I really like this post over at the DrugMonkey blog about the role of authority in science. I like it even though it has South Park pictures in it, which I detest.
Near the end, the talk turns to university instructors:
Your whole professional life is predicated on you as the Authority. In the classroom, you have all the knowledge and the students have relatively little. They are explicitly seeking you out for your authority. Even within most “teaching departments” you are the sole expert in not just a narrow area but in several subfields, are you not? And...c’mon, ‘fess up. It goes to your head after awhile doesn't it? ...
Is it any wonder you develop into a know-it-all who cannot conceptualize anyone else having valid opinions or rationales? Any wonder you start to broaden the scope of your claimed authority? After all, nobody challenges you in your day to day life. And for the most part, you are right. But not all the time, my friend, not all the time.
I think this is one of the reasons that extreme deference in my students drives me absolutely insane. I hope that at some level, I want to be challenged.
Having authority should mean recognizing challenges as challenges (in the best sense of the word) , not threats.
This video of Chris Comer describing her firing is up at an National Center for Science Education website devoted to the film Expelled. I haven't been blogging about Expelled, because many, many people have repeatedly identified it as a highly suspicious propaganda film. Not all that much to add there.
No new information there, really, but worthwhile to hear the story from Ms. Comer.
Also, the position she used to hold at the Texas Education Agency is still showing as vacant.
One of the things I occasionally get in my mailbox is updates from the National Science Foundation, since it is the agency that I look to most and have worked with most for funding. This morning, a link to a report about the NSF's "human capital" came in. I thought it was about science careers generally, but it turns out to be very specific to NSF employment. I did catch one interesting point:
While NSF’s workforce has grown by eight percent between 2001-2007, during that same time period, proposals submitted to NSF for competitive review grew 40 percent.
So, as expected, more and more people are looking for a piece of a pie that isn't getting any much bigger in a hurry.
Only nine days to go until the Institute for Creation Research's application to grant Master's degrees in science education is taken up by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. It's on the agenda for the 24 April meeting. Item IX.H.
You may be wondering about the local reaction to stories like this one:
The Bush administration is bulldozing environmental laws to build a controversial fence designed to block illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican border. ... In southern Texas the fence will run along flood-control levees between 100 and 1500 metres from the Rio Grande, creating what critics call a "no-man's land" between fence and river.
This section of the fence will cut through rich wildlife reserves, including the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Alamo, the Sabal Palm Audubon Center and most of the Nature Conservancy's Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve near Brownsville.
And it may surprise you that there really isn't much local reaction. I've seen occasional posters around campus saying "No border wall," but they're rare.
Additional: Of course, I write something like this and then discover there's going to be a forum about the fence held on campus tomorrow. Still, as I said, it's been very low key promotion.
Earlier this week, I was involved in reviewing a proposal for a new textbook aimed at introductory biology students. The book was trying some different things in the way it was structured, and was trying to integrate mathematics throughout. All very smart, well-meaning stuff. But sometimes, you wonder if textbook authors forget the conditions on the ground.
Last week, I had a student come into my office who reminded me. He said he had been in the wrong class for the last two and a half months. He asked if he could make up the missing work.
Now, I had better provide a little context. I teach three classes in a row. Originally, I was slated to be in one room for the first class, then move down the hall for the next two. This seemed silly, so I asked the lecturer down the hall at the time of my first class if we could switch. That was fine. Signs on the doors of both classes were up for many weeks explaining that the class had moved.
The student had a class list at the start of the semester that listed all the rooms, and followed it. The printed list he had was not updated with the room switch.
The class he had been sitting in since the beginning of the semester wasn't even a biology class. Not even in the same discipline as class he was supposed to be taking.
(One person refused to believe this student's explanation. To which I replied, "If that's the story this person said to look good, what's the real story going to be like?")
I want to make something clear here: I am not laughing at these students. The point is that such students remind me that all the time I spend thinking about how to better explain gamete formation... or how to better use clickers... or to integrate quantitative mathematical into my lectures... is just not going to matter for a lot of students.
I just don't know that I can do anything to make it right for those people.
But, in the words of ZZ Top, did it know how to use them?
The BBC is reporting on this wonderful fossil. (There's a video here.) This is an old finding I wasn't previously aware of, but it's great to see how technology is getting ever better at making the unseen seen. The BBC link seems to indicate this will be appearing in the French journal Comptes Rendus Biologies.
Just like cloning mammals arrived sooner than most people expected and left people scrambling for how to deal with the situation, I'm starting to think that we'd better start doing some serious thought about the legal ramifications of robotics.
I'm thinking much the same thoughts after reading this story and accompanying video.
To me, it's no surprise that people will respond emotionally to robots, because people tend to treat everything as alive. Watch the amount of attention people give to their cars sometime. I can't remember if I blogged about it, but I saw some time ago an interview with a researcher who found that the further people were from their computers, the more likely they were to use profanity in describing it -- that is, they were being polite to the computer.
Theodor Boveri was a developmental biologist, who did some important early work on cell division using Ascaris, a species of parasitic nematode worm. I wasn't familiar with his work, but scanned this recent review article.
The article ends saying that Boveri actually became infected with these parasites late in life, leading him to write:
It is mean when the beasts you have worked on, now start working on you.
At lunch today, we official (re) installed a chapter of Beta Beta Beta in my department. This is a national honor's society for biology, which support undergraduate student academic success and undergraduate researchers.
Being Canadian, where the practice of fraternities and sororities has never been strong on universities, I had a certain suspicion about a society with so many Greek letters in it. But the students wanted a chapter, and I wanted to support the students, so I said I would be the advisor for the chapter and help get them off the ground.
So we had Ron Humphery, the regional director, down to officially start the chapter. It turned out that this was bringing a chapter back to our institution. We had a chapter way back in the 1980s, apparently -- our tech Tom was a member back then. But somehow, it lapsed and there hasn't been one for a long, long time.
Dr. Humphrey was actually a little surprised by how much the national office sent down for our new chapter, particularly a huge tablecloth with the Beta Beta Beta seal, which made the various bits on display (the charter for the chapter, the coat of arms, membership book, candles, etc.) look pretty darn classy.
And now we are chapter Nu Omega, with a few new members and high hopes. We'll see how it goes.
There's a new talk by Al Gore on TED today. I found it very interesting, particularly the analyses of where climate change sits on the food chain of the media.
Then my eyes strayed down to the comments.
Wow.
You hear about terms like "culture war" bandied about, and sometimes you wonder, "How bad is it really?" And then you see the absolute opposition, catcalling, insults, and appeals to conspiracy and cultism in something like this. Which, I have to point out, is about a topic that isn't scientifically controversial.
I think maybe Jimmy Wales got it right. The real culture war isn't over politics: "It's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks."
In this age of comments, reviews, and all of that which is supposed to be part of Web 2.0, the maddening thing is how easy it is to be a jerk. To hop onto a site and give a one start review with a one line dismissal to a book you've never read. And it creates such a caustic environment. Who wants to stand in the middle of a yelling contest?
And as much as I want to be one of the people reaching out to talk about science and education and my profession, seeing the jerks in action make me worry of getting burned.
Additional: And this is why comments here are moderated, incidentally.
The peacock's tail is the example of a feature that seems to have evolved not for survival, but for attracting mates. And it is truly spectacular, as the video clip shows.
One explanation for the great size of the tail is that if females prefer mating with males with large tails, those males will have greater reproductive success. Thus, there will be selection for the large spectacular tails that peacocks have.
This paper is getting a fair amount of attention (e.g., a mention on the latest Science podcast) because it counter intuitively argues that females do not prefer males with larger tails.
There's something important to know about this paper: The authors didn't do any experiments. That is, they never actually changed the tails of males in any way to see if this changed their courtship or mating success.
Instead, they watched peacocks and peahens mating in a free-ranging population in Japan (268 matings, if you're curious), and measured the peacocks' tails in various ways from photographs. Then, they looked to see if there were any correlations between tail shape and mating success.
No correlation between the length of the tail and mating success.
No correlation between the number of eyespots on the tail and mating success.
And this is where this being a study rather than an experiment makes the interpretation difficult. The authors worked simply with what they found in their field setting. And there was very little variation in peacock tails. If there's no variation, it's very difficult to make any conclusions about choice.
Image a situation where you have to pick between numerous $1 bills. You pick a $1 bill more or less at random, and the researcher concludes that value plays little role in your decision making process. The peahens may not have had much to distinguish the peacocks here, so other factors may become more important.
Indeed, the authors found correlations between behaviour called "shivering" and mating success. When the authors put all these factors to try to explain mating success in a single year, however, not much is explained.
They also found a correlation between tail length and predation -- although few peacocks were preyed upon. Although many individuals were identified using leg bands, the authors say very little about the age of the individuals they were studying. One could image a situation where the oldest mails have the longest tails, but because they are old, they are the most vulnerable to predators.
The authors propose that the peacock's tail is a relic. That is, it was important once, but is mostly unimportant now. This is an interesting idea, as are several others that they float in the discussion. But ultimately, I wish they had done some experiments.
Reference
TAKAHASHI, M., ARITA, H., HIRAIWAHASEGAWA, M., HASEGAWA, T. (2008). Peahens do not prefer peacocks with more elaborate trains. Animal Behaviour, 75(4), 1209-1219. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.10.004
I never offer extra credit in my classes any more, but a lot of my colleagues do. And we've all noticed that students will sell their grandmothers for tiny amounts of extra credit. Amounts that almost never impact on their final letter grade.
All in the Mind has an interview this week with author Dan Ariely, who wrote Predictably Irrational. He talks at some length about the persuasive power of “Free!” People will make bad decisions when something is free. A $1,000 discount on a car may not means as much as a few free oil changes – even though that may only total a hundred dollars in value or so.
I suspect that “extra” does much the same thing for students. Somehow, something “extra” has more weight than regular points, even if their tiny.
I’ll let you students in on a secret. You will never, ever be able to talk a professor into changing your final grade is he or she offers extra credit. If you were close to the dividing line and you didn’t take the extra credit, the professor will say, “Your fate was in your hands – you could have got the better grade if only you'd taken the extra credit.” If you did take the extra credit, the professor will say, “Look, you didn't make the grade even with all that extra credit you took.”
Why take irreplaceable objects like the Lucy fossil out to display publicly?
One answer might be the magical belief that there's some sort of "essence" to the thing. That the real fossil stirs us in a way that no copy ever can. Another might be that there are little details that are not readily appreciated in reproductions or at a distance. I have a small collection of sketches and original comic art, and I do love seeing little changes that were masked in the final printed page. An artist's quick sketch on the reverse of the paper, an editorial change where the art was covered over and redrawn. And I definitely get a better appreciation for the sheer size and scale of a dinosaur when I see a complete mounted skeleton of an Allosaurus and its trio of wicked meat hook claws.
I went to the Houston Museum of Natural Science because I probably wouldn't have another chance to see the Lucy fossil again. I'm not sure if I went because of the first reason or the second. Being an evolutionary biologist, it seemed somehow important for me to take this opportunity. And it was a good excuse to get out of town for a weekend.
The Lucy fossil was part of a much larger display on Ethopia. I found this very interesting, because I knew next to nothing about the history of the region. I had never heard of ancient cities like Aksum and Gondar, so I appreciated the exhibit greatly.
But as for the Lucy fossil itself... I don't know that seeing the original Lucy fossil really enriched my understanding or appreciation of human evolution. Although renowned for being so complete, it is still really fragmentary. This makes it hard to pull much of a sense of anything. And because I don't know much about vertebrate morphology, I couldn't make sense of even something simple like how this skeleton is distinctly female, or how it differs from other early hominids. My ignorance was simply too vast.
Still, despite my personal ambivalence, I don't oppose the exhibition of the fossil, as some have. Because I am an evolutionary biologist, perhaps I had too much information in some ways so that what would be new and unusual to other people were things I already knew. And hopefully others will be struck by little details and gain some deeper understanding of Lucy that they didn't have before.
Spent the entire day at the Houston Museum of Natural Science -- and didn't quite get through everything! Even leaving out the two special displays you had to buy separately. This is an excellent museum, with lots of wonderful things to see.
The most unexpected pleasure was the gem gallery. I would never make a specific trip to see a gem gallery, but this is really excellent, with all manner of stunning minerals in shapes that almost defy belief.
Also saw the Imax movie Galapagos 3-D, which may well be one of the best Imax films I've seen yet. Really amazing footage on th land and underwater. The close-ups of some of the giant tortoises and marine iguanas are particularly effective, with the combination of the huge Iamx screen and the 3-D really making you almost feel like you're kneeling right there.
The star, and the ostensible reason I made the trip up, Lucy? More about that in a later blog post.
The Dallas Observer has a lengthy article about the upcoming revision to the Texas public school science standards. For those who have been following this, there is not a tremendous amount of new material here. And are a few minor mistakes. But this doesn't detract too much from the piece.
This post over at Uncertain Principles argues that the problem with introductory physics classes are that they're too much like high school physics classes. Students are bored and have seen it all before.
The same argument could probably be made about any first year introductory science class. I'll slide this over to introductory biology rather than physics for the rest of this post, because I think the issues are so similar.
First, there's an empirical question of how similar those really are. And if they are similar, it is because they represent core concepts students need to progress?
Second, even if the subject matter of the classes are similar, does it hurt to revisit the basics? After all, expertise is not something that one develops over their last year of high school -- it takes years of practice and effort. And even if students have seen something before, they may not have seen it "my way." Give two instructors the same material, and one can take it and create something intriguing and entertaining, and the other can suck the life right out of it.
Third, are students bored because they know it already? If so, you'd expect very high rates of success -- which is not what most introductory university science classes see. Hugh failure rates in introductory science classes are the norm, not the exception. Sad but true. This suggests that if students are bored, it's not because they "know it."
But for the sake of argument, if the author is on to something, there may be a deeper problem in addressing it. It's highly doubtful that university instructors know what is being taught in high schools. Most university level instructors may have only vague ideas of the conditions "on the ground" in the schools their students attended.
