You can read it when you take a break from masturbating, Stormcrow.
Maybe stereotype threat is real but we haven't done enough as a society to spread the stereotype that girls are bad at math.
Maybe stereotype threat is real but we haven't done enough as a society to spread the stereotype that girls are bad at math.
Indeed. Heebie are you sure you're doing enough to incorporate gender based psychological sabotage into your teaching style?
"The next few steps of this proof are tricky...the girls might just want to take it on faith."
I think it was about 1993 when I realized that I didn't care about how something was proved and wouldn't remember the details anyway. Now I just remember what was proved. Saves me so much time.
"The next few steps of this proof are tricky...the girls might just want to take it on faith."
Hey girl, are you familiar with the work of Soren Kierkegaard?
Remember the day that everyone ran out of things to say?
I know I've encountered it before and used to know what it means, but: what does "d = " mean in psychology literature? Somehow it's being used to measure the size of the gender difference, but the paper doesn't define it, as far as I can tell.
I don't know. And I think I'm supposed to know.
Remember the day that everyone ran out of things to say?
The soccer match decapitation has rendered the internet speechless.
I only see it used for the Dubrin-Watson and I can't see how that would be what it means here.
What about α? Like on page 7 where it says students were given 13 SAT problems and has in parentheses (α = 0.87).
I'm guessing Cohen's d, which is basically just a standardized measure of difference.
15 not to 14.
α is Cronbach's alpha, a measure of consistency for scales and whatnot.
12: Yeah, you've got decapitation on one thread, acute suppurating epididymitis on another, and hard math on this one.
Social sciences must be maddening -- you think you have a result and it won't stay established. I suppose that happens in any field, but it's worse studying people.
Is it worse? I would have thought this is all just what you expect from statistics together with publication bias, regardless of the field. If you're going to find a positive effect 5% of the time even when it isn't real, and you only publish positive effects, then your literature could fill up with nonexistent effects pretty rapidly, no matter what you're studying.
If you're a social scientist and you read things like 18, it makes you significantly more likely to do bad science.
I hope you feel guilty, LB.
It is Cohen's d. That paper seems reasonably interesting in its conclusions, but it isn't very well written.
19: We need a social sciences journal of boring and obvious results.
18: Not so long ago, some guy was working on a research study and the person in charge wanted preliminary results based on partial data to discuss at a meeting (the study took four years or so was about halfway through follow-up at that point).
Among the preliminary findings: clinic X sucked something awful.
Among the attendees of the meeting: A person with managerial responsibility at clinic X.
Among some guy's thoughts: wishing he was more happy about the positive improvement produced than upset about how hard this made the final analysis.
19: yep, that's the real issue. It is fairly maddening, although it happily isn't universally the case that people in the social sciences do research that way.
22: it's fairly complicated in practice.
Well, to be honest, I don't know if it's worse, really. But one does get the impression that total about-faces happen more commonly in psych/social sciences than in sciences less dependent on studying people.
This goes back to an earlier conversation on why researchers don't spend more time replicating results. I mean, if the standard normal response to any interesting new result in any field was for anyone in the same field with any spare resources to try to either replicate it or shoot it down, there wouldn't be so much of this sort of thing. I know there are good reasons why that doesn't happen, but it'd be utopianly nice if it did.
I guess the real problem with 18 is the "you think you have a result" part. In the last ten years, we've seen lots of 2- and 3-sigma bumps that could have been new particles or new decays of known particles or other exotic physics. But we never thought we had a result because we knew there was enough data that these things were going to show up now and then, and sure enough, they disappeared as expected.
I mean, if the standard normal response to any interesting new result in any field was for anyone in the same field with any spare resources to try to either replicate it or shoot it down, there wouldn't be so much of this sort of thing.
That does happen a lot in medicine, but almost always with a slight variation as you can get money to apply it to a different population or something.
26.1: that isn't strictly true. Total about-faces happen more commonly in certain sub-fields of social science/psych than they do in, I don't know, high-temperature physics. Lots of sub-fields of social science and/or psych have been plugging along producing incremental, believable improvement for decades, but they tend not to have sexy results about higher-order social and cognitive behaviors that are both hard to operationalize and likely to produce small efffects.
I suspect that the social science results and reversals are more widely covered because they're easier to understand than something like biology, where results are also often difficult to reproduce, but harder to explain in easy-to-understand articles. There was/is a big argument going on involving how antibiotics work, for example where a large, prominent researcher's theories are being contradicted by some very arcane but lovely experiments. Or what about the arsenic-eating bacteria?
28: use bigger samples and/or chase much bigger effects, mostly. As an example of the latter, researchers who study gist representation in memory (you show people a bunch of words like "cold", "blizzard", "winter", "ice", "shovel", "flurry" and "freezing", and when you ask them later if they saw the word "snow" they usually say yes) don't really have to worry about rejecting the null hypothesis because the experiments works on everyone to a first approximation; you can do it to any random room of people during a presentation and it will obviously and evidently work.
32: yeah in fact I'm not sure it even makes sense for me to agree that there are more complete about-faces in social science than other sciences. It could be the case, but definitely something like social psychology just gets covered a lot more.
34: yeah in fact I'm not sure it even makes sense for me to agree that there are more complete about-faces in social science than other sciences.
Maybe you should do a study!
32: In most fields we don't consider it relevant whether the researcher is large or not. Small scientists can be pretty good too.
Or what about the arsenic-eating bacteria?
They don't need a separate bedroom and I think we've got some old mouse bait in the basement if they need to eat.
More importantly, that abstract takes the APA style of using numerals for numbers past the point of reason. ("Stereotype threat has been proposed as 1 potential explanation for the gender difference in standardized mathematics test performance among high-performing students.") It makes me feel like I'm reading The Southpaw.
I've got an APA publication manual and as I read it, those should have been written out. Of course, my manual is from 2001, so I don't know if it has changed.
36, Oops. I edited something originally saying he had a large body of work that was even more poorly phrased than what you see.
37, As long as your mouse bait has potassium, too, since the arsenic thing was totally and completely wrong. Other than that, you can request samples from the author!
I've been reading about PLOSOne, and I think it's the greatest journal ever, and will fix all of the world's problems. They referee papers, but only for the quality of the research, not the interestingness of the conclusion. So if you have a careful experiment with a null result, they print it.
38: It makes me feel like I'm reading The Southpaw.
I bought a trilogy of the three '50s Henry Wiggen books which I unexpectedly found to have been signed by author Mark Harris. Turns out he was a prof at Pitt in the late '70s and I guess signed up some copies (or at least 1 anyway). I do like the concept of TEGWAR, but wonder if it was original with him.
TEGWAR, but wonder if it was original with him.
Nope, Tolkein had already gotten there by the 30s, according to Wikipedia.
The Elvish New Grammar Without Any Rules.
|| Oh, by the way, I went to alameida's store on Saturday, and it's extremely cool. And business seems to be going well - she kept leaping up mid-conversation to do high-pressure furniture sales on hapless passing Narnians.
|>
The Elvish New Grammar Without Any Rules.
xox.
43, Yes. They wouldn't send out their poor defenseless bacteria without snacks. Plus, you have the requisite uni affiliation.
Some doctor here died from cyanide poisoning. Her husband, another research MD, had ordered a whole batch of cyanide on his research account. Police are investigating. It seems to be taking them a very long time.
The real issue with psychology, at least as it seemed to me from browsing a few psych journals, is that 95% of the studies seem to exclusively use 18-22 year old college students as their subjects.
More generally, I think poorly supported claims in the social sciences just make it into the public eye more often than similar weak claims in the physical sciences.
"When we doped graphene with compound X, we improved its conductivity by a factor of Y" isn't likely to get much general attention whether it's well supported or not, but a shoddy study concluding "Women drive like this, but men drive like that" has a good chance of making it into the New York Times.
You could mix the two approaches, except that no IRB will let you test the relative conductivity of men and women.
"When we doped graphene with compound X, we improved its conductivity by a factor of Y" isn't likely to get much general attention whether it's well supported or not...
I should amend this. If "X" is chocolate and "Y" is a elventybillion, than I suppose that study might make it into the New York Times.
Hey, ydnew, do you have a link to the arcane-but-lovely experiments? I'd missed this development.
Walt, I agree completely, but find that it's an uphill battle to convince coauthors to submit there. Which is annoying. We just had a manuscript rejected from a workmanlike traditional journal on grounds of insufficient novelty, and the objection really does seem to be that, when we used an established method in a previously uncharacterized environment, we found that the biology of the new environment was kind of similar to that of another environment. Not sexy, but I am certain we have colleagues who would find this result useful, and it's going to be tough to get it published. I get that the swanky journals will only publish discoveries of microbes that shoot lasers out their pili (or, you know, purport to have arsenic in their DNA), but it's really, really problematic to have that sort of attitude creep into well-respected but unswanky journals.
elventybillion
The Elvish new math without any rules?
52.1: eh? I mean, yes, it's a (known) issue, but for some parts of psychology it doesn't really matter (if 18-22 year old college students are all the same along some metric maybe that tells you what you want to know about brain and behavior) and for other parts of psychology getting away from that subject population (using subjects on mechanical turk, for instance, or doing cross-cultural studies) doesn't really solve your problem, which is one of insufficient power and/or publication bias and/or bad statistics.
55: I feel like in my neck of the science woods people will often deal with that by embedding a replication or near-replication in a paper with a few different experiments; does that not happen over there?
I once got a replication embedded in the rollers of the copy machine.
55, Summary here. Original citations linked in the summary. (Disclaimer: Not affiliated with any of these labs or projects.)
Back to the substance of the result, I am surprised -- I guess I'd gotten the impression that prior results on stereotype threat were the sort of thing Sifu mentions in 33: big enough effects that they were easy to see.
Women always want to discuss the substance of the result.
Women always want to discuss the substance of the result.
Women discuss social science articles like this, but men discuss social science articles like that.
I'm sure there's a study somewhere that proves this.
From some quick googling, I was wrong about that -- having a hard time finding an effect from stereotype threat isn't new to this paper.
Shame. It sounded so fixable.
Beyond publication bias, I think the social/human 'sciences' differ fundamentally from other sciences because the study of cultural phenomena basically does not lend itself the scientific method, and higher-order human characteristics are all social and cultural. The scientific method is reductionistic and analytic; that works well for some phenomena but not others. Trying to pull a single variable out of a system as complex as a thinking person embedded in their culture and history and figure out the impact of just that variable is almost impossible in a practical sense.
But I think social psychology in particular may have a bad publication bias problem. The whole stereotype threat thing never made sense as an explanation for achievement gaps of the scale and persistence we see. Of course, in fairness if you actually read the original stereotype threat papers they did not make the claim of explaining the actual gaps observed between e.g. racial groups, nor could they have given their methods.
Women discuss social science articles like this
Women social scientists stalk like this.
A one-time NYU professor, Mees sent Buiter more than 1,000 emails over a two-year period, authorities said. Some of them were laced with threats, while at least one was a hyper-sexual come-on. "What can I do to make it right? Shall I lick your b---s?" Mees allegedly wrote in one email. "Shall we adopt a child?" she wrote in another. At least one message was far darker. "Hope your plane falls out of the sky," Mees wrote to Buiter, court papers say.
61: I mean, I think the differences in math scores are already pretty small. So even if stereotype threat explained the bulk of that it would still not be a huge thing.
66:
Mees -- who once founded a female-empowerment organization called Women on Top -- was arrested at 11:45 p.m. Monday.
Ah, NY Daily News--leaving no low-hanging fruit unplucked.
65. Max Weber didn't see things this way, and he's still in print.
55 is pretty cool. I always get nervous when I read about these compounds and then look for eukaryotic activity, the adverse effects are basically always disturbing.
Shall I lick your b---s?
That word isn't usually censored, is it? Or wait: is there some other word that goes there? Am I not being imaginative enough?
Max Weber didn't see things this way, and he's still in print.
Weber was not using the 'scientific method' in the sense I was referring to in 65. Note that I was not implying that the social sciences should not be A) empirical, B) causal (make causal statements), C) mathematical.
55/60
Perhaps it's just hindsight, but the now-debunked idea seems pretty unlikely to me. Mechanisms of antibiotic activity are often much more complicated than the standard story of "shutting down one enzyme", but the idea that all antibiotics work by the same mechanism despite having different enzyme targets is the kind of just-so story that rarely turns out to be true.
I think you'd better write a paper on this spacetime anomaly.
78: Not as of 2046. Also, make a note to yourself to never, ever get a comb-over.
2046
Moby Hick is secretly Tony Leung?
How many bees are we talking about?
Fewer and fewer every year. The decline of bees has been on the news for a few years now.
Still, you'd have to be, like, wizard beelicker to lick them all.
How many licks to the collapse of a bee colony pop?
You laugh now, but when the bees are gone and the only way to get honey is to steal it from the bears yourself, then you'll be sorry.
75, the theory did get him many, many high profile papers (past many reviewers). I think the actual evidence was insufficient, and I suspect those in the field were pretty skeptical, but it still took about seven years for solid rebuttals to come out.
58: sometimes, but it's not super common. And it doesn't seem like an appropriate strategy here; the similarity is not in our methods but in the underlying biology of the two environments, and that similarity is interesting in itself. I think what we're seeing is the somewhat reactionary end of the SEQUENCE ALL THE THINGS euphoria that has gripped the field for much of the last decade.
ydnew, thanks for the link. Hadn't even heard about the ROS hypothesis, but I'm with F at 75.
I think the social/human 'sciences' differ fundamentally from other sciences because the study of cultural phenomena basically does not lend itself the scientific method, and higher-order human characteristics are all social and cultural. ... Trying to pull a single variable out of a system as complex as a thinking person embedded in their culture and history and figure out the impact of just that variable is almost impossible in a practical sense.
I was actually thinking about this very topic this weekend, when I read this book about "the lives of young women who struggle to negotiate the complexities of sexual desire and pleasure, and to make sense of their historically unique but contradictory constellation of opportunities and challenges" (shut up! this wasn't about prurient interest! it's a peer reviewed book from an academic press, and it was listed as a related title on the press's page for that "Doing the Best I Can" book, and the library had an ebook copy, which it didn't of DtBIC, and I hate you all!).
Anyway, the point is that, while it was reasonably interesting--basically, the argument is that many successful, high-educated young women convince themselves of the irreconcilability of satisfying both sexual desire and relational desire, in order to manage anxieties about vulnerability and tradeoffs, anxieties exacerbated by the combination of increased opportunities but persisting structural barriers (high-powered careers increasingly demanding 50+ hour weeks)--it was hard to know what to make of it, from an epistemological point of view. The author--a clinical psychologist who became a sociologist, or maybe vice-versa--interviewed 20 snowball-sampled young women, three times each, and highlighted some common themes that struck her as salient, given her background in therapy. But even aside from obvious sample-size-driven lacunae (all 9 of the case studies she highlights are described as being attractive, for example), it just seemed so impressionistic. (That said, one interesting recurrent theme was how many of her interview subjects identified strength with masculinity with hardness and emotional untouchability--as opposed to, say, resilience [I read this blog post recent, which had me thinking on that.] A bit sad.)
Maybe we can get Tia to show up to defend the evidentiary foundations of psychodynamic therapy.
[I read this blog post recent, which had me thinking on that.]
Possibly via this link . . .
this book about "the lives of young women who struggle to negotiate the complexities of sexual desire and pleasure, and to make sense of their historically unique but contradictory constellation of opportunities and challenges" (shut up! this wasn't about prurient interest! it's a peer reviewed book from an academic press...
Unless the conclusions are firmly grounded in evopsych speculations about how highly educated young women behaved on the veldt, I'm not buying it.
90: Cool, my library has that and I would definitely read it. Usually books like that have a bunch of surveys done and then also a few people followed closely so the writer can claim she's choosing characteristic samples to follow. Just having 20 (and even though she said in an interview I just read that 20 is split to be half white and half women of color, half queer and half straight, that seems to be drawing conclusions from even smaller demographic groupings or something. I dunno.
I don't think "O'Drinkys" actually exists, but there's a bar in downtown Detroit called "O'Blivion's" which is pretty much the perfect name for a bar in downtown Detroit.
Damn it. Also, there is no way that Trapnel wasn't reading "Hard to Get," the sexual lives of 20-something women academic study, with purely academic disinterest. Put your knowledge to good use, egghead!
Wasn't should be was, maybe, or something. Change the negative into a positive. Whatever, fuck it, what I'm saying to XT is get out of all of this methodology and into someone's panties.
I prefer 30-something women--you know, like the one I'm in a relationship with.
What, just because you're in a relationship you can't get out of methodology and into panties? What the fuck is wrong with people.
Getting into panties requires methodology itself, doesn't it?
Respected academics nearly came to blows over that very question in the Unterhöschenmethodenstreit of the turn of the last century.
101: One leg at a time, just like everyone else. Do we have to have the whole how-to-put-on-a-shirt discussion again?
Getting into panties requires methodology itself, doesn't it?
First one foot, then the other.
I suppose Schlüpfermethodenstreit would be better, actually.
But that's more of a method than a methodology.
One leg at a time, you say? Hot.
Not really sure what I was going for there. It looks a little creepy standing on its own.
Do we have to have the whole how-to-put-on-a-shirt discussion again?
This morning I actually attempted to put a shirt on one leg at a time.
It's not very nice to call nosflow's married lover a shirt.
110: It looks a little creepy standing on its own.
The eerie rites of Halfordismo.
||
So, I found out a bit more about my favorite local volunteer teaching organization. (The one that lost most of its students by trying to charge tuition.) Now their idea of charging tuition makes even less sense than it did before. Their expenses are quite a bit more than I'd guessed, and the grants that used to cover them were a lot bigger than I'd guessed. If those grants dried up this year, there's no way the money raised by charging tuition would even make a dent in the problem.
I really don't know the whole story, though... just lots of little bits and pieces. But watching these people is giving me culture shock. So this is what goes through the mind of a person who runs a small business!
|>
This story about the IQ cap on New London police officers seems somehow a propos.
90: Anyway, the point is that, while it was reasonably interesting--basically, the argument is that many successful, high-educated young women convince themselves of the irreconcilability of satisfying both sexual desire and relational desire, in order to manage anxieties about vulnerability and tradeoffs, anxieties exacerbated by the combination of increased opportunities but persisting structural barriers (high-powered careers increasingly demanding 50+ hour weeks)--it was hard to know what to make of it
I'll say. Reading the thread backwards, I had no idea where you were going with this.
That is, it sounds (from 90) like an awful book. Why are successful, highly-educated women ones whose work demands 50+ hour weeks? For example. There's an unexamined assumption about the meaning of "successful" there.
It is true that anxieties about vulnerability are an issue for many women. Too bad the issue was parsed in the way 90 outlines.
The book in 90 sounds suspect, as a way of getting at what's common to 20-something successful women yet distinctive of them, unless there are contrast cases --- non-successful young women, successful older women, successful young men, etc. Lichtenberg: "We must not seek to abstract from the busts of the great Greeks and Romans rules for the visible form of genius as long as we cannot contrast them with Greek blockheads."
Plus what 118 said.
Cosma! Long time no encounter. I'm writing a paper that uses Bayesian statistics. Should I feel bad about that?
You don't have to feel bad. Just become more likely to feel bad than you were before.
My collaborator keeps changing the phrase "posterior distribution" to "a posteriori distribution" in the draft, and so I guess is uncomfortable talking about butts.
Soon you can insist on an important caveat: "I like big buts and I cannot lie."
The book in 90 sounds suspect, as a way of getting at what's common to 20-something successful women yet distinctive of them
I don't think the author was trying to establish this, not exactly. 1- She explicitly frames her project as exploratory rather attempting to pinning down effect sizes, so if I were to be charitable I'd say she's trying to uncover plausible causal mechanisms, which may or may not be in play with particular individuals. I sort of doubt she'd like that language, though. 2- She defended her limiting the sample to college-educated women at one point with an argument along the lines of, "if even these women, who have the most opportunities, are feeling these anxieties, than so must those who aren't college educated, etc." But on the other hand, this argument sits uneasily with the way that she explicitly ties some of these anxieties to the rise in long-work-week expectations for educated professionals.
I'm not really defending the book. But it really made me think how difficult it is to establish any sort of causal effects with something whose observational data is so reliant on (time-intensive) interpretation or introspection.
"I like big butts with a high probabli-tie."
how difficult it is to establish any sort of causal effects with [...] observational data
As for Parsimon's comment, Why are successful, highly-educated women ones whose work demands 50+ hour weeks? For example. There's an unexamined assumption about the meaning of "successful" there.
She's drawing on this report, among other things, which groups together "Professional-managerial families, defined as families with incomes in the top 20 percent, in which at least one adult is a college graduate--13 percent of families in 2008"; men in this group are more likely to be working 50+ hr workweeks than they were in 1970. I haven't actually read the full report. But the stylized fact, so to speak, is that both men and women at the top of the income distribution would like to be working fewer hours, but can't negotiate this without "opting out" entirely, while folks at the bottom end of the income distribution desperately need more hours of work; they're typically working part-time if at all, and would like not to be. I didn't think that was particularly controversial, though obviously talking about things as "successful" or "high-powered" is pretty loaded.
Cosma! We thought you was a toad tetrapod!
128: Got it. "Successful" here means top 20%.
125: She defended her limiting the sample to college-educated women at one point with an argument along the lines of, "if even these women, who have the most opportunities, are feeling these anxieties, than so must those who aren't college educated, etc." But on the other hand, this argument sits uneasily with the way that she explicitly ties some of these anxieties to the rise in long-work-week expectations for educated professionals.
It definitely sits uneasily: the most I'd be willing to conclude is that women in the top 20% are more likely to experience these anxieties. That doesn't seem much of a surprise to me; think how many popular press columns geared to the top 20% of women have cautioned them to choose mates/husbands in a practical, efficient manner, as though conducting a job interview (rather than holding out for true love).
But this strays from your original reason for mentioning the book. I think it just irritated me a bit because it seemed to be generalizing from a demographic that's actually relatively unusual, which seems like a rookie mistake.
Someday, it will be revealed that Parsimon is actually Sheryl Sandberg, enjoying a totally fake persona on the internet.
131: What?? I was actually just thinking that it was probably best that I didn't include a slam against Sheryl Sandberg in the foregoing.
Now reading the Salon write-up on the book that Thorn linked in 93, since I was having trouble understanding what was "groundbreaking" about the book.
"if even these women, who have the most opportunities, are feeling these anxieties, than so must those who aren't college educated, etc."
Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but this seems wrong. Going to college gives you more opportunities, but it also raises your expectations. High expectations => anxiety.
Maybe we can get Tia to show up to defend the evidentiary foundations of psychodynamic therapy.
I'm busy telling stories about pooping myself.
High expectations => anxiety.
There is such a thing as goyim.
Huh. Per the Salon interview linked in 93, the author (um, Bell), says that her gay and bi- interviewees were less hung up:
There certainly were women that I spoke with who did manage to kind of express and feel the full range of their desires, for relationships, for sex, and for all kinds of things, and it was much more like my queer, lesbian and bisexual respondents had comfort with the range of desires than it was with my straight respondents.
Isn't that interesting! I wonder what would happen to her results if she interviewed people not in the top 20%? Suppose she interviewed a bunch of artists and folk singers, or massage therapists, or small business owners of, I dunno, hair salons or small town real estate agencies, or high school teachers or ?
My sarcastic voice is running away with me -- sorry -- but even the Salon interview spends most of its time referring to "how young women today feel" before Bell does say
I certainly can't make any claims about representativeness
I really don't know the whole story, though... just lots of little bits and pieces. But watching these people is giving me culture shock. So this is what goes through the mind of a person who runs a small business!
That, and how to make sure no employees work more than 30 hours a week.
121: Since I am dating a Bayesian, I'd prefer not to comment.
122: "a posteriori distribution" makes you sound like a noob.
125: I think even at a qualitative, exploratory level Lichtenberg's line applies. Saying "Successful 20-something women deal with practices relating to the transmission of genetic information like this" implies, pragmatically, that the "successful", "20-something" and "women" are all relevant; how do you know, if you can't contrast with other cases? (Cf. Wesley Salmon's example of Mr. Smith, who never became pregnant despite regular sex with Mrs. Smith, "because" he took Mrs. Smith's birth control pill every day.)
The important thing here is that Cosma's appreciation of Lichtenberg shows him to be a man of great wisdom and refined sensibility.
I am tangentially reminded of a definition of Big Data* I recently came across: The persistent belief that within any sufficiently large pile of horseshit lurks a pony.
*Or "biiig da-ta, big bad data" as I always hear it.
Hopefully I can take "a posteriori" out of the paper before we submit it anywhere, but god I hope that's the biggest thing on the "makes us sound like noobs" scale. It's unlikely to be.
It's veering toward "arrogant theoretical physicists swoop in and claim to have original insight in field they don't understand" and I hope we're not higher on the Dunning-Kruger scale than I think we are.
This isn't the dinosaur thing, is it?
I mean, I'm kind of exaggerating. We're being more careful and rigorous than any number of other papers that have been published on closely related ideas. Still, there's always room for someone to be like "oh, but if you look at the data on such-and-such an isotope, you can tell that four of the craters you included are definitively from other causes" or something.
Which is why I'm trying as much as possible to phrase the paper like "here's an idea and a sketch of how you'd go about testing it, but this needs to be refined with better data and more detailed modeling by experts in several subfields to be trustworthy", while my colleague tries to make it flashier and tell the media about it.
You've already shown this to a bunch of experts in the relevant subfields, right?
Indeed, he's discussed it with a whole bunch of opinionated dinosaurologists in this very forum.
148: I'm trying as much as possible to phrase the paper like "here's an idea and a sketch of how you'd go about testing it, but this needs to be refined with better data and more detailed modeling by experts in several subfields to be trustworthy", while my colleague tries to make it flashier and tell the media about it.
How's that working out for you two? I've generally only been around the margins of formal scientific papers but several times I've seen them be the final straw that blows up working relationships. Eh, probably routine in the academic world.
Wait, are you really writing about dinosaurs, or is "dinosaur" one of our cute little codes like "wolf cub" and "puppy"?
"Dinosaur" is code for "bird."
I mean, okay, operationally, and going overboard with the Googleproofing, the paper is basically: as we've argued before certain models of da/rk mat/ter could predict the existence of a thin, dense di/sk or da/rk mat/ter in our gala/xy sitting inside the usual di/sk of sta/rs and whatnot. Because our so/lar sys/tem oscil/lates up and down around the pla/ne of the ga/lactic d/isk, every thirty mil/lion ye/ars or so it could pass through this den/se layer of da/rk mat/ter. And there's a chance that the grav/itat/ional inf/luen/ce of the da/rk di/sk (or some clouds within it, or something) could per/turb the O/ort Cl/oud, stirring up a show/er of com/ets. So may/be that is an important influence on the pattern of imp/act crat/ers over time. So we put a pri/or on the space of mo/dels of sol/ar motion given cons/traints on a da/rk di/sk, sample it, and compute a likeli/hood based on the overlap in time of the densit/y of mat/ter near the Sun versus the time the impa/ct crat/ers are dated to. There's hardly enough data for a stati/stical state/ment to give evidence for the model, but the post/erior distri/ibu/tion prefers da/rk dis/ks of a certain range of de/nsi/ties and thick/nes/ses, and that gives a target for other astro/nom/ical observations that could confirm or rule out that such a di/sk exists.
That's the fairly sober version that I still think will have a lot of people thinking I'm a crackpot because it isn't sort of a standard, community-sanctioned thing to be spending my time on.
The flashy version that will be told to journalists and possibly be the title of the paper is more like: "Di/d Da/rk Mat/ter Ki/ll the D/ino/s/aurs?" with a strong implication of "yes" even though, amusingly, none of the fits that look good have the da/rk de/nsi/ty peaking 65 mil/lio/n ye/ar/s ago. (But I guess "Di/d Da/rk Mat/ter In/flue/nce the Eo/ce/ne-O/ligo/cene Exti/nc/tion E/vent?" wouldn't produce headlines.)
'or' should be 'of' somewhere early in 155
Haven't there been earlier theories about some big fucking r/ock we can't see knocking smaller but still big enough to hurt r/ocks toward E/arth?
155: have you sold the movie rights yet? K-sky could do the script.
155: that's way less crackpotty than I was hoping.
160: I was sort of hoping f/or "dinosaurs were killed by a comet that w/as actually the dark-matter poop o/f a space giant running a marathon." Science sucks.
158: Do you mean Ne/me/sis? If so, yes, but I think the consensus is that we should have seen it by now and its orbit wouldn't have been stable anyway.
163: Probably. I read about it in a Dave Barry column.
I guess it's already too late to prevent any thread here from containing both "da/rk mat/ter" and "din/o/saurs" in ungoogleproofed form, and none of these threads will ever get to the top of the Google search results for those two terms together, so I don't know why I'm us/ing th/e slas/hes so m/uch.
Haven't there been earlier theories about some big fucking r/ock we can't see knocking smaller but still big enough to hurt r/ocks toward E/arth?
Verhoeven, P. (1997). Starship Troopers
Dinosaur slash dark matter fanfiction.
The theropod turned away from his soup suddenly. Was that a noise at a door? He couldn't see anything, just his safe, comfortable kitchen, shadowed now in the late afternoon. But was one of those shadows... moving? Coming closer? Now... carressing... now... knowing him.
Was that a noise at a door?
Theropods have lots of doors.
"Di/d Da/rk Mat/ter In/flue/nce the Eo/ce/ne-O/ligo/cene Exti/nc/tion E/vent?"
I know very little about that event - read one book by Donald Prothero - but I got the impression it was quite different from the K/T extinction, much slower to the extent that you can track the climate change, and a different extinction pattern. I suppose that could reflect a different pattern of rocks actually hitting, which would be just dumb luck. What's your take on that?
There are multiple imp/act cra/ters around that time (none as big as Chicxulub) and evidence that the amount of dust in the solar system was heightened over a 2.5 million year period (see papers by K/en Far/ley), so there was definitely an extended interval of extraterrestrial events that could have had an effect.
So, assuming impact as a major factor in either case, the differences would reflect a different pattern of impacts (which would be close to random)?
Could be. Could also be that the Eocene was a com/et show/er and the K-T was just a single asteroid. (Although there's also the Boltysh crater at about the same time....)
I've gotten over my c/omet/asteroid fear. My new scientific apocalypse fear is the Yellowstone supervolcano.
Let me be the first to put forth the theory that the dinosaurs were driven to extinction by stereotype threat.
There's another Far/ley paper saying the K-T event isn't associated with the same kind of generalized dustiness the late Eoc/ene was. There's also a bunch of literature on whether particular impacts are com/ets or ast/eroids but I'm not sure if there's a consensus and the geological details are beyond me.
Hey, so if the d/sk passes through the plane of the atmosphere every so often, and it makes things super dusty, and dustiness (per pinatubo) reduces sunlight and therefore temperatures, you have to assume that there's a pretty good chance d/ark m/atter will fix cl/imate ch/ange, yeah?
Switch that first sentence around. I blame Zardoz.
Let me be the first to suggest that geological events released new sources of soluble ionic compounds and thus by increasing salinity of the oceans lead to mass extinctions.
179 emended: er, that first clause. I still blame Zardoz.
If you don't have red diapers, you're the worst father ever.
Glossary of Climatology - p.17
Evaporation - The physical process by which a liquid or solid is changed to a gas; the opposite of condensation.
Extratropical - In meteorology, the area north of the Tropic of Cancer and the area south of the Tropic of Capricorn. In other words, the area outside the tropics.
Farts, dinosaur - The quality of the air has improved since the end of Cretaceous due to the absence of dinosaur farts.
Forecasts - A weather forecast, or prediction, is an estimation based on special knowledge of the future state of the atmosphere with respect to temperature, precipitation, and wind. Weather forecasts are now routinely provided for up to 14 days in advance and outlooks for seasonal and longer timescales
Theropods have lots of doors.
Wherefore examine all the doors, both the revolving and the one-way, for the beginning of wisdom is transgressing the threshold.
The dust would be an indirect effect of comets and asteroids and whatnot in the solar system banging into each other and generally making a mess. I'm not sure if there was enough of it to affect the climate. I kinda suspect not, but maybe if I read that Far/ley paper more carefully.
Big data definition: you can't find the needle, so you get a Hadoop cluster that can handle 10 times as much hay.
The title of the post says AH Harvey, but the article says AD Harvey. Layers upon layers.
And I'm in the wrong thread. (Had)Oops.
Extratropical - In meteorology, the area north of the Tropic of Cancer and the area south of the Tropic of Capricorn. In other words, the area outside the tropics.
In mixology, the flavour of Lilt.
Recent debacle about Space Dinosaurs. Not crackpot per se but self-plagiarized and the press releases focused on the throwaway line "Such life forms could well be advanced version of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them."
I did get the book trapnel talks about in 90 on my library trip today, but first I'm reading Sista, Speak!, tracing the language use, literacy, education, and self-awareness abot all those things in the black American author, her sister (raised by paternal grandparents), their mother, their aunt, and their grandmother, all of whom have different educational backgrounds determined in part by the state of black or integrated schools and what job expectations were for black women of their classes as they were growing up. This seems like a perfect way to write a book through the lens of a small sample and I have no problem with the book being set up this way and look forward to reading the rest of it.