Seriously, has the bar sunk this low? I was certain the authors would express caution in interpreting causality, but alas: "Our results suggest that some sexually transmitted parasites, such as T. gondii, may produce changes in the appearance and behavior of the human host".
I was directly quoting the article and am not a domain expert. It is interesting to see some commenters here state that it isn't an STD. It appears this is an open question.
Perhaps it's because I don't frequent the literature, but I interpret that as "T Gondii. may [provided by our level of statistical certainty in MANCOVA] produce changes". Otherwise, what's the point of performing a statistical analysis? Moreover what's the value of any assertion if it can be guarded by an unbounded-uncertainty keyword "may".
I think that's a classic case of reading between the lines and making implications where one shouldn't. If I'm using words that state uncertainty, it is because I am not certain, but only say it is a possibility. A research result that shows there is a correlation is already interesting without establishing or confirming causation. Their wording is exactly saying that. Without that paper we wouldn't even know there is a correlation!
How else would you like them to state that without being overly verbose?
> How else would you like them to state that without being overly verbose?
"Our results suggest that some sexually transmitted parasites, such as T. gondii, may be correlated with appearance and behavior of the human host."
I appreciate your viewpoint. I would counter it by saying that there are two sources of uncertainty here: choice of model & sampling variance. It's my opinion that in scientific writing, one should be precise with which source of uncertainty they are guarding. If I'm allowed to group these together, why can't I make a similar statement of causation of any old spurious correlation - when obviously my model is bad?
Considering this example again - isn't it arbitrary that the authors get to choose which hypothesis (among many, like attractive people being predisposed to own cats) they get to claim "may" be demonstrated?
> "Our results suggest that some sexually transmitted parasites, such as T. gondii, may be correlated with appearance and behavior of the human host."
But that is a different statement. They say that they found correlation and there may be causation. You say there may be correlation, a much weaker claim.
> Considering this example again - isn't it arbitrary that the authors get to choose which hypothesis (among many, like attractive people being predisposed to own cats) they get to claim "may" be demonstrated?
Of course it is arbitrary. But that was their hypothesis and you have to start with some hypothesis, no? They gathered data to establish correlation between the infection and attractiveness. They didn't gather data for anything else, so I think it's pretty reasonable to say we found correlation and further research might be interesting to see if there is causation.
Literally the next sentence says "Taken together, these results lay the foundation for future research".
If you go beyond the abstract and into the actual article, they are pretty careful to just list possibilities for the observed correlation. They certainly could have stated that it might just be spurious correlation there, but I don't blame them too much. These articles are supposed to be concise and not verbose and especially the abstract is supposed to be as concise and short as possible.
I agree with your general premise and the linked article though. It should be a given to consider that and ideally also state it in the article.
> Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web
Unless there's some nuance I missed, I immensely disagree with this statement.
I'm currently in the biomedical literature review space, and I appreciate the detailed insights. I wonder if the author considered that literature review is used in a wide variety of domains outside pharma/drug discovery (where I perceived their efforts were focused). Regulatory monitoring/reporting, hospital guideline generation, etc.
This is a billion dollar industry, and I couldn't agree more that it's technologically underdeveloped. I do not agree that AI-based extraction is the solution, at least in the near-term. The formal methodologies used by reviewers/meta-analysts: search strategy generation, lit search, screening, extraction, critical appraisal, synthesis/statistical analysis, are IMO more nuanced than an AI can capture. They require human input or review. My business is betting on this premise :)
Thanks for digging into this- what a cool adventure!
In your research, were you able to find GPS coordinates of the purported island? I'd be interested in taking a trip out to search myself, but doing a grid search of the whole island sounds challenging based on your report.
Agreed on both of your conclusions. Looking at the island's topography [1], I'd be hard-pressed to believe there's a pond anywhere on that island, excepting maybe the northeast corner. But, their story doesn't add up. The timeline of the article states they paddled to Ryan Island and then it immediately jumps to them getting lost on the paddle back to camp. The whole story is about verifying the existence of this "island", so why is this crux of their journey not mentioned?!
I frequently canoe and camp around northern Minnesota and Lake Superior. I do not understand how they could have possibly traveled a total of 18 miles from Malone Bay to Ryan Island, as the article states. At most, it would be a 1 mile portage and a 5 mile paddle. Getting lost and adding 12 miles seems very unlikely, as you mention, due to all the navigable landmarks in Siskiwit Lake. And that's ignoring GPS.
My guess is that they are not strong paddlers and/or navigators, got to the island already tired, saw the amount of bushwacking that would be required to explore the island, and bailed.
For the record, I think this is really cool. Something about the story, as presented, doesn't sit right though.
>After canoeing back from Ryan Island, mother and son got well and truly lost. At some point during their 18 miles of hiking, they lost the trail. In their genuine terror—it was, by then, the middle of the night—they realized that their best shot was to find the coastline, since following that was guaranteed, eventually, to get them back to the lodge. Finally, they found the park ranger’s house, and had no choice but to knock on his door until he woke up. They didn’t know it, but they were still 10 miles from the lodge, and would have missed their flight off of the island had they not been driven back.
It looks like a 1/4 mile portage and maybe 1 1/2 mile paddle to Ryan Island from Malone Bay.
They were taken by a water taxi to Malone Bay. Why would they be walking back to the lodge without their canoe?
Assume that, for some reason, they were walking back and were going to come back for their canoe later. Seems an odd plan but let's go with it. Why would a park ranger have a house somewhere 10 miles away from the lodge (which puts it at pretty much the opposite end of the island).
If we work backwards the odd wording here is "driven back". It's possible they mean by boat, and the spot 10 miles from the lodge with a dock is Daisy Farm campsite. There's no ranger station but it is manned in-season, perhaps what they meant there.
But to hike 18 miles to Daisy Farm? Certainly they would have had to drop off the canoe. And "canoeing back from Ryan Island" to me says they did drop off the canoe. My guess is they dropped it off and tried to hike back to the lodge on foot (which would be a long hike) and got turned around.
The problem is the trail from Malone Bay goes the wrong way. It would be more likely for them to portage from Ryan Island to Chippewa Harbor or Lake Richie campground, drop off the canoe at that campground, and then attempt the hike back. The mileage from there is close.
Another reason why I think they ended up at Daisy Farm is that it says "their best shot was to find the coastline since following that was guaranteed". Following the the wild coast of Isle Royale in the dark is a suicide mission. However, the trail from Daisy Farm to Rock Harbor does follow the coast. In fact its one of the only trails on that side of the park that does.
My guess is they didn't get off the trail and into the wilderness at all, they just took a wrong turn onto a different trail and decided to take whatever trail they ended up on to Daisy Farm and then head to the Lodge. At which point they bugged the campsite director.
I also agree it's obvious they did not go onto Ryan Island. They even had GPS coordinates of where to go. No doubt they would have bushwhacked to take a picture if they did go. The fact that they didn't leads me to believe they not only didn't bushwhack then, they also didn't do it on their hike back in the middle of the night. IE, they stayed on marked trials the whole time.
We were definitely on Ryan Island :) It's very easy to get to. The trip from Ryan Island back to Rock Harbor is another story... Don't try to do that all in one day and half in the dark.
Upon a little more research, in an NPR interview [1], Dickey does not claim to have exhaustively searched the island / proved non-existence:
> DICKEY: We hiked in as far as we could to try to find the center of the island, was unable to find Moose Flats or Moose Boulder. Who knows; it could have been there, but highly unlikely.
There's a bunch of comments in this thread from people who did not read even the abstract of the study.
Those 3 data points were used in a graphic, which is not relevant to the actual experiment performed. Their experiment focused on cohorts of "parents who were (just) entitled to the new paternity leave" and "(just) ineligible parents". This design provides quasi-randomization so that any prior "downward trend" is not relevant, and clearly there are more than "3 data points" at play.
