if we could pick out which areas won’t solve any problems in the given time frame and just cut those, but as we discovered way back at the start of this enormous post, we don’t yet have the time machine we need to do that.

Evan sent me to his own analyses of Vince’s speech where he said he’d already answered my question. Except I’d already read them both, and he hadn’t. All he said of Vince and salami slicing was that “Rightly, he rejects this”.

The problem is, I can see a very persuasive argument for salami slicing. If you can’t sensibly predict which areas are the best to fund, why try? Funding councils already choose what to fund on the basis of merit of the proposal and the past research record of the applicant. Removing the same percentage of funding from all areas would mean the application process would get that much tougher across the board[7]. It would self-select the most meretricious sounding proposals and scientists but wouldn’t attempt to second guess what fields will turn out to be most useful. Vince Cable calls salami slicing “lazy”, but it’s only lazy if there is a better alternative, otherwise it is “efficient”.

The self-evident truth is held to be that salami slicing is bad, but no one seems able to explain to me quite why. Maybe I have missed something obvious, but the thing about self-evident truths is that they often aren’t.

1. Ex Lib Dem MP for Oxford West & Abingdon, and one of this May’s most distressing casualties if you care about science (or even evidence-based policy setting).

2. Brand spanking new Lib Dem MP for Cambridge and looking likely to take over Evan’s mantle.

3. Doing stuff because it’s interesting (like GFP) and not just because you can see a future use for it.

4. I confess, at this point my irony meter required a new fuse.

5. There was also some rather patronising stuff about “doing more with less” and cutting funding to projects that are performing less than excellently, which only served to annoy me further and demonstrate that Vince clearly doesn’t understand how much we are already doing with less. Nor does he seem to understand that projects wax and wane in their standing on the world stage. If you axe them while they’re down, they can’t ever get back up again and you might miss out on a lot.

6. Well, actually, no they don’t. Not to science as, according to CaSE (pdf), for a modest spend of less than 2.5% of GDP, science and engineering return almost 1/3rd of the UKs GDP. In other words: it is a false economy. What you are really doing when you cut research funding is borrowing future income to pay today’s debts. We should cut absolutely everything else there is to cut before we touch research funding and, whatever the government may be telling us, we are not there yet. But that would seem to be a debate we already lost, so lets discuss how to limit the damage as much as possible instead.

7. A frankly terrifying possibility, but apparently now inevitable, whatever happens.

Bill and Melinda Gates

In 2001 the long running antitrust case between the US government and Microsoft came to an end. The case didn’t dent the company’s profitability too much, of course (although there are signs that its star is fading as Google’s rises), but it did seem to rather disillusion Bill Gates, and he separated himself and his personal fortune from the company’s and went off to set up the Gates Foundation. The charity is not without critics[1], but it is certainly mind-bogglingly large and has staggering potential to do good. Notably their vaccine and health program is working to eradicate polio once and for all.

Warren Buffet

A pretty darned successful and wealthy investor, Warren Buffett overtook Bill Gates as the worlds richest man in 2008. He is famed for spending little, in spite of his huge wealth, and describes the current turbulent time on Wall Street as “poetic justice”. His fortune is in the region of $60 billion dollars, however, he has pledged to give away 99% of that money (much of it to the Gates Foundation). 1% of 50 billion is still 500 million, so his family and he will hardly starve, but still, 99%! It would seem he also places a great deal of importance on charitable giving of time as well as money and while he admits he himself does not donate his time (although he must spend some time on his philanthropic work as he does a fair amount), he has apparently brung his children up right, because he says they do. When you read what he has to say, Warren Buffet appears to just be a good man. There are too few of those around, so we are lucky that the richest two people in the world apparently fall into that bracket.

Between them, Warren Buffett and Bill and Malinda Gates have persuaded a further 40 US billionaires to pledge at least 50% of their wealth to charity. I wonder if that is enough to shift those “2% of the world’s population possess 50% of its wealth” statistics? The sums involved are vast, so it might just…

Google

Google are the new Microsoft, which means it is fashionable to distrust them and assume they are out for nothing except power and money. Yet, if you scratch the surface, you find a solid core of ethical business practices that appears to be more than fancy words. Their green initiatives arm is doing a lot to make the company as close to carbon neutral as is currently possible and they recently invested in two new wind farms. They have a philanthropic arm too and, while it isn’t as big or as dramatic as Warren Buffett’s gesture, it uses employee time and the technology Google has invented to track and help solve real world problems away from the internet.

Innocent

As well as making darned tasty smoothies (and other things[2]), the Innocent Smoothie Company are more devoted to ethical and sustainable business practices than any other company I have come across. Every single step of their manufacturing process is carefully balanced against the environmental and human cost. They carefully research the best places to buy their ingredients and they recently started the process of shifting some of their mango buying to Kenya for no reason other than they wish to start contributing to African economies. They not only use the latest recycled and recyclable packaging in all their products, but they also research and develop new and improved sustainable packaging which feeds into that used by other companies. Their premises are, like Google’s, run to be as sustainable as possible, with great care taken over not only their carbon footprint, but also their water one. Oh, and there is, of course, a foundation that takes 10% of the company’s profits and donates it to the communities where they buy their fruit.

I don’t believe in evil people, only evil acts, and I suppose that means I don’t believe in naturally good people either, but these few people and companies are demonstrating that you can accumate wealth for reasons other than simple acquisitiveness and that a business does not have to be evil in order to be profitable. I just hope everyone else catches on before it is too late; we are already standing dangerously close to the edge.

1. Seemingly often of the “Bill Gates is evil therefore his philanthropy must be a lie” mindset.

2. Oh boy, how I have missed Innocent while I’ve been overseas. I wish they’d start moving into the Japanese market!

In the light of the ongoing and increasingly worrisome Horizon oil spill it becomes even more relevant.

I’d like to draw to attention in particular to one comment made about 5 mins into the second video. Germany went from no wind energy to 25% of its electricity from wind (on an average month, 50% on a good one) in 8 years. 8 YEARS! We could have this cracked in two decades and we don’t need nuclear power to do it.

Hat tip to Quaderror san, who’s wonderful YouTube animations provided the inspiration for the scientist dude. Much more interesting than your average stick figure.  Thanks Dr Quad.

*Now with new and slightly improved versions*