When academic success is news

Pretty regularly, American news media runs a story with some version of this headline:

Accepted into every Ivy League school

That’s obviously a big achievement for a high school student. But I have noticed this:

The students making the headlines are almost always minorities.

News coverage focuses on the unexpected. That news coverage so consistently focuses on minority students means that their success was not expected. Success is not normalized for them. Their success is some sort of bizarre, noteworthy exception.

Even while I appreciate the importance of visibility of success for minorities, the underlying message being sent – “We didn’t expect this kind of success from you” – is kind of crappy.

Pay your interns

Matt Shipman pointed to a crowdfunding campaign for a student who wants to do an internship at NASA.

That’s horrible.

Internships should be work that give entry level experience. But the key word is “work.” If you don’t pay interns, you’re just exploiting them. And that’s wrong.

Spotting this on top of a university getting ready to destroy millions of museum specimens, and a new professor being criticized publicly for caring too much about teaching and outreach, make me feel like this about science culture, particularly academic science:

The University of Loisiana at Monroe is run by vandals

This is shocking.

From the University of Louisiana at Monroe Museum of Natural History’s Facebook page:

Dear Friends,

It is my sad duty to report to you that the ULM administration has decided to divest the research collections in the Museum of Natural History. This includes the 6 million fish specimens in the Neil Douglas fish collection and the nearly 500,000 plant specimens in the R. Dale Thomas plant collection. They find no value in the collections and no value of the collections to the university. The College was given 48 hours to suggest an alternate location for the collections so that Brown Stadium can be renovated for the track team. With only about 20 hours left, we have found no magic solution yet. To add insult to injury on what was a very hard day, we were told that if the collections are not relocated to other institutions, the collections will be destroyed at the end of July.

While we weep that our own institution would turn its back on 50+ years of hard work and dedication, we will not abandon the collections to the dumpsters. They did not have the courage to inform us face-to-face, but we have the courage to persevere through these dark times.

Oh, in other sad news, we were informed that there will not be any expansion of the public displays in Hanna Hall.

I understand that sometimes universities need to change what they do. And I’ll say that it’s not reasonable that universities support athletics and student athletes. But come on. Giving 48 hours notice over the fate of millions of specimens is ludicrous.

This is the exact opposite of what universities are supposed to do. Universities are supposed to be institutions that preserve knowledge for future generations, not chuck it in dumpsters.

Shame on you, ULM. Shame on you. You’re acting like vandals, not scholars.

I think the only hope for this collection is that enough people draw attention to its plight on social media that the university administration will change its course.

Hat tip to Terry McGlynn.

Update, 29 March 2017: The original Facebook post is gone. Now there’s this one:

Press Release: ULM to donate two collections from Museum of Natural History

By mid-July the fish and plant collections of the University of Louisiana Monroe Museum of Natural History will hopefully have a new home, according to Dr. Eric Pani, Vice President for Academic Affairs.

Several factors led to the decision to donate the collections, which have been stored in Brown Stadium since the museum was moved to Hanna Hall last year. Many of the specimens are preserved in flammable liquid and must be kept in a facility with a fire sprinkler system.

“Unfortunately, the fiscal situation facing the university over the years requires us to make choices like this. We can no longer afford to store the collections and provide all of the public services we have in the past,” Pani said.

Last week Pani told leaders of the College of Arts, Education and Sciences, which manages the museum, of the decision. He met with them again this week. He said the collections, except for some of the teaching specimens, will be donated and relocated by mid-July. The CAES people asked for 48 hours to determine if space on campus could be found and the entire collection retained.

Tuesday posts on social media could have been interpreted that the collection would be destroyed in a few hours.

Pani addressed other statements on social media, including that there would be no expansion of the museum. He clarified that expansion will be postponed for about two years while another project is underway.

The collections in Hanna Hall are open for public viewing; the specimens in Brown Stadium are for research.

Pani said renovations and improvements to the track at Brown Stadium are slated to begin in the summer. The work will raise the track to sanctioned status, allowing meets to be held there and other schools to host track and field competitions. Thus, it will provide an economic development boost for the region.

“It would be an honor for the university to donate the collection to an organization with the space to preserve and display it, and we fully expect to find such a facility as soon as possible,” Pani said.

I’m still kind of gobsmacked that a provost would argue that a stadium should take precedence over a museum because money. A museum represents a university’s primary mission. Sports does not.

This press release is nowhere to be found on the university’s news center.

More additional: Gizmodo features the story and has more comments from the VP for academic affairs, Eric Pani.

Because state appropriations have been cut more than 50% since 2008, we have struggled to provide public services. The collections have not been used for research by our students and faculty much in the last few years but are being used in class. Research use has largely been done by others from loans we have made to them.

Given that, I asked that Biology pare the collection down to something that would fit into a space typical of a classroom and would meet their teaching needs. The rest of the collection needed to be moved.

I asked that they begin to seek other institutions willing to accept our donation and transport it to their new home. As I further explained to them, this work needed to be done by mid-July because of the construction timeline involved in the renovation of the space. The 48-hr period mentioned in the Facebook post was based on their request to locate other space on our campus where the whole collection could be moved. Given what I know about campus space, I doubt they will find anything, so it would be better for them to spend the time looking for someone to accept the donation. However, I am willing to listen if they can find oncamous space. I just don’t want the search dragging on.

Christopher Dick shares an email from Pani. It’s basically the same as the Gizmodo statement.

As the Gizmodo article notes:

You can’t spell Pani without pain.

Still more additional: Andy Farke lays out the problems of trying to find a home for abandoned museum collections.

Without $$$, it's asking the impossible. It costs a lot to transfer even a well curated collection from one place to the next, even under the best of circumstances. ... Space, cabinets, databasing, archival materials, staff time, etc. It adds up fast! This is also the reason why museums are often very picky about what we take as donations or accessions.

External links

ULM Museum of Natural History Facebook post

Why people with university degrees still can’t name a scientist

I was thinking about the “Most people can’t name a living scientist” factoid again. Something that often puzzled me was that the fraction of people who can name a living scientist is often reported as being so much lower than the fraction of people with a university degree.

Why, if so many people have university experience, do they not know scientists at those universities? Even non-science majors usually have to take some introductory science classes to meet breadth requirements.

I had an hypothesis about that, so I ran this poll:

The results were consistent with my hypothesis. Maybe one of the reasons people wouldn’t name a professor as a “living scientist” was because they mainly associate the occupation of “professor” with the role of teaching more than research.

But I realize now that I was probably operating under a false premise. My question was premised on the idea that science classes were taught by people with doctorates. That is, tenured and tenure-track faculty.

I saw some data a few years back showing that my university bucked a lot of national trends for a long time. The proportion of tenured and tenure-track instructors had increased in the 2000s. But this is not the case for most institutions. This article forcibly makes the point that most higher education instructors across the United States do not have a doctorate and were not tenured or tenure-track.

Consequently, even people who go through a full university degree may not have very much contact with instructors who have ever had an active research program. That might be another contributing factor to why so few people can name a living scientist.

External links

The decline of faculty tenure

Traditional lands

Katherine Crocker suggested that scientists should acknowledge when their work was carried was carried out on First Nations / native American territories. Karen James found an excellent (though still in progress) mapping tool that shows what locations in the United States and Canada were the territory of what tribes, nations, and bands.

It’s too late to put any acknowledgement in my existing papers, but hey, this one of the things academic blogs are for.

The collection of sand crabs in my doctoral work was carried out in the traditional land of the Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe.
 
One of my next papers, to be published in Journal of Coastal Research, had two locations.

 
My #SciFund funded field work took place in traditional Seminole land.

The last was the most interesting, and most affecting:

My local field site, which has been where I have collected animals for many of my papers, sits in a region of native Americans that have been collectively referred to as Coahuiltecan. They were not considered so much a unified tribe as bands.

Unlike the tribes listed above, which are still active, the Coahuiltecans were wiped out by European contact. It made me realize why I had never heard about local native groups, unlike other places I’ve lived. I knew about the Blackfoot in Southern Alberta, I heard much discussion about aboriginals in Australia, I saw Seminole buildings when I was collecting in Florida.

Thank you, Katherine Crocker. I learned something.

Update, 20 March 2017: My colleague Frank Dirrigl informs me that much of the lower Rio Grande Valley was Lipan Apache land.

Update, 14 August 2017: I stumbled across the webpage of the Carrizo/Comecrudo, who live in the South Texas area. Even the tribe’s own webpage describes them as “this little written about nation.” This article describes more, referring to the tribe as “Esto’k Gna.” It also explains my earlier fumbling efforts to discover what tribe was in this region:

Our Identity and Life Ways have been misinterpreted by many European-Americans including Spanish-Mexicans who have written about us. Through complete lack of knowledge or arrogance, they misidentified our Clans, Societies and Bands as being separate small “Tribes.” Many times, for devious reasons, we were intentionally mislabeled as other tribes such as the Lipan or the Comanche. A scholar went as far as making up a name of Coahuiltecan that grouped us with other Tribes from a whole region. The result was further confusion of our Identity. A priest even created the “Coahuiltecan” language by mixing vocabularies and grammar of languages from three different tribes.

External links

Native land
The Biggest Tribe You Never Learned About In Your Texas History Books

The value of editors

There is a line of thought among some scientists – and it is not a short line among a small fraction of scientists – that pre-publication peer review is useless, reviewers are useless, and editors are useless. Thus, journals are useless.

Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde was brave enough to post one of his old rejection letters this on Twitter (text follows images). Albrecht prefaced this saying, “Lessons learned as a young and arrogant graduate student.”

Canadian Journal of Zoology
17 April 1997
File Number: Y1150

Mr. A.I. Schulte-Hostedde

Department of Zoology
Umversity of Guelph
Guelph. Ontario NlG 2W1

Dear Mr. Schulte-Hostedde:

Subject: Patterns of Association in a Temperate Rodent Community

We have sent your paper out for re-review. Neither reviewer has been convinced by your rebuttal and as a consequence we have decided to reject your paper. We are returning the paper to you.

Neither reviewer has provided comments for transmission to the authors. Let me, however, add some comments of my own, since I detect that you may not understand the nature of the review process. We try to select reviewers who are knowledgeable and objective and who understand the role of the Canadian Journal of Zoology as a generalist journal. They are volunteers who support the discipline by committing some of their time to helping authors get their work into an acceptable form. In your case both reviewers had a number of substantive suggestions for improvement. We indicated that the paper was unlikely to be accepted without major revisions.

Your revisions were anything but major. So far as I can determine, they consisted of changing the title and adding a short section on predation. Under such circumstances we sometimes return the manuscript directly to the authors, asking them to try again. But in this case, there was an extensive rebuttal, and we thought that the reviewers should see that. The reviewers have, as I say, not been convinced, and they are both deeply disappointed by the nature and tone of your response. To quote one of them “if the authors do not respect the reviews I do not know why they would want to publish their research in the Canadian Journal of Zoology nor do I understand why the editors would accept it.”

You are just beginning your career. Let me take off my editorial hat and, as a person who has been publishing in the field for more than 40 years, offer some advice. Of the approximately 200 papers which I have published, only two were accepted without change. Of the remainder, I have invariably benefited from the advice of the reviewers. I think that you would be wise to regard the reviewers not so much as gate-keepers, but as persons who volunteer helpful advice.

Yours sincerely,

K.G. Davey/A.S.M. Saleuddin
Editors

You know what? This was written by people who care both about the scientific enterprise, and the professional development of the author. This is mentoring. This is humane. You are far less likely to get this sort of interaction from posting draft manuscripts on pre-print servers and hoping people click “Like” bottons afterwards.

I know that this is an unusual, dare I say, exceptional bit of editorial advice. But if more editors worked like this, fewer people who would question the value of journals.

How to talk to professors in their offices

I see an amazing number of questions on social media and Quora and the like from students of all sorts where my answer is, “You have to talk to faculty.”

“How do I approach a professor about my class?”

“Should I include this information on my application?”

“Should I get authorship on this journal article?”

“How can I get more time with my professor?”

Dear students, program applicants, and the like: There’s no way to talk to faculty that guarantees you get what you want. There is no risk free, fool proof conversation outline. Professors are people, and at some point, you have to learn how to talk to people. You’re an adult. The professor is an adult. Have adult conversations.

You may be shy; I get that. I was, too. But trust me, your life will get so much better and less complicated when you ask questions to the person you want an answer from, not random people on social media. Embarrassment is momentary, knowledge you gain lasts.

And a good way to ensure you don’t get what you want is not to ask, or to ask the wrong person.

Talk to professors, not about them.

Tuesday Crustie: Space crabs

Man, I love vintage science fiction covers. The cover may be the best thing about the book, since the author’s work is described thus:

(T)wo sf novels remarkable for their clumsiness and their apparent ignorance of the basic laws of Physics.

Hat tip to Pulp Librarian and Miriam Goldstein.

“Explain it like you would to...”

People like to tell scientists what sort of explanation counts as “clear.”

So you get clichéd advice like, “You don’t really understand something unless you can explain it to a six year old child.” (Maybe this is why doing a Google Image search for “explainer” gives me the results above: the top results are all simplistic, almost child-like, cartoon images.)

Well, I’m sorry, but there are some things that a young kid is just not ready to understand. Differential equations? Quantum mechanics? Tesseracts? There are tons of perfectly fine scientific concepts that are no less legitimate because kids won’t get them.

Meanwhile, at the AAAS meeting in Boston, Mike Taylor tweeted another “explainer” cliché:

Claudia Dreifus: “If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, don’t bring it to a reporter.”

The “Explain it to your grandmother” cliché makes me even grumpier than “Explain it to a child.” Why is “grandmother” become a synonym for “uninformed person”? And it’s always, and I mean always, a “grandmother.” Never a “grandfather” or a “grandparent.” So there’s an assumption that women are the uninformed ones that need to have things explained.

Then there’s the age issue. Plenty of older people are perfectly clever. Indeed, some of them are called, “professors.” Other examples:

All three of my children’s grandmothers have college degrees, including graduate degrees and a law degree. - Keith Bertelsen

My kids’ grandmother was one of first women to enter IT in the 1980s, and she does not appreciate condescension. - Miriam Goldstein

My grandmother is one of the sharpest and most well-informed people I know, so def seems like an odd use of “grandmother” to me - Rachel Fritts

Friend of the blog Al Dove raised one good point in defense of the “grandmother” advice:

I’m 99.9% certain grandma was picked to mean “be RESPECTFUL,” not because she’s old and dumb.

Being respectful is a good goal in communication, but given the baggage that “Explain it to your grandmother” has, I think it’s best to look for a new metaphor. The desiderata might be someone who is:

• An adult with some education, although not an expert.
• Someone you should treat with respect.
• Someone whose time is limited and valuable.

My suggestion for an imaginary target audience is:

“Explain is like you would to a world leader.”

A prime minister, president, and the like are all people that any scientist should aspire to be able to coherently and concisely explain what they do and why. Justin Kiggins arrived at similar advice to me independently. But while he was being facetious, I am being sincere.

But even that will have it’s limitations. Politicians are people who often think very short-term (new cycles and next elections), which can be tough for a scientist. This reinforces a lesson I have seen many writers: “There is no ‘general public.’”

Update, 23 May 2017:  Ed Yong suggests, “Explain it like you would to an airport security agent.”

Airport security lines, it turns out, are a fantastic venue for scientists to try their hand at outreach. Various scientists are said to have claimed that you don’t really understand something if you can’t explain it to your grandmother, a barmaid, a six-year-old, and other such sexist or ageist variants. But how about this: can you successfully explain it to an TSA official—someone who not only might have no background in science, but also strongly suspects that you might be a national security threat? Can you justify your research in the face of questions like “What are you doing?” or “Why are you doing it?” or “Why are you taking that onto a plane?”

Hat tip to Megan Duffy.

More March for Science thoughts

A while back, I noted that the planned March for Science had gotten a lot of flak, much of which seemed... unhelpful.

I want to be clear, though: this is not to say that March for Science should be immune from criticism.

I reckon it’s fair to say they are not making everyone feel welcome to the march. They’ve also made other communication missteps, like tweeting outdated news articles and misleading science facts. That said, I have not been following everything the March organizers have been doing or saying super closely (though I’ve collected a lot of links in this post).

I think the March for Science is important. It has excited a lot of people, but soured some. I hope that the organizers do better. Sometimes, even reviewer two has a fair point.

Update and correction, 16 February 2017: The claim that Science March had tweeted out an out of date news article was incorrect (strikethrough above). It may have come from supporter of the March, but not March organizers themselves.

Related posts

March for Science and Reviewer Two
An outsider’s perspective on protest

External links

March for Science

Bilingual university plans; more program woes

The Texas observer has a profile on UTRGV focusing on plans to make the university a bilingual institution.

When this has been brought up on campus within faculty, I had heard that there was a law somewhere that said the language of instruction for public universities had to be English. I could not find it, so maybe this was just a rumour. It used to be that the state’s K-12 schools were English only... but that was over 40 years ago.

While I’m here, on top of our institution’s issues with accreditation, the nursing program is under warning.

External links

Inside the Nation’s First Bilingual University
Bilingual education
UTRGV nursing program under warning

My heart beats true

It’s only the second round, and I am absolutely hooked on the AFL’s women’s competition.

Why am I hooked? Check out the 8 February edition of the Outer Sanctum podcast. Listen to how people flooded out to the first round of games because they recognized it was something historic. Listen to people admitting they were moved to tears, particularly a lot of women who never had a chance to play in a top competitions. Listen to the presenters talk about the diversity in the league, and how different the players’ stories are from the men’s competition: the men footballers had a pretty straight line into professional sports. The women have day jobs of all sorts (one Demons player is a dairy farmer), and many excel at several sports.

And what other sporting league – particularly football of any code – would have an openly gay couple playing for two different teams and competing against each other? The bigger, longer running men’s competition has never had a single out gay player, never mind a couple.

I am so enthralled that I decided to become club member, even though I will never get to a game in person this year. I barracked for the Demons since I lived in Melbourne years ago, and I’m continuing that in the AFLW. Go the Dees!

Related posts

The best ad during a football game was in AFL Women’s, not the SuperBowl

External links

Outer Sanctum podcast
First openly gay AFL player couple: "We're proud, and proud of each other"
Melbourne Demons

Staying active in the lab and/or field when you’re the boss

For many scientists, there comes a point in their careers where they are not collecting their own data. They supervise students, and the students collect the data, leaving the senior scientist (or, to use grant-speak I hate, the principle investigator or “PI”) to write grant proposals and help draft papers.

I’m a beleiver that senior scientists should have at least one project of their own. One project where they collecting their own data and write it up themselves as first author. I know that this is overly optimistic, and not a lot of people can do this. But even if you don’t have your own project, it’s still valuable to be in the field or in the lab doing something.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in the lab collecting data. I’m quite excited by the small amount of data I have so fa.

But the project I’m collecting data for started as an incidental observation last summer. I was helping one of my students on a project, and noticed something interesting. Just happenstance while we were looking at something mostly unrelated.

That incidental observation last summer is probably going yield at least one paper.

No matter how good and dedicated students are, the likelihood that any of them would have noticed what I noticed, and recognized it as interesting, is low.

There are benefits to having experienced observers, and that’s almost always the PI. You transition from lab bench to office desk at your own peril of missing some cool stuff.

The name game and fame

 
There have been several “Scientists need to do more outreach!” editorial lately. Some have reminded people that most Americans can’t name a living scientist.

The “Do more outreach” editorials got some justified pushback from science Twitter. People listed the many, many things that scientists have been doing for outreach, not least of which was the #ActualLivingScientist hashtag on Twitter. Teachers in K-12 schools started printing out their favourites and stuck them to boards for students to see (above).

But while I love this stuff to death, I don’t think that it will make a big dent in the ability of people in polls to name a living scientist.

If you were asked in a poll to name a living lawyer, would you name a local attorney whose billboard you pass every day on your commute?

If you were asked to name a living football player, would you name your kid’s friend who plays on the high school team?

Probably not, because when you are thinking about answering a poll, you tend to think have to think fast. The names that pop to people’s heads are probably people who have some national fame. So no matter how much grassroots stuff scientists do, in a poll, people are still going to answer with names like Bill Nye or Neil Tyson or Bill Gates or Albert Einstein.

Related posts

Do you know this man?
Who gets to be a scientist?
I want to be Carl Sagan, but can’t

External links

A lot of Americans don’t know a single scientist. We need to fix that
Meet some #actuallivingscientists on Twitter
Picture from here.

The current and future fights between universities and the White House

I make a cameo appearance in this Times Higher Education piece that focuses on the US administration threats to stop sending federal money to the University of California, Berkeley if they don’t allow a bigot to speak there. The article wonders if the UC Berkeley story will just be the first in a long series of battles between the current administration and academia.

External links

Trump's Berkeley threat spotlights future battles

Tuesday Crustie: Sticker shock

Last week, I polled people on Twitter, asking what people thought was the highest price paid for any invertebrate.

I was surprised that most people guessed over $10,000.^* If you had asked me, I could not think of any invertebrate that could command that sort of price tag.

I polled because I had read about this crayfish, named “Chao Khun Chang.” It’s an unusual colour morph, but otherwise, it is the ubiquitous Louisiana red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii.

As far as I know, it was sold for the highest price ever paid for a crayfish, and possibly for an invertebrate:

It sold for 1 million baht in Thailand, which is in the neighbourhood of US$28,500.

By way of comparison, I’ve been examining the price of crayfish in the North American pet trade for several years now (Faulkes 2013, 2015). The average sale price is $5 to $25 (depending on species). The highest asking price I’ve ever seen for a crayfish was $80, and the highest price paid (including shipping) was $65 (Faulkes 2015).

This crayfish is the invert arowana. It’s amazing.

^* Winner of the best response was David Dobbs, who wrote:

Way over $10,000. Paul Ryan doesn’t come cheap.

References

Faulkes Z. 2013. How much is that crayfish in the window? Online monitoring of Marmorkrebs, Procambarus fallax f. virginalis (Hagen, 1870) in the North American pet trade. Freshwater Crayfish 19(1): 39-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.5869/fc.2013.v19.039

Faulkes, Z., 2015. Marmorkrebs (Procambarus fallax f. virginalis) are the most popular crayfish in the North American pet trade. Knowledge and Management of Aquatic Ecosystems 416: 20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/kmae/2015016

External links

Crayfish with rare colours sets B1m record
Distinctive species of ghost crayfish fetches one million baht price
Man sells cow-patterned crayfish for 1 million baht

The best ad during a football game was in AFL Women’s, not the SuperBowl

Nope, the best advertisement I saw this weekend was during Round 1 of the inaugural AFL Women’s competition. Powerful and emotional.


(There are a lot of shorter versions that snip out a section of this longer ad. The first one I saw was this one.)

I amazed by how directly it attacked tropes about the importance of looking a certain way, the double standard faced by women athletes, and about having the ambition to do what you want. Whether or not it was intended, it may be the most overtly feminist ad I’ve seen in a long time.

I have been watching the formation the of the women’s competition with interest, and I think this ad crystallized why I think this league is so important. When I lived in Melbourne, I was just so astonished by how much passion for footy was part of the city. It was unavoidable and infectious. That bloke’s game was an integral part of the culture.

This is a big cultural change.

Imagine being a young girl seeing an ad like this. Suddenly, a dream that you might have had that was impossible – playing professional AFL football – is suddenly possible. And if that is suddenly possible, what other things can you accomplish?

If a male wants to be a ballerina, he can be a ballerina. If a kid says they want to be an astronaut... then you be an astronaut. - Moana Hope

Even though my team, the Demons, lost in round 1, this first round has left me anxious to see more. I’m telling you, there are going to be doctoral dissertations about the creation of the AFL Women’s league in years to come.

P.S.—There is a website that streams AFL games to locations outside of Australia, WatchAFL.com. There is a free trial period that allows you to try the service until 22 March. This gets you through the regular season for free; the Grand Finale is 25 March 2017.

External links

AFL Women’s
Watch AFL

An outsider’s perspective on protest

Here is the latest criticism of the March for Science.

William Happer, a physicist from Princeton University who met with Mr. Trump before his inauguration and who has been cited as a potential science adviser to the administration (said) that scientists could risk losing some of their public support with a large-scale protest.

“It’s quite possible that this kind of public exercise could actually be bad for science — it’s like the toddler banging his spoon in the highchair,” he said. “It may not turn out to garner a lot of sympathy.”

Comparing a peaceful protest for science, by a group that is highly educated and slow to enter the political fray, to a baby’s temper tantrum is insulting. As a potential advisor to the administration, Happer has a vested interest in trying to dissuade scientists from protesting.

Between now and 22 April 2017, when the March for Science occurs, many more people will try to tell scientists all the ways that a peaceful protest could (as in maybe, as in might, as in hypothetically if some bizarre circumstances were to occur) make the situation for science worse than it is now. 

I am no social scientist, nor historian. But it seems to me that this pattern has occurred in the past:

There is unfairness in the world. People, justifiably upset, organize against it. Some people plan public protests about that cause. Others warn that the public protests will hurt the cause, and instead advise people to “work within the system” for change. For instance, Randy Olson asked if a public protest for science was more or less effective than a petition.

But the naysayers never seem to be able to point to cases where movements were clearly halted because of protests (possible exception: violent protests), or cases where not having protests yielded demonstrable progress.

Petitions rarely make national news or become events that people remember years later. On the other hand, protests often become important cultural touchstones for the communities involved and go down in history.

Related posts

March for Science and Reviewer Two

External links

March for Science
‘Listen to Evidence’: March for Science Plans Washington Rally on Earth Day
Will a March Help Science?
Scientists plan to march on Washington — but where will it get them?
In Age of Trump, Scientists Show Signs of a Political Pulse
Why I’m marching for science
The War on Science Is a Trap
I’m going to #sciencemarch in Washington. Here’s why
A lot of Americans don’t know a single scientist. We need to fix that
The March For Science In Washington Is Political Whether You Like It Or Not
Out of the lab, into the streets: Scientists, feeling threatened, plan an Earth Day march
The ‘March for Science’ is gaining mainstream momentum
Science entering a new frontier: Politics

New neuroscience – excuse me, neurosciences – institute for UTRGV

This morning, the university announced it received at $15 million gift to start an “Institute for Neurosciences.”

You might think as the only person on this campus remotely doing any kind of research related to neuroscience for years (the better part of a decade, I reckon), I might have gotten some sort of heads up about this. I did not. This was a surprise to me.

It reminds me of when UTRGV created a “School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences.” Probably half my research involves marine organisms, but nobody thought to ask if I wanted to be involved. There is a lot of “left hand knows not what the right hand is doing.”

And by the way, there are not multiple “neurosciences.” It’s a single discipline.

External links

UTRGV School of Medicine receives $15M gift to start neuroscience institute

March for Science and Reviewer Two

It’s always Reviewer Two who screws you over.

Every academic knows Reviewer Two. This is the person sends back your paper with comments that are not helping.

It’s not the experiment they would have done.

They think you should do more experiments.

They want you to cite these unrelated papers.

They just don’t believe the results, even though they can’t or won’t point to a single flaw in the methodology or error in the analysis.

Reviewing journal articles was not a big enough venue, so a lot of people want to be Reviewer Two on a planned March for Science.

The March for Science is an event planned for 22 April 2017. It emerged a couple of days after the current US administration began, with the gag orders of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and US Department of Agriculture (USDA), with the EPA also having all grant activity frozen.

Second reviewers appeared almost instantly. So far, I’ve seen these as the most common complaints about the March for Science.

• “Why doing you care about science rather than this other thing that I care about more?”
• “Why are you mentioning anything besides the science?”
• “Scientists should not get involved in politics.”

Probably the most widely circulated critique was an editorial in the New York Times by Robert Young. It proves yet again that if you look hard enough, you can find someone with a Ph.D. who will support any position you care to name.

The frustrating thing is, Young is someone who does policy work and does outreach. He writes:

I learned was that most of those attacking our sea-level-rise projections had never met me, nor my co-authors. Not only that, most of the public had never met anyone they considered a scientist. They didn’t understand the careful, painstaking process we followed to reach our peer-reviewed conclusions.

Young points out that scientists are invisible, and argues that scientists need to be visible, but does not want scientists to be visible in a march. A march would make scientists more visible than they have been in a long time. There will be media coverage, nationally, guaranteed.

Young wants people to play the long game and get involved in local politics. This is important, but there is no reason not to do both. Arguing for “long term outreach and education” is normally a sensible position. But this is not normal. There has never been an American administration with spokespeople proposing “alternative facts” over simple and verifiable information. There has never been an administration threatening to abolish federal science agencies. There has never been an administration complaining about social media accounts for tweeting facts.

What’s even weirder about Young’s argument is that he doesn’t even have an anecdote suggesting that this “long game” approach will work.

The coastal commission ignored it. The authors, myself included, were widely slandered. And the Legislature passed a law that barred state and local agencies from developing regulations or planning documents anticipating a rise in sea level.

There isn’t a happy ending here with politicians changing their mind. On the other hand, we have the “Science is Vital” campaign in the UK and the “Death of evidence” demonstration in Canada. How did they do? Science is Vital got something done:

Back in 2010 our efforts, along with that of many others, resulted in a ring-fence for the publicly funded science budget – a freeze rather than a cut.  

The Death of Evidence campaign’s outcomes are maybe a little harder to point to a specific outcome, but it led to formation of Evidence for Democracy. (Interview here.) But in neither case did public demonstrations lead to anything bad happening.

When a wrecking ball is swinging towards you, you don’t try to gently nudge it out of the way. This is shaping up as a fight for survival for science in the United States. I do not say this lightly.

In The Ridonculous Race (an animated spoof of The Amazing Race), two competitors are “geniuses,” Ellody and Mary. One challenge is to build a sandcastle. The geniuses write a complicated plan in the sand that chews up time and then gets washed away by a wave before they even start their castle. And they are cut from the competition because of it.

Scientists are so used to being careful, slow, and critical. This is our strength. It is also our weakness. Addressing every concern of all the second reviewers of March for Science could take scientists out of the race.

Related posts

The political attack on science escalates with EPA granting freeze

External links

March for Science
Are scientists going to march on Washington?
Scientists are planning to march on Washington. Here's why
A Scientists’ March on Washington Is a Bad Idea