Commentary: The critical role of measurement (and space elevators) in the study of child development.
Commentary: The critical role of measurement (and space elevators) in the study of child development.
复制标题
DOI：
10.1093/jpepsy/jst145
复制
发表时间：
2014-03
影响因子：
3.6
通讯作者：
P. Curran
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
P. Curran
几年前，我与一位研究科学家成为朋友，他是校园分子物理实验室的成员。我们大部分时间都在争论棒球（投手应该一直击球），但偶尔我们会谈论工作。他正在研究开发一种太空电梯，这种电梯由一颗放置在地球同步轨道上的卫星组成，同时拴在地面上，允许电梯将有效载荷运送到太空。他会谈论诸如纳米管、微细加工、非共价分子间力和分子组装器之类的东西，然后会问我自己目前的项目。在听说他的工作后，我会不好意思地告诉他我是如何试图开发一个儿童抑郁症的测量模型的。我描述了我们是如何收集二进制数据的，这些数据表明从一个随时间推移而跟踪的儿童样本中获得的症状的存在或不存在，我们试图将二进制项目映射到一个连续分布的分数上，以模拟抑郁症的轨迹。我感到很不好意思，因为我们的经验数据只不过是一个由0和1组成的矩形，基础数学并没有超过高中微积分，而必要的计算机编程最多也就是几十行代码。然而，在我的描述结束时，我的朋友笑了，摇了摇头，说他很高兴他有一个更容易解决的问题;他不想解决像测量儿童抑郁症这样具有挑战性的问题。
A few years back I became friends with a research scientist who was a member of a molecular physics lab on campus. We mostly spent our time arguing about baseball (the pitcher should always bat), but occasionally we would talk about work. He was researching the development of a space elevator that consisted of a satellite placed in geosynchronous orbit while tethered to the ground, allowing an elevator to deliver payloads to space. He would talk about things like nanotubes, microfabrication, noncovalent intermolecular forces, and molecular assemblers, and then would ask about my own current projects. After hearing about his work, I would sheepishly tell him about how I was trying to develop a measurement model for childhood depression. I described how we had gathered binary data indicating the presence or absence of symptoms obtained from a sample of children followed over time and that we were trying to map the binary items onto a continuously distributed score to model trajectories of depression. I felt so sheepish because our empirical data were nothing more than a rectangle of zeros and ones, the underlying mathematics did not go much past high school calculus, and the requisite computer programming constituted a few dozen lines of code at best. Yet at the end of my description my friend laughed, shook his head, and said that he was glad that he had the easier problem on which to work; he had no desire to tackle something as challenging as trying to measure depression in children.