Posts Tagged ‘seed’

Malcolm Gladwell and the popularization of social science

December 7, 2009

Recently, I was talking with a couple of sociologists about Contexts magazine’s project to identify the most popular books in sociology from the last ten years. (It’s a sequel to a 1997 paper by Herbert Gans). It’s safe to say that at the top of the list will probably be a book by Malcolm Gladwell. When the ASA gave Gladwell its award for excellence in the reporting of social issues, the organization praised him for possessing  ”that rare sociological imagination that illuminates social processes by seeing what social principle they share, that is by discovering unexpected links between disparate situations, links that render deep insights into human interaction.” Of course, one person’s talent “for grounding social controversies in everyday experiences, thus giving his articles a wide appeal” is another person’s “dilettantism and intellectual phoniness.”

In a recent piece in Seed Magazine, Evan Lerner breaks down the backlash against Gladwell by reviewers in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Daily Beast. Personally, I’m leaning towards the ASA’s point of view. Gladwell’s imagination and clear writing has brought pulled many provocative ideas from the sciences into mainstream popular culture, and it would be a shame to lose that.

Posted in sociology | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , ,

Dave Munger on the Placebo Effect

November 9, 2009

Over in Seed magazine, Dave Munger posts an interesting article on subject-expectancy effects. Here’s an excerpt:

This is the primary misconception about placebos: that the placebo itself is somehow “working” to treat a medical condition. You can see it even in the headline for an otherwise well-crafted article that appeared in Wired last August: “Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.” As internist and medical professor Peter Lipson noted on the Science-Based Medicine blog, placebos by definition have no medical effect. The “placebo effect” is due to the subject’s (and sometimes, the experimenter’s) expectation that a treatment will work. And, of course, a patient sometimes recovers simply due to chance or because his or her immune response handled the problem. Researchers observe an improvement, and this gets attributed to the placebo. In the case of the Wired article, the misconception in the headline is cleared up by the text of the report: The placebo effect may be getting stronger for reasons that are unclear to researchers. Placebos themselves, as ever, remain ineffective.

Posted in sociology | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , ,

Garrett Lisi on Peer Review in Seed Magazine

June 5, 2009

Seed interviews physicist Garrett Lisi on the reasons he rejects traditional academic journals.

Seed Magazine: Why did you choose not to submit your paper to a traditional peer-reviewed journal?
Lisi: I think peer review is important, but the journal-operated system is severely broken. I suspected this paper would get some attention, and I chose not to support any academic journal by submitting it. Under the current system, authors (who aren’t paid) give ownership of their papers to journals that have reviewers (who aren’t paid) approve them before publishing the papers and charging exorbitant fees to view them. These reviewers don’t always do a great job, and the journals aren’t providing much value in exchange for their fees. This old system persists because academic career advancement often depends on which journals scientists can get their papers into, and it comes at a high cost — in money, time, and stress. I think a better peer-review system could evolve from reviewers with good reputations picking the papers they find interesting out of an open pool, such as the physics arXiv, and commenting on them. This is essentially what happened with my paper, which received a lot of attention from physics bloggers — it’s been an example of open, collaborative peer review.

Seed: How will “open science” and other new ways of sharing information transform science?
Lisi: I think we’re in the midst of a gradual revolution, following the rise of the Internet. The success of the physics arXiv — where physicists post freely available versions of their papers — has made it possible for anyone to access the literature from anywhere. This let me move to Maui 10 years ago and stay in touch with the field. Now an NIH mandate, requiring that publicly funded papers be posted to PubMed, will produce the same liberating effect in other fields. The net is also affecting the way scientists work directly, with wikis and blogs used for discussions, collaborations, and individual note keeping. These new tools, along with online social networks, allow geographically independent researchers to keep in perpetual, productive contact. Since theoretical researchers are no longer anchored to one location, I’ve been working on creating Science Hostels — micro-institutes in beautiful places where scientists could live and work, while having a bit of fun, and keeping more of a balance in their lives.

I like the idea of PubMed or physics arXiv. It would be wonderfully disruptive if the social sciences had a central archive that was open to the public. However, there are plenty of institutional reasons why this sort of change would be difficult and unlikely. Are there any current resources like this on the web?

Posted in sociology | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , ,