Regularly scheduled maintenance

From a memo I got on the 14^th:

As you know by now we are getting a new boiler for the Science building to replace the current one that is currently having performance issues.

If you’ve ever wondered what a boiler for a science building looks like, here it is:

I snapped these on my way into the building this morning.

It’s going to take a while to get those track divots back to normal.

Tipping Open Lab 2010

As part of a writing class I am teaching, I had my students read a lot of the submissions to Open Laboratory 2010. They started before the final submission deadline, so what they read was in no way a comprehensive survey of all the nominated posts, but they read a decent fraction of them. Then, they voted on the posts they liked the best.

In case you’ve started a betting competition for who will be in the next Open Laboratory anthology, these might have good odds...

1. Wired Science: Freaky Sleep Paralysis: Being Awake in Your Nightmares
2. White Coat Underground: Fountain Pens
3. Neurophilosophy: Voluntary amputation and extra phantom limbs
4. Plus Magazine: You aren't what your mother eats
5. The Quantum Lobe Chronicles: The peripheral attention deficit of primary psychopaths
6. Neurotopia: The Value of Stupidity: are we doing it right?
7. Mauka to Makai: Baby-Making
8. The Primate Diaries: Does Taking Birth Control Alter Women's Sexual Choices?
9. The Quantum Lobe Chronicles: Did sleepwalking once serve as an adaptive function?

That said, the students I think keyed more into the novelty of the topic being discussed in a lot of cases more than the actual level of writing.

A quick exercise in critical thinking: Vaccines and dystonia

One of my neurobiology students pointed me to a video of a women suffering from dystonia. The story very strongly implies that her dystonia was caused by getting a seasonal flu vaccine.

I’d ask anyone looking at that video to consider these things:

1. Correlation does not imply causation. That you do a rain dance, and it later rains, does not mean you caused the rain. That she had a vaccine before the onset of her condition does not, in and of itself, mean the vaccine caused it.
2. “Doctors say...” What doctors? There were no doctors interviewed on camera, or listed by name.
3. No peer reviewed research was mentioned. I did a very quick search on Google Scholar, and found no papers discussing both vaccines and dystonia.
4. What I did find was a review of people who have been diagnosed with dystonia which seems to have underlying psychological causes rather than biological causes. This indicates that there are a wide range of causes for dystonia.

Let me try to be crystal clear: I am not saying it is impossible for this particular case to have been caused by the vaccine. I am saying that the story, while emotional, isn’t informative.

Cooperation and generosity in evolution

One of my students emailed me asking what I thought of this article, “Social scientists build case for ‘survival of the kindest’” on the biology of human sympathy and kindness. I am not sure what they're going for here. Stuff in this article ranged from unsurprising to dubious to wrong.

Unsurprising: It’s been known for a long, long, long time that cooperation can be a winning strategy for evolutionary success. This stuff in the article doesn’t weigh against an hypothesis that selfishness at the genetic level provides evolutionary success, as far as I can see.

Dubious:

“The tendency to be more empathetic may be influenced by a single gene,” Rodrigues said.

The track record of people claiming to have found single genes to explain a complex social behavioural pattern in humans is lousy. I can’t think of one.

Wrong:

Keltner and his team are zeroing in on... the vagus nerve, a uniquely mammalian system...

Frogs have vagus nerves. The neurotransmitter acetylcholine was first called “vagustoff” because it was isolated from frog vagus nerves by Otto Loewi, for which he won the Nobel prize. And, just to be crystal clear... Frogs? Not mammals!

While this detail is just that – a detail – errors like that burn credibility.

“This new science of altruism and the physiological underpinnings of compassion is finally catching up with Darwin’s observations nearly 130 years ago, that sympathy is our strongest instinct,” Keltner said.

None of the cases they talked about are clearly altruistic (at least, I couldn’t tell from what’s written in the article). Altruism is “I incur a cost that benefits you.” What is presented in the article seems to be either cooperation or mutualism (“I benefit and you also benefit”), or maybe generosity (“This costs me nothing and you benefit”). And by costs, I mean survival or reproductive costs, not someone making a six figure annual salary giving $5 to charity.

Cooperation is dead easy to explain through evolutionary theory. Generosity is not problematic, although you might expect it to be rare. Altruism is difficult for evolutionary theory to explain, which is why there are many papers in prominent journals about models and explanations for altruistic behaviour.

I’m sure much of the basic research underlying this article is fine and Interesting stuff, but this write-up has way too much of an “Everything scientists thought was all wrong!” vibe for my liking.

I lost!

Back in October, I posted an entry about reverse evolution in the NESCent competition for blogging about evolution.

I did not win.

But I cannot feel bad about that, considering that I was totally pulling for “Nerdy” Christie Wilcox, whose post I loved. I read it and thought, “OoooOOOoooh, this is so much better than mine.” This is not to take anything at all away from Jeremy Yoder’s post, but a man is allowed to have a favourite.

Other entries are here. Lots of fine reading!

Comments for first half of December, 2009

At Canadian Girl Postdoc in America, I offer suggestions on how to deal with a workplace bully. Oddly, I had just been listening to a radio show about that topic only a couple of hours earlier.

Conversation Matters talks about long-term potentiation between neurons. As I often do, I try to clarify a few factual details that don't necessarily change the big picture.

Terra Sigilata asks whether the acronym STEM includes medicine. For me, it absolutely does not. I comment further.

Building Blogs of Science mentioned teaching with Second Life; I describe my colleagues’ reactions to the idea. Let’s call it... poor.

Is science democratic? SomeBeans thinks no. I think so, and point out an argument I made here a couple of years ago.

At A Skewed View, I try solving a puzzle.

Why Evolution is True posts one of those funny pictures that makes the rounds on the Internet. But this is a case of it’s funny because it’s not true.

Speaking About Presenting talks about how being willing to make a fool of yourself can work to your advantage. I agree, but use different words.

DrugMonkey picks up on a question from Dr. Becca on whether it's okay to reject a manuscript because the writing is atrocious. I say yes, but only in extreme cases.

At the There and (Hopefully) Back Again blog, BioChem Belle talks about picture-taking etiquette in seminars and presentations, which raises many issues, and I'm not sure which one I should be mad about.

Dr. Becca bemoans problems with journal editors at One The Market.

The Women in Wetlands blog asks what to do about an individual showing odd behaviour. I don’t think chatting to Human Resources is the answer.

I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts’ shells

Octopuses using coconut shells has been all over the web the last couple of days due to the publication today of a new paper by Finn and colleagues. The title is helping generate the attention: tool use.

This is a cool finding, but it is not as path-breaking as one might think.

First, the authors do note that there have been possible cases of tool use in invertebrates besides octopuses, but argue that other cases are too context-specific to be “real” tool use.

Second, this is not the first time the phrase “tool use” has been used regarding octopus behaviour. I remember having discussions about tool use in octopuses arising from discussions with Jennifer Mather, my undergrad supervisor. In her field site, she noted that octopuses made dens. These were not just nooks and crannies that octopuses crawled into. The octopuses actively modified their dens by bringing in rocks to block the entrance.

So we’ve known for 15 years that octopuses can actively use objects in their environment for protective purposes. I think the coconut shell carrying and use could be an extension of the den modifying behaviour. The difference with coconuts is that the octopuses can move them around with them, and it’s hard to think of rocks an octopus could do that to.

The coconut carrying behaviour is interesting not because it shows tool use as such, but because it shows anticipation and planning. They show octopuses carrying the coconut shells under their bodies. Finn and company argue that is costly behaviour, except that the octopus could then cover itself with the two halves of the coconut.

In reading the paper, though, I am not sure if they saw a case where an octopus carrying the coconut shells switched to covering itself with the coconut shell. Yes, I’m being picky with that criticism. They may have seen that behaviour. Even if they did not see it, it’s a completely reasonable assumption that the octopuses do use the shells as shelter, and I have no other hypothesis as to what the octopuses are doing with those shells. But if they did not see it, it’s important to keep in mind that they’re inferring the connection between carrying the coconut shells and using them as shelter.

References

Finn, Julian K., Tregenza, Tom, & Norman, Mark D. (2009). Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus Current Biology, 19 (23), 1069-1070. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.10.052

Mather, J. (1994). ‘Home’ choice and modification by juvenile Octopus vulgaris (Mollusca: Cephalopoda): specialized intelligence and tool use? Journal of Zoology, 233 (3), 359-368 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7998.1994.tb05270.x

Tuesday Crustie: Out of the past

Triops longicaudatus. “Triops is well known to paleontologists as one of the oldest known genera, with fossils from the Triassic that are barely distinguishable from modern day species.” – David Grimaldi

Photo by threefingeredlord on Flickr, and used under a Creative Commons license.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 31: Redundant and repetitive

In our previous installment, commenter Sproglet mentioned some very common advice:

• Tell them what you’re going to tell them.
• Tell them.
• Tell them what you just told them.

I’ve never been crazy about that advice, particularly for a typical academic conference talk. Most conference presentations are 15 minutes. Given that the usual problem is managing to cram the complexity of research into a 12 minute presentation (so you have time for questions), every second is valuable.

Writer Michael Crighton once described how one of Jurassic Park’s scientific advisors (Jack Horner, maybe?) bemoaned that the paleontology scene in the opening of the movie wasn’t as realistic as it could be. The advisor had even suggested to Steven Spielberg a scene that was a little more accurate. Crighton asked how much longer the scene would be than what was in the movie. “About a minute.” Crighton replied it was no wonder it wasn’t used, because a minute is a long time in a movie.

If you’re the sort of person who watches the bonus features on DVDs, you’ll recognize this as one of the main reasons that scenes are cut. You will often hear a director saying, “This was a really nice character beat, but it didn’t provide us with any new information,” or, “We just wanted to get the plot going as fast as possible.”

That economy of storytelling is something many presenters would do well to imitate.

Few movies lay out what’s going to happen in the first act of the film. (Exceptions: Caper movies, where the whole idea is to lay out a plan in detail, then watch where it goes wrong.) Likewise, movies usually don’t end with a series of flashbacks or dialogue recapping the plot the characters have just gone through.

Yet I frequently see people using “Outline” slides (some of my colleagues require their students to have them), with a series of bullet points that are often almost identical to the list of standard sections in a scientific paper. I do not find this valuable in a short talk, particularly given that many technical talks do not have enough introductory material.

I do think repetition is good, particularly in a teaching context, where you want people to retain information for long periods. But there are more natural ways to do it than having a bland outline at the start or a instant replay recap at the end.

Grayscale

The walk into work this morning. I love the way things fade in the distance.