The Half-Life of Facts

by Samuel Arbesman

  CHAPTER 6: HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

  1. increased use of antibacterial soaps: Arbesman, Harvey. “Is Cutaneous Malignant Melanoma Associated with the Use of Antibacterial Soaps?” Medical Hypotheses 53, no. 1 (July 1999): 73–75.

  2. dairy consumption is related to acne: Arbesman, Harvey. “Dairy and Acne—the Iodine Connection.” Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology 53(6): 1102. December 2005.

  3. when Roche brought a problem: “The Benefits of Open Innovation.” InnoCentive. http://www.innocentive.com/seekers/benefits-open-innovation.

  4. When NASA used InnoCentive: Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship. “Legatum Lecture Series Presents: Alpheus Bingham of InnoCentive, Inc.” http://legatum.mit.edu/binghamlecture.

  5. He demonstrated this with a novel finding: Swanson, Don R. “Undiscovered Public Knowledge.” The Library Quarterly 56, no. 2 (April 1, 1986): 103–18.

  6. Building on this, Swanson continued: Swanson, Don R. “Medical Literature as a Potential Source of New Knowledge.” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 78, no. 1 (January 1990): 29–37; Swanson, Don R. “Migraine and Magnesium: Eleven Neglected Connections.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 31, no. 4 (1988): 526–57.

  7. revisited undiscovered public knowledge: Swanson, Don R., and Neil Smalheiser. “Undiscovered Public Knowledge: A Ten-Year Update.” In KDD-96 Proceedings. Edited by Evangelos Simoudis, Jia Han, and Usama Fayyad, 295–98. AAAI Press, 1996.

  8. has a greater chance of solving a problem than do the experts: About one-third of all InnoCentive challenges yield solutions. Lakhani, K. R., et al. “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving.” Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 07—050. (2007); http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07—050.pdf.

  9. the same scientists who explored the errors: Simkin, M. V., and V. P. Roychowdhury. “Re-inventing Willis.” Physics Reports 502, no. 1 (May 2011): 1–35.

  10. Certain concepts in computer science: Trakhtenbrot, B. A. “A Survey of Russian Approaches to Perebor (Brute-Force Searches) Algorithms.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 6 (October 1, 1984): 384–400.

  11. how often scientists were aware of previous research: Robinson, Karen A., and Steven N. Goodman. “A Systematic Examination of the Citation of Prior Research in Reports of Randomized, Controlled Trials.” Annals of Internal Medicine 154 , no. 1 (January 4, 2011): 50–55.

  12. a team of scientists from the hospitals and schools: Lau, Joseph, et al. “Cumulative Meta-Analysis of Therapeutic Trials for Myocardial Infarction.” New England Journal of Medicine 327, no. 4 (July 23, 1992): 248–54.

  13. the creation of a massive database: Frijters, Raoul, et al. “Literature Mining for the Discovery of Hidden Connections between Drugs, Genes and Diseases.” PLoS Computational Biology 6, no. 9 (September 23, 2010): e1000943.

  14. CoPub Discovery involved: Frijters, Raoul, et al. “CoPub: A Literature-Based Keyword Enrichment Tool for Microarray Data Analysis.” Nucleic Acids Research 36 , no. supplement 2 (July 1, 2008): W406–W410.

  15. CoPub Discovery predicted: Another example of a tool like this: Kuhn, Michael, et al. “Large-Scale Prediction of Drug-Target Relationships.” Federation of European Biochemical Societies Letters 582, no. 8 (April 9, 2008): 1283–90.

  16. software designed to find undiscovered patterns: See TRIZ, a method of invention and discovery. For example, here: www.aitriz.org.

  17. computerized systems devoted to drug repurposing: Sanseau, Philippe, and Jacob Koehler. “Editorial: Computational Methods for Drug Repurposing.” Briefings in Bioinformatics 12, no. 4 (July 1, 2011): 301–2.

  18. can generate new and interesting: Darden, Lindley. “Recent Work in Computational Scientific Discovery.” In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (1997) 161–66.

  19. names a novel, computationally created: See TheoryMine: http://theorymine.co.uk.

  20. A Cornell professor of earth and atmospheric sciences: Cisne, John L. “How Science Survived: Medieval Manuscripts’ ‘Demography’ and Classic Texts’ Extinction.” Science 307, no. 5713 (February 25, 2005): 1305–7.

  21. “This can create almost lyrical connections”: Johnson, Steven Berlin. “Tool for Thought.” New York Times, January 30, 2005.

  CHAPTER 7: FACT PHASE TRANSITIONS

  1. Thomas Wright, a British astronomer: Sagan, Carl. The Varieties of Scientific Experience. New York: Penguin, 2006.

  2. In 1953: Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010. p. 157.

  3. Figuring out the right underlying change to measure: In physics, this is related to finding what is known as the order parameter, the quantity that is zero in one phase and nonzero in another phase. Determining this requires a certain amount of creative effort for each system.

  4. a stunningly discontinuous jump in our knowledge: Arbesman, Samuel, and Gregory Laughlin. “A Scientometric Prediction of the Discovery of the First Potentially Habitable Planet with a Mass Similar to Earth.” PLoS ONE 5, no. 10 (October 2010): e13061.

  5. a simple metric of habitability: Others have since developed other habitability metrics. See for example, the Earth Similarity Index: http://phl.upr.edu/projects/earth-similarity-index-esi

  6. Kepler 22b: Kepler 22b is likely quite a bit more massive than Earth. However, there are certain planetary candidates discovered by the Kepler mission that are even more Earth-like but have not been confirmed as of mid-2012.

  7. whole new pieces of math were involved: Singh, Simon. Fermat’s Enigma. New York: Walker & Company, 1997.

  8. There are some problems: This was shown by Kurt Gödel in his Incompleteness Theorem. For further reading, see for example, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Basic Books. 1979.

  9. it turns out we will have to wait until 2024: Arbesman, Samuel, and Rachel Courtland. “2011 preview: Million-Dollar Mathematics Problem.” New Scientist, December 2010. More recently, Ryohei Hisano and Didier Sornette have conducted a more sophisticated statistical analysis; they estimate that there’s a 41 percent chance by 2024, similar to our prediction of 50 percent. Hisano, Ryohei, and Didier Sornette. “On the Distribution of Time-to-Proof of Mathematical Conjectures.” (2012); http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.3936.

  10. Luís Bettencourt and his colleagues: Bettencourt, Luis M. A., et al. “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 17 (2007): 7301–6.

  11. the way it does for living things: West, G. B, J. H. Brown, and B. J. Enquist. “A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology.” Science 276 (5309): 126.

  12. there would be little difference: Personal communication with Sarah Gilbert and Rena Lauer, both medieval historians.

  13. even fashion during the Middle Ages: Loschek, Ingrid. When Clothes Become Fashion: Design and Innovation Systems. London: Berg Publishers, 2009.

  CHAPTER 8: MOUNT EVEREST AND THE DISCOVERY OF ERROR

  1. we now know for certain: See Everest@National Geographic: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/99/everest/roof_content.html (accessed December 20, 2011).

  2. the world record for the tallest tree: Preston, Richard. “Tall for Its Age.” The New Yorker (October 9, 2006): 32–36.

  3. “Revolutions in science have often been preceded”: Cukier, Kenneth. “A Special Report on Managing Information: Data, Data Everywhere.” The Economist (February 25, 2010).

  4. Wilkins went on to define a regular system of lengths: Wilkins, John. An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. 1668. Available online: http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/WilkinsTranslationShort.pdf

  5. the speed of light and the length of the meter: For more on measurements, see the Web site of the National Institute of Standards and Technology: http://www.nist
.gov/.

  6. The world of measurement involves much more: Cardarelli, François. Encyclopaedia of Scientific Units, Weights, and Measures: Their SI Equivalences and Origins. New York: Springer Publishing, 2004.

  7. have been bandying about alternative definitions: Crease, Robert P. “Measurement and Its Discontents.” New York Times. October 23, 2011.

  8. published a tongue-in-cheek paper: Dessler, A. J., and C. T. Russell. “From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: The Pending Disappearance of Pluto.” Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 61, no. 44 (1980): 690.

  9. there is about a one in six chance: The Fisher’s exact test was used here. An online calculator is available here: http://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/contingency1.cfm

  10. illustrated some of the failings of this threshold: Munroe, Randall. “Significant.” xkcd. http://xkcd.com/882/.

  11. “Statistics is the science”: Penman, Bridget, et al. “Genome-wide Association Studies in Plasmodium Species.” BMC Biology 8, no. 1 (2010): 90; Statisticians have developed techniques to account for this problem, such as the use of something known as the Bonferroni correction. This simply states that if you are testing lots and lots of variables to see if they are related to something in a significant way, what you deem a significant p-value must be much more strict, and much smaller.

  12. Planet X was a slippery thing: Quinlan, Gerald D. “Planet X: A Myth Exposed.” Nature 363, no. 6424 (May 6, 1993): 18–19. Grosser, Morton. “The Search for a Planet beyond Neptune.” Isis 55, no. 2 (June 1, 1964): 163–83. The History of Science Society.

  13. He has found that for highly cited clinical trials: Ioannidis, John P. A. “Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research.” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 294, no. 2 (2005): 218–28.

  14. Ioannidis conducted the same test for various biomarkers: Ioannidis, John P. A., and Orestis A. Panagiotou. “Comparison of Effect Sizes Associated With Biomarkers Reported in Highly Cited Individual Articles and in Subsequent Meta-analyses.” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 305, no. 21 (June 1, 2011): 2200–10.

  15. what is perhaps Ioannidis’s most well-known paper: Ioannidis, John P. A. “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” PLoS Med 2, no. 8 (2005): e124.

  16. Regarding a kerfuffle: Zimmer, Carl. “It’s Science, but Not Necessarily Right.” New York Times, June 26, 2011.

  17. “If it confirmed the first researcher’s findings”: Quoted in Cole, Stephen. Making Science: Between Nature and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

  18. researchers calculated that a small amount of replication: Moonesinghe, Ramal, Muin J. Khoury, A. Cecile, and J. W. Janssens. “Most Published Research Findings Are False—But a Little Replication Goes a Long Way.” PLoS Medicine 4, no. 2 (February 27, 2007): e28.

  19. As Lord Florey, a president of the Royal Society, stated: Cole, Jonathan, and Stephen Cole. Social Stratification in Science. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1973. p. 217.

  20. Science is not always cumulative: Cole, Stephen. Making Science: Between Nature and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

  21. “The scientific literature is strewn”: Ziman, John M. Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

  22. A stark example is that of war: Mueller, John. “War Has Almost Ceased to Exist: An Assessment.” Political Science Quarterly, 124, no. 2 (2009).

  23. When born in 1822, Francis Galton: Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 1883. Available online: http://galton.org/books/human-faculty/text/human-faculty.pdf

  24. He wrote a paper: Galton, Francis. “On Head Growth in Students at the University of Cambridge.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 18 (January 1, 1889): 155–56.

  25. how people visualize numbers in their mind: Galton, Francis. “Visualized Numerals.” Nature (March 25, 1880): 494–5.

  26. how many pretty women he encountered: Gorraiz, Juan, Christian Gumpenberger, and Martin Wieland. “Galton 2011 Revisited: A Bibliometric Journey in the Footprints of a Universal Genius.” Scientometrics 88, no. 2 (2011): 627–52.

  27. Galton was the man who ushered in the Statistical Enlightenment: Stigler, S. M. “Darwin, Galton and the Statistical Enlightenment.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 173 (2010): 469–82.

  28. wrote the following of Galton: Price, Derek J. de Solla. Little Science, Big Science—and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

  29. the elderly are capable of crossing the street: Hoxie, R. E., and L. Z. Rubenstein. “Are Older Pedestrians Allowed Enough Time to Cross Intersections Safely?” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 42, no. 3 (March 1994): 241–4.

  30. are the subject of the vast majority of scientific papers: May, Robert M. “How Many Species Are There on Earth?” Science 241, no. 4872 (September 16, 1988): 1441–49; Clark, J. Alan, and Robert M. May. “Taxonomic Bias in Conservation Research.” Science 297, no. 5579 (July 12, 2002): 191–92.

  31. some scientists even call it taxonomic chauvinism: Bonnet, Xavier, Richard Shine, and Olivier Lourdais. “Taxonomic Chauvinism.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, (January 1, 2002).

  32. one of the main reasons that the brontosaurus: Gould, Stephen Jay. Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

  CHAPTER 9: THE HUMAN SIDE OF FACTS

  1. Frogs have a curious type of vision: Lettvin J. Y., et al. “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,’’ Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 47 (1959): 1940–51, reprinted in Warren S. McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965.

  2. the abundance of cod: Helfman, Gene S. Fish Conservation: A Guide to Understanding and Restoring Global Aquatic Biodiversity and Fishery Resources. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2007.

  3. “anything that was invented after you were born”: Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010. p. 235.

  4. they recanted their editorial: “A Correction.” New York Times, July 17, 1969.

  5. Why do we believe in wrong, outdated facts?: Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. New York: Ecco, 2010. One of the main reasons, Schulz notes, that it is so easy to be wrong is very simple: Being wrong feels a lot like being right.

  6. Bradley Wray was preparing his high school students: Wray, Bradley. “Cognitive Bias Song”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RsbmjNLQkc.

  7. Ignaz Semmelweis argued that the doctors: Hempel, Carl G. Philosophy of Natural Science. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

  8. akin to Daniel Kahneman’s idea of theory-induced blindness: Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: The Penguin Press, 2010. p. 99.

  9. A series of seminal experiments were done in this field: Chabris, Christopher, and Daniel Simons. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. New York: Crown Archetype, 2010.

  10. Obama decided to sign the guestbook: Amira, Dan. “President Obama Has No Idea What Year It Is.” New York: Daily Intel, 2011; http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/05/president_obama_has_no_idea_wh.html.

  11. according to WebMD: WebMD. “Blood Nose (Nosebleed) Causes and Treatments”; http://firstaid.webmd.com/nosebleeds-causes-and-treatments; accessed February 4, 2012.

  12. or distinguish Pluto in some other way: The son of a friend of mine explained to me that Pluto was destroyed, the same way that Superman’s home planet of Krypton was destroyed.

  13. reading an essay by Michael Chabon: Chabon, Michael. “To The Legoland Station.” In Manhood for Amateurs. New York: HarperCollins, 2009, pp. 51–58.

&n
bsp; 14. enriched by spirited discussion: Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. New York: Riverhead, 2010.

  15. Pritchett recently proposed an intriguing idea: Howley, Kerry. “Welcome Guest Workers.” The Atlantic (July/August 2009).

  16. Kuhn argued that switching from one paradigm to another: Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. p. 151.

  17. Planck’s Principle doesn’t hold: Hull, David L. Science as a Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1988; Wray, K. Brad. Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011.

  18. Watts has demonstrated: For an overview of his work and this topic, see Watts, Duncan. Everything Is Obvious *Once We Know the Answer: How Common Sense Fails Us. New York: Crown Business, 2011.

  19. there is evidence that the frequencies: Martin, Andrew Thomas. “The Evolving Lexicon.” Dissertation. University of California Los Angeles, 2007.

  20. the rate of a verb’s regularization: Lieberman, Erez, et al. “Quantifying the Evolutionary Dynamics of Language.” Nature 449, no. 7163 (2007): 713–16.

  21. to continue to correct everyone: For many more examples, see Ben Yagoda’s article in Slate, “The ‘Nonplussed’ Problem”; http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/04/the_nonplussed_problem.2.html.

  22. a longer voice onset time: Kuniko, Nielsen. “Specificity and Abstractness of VOT Imitation.” Journal of Phonetics 39, no. 2 (April 2011): 132–42.

  23. A team of linguists studied Oprah: Hay, Jennifer, Stefanie Jannedy, and Norma Mendoza-Denton. “Oprah and /ay/: Lexical Frequency, Referee Design and Style.” In Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, eds. John J. Ohala et al. (1999): 1389–92.

  24. how this linguistic change happens around us: McWhorter, John. “Swearing In: Are Curse Words Becoming More Common?” The New Republic, March 23, 2011.