Something cool, or mere power-law hype?

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John Hull sends along this article from Chance News. From The Economist:

In this week’s Physical Review Letters, Yoshiharu Yamamoto of the University of Tokyo and his colleagues explain how the movements of people suffering from clinical depression can be described by a power law—and how this law is so different from that of healthy people that it looks truly diagnostic.

Further discussion is in the Chance News article. But my question is: why is this in Physical Review Letters? Shouldn’t it be in a journal of medicine, psychiatry, or psychology?

9 thoughts on “Something cool, or mere power-law hype?”

  1. This sounds awfully familiar. Here's an abstract for Joshua Goodman's Comment on Language Trees and Zipping, a note he wrote to the Physical Review Letters:

    I first point out the inappropriateness of publishing a Letter unrelated to physics. Next, I give experimental results showing that the technique used in the Letter is 3 times worse and 17 times slower than a simple baseline, Naive Bayes. And finally, I review the literature, showing that the ideas of the Letter are not novel. I conclude by suggesting that Physical Review Letters should not publish Letters unrelated to physics.

  2. I think the answer is that the reason it's in Phys Rev Lett is that the study was performed by engineers and physicists. In other words, the people approached the study from a biophysicist's perspective and therefore approached publishing from the same perspective.

  3. Cosma Shalizi's rule of thumb seems apropros here.

    if you are a physicist and found you have written a paper on topic X, send it to a journal of X-ology. If X is, by tradition, a part of physics, by all means send it to Physical Review E. If, on the other hand, X is a topic in social science, then send it to a social science journal. Only if X isn't physics, but also isn't really, or isn't just (say) an analysis of social structure, because it's also an analysis of metabolic pathways, and says something new about nonequilibrium phase transitions, and says how to get a free pony, only then does it make sense again to send it to PRE — or Nature, especially if you have a good picture of the pony. (Even then, if we had successful complex systems journals, I'd say send it there.) As precedent, I would point to the way we helped invent molecular biology, publishing not in our own journals but in things like the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

    See also his paper with Bill Tozier presenting a simple model of the evolution of simple models of evolution.

  4. I'm going to be honest about this: I really didn't understand the article in Chance News, but I guessed it might be something Andrew would enjoy.

    I did hesitate before sending it along, however, and I would have sent it sooner if I had known it involved ponies!

  5. John, (I'm too busy

    Just to be clear: I'm not trying to mock this research. I think it's either cool, or power-law hype, or maybe both. I didn't go to the trouble of reading the paper carefully.

  6. The question of whether the paper was appropriate for PRL is an important one, but I think a more direct way to state it would be "Is this physics?"

    A more important question is whether the reported results are real, and I'm not sure I buy the authors' analysis. Basically, the methods they use to fit and test the power-law hypothesis are known to produce inaccurate results, and it's not clear to me that they are aware of this problem. So, until the analysis is done properly, I'm happy to write this off as overhyped and badly done science.

  7. Andrew—

    I didn't think you were mocking it. The previous comment about ponies made me laugh — lol, as the kids say.

    ^_^

  8. It is difficult to overstate the value placed on PRL publications in the physics community – they can, and often are, career making. I can't fault anyone for publishing in that journal if they can. An extended article in another journal would make sense, however.

    Andrew, I wonder if you could comment further on your doubts regarding the authors' analysis? I agree with your thoughts, but I'm not sure (currently) that I know how to make the case you have against their methods. Any suggestions for background reading?

  9. I haven't had a chance to read the article, but my first thought is that this doesn't seem particularly useful. Distinguishing depressed people from healthy people is pretty trivial. The tricky diagnosis is distinguishing clinically depressed people from very sad, upset or lonely people (and of course some scientists think that clinical depression just differs on a continuum rather than being qualitatively different).

    Thom

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