This was a very informative discussion of aspects of statistics, and one of the questions addressed was:
How often do false positive and false negative test results occur in medical screenings?
Screening for disease
Screening programmes test apparently healthy members of the population for serious medical issues in order to catch problems at an early stage when treatment offers the best prognosis.
Screening programmes can quickly test many people… (Image by Ahmad Ardity from Pixabay)
No tests are perfect, so tests will sometimes give misleading results – called false positives and false negatives.
a test result that is:
when an ideal perfect test would have shown positive
when an ideal perfect test would have shown negative
positive
is called a true positive
is called a false positive
negative
is called a false negative
is called a true negative
…but definitive diagnoses may require more sophisticated follow-up investigation (Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay)
Sometimes tests can be tuned to avoid many false negatives by tolerating a higher rate of false positive (or vice versa). This is similar to what happens in statistical hypothesis testing when the choice of 'confidence level' (the p {for probability} value used as a cut-off criterion for 'statistical significance') can be chosen according to whether it is more important to avoid false positives or to avoid false negatives.
Choice of confidence level reflects a balance between admitting false positives (due to chance events) and false negatives (where real effects are not distinguished from chance events). After, Taber, 2019, Fig. 7.
The notion of 'beyond reasonable doubt' used in criminal trials can be understood as based on the principle that it is better that some guilty perpetrators are not convicted at trial than to risk miscarriages of justice where innocent people may lose their liberty (or indeed in some jurisdictions, perhaps their lives). That is, it is better to have false negatives than false positives in criminal convictions.
In medical screening programmes, it is common to have an initial test which might give quite a few positive results (but hopefully not produce many false negatives, where a person with a disease appears to be clear according to the test), even though most of the positive results will prove to be false alarms (false positives) when followed up by a more sophisticated test that it is impractical or too expensive to use for mass screening.
The bias towards false positives built into some medical screening trials means that a person should not be too despondent at getting a positive result in the initial screen. Dr Yates worked through one example to show that based on the rates of false positives on certain screening tests, a person called for regular screenings over a number of years was actually more likely than not to get at least one positive screening result – but still unlikely to be unlucky enough to have the disease.
A teaching analogy
What I most liked was the use of an analogy to compare the logic of the screening process with a familiar everyday situation. Teaching can be seen as a process of making the unfamiliar familiar, and teachers often do this by comparing the unfamiliar they are charged with teaching about with something already familiar to the their students. That is only a starting point for supporting a developing understanding of the new concept or phenomenon, but it often is very useful in making abstract new ideas seem less threatening or inaccessible.
One common way of making the unfamiliar familiar is through analogy: showing that what is new has a familiar conceptual structure – mapping onto a set of ideas already understood.
Scientists charged with giving talks to a public audience as part of 'public communication' of science ('outreach') or attempts to improve 'public understanding' of science also have the job of making the unfamiliar familiar and may also use teaching analogies – as Dr Yates did here:
"I would make the analogy to screenings with a job interview. So, when a company wants to hire someone for a job, they send out an advert, and people send in their c.v.s. And the company can read those c.v.s quickly and make a shortlist. And that's a really cheap way, just as the first screen is a really cheap way of identifying people, who might be suitable for the job, people who might have breast cancer. And then for the job interview you call people in and you interview them and you throw 'assessment centres' at them, you do tests which are too expensive to do to the whole population at large to identify someone good for the job, but you can do it to this smaller population. And in the same way, with the screen we invite people in and we throw more expensive, more accurate tests at them to give them a diagnosis. And the point is, just because you would get invited to an interview for a job you had applied for, you wouldn't assume that you had got the job, right? So, in the same way, just because you get invited for further tests after a screen, you shouldn't assume you have the disease that is being screened for. You should wait and go to the follow-up test and see what that follow-up test says."
Dr Kit Yates explaining the logic of screening programmes
Based on an analogy used by Dr Kit Yates
This seemed a well-considered analogue, one that would be very accessible to most people in the audience. It is a common experience to have applied for jobs: perhaps sometimes not being shortlisted; sometimes called in for interview but not appointed; and sometimes being offered the job. 2
The explanations flowed nicely between the target concept (screening) and the analogue (shortlisting) – as can be seen in the tabulated version below.
"I would make the analogy to screenings
with a job interview.
So, when a company wants to hire someone for a job, they send out an advert, and people send in their c.v.s.
And the company can read those c.v.s quickly and make a shortlist.
And that's a really cheap way,
just as the first screen is a really cheap way of identifying people,
who might be suitable for the job,
people who might have breast cancer.
And then for the job interview you call people in and you interview them and you throw 'assessment centres' at them, you do tests which are too expensive to do to the whole population at large to identify someone good for the job, but you can do it to this smaller population.
And in the same way, with the screen we invite people in and we throw more expensive, more accurate tests at them to give them a diagnosis.
And the point is, just because you would get invited to an interview for a job you had applied for, you wouldn't assume that you had got the job, right?
So, in the same way, just because you get invited for further tests after a screen, you shouldn't assume you have the disease that is being screened for.
You should wait and go to the follow-up test and see what that follow-up test says."
An effective teaching analogy needs to have an analogue that is sufficiently familiar for an audience to appreciate its conceptual structure – and that structure must fit well when mapped across to the target concept. 'Medical screening is like job shortlisting' seems to work well on both these criteria.
1: "If you see a newspaper headline with a big, bold statistic, how do you know that you can trust it? How often do false positive and false negative test results occur in medical screenings? And how do you safely bet whether or not 2 people in any room will share a birthday? This month we hear from Kit Yates about the maths of medicine, crime and the media, exploring real-world data from his book, 'The Maths of Life and Death'. This talk was recorded from our theatre at the Royal Institution, on 21 January 2020." https://soundcloud.com/royal-institution/maths-trust
2. It might be suggested that this process reflects a middle class /professional/white collar employment experiences, whereas for many jobs, such as much shop or factory work, an employer is likely to employ the first apparently suitable candidate that applies, rather than using a slower and more expensive two stage process. This is so, but the situation of short-listing is still generally familiar through story lines in fiction, such as in television dramas.
Is your shampoo of natural, unnatural, or supernatural origin?
Keith S. Taber
It seems that some of the ingredients of a well-known brand of hair care products are not of natural origin (Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay)
A well know brand of hair products is being advertised on television with an explicit claim that the shampoo is 94% of natural origin. Clearly there is also an implicit claim here about the other 6%! This dubious claim does not seem to be a slip of the tongue, as similar references can be found in product details on line (including the examples below). The science teacher in me knew that it was this kind of nonsense which supports common misconceptions about 'natural' being inherently good, and there being a clear distinction between materials that are 'natural', and those that are not.
Shampoos from brands other than Herbal Essences are 100% of natural origin.
The other evening I was watching television, and there was a shampoo being advertised, and although I was not paying attention I thought I heard the claim that the shampoo contained products of 94% natural origin. Had I misheard – a quick 'rewind' suggested not.
My next assumption was that this was sloppy language being used by some advertising copywriter, and that the manufacturer who commissioned the commercial simply had not noticed the slip. So I had a look on line.1 It seems that the brand concerned, Herbal Essences, has a habit or topping up its products with material that is not of natural origin. The company claims it is using at least 90% materials of natural original in its latest products (see the examples below), and this is apparently seen as a positive point to stress in its marketing.
But this is just nonsense. If the shampoo was fabricated using 94% products of natural original, then 6% was not of natural origin. This leaves me to wonder where the rest originates. A shampoo, any shampoo, is 100% of natural origin.
Natural products chemistry
In chemistry there is a common term natural products which tends to be used for materials extracted from living organisms – one can extract vitamin C from oranges, and insulin for diabetics used to be extracted from pancreases from farm animals (although now it is produced by the activities of bacteria or yeast). In that sense salt (produced by evaporating sea water) and chalk (deriving from the shells debris from long dead sea organisms) are not natural products. But like everything else in the material world, salt and chalk are still of natural origin.
So what is a hair product which is not of natural origin, or which is only partially of natural origin? It seems there are two obvious contrasts to natural, which are 'unnatural' and 'supernatural'. Presumably the company was not suggesting it used ingredients of supernatural origin?
Do Herbal Essences employ a specialist formulation technologist to prepare the shampoo ingredients that are not of natural origin? (Image by pendleburyannette from Pixabay)
What makes something unnatural?
Assuming Herbal Essences products do not include material of supernatural origin, the other option would seem to be material of unnatural origin. But what makes a material unnatural.
At various times, in various cultural contexts, the divine right of kings, feudalism and slavery will have been seen as perfectly natural, as well the subservience of women to men. Certain sexual acts that are now widely (if not universally) considered part of the normal range of human behaviours have at various times in different societies been considered unnatural – indeed so unnatural that those found to have 'committed' them might be put to death.
Given that the question of 'what is human nature?' is not settled (didn't Immanuel Kant think this was the core task for philosophy?) the approach that is sometimes taken is to look instead to 'nature' herself (for nature is a 'she' as has long been established – in part justifying her domination and mistreatment by 'man'). If it happens in nature, then that's natural.
"The sun rises everyday but animals occasionally give birth to monsters. 'Natural is what occurs always or almost always', says Aristotle, generalizing from this experience."
Paul Feyerabend
So, by this criterion, saving lives with blood transfusions is not natural, and nor is hip replacement surgery, nor using an incubator to stop premature babies dying. However, cancer is natural. Pushing your siblings out of the nest, or pecking them to death, to get a greater share of the food your parents bring home is perfectly natural. Depositing your eggs in another creature, and paralysing it so that it acts as a defenseless (but alive, and so fresh) source of food when your offspring hatch out inside it, is natural.
"We can save you if you wish, but only by unnatural acts" (Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay)
The man-made is not 'natural'
This depends upon demarcating humans as somehow outside of nature. This is difficult for a natural scientist to accept as 'ever since Darwin' (to borrow a phrase) it has been difficult to see how humans can be considered inherently distinct from the rest of the natural world, even if contingency has led to some obvious differences in terms of the development of culture. This argument then distinguishes the natural from the synthetic, the man-made.
A space rocket is not natural (in this sense) as it only exists because humans built it. Whether this is qualitatively different from technology elsewhere in nature – a badger's dam, a termite's nest, a honeycomb – rather than just a matter of a (admittedly impressive) difference of degree is an interesting question.
There are no doubt times where it is useful to distinguish between materials and objects that can be collected or extracted form 'natural' sources, and those that only exist because they have been synthesised by people – even if we do need to be wary of reading too much into the distinction. The Saturn V rocket did not exist 'in nature', and nor does a lemon coated in a wax so that it will stay 'fresh' longer – but one is the product of considerably less processing than the other. 2
Fluorine compounds (fluorides) are added to drinking water in many places to help protect teeth, but in other places the water supply already (i.e., 'naturally') contains fluoride at much higher levels – indeed, sometimes high enough to be considered a medical risk. This both reminds us that what is natural is somewhat arbitrary, and that what is considered natural is not necessarily desirable.
Natural and natural origin
The Saturn V rocket was synthetic – it was not found 'as is', growing in a swamp or being ejected from a volcano ('You Only Live Twice' style). But the materials it was made from were all of natural origin, even if some of them may have been the result of considerable processing of naturally occurring materials.
Everything you see here is of natural origin (From 'You Only Live Twice', Eon Productions)
Any material thing in our world is of natural origin. Some materials are used much as found 'in nature', sometimes some cleaning or tidying is needed (think of natural diamonds being 'cut' to best reflect light), some purifying (separating compounds from crude oil fractions), some extracting (metal from ore), some synthesising (ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen)… The amount of processing may vary considerably, but everything material that goes into a manufactured product is ultimately of natural origin.
So Herbal Essences products are 100% of natural origin, just as are the products of all their competitors.
A vague distinction
Webpages advertising specific Herbal Essences product lines often simply report that they are of 9n% natural origin, as in the examples below (95%, 96%, 97%). However, I found a page where it was clarified that the 90+% of natural origin included "purified water and ingredient materials derived from a natural source and subjected to limited processing".
So Herbal Essences do not use natural ditch water, or natural swamp water, or even natural sea water in their products, but rather purified water. I am pleased – as I have used Herbal Essences products, and will likely do so again, and I would rather not use dirty water when I am seeking to clean my hair.
Water – easily sourced from nature, and used in hair products (Image by mac231 from Pixabay)
So, it seems that for Herbal Essences, being of natural origin actually means, natural materials found in a suitable form to be used directly, or ("natural derived") only needing a "limited" amount of processing. Limited processing is a good thing in 'green chemistry' terms (less waste, less energy needed) but it is both a vague notion (who is to decide what makes the processing 'limited', and how does a consumer know what Herbal Essences count as limited?), and of course it is simply a quite different concept to being of natural origin.
I guess the company wanted a way of saying they were basing their products on natural products (such as plant extracts) without being misleading by implying that they could simply go and collect all the component materials and use them without needing any further processing. These materials may be pressed, steamed, or separated and purified in other ways, but are not generally the outcomes of complex synthetic processes. I can see both why that would be attractive to consumers, and why it is not easy to get across in a simple catchy term.
Yet the claim that 94% of your hair product is of natural origin, when a moment's thought should lead to the consumer realising that actually all products are of 100% natural origin, is a claim that (unlike the missing 6% of your Herbal Essences brand shampoo), does not have any substance.
a "limited" amount of processing
is both a vague notion and simply a quite different concept to
being of natural origin.
Appendix: Some examples of products that are not completely of natural origin
95% natural origin
The Herbal EssencesCoconut Milk conditioner is, according to their website,
95% natural origin 73% purified water and 22% natural derived ingredients other 5% for a good usage experience & product stability.
"Fruit waxing is the process of covering fruits (and, in some cases, vegetables) with artificial [sic] waxing material. Natural [sic] wax is removed first, usually by washing, followed by a coating of a biological or petroleum derived wax. Potentially allergenic proteins (peanut, soy, dairy, wheat) may be combined with shellac."
The loneliness experiment, a.k.a. The BBC Loneliness Experiment was a study publicised through the BBC (British public service broadcaster), and in particular through it's radio programme All in the Mind, ("which covers psychology, neuroscience & mental health" according to presenter, Claudia Hammond's website.)1 It was launched back in February 2018 – pre-COVD.2
"All in the Mind: The Loneliness Experiment launches the world's largest ever survey of its kind on loneliness." https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09r6fvn
Claudia Hammond describes herself as an "award-winning broadcaster, author and psychology lecturer". In particular "She is Visiting Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Sussex" where according to the University of Sussex "the post has been specially created for Claudia, who studied applied psychology at the University in the 1990s", so she is very well qualified for her presenting role. (I think she is very good at this role: she has a good voice for the radio and manages to balance the dual role of being expert enough to exude authority, whilst knowing how to ask necessarily naive questions of guests on behalf of non-specialist listeners.)
Loneliness is a serious matter that affects many people, and is not be made light of. So this was a serious study, on an important topic – yet every time I heard this mentioned on the radio (and it was publicised a good deal at the time) I felt myself mentally (and sometimes physically) cringe. Even without hearing precise details of the research design, I could tell this was simply not a good experiment.
This was not due to any great insight on my behalf, but was obvious from the way the work was being described. Readers may wish to see if they can spot for themselves what so irked me.
What is the problem with this research design?
This is how the BBC described the study at its launch:
The Loneliness Experiment, devised by Professor Pamela Qualter and colleagues, aims to look at causes and possible solutions to loneliness. And we want as many people as possible to fill in our survey, even if they've never felt lonely, because we want to know what stops people feeling lonely, so that more of us can feel connected.
This is how Prof. Hammond described the research in retrospect:
55,000 people from around the world chose to take part in the BBC Loneliness Experiment, making it the world's largest ever study on loneliness. Researchers from the universities of Manchester, Brunel and Exeter, led by Professor Pamela Qualter and funded by the Wellcome Trust, developed a questionnaire asking people what they thought loneliness was, when they felt lonely and for how long.
And this is how the work is described on the University of Manchester's pages:
The Loneliness Experiment was a study conducted by BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind….
The study asked respondents to give their opinions and record their experiences of loneliness and related topics, including friendship, relationships, and the use of technology – as well as recording lifestyle and background information. Respondents also engaged in a number of experiments.
The survey was developed by Professor Pamela Qualter, from The University of Manchester's Manchester Institute of Education (MIE), with colleagues from Brunel University London, and the University of Exeter. The work was funded by a grant from The Wellcome Trust.
These descriptions make it obvious that the The Loneliness Experiment was not an experiment. Experiment is a specific kind of research – a methodology where the researchers randomly assign participants randomly to conditions, intervene in the experimental condition,and take measurements to see what effect the intervention has by comparing with measurements in a control condition. True experiments are extremely difficult to do in the social sciences (Taber, 2019), and often quasi-experiments or natural experiments are used which do not meet all the expectations for true experiments. BUT, to be an experiment there has to be something that can be measured as changing over time in relation to specified different conditions.
Experiment involves intervention (Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
Experiment is not the only methodology used in research – there are also case studies, there is action research and grounded theory, for example – and non-experimental research may be entirely appropriate in certain situations, and can be of very high quality. One alternative methodology is the survey which collects data form a sample of a population at some particular time. Although surveys can be carried out in various ways (for example, through a series of observations), especially common in social science is the survey (a methodology) carried out by using participant self-responses to a questionnaire (a research instrument).
it is clear from the descriptions given by the BBC, Professor Hammond and the University of Manchester that the The Loneliness Experiment was not actually an experiment at all, but basically a survey (even if, tantalisingly, the Manchester website suggests that "Respondents also [sic] engaged in a number of experiments". )
The answer to the question 'when is an experiment not an experiment?' might simply be: when it is something other than an experiment
Completing a questionnaire (Image by Andreas Breitling from Pixabay)
What's in a name: does it really matter?
Okay, so I am being pedantic again.
But I do think this matters.
I think it is safe to assume that Prof. Hammond, Prof. Qualter and colleagues know the difference between an experiment and a survey. Presumably someone decided that labelling the research as the loneliness study or the loneliness survey would not be accessible (or perhaps not as impressive) to a general audience and so decided to incorrectly use the label experiment as if experiment was synonymous with study/research.
As a former research methods lecturer, that clearly irks as part of my job was to teach new researchers about key research concepts. But I would hope that people actually doing research or learning to do research are not going to be confused by this mislabelling.
But, as a former school science teacher, I know that there is widespread public misunderstanding of key nature of science terms such as theory and experiment. School age students do need to learn what is meant by the word experiment, and what counts as an experiment, and the BBC is being unhelpful in presenting research that is not experimental as an experiment – as this will simply reinforce common misconceptions of what the term experiment is actually used to denote in research .
So, in summary, I'll score The BBC Loneliness Experiment
2: It would have been interesting to repeat when so many people around the world were in 'lock-down'. (A comparison between pre-COVID and pandemic conditions might have offered something of a natural experiment.)
Bee-ware chemicals! (Images by PollyDot and Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay)
A recent episode of the BBC Inside science radio programme and podcast was entitled 'Bees and multiple pesticide exposure'. This discussed a very important issue that I have no wish to make light of. Researchers were looking at the stressors which might be harming honey bees, very important pollinators for many plants, and concluded that these likely act synergistically. That is a colony suffering from, say a drought and at the same time a mite infection, will show more damage that one would expect from simply adding the typical harm of each as if independent effects. Rather there are interactions.
This is hardly surprising, but is none-the-less a worrying finding.
Bees and multiple pesticide exposure episode of BBC Inside Science
However, my 'science teacher' radar honed in on an aspect of the language used to explain the research. The researcher interviewed was Dr Harry Siviter of the University of Texas at Austin. As part of his presentation he suggested that…
"Exposure to multiple pesticides is the norm, not the exception. So, for example a study in North America showed that the average number of chemicals found in a honey bee colony is six, with a high of 42. So, we know that bees are exposed to multiple chemicals…"
The phrase that stood out for me was "the average number of chemicals found in a honey bee colony is six" as clearly that did not make any sense scientifically. At least, not if the term 'chemical' was meant to refer to 'chemical substance'. I cannot claim to know just how many different substances would be found if one analysed honey bee colonies, but I am pretty confident the average would be orders of magnitude greater than six. An organism such as a bee (leaving aside for a moment the hive in which it lives) will be, chemically, 'made up' of a great many different proteins, amino acids, lipids, sugars, nuclei acids, and so forth.
"the average number of chemicals found in a honey bee colony is six"
From the context, I understood that Dr Siviter was not really talking about chemicals in general, but pesticides. So, I am (not for the first time) being a pedant in pointing out that technically he was wrong to suggest "the average number of chemicals found in a honey bee colony is six" as any suitably informed listener would have immediately, and unproblematically, understood what he meant by 'chemicals' in this context.
Yet, as a teacher, my instinct is to consider that programmes such as this, designed to inform the public about science, are not only heard by those who are already well-versed in the sciences. By its nature, BBC Inside Science is intended to engage with a broad audience, and has a role in educating the public about science. I also knew that this particular pedantic point linked to a genuine issue in science teaching.
A common alternative conception
The term chemical is not usually used in science discourse as such, but rather the term substance. Chemical substances are ubiquitous, although in most everyday contexts we do not come across many pure samples of single substances. Tap water is nearly all water, and table salt is usually about 99% sodium chloride, and sometimes metals such as copper or aluminium are used in more or less pure form. But these tend to be exceptions – most material entities we engage with are not pure substances ('chemicals'), rather being mixtures or even more complex (e.g., wood or carrot or hair).
In everyday life, the term chemical tends to be used more loosely – so, for example, household bleach may be considered 'a chemical'. More problematically 'chemicals' tends to be seen as hazardous, and often even poisonous. So, people object to there being 'chemicals' in their food – when of course their food comprises chemicals and we eat food to access those chemicals because we are also made up of a great many chemicals. Food with the chemicals removed is not food, or indeed, anything at all!
In everyday discourse 'chemical' is often associated with 'dangerous' (Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay)
So, science teachers not only have the problem that in everyday discourse the term 'chemical' does not map unproblematically on 'substance' (as it is often used also for mixtures), but even more seriously that chemicals are assumed to be bad, harmful, undesirable – something to be avoided and excluded. By contrast, the scientific perspective is that whilst some chemicals are potentially very harmful, others are essential for life. Therefore, it is unhelpful when science communicators (whether journalists, or scientists themselves) use the term 'chemical' to refer only to potentially undesirable chemicals (which even then tend to be undesirable only in certain contexts), such as pesticides which are found in, and may harm, pollinators.
I decided to dig into the background of the item.
The news item
I found a news item in 'the Conversation' that discuses the work.
Dr Siviter's Article in the Conversation
It began
"A doctor will always ask if you are on any other medication before they write you a prescription. This is because pharmaceuticals can interact with each other and potentially disrupt the treatment, or even harm the patient. But when agrochemicals, such as pesticides, are licensed for use on farms, little attention is paid to how they interact with one another, and so their environmental impact is underestimated."
Siviter, 2021
This seemed a very good point, made with an analogy that seemed very telling.
"We analysed data gathered in scientific studies from the last two decades and found that when bees are exposed to a combination of pesticides, parasites and poor nutrition, the negative impact of each is exacerbated. We say that the cumulative effect of all these things is synergistic, meaning that the number of bees that are killed is more than we would predict if the negative effects were merely added together."
Siviter, 2021
This seems important work, and raises an issue we should be concerned about. The language used here was subtly different from in the radio programme:
"Many agrochemicals, such as neonicotinoids, are systemic, meaning they accumulate in the environment over several months, and in some cases years. It is perhaps not surprising then that honeybee colonies across the US have on average six different agrochemicals present in their wax, with one hive contaminated with 39 [sic, not 42]. It's not just honeybees which are at risk, though: wild bees such as bumblebees are also routinely exposed."
Siviter, 2021
So, here it was not 'chemicals' that were being counted but 'agrochemicals' (and the average figure of 6 now referred not to the colony as a whole, but only to the beeswax.)
The meta-analysis
'Agrochemicals' was also the term used in the research paper in the prestigious journal Naturewhere the research had been first reported,
"we conducted a meta-analysis of 356 interaction effect sizes from 90 studies in which bees were exposed to combinations of agrochemicals, nutritional stressors and/or parasites."
Siviter, et al., 2021
A meta-analysis is a type of secondary research study which collects results form a range of related published studies and seeks to identify overall patterns.
The original research
Moreover, the primary study being referred to as the source of the dubious statistic (i.e., that "the average number of chemicals found in a honey bee colony is six") referred not to 'chemicals' but to "pesticides and metabolites" (that is, substances which would be produced as the bee's metabolism broke the pesticides down):
"We have found 121 different pesticides and metabolites within 887 wax, pollen, bee and associated hive samples….
Almost all comb and foundation wax samples (98%) were contaminated with up to 204 and 94 ppm [parts per million], respectively, of fluvalinate and coumaphos, and lower amounts of amitraz degradates and chlorothalonil, with an average of 6 pesticide detections per sample and a high of 39."
Mullin, et al., 2010
Translation and representation
Scientific research is reported in research journals primarily for the benefit of other researchers in the field, and so is formatted and framed accordingly – and this is reflected in the language used in primary sources.
A model of the flow of scientific to public knowledge (after McInerney et al., 2004)
It is important that science which impacts on us all, and is often funded from public funds, is accessible to the public. Science journalism, is an important conduit for the communication of science, and for his to be effective it has to be composed with non-experts in the public in mind.
It is perfectly sensible and desirable for a scientist engaging with a public audience to moderate technical language to make the account of research more accessible for a non-specialist audience. This kind of simplification is also a core process in developing science curriculum and teaching.
However, in the case of 'chemical' I would suggest scientists take care with using the term (and avoid it if possible), as science teachers commonly have to persuade students that chemicals are all around of us, are not always bad for us, are part of us, and are essential. That pesticides and their breakdown products have been so widely detected in bee colonies is a matter of concern, as pesticides are substances that are used because of their detrimental effects on many insects and other organisms that might damage crops.
Whilst that is science deserving public attention, there are a good many more than 6 chemicals in any bee colony, and – indeed – we would want most of them to be there.
References:
McInerney, C., Bird, N., & Nucci, M. (2004). The Flow of Scientific Knowledge from Lab to the Lay Public: The Case of Genetically Modified Food. Science Communication, 26(1), 44-74. doi:10.1177/1075547004267024 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1075547004267024
Mullin, C. A., Frazier, M., Frazier, J. L., Ashcraft, S., Simonds, R., vanEngelsdorp, D., & Pettis, J. S. (2010). High Levels of Miticides and Agrochemicals in North American Apiaries: Implications for Honey Bee Health. 5(3): e9754. PLoS ONE, 5(3), e9754. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009754 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0009754
Siviter, H., Bailes, E. J., Martin, C. D., Oliver, T. R., Koricheva, J., Leadbeater, E., & Brown, M. J. F. (2021). Agrochemicals interact synergistically to increase bee mortality. Nature. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03787-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03787-7
Imagine the banks were contracted to deliver school teaching…employing their digital assistants
Keith S. Taber
The teacher of the future – imagine the government invited bids to 'deliver' schooling most cost-effectively (only a matter of time?), and the banks undercut schools by proposing to use their existing intelligent technology. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Hi, I'm Rubis, your intelligent science teaching system. I can help with all sorts of everyday science learning queries. Let me know how I can help you today, or try asking me a short, simple question, such as "what is the formula of water?" and I'll be able to help.
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One moment please, I'm just typing. Please select an option:
The periodic table The respiratory system Electrical resistance Acids Food webs
I'm trying to find out why mercury is a liquid at room temperature?
Just to check, do you mean:
What is the difference between a moon and a comet? How dangerous is ascorbic acid? Why is love like oxygen? 1 How can an acrobat balance on a trapezoid of forces? When did retroviruses come back into vogue? None of these
None of these
I can help with all sorts of everyday science learning queries. Try asking me a short, simple question, such as "what are the three ways in which heating occurs" and I'll be able to help.
…
Science teaching, of course, is a process that requires a well-prepared, highly knowledgeable, teacher who is sensitive to, and responsive to, individual learners whose moods and motivations shift from day to day and who may at any time ask a question that the teacher would never have predicted in advance. That's part of the joy (and challenge) of teaching, which when done well is an interactive process where the teacher has to make myriad real-time, 'on-line', decisions in response to a complex and ever changing context. That is, it requires a good deal of 'intelligence'.
Machine intelligence?
One (questionable) sign of 'progress' in our increasingly digital society is how getting access to costumer service usually involves perusing 'contact us' webpages that are designed to send you initially to fixed pages with answers to to 'FAQs' (frequently asked questions); only then offering 'chat' with an 'intelligent' assistant – which seems programmed to only pass you on to a human once it has recognised you have been sent round the same flow-chart loop more than once.
As I have pointed out before, this would be fine if these 'chat-bots' were actually intelligent (even in the limited sense of a learning machine).
My faux 'dialogue' above may seem an unfair parody. (Not a genuine dialogue of course as there was no meeting of minds and taking on board of the other's perspective.)
But if my bank (RBS) were to be given a contract to provide digital teaching services, I imagine it would be just like that. If they could do better, then surely their chat-bot for bank customers would be more useful and less frustrating.
The bank initiated the conversation…
My bank sent me an email suggesting that I would soon no longer be able to make on-line purchases with my debit card unless I used a mobile 'phone (which currently I do not, and am not planning to anytime soon). "As part of new regulations, we'll often ask you to confirm that it's really you who's making the purchase when you use your card to pay for something online. To do this, you'll need to enter a six-digit one-time passcode (OTP) that we'll send to your mobile phone." Of course the message also told me "Please do not reply to this email as the address is not monitored". Hm, so how do I get in touch…
Cora offers "support" and "an instant answer"
Cora, the chat-bot, could make no sense of my inquiry.
Of course no chat-bot (or teacher) could be expected to always respond to any random enquiry. When I was teaching I would not have been able to instantly answer a question from outside my teaching subjects…
"Sir, in what year did Hannibal Lecter cross the Alps with Elephants?" 2
Here, however, I was not raising some obscure topic that the Bank could not have anticipated, as I was RESPONDING to a conversation initiated by the Bank!
Connected with Cora
Perhaps I am being unreasonable?
Hey there. I'm Cora, your digital assistant. Let me know how I can help you today, or select one of the top questions that I am being asked:
Please select an option:
Close an account Change my details Order paying in book Cancel transaction
Cora – 12:00
I choose to let 'her' know how she can help me today:
I have just had an email from the bank, suggesting in future I will need a mobile phone to make online purchases. At the present time I have no need for nor intention of getting a mobile phone.
Keith
I didn't quite catch that, but I'm learning all the time.
Here are some of the top things that I get asked.
Please select an option:
Coronavirus support Unknown transaction Cancel transaction Pending transaction Change account details Make a payment
More
Cora – 12:01
More
selected
One moment please, I'm just typing.
Please select an option:
Check a statement Help logging in Paying in a cheque Struggling financially Check account info Refunds/Retail disputes None of the above
Cora – 12:02
None of the above
selected
I can help with all sorts of everyday banking queries. Try asking me a short, simple question, such as "how do I order a new card?" and I'll be able to help.
Cora – 12:02
I have just had an email from the bank, suggesting in future I will need a mobile phone to make online purchases. At the present time I have no need for nor intention of getting a mobile phone. Please explain how I should proceed.
Keith
Please select an option:
Just to check, do you mean:
Benefit Insurance Claim Manage receipts in app Check my eligibility Suspicious email Remove an account holder None of these
Cora – 12.03
Just to check?
None of these
selected
I didn't quite catch that, but I'm learning all the time.
Here are some of the top things that I get asked.
Please select an option:
Coronavirus support Unknown transaction Cancel transaction Pending transaction Change account details Make a payment
more
Cora – 12.03
more
selected
Please select an option:
Check a statement Help logging in Paying in a cheque Struggling financially Check account info Refunds/Retail disputes None of the above
Cora -12.03
None of the above
Selected
I can help with all sorts of everyday banking queries. Try asking me a short, simple question, such as "how do I order a new card?" and I'll be able to help.
Cora – 12:03
So, basically, Cora can help me as long as I ask a question she has specifically prepared for. I may as well have asked her how come a metal like mercury could be a liquid at room temperature.
Just imagine teachers behaved like that!
Original image by 14995841 from Pixabay
Footnotes:
1 apparently because if you get too much you will get too 'high', but if you do not get enough you will die
"Love is like oxygen You get too much, you get too high Not enough and you're gonna die Love gets you high"
2 This suggests a science joke:
What was the outcome when Hannibal crossed the alps with elephants?
I am not sure, but the offspring would have been infertile.
A faecal transplant is like wild flower seeds in some soil
Keith S. Taber
"Many animals naturally ate each other's poo…as a way of staying healthy" Prof. Tim Spector. (Original image by Debbie De Jager from Pixabay, with apologies to Monty Python)
I was listening to a podcast from 'Science Stories' (BBC Radio 4) about 'Lady Mary Montagu's Smallpox Experiment', where Naomi Alderman described how the aforementioned Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought the practice of opening veins to introduce some smallpox into the body, as a way of protecting against the deadly disease, back from Turkey to Britain.
This was compared with the process of faecal transplantation which was apparently first used in China, and is increasingly being seen as a valuable treatment for some gut disorders. This is the process of ingesting, under carefully controlled conditions, some human faeces – either some of your own carefully preserved (for example, some cancer patients have a sample collected and stored before starting chemotherapy), or from some donor who is willing to offer some of their own. Unlike some other donor procedures (such as kidney donation) this is non-invasive and concerns material most of us just dispose of anyway!
Tim Spector, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at Kings College, London explained the significance of the gut microbiome, the community of something like 100 trillion microbes that typically occupy a human gut. The importance of these organisms for human health is increasingly being appreciated.
Treating Clostridium difficile infection
Disturbances of the gut microbiome can lead to ill health. One particular example is the condition known as Clostridium difficile infection ('C. diff') – which is commonly experienced in hospitals when patients have extensive courses of antiobiotics – which can sadly kill the useful gut microbes as well those disease-causing organisms being targeted. Clostridium difficile (being itself unaffected by many commonly used antibiotics) can in these circumstances reproduce rapidly and vastly increase its numbers. This is problematic as the organism releases a toxin.
C. diff infection can lead to the sufferer needing to visit the toilet urgently and repeatedly – many times each day. This is not only undesirable in itself, but interferes with getting nutrition from food (if the person has any appetite to eat), and leads to dangerous dehydration – and can have other complications. So, this is a very serious condition, and it is readily transmitted from one person to another.
"C. difficile is an infectious Gram-positive spore-forming bacillus microorganism of the gastrointestinal tract, and its toxin expression causes gastrointestinal illness with a wide spectrum of severity, ranging from mild diarrhea to pseudomembranous colitis, toxic megacolon, sepsis-like picture and death…"
Bien, Palagan & Bozko, 2013: 53
Many people have a low level of Clostridium difficile specimens in their gut normally, but as one small part of the much larger and diverse population of gut microbes – in which context they cause no problems.
"C. difficile does not cause any significant disease when it is present in small numbers. However, disturbance of the normal intestinal flora (dysbiosis) by several potential causative factors may result in unlimited [sic] expansion of C. difficile in the microbiota, leading to inflammation and damage of the gut mucosa…"
Bien, Palagan & Bozko, 2013: 56
Someone who has suffered from C. diff infection needs a way to repopulate their gut with a good range of the usual different microbes. And that is when consuming a sample of a healthy person's excrement can be useful. (This is of course done under medical direction and supervision, both to maintain hygiene and to ensure the donor does not have medical conditions that might be passed on with the sample.)
A teaching analogy for faecal transplantation
This was all explained by Prof. Spector using an analogy.
Analogies are comparisons where a less familiar, and perhaps abstract or counterintuitive, concept is explained in terms of something familiar that can be seen to have a similar conceptual structure (see the figure). Analogies are commonly used in science teaching and public communication of science (as here in a radio programme) to introduce scientific ideas.
Figure: A teaching analogy to explain why faecal transplantation can be used to treat C. diff (based on the presentation by Prof. Tim Spector in 'Lady Mary Montagu's Smallpox Experiment')
How does your garden grow?
Prof. Spector developed a comparison between the different microbes found in the gut, and the plants growing in a garden:
"These nasty infections are the most extreme, if you like, that pretty much wipe out most of our normal species. So … we might, say, start with a thousand species and people [with C. diff] might be down to just ten or so, different ones and so nasty ones take over. It's a bit like a garden that has gone very badly wrong and you have put too much herbicide all over it and it looks like an Arizona back yard with a few burning tyres in it. It's very easy for things to take over that and what we want to get, is by putting these bugs in there, to create a really healthy garden that gets back to normal that looks like a nice English country garden with lots of blooms, and really good soil, and lots of plants interacting with each other, and that's the way to think about these microbes, but to do that, to get to this nice rosy picture of a country garden you have to go through yucky stages first"
Before and after faecal transplantation: a medical treatment that can transform your 'garden'? (Images by Simon (left) and Prawny (right) from Pixabay) [Move the slider to change between the pictures].
So the idea of taking a sample of someone else's excrement into our own gut may seem "yukky" – and is definitely NOT recommended without proper procedures and supervision – but may sometimes be a sensible and beneficial medical treatment. Just think of it as resewing the garden of the gut with a nice selection of seeds that will give rise to a diverse selection of colourful blooms.
Naomi Alderman: Instead of poo, we could think to ourselves, 'wild flower seeds'
Tim Spector: It's wild flower seeds with a bit of soil in it as well, so they have come in their own pot [sic] if you like.
'wild flower seeds with a bit of soil…in their own pot'? (Images by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay)
Work cited:
Bien, J., Palagani, V., & Bozko, P. (2013). The intestinal microbiota dysbiosis and Clostridium difficile infection: is there a relationship with inflammatory bowel disease? Therapeutic advances in gastroenterology, 6(1), 53-68. doi:10.1177/1756283X12454590 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3539291/
As part of the primary scientific literature, it publishes articles written by specialist scientists in a technical language intended to be understood by other specialists. Dense scientific terminology is not used to deliberately exclude general readers (as sometimes suggested), but is necessary for scientists to make a convincing case for new knowledge claims that seem persuasive to other specialists. This requires being precise, using unambiguous technical language."The thingamajig kind of, er, attaches to the erm, floppy bit, sort of" would not do the job.
Science News however is news media – it publishes journalism (indeed, 'since 1921' the site reports – although that's the publication and not its website of course.) While science journalism is not essential to the internal processes of science (which rely on researchers engaging with each other's work though scholarly critique and dialogue) it is very important for the public's engagement with science, and for the accountability of researchers to the wider community.
Science journalists have a job similar to science teachers – to communicate abstract ideas in a way that makes sense to their audience. So, they need to interpret research and explain it in ways that non-specialists can understand.
The news article told me
"Like a shaggy dog in springtime, some black holes have to shed… Unlike dogs with their varied fur coats, isolated black holes are mostly identical. They are characterized by only their mass, spin and electric charge. According to a rule known as the no-hair theorem, any other distinguishing characteristics, or "hair," are quickly cast off. That includes magnetic fields."
Conover, 2013
Here there is clearly the use of an analogy – as a black hole is not the kind of thing that has actual hair. This would seem to be an example of a journalist creating an analogy (just as a science teacher would) to help 'make the unfamiliar familiar' to her readers:
just as
dogs with lots of hair need to shed some ready for the warmer weather (a reference to a familiar everyday situation)
so, too, do
black holes (no so familiar to most people) need to lose their hair…
Surely a better analogy would be along the lines that just as dogs with lots of hair need to shed some ready for the warmer weather, so to do black holes need to lose their magnetic fields…
An analogy is used to show a novel conceptual structure (here, relating to magnetic fields around black holes) maps onto a more familiar, or more readily appreciated, one (here, that a shaggy dog will shed some of its fur). A teaching analogy may not reflect a deep parallel between two systems, as its function may be just to introduce an abstract principle.
Conover did not invent the 'hair' reference for her ScienceNews piece – rather she built her analogy on a term used by the scientists themselves. Indeed, the title of the cited research journal article was "Magnetic Hair and Reconnection in Black Hole Magnetospheres", and it was a study exploring the consequences of the "no-hair theorem" – as the authors explained in their abstract:
"The no-hair theorem of general relativity states that isolated black holes are characterized [completely described] by three parameters: mass, spin, and charge."
Bransgrove, Ripperda & Philippov, 2021
However, some black holes "are born with magnetic fields" or may "acquire magnetic flux later in life", in which case the fields will vary between black holes (giving an additional parameter for distinguishing them). The theory suggests that these black holes should somehow lose any such field: that is, "The fate of the magnetic flux (hair) on the event horizon should be in accordance with the no-hair theorem of general relativity" (Bransgrove, Ripperda & Philippov, 2021: 1). There would have to be a mechanism by which this occurs (as energy will be conserved, even when dealing with black holes).
So, the study was designed to explore whether such black holes would indeed lose their 'hair'. Despite the use of this accessible comparison (magnetic flux as 'hair'), the text of the paper is pretty heavy going for someone not familiar with that area of science:
"stationary, asymptotically flat BH spacetimes…multipole component l of a magnetic field…self-regulated plasma…electron-positron discharges…nonzero stress-energy tensor…instability…plasmoids…reconnection layer…relativistic velocities…highly magnetized collisionless plasma…Lundquist number regime…Kerr-schild coordinates…dimensionless BH spin…ergosphere volume…spatial hypersurfaces…[…and so it continues]"
(Bransgrove, Ripperda & Philippov, 2021: 1).
"Come on Harry, you know full well that 'the characteristic minimum plasma density required to support the rotating magnetosphere is the Goldreich-Julian number density' [Bransgrove, Ripperda & Philippov, 2021: 2], so hand me that hyperspanner." Image from Star Trek: Voyager (Paramount Pictures)
Spoiler alert
I do not think I will spoil anything by revealing that Bransgrove and colleague conclude from their work that "the no-hair theorem holds": that there is a 'balding process' – the magnetic field decays ("all components of the stress-energy tensor decay exponentially in time"). If any one reading this is wondering how they did this work, given that most laboratory stores do not keep black holes in stock to issue to researchers on request, it is worth noting the study was based on a computer simulation.
That may seem to be rather underwhelming as the researchers are just reporting what happens in a computer model, but a lot of cutting-edge science is done that way. Moreover, their simulations produced predictions of how the collapsing magnetic fields of real black holes might actually be detected in terms of the kinds of radiation that should be produced.
As the news item explained matters:
Magnetic reconnection in balding black holes could spew X-rays that astronomers could detect. So scientists may one day glimpse a black hole losing its hair.
Conover, 2013
So, we have hairy black holes that go through a balding process when they lose their hair – which can be tested in principle because they will be spewing radiation.
Balding is to hair, as…
Here we have an example of an analogy for a scientific concept. Analogies compare one phenomenon or concept to another which is considered to have some structural similarity (as in the figure above). When used in teaching and science communication such analogies offer one way to make the unfamiliar familiar, by showing how the unfamiliar system maps in some sense onto a more familiar one.
hair = magnetic field
balding = shedding the magnetic field
Black holes are expected to be, or at least to become, 'hairless' – so without having magnetic fields detectable from outside the event horizon (the 'surface' connecting points beyond which everything, even light, is unable to 'escape' the gravitational field and leave the black hole). If black holes are formed with, or acquire, such magnetic fields, then there is expected to be a 'balding' process. This study explored how this might work in certain types of (simulated) black holes – as magnetic field lines (that initially cross the event horizon) break apart and reconnect. (Note that in this description the magnetic field lines – imaginary lines invented by Michael Faraday as a mental tool to think about and visualise magnetic fields – are treated as though they are real objects!)
Some such comparisons are deliberately intended to help scientists explain their ideas to the public – but scientists also use such tactics to communicate to each other (sometimes in frivolous or humorous ways) and in these cases such expressions may do useful work as short-hand expressions.
So, in this context hair denotes anything that can be detected and measured from outside a black hole apart form its mass, spin, and charge (see, it is much easier to say 'hair')- such as magnetic flux density if there is a magnetic field emerging from the black hole.
A dead metaphor?
In the research paper, Bransgrove, Ripperda and Philippov do not use the 'hair' comparison as an analogy to explain ideas about black holes. Rather they take the already well-established no-hair theorem as given background to their study ("The original no-hair conjecture states that…"), and simply explain their work in relation to it ("The fate of the magnetic flux (hair) on the event horizon should be in accordance with the no-hair theorem of general relativity.")
Whereas an analogy uses an explicit comparison (this is like that because…), a comparison that is not explained is best seen as a metaphor. A metaphor has 'hidden meaning'. Unlike in an analogy, the meaning is only implied.
"The no-hair theorem of general relativity states that isolated black holes are characterized by three parameters: mass, spin, and charge";
"The original no-hair conjecture states that all stationary, asymptotically flat BH [black hole] spacetimes should be completely described by the mass, angular momentum, and electric charge"
Bransgrove and colleagues do not need to explain why they use the term 'hair' in their research report as in their community it has become an accepted expression where researchers already know what it is intended to mean. We might consider it a dead metaphor, an expression which was originally used to imply meaning through some kind of comparison, but which through habitual use has taken on literal meaning.
Science has lots of these dead metaphors – terms like electrical charge and electron spin have with repeated use over time earned their meanings without now needing recourse to their origins as metaphors. This can cause confusion as, for example, a learner may develop alternative conceptions about electron spin if they do not appreciate its origin as a metaphor, and assumes an electron spins in the same sense as as spinning top or the earth in space. Then there is an associative learning impediment as the learner assumes an electron is spinning on its axis because of the learner's (perfectly reasonable) associations for the word 'spin'.
The journalist or 'science writer' (such as Emily Conover), however, is writing for a non-specialist readership, so does need to explain the 'hair' reference. So, I would characterise the same use of the terms hair/no-hair and balding as comprising a science analogy in the news item, but a dead metaphor in the context of the research paper. The meaning of language, after all, is in the mind of the reader.
The unbelievable truth – do bacteria focus incident light onto their back-sides, so they can tell which way to go?
"Bacteria are just tiny eyeballs" sounds like another science analogy, but is actually something I learned today from BBC Radio 4.
On David Mitchell's "The Unbelievable Truth" panelists read essays on a topic, but populated with false (and preferably funny) statements. The premise is great: the panelists try to sneak in some true facts which sound so unlikely that they are confused with the falsehoods. Panelists get marks for correctly spotting truths in another panelist's little essay, or for completing their own talk with some of their 'unbelievable' truths not being spotted.
On today's episode I was shocked top learn from Dr Ria Lina that "…bacteria are just tiny eyeballs…".
Because they are not.
Well, not exactly…
Her essay was talking about germs, and included:
"Transmission of disease is determined by how many victims germs can actually see. Viruses have load of tiny little eyes so they are able to see loads and loads of potential victims in all different directions, whereas bacteria are just tiny little eyeballs, and fungi are extremely short sighted poor things, which is why they are only able to infect places like feet."
At the end of the round, David reported that the part about bacteria as eyes was true, although he did not seem very convinced:
David: You have managed to smuggle three truth past the rest of the panel, which are that bacteria are just tiny eyeballs – although to me that sounds a bit like things being put into language that people understand, because they are not like tiny eyeballs, really are they?
Ria: Well the light goes in and it reflects off the back surface which acts like a rudimentary retina…
Right,
…and also you have got to remember that the eye had evolved multiple times in multiple ways, so the squid eye and the human eye even though they both work the same way did not come from the same universal ancestor…
Oh right
…so, bacterial eye is basically what we are seeing now is the beginning of – [sadly interrupted by another panelist]. I'm such a geek…
Ria Lina – self-confessed geek (and there is nothing wrong with that)
I presumed there must be some basis for this claim; that Dr Lina (PhD in viral bioinformatics) must be drawing upon some actual science, but I was not sure what. Whereas the eyeball has a back surface there is no inherent back surface for a bacterium – so this must mean any inside surface.
Although light does reflect off the retina (red eye in camera images is due to the light reflecting from the retina with its rich supply of blood vessels) – the function of the retina is to absorb light and to then signal information forward based on the pattern of light detected. Some species have a reflecting layer (tapetum lucidum) behind the retina to increase efficiency – some light not absorbed by the retina initially gets a second pass though after reflection which allows increased absorption. But this is only useful because there are cells capable of absorbing the light and processing information based on the absorption.
The bacterium is a single cell, so the most sense I could make of this is that when light absorption is useful, a reflecting inner surface could be valuable. This might make sense for cyanobacteria to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis by reflecting light not absorbed on the first pass.
What did we do before the internet?
I did some quick searching on line.
Someone had developed a method of identifying bacterial colonies through light back-scattered, which was useful because the technique using transmitted light was impractical in species that absorb most of the incident light.
Interesting, but the light was not being reflected internally, if I understood the paper.
Someone has developed a technique to increase the light absorbed by photosynthetic algae and cyanobacteria that did use total internal reflection – but if I read correctly this reflection is in the light guide on the way to the cell, not inside it.
Image by Stephan Ernst from Pixabay
So, I was still not buying the eyeballs story. Then I found a report of how "Cyanobacteria use micro-optics to sense light direction",
"Here, we establish that individual Synechocystis cells can directly and accurately perceive the position of a unidirectional light source, and control their motility so as to move towards it. We then show that Synechocystis cells act as microlenses, and that the light intensity gradient across the cell due to this lensing effect is far greater than the effects of shading due to light absorption or reflection. Finally, we use highly-localized laser excitation to show that specific excitation of one side of the cell triggers movement away from the light, indicating that positive phototaxis results from movement away from an image of the light source focused on the opposite side of the cell. Essentially, the cell acts as a microscopic eyeball."
Schuergers et al.,2016
Wow, nature never ceases to amaze.
So, basically the cell itself focuses incident light to be concentrated at the 'back' of the cell (where back is the side opposite the light source), organelles that absorb light can in effect detect this light 'spot', and the bacterium has evolved to move 'forward' towards the light source based on where in the cell this higher light intensity occurs. The system in effect 'knows' which direction to take as forward.
"Here we have shown that Synechocystis cells act as very effective spherical microlenses that focus a sharp image of a light source at the opposite edge of the cell. This implies that positive phototaxis (i.e. movement towards a light source) is actually triggered as a negative response to the focused spot of light at rear periphery of the cell."
Schuergers et al.,2016
This does not seem to involve internal reflection, so perhaps there is another source for the eyeballs claim (possibly with an even more amazing nugget of science) that I have missed and which was the basis of Dr Lina's claim.
Bacteria are not just tiny eyeballs, but…
I still think it is not correct to claim that "bacteria [generally, or even this particular bacteria] are just tiny eyeballs". This is a simplification, and probably not an 'intellectually honest' one that could be considered to be at the 'optimum level of simplification' for communicating a key scientific idea stripped of distracting complications.
Indeed the real wonder of Synechocystis is that it a single cell that acts as an integrated, responsive, coherent system: energy collection unit, eyeball, lens, photo-receptors, controller/processor, and locomotive unit.
Despite this quibble, given the context of the claim (made as part of a comedy show, not a peer reviewed research conference) I think I am impressed enough to have to revise the 'Tweet' I was going to send Dr Lina calling her out for telling an unbelievable lie on national radio. I should have remembered that it is very difficult to come up with any claim about the living world which is so fantastic that one can be confident there is not an example of a species out there which affirms the claim. When it comes to nature we often need to believe the unbelievable truth.
Work cited:
Huisung Kim, Iyll-Joon Doh, Jennifer Sturgis, Arun K. Bhunia, J. Paul Robinson, Euiwon Bae (2016) Reflected scatterometry for noninvasive interrogation of bacterial colonies, Journal of Biomedical Optics. 21(10), 107004, doi: 10.1117/1.JBO.21.10.107004.
Ooms, M. D., Sieben, V. J., Pierobon, S. C., Jung, E. E., Kalontarov, M., Erickson, D., & Sinton, D. (2012). Evanescent photosynthesis: exciting cyanobacteria in a surface-confined light field. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 14(14), 4817-4823. doi:10.1039/C2CP40271H
Schuergers, N., Lenn, T., Kampmann, R., Meissner, M. V., Esteves, T., Temerinac-Ott, M., . . . Wilde, A. (2016). Cyanobacteria use micro-optics to sense light direction. Elife, 5, e12620.
Is the work of cognition like the work of a palaeontologist? (Image by Brenda Geisse from Pixabay)
I like the reflexive nature of this account – of someone reconstructing an analogy
abouthow cognition reconstructs coherent wholes from partial, fragmented data
froma partial, fragmented memory representation.
I was reading something about memory function that piqued my interest in an analogy:
"Neisser, using an analogy initially developed by Hebb (1949) to characterize [sic] perception, likened the rememberer to a paleontologist who attempts to reconstruct a dinosaur from fragmentary remains: 'out of a few stored bone chips, we remember a dinosaur'…"
Schacter, 1995, p.10
I was interested enough to look up the original use of this analogy (as I report below).
This links to three things that have separately interested me:
the nature of memory
the constructivist account of learning and cognition
using analogies in teaching and comunicating science
The nature of our memories
I have long been interested in what memory is and how it works – and its role in academic learning (Taber, 2003). In part this perhaps derives from the limits of my own memory – I have been reasonably successful academically, but have never felt I had a good memory (and I seem to get more 'absent minded' all the time). This interest grew as it became clearer to me that our memory experiences seem to be quite different – my late wife Philippa would automatically and effortlessly remember things in a way that that seemed to me to be a kind of superpower. (She was once genuinely surprised that I could not picture what a family member had been wearing on arriving at a family event years before, whereas I thought I was doing pretty well to even remember I had been there.) Now that neurodiversity is widely recognised, it seems less surprising that we do not all experience memory in the same way.
A lot of people, however, understand memory in terms of a kind of folk-model (that is, a popular everyday account which does not match current scientific understanding) – along the lines that we put information into a memory store, where – unless it gets lost and we forget – we can later access it and so remember what it was that we committed to memory. Despite the ubiquity of that notion, research suggests that is not really how memory functions. We might say that this is a common alternative conception of how memory works.
Schacter was referring back to a tradition that began a century ago when Bartlett carried out a series of studies on memory. Bartlett (1932/1995) would, for example, expose people to a story that was unfamiliar to his study participants, and then later ask them to retell as much of the story as they could remember. As might be expected, some people remembered more details than others.
What perhaps was less predictable at the time was the extent to which people included in their retelling details that had not been part of the original story at all. These people were not deliberately embellishing or knowingly guessing, but reporting, as best they could, what their memory suggested had been part of the original story.
People who habitually exhibit this 'confabulation' to an pathological degree (perhaps remembering totally fantastic things that clearly could not be true) are recognised as having some kind of problem, but it transpires this is just an extreme of something that is normal behavior. Remembering is not the 'pulling something out of storage' that we may experience it as – as actually what we remember is more like a best guess based on insufficient data (but a guess made preconsciously, so it appears in our conscious minds as definitive) than a pristine copy of an original experience. Memory is often more a matter of constructing an account from the materials at hand than simply reading it out from something stored.
Thus the analogy. Here is some wider context for the quote presented above:
"The publication of Neisser's (1967) important monograph on cognitive psychology rekindled interest in Bartlett's ideas about schemas and reconstructive memory. According to Neisser, remembering the past is not a simple matter of reawakening a dormant engram or memory trace; past events are constructed by using preexisting knowledge and [schemata] to piece together whatever fragmentary remains of the initial episode are available in memory. Neisser, using an analogy initially developed by Hebb (1949) to characterize [sic] perception, likened the rememberer to a paleontologist who attempts to reconstruct a dinosaur from fragmentary remains: 'out of a few stored bone chips, we remember a dinosaur' (1967, p.285). In this view, all memories are constructions because they include general knowledge that was not part of a specific event, but is necessary to reconstruct it. The fundamentally constructive nature of memory in turn makes it susceptible to various kinds of distortions and inaccuracies. Not surprisingly, Neisser embraced Bartlett's observations and ideas about the nature of memory."
Schacter, 1995, p.10
These ideas will not seem strange to those who have studied science education, a field which has been strongly influenced by a 'constructivist' perspective on learning. Drawing on learning science research, the constructivist perspective focuses on how each learner has to build up their own knowledge incrementally: it is not possible for a teacher to take some complex technical knowledge and simply transfer it (or copy it) to a learner's mind wholesale.
Excavating the analogy: what did Hebb actually say?
Hebb is remembered for his work on understanding the brain in terms of neural structures – neurons connected into assemblies through synapses. His book 'The Organization of Behavior' has been described as "one of the most influential books in Psychology and Neuroscience" (Brown, 2020: 1).
The analogy referred to by Schacter was used by Hebb in describing perception. He discussed studies using a tachistoscope, an instrument for displaying images for very brief periods. This could be used to show an image to a person with an exposure insufficient for them to take in all the details,
"…the pattern is perceived, first, as a familiar one, and then with something missing or something added. The something, also, is familiar; so the total perception is a mélange of the habitual.
The subject's reports [make it] clear that the subject is not only responding to the diagram as a whole; he perceives its parts as separate entities, even though presentation is so brief. Errors are prominent, and such as to show that all the subject really perceives–and then only with rough accuracy–is the slope of a few lines and their direction and distance from one another"
Hebb, 1949: pp.46-47
That is, the cognitive system uses the 'clues' available from the incomplete visual data to build (in effect) a hypothesis of what was seen, based on correspondences between the data actually available and familiar images that match that limited data. What the person becomes consciously aware of 'seeing' is not actually a direct report from the visual field of the presented image, but a constructed image that is a kind of conjecture of what might have been seen – 'filling-in' missing data with what seems most likely based on past visual experiences.
Cognitive scientist Annette Karmiloff-Smith developed the concept of 'representational redescription' as a way of describing how initially tacit knowledge could eventually become explicit. She suggested that "intra-domain and inter-domain representational relations are the hallmark of a flexible and creative cognitive system" (Karmiloff-Smith,1996: 192). The gist was that the brain is able to re-represent its own internal representations in new forms with different affordances.
An loose analogy might be someone who takes a screenshot when displaying an image from the JPEG photo collection folder on the computer, opens the screenshot as a pdf file, and then adds some textual annotations before exporting the file to a new pdf. The representation of the original image is unchanged in the system, but a new representation has been made of it in a different form, which has then been modified and 'stored' (represented) in a different folder.
Hebb was describing how a representation of visual data at one level in the cognitive system has been represented elsewhere in the system (representational redescription?) at a level where it can be mentipulated by 'filling-in'.
Hebb then goes on to use the analogy:
"A drawing or a report of what is seen tachistoscopically is not unlike a paleontologist's reconstruction of early man from a tooth and a rib. There is a clear effect of earlier experience, filling in gaps in the actual perception, so that the end result is either something familiar or a combination of familiar things–a reconstruction on the basis of experience."
Hebb, 1949: p.47
Teaching analogies
Hebb was writing a book that can be considered as a textbook, so this can be seen as a teaching analogy, although such analogies are also used in communicating science in other contexts.
Teaching is about making the unfamiliar familiar, and one way we do that is by saying that 'this unfamiliar thing you need to learn about is a bit like this other thing that you already know about'. Of course, when teaching in this way we need to say in what way there is an analogy, and it may also be important to say in what ways the two things are not alike if we do not want people to map across irrelevant elements (i.e., to develop 'associative' learning impediments).
Hebb is saying that visual perception is often not simply the detection of a coherent and integral image, but is rather a construction produced by building upon the available data to construct a coherent and integral image. In extremis, a good deal may be made of very little scraps of input – akin to a scientist reconstructing a model of a full humanoid body based on a couple of bits of bone or tooth.
Hebb's analogy
There are examples where palaeontologists or anthropologists have indeed suggested such complete forms based on a few fossil fragments as data. This is only possible because of their past experiences of meeting many complete forms, and the parts of which they are made. (And of course, sometimes other scientists completely disagree about their reconstructions!)
An exscientific analogy?
Often in teaching science we use teaching analogies that compare an unfamiliar scientific concept to some familiar everyday phenomenon – perhaps a reaction profile is a bit like a roller-coaster track. Perhaps we could call these adscientific analogies as the meaning is transferred to the scientific concept from the everyday.
Sometimes, however, familiar scientific phenomena or ideas are used as the source – as here. Perhaps these could be called exscientific analogies as the meaning is taken from the science concept and applied elsewhere.
Developing the palaeontology analogy
So, Hebb had originally used the palaeontology analogy in the context of discussing perception. When I looked into how Neisser had used the comparison in his "important monograph on cognitive psychology" I found he had developed the analogy, returning to it at several points in his book.
Do we analyse what we attend to?
Neisser's first reference was also in relation to perception, rather than memory. Neisser argued that before we can attend to part of a scene there must already have been the operation of "preattentive mechanisms, which form segregated objects" from which we can select what to attend to. These processes might be referred to as analyses:
"…the detailed properties and features that we ordinarily see in an attended figure…arise…only because part of the input was selected for attention and certain operations then performed on it. Neither the object of analysis nor the nature of the analysis is inevitable, and both may vary in different observers and at different times."
Neisser, 1967, p.94
But Neisser was not sure this really was 'analysis', which he understood as drawing on another (what I labelled above) exscientific analogy:
"The very word 'analysis' may not be apt. It suggests an analogy with chemistry: a chemist 'analyses' unknown substances to find out what they 'really' are."
Neisser, 1967, p.94
Rather than refer to analysis, we could draw on Hebb's palaeontological analogy:
"More appropriate…is Hebb's (1949, p.47) comparison of the perceiver with a paleontologist, who carefully extracts a few fragments of what might be bones from a mass of irrelevant rubble and 'reconstructs' the dinosaur that will eventually stand in the Museum of Natural History. In this sense it is important to think of focal attention as a constructive, synthetic activity rather than as purely analytic. One does not simply examine the input and make a decision; one builds an appropriate visual object."
Neisser draws upon the analogy repeatedly in developing his account of perception:
"Such emotion-flooded experiences [as 'physiognomic' perception: 'Everyone has perceived such traits as suppressed anger in a face, gaiety in a movement, or peaceful harmony in a picture'] can be thought of as the result of particular kinds of construction. The same fragments of bone that lead one paleontologist to make an accurate model of an unspectacular creature might lead another, perhaps more anxious or more dramatic, to 'reconstruct' a nightmarish monster." (pp.96-97)
"To 'direct attention' to a figure is to attempt a more extensive synthesis of it. Of course, synthesis presupposes some prior analysis, as the paleontologist must have some fragments of bone before he can build his dinosaur…" (p.103)
"Recognition, whether of spelling patterns or words as wholes, must be mediated by relevant features, as meaningless in themselves as the bone chips of the paleontologist." (p.114)
"The process of figural synthesis does not depend only on the features extracted from the input, just as the dinosaur constructed by a paleontologist is not based only on the bone chips he has found. Equally important is the kind of perceptual object the perceiver is prepared to construct. The importance of set and context on the perception of words has been demonstrated in a great many experiments." (pp.115-116)
Neisser, 1967
And as with perception, so memory…
When Neisser discusses memory he uses a kind of double analogy – suggesting that memory is a bit like perception, which (as already established) is a bit like the work of the palaeontologist:
"Perception is constructive, but the input information often plays the largest single role in determining the constructive process. A very similar role, it seems to me, is played by the aggregate of information stored in long-term memory.
This is not to say that the stimuli themselves are copied and stored; far from it. The analogy being offered asserts only that the role which stored information plays in recall is like the role which stimulus information plays in perception….The model of the paleontologist, which was applied to perception and focal attention in Chapter 4, applies also to memory: out of a few stored bone chips, we remember a dinosaur….one does not recall objects or responses simply because traces of them exist in the mind, but after an elaborate process of reconstruction, (which usually makes use of relevant stored information).
What is the information – the bone chips – on which reconstruction is based? The only plausible possibility is that it consists of traces of prior processes of construction. There are no stored copies of finished mental events, like images or sentences, but only traces of earlier constructive activity."
Neisser, 1967, p.285
Fleshing-out the metaphor
Neisser then pushes the analogy one step further, by pointing out that the 'fleshed-out' model of a dinosaur in the museum may be constructed in part based on the fossil fragments of bones, but those fragments themselves do not form part of the construction (the model). The bones are used as referents in building the skeletal framework (literally, the skeleton) around which the model will be built, but the model is made from other materials (wood, steel, fibreglass, whatever) and the fossil fragments themselves will be displayed separately or perhaps filed away in a drawer in the museum archives. (As in the representational redescription model – the original representation is redescribed at another level of the system.)
"The present proposal is, therefore, that we store traces of earlier cognitive acts, not of the products of those acts. The traces are not simply 'revised' or 'reactivated' in recall; instead, the stored fragments are used as information to support a new construction. It is as if the bone fragments used by the paleontologist did not appear in the model he builds at all – as indeed they need not, if it to represent a fully fleshed-out skin-covered dinosaur. The bones can be thought of, somewhat loosely, as remnants of the structure which created and supported the original dinosaur, and thus as sources of information about how to reconstruct it."
Neisser, 1967, pp.285-286
Neisser's development of Hebb's analogy
The head palaeontologist?
A final reference to the analogy is used when Neisser addresses the question of the cognitive executive: the notion that somewhere in the cognitive system there is something akin to an overseer who direct operations:
"Who does the turning, the trying, and the erring" Is there a little man in the head, a homonculus, who acts the part of the paleontologist vis-à-vis the dinosaur? p.293
Neisser, 1967, p.293
The homonculus can be pictured as a small person sitting in the brain's control room, for example, viewing the images being projected from the visual input.
It is usually considered this is a flawed model (potentially lading to an infinite regress), a failure to take a systemic view of the cognitive system. It is the system which functions and leads to our conscious experience of perceiving, attending, making decisions, planning, remembering, and so forth. Whilst there are specialist components (modules) including for the coordination of the system, there is not a discrete controller overlaying the system as a whole who is doing the seeing, hearing, thinking, etcetera based on outputs from processing by the system.
Here the homonculus would like an authority that the palaeontologist turned to in order to decide how to build her model: raising the question of how does that expert know, and who would they, in turn, ask?
Why change Hebb's orignal analogy?
Altohugh Neisser refers to the analogy as being that used by Hebb, he modifies it. A tooth and rib become fragments of bone, and the early man becomes a dinosaur. Whether the shift from the reconstruction of an early hominid to the reconstruction of a terrible lizard was a deliberate one (for greater effect? because Neisser thought it would be more familiar to his readers?) or not I do not know. The phrasing suggests that Neisser thought he was applying Hebb's original comparison – so I suspect this is how he recalled the analogy.
Perhaps Neisser had regularly used the analogy in his teaching, in which case it may have become so familiar to him that he did not feel the need to check the original version. That is, perhaps he was correctly remembering how he had previously misremembered the original analogy. That is not fanciful, as memory researchers suggest this is something that is very common. Each time we access a memory the wider representational context becomes modified by engagement with it.
That is, if what is represented (in 'long-term memory'*) is indeed "traces of prior processes of construction…traces of earlier constructive activity" then each time a 'memory' is experienced, by being constructed based on what is represented ('in memory'*), new traces of that process of constructing the memory are left in the system.
It is possible over the years to be very convinced about the accuracy of a distorted memory that has been regularly reinforced. (The extent to which this may in part be the origin of many wars, feuds, and divorces might be a useful focus for research?)
So perhaps Neisser had represented in his long-term memory the analogy of a palaeontologist with a few fossil fragments, and when he sought to access the analogy, perhaps in a classroom presentation, the other elements were filled-in: the 'tooth and rib' became 'a few fragments of what might be bones' and the 'early man' become 'a dinosaur' – details that made sense of the analogy in terms familiar to Neisser.
The account of cognition that Hebb, Neisser and Schater were presenting would suggest that if this had been the case then for Neisser there would be no apparent distinction between the parts of Hebb's analogy that Neisser was remembering accurately, and the parts his preconscious mind had filled-in to construct a coherent analogy. I like the reflexive nature of this account – of someone reconstructing an analogy about how cognition reconstructs coherent wholes from partial, fragmented data – from a partial, fragmented memory representation.
Sources cited:
Bartlett, F. C. (1932/1995). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, R. E. (2020). Donald O. Hebb and the Organization of Behavior: 17 years in the writing. Molecular Brain, 13(1), 55. doi:10.1186/s13041-020-00567-8
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organisation of Behaviour. A neuropsychological theory. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1996). Beyond Modularity: A developmental perspective on cognitive science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Schacter, D. L. (1995). Memory distortion: history and current status. In D. L. Schacter (Ed.), Memory Distortion. How minds, brains, and societies reconstruct the past (pp. 1-43). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
* terms like 'in memory' and 'in long-term memory' may bring to mind the folk-notion of memory as somewhere in the brain where things are stored away, whereas it is probably better to think of the brain as a somewhat plastic processing system which is constantly being modified by its own functioning. The memory we experience is simply the outcome of active processing** in part of the system that has previously been modified by earlier mental activity (** active processing which is in turn itself further modifying the system).
Unseen minerals all around us (Ockham's Razor – ABC)
I was listening to a recent episode of 'Ockhams' razor' (ABC's series of short science and technology essays) from 2020 called 'Unseen minerals all around us'. As a radio programme, the audience was likely to be diverse in terms of age, interests, and background knowledge and experiences.
The speaker was Allison Britt, Director of Mineral Resources Advice and Promotion, Geoscience Australia ("Australia's pre-eminent public sector geoscience organisation"), and she was describing the large number of elements used in constructing a modern mobile phone – apparently someone had put a phone in a laboratory blender and analysed the smoothie produced! (Please note: that is not a safe activity for a home science practical.)
Allison Britt, Director of Mineral Resources Advice & Promotion, Geoscience Australia – at a live recording of 'Okham's razor'. (Source: Twitter)
As a science teacher (well, retired – but once a science teacher, always a science teacher at heart at least) I tend to be primed to focus on the ways in which teachers and scientists 'make the unfamiliar familiar', and Britt used an analogy with multiple targets.
The source domain was something familiar from everyday life – seasoning food.
I thought this worked really well, although as a purist (and, as noted here before, something of a pedant) I would have liked the third of her comparisons to refer to a difference that was a matter of degree (e.g., 'taste better' cf. 'work more efficiently'). That said, Britt's formulation worked better as scientific poetry:
So, just like adding salt and pepper to a meal makes it taste better:
putting a little rhenium in a jet engine makes it burn faster and hotter;
putting a little scandium in an aeroplane makes it lighter and stronger;
and putting a little indium in your mobile phone makes the touchscreen work.
Britt, 2021
This was an example of a science communicator making the point of how adding a small, sometimes trace, quantity of a substance can make a substantive difference to properties. I imagine that virtually everyone listening to this would have effortlessly understood the comparison – a key criterion for an effective teaching analogy.
'Psychological Skills in Relation to Academic Achievement through Swimming Context'
Original image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
I was intrigued by the title of an article I saw in a notification: "Psychological Skills in Relation to Academic Achievement through Swimming Context". In part, it was the 'swimming context' – despite never having been very athletic or sporty (which is not to say I did not enjoy sports, just that I was never particularly good at any), I have always been a regular and enthusiastic swimmer. Not a good swimmer, mind (too splashy, too easily veering off-line) – but an enthusiastic one. But I was also intrigued by the triad of psychological skills, academic achievement, and swimming.
Perhaps I had visions of students' psychological skills being tested in relation to their academic achievement as they pounded up and down the pool. So, I was tempted to follow this up.
Investigating psychological skills and academic achievement
The abstract of the paper by Bayyat and colleagues reported three aims for their study:
"This study aimed to investigate:
(1) the level of psychological skills among students enrolled in swimming courses at the Physical Education faculties in the Jordanian Universities.
(2) the relation between their psychological skills and academic achievement.
(3) the differences in these psychological skills according to gender."
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4535
The article was published in a journal called 'Psychology and Education', which, its publishers* suggest is "a quality journal devoted to basic research, theory, and techniques and arts of practice in the general field of psychology and education".
A peer reviewed journal
The peer review policy reports this is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal. This means other academics have critiqued and evaluated a submission prior to its being accepted for publication. Peer review is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for high quality research journals.
Journals with high standards use expert peer reviewers, and the editors use their reports to both reject low-quality submissions, and to seek to improve high-quality submissions by providing feedback to authors about points that are not clear, any missing information, incomplete chains of argumentation, and so forth. In the best journals editors only accept submissions after reviewers' criticisms have been addressed to the satisfaction of reviewers (or authors have made persuasive arguments for why some criticism does not need addressing).
"The statistical analysis results revealed an average level of psychological skills, significant differences in psychological skills level in favor of female students, A students and JU[**], and significant positive relation between psychological skills and academic achievement."
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4535
Rewriting slightly it seems that, according to this study:
the students in the study had average levels of psychological skills;
the female students have higher levels of psychological skills than their male peers;
and that there was some kind of positive correlation between psychological
skills and academic achievement;
Anyone reading a research paper critically asks themselves questions such as
'what do they mean by that?';
'how did they measure that?;
'how did they reach that conclusion?'; and
'who does this apply to?'
Females are better – but can we generalise?
In this study it was reported that
"By comparing psychological skills between male and female participants, results revealed significant differences in favor [sic] of female participants"
"All psychological skills' dimensions of female participants were significant in favor [sic] of females compared to their male peers. They were more focused, concentrated, confident, motivated to achieve their goals, and sought to manage their stress."
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4541, 4545
"It's our superior psychological skills that make us this good!" (Image by CristianoCavina from Pixabay)
A pedant (such as the present author) might wonder if "psychological skills' dimensions of femaleparticipants" [cf. psychological skills' dimensions of male participants?] would not be inherently likely to be in favour of females , but it is clear from the paper that this is intended to refer to the finding that females (as a group) got significantly higher ratings than males (as a group) on the measures of 'psychological skills'.
If we for the moment (but please read on below…) accept these findings as valid, an obvious question is the extent to which these results might generalise beyond the study. That is, to what extent would these findings being true for the participants of this study imply the same thing would be found more widely (e.g., among all students in Jordanian Universities? among all university students? Among all adult Jordanians? among all humans?)
Two key concepts here are the population and the sample. The population is the group that we wish our study to be about (e.g., chemistry teachers in English schools, 11-year olds in New South Wales…), and the sample is the group who actually provide data. In order to generalise to the population from the sample it is important that the sample is large enough and representative of the population (which of course may be quite difficult to ascertain).
In this study the reader is told that "The population of this study was undergraduate male and female students attending both intermediate and advanced swimming courses" (Bayyat et al., 2021: 4536). Taken at face value this might raise the question of why a sample was drawn exclusively from Jordan – unless of course this is the only national context where students attend intermediate or advanced swimming courses. *** However, it was immediately clarified that "They consisted of (n= 314) students enrolled at the schools of Sport Sciences at three state universities". That is, the population was actually undergraduate male and female students from schools of Sport Sciences at three Jordanian state universities attending both intermediate and advanced swimming courses.
"The Participants were an opportunity sample of 260 students" (Bayyat et al., 2021: 4536). So in terms of sample size, 260, the sample made up most of the population – almost 83%. This is in contrast to many educational studies where the samples may necessarily only reflect a small proportion of the population. In general, representatives of a sample is more important than size as skew in the sample undermines statistical generalisations (whereas size, for a representative sample, influences the magnitude of the likely error ****) – but a reader is likely to feel that when over four-fifths of the population were sampled it is less critical that a convenience sample was used.
This still does not ensure us that the results can be generalised to the population (students from schools of Sport Sciences at three Jordanian state universities attending 'both' intermediate and advanced swimming courses), but psychologically it seems quite convincing.
Ontology: What are we dealing with?
The study is only useful if it is about something that readers think is important – and it is clear what it is about. The authors tells us their study is about
Psychological Skills
Academic Achievement
which would seem to be things educators should be interested in. We do need to know however how the authors understand these constructs: what do they mean by 'a Psychological Skill' and 'Academic achievement'? Most people would probably think they have a pretty good idea what these terms might mean, but that is no assurance at all that different people would agree on this.
So, in reading this paper it is important to know what the authors themselves mean by these terms – so a reader can check they understand these terms in a sufficiently similar way.
What is academic achievement?
The authors suggest that
"academic achievement reflects the learner's accomplishment of specific goals by the end of an educational experience in a determined amount of time"
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4535
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4535
This seems to be the extent of the general characterisation of this construct in the paper *****.
What are psychological skills?
The authors tell readers that
"Psychological skills (PS) are a group of skills and abilities that enhances peoples' performance and achievement…[It has been] suggested that PS includes a whole set of trainable skills including emotional control and self-confidence"
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4535
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4535
For the purposes of this particular study, they
"identified the psychological skills related to the swimming context such as; leadership, emotional stability, sport achievement motivation, self-confidence, stress management, and attention"
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4536
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4536
So the relevant skills are considered to be:
leadership
emotional stability
sport achievement motivation
self-confidence
stress management
attention
I suspect that there would not be complete consensus among psychologists or people working in education over whether all of these constructs actually are 'skills'. Someone who did not consider these (or some of these) characteristics as skills would need to read the authors' claims arising from the study about 'psychological skills' accordingly (i.e., perhaps as being about something other than skills) but as the authors have been clear about their use of the term, this should not confuse or mislead readers.
Epistemology: How do we know?
Having established what is meant by 'psychological skills' and 'academic achievement' a reader would want to know how these were measured in the present study – do the authors use techniques that allow them to obtain valid and reliable measures of 'psychological skills' and 'academic achievement'?
How is academic achievement measured?
The authors inform readers that
"To calculate students' academic achievement, the instructors of the swimming courses conducted a valid and reliable assessment as a pre-midterm, midterm, and final exam throughout the semester…The assessment included performance tests and theoretical tests (paper and pencil tests) for each level"
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4538
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4538
Although the authors claim their assessment are valid and reliable, a careful reader will note that the methodology here does not match the definition of "accomplishment of specific goals by the end of an educational experience" (emphasis added)- as only the final examinations took place at the end of the programme. On that point, then, there is a lack of internal consistency in the study. This might not matter to a reader who did not think academic achievement needed to be measured at the end of a course of study.
Information on the "Academic achievement assessment tool", comprising six examinations (pre-midterm, midterm, and final examinations at each of the intermediate and advanced levels) is included as an appendix – good practice that allows a reader to interrogate the instrument.
Although this appendix is somewhat vague on precise details, it offers a surprise to someone (i.e., me) with a traditional notion of what is meant by 'academic achievement' – as both theory and practical aspects are included. Indeed, most of the marks seem to be given for practical swimming proficiency. So, the 'Intermediate swimming Pre-midterm exam' has a maximum of 20 marks available – with breast stroke leg technique and arm technique each scored out of ten marks.
The 'Advanced swimming midterm exam' is marked out of 30, with 10 marks each available for the 200m crawl (female), individual medley (female) and life guarding techniques. This seems to suggest that 20 of the 30 marks available can only be obtained by being female, but this point does not seem to be clarified. Presumably (?) male students had a different task that the authors considered equivalent.
How are psychological skills measured?
In order to measure psychological skills the authors proceeded to "to develop and validate a questionnaire" (p.4536). Designing a new instrument is a complex and challenging affair. The authors report how they
"generated a 40 items-questionnaire reflecting the psychological skills previously mentioned [leadership, emotional stability, sport achievement motivation, self-confidence, stress management, and attention] by applying both deductive and inductive methods. The items were clear, understandable, reflect the real-life experience of the study population, and not too long in structure."
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4538
So, items were written which it was thought would reflect the focal skills of interest. (Unfortunately there are no details of what the authors mean by "applying both deductive and inductive methods" to generate the items.) Validity was assured by asking a panel of people considered to have expertise to critique the items:
"the scale was reviewed and assessed by eight qualified expert judges from different related fields (sport psychology, swimming, teaching methodology, scientific research methodology, and kinesiology). They were asked to give their opinion of content representation of the suggested PS [psychological skills], their relatedness, clarity, and structure of items. According to the judges' reviews, we omitted both leadership and emotional stability domains, in addition to several items throughout the questionnaire. Other items were rephrased, and some items were added. Again, the scale was reviewed by four judges, who agreed on 80% of the items."
So, construct validity was a kind of face validity, in that people considered to be experts thought the final set of items would elicit the constructs intended, but there was no attempt to see if responses correlated in any way with any actual measurements of the 'skills'.
Readers of the paper wondering if they should be convinced by the study would need to judge if the expert panel had the right specialisms to evaluate scale items for 'psychological skills',and might find some of the areas of expertise (i.e.,
sport psychology
swimming
teaching methodology
scientific research methodology
kinesiology)
more relevant than others:
Self-reports
If respondents responded honestly, their responses would have reflected their own estimates of their 'skills' – at least to the extent that their interpretation of the items matched that of the experts. (That is, there was no attempt to investigate how members of the population of interest would understand what was meant by the items.)
Here are some examples of the items in the instrument:
Construct ('psychological skill')
Example item
self-confidence
I manage my time effectively while in class
sports motivation achievement
I do my best to control everything related to swimming lessons.
attention
I can pay attention and focus on different places in the pool while carrying out swimming tasks
stress-management
I am not afraid to perform any difficult swimming skill, no matter what
Examples of statements students were asked to rate in order to measure their 'psychological skills' (source: Bayyat et al., 2021: 4539-4541)
Analysis of data
The authors report various analyses of their data, that lead to the conclusions they reach. If a critical reader was convinced about matters so far, they would still need to beleive that the analyses undertaken were
appropriate, and
completed competently, and
correctly interpreted.
Drawing conclusions
However, as a reader I personally would have too many quibbles with the conceptualisation and design of instrumentation to consider the analysis in much detail.
To my mind, at least, the measure of 'academic achievement' seems to be largely an evaluation of swimming skills. They are obviously important in a swimming course, but I do not consider this a valid measure of academic achievement. That is not a question of suggesting academic achievement is better or more important than practical or athletic achievements, but it is surely something different (akin to me claiming to have excellent sporting achievement on the basis of holding a PhD in education).
The measure of psychological skills does not convince me either. I am not sure some of the focal constructs can really be called 'skills' (self-confidence? motivation?), but even if they were, there is no attempt to directly measure skill. At best, the questionnaire offers self-reports of how students perceive (or perhaps wish to be seen as perceiving) their characteristics.
It is quite common in research to see the term 'questionnaire' used for an instrument that is intended to test knowledge or skill – but questionnaires are not the right kind of instrument for that job.
Significant positive relation between psychological skills and academic achievement?
So, I do not think this methodology would allow anyone to find a "significant positive relation between psychological skills and academic achievement" – only a relationship between students self-ratings on some psychological characteristics and swimming achievement. (That may reflect an interesting research question, and could perhaps be a suitable basis for a study, but is not what this study claims to be about.)
Significant differences in psychological skills level in favor of female students?
In a similar way, although it is interesting that females tended to score higher on the questionnaire scales, this shows they had higher self-ratings on average, and tells us nothing about their actual skills.
It may be that the students have great insight into these constructs and their own characteristics and so make very accurate ratings on these scales – but with absolutely no evidential basis for thinking this there are no grounds for making such a claim.
An alternative interpretation of the results is that on average the male students under-rate their 'skills' compared to their female peers. That is the 'skills' could be much the same across gender, but there might be a gender-based difference in perception. (I am not suggesting that is the case, but the evidence presented in the paper can be explained just as well by that possibility.)
An average level of psychological skills?
Finally, we might ask what is meant by
"The statistical analysis results revealed an average level of psychological skills…"
"Results of this study revealed that the participants acquired all four psychological skills at a moderate level."
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4535, 4545
Even leaving aside that what is being measured is something other than psychological skills, it is hard to see how these statements can be justified. This was the first administration of a new instrument being applied to a sample of a very specific population.
Image by Igor Drondin from Pixabay
The paper reports standard deviations for the ratings on the items in the questionnaire, so – as would be expected – there were distributions of results: spreads with different students giving different ratings. Within the sample tested, some of the students will have given higher than median ratings on an item, some will have given lower than median ratings – although on average the ratings for that particular item would have been – average for this sample (that is, by definition!) So, assuming this claim (of average/moderate levels of psychological skills) was not meant as a tautology, the authors might seem to be suggesting that the ratings given on this administration of the instrument align with what would be typically obtained, that is from across other administrations.
That is, the authors seem to be suggesting that the ratings given on this administration of the instrument align with what they expect would be typically obtained from across other administrations. Of course they have absolutely no way of knowing that is the case without collecting data from samples of other populations.
What the authors actually seem to be basing these claims (of average/moderate levels of psychological skills) on is that the average responses on these scales did not give a very high or very low rating in terms of the raw scale. Yet, with absolutely no reference data for how other groups of people might respond on the same instrument that offers little useful information. At best, it suggests something welcome about the instrument itself (ideally one would wish items to elicit a spread of responses, rather than having most responses rated very high or very low) but nothing about the students sampled.
On this point the authors seem to be treating the scale as calibrated in terms of some nominal standard (e.g. 'a rating of 3-4 would be the norm'), when there is no inherent interpretation of particular ratings of items in such a scale that can just be assumed – rather this would be a matter that would need to be explored empirically.
The research paper as an argument
The research paper is a very specific genre of writing. It is an argument for new knowledge claims. The conclusions of the paper rest on a chain of argument that starts with the conceptualisation of the study and moves through research design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. As a reader, any link in the argument chain that is not convincing potentially invalidates the knowledge claim(s) being made. Thus the standards expected for research papers are very high.
In sum then, this was an intriguing study, but did not convince me (even if it apparently convinced the peer reviewers and editor of Psychology and Education). I am not sure it was really about psychological skills or, academic achievement
…but at least it was clearly set in the context of swimming.
Work cited:
Bayyat, M. M., Orabi, S. M., Al-Tarawneh, A. D., Alleimon, S. M., & Abaza, S. N. (2021). Psychological Skills in Relation to Academic Achievement through Swimming Context. Psychology and Education, 58(5), 4535-4551.
* Despite searching the different sections of the journal site, I was unable to find who publishes the journal. However, searching outside the site I found a record of the publisher of this journal being 'Auricle Technologies, Pvt., Ltd'.
** It transpired later in the paper that 'JU' referred to students at the University of Jordan: one of three universities involved in the study.
*** I think literally this means those who participated in the study were students attending both an intermediate swimming course and an advanced swimming course – but I read this to mean those who participated in the study were students attending either an intermediate or advanced swimming course. This latter interpretation is consistent with information given elsewhere in the paper: "All schools of sports sciences at the universities of Jordan offer mandatory, reliable, and valid swimming programs. Students enroll in one of three swimming courses consequently: the basic, intermediate, and advanced levels". (Bayyat et al., 2021: 4535, emphasis added)
**** That is, if the sample is unrepresentative of the population, there is no way to know how biased the sample might be. However, if there is a representative sample, then although there will still likely be some error (the results for the sample will not be precisely what the results across the whole population would be) it is possible to calculate the likely size of this error (e.g., say ±3%) which will be smaller when a higher proportion of the population are sampled.
***** It is possible some text that was intended to be at this point has gone missing during production – as, oddly, the following sentence is
facilisi, veritus invidunt ei mea (Times New Roman, 10)
Bayyat et al., 2021: 4535
which seems to be an accidental retention of text from the journal's paper template.
Image by Waldryano from Pixabay
Strangely the invitation supposedly from William Stella, Conference Manager of the 'Webinar- Women Health' seems to have been sent to me by a Sara Jones of unitedresearchforum.org.
Sara, or perhaps William (or perhaps Stella if the name 'William Stella' is to be read in the same way as 'Taber Keith S' as I was addressed?) would apprently be honoured if I would give a Keynote talk – about Women['s] health presumably?
Respected Taber Keith S,
Greetings
Hope you're staying safe and healthy during this pandemic.
We would like to cordially invite you to partake as a Keynote Speaker for the upcoming "Webinar- Women Health". It is an online conference scheduled for 16-17th of September 2021. The webinar is a leading forum for Doctors, Physicians, Women Health Researchers, Public Health Professionals, Academicians i.e., Professors Associate Professors, Assistant Professors, novice researchers, and budding scientists. We are open for the Q & A Sessions, Panel Discussions with the Keynote Speaker/Attendees. Break out rooms with the requested attendees.
For more information: …
We look forward to a positive confirmation, an honor for us indeed. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you require any additional information and support from our side.
Thank you
Best Regards
William Stella | Conference Manager
I cannot immediately see what I would have to offer, but perhaps Sara / William / Stella has spotted some connection I have missed. Otherwise, it seems that the state of the academic conference industry has got to such a low point that anyone prepared to offer a keynote on any topic is considered good enough to put in front of (I assume) paying customers?
The scientific committee
The webinar has a scientific committee, also refered to as the organising committee who – one would assume – are at least consulted on possible keynote speakers (otherwise what is the point of such a committee?) and each member seems to be a genuine academic or professional who clearly has expertise relevant to the weninar topic.
Academics allowing their names to be published as members of such a committee give prestige to the event (whilst adding an entry to their own c.v./résumé) but this is only meaningful if they are actively involved in organising the meeting.
Well, I await enlightenment:
Invitation to be a Keynote Speaker: Webinar- Women Health
Dear Conference Manager William Stella (and Sara Jones)
Thank you and your organising committee (Prof. Filiz Namdar Pekiner, Dr Tatiana Zavarykina, Dr Jeffrey V Leyton, Catharine Janssen, Dr Daniela Capdepon and Prof. Sophia Karagiannis) for the kind invitation to be a Keynote Speaker at 'Webinar- Women Health'. I am currently very busy with a range of projects and so have to decline most such invitations, but I do recognise that this is a very important topic where I should seek to contribute if I can genuinely be of use.
You kindly invite me contact you for any additional information, and so I hope you do not mind if I ask which aspect of my research and scholarship you were hoping I might present on. I am sure that you and your impressive international scientific committee deliberate carefully before honouring colleagues with such prestigious invitations, but it is not immediately obvious to me which strand of my work would be most relevant to the intended audience of this particular webinar.
If you are able to tell me which of my project(s) or publication(s) you had in mind as a basis for the Keynote when you issued the invitation, then I would be happy to give serious consideration to whether I could prepare a Keynote talk for the Webinar along those lines. You can find details of my work at:
https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/taber/https://science-education-research.com/projects/https://science-education-research.com/publications/
I am looking forward to learning more about how my work might contribute to this webinar on a very serious and important topic.
Yours sincerely
Keith
