On the alleged correlation between beer consumption and academic productivity.

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Here’s the link to the paper in Oikos.

Before we get into philosophical discussions, however, let’s look at what they actually showed.

Alleged paper/beer consumption correlation

The first thing to notice is that this analysis is over the range of 1-6 liters/capita/year. That’s 1 pint every 6 months up to once a month. Now, I don’t know any Czech ornithologists personally, but I do know several Germans, some Polish, and a couple Hungarians. Their spread of beer consumption rates among them is more like 1-6 liters/capita/week. Therefore, unless Czech ornithologists have a significantly different consumption from the regional average, one must assume sampling error is present among such a rarefied population. When you look at it, and I know this is what passes for great results among ecologists, but the correlation really ain’t all that great, is it?

Now, as we all know but often forget, mere correlation doesn’t imply causation, so it could be just as likely that low productivity causes beer drinking or that some third factor causes both low productivity and beer drinking. What could that putative third factor be? Could it be that people who tend to…ahhh…misrepresent themselves tend to have higher publication rates (until peer-review catches up with them, of course), and would also, on this near-teetotaler end of the drinking scale, tend to under-report their consumption? So all they’ve really done here is show that people who lie on surveys get more publications!

To actually make one serious comment, let me say that it does make sense that someone who has no life at all will spend more time in the lab, but since 99.9% of all researchers worldwide already fall off the right side of the chart, how useful is this information?

Why are we so impatient about new web technology?

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Look, I can use a web meme too! I R teh funnay!David Crotty from CSHL, who I’ve corresponded with before, has again published an obituary for Science Web 2.0. I think this is premature but typical of how the media cycle works, especially on the web where the youthful perspective predominates. I’ll get back to this, but permit me, on the occasion of Castro’s resignation, a brief philosophical detour.
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Scientists should learn to be communicators, says Chris Mooney

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Interesting talk yesterday, the main points of which were:

  • Science is complicated
  • You can’t expect the media to get it right
  • So, scientists should stop obsessing over tedious facts and learn to market, or “frame”, our work.

    • Nice sentiment, but facts are what we’re trained to do, and facts are all that many of us care about. If gene expression profiling suggests that one race is smarter than another, then that’s what they’re going to believe. The very literal, logical point of view is why they became scientists in the first place, and it’s a necessary ingredient of their success. If they cultivated their creative, expressive side they might not have been able to tolerate the grueling tedious hours in the lab that were necessary to achieve their discoveries. I think Chris missed this because of his English background, really, so it’s understandable, but do we really want to put the responsibility of communication on the non-socialized, Asperger’s-afflicted, born nerds?

    Science blogging is great, but one’s audience is self-selected, so you can teach someone who accepts global warming about climate models, and you can teach someone who accepts evolution about phylogenetics, but you don’t get to reach the undecided without the help of broadcast media. Media that exposes people to things they didn’t seek out.

    Of course, I’m comfortable with science blogs being a source of information for broadcast media science reporting, digesting the raw science into understandable issues, but I think that’ll be a pretty bitter pill for traditional media types to swallow.

    “Bloggers producing content that the media repeats?” “Inconceivable!”

    So it seems to me like the real question is whether the real story of science gets told better by science-ignorant reporters sensationalizing things or by unsocialized, slightly sociopathic scientists trying to learn to communicate their results better.

    Maybe there’s a niche for people with a science background who somehow retained communication skills? What’s the going rate for a “science ambassador” these days?

    Chris Mooney in New Orleans

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    The talk is “Science at High Speeds: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming”, at 5PM at the Lavin-Bernick Center on the Uptown campus and it’s part of the Focus the Nation event. Since Chris is a scienceblogger, I’d like to extend a warm blog-welcome to him from my adopted city.

    Check back here Wednesday for live coverage of the event. I haven’t heard of any plans for streaming this, and I’ve been wanting to play around with Qik(my review), so this seems like a good time. I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing, so I can’t vouch for the visual or auditory legibility of anything I stream, but check out my test recording and if you are watching and have questions, you can send me an IM on jabber/GTalk.

    The stream is here(FYI: this is service is alpha and may have network or other issues)
    My profile page is here, in case the embedded stream is showing something from someone else (like it is now).
    The parade is going to make getting from downtown a little difficult, so if you’re planning on being there in person, come early.

    It looks like I’ll be fairly limited in terms of battery life in what I can show, but I have a good feeling it will show up on his YouTube channel.

    Dissertations R hard

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    On the off chance anyone is wondering where I’ve been, I’ve been trying to finish up my dissertation in the extremely narrow gap between the Christmas holidays and Carnival in New Orleans. More content is going to be created in my Flickr photostream than here until approximately February 5.

    See in particular the tag “mardigras” and my friend Maitri’s photostream. How she manages to make it to absolutely every cool event that happens around New Orleans is amazing.