#research problems

[an-idiot-in-research]

How you think you look when explaining your dissertation:

Vs.

The Reality:

[ltwilliammowett]

Ok, so I'm actually looking for a story about a supposed ghost ship that was up to no good off St Helena in the late 19th century and what do I find ? this : There is a fishing boat rowed out of a cave near Egg Island by six headless oarsmen. No context, no time, no legend, nothing but that. What the heck am I supposed to do with that ? Myths are sometimes terrible to trace.

[ineedfairypee]

To P or not to P(hD)

[bitletsanddrabbles]

Me: Okay, this is a stupid little silly fic. It does not need to be research intensive. I just need to know which race tracks were in New York in 1883.

Also Me: I need to know the exact length of the racing season in the 1800s, which races were run at the Jerome Park race track after October 22nd that year, if any, who won which races, what the weather was like...

(Just as a side note, if anyone else needs NY weather by year...THAT you can find pretty easily!)

[in-viro-veritas]

okay this is gonna sorely lack context but it's mostly just screaming into the void anyway so w/e

BRUH I CANNOT WITH MY OLD LAB

Literally ran this damn experiment up through my last day there. Didn't actually get to take the week off in between old and new jobs because I was desperately trying to get my data and notebook together (everything was a mess because I was doing a post doc's job on a shitty tech salary with zero PI support and the bench load was just too much). Been busting my butt to get all my experiments graphed and written up at the expense of my literal current job that I love for their stupid progress report since before The Colonizer's Holiday and I just cannot write up this last mouse study to save my life.

I'm not gonna get any credit or thanks for my work, but I can bet I'll be getting complaints about handing off this last summary the week the progress report is due. Like...I know my PI was gonna send it in at the last minute anyway because that's his MO. And my write up is sO iMpOrTaNt because they only have my mouse model as an actual *thing* to show for the lab work this year- no papers or presentations or ANYTHING ELSE.

Plus, like, this last study is a straight mess as-is. I had to troubleshoot stuff on the fly because the literature had precisely nothing on the kind of study this was and neither PI is actually competent at the bench. Also, as much as this was too much work for one person, doing this study right would have involved a lot more time points. It's a cool concept and this does prove it can be done (and has been somewhat refined from a technical perspective) and the data suggest interesting things, but it absolutely would have to be re-done at least 3x more and that's never happening...fuckers are abandoning the project once the grant is up...after we (read: me and the other tech with lots of advice from the technical director of one of the cores) got shit actually working in the span of 1.5 years.

I'm tired. And out of fucks. And also frustrated.

[kenapiece-main]

Can you believe I'm having to make this meme even after successfully finishing up taxes and applying to job

[embervoices]

They've managed to accidentally gatekeep internet research by blocking off all non-professionals with a giant river of bullshit.

I'm not entirely sure it's an accident, honestly.

Hey... so there now appear to be AI-generated science articles on .org websites that are giving biologically incorrect "facts" on basic, for-children topics

The title is "Are There Freshwater Octopus Species?" which should be an incredibly straightforward thing to answer: No.

The article starts out decent:

"Despite their many fascinating features, there is no evidence to suggest that octopuses can survive in freshwater environments."

Cool. Okay. Next section.

"While most people associate octopuses with the ocean, there are some species that can survive in freshwater environments."

Wait. What?

"Freshwater octopuses belong to the genus Amphioctopus, which includes several species that are found in brackish water and estuaries. These cephalopods have adapted to life in freshwater environments and have been observed in rivers, streams, and even hydrothermal vents."

NO NO NO.

One species of freshwater octopus is Amphioctopus aegina...Another species, Amphioctopus marginatus...

THESE GUYS LIVE IN THE OCEAN. [Scrolls 2 more sections]

Freshwater octopuses are still a topic of debate among scientists. While some researchers claim that they do exist, others argue that there is not enough literature to support their existence.

asd;lkfjasdlf;kjasd;flksjdfa

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

average United States contains 1000s of pet tigers in backyards" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average person has 0 tigers on property. Activist Georg, who lives the U.S. Capitol & makes up over 10,000 each day, has purposefully been spreading disinformation adn [sic] should not have been counted

I have a big mad today, folks. It's a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated... but the reason for that fucking sucks.

For almost a decade, I've been trying to fact-check the claim that there "are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States." I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn't find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I've continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they're regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).

I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would, and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering: there's so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of "thousands of abused backyard big cats": as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?

97.

Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits. 97.

And that isn't even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.

Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There's probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there's been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here's the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that's nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.

Guess what? Turns out, this is because it was never real. That huge number never had data behind it, wasn't likely to be accurate, and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it... and didn't see a problem with that.

Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.

This article is good. (Full disclose, I'm quoted in it). It's comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.

But thing that really gets me?

Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren't real. And that they don't care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that's just how lobbying works after all. They're so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.

"Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (...) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (...) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”

"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (...) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.”"

I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it. By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.

No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn't figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn't matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn't verify their shocking numbers... and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.

So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that's causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn't mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the "bad guys" lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I'll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)

Now, I know. Something something something facts don't matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that's just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can't get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn't been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.

But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren't sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we're here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.

I don't have a conclusion. I'm just mad. The public deserves to know the truth about animal legislation they're voting for, and I hope we all call on our legislators in the future to be far more critical of the data they get fed.

[thistle-and-thorn]

The U.S. Census sites national population by characteristics literally just being downloadable excel files will never not be funny to me like it’s a charming and homemade cake in the middle of a soulless aisle of machine-made Oreo cookies

[velociraptorteahostess]

I spent all morning researching post-mortem lividity and not a SINGLE PERSON at the Super Bowl party asked me about it.

[notbrucewayne48]

"aphobia doesn't exist"

bitch literally not that long ago an aroace youtuber animator was insulted by almost half of its community for being it

[an-idiot-in-research]

How it feels to put a pun in the research title

[poetryintheraw]

I desperately need a friend in medical school so I can ask them all these questions about how injuries work. Yes, I am aware my father is a doctor, but I can't text him at two in morning and ask, "How do comas work? And how fast can delirium set in if you get a fever from an infection from a shallow head wound?"

[bitletsanddrabbles]

When you know you found the release date for the original, UK cinema release of Lon Chaney's "Phantom of the Opera" before, but when you go to find the information again everything says it wasn't released in the UK.

[in-viro-veritas]

ok I know there's wisdom in "don't try to 'live up to your potential' when you're neurodivergent because the people evaluating your potential only see your output and not the recharge time that it requires and all the other sacrifices you must make to achieve that", but...like...

*I* know what I can do when the hyperfocus is hitting and the hyperactivity is being used constructively. *I* know I'm not "living up to my potential" and I can't un-know that. I'm not even expecting to be at 100% all the time - averaging 70-80% would be plenty to keep me satisfied and to (hopefully maybe) accomplish (almost) everything I want to in a rigorous environment. Problem is, I used up too much of it in the AMR Shitshow Lab���️ and now I'm in a group where despite wanting to essentially drink from the firehose of the science that's going on here, I'm running on empty.

I'm about 75% of the way through the first actual break I've had since the 2020 shutdown ended and, as much as I want to be, I am nowhere near ready to come back and hit the ground running. I get that I "need to do nothing" (-my partner) in order to combat some of the burnout, and I was feeling better toward the end of last week, but the past few days have been nothing but sleeping and scrolling and watching TV, all while snuggling my cats. While there's nothing wrong with that, I am way too far behind on life maintenance stuff (laundry, cleaning up and organizing the kitchen, plant care stuff, baking cookies for a neighbor who saved our butts when Fivel the Lab Mouse got a flat tire) that I *know* is just going to accumulate and not get done once I go back to lab. That's not even accounting for playing catch-up with my work responsibilities. But if I could reach > 50% of my executive function + energy capacity, I could do some serious damage. So, shame spiral.

Did I set myself up to fail by choosing this rigorous of a lab?

[inkskinned]

the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"