7 Warning Signs of Bogus Science

Physicist Robert Park wrote The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science for the Chronicle of Higher Ed a few years ago. This is an interesting article. A few main points:

1. It is hard for regular people (non-scientists) to tell the difference between junk science and real science.

2. Yet, regular people are increasingly called upon to do exactly that. This can take many forms, such as voting intelligently on important issues (such as funding new programs), or judges who have new responsibilities of directing juries about how to respond to junk science claims from "expert testimony" in the witness chair.

3. There are 7 ways that we can usually tell junk science from real science:

• The discoverer usually pitches the claim directly to the media
• The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work
• The scientific effect involved is at the very limit of detection
• Evidence for a discovery is anedotal
• The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries
• The discoverer has worked in isolation
• The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation

Privacy Debacles

Following on the horrendous AOL leak of people's search data earlier this month, Wired News: Privacy Debacle Hall of Fame outlines the 10 worst technology privacy violations of all time:

10. Choicepoint
9. VA laptop theft
8. Cardsystems
7. hard drives sold to ebay
6. the Philip Agee CIA thing
5. Amy Boyer stalking & murder
4. CAPPS II airline data
3. COINTELPRO (FBI program)
2. AT&T/NSA phone call tapping
1. Creating the Social Security Number in the first place

Dare to be dumb

Dennis Jerz is one person who reads more blogs than I do, which is probably the key reason why I like his blog so much. Well, that and the fact that he is so interesting. :) He posted this nice bit on innovation from Columbia Journalism Review Weird Science: Why editors must dare to be dumb:

In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don't want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.

book chapter

I am pleased to relate that I had a chapter accepted for publication in the Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives. The title of it is "Researching FLOSS Quantitatively: Motives and Methods from the Field". 'FLOSS' here refers to Free, Libre, and Open Source Software. The abstract is as follows:

This chapter will explore the motivations and methods surrounding the collection, aggregation, distribution, and analysis of data from FLOSS (Free, Libre, and Open Source Software) projects. We will first discuss motives: why does software engineering research rely on metrics at all, and why do we need FLOSS metrics in particular? We will then study methods: what is the current state-of-the-art in FLOSS data collection? Finally, we note some possible future trends, and propose some general recommendations for measuring FLOSS quantitatively.