Standard Deviations From the Beaten Path

First of all, a hat-tip to Skepchick. Second, I have not laughed this hard reading an article from Nature in, well, ever. Jeff Lozier of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has taken a very creative and humorous approach to demonstrating the weakness of an ecological analysis technique.

The idea seems to be that if you know the environments a particular species lives in now, you can make a pretty good guess at the regions it has lived in in the past and will live in the future after the effects of climate change take hold. His argument is that the technique is only as good as the data that go into producing the slick graphics that make it so popular. Lozier’s critique is that species missidentification can lead to unreliable conclusions. From the Nature.com article:

Such errors can be hard to spot, because even if all the data are all highly dubious, a model based on them can still give a plausible-looking result, as Lozier and his colleagues found when they analysed sightings recorded by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

The reported sightings imply that the wooded and mountainous areas of California, Oregon and Washington teem with sasquatch at present. Warm the climate, and, like many other species, it will probably move north and uphill.

“It’s a perfect commentary on the potential problems of this approach,” says Lozier. “Plus, it’s a sasquatch paper.”

Unlikely as it sounds, Lozier’s paper scooped work by another group. “We were trying to do the same thing for the yeti,” says ecologist Carsten Rahbek of the University of Copenhagen. Like Lozier, he wanted to show that models could turn dubious data into plausible-looking predictions.

When I got to the quote, “We were trying to do the samet hing for the yeti,” I nearly spit coffee all over my computer.

There’s a video up (a couple of videos, even) of Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, rapping with Snoop Dogg. See the song Rocket Experience, and the making of video. I grew up on books about the space race. I really should go back and re-read some of them, because that is just one of those few things the sheer awesomeness of which does not attenuate with age. I’m far too myopic and prone to motion sickness to ever go into space myself, but I’ll take studying things in space for a living.