14 July 2010
Super Battery!!!
A benchmark for judging hype:
WSU Researchers Use Super-high Pressures
to Create Super Battery
The researchers created the material on the Pullman campus…The cell contained xenon difluoride (XeF2), a white crystal used to etch silicon conductors, squeezed between two small diamond anvils….The researchers eventually increased the pressure to more than a million atmospheres, comparable to what would be found halfway to the center of the earth….
That’s it: a super-compressed material, not a battery, much less a “Super Battery”. If the material is stable at atmospheric pressure (or anything close), I’ll eat it or breathe the fluorine. This stuff couldn’t even be used in a battery.
As I’ve said, hype like this erodes trust in science and impedes rational choices in research. One way or another, it richly deserves to be stigmatized — how about calling it “deceptive advertising”?
An addendum: By the way, I regard problems like this as primarily institutional and cultural, and I think that placing much blame on any individual would be both unfair and counterproductive.
Why “unfair” to focus blame on individuals?
First, the fundamental problem is with permissive norms and expectations — the actions of people who live down to current standards are more a consequence than a cause. Second, I’m sure that the worst examples of hype emerge thorough multiple stages of exaggeration and confusion, with no standard fact-checking procedure and abysmal standards for what passes for a fact. It’s best to regard responsibility as diffuse, and to not look too closely.
Why “counterproductive” to blame individuals?
I think we’d all benefit from a shift in attitudes that leads decent people to stop doing this, but starting by blaming people for routine behavior would cause needless pain on all sides, making it far more comfortable to instead do nothing. All that’s needed — or appropriate — today is turning up the general level of criticism to make hype less fun, profitable, and acceptable.
For example, people who join in grumbling about deceptive hype at lunch are less likely to produce it when they get back to the office. Progress through griping — what could be more fun?
11 July 2010
“The China Study” Considered Harmful
An influential study of diet and health has been exploded here. The data and the conclusions don’t just disagree, they aren’t even on speaking terms.
Meanwhile, randomized intervention trials indicate that advice on the perils of saturated fat has been wrong.
I suggest some reforms.
4 July 2010
Next up: Asteroids
Soon after Earth’s life first touched the Moon, NASA promised to make spaceflight routine and inexpensive, and I began studying the prospects for space as a genuine frontier.
Geologists had analyzed the new, hard-won lunar samples, and I read up on the results in the local college library. Not nice: almost no carbon, nitrogen, or hydrogen, and no obvious promise of a decent mineral ore. Asteroids, by contrast, had been delivering samples for free in the form of meteorites, year after year. Much nicer: Lots of carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen, along with nickel-alloy steel, a substantial dash of platinum metals, and (of course) a little or a lot of everything else.
I summarized the case for bypassing the Moon in favor of asteroids in a 1983 advocacy piece written partly about resources and engineering, and partly about cognitive biases favoring the Moon.
The biases held, though, and the Groundhog vision has been Back to the Moon!— until recently, culminating in last week’s Presidential statement announcing a plan to
…abandon another landing on the moon, and develop new technologies to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025….
New York Times, 3 June 2010
In terms of relative priorities, I like it.
