Image of the ichthyosaur bones, showing the "alignment" of the disk-shaped vertebral centra that are alleged evidence of cephalopods arranging the bones.

Based on the abstract and the GSA press release, the argument seemed to be absurd. The only positive evidence presented before the talk occurred was the claim that the bones were arranged in a pattern that resembled the alternating pattern of suckers on the arm of a giant squid. No actual physical evidence of the squid itself—no soft parts, no tentacle hooks, not even the hard “pen” that holds up the back of the animal, or its horny beak. The only “evidence” given in the press release was the alternating pattern of the vertebral centra (the large disk-shaped bones in the photograph). According to the author, this was evidence of a conscious effort on the part of a large cephalopod to “arrange” them that way! There was no mention of the possibility that any string of disks connected in the vertebral column would settle in that pattern once the tissues rotted and fell away from the backbone. No suggestion that the entire premise of the talk was just speculation based on a “pattern” of bone distribution, or “seeing patterns” where there are none, known as pareidolia (such as seeing the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, or reading “patterns” in tea leaves and clouds). PZ Myers of Pharyngula.org immediately got very suspicious, as did Brian Switek, and so everyone was itching to find out if there was more to this story than just a press release.

Unfortunately, my own talk at GSA was scheduled in a different room just 15 minutes before the Kraken talk. As soon as I was done, I raced to the scheduled venue, but the crowd was already spilling out through the doorway and  into the hall, and the room was too packed to squeeze in. I stuck my head in and managed to catch part of the talk, and then after it was over, talked to my friends who were in the room. In essence, the talk was exactly the same stuff as the press release. Nothing new that was not already reported, and the author ran so long that there was no time to challenge him or ask any questions.  So the crowd immediately poured back out of the room again (pity the poor speaker who had to follow him!), shaking their heads and laughing at the stupidity of the whole thing. I’ve checked the program of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Las Vegas Nov.  2-5, and he’s not speaking there. That would be the proper place for a talk on ichthyosaurs where true experts could question him. As Switek put it: “I guess a giant, ichthyosaur-eating ‘kraken’ wasn’t enough. A squid with a stroke of artistic genius was clearly the simplest explanation for the formation of the bonebeds”. *facepalm*

The first question that came to mind was: how did this crap get on the program? The answer to that is easy: unless there are gross mistakes in the abstract or it clearly is defective, the program committee won’t reject it. They err on the side of the author, assuming that there might be more to the story than the minimum provided by an abstract. I’ve been on the Program Committee of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP)  for more than 11 years (5 years as Chair), and we tried to weed out the obviously defective abstracts, but there are enormous pressures to accept anything that isn’t grossly bad at first glance. We had to keep telling ourselves that “It’s just an abstract.” Anyone can get their 15 minutes on the program to present their ideas, unless they’re transparently bad or unscientific, but no one takes abstracts that seriously.

I never cite my own abstracts if the work has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and neither do most other people, because abstracts are not peer-reviewed science! For every 20 abstracts one might see at a professional meeting, probably only 1 or 2 will make it through peer review and be published. I have no expectation that this “Kraken” story will ever make it through peer review since it is so clearly absurd and unscientific. In my 35 years of attending professional meetings, we’ve all learned to take abstracts with a grain of salt, because we know that some are not up to snuff, and some are just excuses to get funding to attend and amount to nothing more than “what I did with my summer vacation.”  Then there is the person who games the system, submitting abstracts to several meetings per year but not showing up to defend any of them, so he looks like he’s doing research, but has sent nothing to peer review. Those of us with a long history in our fields know who these cheaters are, and know what to expect when we see their name on the program. When I was on th Program Committee of SVP, we used that knowledge to routinely reject those who had abused the system for so long.

That leads to the second question: who was this guy who got up and gave this bizarre talk? His name is Mark McMenamin, and he’s an invertebrate paleontologist (but not a specialist in cephalopods nor ichthyosaurs) teaching at Mt. Holyoke College. The minute I saw the press release, I suspected something like this was going to happen. McMenamin is well known for his, shall we say, bizarre ideas or unorthodox ways of thinking. Early in his career he made a name for himself by claiming to  have found the oldest multicellular fossil known (in Mexico), but that was quickly debunked. He published a book on his “Garden  of Ediacara” hypothesis about the earliest multicellular fossils, which was controversial but not impossible for these poorly preserved and  hard-to-understand  impressions in sandstone from 600 million years ago that have puzzled paleontologists for decades now. He wrote a book called “Hypersea” that is full of stuff that is either obvious or inconsequential. Those of us with a history in this profession know better than to take his wild ideas too seriously, but unfortunately most people do not have decades of experience as paleontologists and so were expecting something really important. P.Z. Myers noticed that McMenamin has endorsed the weird morphogenetic ideas of Stuart Pivar, and claims “that mariners of ancient Carthage made it to America long before Eriksson and Columbus, some time around 350 BC.” With a track record like that, most paleontologists who know Mark (and I do, pretty well) always take his claims with a grain of salt.

And that leads to the final point: if the entire idea was garbage, why the heck did it swallow up all the attention when there were literally thousands of abstracts at this meeting, 95% of which were solid science? As Brian Switek noted, this is the biggest scandal of all. The press loves  any wild and bizarre story that will capture the public’s imagination (“if it bleeds, it leads”) and they do not realize that a simple abstract is no evidence that the claim has passed any scientific scrutiny, let alone the gantlet of peer review. Frankly, I don’t think they care. As long as it grabs attention and has some semblance of legitimacy from being presented at a major professional meeting, they will run with the story. This story was recycled and repeated among all the high-profile science sites on the web, including LiveScience (then repeated verbatim on Fox and CBS news) to the HuffingtonPost, with no effort to get a dissenting or critical opinion, just straight dope from the author only. At least when Nature or Science writes a commentary on a recent science development, expert science reporters like Richard Kerr of Science know who the best minds in a given field are, and always check the critics before they run the article verbatim from the author. But you won’t find that level of balance or expertise in most science reporting today, especially on the web, since almost none of the “reporters” have any relevant science training, and even worse, there is no incentive to do more than parrot the press release and send the story to cyberspace. No time or incentive to dig further, to call other scientists for opinions, to get at least one critic to speak out. Any crap that makes it onto a scientific program gets reported as final truth, with no caveats.

As Switek put it:

But what really kills me about this story is the fact that no reporter went to get a second opinion. Each and every story appears to be based directly off the press release and uses quotes directly from that document. No outside expert was contacted for another opinion in any of the stories—standard practice in science journalism—and, frankly, all the stories reek of churnalism. What does it say about the general quality of science reporting when major news sources are content to repackage sensationalist, evidence-lite speculations and print them without further thought or comment? Whether you think the “kraken” story should have been reported or ignored due to lack of evidence, the fact remains that journalists should have actually done their jobs rather than act as facilitators of hype. You don’t have to be a paleontologist to realize that there’s something fishy about claims that there was a giant, ichthyosaur-crunching squid when there is no body to be seen.

The irony is that even if this study had passed through peer review and been published in a scientific journal, it’s only step one. There may be several years of scrutiny and testing by the scientific community before the idea reaches widespread acceptance, and a good percentage of the flashy ideas that make the “science news” feed turn out not to pass muster. Yet when the final paper comes out to debunk the idea, does the press report it? No! It’s not newsworthy to find out that a exciting flashy story was false, and that Humpty Dumpty didn’t survive his great fall.

You wonder why the public is so science illiterate? A good start would be to improve the scientific training and journalistic skills of “science reporters”!

On Monday, my family and I attended the annual Fourth of July Parade in Sunland-Tujunga, California. We go nearly every year, and most years they have virtually the same lineup: lots of classic antique cars and hot rods and ATVs and  motorcycles, plus flatbed trailers and marchers from church groups, anti-abortion groups, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, and Girl Scouts, the local Lions, Kiwanis, and other social clubs, horses from the upscale Shadow Hills neighborhood (where movie stars with horses, like Patrick Swayze, lived), fire trucks (including a lot of antique fire trucks and ambulances that come from a company in Sun Valley that supplies them for movie shoots), minor movie stars, TV actors, and local officials—and a small portion of the local high school band (because they’re out of school and mostly out of town by mid-summer).

This is not your typical small town Fourth of July parade, because Sunland-Tujunga is not your typical small town. Once a foothill retreat from the city with lots of “mountain cabins”, it is one of the last Anglo enclaves in the City of Los Angeles. Long ago it was settled mostly by former hippies and bikers, so it is “redneck-NASCAR” heaven (mostly lower-middle class whites). Nearly all of the rest of the City of Los Angeles (and its school district) is largely Latino and African-American now. The parade is very casually organized, and almost anyone can march if they want to. Often, it drags on for more than an hour with large gaps between units, because there isn’t much control over the marchers (except for LAPD putting traffic barricades along the parade route). It is very different from the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day in nearby Pasadena, which is a highly professional, tightly run, multi-million-dollar enterprise with floats that cost more than most houses, and worldwide TV coverage. By contrast, the Sunland-Tujunga parade’s “floats” were mostly flatbed trucks with simple decorations, or old hay wagons pulled by tractors. There were a few changes from previous years: the parade was not led off by the LAPD motorcycle drill team (must be the budget cuts), but instead by a guy wearing a kilt and a cow-skull bike helmet ornamented with flags playing bagpipes on a unicycle. Then there was first for any parade I’ve seen: a float (actually a pickup truck) displaying the “oldest rock in Sunland-Tujunga”—although even from the sidewalk I could tell it was Mt. Lowe Granodiorite (220 m.y. old), not the actual oldest rocks in our local mountains, the Mendenhall Gneiss (1.7 billion years old)(check out the video link above—they actually did a very clever parody of geology, and the rock has its own Facebook page). There were very few local politicians (Congress is still back in D.C. fighting over the budget and the debt ceiling, so they can’t come home). And it was not nearly as political as in previous years, with only a few cars and people touting the local GOP club.

This reminds me of all the publicity attached to a report last week from Harvard Kennedy School Assistant Professor David Yanagizawa-Drott and Bocconi University Assistant Professor Andreas Madestam, which claimed to show a strong correlation between attendance at Fourth of July parades and later political leanings. According to the authors:

“When done before the age of 18, it increases the likelihood of a youth identifying as a Republican by at least 2 percent.

* It raises the likelihood that parade watchers will vote for a Republican candidate by 4 percent.

* It boosts the likelihood a reveler will vote by about 1 percent and increases the chances they’ll make a political contribution by 3 percent.”

What’s more, the effect isn’t temporary. “Surprisingly, the estimates show that the impact on political preferences is permanent, with no evidence of the effects depreciating as individuals become older”. According to Yanagizawa-Drott and Madestam:

“The political right has been more successful in appropriating American patriotism and its symbols during the 20th century. Survey evidence also confirms that Republicans consider themselves more patriotic than Democrats. According to this interpretation, there is a political congruence between the patriotism promoted on Fourth of July and the values associated with the Republican party. Fourth of July celebrations in Republican dominated counties may thus be more politically biased events that socialize children into Republicans,”

I’ve read and reread the original paper carefully, and I’m still not sure what to make of it. It seems clear that the authors were trying to tease out the effect of family, education system, peers, and other variables as predictors of future political leanings. If that’s all they were asserting—a strong correlation between regular parade attendance and family political leanings—then their conclusion should be no surprise. But the report could be interpreted to suggest that somehow a kid attending the parade each year would be inoculated by conservatism just by being there! That’s what a lot of the media have asserted who were reporting the story, as if seeing the parade zaps each kid with conservative memes and forever controls their future political thought processes. As usual, the media (and possibly the original authors) have the cart before the horse. First of all, it is questionable whether there is any validity to their conclusion. It’s just a single study with a small sample, which might be biased by how it was collected—such information is hard to tease out of the original document. The study has not yet been replicated, let alone been cross-checked for all the other confounding variables.

But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the correlation is statistically supported. Once again, correlation does not prove causation. Seeing a Fourth of July parade probably does not mesmerize you with conservative political mojo. Rather, if you attend the parade each year, it is likely that you come from a more conservative family, and that will certainly be a strong predictor of a child’s future political ideas. As is typical of these instances of assuming causation from correlation, the real controlling factor is probably something that predicts a variety of different outcomes. Parade attendance almost certainly doesn’t cause conservative beliefs; the underlying cause is conservative familial beliefs which might predict both more frequent parade attendance and future beliefs of the child. Count on our modern media to fall into the trap of assuming correlation equals causation, and fail to ask the right questions, or to look past the superficial reporting on the original study.

A look at Fourth of July parades across the country suggests even more subtle factors at work. I’ve spent many of my Fourth of July holidays in small towns in Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Colorado, and eastern Oregon. There, the parades are largely about celebrating the community in such small towns, which don’t have many other major events to celebrate over the year (except the county fair in the late summer or fall).They certainly don’t have all the wonderful distractions of the beach, mountain skiing, major-league sports, concerts and theater, and other events that big cities like L.A. have on the Fourth. It is a bit surprising that for a city of over 7 million, there are only a few parades on the Fourth of July in Los Angeles. Instead, we have major parades for the Latino community at other times of the year, a major parade in South-Central on Martin Luther King Day, a  huge parade on Chinese New Year in Chinatown, and other parades that are tied to local ethnic holidays. Even among mostly Anglo communities, the more upscale neighborhood of La Canada, just east of Sunland-Tujunga (with a wealthier, better-educated demographic composed of JPL and Caltech employees), has a big Memorial Day parade, and there are equal numbers of local Democrat and Republican marchers. So the connection between parades and politics is much more complex, and reflects a lot of demographic and cultural factors besides patriotism on the Fourth.

As the demographics of the United States are changing, small towns across America are becoming even smaller, more Caucasian, more evangelical Christian, and older, which is the dominant demographic of the current GOP. The demographic groups that are growing fastest—Latinos and other minorities, young people who are more tolerant of gays and minorities, and the non-evangelicals—are the groups that turned out in large numbers to support Obama in 2008 (but stayed home in the 2010 elections). Lots of pundits and pollsters have pointed out that if the GOP ties its fate to the aging, evangelical Christian, conservative white part of the population, their base will shrink further and lose more elections, because that demographic group is vanishing as Latinos and other minorities, and more tolerant young people and non-evangelicals are quickly becoming the majority of voters.

Once, again, the media demonstrates its remarkable ability to misinterpret the evidence, and fails to look beyond the press release and ask the real questions that need asking. You could blame it on the tendency of the modern media to reduce everything to simplistic black-and-white sound bites. But it may also be influenced by the likelihood that few reporters or pundits know anything about statistics or social science, or how to dissect such reports using the basic principles of skepticism and critical thinking. Just think if these same reporters had a little sign saying “Correlation does not prove causation” taped above their computers!

It was such a jaw-droppingly stupid piece of tabloid journalism that I was intrigued to look it up and see what was really behind the story. But the story on the Linked-In site is not much longer or detailed than the reporting on CNN. Many other media on the web picked up the same story and gave it the same superficial level of discussion. All the site did was a simple analysis of correlations between occupations and first names, based on their data set of Linked-In members of professionals who join the site for networking purposes (which skews the result right there—it’s not based on a random sample of names from census data or any large, rigorously collected data set). But is it true, as they imply, that the name that parents give their child somehow determines what kind of profession they might enter? Does a decision  most parents make before we are born lock us into certain types of jobs? Are we fated, like the boy named Sue in the Johnny Cash song, to follow a certain path because a parental choices?

No, of course, not! Sadly, not one of the media reporting the story bothered to dig any deeper, or ask any tougher questions about what this apparent correlation might mean. They made the tacit but false assumption that “correlation equal causation” without any real attempt to examine what might have caused the correlation in the first place. The first questions they should have asked is: how different is that frequency of first names compared to the frequency of popular boys’ or girls’ names for the cohort of people born at the same time as most CEOs today? It’s easy to go to the U.S. Census website, type in a year, and find out what the top 10, top 20, or top 100 most popular boys’ and girls’ names were for any given year. Let’s assume that your average CEO today is 55 (you can pick any age for CEOs, who might be expected to be in the late 40s to early 60s now). In 1956, the top 20 boys’ names were all the traditional short ones popular with the parents of the Baby Boomers: Michael, James, Robert, David, John, William, Richard, Mark, Charles, Steven, Charles, Joseph, and Gary make up the top 13 most popular names, and Peter, Fred, and Bruce are all in the top 40. The same goes for girls’ names, with traditional Biblical and Anglo-Saxon names dominating the list, as they do for boys: Mary, Debra, Linda, Deborah, Susan, Patricia, Karen, Cynthia, Donna, Barbara, Pamela, Nancy, and Sharon making up the top 13. Note that both Debra and Deborah were in the top 5 that year, and that Sally, Cynthia, and Carolyn all made the top 40. What would have been much more useful than just a list of the top 5 names would be the raw statistics to see how these names ranked in popularity, or whether if you looked at the top 20 names, you ‘d get a list nearly identical to the ones that the U.S. Census would have for that cohort. No such data are provided. If they had been, one could do a simple statistical analysis to determine whether the frequency of names on their survey is significantly different from a random sample of the most popular names at the time CEOs were born. Now that would have been a meaningful comparison, and if the null hypothesis were falsified (the list of CEO names is statistically distinct from a random sample of the most popular names at that time), then you would have something worth explaining and analyzing. As it stands in the Linked-In website, it’s a factoid without any real meaning, and no conclusions can be drawn from it whatsoever—except that the Linked-In people have no training in statistics or social science studies like this.

The site has some other quirks that reveal a lot about the sampling methodology. cultural biases, and very little about the meaning of name rankings. For example, the top names in the restaurant business were Thierry, Phillippe, and Laurent. Hmmmm… Do parents give their boys French-sounding names to turn them into chefs (as the website seems to imply)? OR is it due to the fact that the high-end restaurant business is dominated by French cuisine, so most chefs are French in cultural heritage? The most popular name in engineering is Rajesh. Do parents not from India pick that name to turn their son into an engineer, or could it be that there are a lot of people of south Asian origins in engineering? In athletics, the five most popular names are Ryan, Matt, Matthew, Jessica, and Jason. Given that athletes would tend to be in their 20s or 30s, wouldn’t you guess that these are among the most popular names among kids born in the 1970s and 1980s? Sure enough, that’s what the U.S. Census site shows.

And then there are real head-scratchers that raise a red flag and make me doubt that this data set has any validity at all. The site reports that the top names in sales are Chip, Todd, and Trey! What? I don’t think I’ve ever met a “Chip” in my life, and the only time I’ve heard of a “Trey” was the character played by Kyle MacLachlan on the Sex and the City HBO series, or South Park animator Trey Parker (whose real name is Randolph Severn Parker III, hence the nickname “Trey” or “third”). Those are really the most popular names in sales today? Sounds more like a suspicious data set to me.

The Thoughtful House agreed to the interviews because they figured they would get fair treatment from the likes of Matt. I’m interested to see what kind of a program NBC has put together on this very sensitive subject.

Depending on how this major media outlet writes the script, it could either be a major affirmation of what many within the science community already know, or it could increase the divide between anti-vax’ers and science.

Please, Matt… don’t go Jenny McCarthy on us. Don’t do the usual journalistic job of being “fair-and-balanced”. This is not a “he said, she said” issue. This is science. Do tell the world what the science supports.

“For 23 years, my show has presented thousands of topics that reflect the human experience, including doctors’ medical advice and personal health stories that have prompted conversations between our audience members and their health care providers. I trust the viewers, and I know that they are smart and discerning enough to seek out medical opinions to determine what may be best for them.”

Sorry, Oprah – wrong. She may indeed trust her viewers to be smart but her celebrity status, amplified by her frequent celebrity guests,  blinds many of them from making rational decisions about their health and well-being.  Our celebrity-obsessed culture influences many to accept all the medical quackery she promotes on her show, aided and abetted by way-past-their-prime celebrities and New Age cultist physicians. From ex-Playboy Centerfold Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vaccination campaign to 1970′s blonde bombshell Suzanne Somer’s promotion of “bioidenticals hormone” therapy and the regular appearance of “quantum fantasist” Deepak Chopra, Oprah has done more to misinform our fellow citizens about science, damage respect for science and science-based knowledge than all the Young Earth Creationist propagandists combined. Does Oprah not know how much damage she can do and hurt she can bring when she let someone so completely ignorant of chemistry and physiology as Suzanne Somers to come on to her show to promote her nonsense and exploit the scientific ignorance of her viewers. Ms Somers claims that in addition to taking over 60 vitamin pills a day she also injects her vagina herself with “natural” estrogen synthesized from plants. Ms Somers harped on the claim that estrogen synthesized from plants is natural (because it’s sold by “alternative” medicine websites?) but estrogen prescribed by board certified M.D.’s are not (because it’s sold by Big-Pharma?) So, female readers, – please do not inject anything into your vagina unless it’s done by a board certified gynecologist! And more importantly, please, please do not take medical advice about your reproductive system from anyone (including Oprah) who cannot even use the correct terminology to describe one of your most important reproductive organs. (It’s called the vagina – it’s not a bad word and it’s not V-jayjay!  Pul-leeeez!  Adult women sitting around giggling about their reproductive organs using made-up baby-talk or middle-school slang is not funny and promotes and celebrates ignorance.)

After Newsweek’s take down of the woo-mistress, who did you expect would come to her defense? No other lesser woo-miester than Dr Deepak Chopra who is a frequent guest on Oprah’s show. In a Huffingpost column, Dr. Chopra wrote in her defense: “And the fact that she has celebrity guests who have causes and crusades in the area of health, such as Jenny McCarthy or Suzanne Somers, is not the same as Oprah herself endorsing what they say.” No sh*t Sherlock! What kind of logic is that? For an audience of science-phobic and scientifically ignorant but celebrity-obsessed TV addicts who don’t know their vagina from their vulva; who think that “chi” is real; and who take Jenny McCarthy’s “keep toxins away from my child, don’t vaccinate” mantra to heart, (but ignore the fact that she injects herself at frequent intervals with botulism toxin!) having celebrity guests on her show to push ignorant superstitious nonsense is dangerous and detrimental to the general health and well-being of our population. Is it a wonder at all that areas with the lowest childhood vaccination rates are in suburbs where upper middle-class stay-at-home moms have the luxury to spend time watching the Oprah Show and have their minds poisoned by Ms McCarthy’s anti-vaccination message? (The most recent California Department of Health statistics listed Marin County – one of the richest counties in the country – with kindergartners non-medical immunization exemption rate at 6.3% while neighboring Solano county with blue-collar towns like Vallejo has an exemption rate of only 0.9%)

While the likes of Suzanne Somers and Jenny McCarthy, due to their lack of formal science education may be just ignorant blabber mouths, Dr. Deepak Chopra does not have that excuse. He has a real medical degree from a highly respectable university but yet he chose to ignore everything he learned in medical school and instead makes his millions giving medical advice conspicuous by the absence of science. Dr Chopra endorses, promotes and defends every form of alternative medicine as long as it is based on some ancient Eastern-Mystical tradition. (When he writes or talks, he sprinkles words like “quantum” and “energy field” liberally in meaningless context just to add an air of scientific authority.)  Consider this defense of acupuncture where Dr. Chopra writes in Huffington Post citing this latest study of acupuncture as “evidence” that the modality works: “In Seattle a recent study of 638 patients with chronic lower back pain were given either some sort of acupuncture or standard treatment with anti-inflammatory drugs and massage. On average, the acupuncture patients received twice as much benefit as those on standard treatment. The kicker is that some of the patients received fake acupuncture — they were pricked superficially with toothpicks — and received the same relief.” No, Deepak, are you really so dense as to not understand what the study showed about acupuncture? The study clearly demonstrated that “fake” or “sham” acupuncture, done with toothpicks or needles poked randomly without regards to locations of the mystical “chi” meridian lines works just as well as “real” acupuncture. Goofy charade with sharp objects (toothpicks?) poked randomly at body parts is not acupuncture by even the most lax definition of what acupuncture is and if it works just as well as acupuncture with real needles inserted at proper “chi” meridian line locations, can we not learn something – that perhaps “real” and “sham” acupuncture are the same thing? If there is no difference between “real” acupuncture and sham/fake acupuncture, where is the evidence that there is anything to support acupuncture other than the fact that it’s just a placebo? The awful truth about this acupuncture study is that it’s either the first nor the only, but one of many such studies done, which confirmed the same placebo effect outcome. There is no shame, and it’s not a crime to be ignorant, but it is stupid to continue to be ignorant when information and knowledge is handed to you or shoved in your face. It is highly irresponsible for someone with credentialed authority (like an M.D. and with license to practice medicine) to knowingly and deliberately disseminate wrong information about proven ineffective treatments and to actively promote ignorance and stupidity. Dr. Deepak Chopra seem to have an endless supply of drivel and never miss an opportunity to preach his nonsense when given an audience – which lately seem to be provided by Oprah and PBS pledge weeks.

Conferences are a brilliant way to bring people together in order to foster communication. Certainly, if you are attending a conference, you are most likely interested in the topics to be covered. But, there is always the session that you didn’t expect to be interesting that turns out to be thought-provoking. Not to mention the mixers where you most certainly bump into people of all types, and have conversations you could never expect. The environment (or, it might be the alcohol) pushes people out of their shells, making them more social than normal, more interested than normal, and allowing maximum information transfer to take place.

How can the conference vibe be transferred elsewhere? How can we get people out of their mental caves and interested in communication… or, even learning, dare I say it?

First, the environment needs to have ease of entry. People need to find what they are interested in easily. The minute search takes too long, people lose patience and move on to something else. The internet is a great place to foster mass communication and information transfer, and social and new media are getting to a point that the barrier to entry into any conversation topic is incredibly low.

Second, the content needs to be engaging. Just like college lectures, the less interesting a video, blog, or slide-show are, the less people connect to the material. People judge novel content just like they judge people… subconsciously. Whether they are aware of it or not, they have decided their level of interest within 2 seconds. If the approach to getting information across is not able to make a good first impression, the opportunity for engagement is already lost.

Third and finally, the environment needs to allow free exchange of ideas and responses. This is crucial to the basic idea of communication as communication can never be one-sided.

The social web is getting closer and closer to putting all of these pieces together, and I am constantly on the lookout for interesting projects that are on the verge of making science communication better. In my recent web jaunts I came across the Imagine Science Film Festival, which will take place in New York in October. I think this festival is starting in the right place.

The festival is organized by Imagine Science Films and sponsored by AAAS and Science Magazine. But, rather than just getting film-makers to submit films and holding a physical festival, the organizers have partnered with the well-known video sharing site, Vimeo. In doing so, they have enabled the submission process to become a social one. People can upload and comment on each others videos. And, the hope is that the films run the gamut from artistic to educational to fun. This brings together film-makers from all different backgrounds into one conversation about what science in film actually is or even what it can be.

Also, Vimeo is featuring a different video each week from the group of submissions, which has the effect of bringing people from outside the circle of science enthusiasts or interested film-makers into the conversation. The barrier to entry is low due to Vimeo’s involvement. Add to this the fact that the content is video, which can be quite engaging if done well. And, the forum allows for the exchange of ideas through the video format and comment system.

In all, this has all the pieces to enable the successful fostering of communication about science in a much broader forum than that offered by a conference setting.

Oh, and if you’d like to submit a video, the contest entry ends July 31. So, get on it.

From the Huffington Post:

I have also read that this flu outbreak is a massive government/pharmaceutical company conspiracy to sell more Tamiflu. Quite conveniently, Tamiflu is one of two antiviral therapies to which the virus is not resistant. Hence, Roche stands to make a fair bit of money from this flu scare.

The other even more entertaining theory is that a pharma company or research lab is behind the creation of the virus. For some reason, it is more difficult for the conspiracy theorists to believe that the virus could have emerged naturally than that… “it came from the lab” (should be read aloud with a spooky edge to the voice).

Learn some basic biology people.Viruses mutate and evolve very quickly. They can recombine with material from other similar viruses. In the case of Influenza A, there is not much separating the avian and the mammalian strains genetically. They mix and match their bits and pieces all the time.

Most of the time, it is of no consequence. The virus is in the wrong environment to be transmitted to a suitable host, the mutations aren’t quite virulent enough to cause a problem in human populations, they aren’t spread easily enough… any number of things can keep the virus from spreading.

However, every once in a while, the virus gets it all right. That’s what we worry about. That’s why the world’s health organizations respond seriously to even a mild threat.

The conspiracy theorists can postulate all they want about governmental influence, secret organizations, and even space aliens. But, it all comes down to parsimony. The simplest explanation is often right.

CNN wants emotions, theatrics, the stamping of feet, mano-a-mano anger, and outrage contests. This is a presidency defined by cable news food-fights and Maureen Dowd-style armchair psychoanalysis. Obama wants to “know what he’s talking about,” pick the best policy to achieve it, and explain it as calmly as he can to his country.

I’m curious to see how the contest turns out. Will Obama give in to the pressures of the press to deliver a sound-bite or some kind of emotional outburst that will keep the pundits busy for weeks? Or, will he continue on his tack of cool-headed, clear explanations that deal more with long-term planning than instant gratification?

Whether or not you agree with his budget requests, all outward appearances are that he and his advisers are thinking carefully about what steps to take that will have long-term beneficial effects. This doesn’t necessarily help the press out, who want a story with a whiz-bang headline right now.

PRESIDENT OBAMA THINKS ABOUT BUDGET

OBAMA PLANS FOR FUTURE

CRYSTAL BALL SALES PLUMMET WITH OBAMA IN OFFICE

(heh. That last one is for The Onion)

I am interested in how this will turn out, you see, because I think it has certain parallels to science and science reporting. Science has trouble getting media attention because it is a long-term endeavor. The whiz-bang headline of today might be wrong tomorrow. Journalists and editors know that papers need to sell, and sensational news is the way to get peoples’ attention and sell pages. But, constant contradiction will reduce the draw and foster mistrust.

“Don’t scientists know anything?”

Can media learn how report on ideas that might have future effects without resorting to conflict? Will they learn from Obama how to explain complicated concepts to the public? If a change in reporting news from out of Washington occurs, will science reporting benefit as well?

While that is probably true (non-crackpots see the world logically, and don’t understand how it could be any other way. Hence, no yelling.), the factor driving the publicity engine is controversy. The media loves controversy because it is usually fueled by emotion, and emotion gets peoples’ attention.

I just received a press release for Terence Witt’s book “Our Undiscovered Universe”, his treatise on the physics of the universe. The book and the ideas it contains have been reviewed elsewhere at length, and found to be lacking theoretical soundness. So, I will refrain from discussing the ideas here.

However, I think it is important to consider how different individuals within the media institution might react to a press release like the one I received.

This is [name redacted] and in a few weeks Terence Witt will be releasing his new book through Emerald Book Company.  In it he is disputing the Big Bang Theory and it is called Our Undiscovered Universe. This is an issue we all have a stake in.  Where do we come from?  Is it possible the universe was always here?  Let’s have a thought provoking discussion.    Mr. Witt would be happy to take the side that the universe always existed.

Terence Witt is a visiting scientist at Florida Institute of Technology and is work was recently publishing by Physics Essays.  He resides in Melbourne, Florida and is the former CEO of Witt Biomedical Corporation.

You can learn more at www.OurUndiscoveredUniverse.com.   I would be happy to set up a debate.

Thanks.

The first things I notice are the attempt to create personal controversy – we all have a stake in how the universe was formed, not just scientists! – and then to get me to agree to a debate or “thought provoking discussion.” Now, these tactics set off my alarm bells, and I immediately check his credibility to find that he is mostly self-published. He has yet to publish in Arxiv, and only white-papers are available on his websites. He does have a single paper related to his renegade ideas published in “Physics Essays” as of last year.

I wonder if an uninformed producer would see the same potential problems to booking Mr. Witt for an interview? Instead, they might see the controversial hook as appealing, and the idea of a debate as beneficial (it is always good to present all sides of a story).

The tactics used in the press release are one reason why pseudoscience continues to make such an impression through the media. Shouldn’t real-science publicity efforts use similar methods in order to be heard?

But, as I look at the way that science reaches the majority of the public, and how the public responds to it, I (and I’m not alone here) find that there is something wrong. People just aren’t getting excited about science.

And, they should be getting excited! There is so much amazing work being done that will change our lives to the point that our grandchildren will laugh when we tell them about our ipods, computers, planes, and trains.

So, why aren’t people interested? Where is the information falling by the wayside? How can the trend be changed?

I’d love to hear what you think.