Discovery

Loyal readers will recall the Discovery blog last week extolling the wonders of a Facebook application accurately predicting the losers of “American Idol” for three weeks straight. John Tarnai and Danna Moore, leaders of the Washington State University Social and Economic Sciences Research Center, explained that this made sense. Whether they voted by phone during the show or by web on a Facebook fan page, said Tarnai and Moore, the survey’s self-selected participants are coming from the same highly motivated pool of “Idol” fans.

Now comes the upset.

Based on 1,700 votes cast through Facebook’s Idol Fanatic fan page, this seemed like the outcome after Tuesday’s Shania Twain-themed performances:

Crystal – 30.9%

Lee – 19.9%

Casey – 14.4%

Aaron – 13.6%

Siobhan – 12.5%

Michael – 8.6%

But on Wednesday’s results show, the bottom three were Casey–not Aaron–plus Michael and Siobhan. Siobhan–not Michael–was voted off.

We asked John Tarnai if the difference between Michael and Siobhan, or Casey and Aaron, might be accounted for by the survey’s margin of error.

John’s response:

“This is very interesting, especially that the bottom three on the show were also part of the bottom four on the Facebook survey.  Unfortunately, since neither the Facebook sample nor the voting on the show is from a probability sample, you cannot use the margin of error to explain the difference.  The margin of error is only accurate for probability samples.  For self-selected samples such as Facebook and the Idol show, there is no way to assess the true margin of error.

“However, if you did use margin of error, the appropriate one to use would be the total 1,700 vote sample, or plus/minus 2.3 percent.  It’s possible that the voting on the show came closer to the actual performance than the Facebook votes, which may have caused some people to switch their votes.  That’s my take on it.”

If it’s any consolation, the Idol Fanatic-meter proved more reliable than the dozen prognosticators tracked by the Los Angeles Times “American Idol” Buzzmeter. Only one of them, Steve Gidlow of In Touch Weekly, saw Siobhan heading for the door. Eight predicted Michael would be gone.

Update: One possible explanation for the Siobhan upset is a snafu in which the wrong phone number to vote for her was posted on her Facebook page. It turns out those votes went to Aaron. The error has launched a petition drive to get her reinstated. Chances are justice will come in the form of Aaron getting voted off after Sinatra night. Here are the latest numbers:

Crystal:  33.7%

Lee:  31.3%

Casey:  12.2%

Michael:  11.9%

Aaron:  10.9%

Tis the season of America’s favorite white-knuckled adventure in opinion gathering: “American Idol.” Each week sees a blend of hype and talent reaching a crescendo as—obligatory drum roll and slow pan of contestant close-ups, please—a would-be star gets voted off the show.

Such viewer anxiety need not be. The Idol Fanatic Facebook page has an application through which fans can vote for their favorite contestants. So far the page’s 1,600 members have perfectly predicted the week’s winner and bottom three.

Researchers in Washington State University Social and Economic Sciences Research Center, the largest university-based survey research center in the Pacific Northwest, explain how this could happen.

“This isn’t really what we would consider a phone poll; instead, it is a self-selected survey,” says Director John Tarnai.  “That is, people self-select themselves into the survey, which I think probably explains why the Facebook page can predict the winners.  In both cases, it is people who are interested in ‘American Idol’ and the contestants who self-select themselves into the survey.   The fact that some people use the telephone and others use a Facebook page or texting is less important than that they are interested enough in ‘American Idol’ to want to send in their votes.”

The operating principle is what Danna Moore, the center’s associate director, calls saliency—the strong interest of the voting viewer. The stronger the interest, the more likely the act of voting.

To keep with this Tuesday night’s theme of “inspiration,” you might say both the phone and the Facebook voters are inspired. You might also say, as does Moore, that neither method makes for a legitimate survey, as it doesn’t reflect the broader population.

“It does not tell you anything about the portion of people in the population that had no opportunity to participate as they aren’t watching the show,” Moore says. “. . . Chances are that people not watching the show would be very different and they are also not asked to vote.”

That may be fine for the show, which has close to 30 million viewers and voters. But it may not be the best measure for the winners.

Says Moore: “The big question is: Will people selected on the show by these methods be true winners or successful in the long run when the whole population votes with their dollars and buys albums over time?”

(For more on that, note how Clay Aiken, season two runner-up, has outsold winner Ruben Studdard by nearly two to one.)

So far, the Idol Fanatic page and its blog have held off on announcing results ahead of the show. But starting Wednesday, they will be announcing results before the results show starts on the East Coast at 3 p.m. PST, said spokesperson Andrea Ragni.

So let’s say you want to know just how a hooded cobra strikes its iconic pose–a mystery that has eluded researchers for more than 200 years.

How do you do it?

Very carefully.

Ken Kardong, a professor in WSU’s School of Biological Sciences, and Bruce Young from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, inserted tiny electrodes in the necks of cobras and measured the electrical activity of different muscles as the snakes flared their necks.

“Doing the surgery was the riskiest part of the study because you have to work around the head but the snakes are prone to waking, which can be disconcerting,” Young told Inside JEB, a news page for the Journal of Experimental Biology, which features a research paper on the work.

The researchers found eight muscles involved in opening the hood. Two groups–the levator costae and the intercostal muscles–are key.

“A second set of muscles connecting ribs to skin primarily keep the skin taut, rather than to displace the ribs relative to the vertebrae,” the authors say in their paper’s abstract. ^“A third set of muscles coursing between ribs function primarily to transmit forces between adjacent ribs rather than to move ribs.”

Young, B. A. and Kardong, K. V. (2010). The functional morphology of hooding in cobras. J. Exp. Biol. 213, 1521-1528.

Links

Cobra hood mechanism revealed by electrode study (BBC News, April 17, 2010)

By Julie Titone, College of Education:

You’re in seventh grade, slouched in your seat. The science book on your desk is a jumble of words like endoplasmic reticulum, enzymes and organelles. You’ll NEVER understand this stuff. If you had superpowers, you’d blast right through the classroom window.

Matt Marino to the rescue.

Marino, an assistant professor at WSU, is working with two leading education companies to create science video games that redefine how middle school students learn about science.

“If you’re reading at a fourth grade level, middle school science vocabulary can be pretty brutal,” said Marino, whose goal is to help students meet new federal science education standards – and have fun doing it. His partners on the game project are Wisconsin-based Filament Games and Texas-based PCI Education.

Read more at WSU Today…