----- Original Message ----- On Thu, 13 Sep 2007, Shearon, Tim wrote: > Mike- Your points are well taken. On the other hand, you said, " as > students of S.S. Stevens would know, we rely upon an internal scale of > magnitude which allows us to arbitrarily assign different degrees of > magnitude to different discrete entities which may embody different > qualitative properties." I think you can see that there are multiple > things mitigating press presenting it accurately. If they presented this > carefully and accurately they'd have neither time nor reader attention > for important issues like Britney's rear or who Nicole is dating. :)
One thing to remember is that the NY Times is considered the U.S.' "paper of record", which implies that one might be able to rely upon it as a somewhat reliable reporter of information, beliefs, and knowledge in popular terms (as well as psychological myths such as Freud's use of the iceberg metaphor). I can appreciate the difficulty of presenting some technical issues such as the Stevens' theory but newspapers *seem* to do a credible job when it comes to writing about topics in physics such as black hioles, virutal particles, "spooky action at a distance", and GUT (Grand Unified Theories). Then again, I'm not a physicist and it is possible that when physicists read these articles they too feel frustrated by the lack of detail and accuracy presented. > Seriously, I really do understand your frustration at the low level of > presentation (remembering that they aim this stuff at about a 10th > grader and they aren't talking about gifted 10th graders!). As someone > interested in the neurosciences I can also state that the information > presented in that piece is pretty shallow and reflects extremely poor > understanding of what was done. It would be nice if some talented scientist(s) started a blog called something like "Scientific Accuracy in the Popular Media" which reviews the scientific accuracy of science-related stories in the media. I assume that if they were still alive, Stephen Gould and/or Carl Sagan's might have done this. I wait for one of their intellectual offspring to come to this chore. I also hope that such a blogger would "agitate" for popular media to follow certain basic guidelines such as (a) NEVER use "some scientists say", instead give the name of specific researchers so that an interested reader (or our students) can check PsycInfo, PubMed, and other article databases for their publications so we can see what they wrote and actually said, (b) provide references to the research that is being presented, and (c) minimize quotes from researchers about research, issues, and other aspects of the topic being presented. This may make for popular writing but it also makes for bad scholarship. Let me expand upon the issue of using quotes because I've thought about this issue for a while and it seems to me to raise an important difference between the scientific and popular presentation of scientific information. If one relies upon an article or paper that has undergone peer review, I believe that at the very least some checking of the validity of statements has been made along with some evaluation of the accuracy and "coverage" (the limitations of how general results or conclusions are). However, if a reporter simply asks a researcher to provide a statement or an explanation, there is no guarantee that the reporter or anyone else in the process will be competent enough to catch errors or other problems. The statement will be published and researchers familiar with the material will wonder "did so-and-so really say that or did the reporter record the statement incorrectly?". One example of the last point involves a passage in a recent pop neuroscience book by a science writer that I'm reviewing. The author asks a neuroscientist about some aspects of working memory and the neuroscientist is quoted as saying to effect "the capacity of working memory is very limited, on the order of 4 to 7 BITS". Anyone with familiarity with George Miller's "Magical Number 7" paper will find this bizarre because in it Miller argued (a) bits in the information theory sense might describe some aspects of attentional/perceptual performance and (b) could NOT be used to measure the capacity of immediate (working/short-term) memroy because its capacity could be increased through recoding or chunking -- thus, working memory may contain 7 +/- 2 CHUNKS each of which can vary in the number of bits they contains. So, did the neuroscientist mis-speak? Did the science writer get it wrong? Did an editor change "chunks" to "bits" because the general reader might have more of an "intuitive feel" for bits instead of "chunks"? Or are there large parts of the scientific community that actually think that Miller said "bits" instead of chunks (the book's author thanks many scientists for contributing and reading parts of the book)? This point and others on cognitive psych in the book had me wondering who was doing the "fact checking" -- it also made me wonder about the accuracy of the reported neuroscience I was taking "on faith" simply because it's outside of my own area of expertese but which might represent as big a blunder as failing to distinguish chunks from bits. > But, all things considered, I have to > point out that I got more questions from that piece (both in and out of > class) than most things in the textbook. Most folks (especially > colleagues!) were surprised to find how much the article left out - > several have actually asked (gasp!) for further readings and the student > newspaper wants a piece in response with more detail (Plus I've received > two requests for comment from local papers- now talking to the press- > there is an minefield!). As I mention above, tell local papers (a) always identify who the researcher is who is being quoted and (b) allow the publication of references (APA style) for research that is referred to. > All in all it seems to have generated a bunch > of "teachable moments" - that has helped to temper my frustrations > somewhat. :) As to your points on correlation being confused with cause > etc., I couldn't agree more (or with how frustrating that is). One of > our emeritus professors is known to often use the phrase, "They are > grossly over trained and grossly under educated". Seems to ring true. > Not that this makes it much less frustrating! Let me ask one final question because I have recently started to be bothered by it. When an article get published in an APA journal or a Psychonomics Journal or other "traditional" journals, I have some sense of the degree of review an article receives before it is published. I am less clear on the review process for journals such as Nature Neuroscience but my specific question concerns the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" (PNAS) because my informal examination of cites to this journal seems to indicate that "high citation" articles in neuroscience have gotten published there. I recognize that this is supposed to be high prestege journal because it is published by the NAS. However, is my memory correct in that this is also a pay-per-page journal in which members of the NAS can publish and -- this is the critical point -- without undergoing peer review? A similar arrangement existed for the old psychonomics journal "Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society" where members of the society could publish short articles (1-4 pages) for free and without peer review (Disclosure: I published there, see Palij, Leveine, & Kahan 1984) but the publications were of "uneven quality" even though some well-known experimental psychologists had published there (one of my favoriates has Beth Loftus as a co-author and a title "How Deep Is the Meaning of Life" using a levels of processing manipulation).. So, does PNAS have peer review prior to publication or is it simply pay per page journal ? -Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
