Malcolm Gladwell gives a fascinating talk about recruiting here. He claims is that the things we try to have as objective measures to predict future performance often don't work.
This resonated with me, because I am our graduate program coordinator. And we have just the kind of objective measures that Gladwell talks about, mostly undergraduate GPA and the GRE. It's tough, because these are known to be imperfect measures. I've seen students with low undergrad GPAs do fine in grad school, for instance. And there has been a lot of discussion about biases in the GRE, how good the predictive power is, and so on.
I don't think Gladwell is seriously advocating a strategy of, "Let everyone have a go and see who rises to the top." But given that resources are finite, what alternatives do we have? Companies can't hire all applicants, programs can't take all comers, and sports teams can't have infinite numbers of rookies. Gladwell's talk is good at identifying the problem of recruitment, but I am left wanting a hint of a solution.
Still, his talk is good in that it is a healthy reminder of just how imperfect these "objective" measures are.
Speaking of graduate school, grad students may be interested in a networking website called Graduate Junction.
That's why I almost never review articles for these journals anymore (as opposed to Open Access journals, which I do--two in the last month alone, and that's during grant season). Seriously, if they ever did want me to review, then they have to pay me just like any other business who wanted to consult my expertise would. If enough of us did that, well, things would get very interesting....
In other words, "Strike! The combined action of the scientific proletariat will bring the bourgeois publishers to their knees!"
I am very ambivalent about this idea. On the one hand, I definitely support the open access model. On the other, strikes only work when there is solidarity, and I am not sure enough researchers are willing to take this cause on. I think it has the potential to hurt scientists who are trying to publish in those journals more than the publishers themselves.
In the long run, I think open access will win just because that's where researchers will chose to submit. I think that serves the cause better than withholding reviews.
The news about Chris Comer's suit against the Texas Education Agency has started hitting the press. Mostly in Texas, as evidenced by articles in The Austin American-Statesman) and News 8 Austin.
The News 8 Austin piece commits the soundbite problem: Here's one person on each side, now decide which apparently equally valid viewpoint is right.
"Intelligent design is credible, there are things that intelligent design begins to explain that evolution cannot," creationism supporter Lane Wood said.
Like... what, exactly?
It's interesting that News 8 calls Wood a "creationist" and not an "intelligent design proponent." Which shows again the "ID has nothing to do with religion!" to be pure fiction.
But there's some national awareness, too, as seen by this USA Today piece. Which characterizes one woman's forced resignation, loss of income and benefits, and resulting struggle to support her father as a "tiff."
Yeah.
Note to USA Today: A tiff is what happens when you can't agree with a friend over what flavour of cheesecake to order for dessert. You don't get fired over tiffs.
Not that I obsess over the amount of traffic this blog gets, but I couldn't help but notice that it spiked yesterday. The number of people visiting went up. A lot.
I don't know that the content of this blog particularly screams out, "Liberal arts!" I am kind of pleased, though, as I do consider myself a product of a liberal arts education, and I do try to continue to incorporate liberal arts principles into some of the teaching I now do.
What I consider to be the essence of a liberal arts education is breadth. It's the study of different disciplines with the understanding that one can and often does inform and enrich understanding of the others.
I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Lethbridge (pictured), which then, as now, advertises itself as giving a liberal arts education. One of the things I am pleased about in having received my degree there is that I have a Bachelor of Arts and Science -- although it's abbreviated as B.Sc., it is in both fields, and indicates the breadth I had in my education. I'm not sure if that option is still available now.
I took acting classes, which helped me when I started giving presentations as a graduate student, because I knew how to project my voice. And I'm convinced that provided scaffolding for my lecturing and presentations today.
I took courses in philosophy, particularly logic, ethics, philosophy of science. In particular, I took some course in philosophy of biology that turned out to be very useful when I jumped ship from psychology to biology in my graduate work.
Of course, there were times when the cross-disciplinary nature worked against me. There was one semester where the writing of Karl Marx appeared prominently in every single class I was taking -- including unlikely locations like statistics. Mentioning Marx sent me into a fetal position by the end of the semester.
I've spent the bulk of today working on reviewing a manuscript for a peer-reviewed scientific journal. I was asked by an editor that I have never met to review a paper by authors that I do not know for a journal I rarely read.
Of course, I leaped at the opportunity.
Some researchers hate this and shun it as much as possible. I actually like it. It makes me feel like I'm participating in the process, and I'm still at the stage where being asked to review papers is a rare thing. Being asked to write a review is still a bit of an ego boost for me.
Particularly in cases like this, where you have no direct personal connection with any of the players involved. The research community is so small -- especially the ones I tend to hang out in -- that it's kind of rare to have something like this drop out of the blue and have no personal knowledge of the people involved.
Speaking of the scientific publishing process, I was recently reminded of how little people understand how it works. I was explaining the submission process to one of my students, and mentioned how some journals have a submission fee (for instance, the PLoS journals).
This prompted a "Wait, what?"
Then I tried to explain page charges...
I genuinely think a lot of people think that scientific publishing follows the models of other forms of publishing: writers are paid for their work. It doesn't. In scientific publishing, you're lucky if you can find a journal that publishes your work that won't cost you anything.
Metropolis is a classic science fiction film. "Masterpiece" is usually in the same sentence as its name. It is to science fiction what Charlie Chaplin is to comedy.
Chris Anderson provokes with an article titled, "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete."
There's some interesting ideas, but the argument is based on a false premise.
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear.
It's perhaps understandable that an outsider, a non-scientist would mistakenly believe this premise to be true: that there are massive amounts of data available for all scientific problems.
There are not.
There are only a few fields of science that generate large amounts of high-quality data. I'm thinking maybe some branches of physics (like nuclear physics, maybe astronomy), social sciences (demographic and census data, automatic tracking of web useage), and maybe genetic data for a select few animals (humans, mice, fruit flies, Arabidopsis).
These are the exceptions.
In most cases, scientists have to eke out by hand one experiment at a time. It's not automated, it's not massive, and it doesn't generate huge numbers. To take an example from my field, invertebrate neurobiology, there isn't really good agreement on how to describe neurons in such as way that they can be put into a searchable database (although the NeuronBank project is making an effort to at least think about that problem).
Anderson goes on to say:
There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.
Scientific theories have three traditional virtues. Predict, control, explain. Massive datasets may indeed give us pretty good predictive power -- correlations often do. It may not give us control. And it certainly doesn't explain. We really need causal mechanisms to explain.
For instance, let's take climate change. If it were the case that massive data is all you need, there would seem to be no need for the ongoing debates about climate change. We have massive datasets there. And indeed, the scientific questions are supported by a large consensus. But people don't care that there's a correlation between carbon output and temperature change, they want to know if one is caused by the other. The policy decisions are very different depending on what your thinking of causal mechanisms are. Cause is king.
Now, Comer has filed – in federal court – to get her job back and her name cleared.
Of course, "Comer" is Chris Comer, former employee of the Texas Education Agency (TEA). She forwarded an email announcing a lecture about intelligent design, and was later asked to resign.
Comer is asking for reinstatement, for a judgment finding the TEA at fault and for reimbursement for legal fees.
The TEA was not available for comment late Wednesday.
Let me make a prediction as to what the TEA will say. "This wasn't just about the email, it was also about a whole slew of other policy violations." That's what they've been saying all along. And some of the released documentation does support that contention. Whether the infamous bone-headed statement about the Agency's neutrality on evolution is going to be enough for a judge to support Comer's case is not at all clear.
For those who want an reminder of how this story has unfolded, click here (reverse chronological order, so skip to the back and bottom and go up).
It's always a kick to read about someone you know. In this case, this article talks about work by my former undergrad supervisor, Jennifer Mather. One of my first appearances in the biological literature was an acknowledgment for assisting her with research described in this paper.
Today is the 150th anniversary of the first scientific announcement of the theory of natural selection, as described here. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace had a jointly-authored paper read the Linnean Society of London.
The writer of the blog post speculates on why the contribution of Alfred Wallace has been overshadowed by Charles Darwin. Surprisingly, to me, it doesn't mention what seem to be pertinent facts.
First, Darwin had a much more highly developed theory. He had spent decades accumulating evidence and working through arguments and dealing with difficulties. Wallace had the idea pretty much full blown in a fever dream, and freely admitted that Darwin had ideas he'd never even thought of.
Second, Wallace got very interested in spiritualism later in his life. Certainly, there was a lot of interest in that generally in his time. While interest in the supernatural certainly doesn't disqualify someone from becoming a scientific icon -- cf. Isaac Newton's interest in alchemy -- it really doesn't help Wallace's reputation as a scientist or intellectual figure.
Be that as it may, less than a decade after Darwin and Wallace's paper in the Linnean Society of London announced one of the best scientific ideas of all time, a group of people had another great idea:
The confederation of Canada.
Happy evolutionary sesquicentennial and happy Canada Day.
The exuberant among you may now toot your party favours.
I mentioned in my last post about how John Wick's comments about running a role-playing game made me think about running a class.
A strange comparison, you think? No. In both cases, one person is given somewhat arbitrarily given power (teacher or GM / DM) to determine the fate of another group of people, who have divergent opinions, goals, strengths and weaknesses (students / players) and they have a somewhat adversarial relationship.
John and Jared says there are three big questions to ask about a game, but I think these can also be applied to creating classes.
What is your class about?
How is your class about that?
How does your class reward or encourage that behaviour?
In any particular class, people tend to focus on the content. That is, a certain set of facts, ideas, and concepts.
But classes are also about behaviour. As instructors, there are certain things we want students to do. Often, it's developing a skill. This can be lab based skill, meeting a deadline, arguing, writing, analysis, collaboration.
And we want students to do things a certain way -- the way that meets the professional standards of the field. When we want them to write, we want it thoroughly researched. We want it to be original, and not a cut and paste job from the internet.
In my case, in the fall, I'll be teaching a writing class. That answers part of the first question, but only part. What are the skills I want them to have? That leads to the second question, which I'm still struggling with. How will my class be about writing? About the one thing I've decided is that it won't be a class where I get up and talk for 150 minutes a week, and give students homework and a monthly test.
And the big one: How will I reward and encourage that behaviour? After reading more about how economic incentives often fail to change people's behaviour in the desired way (also mentioned in my last post), I am skeptical that the answer is going to be "just with marks."
If you want students to do literature research in a certain way -- say, not start and stop with Wikipedia -- do you have any mechanic to encourage that behaviour other than reviewing the final paper and searching for plagiarized Wiki articles?
If you want students to ask questions in class, do you have a mechanic that rewards them for doing so, other than maybe remembering to say, "Thanks for the question?"
If you want students to work together, do you have a mechanic that allows for them do turn in a joint paper, say? Or do you insist everyone does their own?
I haven't been very good about this myself, as I've tended to have classes where I focused on a combination of memorizing factual information and drawing logical inferences. In other words, the very bottom of the thinking hierarchy (a laBloom's taxonomy).
John adds a fourth question, which I wish more instructors (including myself) would think about more often:
How do you make that fun?
A lot of instructors would probably turn up their noses that their classes should be fun. But if the "F" word annoys you, think of it as engagement instead. How can you do all this and engage people?
Ever since seeing John Wick’s "Power to the Players" video about players in role-playing games (above), his comment, “Always tell the players, ‘Yes’” has been rattling around in my head. I’ve been trying to think about how I can adopt that philosophy to deal with students. Because so much of what I end up doing to student requests is saying, “No.”
And then he goes on to talk about how to say “Yes” to players, but to put them into dramatic situations. There's something in there about motivating players – in this case by creating dramatic situations – that I think can apply to students, but I haven’t figured it out yet. I think it has something to do with trying to motivate people by applying consequences.
Then, yesterday, I came across another fascinating article in the new issue of Science. I was struck by this little story (emphasis added):
In Haifa, at six day care centers, a fine was imposed on parents who were late picking up their children at the end of the day. Parents responded to the fine by doubling the fraction of time they arrived late. When after 12 weeks the fine was revoked, their enhanced tardiness persisted unabated.
Another case of where trying to motivate by creating consequences for peoples’ actions, and it doesn’t work.
I have to think more about on this.
As a bonus, here’s an audio file of Sir Ken Robinson giving a lecture on education reform. It doesn’t talk directly about motivating people, but it's in there tangentially, as it deals a lot with how education is demotivating people because it is based on an out-of-date educational system. Lots and lots of fascinating ideas there.
At least, I hate shopping for my lab. It's taken up most of my time for the last several days. And it's a pain, for two reasons.
One is that the purchasing is complex. When I personally want something from most internet based businesses, I give them a credit card or just click on PayPal, and away I go. Not with science shopping. Since it's the university, we have to go through a convoluted purchase order arrangement, which differs depending on how much money you want to spend (among other factors).
The second is that the websites of science suppliers are really disappointing in their ability to locate items. If you want pipette tips, suppliers have a huge range of them, and not many options to sort them. The clunk solution? To look through the well-organized -- but clunky -- print catalogs (pictured), which are faster to browse. Of course, the prices in those are out of date, so you have to find the item you want, type in the catalog number into the website to get the correct, current price. If the item hasn't been discontinued.
Even worse, it's nearly impossible compare items. You can't do anything like you can on many shopping websites to compare features of different products. So you have to look at each one individually, which takes a bloody long time for many common supplies. Let's say you type in "HCl," the chemical formula for hydrochloric acid. You get 2,794 hits from one supplier. Even if you just look at the best matches, you still have to wade through 40 separate entries, from different suppliers, different amounts, different purities, and so on.
And try to figure out how much shipping will cost you. You probably can't. One of the reasons I use one supplier in particular is that they don't charge for shipping, which means they get a lot of business from me because they have reduced the number of things I have to worry about in my order by one.
It's such a pain that it routinely goes on the bottom of my "to do" lists, which is not a good thing. So if you're running a scientific supply company, consider looking into what your customers do so that you can help them do it better on your website.
Saw a very interesting talk tonight by Leon Logothetis. Leon is the -- I'm tempted to say victim -- of a television show called The Amazing Adventures of a Nobody (see also here). He's done three of these series, and in each, the premise is simple: Travel from A to B on five units of local currency a day (pounds / dollars / euros).
He was at UTPA because UTPA faculty and students helped him out, giving him a place to sleep overnight and then buying a train ticket. Although the television series makes a great point of the number of times people said "No" to him, he emphasizes the great generosity he received. Interestingly, while traveling Europe on season three, he said the most consistent aid he received was from American tourists, flying in the face of the cliched American traveler. He said it became a joke with the film crew. He'd get up in the morning and say, "Time to go find some Americans." When the crew protested that he was supposed to be interacting with Europeans, he replied, "But they're not helping me."
This picture sort of sums up the The Crustacean Society meeting: all a bit of a blur... But really! You could see the ocean from the poster session.
My student Sakshi and I made the 7 hour drive to Galveston, gave our poster, saw a couple of talks this morning (notably on cave biology -- cool stuff!), turned around and came back today. Whew!
The good news was that this quick trip up was definitely worth it. We got some feedback on the poster that may explain some puzzles we've had from one of the few people who had concrete information. And I met someone who specifically wanted to talk to me about some writing.
It only takes one thing to make a trip worthwhile, and I got two.
Had a bit of a bad moment when I walked into the room where the poster session was being held, and saw every space available was occupied by another poster. Decided to cover up an announcement temporarily to display the poster, as shown below.
The Houston Chronicle has an editorial also responding to recent comments that Don McLeroy (chair of the Texas Education Agency) made to the New York Times. It also zooms in on McLeroy's badly wrong "two systems of science" comments.
Something I didn't know before comes up:
(Texas governor Rick Perry) unilaterally appointed McLeroy to chair the board last summer a few weeks after the Legislature disbanded. (Much simpler than having to defend his controversial choice during Senate confirmation hearings.)
Interesting.
It concludes:
All people are entitled to their private religious beliefs, but nobody is entitled to use the state's public education system to promote them. What chance do Texas students have of competing in the 21st century if their learning of science is warped and stunted by such benighted leadership?
When I interviewed for this job in 2001, several people said to me that they expected my department to have a Ph.D. program in about 5 years -- that is, two years ago. It was one of the things that attracted me to this job. Since then, I've become our graduate program's coordinator and have been trying to pave the way to that Ph.D. program that helped tantalize me into this gig.
So this article in The Austin American-Statesman suggesting there's a glut of Ph.D. programs is not encouraging news.
Higher education specialists generally agree that doctoral education should be reserved for a relatively small number of campuses to ensure the depth and quality essential for creating a thriving community of scholars.
I don't think I'd ever heard that position before. Maybe it's just because I'm from western Canada, where there were about six universities in two provinces at the time, and 5 of them had doctoral programs (UBC, UVic, SFU, U of A, UC). I went to the about the only university that didn't for my undergraduate degree, U of L.
An editorial in the New York Times, following up on their recent story, shows that the "strengths and weaknesses" rhetoric on teaching evolution isn't fooling people who are paying even a little attention. They home in on the same statement I criticized recently.
The system accommodates what Dr. McLeroy calls two systems of science, creationist and "naturalist."
The trouble is, a creationist system of science is not science at all. It is faith. All science is "naturalist" to the extent that it tries to understand the laws of nature and the character of the universe on their own terms, without reference to a divine creator.
I keep wondering when those in charge of the Texas Education Agency will realize that individuals like Don McLeroy, the chair and not-quiet-about-being-a-Young-Earth-Creationist are giving the state black eye after black eye.
If the creationist view prevails in Texas, students interested in learning how science really works and what scientists really understand about life will first have to overcome the handicap of their own education.
The New York Times has an article that focuses on the teaching of evolution in Texas, no doubt prompted by the upcoming review of science standards.
As he has before, Texas Education Agency chair Don McLeory makes some statements that are badly and deeply wrong:
Dr. McLeroy, the board chairman, sees the debate as being between “two systems of science.”
“You’ve got a creationist system and a naturalist system,” he said.
No, you don't have a "creationist system of science." Creationism does not subscribe the underlying assumptions necessary to practice science. Things like empiricism and naturalism unify all the divergent branches of science. Despite their diversity, "No miracles allowed" would apply to any branch of science.
As it happened, the lucid Susan Blackmore had a TED talk up about Darwin's ideas within 24 of my own talk on natural selection to a graduate class.
She comments at one point that mimetics isn't taken seriously. I think there are very good reasons for that, which have to do with how memes could be measured. Let's compare mimetics to its senior sibling, evolutionary biology.
As Blackmore point out, there are the three things needed for natural selection.
Variation. We can easily quantify variation in organisms. We can measure height, mass, number of spines, colour, and so on. No doubt memes vary. For instance, the movie The Aristocrats is an exercise in variation, with one hundred comedians telling the same dirty joke. But how do you measure that variation? How do you compare three versions of the same joke? How much does switching words around matter? The language? The tone of voice? If it's on paper or someone's memory?
Inheritance. If something isn't heritable, it can't be subject to natural selection. I'll spot mimetics this one for now.
Competition for limited resources. This is known by several terms; superfecundity is one I use in teaching. Organisms need resources, and resources are finite. Again, we know what those resources are with biological organisms: energy, water, food, mating partners. We can measure how much of them organisms get. What are the resources that memes are competing for? How do we measure how many of those resources they acquire? How do those resources affect their ability to copy themselves?
I don't know if anyone is seriously working on these problems. But if mimeticists can come up with ways to quantify these things, they'll be on their way to rigorous science.
I was working on some images for a poster this afternoon, and I liked this one, so I thought I'd share it. It's a shrimp antenna magnified 50 times under a dissecting microscope. The title of the post is a reference to a well-known Barnett Newman abstract painting.
This is a nice object lesson in the lure of photomanipulation, though, as the previous post mentioned.
The top image has been rotated, the out of focus dots in the background removed by a little cloning, and the overall image sharpened. The original raw image is shown at right. I would say the top one is more attractive, but is it equally honest?
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about the problems of digital image manipulation. It's a very tough thing. I've had several pictures that are clear through the microscope, but the subtleties are hard to capture on film. A little contrast enhancement makes it more visible, but have you changed the data in a way that changes the interpretation?
I'm going to have to think about whether and how to talk about his in my biological writing class this fall.
If you want to see professional retouching in a way that will make you look twice at images for a while, try looking at this professional retoucher's web page.
Several sources are reporting that The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) is petitioning the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) to reverse its ruling, citing "viewpoint discrimination." The wire articles note that this opens the way for ICR to sue the Board, which has been a strategy the Institute has taken before.
I am trying to read about what "viewpoint discrimination" entails legally. My initial skimming suggests to me that ICR is going to have a very hard case to make that this is viewpoint discrimination (which is apparently a legal no-no) and not content discrimination (which is legally okay).
I bust another invertebrate neurobiology myth on the All In The Mind blog that crops up in a post about cars, of all things. What follows is a slightly edited version of my comment on the post.
It’s widely thought that sea squirts (also known as tunicates or ascidians), once they’ve found the place where they'll spend the rest of their lives, have no further need of their brain and eat it.
The punchline is, “It’s rather like getting tenure.”
The facts should never get in the way of a great joke, but the truth is more complicated. The swimming tadpoles are only about a millimeter long, and there are only a few hundred neurons in the entire tadpole (Meinertzhagen and Okamura 2001), of which the “brain” is only a small part. Tadpoles have miniaturized brains.
Sea squirt larvae do undergo metamorphosis into a adult with a small brains, but it's not the vestigial little thing that the “eat your own brain” story suggests. “In fact, adult ascidians have perfectly good brains, an order of magnitude larger than those of their larvae, and their behaviour is as finely adapted to sessility as that of the larvae to motility” (Mackie and Burighel, 2005).
We’ve learned a lot about how brains work from invertebrates, and their complexity is often underrated.
References
Meinertzhagen IA, Okamura Y. 2001. The larval ascidian nervous system: the chordate brain from its small beginnings. Trends in Neurosciences24(7): 401-410. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0166-2236(00)01851-8
The Texas State Board of Education is reviewing and approving standards for lots of subjects this year, and it's not pretty. The Houston Chronicle reports:
"I find it's really wild that we can work for three years on a project and then the board is so qualified they can pull it out of their hat overnight," said board member Pat Hardy, a Fort Worth Republican who, like other board members, received the substituted document when it was slipped under her hotel door less than an hour before their meeting was set to convene Friday morning.
I personally can't comment on the English standards that have been passed, but guess what's next?
Science curriculum, which includes the divisive teaching of evolution, is next up for review by the board.
"It does not bode well for any of us with the science (curriculum) review coming up," Canaday said. "Everyone I spoke to about this week's meetings asked me why on earth would English be considered a controversial subject. If it's this difficult to change the English curriculum, it's just going to be a war when it comes time for them to try to agree on science standards."
Or could be in a few years. Seriously, check out this article.
As of this month 85 per cent of the 4.3 billion available Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which identify devices connected to the net, are already in use. Within three years they will all be used up, according to a report by the OECD.
I'd never heard about Miller-McCune magazine until just now, but they have an important article about how "doubt" is abused in public debates. It focuses on the well-documented strategy of the tobacco industry to pick at research findings that were bad for business: that is, smoking was bad for you.
"Eventually, the science wins," Michaels says. "But at what cost?"
I spent the bulk of the day on a long, long overdue review of the budget of my REU program. I think I've worked through all the research supply issues. And it's still not done! Tomorrow, I work through the travel budget, which should be a bit easier.
The Law of Maximum Inconvenience states that when you remember something kind of important that you forgot in the lab, you''ll remember it at quarter to one in the morning while you're trying to get to sleep.
I had brought back some shrimp from the Coastal Studies Lab yesterday. Unfortunately, the mortality rate when I do so is invariably pretty high. So I had quite a few corpses to dispose of.
Except that I forgot to dispose of them.
And I knew I had to get up and walk down to the lab in the middle of the night to get those dead shrimp into a waste container. Because nothing stinks like dead marine things, and they would probably be pretty stinky by morning.
So I trudged over to the lab in the middle of the night.
It was fairly depressing to see all the lights on in a lot of university buildings, though. Middle of the night. Between spring and summer sessions. Who's around? Janitors, yes, but do they need to have the entire building lit up, even floors and rooms where they're not working? Lights cost money, you know...
The first time gas was edging up towards $3 a gallon locally, I got into a conversation with colleagues about how high prices would have to go before people started changing their driving behaviour. I estimated that people would continue to complain, but wouldn't start to seriously change their driving habits until gas prices reached $6 or $7 a gallon.
Gas is now well over $3.50 and edging towards $4. But I have to say, prayer doesn't count as changing your behaviour.
I'm still waiting to see evidence of people doing something different in how they drive. I'm terribly disappointed my university has done nothing to encourage carpooling, say.
I'm thinking about this quite a bit, as I want to make more trips to the Coastal Studies Lab for research this summer, and there's a meeting of The Crustacean Society in Galveston that I'll be attending. Luckily, I'll be driving the friendliest car in the world which gets good highway mileage, but suddenly these in-state trips take on more significance.
"Are you going away for summer?" and all its variations.
What with the two summer classes I'm teaching, two manuscripts I'm revising, two grants I'm managing, multiple students I'm supervising, and tasks backlogged out the wazoo...
We've had a couple of campus-wide faculty meetings over the last week, concerning salaries. Only a small fraction of the faculty were there, which is perhaps surprising given that everyone gets paid. It is exam week, I suppose.
The topic at hand was salary compression and inversion. This is a nation-wide problem. Basically, across the country, the wages of faculty members are going up about 3% per year. The starting salaries of new hires are going up substantially higher -- I think I heard an estimate of something like 10% a year.
Consequently, new faculty are making relative more than senior faculty (compression). In extreme cases, new faculty make more in real dollars starting out than senior faculty (inversion).
The best strategy if you want a raise? Quit your job and get a job at another institution.
It's the end of the semester. Most of my colleagues are frantically grading. I am frantically trying to go back and get to the many tasks that have been getting stuck in cracks. Some have fallen through and cannot be retrieved. For instance...
I had a workshop application form that has been sitting on my desk. I didn't get to it right away, because it needed a CV. My CV was out of date (stuck in the crack), so I didn't finish and ship the application. I picked it up again today, googled the time of the workshop (which wasn't on the application form), and found out that the workshop was happening... yesterday through tomorrow.
Nope, can't make that one.
Also just discovered that I missed the early registration deadline for a meeting. That was yesterday.
It will be interesting to see how many things have slipped through the cracks and how many are merely stuck there.
The nail on the right side reached a point where it got loose and I had to trim it off. It's now grown back out to the edge of the finger on the right side, but not so much that I've been able to trim it, hence the slightly rough appearance you can see. The left side wasn't hit as hard originally, and you can clearly see dividing line where I trimmed back the loose nail on the right.
Then, behind the remains of the actual bruise, there's a section where the nail growth seems a little swollen. But it's flattened out further. So I'm expecting all traces of the bruise to be gone maybe in July or August, and the entire fingernail tp be back to normal in, say, October.
The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) is predictably upset about not being allowed to offer Master's degrees in science education.
They have now issued a press release announcing that they have put their entire application on-line. The title of this press release?
"Academic freedom in the balance."
I'm going to give a serious answer before tossing off a one-liner.
Academic freedom is an absolutely essential part of academic life, much discussed, but it is easily misinterpreted. In the United States, pretty much the gold standard for defining academic freedom was made back in 1940. My own institution still refers to it in our handbook of operating procedures. It's a statement from the American Association of University Professors. It's short, readable, and online here.
The statement is all about protecting teachers. It describes academic freedom in terms of a relationship between individuals and their institutions. Everything concerns what an individual is allowed to say without risk of losing her job.
This is substantially different from what ICR is talking about, which is a relationship between an institution and an accrediting agency. Accreditation is a very different matter than tenure. So really, crying "foul" about academic freedom misses the mark.
That's the serious answer.
The one-liner is that "academic freedom" is not code for, "Validation of any random idea that you happen to have have."
de Bruyn PJN, Tosh CA, Bester MN. 2008. Sexual harassment of a king penguin by an Antarctic fur seal. Journal of Ethology26(2): 295-297. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10164-007-0073-9
"We report a case of interspecific sexual harassment bridging the rank of vertebrate class."
A seal. A penguin.
You can't make this stuff up.
You could, however, make endless jokes about it. But I won't, since this could devolve oh so quickly.
Unfortunately, our library doesn't have a subscription, so I can't comment in more detail. More commentary, however, can be found in the Zooillogix blog, which had this one first.
Over in the Waco Tribune, there's an funny column titled, "Religion in fake mustache." It points out the apparent split between the the THECB's rejection of the ICR proposal and the upcoming revision of the state's K-12 science standards:
Not that their functions intersect, but this development signals a clash of intentions between the coordinating board and some members of the State Board of Education.
With state science standards coming up for approval, some members of the board want to make room in them for intelligent design or outright creation theory.
The column notes that the ICR is threatening to sue THECB.
Today was a bit of a strange day. It was the last day of class. There was free lunch to celebrate the university get re-accredited (even though this happened several months back). And then the chemistry department upstairs had more free food at the end of the day as their end of year celebration. Very bad, since habits learned in grad school -- when there's free food, you take it -- die very hard.
And somewhere in between was a faculty senate meeting.
The Austin Chronicle's Naked City blog comments on the recent announcement of Kenneth Heydrick as the science director for the Texas Education Agency:
The Texas Education Agency has offered the job of science coordinator to Kenn Heydrick. That should quash the conspiracy theorists who speculated that the agency removed former coordinator Chris Comer last year to replace her with someone who supports intelligent design.
Emphasis added.
It's a little premature to conclude that, "Evolution could not have been the reason for someone's dismissal, because the position was filled by someone supportive of teaching evolution." Let's not forget that Chris Comer's forced resignation attracted national news attention negative to the state of Texas, almost all of which was extremely negative. There was some in very strong advocacy from university professors on the part of teaching evolution. It is at least conceivable that some people in hiring positions noted this, and realized that hiring anyone with weak credentials or wishy-washy views on the subject of evolution would make a lot of people look very, very bad.
This may well have been a case where vigilance worked.
I started off my research career with octopuses when I was in a landlocked prairie province. And my supervisor talked from time to time about the deep mystery that cephalopods (squids, octopus, cuttlefish) could use colour, but couldn't see colour. So this is the sort of paper I've been waiting a long while to read.
To get a tiny little taste of the remarkable behaviour of these animals, check out David Gallo's talk below; the relevant bits start about 1 minute 50 seconds in.
I like to show the TED talk first, because it's so great to hear the audience's response. But if you want to see the last bit alone...
And one more link, a PBS special on cuttlefish. The video clips here are almost as amazing as the vanishing octopus.
How do researchers start to get a handle on such glorious eye candy?
This new paper tests the idea that the colours that cuttlefish can make are similar enough to the colours found in their natural habitat that the animals don't need to see colour. That is, if you can change colour to many different shades of brown, you are not likely to stand out too much if you inhabit an area where most things are brown.
There's surprisingly little behaviour or physiology in this paper, which is unusual for this journal. The main technique the authors used was to photograph cuttlefish on various natural and artificial substrates. The digital revolution in photography is making feasible what would have been a nightmare not too long ago. It's now dead simple to take an image, put it into a computer, measure its red, green and blue values, brightness, and so on.
The team selected several spots on the cuttlefish body to measure the animal's colour, then selected several spots on the nearby substrate to measure the colour of the surrounding sand, shell grit, and so on. Some sand were commercially available sands that were... perhaps not quite natural looking (bright red), and others were collected nearby.
They then used computers to compare the cuttlefish colour and the surface. In general, it's quite a good match. Interestingly, however, the match seems to get better as the water gets deeper. If you've ever swam underwater, you know that colours change because the water filters out the light. Red light drops out really quickly, so the deeper you go, the more blue the water appears.
I had to say "seems to get better" in the previous paragraph, because the researchers didn't actually photograph in anything other than very shallow water. Instead, they calculated what they would expect to see at increasingly greater depths. Although I would normally grumble at this, the physics of light and water are probably sufficiently well understood by now that this is probably a pretty safe prediction.
The paper also presents some data on the colour pigments in the animal, but this basically confirms what people had seen by eye: there are three colours in the dorsal side of the animal, and two ventrally.
Thus, this paper hints that how to use colour while being colour blind is a problem with an evolutionary solution, rather than a physiological one. Those with the pigments that best match their local habitat will win out over generations, not in the few seconds where the animals are making those lightning fast colour changes.
Reference
Mäthger, L.M., Chiao, C., Barbosa, A., Hanlon, R.T. (2008). Color matching on natural substrates in cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis. Journal of Comparative Physiology A DOI: 10.1007/s00359-008-0332-4
Turning on the computer is typically one of the first things I do in the morning after having a shower. Yes, it's not a good habit. But this morning, I got rewarded for it.
I had just tweaked a lecture for my general biology students last night, and I knew what I was going to talk about. This was my last lecture for the semester. I had talked about viruses last week, and was going to talk about how molecules originally discovered in viruses (integrase and reverse transcriptase) were now being used in biotechnology applications, including gene therapy.
I open up my news feed this morning, and find staring back at me:
The headline is a bit over the top (the patients weren't completely blind, for instance), but the science was exactly what my lecture (in a couple of hours) was about: using a virus to deliver a modified gene to a patient. And the article even has an associated video showing some of the behavioural trials with the patients.
I love being able to bring in that newly published stuff into my class, but sadly, it's rare that you have the opportunity to do so, particularly in a general introductory class. So this was just friggin' awesome, and a great way to drive home the point that this is a great time to be studying biology.
The press release says that he has edited a biology textbook, though I can't find what it is, and that his first degree is in biology. Even more encouraging, an Austin American-Statesman Homeroom blog notes:
Heydrick has stood up to attempts to weaken teaching evolution in the past, asking the State Board of Education in a 2003 hearing on textbooks not to require changes in textbooks to water-down evolution lessons or add “nonscientific alternatives such as intelligent design.”
Heydrick, who worked as a high school science teacher for 10 years, has held several state and national leadership positions, serving as immediate past president of the Science Teachers Association of Texas and on the State Board of Education's earth science task force.
I can't resist quoting a snipe from the American-Statesman blog, though:
And his current boss at Pflugerville says he’s good at working with teachers and working with others, plus he’s got seven dogs and four cats. Because being an animal lover obviously makes him better qualified to shape the state science curriculum.
Ha!
This appears to be good news on the face of it. Certainly, there had to be the worry on whether the TEA would try to hire someone with weak credentials in biology. But he appears to have the chops.
Two major antievolution stories in Texas are ending on an optimistic note in the same week. Interesting.
The Houston Chronicle was one of the first news organizations to confirm what's already been on the blogosphere: that THECB denied ICR's MS in science education plans. A follow-up story notes there was little discussion before the vote, probably due to the public presentations made before the earlier committee vote.
The news services have been reasonably quiet about this decision.
So far, almost the only editorial comment I've seen has been from the Austin American Statesman, which wrote:
Dedicated learning in its many forms is generally wonderful. But course work must be labeled correctly. The state is right to require that a graduate degree in creation studies, which the Institute of Creation Research offers, be called what it is - a degree in religion, not science. ... Paredes and the coordinating board took a correct and principled stand in denying the creationist institute’s science course.
Meanwhile, the Daily Skiff blog from Texas Christian University reports on the ICR's press release following the decision against them:
The manner in which the hearing was conducted was characterized by viewpoint discrimination.
I wonder what "viewpoint discrimination" is. Is it something different than disagreeing?
The Texas Observer noted that there were three people who spoke in favour and seven who opposed it. If there was nobody who spoke in favour, or only one, that might be a stronger case for not having a chance to make the case.
It could also just point out that many people think that the program as proposed is just a bad idea.
The Texas Observer blog is reporting that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) supported the Academic Excellence Committee's recommendation: No science education Master's for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR).
I'm waiting to see more news coverage, but if so, this would spell the end of the main event. But given that several news stories have mentioned that ICR will follow "due process," expect a rematch.
Nature blog The Great Beyond comments briefly about the THECB committee recommendation.
And finally, the Texas Freedom Network had a press release about survey results of Texas university faculty on the ICR issue. Science faculty were against the idea.
The following is a blog post I made over at the All in the Mind blog in response to a recent show on evolutionary psychiatry. I wanted to post it here, because I've been wanting to discuss the "reptilian brain" idea for some time, as it may well be one of the most popular but wrong ideas about the evolution of nervous systems out there.
More posts on reptile brains later, I hope.
;;;;;
The basic premise discussed in this show -- that human behaviour has an evolutionary history -- is not terribly contentious. The specific model discussed in the program, Paul MacLean's "triune brain," is more problematic.
As typically expressed, MacLean's model suggests that entire reptilian brain has been conserved through the evolution of the mammals, with new brain regions essentially added on to the existing core, like suburbs being added to a city.
There are a few problems with this model.
First, MacLean's ideas seem to be highly influenced by old ideas that emphasized the "march of progress" or the "great chain of being." In particular, the MacLean model seems to be based on the notion that reptiles were the ancestors of mammals. It's debatable whether reptiles are the ancestors of mammals, however. It may be that the two groups shared a common ancestor, then diverged. It's also somewhat misleading in that it lumps all reptiles together. Snakes, for instance, appear much later in the fossil record than the earliest mammals.
Second, the suggestion that the entire reptile brain is essentially the mammalian hind brain is not supported by modern neuroanatomy. To give an example, in MacLean's model, the limbic system is characterized as a "lower mammalian" part of the brain. There is evidence, however, that reptiles have a limbic system (Bruce and Neary, 1995; Lanuza et al., 1998).
MacLean's "triune brain" hypothesis may have caught the popular imagination, but it has not proved useful in modern neurobiology.
References
Bruce LL, Neary TJ. 1995. The limbic system of tetrapods: A comparative analysis of cortical and amygdalar populations. Brain, Behavior and Evolution46(4-5): 224-234.
Lanuza E, Belekhova M, Martinez-Marcos A, Font C, Martinez-Garcia F. 1998. Identification of the reptilian basolateral amygdala: an anatomical investigation of the afferents to the posterior dorsal ventricular ridge of the lizard Podarcis hispanica. European Journal of Neuroscience10(11): 3517-3534.
More coverage this morning about the THECB's Academic Excellence Committee's recommendation in anticipation of the full Coordinating Board vote today.
The Houston Chronicle has an article that describes some of the testimony before the Committee vote:
Paredes' recommendation and the vote by members of the Academic Excellence and Research Committee followed a 30-minute public hearing, during which 10 people — most of whom said they held doctoral degrees in a scientific field — split over the issue.
"What they are calling science education has as much to do with science as reality television has to do with reality," said Paul Murray, a geophysicist from Austin.
Chris Krosschell, a former Air Force pilot, played a tape of Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, speaking as he looked back at the Earth.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," Borman said, quoting the opening passages of Genesis.
Texas Christian University's Daily Skiffsupports the committee recommendation:
The higher education board should be commended for their actions to bring this issue to a vote instead of letting a group use its own agenda to decide what is a justified master's degree program.
The Austin American-Statesman has a longer story on the THECB committee vote, including pinpoint accurate comments from Ray Paredes (emphasis added):
Paredes said the institute's catalog and other records portray as unshakable fact that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, that God created all things in the universe in six days as described in Genesis, that theories of origin and development involving evolution are false, and that most biblical miracles require a temporary suspension of basic natural laws.
"Whatever the ultimate merit of such views, they clearly stand at odds with the most basic tenets of scientific work such as observation, testing and analysis," Paredes said.
A lawyer for the Bible-based group also warned that the coordinating board could eventually face legal action for suppressing the free-speech rights of the institute.
THECB commissioner Ray Paredes is quoted:
“Evolution is such a fundamental principle of contemporary science it is hard to imagine how you could cover the various fields of science without giving it [evolution] the proper attention it deserves as a foundation of science,” he said.
Houston Chronicle has quotes from ICR director, Henry Morris III:
"It really wasn't a surprise given the current climate of opposition that exists," Morris said. "We anticipated resistance when we applied for it."
It'll be interesting to see if this ripples out into the national American and international news.
On Earth Day 2008, I drove over 150 miles in a car, alone.
I feel bad about the carbon footprint (stupid infrastructure determining my choices again), but I am happy with why: I finally was able to go out to the Coastal Studies Lab and get some data that will help wind up some experiments my student and I started back in December or so with some shrimp.
If you've ever wanted to imitate a scientist, just watch the picture below for 10 minutes.
Okay, now do that 14 more times.
The shrimp were pretty subdued and didn't do a tremendous amount of behaving for me. Which, in the context of the experiment, is actually interesting.
My Master's student Sandra successfully defended her thesis yesterday. Hooray! Now, I just hope the revision can be done in time. This could be tricky, as she was about to give birth any day now.
The Christian Post has a news story about the upcoming meeting of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Institute for Creation Research.
A e-mail update sent Thursday by Dr. Henry Morris, founder of ICR, reported that the April 23 hearing will also include an "unusual" half-hour session which will be open to public comments.
Morris told The Christian Post that his contact, who has worked with THECB for 15 years, informed him that the Board never before authorized such a public comment session.
"We have been told second-hand, through our contact, that their objection is that we are using the word 'science.' If we would just drop the word science," the approval would go through, said Morris.
Which raises the question of why they don't simply call it a degree in creation studies and be done with it. That would seem to be the "everyone wins" scenario. ICR gets their program with an honest label.
He argued that students exercise critical thinking skills when they are taught how to compare an evolutionary mindset to a creationist mindset.
"How can you be a critical thinker if you don't know what the other side is?" he asked.
Saying you are "the other dies" does not make that side equally valid. Even if it was, you have to have some confidence that alternate views are treated objectively. And the Institute of Creation Research has made it very clear that it's anti-evolution, and it does not represent the consensus view on science. It's fringe.
Regardless of the outcome this week, this is unlikely to be over this week...
The ICR has the option to appeal within 45 days and/or to reapply within 180 days if the Board rejects the application. In the case of approval, ICR will begin its effort to obtain accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
In case you saw the recent news story that a teenager corrected NASA about the probability of an asteroid impact... check here.
Besides, arguing about correct probilities over something like asteroid impacts seem to have a certain... I don't know... squishiness to it. It's not something that is going to have a definite answer, like the probability of throwing snake eyes in dice. It's going to be complex, and low probability, and highly subject to revision anyway.
Apparently, there's also been another story circulating in the US about a teenager who is doubting that climate change is caused by human burning of fossil fuels (no link now).
What is the point of such stories? In neither case is the teen rebel providing any sort of definitive evidence. They're getting press just for doubting at a slightly more sophisticated level than their peers. I'm glad they're interested in science, but shouldn't they get attention when, you know, they contribute actual data? Like all the rest of us professionals?
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.
Malcolm Gladwell gives a fascinating talk about recruiting here. He claims is that the things we try to have as objective measures to predict future performance often don't work.
