Talk:1574: Trouble for Science

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 14:21, 7 September 2015 by 173.245.54.87 (talk)
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Sentence case, or down style, is one method, preferred by many print and online publications and recommended by the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. The only two rules are the two rules mentioned above: Capitalize the first word and all proper nouns. Everything else is in lowercase. http://www.dailywritingtips.com/rules-for-capitalization-in-titles/ 173.245.50.154 12:30, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Problems with the p-value as an indicator of significance

The p-value alone can never be an indicator of significance. However, it is still often used as the only indicator, because a full set of parameters (including sample size, test setup, etc.) can't easily be packed into a single number. There's a nice article in nature about this problem: [1] I can also recommend story about (ab-)using hacked p-values to get maximum publicity. I hope this helps :-) --141.101.105.183 12:41, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I think the joke is that these newspapers are talking about how bad science is, and yet they manage to come up with a stupid story about Bunsen burners, presumably being too scientifically illiterate to know the problem. Timband (talk) 12:55, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Controlled trials show Bunsen burners make things colder

Actually, I can easily imagine a way to use a Bunsen burner to make something colder. Involving an unlit Bunsen burner that has been placed in the freezer for a couple hours, for example. Nowhere in the headline is there any mention of a flame. --Svenman (talk) 12:59, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually, there was a (badly formatted and badly placed, probably therefore now removed) comment on the explanation page earlier which pointed out that feeding a Bunsen burner from a propane bottle will cause the pressure, and therefore the temperature, in the bottle to decrease. That is a lot less contrived than my original idea. --Svenman (talk) 13:37, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
That was me. Trying to get my 2 cents in on my phone before I forgot. http://www.propane101.com/propaneregulatorfreezing.htm as an example. Mattiep (talk) 13:45, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I think the joke is in the wording of the headlines. The fact that a replication study fails to reproduce can be seen as a contradiction. Overfeeding rodents leads to fat rodents. This compromises their ability to function als animal (runway) models. I haven't figured out the other ones yet. But that's çause I'm dumb :-). Alva. 141.101.104.80 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

  • It's way simpler than that - The joke is that people outside of sciences (with no understanding really of how to science) will report basically anything that sounds shocking or exciting, especially if it proves those nerdy, scary scientists wrong! So Randall gives us a bunch of possibly headlines that to a layman read like real, scary news about science, but to scientists this is stuff that is generally well known and understood. The last one is just taking it a step further for credulous news editors - They've been lying to us all this time! 13:33, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
    • I think it's even simpler than that: the title is "Trouble for Science" and it shows a series of misleading headlines about misleading (i.e.: invalidated) scientific studies. The implication is "Trouble for Journalism".173.245.54.87 14:21, 7 September 2015 (UTC)