houndawg wrote:You still haven't answered the question John.
If you're talking about my "credentials" I had written a response specifically describing a number of things in my experience and publication history here but decided to come back and delete that and replace it with comments focusing more on one episode. I WILL say that since I said "publication"history" and don't want to create the impression that I've got an extensive one I'll clarify by saying I have never sought to publish and have never been a lead author. Right now I can just think of four published papers such that I am listed as a contributing author because the lead author enlisted by assistance in data analysis or environmental investigation. Seems like there's a fifth one....some dim memory of that in my mind...but right now if there is I can't specifically remember it.
I've been working in the biological and environmental science fields for 31 years now. But I do "applied science," not publication. An important aspect of that, though, is that I USE peer review journal published literature all the time. And when you actually try to apply what's in that literature and there are problems with it you see it.
As an example: I was given responsible for assessing a new fishery once. The fishery consisted of one "type" of animal but there were actually three species. All three species are protandrous hermaphrodites; meaning that they first sexually mature as one sex then develop into the other sex as they grow larger. They are males first then turn into females. So the females are larger. Among other things, I needed to look at average size and the ratio of females to males of each species being processed as well as the proportion of the catch consisting of each species.
I looked at the literature for previous surveys. I found some and immediately saw that there were problems. I designed my own survey and implemented it. I presented the results to a joint meeting of two State chapters of the American Fisheries society. My presentation won the "Best Presentation" award.
And it was about how the flawed survey approaches in the literature resulted in OVER estimating the average size and well as the female: male ratio in each species. I even saw a reason for it. The previous surveys involved people doing what they called "random" sampling of containers of product. They'd kind of haphazardly take individuals from the containers off the top. Easiest thing to do.
But fishermen were paid according to the count size. The bigger the animals (smaller the count) the more they got per pound. And that was a problem. One difference between my survey and the others, among several key differences, is that I would empty each container then systematically sample from the entire set of animals. For example, if there were 300 animals in the container I would do something like randomly select a number in the range 1 through 10, start putting the animals back into the container while counting, keep the one corresponding to the randomly selected number aside for my sample, then continue on while taking every 10th animal after that.
As a result I saw everything in each container I sampled (which was also determined by a systematic strategy incorporating randomization). And what was happening is that the bigger animals were at the tops of the containers. The fishermen were apparently making sure to put the larger animals at the top so that when the buyer checked the count size he based it on the bigger individuals in the container. So if you did what was done in the existing literature you got fooled just like the buyer of the product got fooled. That meant existing literature over estimated the average size of animals of each species and over estimated the female:male ratio. They also over estimated the proportion of landings accounted for by one species because, though it was relatively rare, individuals in it were substantially larger than those in the other two species.
I am guessing that if I'd submitted a manuscript on my survey for publication it would've been published. It certainly was a lot better than any of the surveys I saw in the existing literature. But it's not what I do. The survey was done because I needed information and I did not think what was already in the literature was accurate. I did it to get accurate information for decision making purposes. And that's pretty much my thought process in everything I do.
I know that's a lot of detail on one thing in my experience but it's by no means the only time I've run into issues in trying to apply what's in published literature. My primary "credential" when it comes to this sort of thing is real life experience along the lines of what I described above with respect to that survey. My job is such that you do applied science to make actual decisions then get to see if you were right or not in the real world. And I've been doing it for more than 30 years.
