Category Archives: Science

They’ve gone PLAID!! or CERN finds faster than light particle.

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Yes, CERN has claimed that the speed of light has been broken by Neutrinos. What is exactly does that mean and why is it a big deal? First why is breaking the speed of light a big deal? According to the theory of special relativity, the speed of light is the maximum speed that something can accelerate to. Because of the famous equation E=mc2 it would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object beyond the speed of light.

What is a Neutrino? A neutrino is one of the particles that make up other particles. It’s part of the building blocks of atomic theory. Neutrinos carry no charge, so they are different than the electron. Since they have no charge they are able to pass through matter. Neutrinos also require very special detection mechanisms. Neutrinos also have mass. 
This is why it is a big deal to have detected the speed of a neutrino at greater than the speed of light. Either the neutrino always has traveled faster than the speed of light or they were somehow able to accelerate to a speed greater than that of light, which requires infinite energy under our current model of physics. Since we’re talking about a particle accelerator here it can be assumed that the collision created the neutrino, thus we know that it is impossible for infinite energy to have be entered into the system.
Now that we understand what is going on, what is at stake here? A particle that is able to accelerate to a speed faster than the speed of light completely shifts our understanding of subatomic particles. Actually, it obliterates it. We will have no clear understand of what is going on at these particle sizes. 
Could this be the greatest finding in the 21st century? Yes. All physicists believe it would be. Are people just accepting these findings? No. There is a great deal of skepticism, and it’s not just from the broader community. The scientists that are presenting the results are basically issuing a challenge to the scientific community to show that they are wrong! Based on their findings these results are in fact statistically significant. 
Are other scientists going to test these results to verify it? Well, there are only two other places in the world that could have the capabilities to test it. Fermilab in Chicago and a Japanese lab that was damaged by the earth quake and tsunami. However, Fermilab’s equipment isn’t sensitive enough to detect the difference in the speeds. Basically, the speed difference is so small it is within the margin of error for the detection equipment.
What’s this all mean to me though? Well, for us non-physicists life goes on as normal. We can’t suddenly travel faster than light. However, this is a case of good science at work. We should seriously pay attention to what happens here. This type of science happens all the time at a smaller scale. For evolution this type of science is happening. Some extraordinary claim is made, which requires extraordinary data to support it, then is tested by other people. IF the claim withstands additional scrutiny the claim is accepted. In some cases where the claim is so extraordinary that the people making the claims don’t really buy it, then it is the duty of the scientific community and the larger community to give them the support they need to determine the validity of the results.
Here’s some comments from British CERN physicists Brian Cox.

Ethics in Science III

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I’ve been doing a series on Ethics in science, part one, part two, because there’s been a lot of public issues in the UK about the behavior of scientists. Any suggestions, or laws put into affect would have far reaching impacts. As any scientist in the UK would be required to follow them and any scientist that wishes to publish in a journal headquartered there. I believe Nature is. Nature is THE journal to get published in.

There are some different suggestions on what should be done, including ethics review boards and independent verification of results. The UK’s investigation of fraud led to this result:

In the same way that there is an external regulator overseeing health and safety, we consider that there should be an external regulator overseeing research integrity,” says the committee’s report. “We recommend that the government set out proposals on the scope and powers of such a regulator and consult with the research community and other relevant parties to develop them.

I understand what they are going for here. They want to prevent another vaccine debacle or prevent another cold fusion lie. I think they also plan to prevent another “Climate gate.” While these are noble causes, I can’t help but fear that politics will get involved in this process. If a scientist is found of committing true fraud their career is over. There just isn’t the right incentives to commit fraud in MOST sciences. Yes, it happens, but it’s more likely to be a mistake than true fraud. Which is something that peer review might catch. However, even this is difficult without the initial data set, or recordings of how the experiment was carried out. Scientists are pretty brutal when going through the peer review process. They question everything and you have to have a satisfactory answer to all their questions if you want the results to be published. The true best way to improve scientific debate is to provide incentives to publish articles that have debunked previous research. This will fix more problems than a regulatory board for most of the sciences.

However, then we come to medical sciences. Here there are much greater incentives to commit fraud or intentionally mislead. Why? Well, for a blockbuster drug they can sell Billions in revenue a year. If a drug company thinks that they have a blockbuster on their hands they will try to get it to market sooner. In most cases they have patent protection for at most 10 to 15 years. But you’ve said patents are for 20 years. That’s true, however, it typically takes drug companies 10 years to get a drug to market. After the last ten years they are able to request a 5 year extension.

Why is the system set up like this? Well, the drug companies test a lot of different drugs and not all of them can be blockbuster drugs. A lot of them don’t make it through the rigorous testing process either. The drug companies have to pay for all of that as well as make a profit. So, they charge a lot for these blockbuster drugs. They actually do have some different prices to try to help the poor out as well though.

So, in clinical trails there is more incentive to commit fraud or with hold important results. What can be done about it? Well Bernie Sanders (US Senator) has proposed a prize competition for developing different kinds of drugs, which as a stipulation of getting the prize the US government would own the patent. The government would license the patent out so drugs could be cheaper. However, this prize would have to be huge which would again provide more incentives to defraud the government. It would have to be in the billions to allow for the drug companies to recoup their expenses. It could force much stronger restrictions and oversight on the drug trials though. Which could reduce the ability to commit fraud. The prize committee could potentially be made up of scientists that are part of the NIH (National Institute of Health) which would do the data analysis for each of the “Blockbuster” trials thus forcing impartiality into clinical trials.

This could work. Additionally there could be sanctions put on the fraudulent authors, where they are unable to publish for a year, at any level. Where they lose their grants, or are unable to hire new graduate students until they show they have been reformed. This would certainly kill their career. However, this should happen.

Finally, I think that scientists should be required to add any conflicts of interest in the publications as well as sources of funding. In many cases this already happens as the funding agencies require it, however making it an explicit part of the publication process will make it more transparent. Transparency is vital to science.

Science isn’t perfect, but it’s our best tool for understanding the world around it. Committing fraud on the scientific community and the world as a whole is a horrible crime and should be treated as such.

Ethics in Science II

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Yesterday I discussed some of the ethical concerns within the Medical science field. This case most likely has the most frequent cases of fraud and unethical behavior. Why? Because there’s a ton of money involved. Clinical trials relate to drugs, which is a multibillion dollar industry. Additionally, there is no requirement by the National Institute of Health to list any potential conflicts of interest. According to Nature there was a plan in the works to require this. However, it got scuttled. In business people go to jail for these types of things.

However, medical science is not the only place where fraud happens. As this ethic blog notes there are a lot of several different kinds of fraud. Some are intentional, others are less intentional. The biggest problem is intentional fraud. Where the author makes up some result. There are two pretty big examples of this. The first is the fake human clone from South Korea by a scientists named Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. This  guy was rather quickly outed as a fraud. However, this wasn’t until there was a HUGE debate in the mainstream media about the ethics of cloning human stem cells. This helped push the US and much of Europe to ban cloning of human embryos.

The second most famous case of fraud is the case of cold fusion. What is cold fusion though, why would people want to make claims of making that happen? Well, fusion is what the sun does, if we could manage to do that on earth without burning ourselves up that would be pretty awesome. Basically, as the PopSci article states, is that with fusion you get more energy than what you put into it. It basically would solve all world energy problems. The first person that does it would basically be a savior to the human race. So, it’s something that people really want to do. There’s debate if it’s even possible, it’s theoretically possible, but physically possible is still up for debate.

So, accidental fraud comes about from introducing a personal bias or from misinterpreting data. Both of these happen fairly often in science. Why? because we’re human, and this is what the scientific method is supposed to eliminate over time. Before publishing results you typically need to have been able to reproduce them and show that there is a trend that is consistent over time for the phenomena that you are studying. This is one of the biggest requirements for science. Which is why in clinical trials there are at least three stages to ensure repeatability of the data.

The other good thing about the scientific method is the fact that other people can take your results and findings and test them. IF the results are different they can be published and used to dispute the previous findings. This happens all the time in regular scientific discourse. In fact there’s a great example of this going on right now. This debate has been going on for about a hundred years now or so. Recently a group debunked Gould’s bias argument. Basically a guy back in the late 1800’s measured a big set of skulls to see if there were any size differences. Stephen Jay-Gould, basically the Richard Dawkins of his day, re-analyzed the data because he felt there was bias in it, and found that there was in fact bias! Well, this recent group actually remeasured the skulls and found out that it was Gould that was biased and that if anything the original sample was more correct.

Science is supposed to be totally objective. As we can see from this discussion it’s not, and cannot be. Why? We’re human. However, the system works really well as a whole. In my next blog I’ll discuss some of the ways we can address issues of fraud other concerns that I’ve mentioned over the past two days.

Ethics in Science

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So, right now the UK is in a big uproar about ethics in science. There have been parliamentary hearings which have deeply concerned scientists. In one opinion piece from the guardian the author argues that it’s been too long going that the scientific community has been able to function without some sort of regulation. Scientists of course object to this. Because there is a method to the manner in which they work. Many, from the tone at the hearings, feel this is another assault on the scientific community.

However, it maybe that there’s some scientific work that is more likely to have fraudulent activity in it. Today the Guardian published an article about scientific ghost writers. Scientific Ghost writers can come in two forms. The first is harmless where the author is really the person that got the funding. Depending on the journal these authors are either the second or very last author on the paper. This is normal, as typically you’re working in that person’s lab and they are paying you. So they should get some credit for the work done as they may also have had an advising role. The second kind of ghost writing is much worse. These writers were in no way associated with the research and their names are put on the article to give it weight, or if they were the ones supposed to be doing the research and some one else did it. In the Guardian article they are focusing on clinical trials for medicines.

This isn’t the only country where fraud, exaggerating claims or ghost writing occurs. Although, the UK has had one of the most famous cases with the retracted article linking MMR vaccine to Autism (meaning it was fraud). This also happens in the US and in many clinical trials. In fact a Greek doctor has made it his mission to unearth clinical trial fraud and really understand what was going on there. The Atlantic had a great write up about this in November of 2010. The doctor  Ioannidis has been making a career out of debunking claims as well as researching the causes of these problems. He argues that the double blind clinical trial isn’t giving us the best results we could possibly be getting in medical science. Although, he doesn’t offer a huge amount of alternatives. 

The New York Times also ran a story about in September of last 2010 about some of the ethics behind clinical trials. This article discusses how two cousins ended up in the same trial and one cousin was given the treatment and the other was not. It was a story that was really questioning the ethics of the clinical trial, because it was obviously working. However, pushing through these treatments without fulling testing them can be just as dangerous. Granted these people were near the end as it was. The cousin that didn’t receive the new treatment died from only getting the chemo.

One the one hand we want to get promising medicine out as fast as possible. However, we want to ensure we are properly testing these medicines to ensure safety. This leads to a great deal of ethical concerns. For promising medicines do we make exceptions? Do we allow fully untested medicine into the wild? These are difficult questions. From an ethical and moral standpoint allowing a patient to die because of a randomized test is very questionable, which is what happened in the case above. However, in some cases rushing through medicines like these end up causing deaths in other manners. In the case of Vioxx this is exactly what happened. In many people it reduced the risk while in others it out right killed them. Where is the balance? I think this is why the UK is pushing for more oversight in these cases.

*Note: my dad, a nurse practitioner pointed out that i was slightly wrong about Vioxx. He’s correct. There were more ethical problems than the fact it was a bad drug. Simply the creators of Vioxx hid the fact that it impacted african americans differently than white americans. If Vioxx hadn’t done this it wouldn’t have been a problem for the drug to stay on the market. If you want to read more about Vioxx there’s a chapter in the book Denialism By Michael Specter

In my next blog I’ll discuss scientific fraud and ethics in other fields.

Software Patents are the new Copyright

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In one of my previous posts I commented that I was seeing a convergence withing copyright activities. I believe that something just as horrible is starting to happen within the software patent world. I think that it will threaten the free software movement as well. We’ve had patent trolls around for a long time now. Almost since the first patent was created, however, this didn’t interact with our daily lives. It was similar to the way that copyright didn’t affect you and me on a daily basis. Sure, changes in prices or the removal of a product could affect us, but typically we were able to find a replacement or dealt with the price change. However, I think that this new type of patent troll is more dangerous. Yesterday I saw a post on Ars Technica discussing how Lodsys is going after Apple app developers. Apple isn’t happy about this at all, because it threatens to ruin the base they have developed.

I think there are some other problems with this as well. Historically, if a company, that produces software, was looking to go for an IPO or bought by another company there’s a thing called due dilligence, where the products are checked for stolen code. This is a big deal, because if I stole the code from Linux or some other open source software, my entire project falls under the GPL, and forces my source code to become open as well. This can create massive headaches for companies.

There is a key difference between what used to happen in the past and what is happening now. Before it was the method of making something happened that mattered. For example if I took a really fast way to sort something from open source how it was sorted was what mattered, not that it sorted. Why does this matter? Well the code is also technically copyrighted and owned by the writer. Now the outcome matters as well. What if some one had a patent on sorting. I’ve mentioned how crazy this would have been in the past and how this would impact innovation.

Let’s say some one decided to put in for a patent on shooting animals at some sort of target through a controlled interface. Once the animal hit the target the animal interacted with the target which changed the user interface to indicate that the change had occurred. I have two games on my phone right now, Angry Birds and Monkey Blaster that would both be impacted by this patent. Both of them have very different goals and methods for shooting an animal at a target and different results once it hits the target. Indeed, the definition of target is different between these two games. However, neither of these developers are going to be looking for patents when they have an idea about what’s the next game they want to make.

The patent that is mentioned in the Ars article is absurd. It should never have been approved. There’s nothing novel in the development of the in app purchase. That is something that should be obvious from any one in the computer industry. You could easily see the relationship between a website and an application. In fact, I’m sure that there have been cases of this in the past. Another question that remains to be seen is this going to impact services like Steam? The article notes that Lodsys has already gone after EA.

This change in behavior towards apps and software patents is a very bad change. We need to work to address these types of problems. Returning to the requirement of producing a product to have on the market within a certain number of years could help address these problems. However for software this will likely just lead to a crappy product put on the market that no one buys and no one knows about.