On science blogs this week: No consensus

Have the wheels come off the sunspot cycle? Video games good for kids? Galileo was wrong? Plus art appreciation for the Mandelbrot set.

 

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HAVE THE WHEELS COME OFF THE SUNSPOT CYCLE? An item that might potentially have very large consequences for all living things got a bit of serious attention, but only a bit. Charlie Petit, a Knight Science Journalism Tracker, examined the latest on astronomical observations suggesting that the 11-year sunspot cycle is behaving abnormally. Sunspots should be increasing, but they're not. If that trend persists, one potential consequence is global cooling — or at least mitigation of the present warming trend.

The story, based on continuing work by astronomers at Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona, has popped up before, and Charlie gives us background and links. But other bloggers, mysteriously, didn't join in. He observes:

This is a legitimate news topic. A decent chance that the Sun will moderate its overall output (which overall has positive correlation with sunspot number despite intuition that proliferation of big cool dark spots ought to dim a star), and thus counteract to some small or large extent the current warming driven by fossil carbon burning, merits full public airing. It sure would complicate efforts to get the world's nations to drastically change their energy policies.

ARE VIDEO GAMES GOOD FOR KIDS? Not much blogging attention paid either to a review paper in Neuron examining the evidence, pro and con, that technology — especially video games — is doing bad things to children's brains. Odd, considering that the topic has generated much press in the past. Get a free PDF of the full-text Neuron review via this link.

Vaughanbell notes at Mind Hacks:

You'll notice a few things that are different from your usual article about the impact of technology: it is written by cognitive scientists who are actually involved in the research; it is published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal; it discusses the whole range of evidence; and it hasn't made any headlines.

One reason for the paper's low profile might be that, in summary, many of the findings go against cherished beliefs. One of mine is that action video games — i.e., shooters — cannot possibly be a Good Thing. Wrong. They have positive effects on attention and memory — although, points for my side, they seem also to increase aggression, and video games in general are bad for reading and writing.

With brilliant timing on the pro-shooter side, Current Biology has just published a paper showing that they enhance decision-making ability. Now we know what training our future captains of industry need. Permit me a biased shudder. Discussions by Andrew Moseman at 80beats and John Timmer's Nobel Intent at Ars Technica.

Says Christopher Mims of Mims's Bits at Technology Review:

The question, it turns out, is not whether or not technology is good for us: The question is, how does it fundamentally change our brains, in ways that can persist for years, for better and for worse.

HOW TO GET PEOPLE TO ACCEPT SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS. As I acknowledge above, it's not so easy to jettison biases, even in the face of contrary evidence. A press release this week from the National Science Foundation promoted a paper on the reasons scientific consensus fails to persuade people that, for example, global warming is real. (Not counting those pesky sunspots, of course.) The release prompted me to look for new blogging on science's inability to convince folks of the Truth. I couldn't find any — maybe because the conclusion, while it may be accurate enough, is a bit banal — and not useful for figuring out how to get people to change their minds.

The conclusion being that people are inclined to accept the authority of experts when it fits their own preconceived beliefs, and inclined not to when it doesn't.

Duh.

Here's the abstract of the paper; the full text will cost you 30 bucks. If, like me, you don't think it's likely to be worth it, here's the NSF press release summary.

The penultimate graf outlines the responsibilities of science writers.

"The problem won't be fixed by simply trying to increase trust in scientists or awareness of what scientists believe," added [one of the authors, George Washington University law professor Donald] Braman. "To make sure people form unbiased perceptions of what scientists are discovering, it is necessary to use communication strategies that reduce the likelihood that citizens of diverse values will find scientific findings threatening to their cultural commitments."

And just what communications strategies might those be? I'd love to know, and I'll bet you would too.

GALILEO WAS WRONG, BRING BACK PTOLEMY. Here's another example of prior beliefs getting in the way of accepting evidence. I went to Phil Plait's blog Bad Astronomy to see if he had anything to say about sunspots. Nope, or at least not recently. But I was entertained (and informed) by his earnest, straightforward, and near-polite explanations for why the folks are mistaken who believe that the Earth is fixed in space and the universe revolves around it. Yes, there are such people in 2010, known as Geocentrists, and apparently they are serious.

Nice try, Phil, but as we learned from the previous item, a waste of time and energy. If people want to believe that the Earth is the center of the universe — undeniably a psychologically attractive idea — they're not going to change their minds just because some prof tells them it would make it harder to send a space probe to Saturn.

ART APPRECIATION FOR THE MANDELBROT SET. At Wired Science Jess McNally has gathered photos of what he calls Earth's most stunning natural fractal patterns. (Plucking from the Web a definition more or less at random, a fractal is "a geometric pattern repeated at smaller and smaller scales to form irregular shapes and surfaces that do not look like the original pattern.")

Prepare to have your socks knocked off. Oh, that Romanesco broccoli, why have I never seen it at the supermarket?

September 17, 2010

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