Apprentice research

A bit of original research caught my eye the other day, in a book of papers which constituted the proceedings of a conference in Vienna. The conference took place in March of this year and the book of the conference appears to have been produced more or less immediately, with my having a copy in my hand, via Amazon, by May. So that part of the machinery was efficient enough.

The authors of the papers all appear to have read the notes for authors and the papers all come with the apparatus which one expects from a serious research person, with sections like affiliation, abstract, introduction, results, discussion, conclusion, acknowledgements and last but not least, references. And since the rule is that you can only have a reference in the reference section if you also include it in the text, the texts are well larded with references; it all going to help along the important business of you cite my paper then I'll cite yours, of keeping my citation rates up, without which I might have the faculty police breathing down my neck about my research performance. On the other hand, there is not much in the way of footnotes.

The particular bit of research in question occupied 11 pages of book, with just about 2 of the 11 given over to the references section, and was a look at the question of whether playing a computer game alleviated pain. To this end the researchers recruited 40 experimental subjects, half men and half women, and after various experimental and statistical shenanigans the upshot was that men reported less pain when they were playing the game while the women did not. Which might be loosely translated as men are more easily distracted by computer games than women, a conclusion which one might have come to otherwise.

I was fairly baffled by the statistics, of which there were a lot, despite their not being particularly heavy weight and not going much beyond standard deviations, but I was reminded of once reading about the poor standard of statistics in many papers on psychological and sociological subjects. On the other hand, google was quite helpful in plugging other gaps, telling me in very short order, for example, what a Likert scale was, opening up to my view a whole field of research into the behaviour of such things. A splendid opportunity to chase a whole new hare.

But overall, despite my interest in the subject matter, I found the whole business a little depressing. All this care, attention, collaboration and machinery spent in this way, giving the appearance of a colony of ants busy about their common task. I guess I would never have been much good at being a worker ant - and so would never have progressed to working foreman ant, never mind chief ant.