runliveandsmile:

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

the-real-seebs:

curlicuecal:

playing science telephone

Hi folks. Let’s play a fun game today called “unravelling bad science communication back to its source.”

Journey with me.

Saw a comment going around on a tumblr thread that “sometimes the life expectancy of autism is cited in the 30s”

That number seemed….. strange. The commenter DID go on to say that that was “situational on people being awful and not… anything autism actually does”, but you know what? Still a strange number. I feel compelled to fact check.

Quick Google “autism life expectancy” pulls up quite a few websites bandying around the number 39. Which is ~technically~ within the 30s, but already higher than the tumblr factoid would suggest. But, guess what. This number still sounds strange to me.

Most of the websites presenting this factoid present themselves as official autism resources and organizations (for parents, etc), and most of them vaguely wave towards “studies.”

Ex: “Above And Beyond Therapy” has a whole article on “Does Autism Affect Life Expectancy” and states:

ALT

The link implies that it will take you to the “research studies” being referenced, but it in fact takes you to another random autism resource group called…. Songbird Care?

ALT

And on that website we find the factoid again:

Ooh, look. Now they’ve added the word “some”. The average lifespan for SOME autistic people. Which the next group erased from the fact. The message shifts further.

And we have slightly more information about the study! (Which has also shifted from “studies” to a singular “study”). And we have another link!

Wonderfully, this link actually takes us to the actual peer-reviewed 2020 study being discussed. [x]

ALT

And here, just by reading the abstract, we find the most important information of all.

ALT

This study followed a cohort of adolescent and adult autistic people across a 20 year time period. Within that time period, 6.4% of the cohort died. Within that 6.4%, the average age of death was 39 years.

So this number is VERY MUCH not the average age of death for autistic people, or even the average age of death for the cohort of autistic people in that study. It is the average age of death IF you died young and within the 20 year period of the study (n=26), and also we don’t even know the average starting age of participants without digging into earlier papers, except that it was 10 or older. (If you’re curious, the researchers in the study suggested reduced self-sufficiency to be among the biggest risk factors for the early mortality group.)

But the number in the study has been removed from it’s context, gradually modified and spread around the web, and modified some more, until it is pretty much a nonsense number that everyone is citing from everyone else.

There ARE two other numbers that pop up semi-frequently:

One cites the life expectancy at 58. I will leave finding the context for that number as an exercise for the audience, since none of the places I saw it gave a direct citation for where they were getting it.

And then, probably the best and most relevant number floating around out there (and the least frequently cited) draws from a 2023 study of over 17,000 UK people with an autism diagnosis, across 30 years. [x] This study estimated life expectancies between 70 and 77 years, varying with sex and presence/absence of a learning disability. (As compared to the UK 80-83 average for the population as a whole.)

This is a set of numbers that makes way more sense and is backed by way better data, but isn’t quite as snappy a soundbite to pass around the internet. I’m gonna pass it around anyway, because I feel bad about how many scared internet people I stumbled across while doing this search.

People on quora like “I’m autistic, can I live past 38”– honey, YES. omg.

—

tl;dr, when someone gives you a number out of context, consider that the context is probably important

also, make an amateur fact checker’s life easier and CITE YOUR SOURCES

“the age at which people in this study died” is nothing like a life expectancy

Not responding to your comment specifically, but I do want to clarify, because I’ve seen a LOT of people miss this detail in the comments:

The study had only 26 people who died. Out of 400 something.

94% of people in the study DIDN’T DIE! 94% of people were not even counted towards the average! They didn’t die unusually young because they are still alive! And presumably going to live way longer and going to continue pulling the average up and up and up and UP.

Like, I really cannot even express how silly “the average age of death of 6% of people” is as a statistic.

It’s SO silly that i think that’s why people in the notes are often missing it.

It’s just an utterly crazy thing to do with numbers.

like, just to put this in perspective, I can equally correctly say that the average age of death for 4% of people in USA is under 39.

The most important points have been mentioned already, but since I was masochistic enough to skim through the 2020 paper there’s just a few more points I’d like to add. (Cave: Subjective statements following. This paper has put me in a bad mood.)

First off: “Peer-reviewed” does not always mean that it’s a good study. I have read far too many papers that show methodological deficits to believe otherwise. This is annoying as a reader if you’re trying to find reliable information, but it’s (usually? hopefully?) not malicious: The reviewers requested by the journal are often working under time pressure (reviewing is voluntary work, you don’t get paid for it and have to do it on top of your normal workload etc.), might specialise in different fields and therefore not know particular details etc. Please don’t blame the reviewers (as tempting as it may be).

That said, this is paper is just not very good.

• Literally the first paper the authors cite is miscited. The *first sentence* of the paper states “Although studies have shown that there is some abatement of autism symptoms over time (e.g., Woodman et al., 2014), many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) continue to experience significant challenges throughout adulthood.” Now, if you look at the references, the title of Woodman et al., 2014 is “Residential transitions among adults with intellectual disability across 20 years.” And if you check the paper, there is not a single mention of ASD or autism in the entire paper! So what happened here? A simple search for “Woodman AC autism” in Google Scholar reveals that Woodman also published two other papers in 2015 and 2016 titled “Change in autism symptoms and maladaptive behaviors in adolescence and adulthood: The role of positive family processes” and “Contextual factors predict patterns of change in functioning over 10 years among adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorders”, respectively. Doesn’t that sound like something that fits the context far better? It’s likely that the authors meant to cite the 2015 paper. They just apparently failed to check their reference list even once. That’s just sloppy and I can and will blame them for that.
• Out of the 26 people that died over the course of the study, the causes of death were cancer (5), cardiac arrest (5), seizures (3), respiratory failure/pneumonia (3), choking on food (2), medication side effects (2), accidental poisoning (1), or unknown (5). And yes, the authors do state that “Being in fair or poor health was the strongest predictor of mortality”. Gee, really? That’s not a surprise for anybody, and it will not get a paper published, so they (cave: provocative allegation following) apparently decided to throw all those causes of death into the same pot, take some scores for “impairments in social reciprocity” and “independence in activities of daily living” and see if they by chance get statistically relevant results. And yes, with n=26 vs. 380, chance *is* a relevant factor. You wouldn’t do statistics with that. Or at least shouldn’t. (I’d claim that statisticians would weep, but the ones I have talked to seem to be far too used to this.)
• “Perhaps the most intriguing finding of the present study concerns the extent to which impairments in social reciprocity, as evidenced in early childhood, are predictive of mortality that occurs decades later in adulthood.” PLEASE tell me the causal relationship between “impairments in social reciprocity” (“abnormalities in joint attention, social smiling, responsivity to the approaches of others, interest in people, exhibiting a range of appropriate facial expressions to communicate, and social overtures”) and cancer. I’m waiting. “[…] Future research that elucidates the mechanism by which impairments in social reciprocity may directly or indirectly affect survival in adulthood is needed to understand this finding fully, but the findings point to the importance of lifelong social engagement.” Or you just did bad statistics. But how useful that *explaining* the causal relationship is now somebody else’s job.

To not completely derail the point of the original post; sometimes there are papers which are just *not good* (which, to be fair, may be caused by systemic issues such as publication pressure etc.) and which may make a game of science telephone easier. (That doesn’t excuse you from employing reading comprehension and fact checking, though.)

glad google ai is on top of this

somewhere-south-of-neutral:

curlicuecal:

ceekari:

saffronheliotrope:

curlicuecal:

please help me figure out something I’m debating with my brother because I secretly think he’s crazy

After you’ve applied your stick of deodorant you…

put the lid back on

roll it all the way down to the bottom of the tube and put the lid back on

other / i’ve never closed a deodorant tube / show results

See Results

I love polls that are like “I have a very specific point to make about someone else’s weird-ass habits”

Also peak sibling behavior, good job!

Why would you roll it back down? What would be the purpose

(via @antlereed)

This is my favorite response and the only reasoning I will accept from now on

So, OP, why have you been biting your brother’s deodorant?

I can’t, he keeps rolling it down ;__;

curlicuecal:

shinyrock6498:

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

bongjoonheaux:

does it indicate anything about me that I immediately recognized what paper this figure is from

so I had to immediately go and pull this other amazing figure from the paper, which is “THE HEXAGON” a device with six rooms for fruit flies to have sex in and a central room for a fruit fly to observe six couples having sex at once

Is the goal to see if being able to observe multiple options simultaneously effects the watching flies’ choices?

hello, thank you for asking, I was basically sitting over here vibrating hoping for the opportunity to infodump more

so the things about making decisions is that it takes a bunch of time and energy and brain power to gather and assess information, and it is evolutionarily advantageous to cheat and offload as much of the work as possible onto other people. thus, there is natural selection for observing other people’s decisions and mimicking them.

in a lot of critters, this means it is advantageous to watch who someone else picks for sex so you can copy what they decided was sexy when you select your own partner

the simplest version of the fly sex panopticon is basically just a 2-chamber tube where scientists can orchestrate sex shows for fruit flies.

(“watch a demonstration” is scientist code for watch anorthern pair of fruit flies have sex)

you can very quickly instill a preference: cover male fruit flies with pink or green fluorescent powder, and then let a female fly observe another female fly having sex with a pink male. the observer will conclude that pink is extremely sexy and be much more likely to select a hot pink male herself. by switching the colors and the learned preference to green, you can demonstrate that this is indeed learned behavior, and not some kind of pre-existing genetic preference.

the 6-way “sexagon” was invented for this paper to test how seeing different ratios of pink vs. green males being chosen would affect the development of preference.

the cool thing about this graph is it shows it didn’t matter if there were only slightly more of the the females picking pink or green males, the observer would still develop a preference for whatever the majority were choosing.

the whole paper is very cool, and absolutely worth a read:

Science | AAAS

AAAS

it argues (and supports experimentally) that since preferences can be learned and passed on, fruit flies have an actual culture that can vary among populations and be transmitted to youngsters across generations.

this is super cool, because most studies proposing or examining the existence of culture in animals have been focused on higher level stuff like monkeys. if something as simple as a fruit fly can have a culture, this suggests that animal culture could have had huge effects on evolution from the ground up.

so yes, animal culture! fruit fly culture! very cool

but also an excellent evolutionary argument for voyeurism

the sheer frequency of the phrase “decapitated virgin females” does imply as much

curlicuecal:

So I’ve been working on making sure all my course videos are captioned for accessibility

And I wanted to go in and hand add captions to the video for reading blood pressure to indicate when the korotkoff sounds occur

Except to edit captions the system first makes me auto-generate captions

And I was expecting either something blank, or complete nonsense where the sounds occurred

But I was *not* prepared to open it up and see the heart noises translated like this:

oh no

IT HAPPENED AGAIN

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

these ai-generated articles are really getting round the bend

fascinated by “keeping nipples hard with asexual nature”

don’t just say that like anyone knows what it means

I feel like this might be inaccurate, but I’ve never been to Australia

NO

ceescedasticity:

curlicuecal:

Do you say

“the data is good”

“the data are good”

I’m aware that “data” should be plural, but I say “is good” anyway, so there

I’M aware that many style guides allow “data” as singular, so double there

“the datum is good” – I only collected 1

See Results

All too often I say “the data is bad :( ”

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

had a dream that I ran a tumblr bracket tournament but it was a competition to choose the “blandest animal”

by the way, I do not remember what animals were in the bracket at all, but I do remember wombat had made it really far and all of the notes were like “he’s just a guy”

2 categories of responses:

curlicuecal:

I think air quotes are my favorite hand gesture

We literally invented a way to draw punctuation in the air so we could be sarcastic better, love that energy

Are there other gestures like this?

I want to be able to do emojis in real life

facial expressions

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

bananonbinary:

curlicuecal:

very excited about this new medical option where we swallow a vibrator

i regret to inform you all that i did the research so you dont have to, and its exactly what you think. it’s a machine. its got an app. you can monitor the pill, in your body, through the app.

you raise such a good question

what is endgame for the vore vibrators

y'all, literly nothing on this website will tell me what is in the capsule or what happens to the capsule when it comes out the other end, but I have learned that it takes 3 weeks of treatment to see significant results and also that you have to place the capsule in an “activation pod” before you swallow it

and yes there is an app

I found a pdf they provide for physicians and I am currently making my way through it

current fun facts:

-the Pod has a usb charger and a wall adapter

-do not MRI this capsule, dear god

-do not bite the capsule

-if a child swallows a capsule they need to go to the hospital

more fun facts from the dosing instructions

there are no directions for what to do at the end of the line so I am assuming the mystery capsule (that should not be allowed around pacemakers) gets flushed

it does say to see a doctor if you think it has not been excreted “within 2 weeks”

ps I assume this is standardized language, but I LOVE the idea that the vore vibrator might accidentally interfere with TV and radio

@kawaiianimeredhead i vote yes

the-haiku-bot:

curlicuecal:

I’m tired of Hades being the creepy one on the relationship

AU where Persephone is a zombie. She died too young and her mom couldn’t bear to let her go and breathes a wisp of life into her every morning to keep her almost-not-quite alive by her side. This is a little uncomfortable for Persephone, but she’s an adaptable type, so she rolls with it.

Hades kidnaps her because she’s *already dead*, hello, did she get lost? It’s an unkindness to leave a soul wandering. Turns out he wildly misread the situation and now he’s got an annoyed and amused zombie houseguest causing all kinds of trouble while she waits for her mom to come knocking.

Also Persephone thinks the underworld is fucking awesome (*way* more comfy than being dead in the living world) and Hades is stupid-cute and pretty soon she’s working out an elaborate plot to timeshare.

I’m tired of Hades

being the creepy one on

the relationship

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

it’s a bot parade

it’s been 12 hours ;__;

*stands on side of road clapping as bot parade goes by*

Don’t talk to me or my (*checks notes*) 2,478 bot followers ever again

I’m tired of Hades being the creepy one on the relationship

AU where Persephone is a zombie. She died too young and her mom couldn’t bear to let her go and breathes a wisp of life into her every morning to keep her almost-not-quite alive by her side. This is a little uncomfortable for Persephone, but she’s an adaptable type, so she rolls with it.

Hades kidnaps her because she’s *already dead*, hello, did she get lost? It’s an unkindness to leave a soul wandering. Turns out he wildly misread the situation and now he’s got an annoyed and amused zombie houseguest causing all kinds of trouble while she waits for her mom to come knocking.

Also Persephone thinks the underworld is fucking awesome (*way* more comfy than being dead in the living world) and Hades is stupid-cute and pretty soon she’s working out an elaborate plot to timeshare.

curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

so I clicked on one of the tumblr ad links and

guys

guys help me

I was not prepared

help me oh my god

“G Point Specialist”

what do you mean SPECIALIST that thing is gonna get every damn point in there

(via bundibird)

curlicuecal:

Ant tending aphids and an assassin bug hiding on a sunflower

ALT

@codedredalert, oh this such a good question! and I do love talking about ants and ant mutualisms

So there are two important things to know about aphids, and lot of sucking insects that feed on plant phloem (aka sap, kind of the plant equivalent of blood):

• 1. Aphids are basically plugging their mouth into a firehose, where the pressure of plant fluids into their bodies is so strong they actually have to have physical mechanisms to slow the flow down

[aphid feeding on plant phloem with stylet mouthpart. scientists can cut the aphid away, leaving the stylet in place to collect phloem from the plant like the tiniest straw. this is not very nice to the aphid. - Image source]

• 2. Plant juice is super high in water, pretty high in sugar, and very low in other useful stuff like, say, amino acids/proteins. So in order to get a useful diet, aphids drink WAY more than they need, and excrete all the excess water and sugar. This sticky sugar poop is called “honeydew”.

[aphid excreting honeydew - image source]

If honeydew builds up around the aphids it can grow mold, cause infections, kill the plant, attract predators - all sort of unfun consequences of living in your own sugar poop.

[sooty mold on leaves - image source]

Some insects handle this by launching the honeydew far away from their bodies (like the aptly named “sharpshooters”– stand under a tree full of those and enjoy the faint, sticky mist.)

[sharpshooter launching honeydew - video source]

A lot of insects just kind of make do (make dew?) and move on when the situation gets sticky dire.

But a really *cool* thing you can do, is provide your sticky goo to ants as a delicious snack. In fact, if you are an aphid in an ant-aphid mutualism, they may even approach you and tap you with their little antennae and milk it right out of your butt–wow, the image I am crafting with words right now; what is my life?

[ant drinking honeydew from aphid - image source]

Anyway.

I called it a mutualism, so what do the aphids get in exchange for being the sweet beverage equivalent of moo-cows? Well, for one they hopefully don’t get eaten. That’s a plus. And for two, their hangout spot doesn’t get quite so sticky. And for three, the ants patrolling around on the plants may chase off other predators and herbivores, making a nice safe home. Yayyyy!

[ants defending aphids from ladybug - Image source]

(I mean, sometimes they may not. I have definitely also watched ants callously ignore a ladybug chomp chomp chomping its way through their aphid farm while the ants sip their aphid tea.)

Interestingly, ant-aphid mutualisms can sometimes even benefit the plant! (Making it a plant-ant-aphid mutualism ot3? Maybe). This is because although aphid feeding puts some wear and tear on plants (especially if their population gets large), a lot of bigger, munchier, leaf-feeding bugs like caterpillars and grasshoppers can do even more damage to plant.

[caterpillar rapidly eating a leaf - Image source]

Terrible! Do not like. Maybe it’s worth it to try out having aphids after all? Because if you’ve got aphids, you’ve got ants. And if you’ve got ants, maybe they’ll chase off some of the bigger herbivores. And all it cost you was a case of horrible blood-sucking plant lice (aka aphids).

An even more direct strategy that skips the lice: many plants invest in extrafloral nectaries– basically little spots on the leaves and stems that release sugary nectar.

Why have this nectar if it’s not in a flower attracting pollinators? Well, one use for providing this free lunch is to get yourself some ants.

[ants feeding at extrafloral nectary at base of leaf - Image source]

Worth a shot.

ALT