The pros and cons of open peer review, blinded peer review, and double blind peer review are welcome. But I crave a different change to peer review.
I wish peer review was a conversation, not a series of statements.
Right now, a referee writes one long review. This goes to an editor, who compiles and passes them back to the author. The author writes another long reply, point by point, and has to to to address everything in one go. Repeat for each round of review.
Why can’t the comments come from a referee in something closer to real time?
As an author, I would love it if a referee could say to me, soon after getting a paper, “I noticed this issue right away. It’s important, but easy to fix.” And then I make that fix while the referee is thinking about other aspects of the paper, and say, “Done.”
As a referee, I would love it if when I didn’t understand a point, I could ask the author, “Do I have this right?” Right now, I have no way of clarifying the author’s intent until I have gone through the entire review and sent it to an editor. Lots of comments on my review might be based on simple misunderstandings.
I do understand that one advantage to getting a review all at once is that it forces the reviewer to consider the paper in its entirety. You get cohesion and clarity that way. I’m not advocating getting rid of those overall summaries. I would just like to see more ways that authors and reviewers could communicate with each other, and to have the option for back and forth that isn’t measured in weeks or months.
Interstellate is the brainchild of Cait. The mandate of this project? To show off bee-yoo-tee-ful neurons.
There’s a magazine coming (maybe in time for the Neuroscience meeting), and Cait posted a preview of the first volume above last night. Look closely, and you might see one that is familiar...
Update, 25 October 2016: It’s out! Download the PDF here.
Well, this is an interesting reveal on the eve of UTRGV’s big flagship science and technology event, HESTEC. The physics department in the legacy institution, UT Brownsville, committed fraud with about $2 million worth of federal research money.
Not a good look, considering that the agencies they ripped off, like NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense, have traditionally been big partners in HESTEC. Indeed, NASA is an official supporter of this year’s event.
And this is not a low-profile case, either. It’s part of the team that was involved in the discovery of gravitational waves. And that’s one of the biggest findings in physics in decades.
An audit from the UT System Office of Internal Audits found at least six federal research grants were overcharged for a total of $1,957,547.27 for the partial or full payment of salaries of faculty who were mainly teaching and not conducting research, a critical violation of grant conditions that could have potential impact on future grant considerations.
“Salaries were charged up to 100 percent of the federal grants even though their workload reflected a full teaching load in Physics,” the audit states.
These funds came from research grants awarded to the Center for Gravitation Wave Astronomy by National Aeronautic Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation-- two institutions that helped fund the center in 2003-- and the Department of Defense.
UTB notified the UT-System of at least three faculty members who were identified as being paid up to 100 percent of their salaries from research funds for multiple years, which was not part of the grant agreement.
“Center for Gravitation Wave Astronomy knowingly overcharged multiple research grants,” states the notification sent by UTB to the UT System Office of General Counsel. The department, referred to by audits as CGWA, was part of a recent national announcement in which gravitational waves had been detected, which is considered a huge scientific advancement in the field of physics.
The investigation revealed CGWA overcharged on six federal research grants from 2009 to 2015 to partially or fully pay the salaries of more than eight faculty members and some students. The investigation also concluded that the head of this department, CGWA Director Mario Diaz, was aware of the overcharges.
Of course, our institution’s president won’t promise that he will do anything about this:
When asked whether Diaz would keep his job, Bailey said he could not comment on personnel matters, but UT officials are still conducting an investigation and will send UTRGV officials the findings. Only then will any appropriate actions be taken.
After the creation of UTRGV, many administrative roles changed and some officials even retired, Bailey said. His main goal was to move forward and fully implement procedures that prevent these things from happening, especially now that the university is seeking more research funding.
“It was not under UTRGV’s watch,” Bailey said. “It’s important to us that we make sure that we have all of the processes in place so that it doesn’t happen again.”
My take is that Bailey seems the sort who subscribes to the “Do nothing and hope the problem goes away” school of university administration, and that he will be more concerned with preserving the institution’s image than whether or not anyone is made to pay for this blatant misuse of money. I expect he will try to wait this out and hope it blows over.
Oh wait, there’s more.
There’s another $3 million that the legacy institution has to pay back.
“We concluded that UTB’s benefits expenses for UTB and (Texas Southmost College) were incorrectly calculated and reported,” the audit states. “As a result, it was determined that the APS 011 reports needed to be recalculated for each institution separately.”
That second half is bad, although it isn’t as relevant to me personally as the first half. Faculty in my college, at my institution screwed up managing federal research money. I’ve gotten money from NSF before, but I think it just got a lot tougher. If I were at one of those agencies, I would be ready to blackball the institution.
And that money was probably going to be used for faculty pay increases. So because someone else misused money, I might be kissing my chance for a raise anytime soon goodbye.
There are fifteen rounds in a heavyweight boxing match.
There are fifteen weeks in a semester.
Today, I feel like that isn’t a coincidence.
Sometimes, a semester can feel like a boxing match. You know when it starts, know when it ends, you get a few breaks in the middle, and you just know that there are going to be a lot of punches thrown at you in between.
You hope that you can dodge out of the way of some of those punches.
But you cannot dodge them all.
You’re going to get tired, you’re going to lose your quickness, as the rounds wear on.
The difference between the two is that in teaching, you can’t win early. You have to go the full fifteen rounds. You can only win by judge’s decision, never by knockout.
You just hope that you have trained well enough make it to the last round. You just don’t want to throw in the towel...
Or be the one who goes down in an early round.
And I think there’s a risk both fighters and academics take. They can start to lose their form after too many of these encounters. It takes its toll.
I can’t recall the last time I felt so drained so early in the semester. We’ve barely been at this a month, and I’m already looking forward to the last round.
And one of the university’s prominent supporters, a Texas senator, says the medical school is, “Not okay.”
“The medical school is not okay. I don’t think people really realize how much money it costs and how complicated it is to create a new medical school,” Hinojosa told the Rio Grande Guardian. “The type of equipment that it needs, the type of infrastructure support that it needs to be successful. We cannot do a top-notch job unless we get support and help from the community.”
Basically, there is wrangling about taxes to support the medical school, and there is a vote on the November ballot about it.
Yeah. The new medical school was supposed to be the jewel in the crown of the new university. It’s not looking so shiny right now.
It’s a word that has both a negative and positive meaning when you say it of a person. And if I had to use one word to describe the pseudonymous blogger Drugmonkey, that’s the one.
Drugmonkey is sharp.
One friend said to me, “Drugmonkey is mean.” He is quick to unleash cutting remarks. He has called a lot of people he disagrees with “wackalooons,” and that’s when he’s feeling polite. He’s impatient and profane. I can probably make his blood boil by mentioning “pit bulls,” “professional editors with English degrees,” and “numbered references” in the same sentence. He’s got opinions, and sometimes it feels like he will never admit he was wrong or change his mind in the slightest. He can be infuriating. It’s not fun being on the receiving end when he thinks you’re wrong.
Drugmonkey is sharp.
He is smart. Nobody has written more about National Institutes of Health funding, or developing careers in biomedicine and – more importantly – nobody has written about it with more insight and intelligence. And he has consistently taken agencies to task on issues like racism and sexism, and asked why they are not doing better on long standing problems in ensuring more diversity. He wants to make sure senior scientists don’t pull the ladder up behind them. He cares about other people, not just himself, and wields his razor sharp and lightning fast writing skills to advocate for them, and for fair treatment.
That makes him one of the good ones.
He’s started a lot of conversations, and made a lot of people think. You can see evidence for it in the comments in his blog. (Justin Kiggins says he reads Drugmonkey’s blog for the comments.)
I have only been in a room with Drugmonkey once, at Madhatter’s in Washington DC, at one of Dr. Becca’s BANTER meet-ups during Society for Neuroscience. We didn’t have a chat to converse at length in person. But it doesn’t matter, because online conversations are real conversations. Thank you, Drugmonkey, for the many conversations we have had. I am not sure I have ever changed your mind, but you have changed mine. I have learned a lot from you, and I grateful for it.
And thanks to whoever came up with the idea of Drugmonkey day!
“We understand that there were two sides to this,” he said. “The
students that [are part] of that certain student group is opposed to LNG
and I hope you understand that there are those who are for it as well.
We can’t get involved in either of those sides. We’re simply focused
on providing the best educational opportunities for our students.”
And that would be Guy Bailey, our university president, arguing with a straight face that signing a memo of understanding with an energy company, NextDecade, is “not taking sides.” What rot. That’s not even an “implict” endorsement, that’s an explicit endorsement.
I also don’t buy the “We’re just focused on education” argument, either. Why do we have a South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Center? It’s not just to educate people about that; it’s an active effort to improve health in the region. This university does all kinds of things that are not related to education.
The president’s office got over 200 calls about the university’s memo of understanding with NextDecade, and almost all were against it.
I hate the crummy arguments. I wish that administrators would keep it a hundred: say there is a real controversy. Talk about the pros and cons of partnering with corporations. But I so wish they would stop kidding themselves.
Here’s a picture of UTRGV president Guy Bailey from a little over a week ago, doing what he’s doing in a lot of pictures: agreeing to take money. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration. There wasn’t a cheque from NextDecade, the other party in this agreement. Instead, the press release says this is a:
(S)trategic partnership to foster STEM-based (science, technology, engineering and math) education programs,facilitate research and job training opportunities for UTRGV students, and promote collaboration between academia and industry(.)
This is not just yesterday’s news, it’s last week’s news. Why am I blogging about this now? Because I missed it. It wasn’t on the university’s home page. It wasn’t in the daily news email we all get. No administrator – not my chair, not my dean, nobody – mentioned it, even though, as a STEM faculty, I should be one of the people potentially affected, nay, benefiting from this partnership, because it’s for STEM education, right? It snuck past my radar, almost as though the university isn’t proud of this partnership. Hm...
The partnership is with NextDecade, a company proposing to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in the region. Here’s how the Sierra Club describes it:
If built, the Rio Grande LNG export terminal would be the largest single source of air pollution in Cameron County, according to its expected emissions. Its construction would require filling in hundreds of acres of wetlands in an area that is critical habitat for the endangered ocelot and Aplomado falcon. There are also concerns that the view of the industrial landscape and associated pollution could threaten the Valley’s beach and nature tourism industries.
UTRGV declined to address the controversial aspect of local LNG projects. In an emailed response to The Brownsville Herald’s request for comment on that aspect, university spokesman Patrick Gonzales wrote only that “UTRGV is excited about the education opportunities this NextDecade LLC partnership provides, especially in the STEM fields, for our students.”
UTRGV is going to deal with community controversy by pretending it doesn’t exist. That is not the way to build trust with your community.
Calling this partnership a boon for “STEM education” is too
generous. This will be a partnership for TE education. I doubt there
will be anything for science or math students or faculty. This might be for engineers.
Bailey has more or less said that he sees money as the solution to all the university’s problems. When he started, he accepted money from the food industry for diabetes and obesity research. That’s a conflict of interest. This NextDecade partnership is also rife with potential conflicts of interest. I wonder what would happen if biology faculty started doing
research on those endangered species whose habitats could be affected by
the LNG export terminal?
A lot of old UTPA signs were swapped out for UTRGV ones last week when the semester started. Maybe they should have looked like this:
In a recent document, one of our adminstrators was talking about student learning outcomes (SLOs), and wrote (my emphasis):
Identifying which SLO a course addresses is not a huge task. It only ensures that students learn what they are required to learn so that we send a product out that we are proud of.
Wait. Did this administrator just call our students, “products”? Pretty sure the answer is yes.
When I first ran across this, I was surprised and disappointed. The more I’ve thought on it, the madder I’ve gotten. Our students are not “products.” They are people.
This is just horribly dehumanizing. I only hope the administrator who
wrote this will feel a little shame for writing that when this is
pointed out.
It’s such a revealing glimpse into the model of education that administrators long to have, which is an industrial model.
As few professors, oops, lecturers, oops, adjuncts, oops, workers, oops, online tutorial programs as needed to churn through as many products with as little variation as possible.
Many others have pointed out this is a trend in North American higher education. But I’ve worked under a lot of administrative teams here. These are attitudes that are specific to this administrative team now, that I have not seen under previous administrations.
There’s practically a new emerging literary genre of academics writing pearl clutching thinkpieces decrying the sad effect of social media on academia and science.
Last week there was an opinion piece in PNAS. It was illustrated with this picture:
Then, there was this piece in Times Higher Education.
In return for feeding our desire for evidence of how we are doing in our social interactions – our narcissistic craving for others' approval – first Facebook and then a group of other social media corporations persuaded half of humankind to give up their most intimate personal details.
Both of these pieces got soundly criticized, as they should, because they make some silly statements. For instance, the Egan piece says:
Students need to be helped to sever some of the ties that bind them to the people they already know and to discover new forms of connectedness in the shared writings of the wider world.
This is...literally exactly why I started using social media more when I started as a grad student.
That’s my experience, too. Social media has given me a window into what other people are thinking in a way that I just haven’t had before.
A very common charge levied against social media is that is is mere “narcissism.” What these anti-social media types seem to forget is that there is another, largely invisible category of social media users: the lurkers. For every person who is active on social media (the “narcissists” posting material), there is an unknown number of people quietly reading, listening, learning.
If you condemn the posting of scientific or academia material on social media, you’re penalizing not just the producers of that material, but you’re saying that all the people who might learn from that don’t matter, and that their learning is somehow invalid and unworthy. Presumably because it’s not in a brick and mortar building.
This “cane shaking at social media” genre needs a catchy name. Like how people writing editorials about why they got out of academia became known as “Quit lit.”
This is an excerpt of a data set from a manuscript I’ve been working on.
The box shows where half the data live, with a line dividing the boxes marking the median. The small black square in the mean, and the little crosses show highest and lowest data points.
When I submitted the manuscript, I didn’t do any statistical analysis of the data. One reviewer asked me to to a statistical analysis. It was a perfectly reasonable request that I should have anticipated. The reviewer didn’t see the same plot that I have above and didn’t know the data as well as I do.
But it got me thinking. John Vokey, one of my undergraduate professors at the University of Lethbridge,used to refer to some differences as “significant by the IOT test.” IOT was an acronym for “Inter Ocular Test.” In other words, the difference was so bloody obvious that it hit you right between the eyes.
“If the mean for one group is up here with only a little variation, and the mean for the other group is down here with this much variation, what do you need a test for? Why not just say they’re different?”
I didn’t do an analysis because I thought there was no point. In the data above, there is no overlap between the two sets at all. Do you need a statistical test to tell you that those two data sets are different?
It is easy enough to do a simple t-test on the data above.
But does adding the test and p value tell you anything more, or different, than the plot alone? Or is including the p value a statistical “fig leaf”?
Do your thoughts about analysis change when I plot the raw data next to the box plot?
Now you can see more clearly that the sample size is small. But even then, when there is no overlap in the data sets, is there any test or condition that will say those two are not statistically different?
Philanthropy: Up 530%
Research expenditures: Up 56%
Student applications: Up 21%
Based on this, the UT System values money above all.
This is consistent with comments UTRGV president Guy Bailey made to faculty last year. He said he was often asked about what problems the new university was facing. He said, roughly (not a direct quote) that he told people, “I don’t have any problems that money can’t solve.” And indeed, the rest of his presentation talked about how UTRGV could get more money from the state by optimizing patterns of student enrollment. The main times I have seen our president in the news have been when he’s accepting money from donors.
The longer press release is a bit better. The first bullet in the list is student retention rate. That is indeed something to be proud of, considering that retention was something the legacy institutions struggled with. But the next two items on the list are about money.
I find it interesting that I can know I’ve crossed half a million views on a Q&A site, but still have no idea what having a journal’s “Top 10 paper” for a month means in terms of page views, downloads, and so on.
I’m far from the first to note how music locks us into times. You can’t control what songs are playing and popular in any year, and they become indelibly associated with that time in your life.
For me, I can’t think of The Tragically Hip without thinking of grad school. 100.3 The Q, the local Victoria rock radio station, declared The Hip to be their “house band,” so they were kind of ubiquitous on the airwaves when I was doing my doctorate.
When I moved out of the country, I didn’t hear their music any more. I’d heard about Gord Downie’s diagnosis of terminal cancer. But I happened to be in Canada this last weekend, and caught a bit of the Hip’s final show on CBC. I saw people’s reaction on Twitter. Even with my tiny little familiarity with the band and the music, I was awestruck by how they touched people last Saturday night.
I was never actually a big fan of the Tragically Hip’s music. But I always liked this one a lot.
In the middle of a good article, I find this aside:
(Last
semester, we even got a Faculty-wide email encouraging us to write up
our Master’s students’ project work for publication. Because what
science needs right now is more unfinished crap.)
Objection!
It’s terrible to characterize master’s theses as “unfinished crap.” It shows how little regard you hold for master’s students and their work. What have master’s students done to warrant their research being treated with such contempt?
I wish I could say this was surprising, but I have seen over and over again this disinterest in master’s students, their work, and their degrees. Research universities view master’s degrees as the exit route for bad doctoral students. Funding agencies don’t want to support them, because they buy into the “failed doctoral student” narrative, and because master’s are not terminal degrees.
This is another one of those biases that works against the stated aim of many institutions to increase diversity in science. As Terry McGlynn has often noted, under-represented students come from under-represented institutions. Many of the under-represented students we say we want to recruit may not have immediate access to an institution with a doctoral program. They may want to gain research experience in a master’s that may not have be available to them as undergrads (but that undergrad students at the more swanky universities may have already had).
In my role as grad program coordinator, I have been the person sending
those emails asking, “Why we are graduating so many master’s students
with thesis, but we are not seeing papers being published based on that
thesis research?” I send them because we have always had in our program’s guidelines that a master’s thesis should represent a publishable peer-reviewed journal. My rough and ready guide is that a master’s thesis represents one paper, and a doctoral dissertation represents about three papers.
If you think your students’ work is “unfinished crap,” let me suggest to you that it is not always the students’ fault. Maybe it’s the fault of professors who didn’t mentor the student, didn’t support the work, and can’t be bothered to do their job right.
In every case, Voigt is pursuing the arowana. She first hears the name from a law enforcement who is talking to her about the exotic pet trade in New York. She learns that the arowana is a large fish prized by a certain kind of aquarium owner: usually Asian, male, and rich. The latter is the most necessary feature for many arowana owners, because single individual arowanas are fetching hundreds of thousands of American dollars.
That’s not a typo. It’s no surprise that you find arowana gracing the landing page of Aquarama, a trade show for the aquarium industry that Voigt visits early in the book.
Even by the time Voigt visits Aquarama, it’s clear that the arowana is the center of an unusual market, often shrouded in secrecy, and both threats and acts of violence. Again and again throughout the book, arowana are stolen, smuggled, and fought over, both in the professional and literal sense of the word.
The strangeness of it all is compelling for the reader and Voigt, who ends up pursuing this fish through multiple countries and jungles. She’s accompanied by a memorable set of other people, who I found myself constantly googling to see by the time I reached the second half of the book.
The Dragon Behind the Glass is not an academic work, but it almost could have been. Voigt’s research on the pet trade and the science is flawless. There is lots of solid biology and scientific history. For instance, we learn one species of arowana was collected and drawn by no less than the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, on an expedition to the Amazon that was ultimately doomed. (Sean Carroll’s Into the Jungle describes why in more detail than here. It’s about the only example in the book where I felt Voigt missed a good story.)
I came to this book because of my own research on the aquarium industry. But I was an armchair investigator. I was frustrated by my inability to get a handle on much of the supply chain for aquarium animals (crayfish in my case). Voigt provides that inside view of the production and wholesale end of the aquarium trade, and has many thoughtful asides about the pet trade. She considers the pros and cons of collecting from wild populations, CITES listings, and the paradox of the arowana being “a mass produced endangered species” (a term that applies perfectly to some crayfish in the pet trade, too).
It’s trivia night at the pub! Because I am a non-imbiber, the most fun alcohol ever gets for me is enjoying the names and the bottle designs. I was tickled by this name when I saw it on the menu: “Evil crawfish.”
This was the art before all the brewer’s insignia got added.
Another version of the tells the story behind the name. The same company makes “Eagle Claw Fist.”
Once upon a time a man walked into a bar where a friend of our’s was tending the taps. He tried to order an Eagle Claw Fist, but got it wrong and asked for an Evil Crawfish. When we heard the story, after much laughter, we knew one day we’d make the beer. Finally, here it is, built off of ECF, but cleaner, meaner, less bitter, and dry hopped with Citra, El Dorado, and Mosaic.
I sometimes get emails from undergraduate student here asking if there are research opportunities with me. Partly because I have some bottlenecks in my lab (microscopes are a limiting factor), I can’t have a lot of students in my lab.
I’ve started offering them research opportunities to do data extraction or analysis, rather than data collection. I ask them to extracting data from websites or journal articles, and get them into an analyzable form. For example, getting latitude and longitude coordinates for species locations in the literature. Or compiling weather data.
I never heard from those students again.
I can only speculate as to why they never follow up. But, at a guess, I think they don’t consider working with spreadsheets “real” research. For them, “real” research means having a lab coat on and a pipette in hand, or getting a sunburn out in the field with a notebook in hand.
Students are shortchanging themselves.
First, I suspect that by the time you’re asking someone to compile and analyze
data from some other source, it may be more likely to result in the
student getting their name on a publication than bench or field work.
Second, extracting existing data and putting into a form that can be analyzed
is far, far more likely to be a skill that these students will use
throughout their professional career. Lots of professional level jobs
require working with spreadsheets; very few require running gels.
August is rarely a happy month for academics. Summer is more than halfway gone, we haven’t done as much research or as much writing as we wanted, and classes are going to start gearing up again very soon.
At my university, and public universities across Texas, today marks the start of an even less happy month. Today, 1 August 2016, is the day Texas’s campus carry law goes into effect.
The sign above, on the door leading to the research labs, including mine, went up Friday. The law permits university administrators to set “reasonable rules” for “campus safety.” (Yes, the wording is vague, which caused no end of difficulties in drafting policy, I’m sure.) Consequently, there is a long list of exclusionary zones on UTRGV campus, including labs.
University administators, and many others, lobbied harder against this law than any other I have seen in my time here, but to no avail. It’s telling that private universities were given the option to opt out of the law, and 36 out of 37 did.
