I have, almost without exception, really enjoyed working with every textbook publisher salesman that has visited our campus.
Even though the job of these reps is to make the sale, many of the companies send their reps to our department to visit regardless of whether we are currently using any of their books. They'll be visiting even if there's not a prospect of us using one of their books for several years.
Another thing I appreciate is that I've found most textbook reps are quite interested in teaching. They want to know how we instructors are teaching, what our challenges are. They often have very thoughtful things to say about the thought and design process that went into a book that are not immediately obvious.
Textbook reps have a very unique perspective on the state of teaching. They are probably among the few people who go from institution to institution and actually talk to different instructors about their teaching.
It does not hurt that when they are here, they often feed us lunch if they think there's a sale to be made. And even when there isn't, they'll often bring cookies.
I'm running up to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The main reason (excuse?) is to see the Lucy exhibition, which features one of the most famous fossils in the world, which is shown very, very rarely. And travels even less.
Many lament the lack of scientific knowledge of those outside of the field -- the general public, the lay audience, etc. A new report of cable news networks gives one possible indication of why that might be.
Amount of time spent on reporting on science and technology on cable news networks:
Less than 1%.
Okay, but lots of people have pointed out problems with cable news network coverage, particularly in the U.S. They have 24 hours to fill, must be on air, and have very little time for reflection or investigation.
And indeed, the broadcast news networks fare better.
2%.
What about newspapers, that bastion of investigative journalism, thoughtful reflection, and longer attention spans? Also 2%.
But what about the internet? I mean, the whole internet is based on science and technology, was first put to practical use by universities...
1%.
And remember, this is science and technology. If you took out coverage of computer stories -- announcement of a new iPod, Google buying... anything, maybe the HD DVD Blu-Ray war is counted in there -- I shudder to think what the values would be. I think there would be a few zeros between the decimal and the number.
Only one science-related story -- global warming -- made the top 10 stories in any of those four media, with an astonishing 1% of coverage on network news. Astonishingly low, that is.
I was going to make a graph of this, but it was too depressing. Is it any surprise that people do not have a good understanding of science when they hear so little about it?
And yet, the contacts list for the TEA Science Unit still shows no replacement.
Now, hiring someone in a bureaucracy can take a long time. I've been a search committee chair in a university -- I know this firsthand. But I wonder how long it will take to fill? Will it fill before the science standards are reviewed? Will there be any attention from the media, blogosphere, and the like when it does fill?
I was going to let this go, but it's been bugging me too much. This New Scientist article is an interview with Michael Heller, who’s won a major award that is geared towards “spiritual realities.”
Here’s part of it, where the interviewer asks:
What do you make of the current debate between science and religion, in which the two are often presented as mutually exclusive?
The question bothers me. A lot. I'm disappointed that Heller took it as posed.
It assumes that there is this unitary, singular point of view called “religion.”
This does a tremendous disservice to the wonderful breadth and variety of religious beliefs out there. Of course, “religion” for most Westerners means “Christian” – or possibly one of the other monotheistic religions. But you have Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, the beliefs of First Nations of North America, the aboriginals of Australia, to people who don't have any well articulated system of religious thought but just feel "spiritual" – just to name a few.
Is it not possible that some religious beliefs really are mutually exclusive with science? And is it not possible that some religious beliefs are completely compatible with science?
Which means Good Friday is next week. Which means there are no classes Friday. Which means that I can't do the lectures I planned to do next week. Which means I have only a few days to think of something for Monday's lecture.
See, my lectures are organized by week. They are very highly structured. Normally, I do have a "short week" lecture I fit in around the holiday near the end of semester, be it American Thanksgiving or Easter.
But Easter moves around the calender. And in the six years I've been teaching, this is the earliest it's been. Usually, I have one, maybe two, weeks of lecture before I hit the short week.
Excuse me. I have to go think of something to talk about.
Two interesting articles that I want to point out.
The first is a Psychology Today article on magical thinking. This, to me, is another way of looking at the more fundamental question about the basic nature of belief, which fascinates me. Why do people believe something or not? Are there limits to what we can believe? And as a teacher, how can I affect what people believe -- or should I?
Second is a Time article looking at research into expertise. As a teacher, I want to pass on expertise. As a researcher, I want to hone my expertise. How do I do that?
Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving.
The switch to daylight saving is kicking my butt. It's a good thing that there are no classes this week, because I'm sleeping later than I'd like and arriving to work later than I'd like -- if there were classes.
Something that may interest a few readers: a news aggregation service called Alltop has a fairly decent selection of science news feeds, and not the usual combination of science and computing / IT news.
The Nature podcast has an featured editorial (link opens an mp3 audio file; editorial starts 14:24 in) on the Institute for Creation Research's application to grant Master's degrees in science education in Texas.
Nature news editor Alex Witze paints a none-too-pretty picture of Texas and Texas scientists. She wrote for the Dallas Morning News for nine years, so she is familiar with the place. She essentially says, "Texas is about the only place where the ICR's application wouldn't be laughed out of the office."
I think incredulity doesn't do justice to the situation. There are several good reasons why ICR application isn't being laughed out. It's no fly-by-night operation, they've done the requisite paperwork, and they have shown a nasty tendency to sue.
She chastises scientists for not talking to people. If only we scientists got out of our ivory towers, creationism wouldn't have such a hold on people and would not be seen as credible.
I have two objections to this.
First, I am not sure what venues she thinks scientists should be doing all this communicating in. Are we supposed to walk door to door with a copy of On the Origin of Species in hand and as people, "Have you considered the benefits of rational empiricism to society?" Stand on a soapbox in the town square and announce to passers-by, "The Earth is ancient! Humans evolved!"? I blog for just this reason, but gone are the days where a spot on the web would guarantee an audience tooling around.
Finding venues for meaningful communication is not a trivial problem.
Second, she claims, "If you want regular Americans to understand why science trumps creantionism, you need to get out of your ivory tower and talk to people. They're ready to listen."
Are they ready to listen? Just yesterday, I wrote about how people's trust of experts varies depending on the perceived values of those experts. For many people, they don't believe in evolution not because they don't have enough information about it -- it's part of their values. These are people who want to be "a good person" and have decided that following a particular form of Christianity is how they can be a good person. And part of that package is that evolution is atheism, therefore evolution is bad, and evolution leads to moral decay, breakdown of the family, homosexuality, drug use, and genocide. And let's not forget that fossils are the handiwork of the devil.
So I really have to question how many people are ready to have a serious conversation about why evolution trumps creationism.
The reliably fascinating Science Show had some interesting comments about how people evaluate things that they know nothing about. In this case, the example is nanotechnology. Interestingly, according to Dan Kahan:
(A)lthough most people don't know very much about nanotechnology, they're still pretty opinionated about it.
Wait. How can someone hold an opinion on something they know nothing about?
What we found is that that very quick visceral reaction was driven a lot by emotions. So just the term 'nanotechnology' or even a very brief description of it can give somebody an initial sense of whether it's risky or beneficial.
So people are making snap judgments based on very limited information.
(A)s people start to learn about nanotechnology they don't form a uniform opinion. In fact they become culturally polarised. There's a body of research and cultural cognition is the mechanism that describes the phenomenon that shows that people tend to conform their beliefs about risks to their values. So if you're somebody who likes commerce and industry and private initiative you tend to be very sceptical about environmental risks. If you're somebody who believes that commerce and industry does bad things and creates inequality, you'll embrace findings of risk. We found that people who have values like that, when they're exposed to even just a little bit of information about nanotechnology they divide along those lines.
And the thing that interests (and scares) me most is how people viewed expert opinion.
We did an experiment where we created fictional experts, and we found that people, just by looking at them and by reading a mock CV, would impute to them values just about how society should be organised. Then we assigned to those advocates positions on nanotechnology just randomly -- suspend it pending more research on risk, allow it to continue pending more research on risks -- and we then saw how people reacted to the arguments of these fictional experts. It turned out that people would adopt whatever argument on nanotechnology was being advanced by the experts whose values were closest to theirs.
Emphasis added. And a big factor, which the piece talks about later, is religiosity. You don't have to look very hard for evidence of that in America. They call it the culture war.
This, to me, is a very depressing set of facts, but Dr. Kahan did leave me with a little bit of optimism:
(Y)ou shouldn't just assume that people are going to form beliefs about nanotechnology that match the best scientific understandings out there. In the normal course they're going to form beliefs that fit their cultural predispositions but then don't assume that's inevitable. In fact it is possible to devise communication techniques that can help to counteract that bias.
Most people are inclined to think that the universe is teeming with life, because the universe is just so darned big. But if so, where are they? That's the question physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, and has since become known as Fermi's paradox.
One of my first articles concerned the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. It has been interesting to see new knowledge come in on that front since I wrote that article over a decade and a half ago. This article in the New York Times provides a nice overview from a more recent perspective, such as the discovery of extrasolar planets (none were known when I wrote my original article).
Took the plunge and bought the world's friendliest car. I almost literally got mobbed by five people at a gas station asking about it, with one girl taking pictures of it. For a hermit like myself, the level of attention will take some getting used to.
It all started when I saw this segment on Top Gear.*
I'd never seen a Smart of any sort before. And I absolutely sympathized with the team's assessment of the Smart Roadster: they want to hate it, but it's just such a giggle to drive. As I mentioned before, I used to drive an MG Midget.
British cars. The jokes are just too easy. “Two hours in the garage for one hour on the road.” “Why did the British never get into manufacturing computers? Because they couldn't figure out how to make them leak oil.”
But that MG was so. Much. Fun to drive. You can't fall out of love with an MG, despite how completely annoying the engineering was when you had to fix it. (And you would have to fix it, trust me.)
Fast forward to seeing an article on CNet a small electric car being sold by Zap motors. (Update, 8 March 2020: Defunct, as described here.) While tooling around their website, I see that they are importing these small little Smart cars.
Weirdly, soon after reading that article, I see one driving around on UTPA campus.
The Zap website had an article a lawsuit over the Smart cars, and Google eventually leads me to a website describing plans to bring Smart to America. Which leads me, ultimately, to reserving one and buying one, for reasons I've mentioned before. If all goes well, I'll be driving back from San Antonio in a new car tomorrow.
But why am I blogging about it? After all, this is allegedly a science blog.
I'm blogging about it because so much of doing science revolves around and is impacted by things that, on the surface, have nothing to do with doing science.
One of the reasons I took this job was that I am a comparative biologist. Looking at diversity of organisms and finding new behaviours is what winds my crank, scientifically speaking. That my institution has a lab on the beach (the Coastal Studies Lab), where I could have access to a whole variety of different species of crustaceans for collecting, seemed like a great research opportunity.
Since taking this job in southern Texas, my research has progressed... differently... than I originally anticipated. And part of that has just been because of cars.
I live in a two person household in a region that is a veritable hymn to the offspring of Henry Ford.
Absolutely everything revolves around cars, and absolutely everything assumes you have a car. Everything is strung out vast distances, where any two points you'd want to go are probably about hours of walking apart (if not much, much more). One of my colleagues went for a walk, and someone literally stopped and asked, "Are you okay?" That's right, if you are walking, something must be wrong; the concept of walking for enjoyment is quite alien. It's too hot and dangerous to bicycle. You won't see a taxi anywhere. And forget you even heard about public transportation.
The Coastal Studies Lab is about 80 miles from the main campus. If I drive there, that would in all likelihood means that my partner could not, say, go to work. So rather than being able to go out with any regularity, I end up not going out to the lab for months and months at a stretch.
One car means few trips to the lab which turns into fewer animals which means less research accomplished.
So that why I'm blogging about getting a car.
Although I wanted a small car as a second vehicle, I am glad that I didn't have to go to this extreme...
* Interestingly, memory cheats. I totally had forgotten this was the Roadster, not the regular fortwo model.
The Minnesota Soybean Growers Association and the Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council funded research on biofuels.
The research resulting from this came out in Science, about as high-profile and as prestigious as scientific research gets, indicating that biofuels made the carbon emission situation worse rather than better.
The organizations pull their funding.
Why?
"The university hurt the farmers' feelings, OK? That's probably the best way to say it," said Jim Palmer, executive director of the two groups.
Wow. Just... wow. "Kill the messenger," anyone?
There seems to be a misunderstanding about the difference between giving money to researchers and giving money to, say, PR firms. Researchers have the obligation to publish their results regardless who paid the money.
Can the people in these agencies not see how this kind of action would tempt researchers to do bad science? To withhold information? How taking this action makes them look even worse?
I am in the process of buying a new car. I wanted to get something as fuel efficient as possible. So I'll be getting one of the first Smart fortwo cars released in the U.S. (pictured). These have been in Europe for a decade. I first became aware of Smart when I saw one on Top Gear. They described the Smart cars as being marketed as a "fashion accessory," but then road tested in Birtish back roads, and gave it a positive review as a sports car. I used to have an MG Midget, and it seemed to me that the Smart was sort of a spiritual descendant of the Midget.
How I wish I could go further. But I can't. The sad fact is, I can't afford a hybrid. I tried to buy one when I first moved to the U.S., and the bank wouldn't loan me the money, and I'm not in a much better position to buy one now.
The Zenn (left) is a fully electric car made in Canada, and its name means "zero emissions, no noise." Weirdly, it's very difficult to buy in Canada, as Rick Mercer discovered. It actually can be bought in many places in the U.S. -- but Texas isn't one of them. Sigh. But even if it was sold in Texas, I still couldn't buy one. Because I'm an apartment owner, I would have no place to plug it in.
Two things occurred to me about this. One is how dependent our choices are on available infrastructure. The second is how Canada -- and the northern states -- might have a huge advantage in moving to electric cars faster than someplace like the U.S. Canadians have been plugging in their cars forever. This amused people from more southern climes, who laughed at the electric plugs dangling from the radiator grille. because it gets so cold in winters that engine need block heaters to prevent them from freezing. Since Canada has at least some infrastructure that provides electricity for cars (at least places where people would park them for long period during winter), it might facilitate the influx of electric cars.
If politicians would just wise up and let them sell some.
Good luck at trying to access the page. It's been very slow today, the server no doubt reeling under the load of people who have been eagerly awaiting it.
This particular database spring from a TED prize for biologist E.O. Wilson, shown below.
Not to belittle Wilson's enormous contribution for this project, but I do need to say that kind of project has been on the minds of a lot of people for a long time. There are various taxonomic databases out there. The Tree of Life was probably the first major one, and Wikispecies is another. And those projects have been very valuable, but I think it's fair to say they haven't revolutionized the science the way that GenBank did for DNA or that Wikipedia did for general knowledge.
Hopefully, Encyclopedia of Life can be that transformative resource.
It's interesting to compare how different databases look. Let's take spiny sand crabs, Blepharipoda occidentalis, the main species I work with for my doctorate. In Tree of Life, there isn't a listing for the species or even the genus. Just a species name in Wikispecies. Like the Tree of Life, I can't even get close to "my" sand crab species in the Encyclopedia of Life yet, but I think you get a sense of the ambitious nature of these projects.
TED talks have shown up in this blog a lot, because they are just so good. Below, Chris Anderson, who runs that conference, is interviewed below, and has a lot of interesting things to say.
He talks a little about the success of the TED talks, using Hans Rosling as an example (see his now classic presentations here and here), makes these interesting observations:
When you think about what that means for the role of teacher in our society, I think it's really interesting. The role of teacher now, in the last couple of decades, has been one where everyone says, "Oh yes, that's a terribly important job, passing on knowledge to the next generation," but no one of ambition, very few people of ambition, do it. Because it pays so poorly and it's hard.
That's changing, because the economics of the internet have dropped... in the last two years, it's spectacular what's happened. The de facto cost of a teacher, live, filmed, giving a talk, where you can see them in their full glory, giving, being inspiring, sharing their ideas, and so forth... The cost of transferring that to someone on the other side of the world, two or three years ago, was two dollars. One transfer, person to person. Because you would have to burn it on a DVD and mail it to them. Even at scale, the incremental cost of adding on a person would be two dollars. So, of course, it didn't happen.
Broadband internet, the online video revolution, you know, it's not just about YouTube. For these teachers as well, the de facto cost of doing that same thing has fallen to about a penny. That's so cheap that a sponsor will pick up the cost. So it's free.
So that means, we're just seeing, we're on the verge of the really early stages of this, an explosion of knowledge and the transformation of what it means to be a great teacher. So instead of going into teaching thinking, "Oh, I'm going to influence 30 people a year if I'm lucky," some teachers, at any rate, can go into teaching knowing that if they're great, they will change the world. They will have a global audience in the millions.
A long time ago, I read a comment on why university professors were often poor teachers. A mediocre researcher might be known around the world, but the reputation of the very best teacher stops at the edge of campus.
Sad, but often true. Indeed, I can only think of one professor who had a reputation for teaching a brilliant class. Don Abbott. And I do admit that my Ph.D. supervisor and some of my friends took the classes for which he was famous, but that is not how I learned of his reputation as a phenomenal teacher. So great was his reputation for his instruction that a book was published that was based in large part on notes from that class and included work from students.
But Anderson is right: now, the best lecturers can gain fame as being a superb lecturer. Walter Lewin provides another superb example.
I have, almost without exception, really enjoyed working with every textbook publisher salesman that has visited our campus.
