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Tenure guidelines usually leave something out

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak as a panel member to a new faculty workshop, about “common pitfalls and best practices” on the road to tenure. One of the interesting things about the other speakers was that several of them were very down on presentations, arguing that too many faculty go to conferences for the wrong reasons.

As it happened, I had been attending a meeting earlier that day in place of our department chair. I had an opportunity to review the tenure requirements of a lot of different departments, which you normally don’t have a chance to do. A few things stood out.

Many of the departments had long, very legalistic tenure requirements, often containing fairly trivial things. For example, “You have to give your a syllabus to classes, preferably on the first day” was the sort of thing that some had. (Given that a syllabus is a CYA document, it does make sense that it would be referred to in another CYA document.)

I told the faculty that it’s a mistake to think of those tenure requirements as a checklist. Tenure requirements are almost always written for the benefit of the tenured faculty, not the tenure-track faculty those requirements are ostensibly there for. Tenure requirement are often written in such a way as to give the tenured faculty the balance of power in making tenure decisions.

While the written guidelines cover minimum expectations for teaching, research, and service, there’s typically a big unwritten set of conditions: collegiality. If the tenured faculty don’t like you, the tenure guidelines are usually slippery enough, referring to intangibles (e.g., “publication quality”) that it will be hard to get past the gates.

Can crayfish feel electricity?

The sensory abilities of vertebrates and invertebrates are generally more similar than they are different: both groups can detect light, sound, pressure, and so on. One of the few cases of a sensory ability that seemed to be the domain of vertebrates alone was the ability to detect electrical signals: electroreception. Several fish have it, and use electrical signals to communicate. Platypus have it. Electric signaling in fish is a classic examples of behaviour understood at the neural level.

For a long time, people argued that invertebrates don’t have electroreception, for reasons that were perhaps a bit idiosyncratic. One explanation I heard given was that something like a crayfish was too small. And I’ve seen crayfish much bigger than knifefish.

A few years ago, a couple of papers came out that started to pick apart that idea, and showed that crayfish could respond to electrical signals. This new paper by Patullo and Macmillan^* pushes the state of the art forward in a couple of ways (And it does so with some rather graceful prose, I might add.)

First, it expands the number of species. The authors used Cherax destructor, which they’d used in a previous study, and also tested Cherax quadricarinatus (pictured). Both species decreased their activity in the presence of electric fields, at about the same intensity levels.

The intensity levels were the second way this paper pushed things forward: it showed that crayfish were responding to much lower levels of electricity than previous studies – about ten times lower. Because neurons run on electricity, if you give an intense enough signal, animals will respond, even if they have no specialized sensory apparatus for detecting electical fields. This paper goes further towards suggesting that crayfish can respond to a biologically relevant electrical signal. And, indeed, one of the key features is that the electrical signal played to the crayfish was derived from a swimming tadpole, which crayfish will prey upon.

These experiments seem rather tricky to pull off and calibrate. Behavioural analysis is complicated by there not be any particular behaviour identified (yet!) that is reliably and consistently evoked by an electrical signal. This is going to make the next stage of this research, locating the neurons responsible for crayfish electroreception, a challenge.

^* Full disclosure: I have worked with both authors on this paper, so I think of them as Blair and David. And, as an example of how long it takes to get things out in science, I helped them start this project over ten years ago.

Crossposted at Marmorkrebs blog.

Reference

Patullo, B., & Macmillan, D. (2010). Making sense of electrical sense in crayfish Journal of Experimental Biology, 213 (4), 651-657 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.039073

Times Online wants to know the best science blogs

The science blogosphere is chatting a lot about the release of the Times Online list of top 30 science blogs. There’s generally good stuff there.

Those quickly scanning the list to see if their favourite made it in might miss this request:

We’d like you to help us us to compile the definitive list, the Top 100 Science Blogs. Send the name and url of your favourites to eureka@thetimes.co.uk, with “Best blogs” in the subject line.

When the going gets tough, do the puffs get going?

You would think that having a dedicated set of neurons that triggered super-fast escape responses to get away from fast predator attacks and other sudden events in your area would be something that you’d want to keep around. This is usually so, but it turns out, not always. This is a problem I’ve been struggling with for some time now, and I’m thrilled to bits to find another example.

Fish have a group of neurons that trigger escape responses called C-starts, so called because the fish bends in a C shape away from the source of the stimulus. The largest of these neurons – large enough to be called giant neurons – are Mauthner cells, named after their discoverer. Bigger neurons send faster signals, so if Mauthner neurons are inactivated experimentally, fish can do C-starts, but they’re slower at it.

Anna Greenwood and colleagues have now found an interesting case of a natural experiment: two fairly similar fishes that differ dramatically in their responses to startling stimuli. They’re two different pufferfish: the green puffer (Tetraodon nigroviridis; below left) and the long-spine porcupinefish (Diodon holocanthus; below right).

Give these two animals the same sudden sound, and both will respond... but the green puffer is much faster, performing a classic C-start (start of movement marked with asterisk in first row of silhouettes). The porcupinefish takes twice as long to react (second row of silhouettes), and doesn’t bend nearly as much.

The neural anatomy correlates with these differences in behaviour. Large Mauthner cells in green puffers, no large Mauthner cells in porcupinefish. The position of the Mauthner cells is consistent enough that Greenwood and colleagues were able to provide argue that the Mauthner cells are missing in porcupinefish, not just tiny.

Greenwood and company suggest two scenarios where the Mauthner cells might be lost. There might be relaxed selection on the trait, and it’s lost sort of by happenstance, a little like how cave dwelling organisms tend to lose pigments or eyes.

Alternately, there might be some active disadvantage to having the Mauthner cells. For the porcupinefish, that disadvantage might be that Mauthner cells and C-starts interfere with a dramatically different anti-predator behaviour: inflation. Greenwood and company don’t provide hard numbers, but report that porcupinefish are much more likely than green puffers to do the classic behaviour that gives puffers their names.

The result of all of this detailed behavioural analysis and anatomical work is... to send researchers back to the field. To understand what drove their neurobehavioural changes, we’ve got to get a better handle of the differing ecology of these species.

Reference

Greenwood, A., Peichel, C., & Zottoli, S. (2010). Distinct startle responses are associated with neuroanatomical differences in pufferfishes Journal of Experimental Biology, 213 (4), 613-620 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.037085

Anonymity doesn’t make science better

A group of stem cell researchers are claiming that there is a group of scientists who are impeding publication on stem cell research. Maybe. Maybe not. I wanted to comment on this quote (emphasis added):

Commenting on the allegations, Monica Bradford, executive editor of Science, another major journal, said: “Our current policy is to preserve the confidentiality of reviewers’ names and comments. Some journals have tried experiments to test the impact of open review on the quality of the feedback received through peer review.(”)

Anonymity is a problem; see previous post here. Keep peer review, but actually have people own up to what they write, so we can see if there’s a shadowy cabal of researchers controlling the discipline or not.

It’s ironic that one of the bigger fights in scientific publishing is about open access for the papers, open archiving of the data, but the actual review process remains out of view, not only of the public, but of the scientists themselves.

Additional: Here’s the letter from the scientists complaining about review practices.

Tuesday Crustie: Clawless

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested a sand crab identified as Blepharipoda occidentalis was probably Hippa. Here’s Hippa adactyla: a type specimen of Danish biologist J.C. Fabricius (from here). I love the antique look of this image.

Here’s a more modern image (from here).

Octopus intelligence

My first supervisor, Jennifer Mather, is featured today on the world’s most popular site called Boing Boing. She discusses the recent description of octopuses using coconut shells, which I blogged about here.

How many species have you published on? Update!

Last year, I asked my fellow researchers how many different species they had published original data about.

My tally just increased by one.

1. Spiny sand crabs, Blepharipoda occidentalis (Paper)
2. Pearly sand crabs, Lepidopa californica (Paper; pictured, right)
3. Mole crabs, Emerita analoga (Paper; pictured, left)
4. Squat lobster, Munida quadrispina (Paper)
5. Signal crayfish, Pacifastacus leniusculus (Paper)
6. Yabby, Cherax destructor (Paper)
7. Spiny lobster, Panulirus argus (Paper)
8. Balmain bugs, Ibacus peronii (Paper)
9. Slipper lobsters, Ibacus alticrenatus (Paper)
10. Spanner crab, Ranina ranina (Paper)
11. Cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus (Paper)
12. Sea squirt, Ascidia interrupta (Paper)
13. Marmorkrebs, Procambarus sp. (Paper)

Looking forward to seeing how much further I push that number up before the year’s out.

Meet the new number two, same as the old number two

My last review article continues to hang around in the bridesmaid position at Brain, Behavior and Evolution for the fourth straight month, and has been in the top three for nine months now.

Now, if some citations would just start appearing...

Do you like me? Or any scientist?

Dr. Doyenne at Women in Wetlands has, like me, been reading Randy Olson’s Don’t Be Such a Scientist.

(A)re scientists likeable? Well, some of them are, but why? In the coming posts, I’ll try to delve into how scientists can be more effective at science communication.

I look forward to her takes! And her posts are a nudge to me that I had been meaning to write about this myself.

The first element to consider is something that is entirely out of any scientist’s hands: culture. I think it’s fair to say that there is a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in the United States. In other countries, intellectuals are probably more valued (France and Israel may be a couple of examples, though I don’t pretend to have any hard data on this.) If the culture doesn’t value deep or abstract thinking, scientists are going to have a hard time being seen as likeable.

In her follow-up, Doyenne writes (emphasis added):

I’ve noticed in the blogosphere that some science bloggers gain notoriety by engaging in negative rants, heavily laden with cursing and rude attacks on anyone with a different opinion. You probably know which blogs I’m talking about. Some have huge followings, probably because readers mistakenly think that an angry voice is bound to be a truthful one. Instead of expending effort to develop an intelligent, interesting, or useful voice, these angry bloggers use their vitriol as an easy way to attract attention. Take a close look at some of these blogs, and you will see that very little real information or useful insight is conveyed.

Olson writes about this at some length. He argues that so many bloggers are amateur communicators that it’s no surprise they use anger. Anger’s easy to convey.

But.

I have read many science bloggers whose writing is both angry and truthful; profane and insightful.

A lot of people will point at the former and use it as an excuse to ignore the latter. (I’m not saying Dr. Doyenne is doing so. She doesn’t name names, so I have no basis for comparison.)

That writers accomplish demonstrate what I think is a much bigger advantage for scientists than likeability. Likeability for scientists is an uphill battle at best. (To be clear, I’m not saying that scientists should try to be unlikeable. Trying to improve would be a good thing.)

In his book, Randy Olson also writes about the emergence of unscripted entertainment; reality television and the like. On one of his commentaries for Doctor Who, writer Russell T Davies said of such unscripted shows, “That’s what drama is now,” using Susan Boyle’s run on Britain’s Got Talent as an example. Olson says people enjoy the spontaneity in such moment; I think it also has to do with seeing genuine reactions. I think people enjoy a lack of artifice, even though we are constantly advised to create façades and hold things back.

Authenticity is something that scientists have in abundance. Something like ClimateGate is damaging not so much because scientists were seen being unlikeable, but because they were seen as not being straight-shooters.

I would hate for researchers to lose their authenticity in pursuit of likeability. As Danielle Laporte wrote elsewhere:

Authenticity is incredibly efficient. Consistency builds velocity. When you’re who you really are, people know what to expect of you, and that’s a beautiful thing.

Show me who you are, even if it’s a bit risky (risk = momentum.)

Additional: See also this post on authenticity in game promotion.

Comments for second half of January, 2010

Janet Stemwedel, a.k.a. Dr. Free-Ride, asks at Adventures in Ethics and Science about leniency for students caught cheating. I advocate consistency.

Professor in Training continues talking about what potential tenure-track faculty should look for after getting a job offer. I add three points.

Blue Lab Coats picks up from Professor in Training and on my post about lab personnel; I stress the variation across institutions.

At On the Market, Doctor Becca asks why other postdocs are not writing about their job search experiences. Perhaps because a couple of apparently pseudonymous descriptions were not as discreet as the author hoped?

Doctor Becca also asks for some input on some popular science writing she did. Remember, she asked, and I’m just trying to help.

At The Tree of Life, Jonathan Eisen doesn’t like “connectome.” What else you got?

Biochem Belle ponders what makes an undergrad institution create a doctoral program. Tough to say, but it seems ill-timed, to say the least.

Journal Club vs. Ethics Bowl

Study in contrasts yesterday.

We had the first meeting of Journal Club yesterday. A paper had been sent by email earlier in the week, and we moved the time forward a bit to try to make it a bit more friendly to students.

Start time rolls around, and there are six faculty and one student – the one who picked the paper for discussion.

Another student shows up about 10-15 minutes late.

Last semester, when we had a few more students showing up, it was often like trying to pull teeth to get student to venture an opinion.

After Journal Club, I drove down to a coffee shop where there was a meeting of the Ethics Bowl team. Our university placed in the regional competition, and will be competing in the national competition in March.

By the time I got there, there was the team’s coach and about five students involved in animated discussion of the cases. A few more students showed up a later. People occasionally have to be reminded to let the other person talk.

And the score at half-time:

Ethics Bowl, several hundred; Journal Club, nil.

It’s damned depressing. I crave that intellectual back and forth in our department. I’ve tried to encourage it and foster it. And apparently I have earned a great big fail on that count.

Single use clothing

Mitch at Chemistry Blog describes his postdoc interview. He writes:

Lesson #3
You need to wear a suit.

I never get why academics insist on wearing clothes to an interview that they’ll never wear again if they get the job.

Image from here.