Three Weeks for Dreamwidth: The FONSFAQ Science Project: prompts

[yvi]

dingsi started it with the Germany FONSFAQ /Masterlist here), and here it is:

Frequently (Or Not So Frequently) Asked Questions About Science

What do people want to know about all kinds of science fields? Feel free to ask questions on basic or not-so basic Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Medicine, Geology, and so on! Whether you want to know how DNA mutates, how nuclear fission works or what we know about the pleacebo effect, just post a comment.

And if you know enough about one of the prompts, claim it and write an entry on it during the next few weeks. I know we have many scientists and interested laypeople on Dreamwidth, so let's get tose together!

Directions:

1. If asking a question, make the subject "PROMPT: [short summary of prompt]", so I can index them in this entry
2. If claiming to answer a question, make the subject "CLAIM"
3. When you have written your entry and posted it to your journal or this community or whereever you like on Dreamwidth, post a comment with a link to the entry in the comment thread. I will post a masterlist of answers sometime next week and update it regularly.

If you are not sure whether you will get around to answering something, don't worry - there is no direct need to claim anything.

Also, if you have a subject you'd really like to write about yourself, don't be shy and just post a comment with "CLAIM: [short summary of prompt]" yourself. The more entries, the better.

Any more questions, just ask!

Prompts

Biology
cesy: Next big thing in biology

Computer Science
snowynight: Cutting-edge computer science

General
vacillating: Scientific theory

Medicine
yvi: IVF
snowynight: Recent develoments in gentic therapy

Scientists
yvi: What got you into science
holyschist: What do you want the public to learn about science

Comments

PROMPT: interpreting study results (for beginners)

[krait]

I notice there's a whole lot of confusion in the mainstream media when scientific results are published; people don't seem to know how to interpret findings, or what a lot of the terms mean (standard deviation, causation versus correlation) or how a GOOD study should be set up (placebos, double-blinds, possibility of influence by other factors such as corporate sponsorship, how many subjects should be used to get a reasonably accurate result, how data is collected) or what to look for when something is probably sketchy (sample size, lacks citations from other research, data comes from surveys, ...?) and common flaws found in many studies (same as "sketchiness indicators"?).


As you can tell, I know some of these things, or at least have vague memories of them from school, but not enough to really write the entry!

This prompt might benefit from multiple answers, in fact -- I'm pretty sure that a reasonable number of subjects could be "10,000" when studying mice or corn plants, but "50" when studying people with heart murmurs... likewise it's probably silly to give a placebo to a cat, but sensible to a human. (At least if it's a drug study. If it's a study of, say, allele frequencies in population X, it's not going to be at issue at all.)