Bleh, homework help?

Would anybody with a really critical, science-y mind be willing to give me a hand?

I have to come up with a strength and weakness for a study published this February about goats lol. I am dead tired, sick and just cannot for the life of me come up with something that does not relate to numbers (which we were told to avoid).

If anyone is willing to give me some ideas or even put me on the right track I can pm you the study. And I will also provide virtual cookies and many awesomely super vibes your way. Thanks!

I'm about to go to bed so I don't want to read it, but keep in mind that the weakness of most studies is that you can almost always find a flaw in the study design.

I totally understand, and thank you It's an animal behaviour course but we spend a lot of time on experimental design, hence the hw.

umm I could try? No promises, though LOL

Where's Dekka?

Thanks Jess! PMed

Hah Renee Dekka was actually who came to mind when I thought about asking chaz for opinions She's not on though right now... Oh well, my fault for asking last minute

ugh sorry, forget about it My stupid computer can't even OPEN the thing, cause it's that broken

If you can fix it in the next hour or so you can PM me too. I'm tired and my experimental design knowledge is a little rusty, but I can give a stab at it.

Hey Jess, don't worry about it and thanks anyway!

Lizzy I PMed you

Ok another question

I am supposed to identify the hypothesis, but the closest thing I can find is:

"We investigated social impacts on acoustic communication in goats, a highly vocal and social species with sophisticated cognitive skills. We recorded and analysed contact calls of goat kids to determine whether and when social group and kinship identity cues occur during development."

It sounds like more of an investigation than a hypothesis... Not sure what I should say they 'hypothesized', if that makes sense.

that's more the reason of the study, than the hypothesis... is there anything that says what they expected the outcome to be?

Hmmm... I can't seem to find anything like that Here is the abstract:

"Vocal plasticity is the ability of an individual to modify its vocalizations according to its environment. Humans benefit from an extreme form of vocal plasticity, allowing us to produce a wide range of sounds. This capacity to modify sounds has been shown in three bird orders and in a few nonhuman mammal species, all characterized by complex vocal communication systems. In other mammals, there is no evidence for a social impact on vocal development. We investigated whether contact calls were affected by social environment and kinship during early ontogeny in goats, a highly vocal and social species. To test the influence of social environment on kid vocalizations, we compared half siblings raised in the same or different groups. The effect of kinship on calls was assessed by comparing full siblings with half siblings. Calls of half siblings were more similar when they had been raised in the same social group than in different groups, and converged with time. Full siblings had more similar calls than half siblings. The group-specific indicators in kid vocalizations show that goat call ontogeny is affected by their social environment. This suggests that vocal plasticity could be more widespread in mammals than previously believed, showing a possible early pathway in the evolution of vocal learning leading to human language. 2012 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved."

I'll take a second look.

Sorry Im not much help here. All I can do is *hug* I been doing home work since 11 am. and finished about 11PM..

Oh never mind, just found this!

"We predicted more similarities between calls of full siblings than between calls of half siblings, that is, kinship identity cues."

Yay there you go!

Aw, thanks Hug to you too! It's 9:30pm here but I have a feeling I will be up until like 2... Partly my own fault for leaving it to Sunday, but I worked a double shift yesterday (left my house at 11am and got home at 10:30pm) and have felt sick so slept in this morning... Oh well. Lots of caffeine for me tomorrow lol.

Ah, and it gets better!

"We hypothesized that if kid contact calls contain group identity cues (i.e. show similarities between calls of same-age kids of a given social group), these cues should be more pronounced at 5 weeks old, when goat kids are fully inte- grated into the social group with other offspring of the same age, than at 1 week old, when they stay mainly alone or with their sibling(s)."

Thanks you guys are the best

Still working on a critique though if anyone has ideas...

Hmmm...not sure how to really explain this, and based only on the abstract, but a weakness could possibly be that individual personalities are ignored? Like, maybe the ones with similar calls just happened to be more likely to be social through their genetic expression? Correlation is not necessarily causation, blah blah blah....

Ahh yes, this is the cliche answer but it's usually a good one. They did make a few assumptions in the end... here's a good one:

[From the "Discussion"]

There are a lot of other things it could result from as well, they shouldn't say "probably."

Your PM box is full, but I've sent you all I have. Good luck, be sure to let us know the answer!

Thank you all so much for the help! And I will definitely let you know what he says