The author of EvolutionBlog had the gumption to go to a conference on creationist research (no snickering, please). There several posts in a series of his report, but I wanted to point out Part 3, which has some interesting comments from "an enthusiastic young woman identifying herself as affiliated with the Institute for Creation Research Graduate School." I've been blogging extensively on ICR's efforts to get permission to offer Master's degrees in Science Education, so her comments make for interesting reading. Much of the post centers around some ill-chosen words for which the speaker apologized, but I'll just call out this:
I don't think Christians understand the depth of the stronghold evolutionists have in our system. They have engineered things to stop anything that we say, to report anything that we say.
We're doing a really, really bad job of our "stranglehold," when pretty much every poll that I've seen indicates that a huge fraction of U.S. citizens disagree with the conclusions of evolutionary science.
Also, several people suggested the ICR offer a Master's degree in Religious Studies rather than Science Education. Is it "strangling" someone's point of view to ask them to put a different label on the bottle?
In my job as a professional science writer, I use no less than eight different software packages to get the job done. And that number is tending to go up, not down.
On the writing side, I use word processor, obviously. I'm using Microsoft Word for most of my work, but lately I've started using Google Docs when I have to collaborate with students.
A word processor alone doesn't help much with the task of references, though, so software package number 2 is a specialized reference manager; I'm currently using EndNote.
Now that I have the words under control, I need to deal with numbers. Microsoft Excel is great for data entry and simple manipulation, but again, I'm moving towards Google Docs for certain tasks. But Excel can't do the sort of high end analysis that I need as a scientist. So I have a statistics package (currently SPSS), and scientific graphing software (currently Origin), bringing the total to five.
I find I also need two kinds of graphics software: one for vector based images, and one for a pixel based images. I've been using Corel Draw since version 3, so I'm going to continue to use it for as long as I can for the vector images. Luckily, the package also includes Corel Photo-Paint for the pixel images.
I could, strictly speaking, stop there. But I consider posters a sort of manuscript, and I could use my graphics packages for making posters -- and have done so in the past. But I've found a simple desktop publishing program can actually be faster and easier. Microsoft Publisher is little known but very useful in this regard.
And that's what I use just for mastering my manuscripts, never mind presentations or websites or other odds and ends.
Today was the last weekday before classes start next week. So, unusually for me, I did something sensible.
I got the heck outta Dodge.
I had decided to go to the Coastal Studies Lab, and nothing came up that prevented me from going, as so often happens. I did leave a little later than planned, as I got into an early morning unexpected hallway conversation about how messed up certain assessment practices were.
On the drive out, I used to feel guilty about not going to the Coastal Studies Lab -- and I still do. But now I also feel guilty about going to the Coastal Studies Lab. My carbon footprint is on my mind a lot.
The day was just about perfect for collecting. Not very busy, and cloudy. Particularly important today, as aI forgot my sunscreen (again) at home. I was able to get everything I went to South Padre Island for, but the best thing may have been that I got an idea for a fun little project I'll have one of my students get on.
I returned to the department to a broken photocopier -- which is a big deal just before classes start because all the instructors want to copy their class outlines -- and our hardworking clerk staying late to copy the material for the professors who had gone home already. She also tells me there was a steady stream of people going by my office looking for me.
Heh. But I fooled them...
Very tired, though. While I was not as waxed as if it had been sunny, I was shoveling for a few hours on the beach, and it's hard yakka.
If you go to the CBC entertainment wesbite, you can listen to the hokey pokey my way. Don't scroll down if you want to listen to the live clip. A transcription is below the picture, for when the clip is removed, as I'm sure it will eventually be.
The Zen Hokey Pokey
You take your left arm And you don’t move it at all You take your right arm And you keep it really still Sit in contemplation Doing Zen meditation Is that what it’s all about?
You take your left foot And you leave it where it is You take your right foot And you completely clear your mind Practice non-attachment Surrender everything Now you’re doing the Zen meditation
Now that I've managed to tame my email inbox for work, I'm working on the rest of the office. This is somewhat scary. I found some paperwork I had to sign off on that hit my desk in... oh... start of November 2007.
That probably hasn't been empty for the better part of a year. My email inbox has generally been way, way backed up, which is indicative of how ratty this last academic year has been. The task of emptying my inbox was inspired by a recent post by Seth Godin.
I'm going to see how often I can keep that inbox counter to zero, and try to initiate a few things instead of catching up.
Of course, this does overlook the fact that I have... how many email addresses? Yeesh.
One of the two samples of DNA said to prove the existence of the Bigfoot came from a human and the other was 96 per cent from an opossum, according to Curt Nelson, a scientist at the University of Minnesota who performed the DNA analysis.
They tried to pass off a frickin' possum as an undiscovered bipedal hominid?
Biscardi said the DNA samples may not have been taken correctly and may have been contaminated, and that he would proceed with an autopsy of the alleged Bigfoot remains, currently in a freezer at an undisclosed location.
Give unto me a break.
You have contamination problems when you're dealing with traces from a crime scene, ancient DNA from hundreds or thousands of years ago, not when you have a two meter biped stored in a freezer that you can grab a few chunks from.
The two men who claim to have found Bigfoot have admitted to filming a hoax video with a fake scientist, but they still claim they have a real Bigfoot corpse in the freezer and will reveal all at a press conference.
This reminds me a lot of the English girls who claimed to see fairies, fooled so many people, admitted to faking photographs but insisted they had seen fairies.
Sigh.
Yesterday, I didn't get a chance to post my predictions: that they'd show pictures of gels of claimed DNA, but not allow any other labs to take samples.
Headline pretty much says it all. Except it should say, "US hunters claim they have found sasquatch," as far as I'm concerned.
I've blogged a fair amount about new species, because it shows how much we need to learn about the biology of our planet. For my thoughts on sasquatch, see here.
I suspect this is going to turn out like this previous sighting... That the pictures on on a site called http://www.inquisitr.com/ does not fill me with hope.
The picture itself does not fill me with hope. It looks a little too "carnival sideshow" to me.
I was able to stay pretty much in the black all the way through my undergraduate and graduate education. I went briefly into a bit of debt to move across 3 times zones to my first post-doc, but I was out of debt before I started my second post-doc in Melbourne.
The end of my second post-doc was when I went seriously into the red, long term.
I had to a trans-Pacific move back to North America. When I came back, I was unemployed for a while and owed taxes. I was offered the job I currently hold a couple of months later, and then had a trans-continental move. That combination sunk me. I got a line of credit with my bank extended, and that was how I paid to get here to start my job.
I was slowly paying off the debt, but sunk back when I decided to hire a lawyer to help with my green card application (worth every penny), and had to dip into the credit line again.
Today, thanks to some summer teaching and a little bit of grant salary, I paid back the last big of money owed on my credit line. Today, I am not debt free (I still have a lot of payments left on the world's friendliest car), but this is a relief.
I mention all of this just in case you ever wondered when in their career professors start to pull into the black. Everything in this job is about the long haul.
Departments should remove conference presentations as a requirement of job performance.
I love research conferences. They're one of my favourite parts of my job. But increasingly, I feel incredible guilt every time I travel by any means other than foot. Jet fuel is a big greenhouse gas source.
I will have to struggle with my own conscience over my own personal decisions to travel to conferences or not, but there is something institutional that can be done.
Right now, our department expects -- indeed, requires -- faculty give conference presentations to get tenure. I imagine it's the same in many other departments in many other universities.
It made perfect sense not too long ago to require conference presentations. It's not that long ago that video -- heck, even simple graphics -- on the net was a pain. (Some of you might remember the days of Gopher with me.) It was faster and more efficient to communicate by physically meeting in one place.
I'm not sure that's true now. Look at the phenomenal TED talks, for instance. We have reached the point where we can think about doing research communication very differently.
A Blog Around The Clock contains a nice analysis on something I've discussed before, and that many are starting to notice, namely how easy it easy to find things that conform to your pre-existing beliefs:
The difference between now and then, now being 2008 and then being, let's say, 1958, is in the distribution. With three TV channels, a local paper or two, a local radio station or two, everyone got the same serving of both news and entertainment. This was a "push" - the information is pushed onto the audience, who has to take it or go live in a cave. ...
Today, the media reality is that it is a "pull" model - there are so many outlets, hundreds of cable channels, increased numbers of magazine, millions of blogs, satellite radio, that everyone searches for information and entertainment they are interested in. And ignore the rest. ...
The only venue I can think of, the only place where "push" still works and people are literally forced to listen to things they personally don't care about - is school.
And after that rattling around in the back of my mind for the day, it dawned on me that this is why creationists are putting so much effort into attacking the teaching of evolution in schools. School is rapidly becoming the only place where kids might hear opposing views.
Now that I think about it, I can't help but wonder if the "push" model of might also be doomed.
If you're crossing a border into the United States, the government can take away anything electronic for any reason for any length of time and give the information on it to others.
Many scientists cross American borders to go to conferences or to do field work. And most are highly dependent on their laptops in particular, which are often used for data collection, grant writing, and so on. Taking away a computer could be devastating. So I'm labeling this one as "Science and politics."
Memory is U shaped. Presentations should be W shaped.
People tend to have higher recall for the start of things and the end of things than bits in the middle. The tendency to remember the start of things is the "primacy effect," and the tendency to remember the end is the "recency effect."
Consequently, the start and end of a presentation are rather important, because that's something people will tend to remember no matter what you do. This is both a blessing and a curse, since you don't have to work hard here. If you summarize your talk at the opening and closing, people will tend to get the message and you don't have to do a lot of work to get their attention and have them remember it. On the other hand, if the opening or closing do not go smoothly... they'll remember that, too.
I first became aware of how screen writers approached pacing by an article about Malcolm Hulke, who wrote a lot of television in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed he wrote a book about it. Hulke argued that a story should be W shaped. You need something at the start to get the audience's attention, and a big finish -- which is perfectly in line with the U shape of memory recall.
The place where you have to do the most work is in the middle.
After a few minutes, people's attention starts to drift. It's in the middle of a presentation that people are less likely to be engaged. You have to do something to bring them back on board, and keep them engaged. This is the middle peak of the W. In a presentation, there are several things you can do. Change the pace or the tone. Do the unexpected. Do something to refocus the audience's attention. If this was a movie or a TV show, you would have a car chase, plot twist, or a dinosaur appear.
This discussion from a Nature podcast is, I think, another variation on the "W" scheme:
Focussing in a way on the idea of mini-cliffhanger this seems to be a thing that lots of good movies have in common. If you imagine Bruce Willis making his way through the skyscraper in Die Hard, he has sort of intermittent battles with the terrorists, which kind of comes to our head at various points and then things calm down a bit and then a new cliffhanger builds up and he gets into another fight. ...
(W)eirdly enough that pattern also seems to happen in Casablanca, if you imagine, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Berkman's characters. They are not fighting obviously, but while they are in a way, they're, sort of, wrestling with their feelings and they are, sort of, drawn together and then apart and together and there is a, sort of, mini-cliffhanger's feeling there(.)
A "mini-cliffhanger" is one way to create that middle peak of the W.
And the revisions are done and the manuscript is submitted! Poor manuscript, waiting for almost a year for me to get some uninterrupted time so I can focus on it and complete it.
If and when I get this paper accepted, I think I'll tape up the first page where I can see it and write on it with a Sharpie: "Never again."
Over in Time Higher Education, there's an article by Tim Birkhead of note. He writes:
The scientific research councils seem to be obsessed by hypothesis testing.
The little bit about "research councils" is something that casual readers might miss. What Birkhead is really bitching about is not hypothesis testing. It's about money.
This point become a little clearer here:
The entire funding strategy by the research councils is risk averse.
Again, this has little to do with hypothesis testing, and a lot with the amount of available resources. "Research councils" are government agencies. As such, they are accountable to people who tend to have a very dim view of research in the first place. In times of restraint, many will favour the safe bet, the guaranteed return, rather than the boom and bust excitement of investing in long shots.
As someone who has suffered at the end of the grant killing phrase "too descriptive" more than I'd care to recall, I'm sympathetic. But to blame hypothesis testing as too limiting is wrong.
There are some parts of the scientific enterprise that are more fun for me than others. Very low on the list are revising manuscripts after they have been reviewed.
The good news is that the manuscript is always better after revision.
The bad new is that the amount of improvement is much less than the amount of effort that goes into making the improvement.
I'm currently trying to deal with an almost off-handed comment by one reviewer. There will definitely a paragraph and a couple of extra lines in the paper that wouldn't have been there without that query... but it's taken me most of yesterday afternoon and all morning to do the research to track down the answer.
This is one reason (though by no means the only one) why a couple of my manuscripts have been awaiting revision for way too long. One is finally in press, and I'm working hard to get the other one back to the editor.
Back to the revision... very close to done now, I think.
The Austin Chronicle has an article discussing the start of the revision of Texas K-12 science standards. I thought those were going to be discussed later in the year, but apparently things are starting now.
According to SBOE chair and College Station dentist Dr. Don McLeroy, this year's "battle is to bring in some of the weaknesses of evolution," to ninth- and 10th-grade biology classrooms, retaining language requiring that teachers instruct students in the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories.
And why should we do that? Isn't the evidence overwhelming? What weaknesses are we talking about?
For once, McLeroy spells it out. Get ready. You can feel the sense of dread permeate the room.
In McLeroy's opinion, there are three major weaknesses of evolutionary theory that schoolchildren should be made aware of. He arrived at these conclusions by "reading everything [he] could get [his] hands on" and listening to podcasts.
Setting aside whether all the kids in the state's education should be determined by one dentist listening to some stuff on the internet, let's get on to the criticisms.
First weakness: the fossil record. "There are gaps," said McLeroy, that do not include enough transitional forms of life to support evolution. Second, McLeroy says there has simply not been enough time on Earth for the minute changes required by evolution to have taken place. Thirdly, McLeroy says the incredible complexity of cells proves divine design.
In turn.
First, McLeroy seems to imply that there are some transitional fossils, so the issue is that there isn't enough. Of course, there will never be enough for him.
Second, McLeroy doesn't say how old he thinks the Earth is. Since he is a Young Earth creationsist, he probably thinks the world is about 6,000 years old. If that's how old the world was, McLeroy would be right that there hasn't been enough time. But the Earth is ancient.
Third, argument from personal credulity.
The article concludes with the concern:
If the weak-evolution curricula passes, Texas schoolchildren will be able to achieve that success in one of two ways: fly out of state for biology class and be back in time for lunch or set their sights on excelling at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.
While messing around trying to find data for my SciLink tree (see here), I stumbled across NeuroTree.
This represents a substantial improvement on my earlier efforts to track my intellectual heritage. It really allows me to track back to the beginning of psychology and neurophysiology.
It is quite astonishing.
The above picture shows a small part of the tree to which I belong... Click above on Don Kennedy to see what I mean.
Not in the literal sense, since they are fictional things, after all. Sadly for me, zombie stories have become a popular genre the last few years. But I may have to try to watch Diary of the Dead. Because I was very intrigued by George Romero's comments about it, and his planned sequel:
“There's still quite a lot left to say,” he feels, “about tribalism, because my feeling is that what happens on the internet is not discourse. Anyone can get up there and write a blog and people who happen to agree with your perspective are going to plug into it.” Far too often, he thinks, the attitude becomes, “I’m right, and here's another guy who thinks the same as I do. The internet reinforces things: it creates tribes, rather than bringing people together for some kind of discourse or understanding of opposite views.”
This resonates a lot with me, as it's something I've written about beforeseveral times.
One of the key elements of thinking scientifically is that you must be willing to change your mind. In many cases, you'll change your mind in response to evidence, but that might not be the only way. But science is becoming unusual in that regard, in that it is becoming one of the few areas that positively demands discourse and works against “tribes,” as Romero calls them.
And that demands that you really listen to what the other person is putting out there.
In that spirit, check out Evelyn Glennie's talk. She says:
Of course, my job is all about listening, and my aim really is teach the world to listen. That's my only real aim in life.
When I was doing my post-doc at the University of Melbourne in 2000, I was around to witness one of the most amazing seasons in professional sports. The Essendon Bombers romped through the home and away season and finals with a mere one loss, when they got caught napping in one game. They were seemingly unstoppable.
Now I find myself wondering if the Geelong Cats, less than a decade later, can pull off another fairy tale season. They've just beat their closest competitor... and they've only lost one game. Can anyone stop them one more time this season?
Lili, Claudette, Erika, Emily, Rita all rated mentions here, and a couple even warranted shutting down the University.
But Dolly was the first where the action was justified. I am taking some perverse enjoyment in that it was not a false alarm situation.
Wednesday morning was cloudy and rainy, but by afternoon, it was definitely a storm. Nothing all that fearful if you were inside, for the most part, but not something you'd want to be outside in.
We lost power about 6:45 pm yesterday, and didn't get it back until about 1:30 pm today. If it wasn't for the power loss, we would have been largely unaffected.
When I got up this morning, however, it was clear that Dolly had a bit more oomph that I'd thought.
No, the picture below wasn't taken in the middle of the storm. It's not windy at all. I'm pretty sure it wasn't at that angle last I looked...
Most of the roadways were clear in the area around our apartment, but it was clear that it had rained. Campus is going to be a mosquito breeding ground for a day or two, I'll bet.
Was surprised to see this big palm on its side on campus. Palms usually don't move.
Some businesses near campus were open, but some damage was visible.
So when I read this post on The Daily Transcript about how SciLink is plotting relationships between researchers, I had to get me some of that. I joined right away and already found some interesting links between myself and some other researchers through our former mentors.
This is a phylogeny of most known dinosaur species. While I appreciate the scientific information it contains, I also enjoy it just as a piece of graphic design. I'm tempted to make it one of my "Classic graphics" columns, but maybe that will be for another time.
Tropical storm Dolly is heading roughly this way, and they're saying it's liable to become a hurricane. I am not terribly concerned, as it looks like this will just amount to being windy and rainy for a day or so.
Additional: The university is closing shop for two days. A chance to get some uninterrupted writing time in, mayhaps.
Illiteracy is the inability to read with any proficiency. The use of the word goes back to the 1600s.
Innumeracy is an inability to use mathematics with any proficiency. This word was coined in the 1980s.
I know of no similar word to describe an inability to read, create, and understand information graphically.
I am thinking about this now because I am awake very late at night working on a graph to help out a student. The images are the graphical equivalent of a student handing in a written assignment in LOLspeak.
I wonder how many people can't make head or tails of a simple X/Y scatterplot?
Texas Education Agency's Don McLeroy continues his efforts to fool people, as documented in this article in The Bryan/College Station Eagle.
The thinktank called the Discovery Institute has a new dodge around the American constitution. They're tell people to put in discussion of "strengths and weaknesses" in the teaching of evolution. Texas has had such language for a while.
Don McLeroy, a creationist and the chairman of the state board, said he would make it a priority to keep the phrase in the state science curriculum.
"It (strengths and weaknesses -ZF) was written for evolution, and everybody admits that," he said. "They say we're trying to put in creationism. We're not. To me, this whole evolution controversy is a distraction."
McLeroy is the one making distractions. The "strengths and weaknesses" phrasing specifically targets evolution, but McLeroy won't say why, of all the science that gets taught in schools, evolution is singled out. Because he knows he can't, because it's clearly about attacking and undermining evolution and thereby indirectly promoting fundamentalist religion.
The article goes on to say that local teachers interviewed for the approve of teaching strengths and weaknesses, but for all sciences. McLeroy's quote shows the motivations have nothing to do with science.
I listen to lots of science radio on my iPod while I'm walking to work. Dr. Karl's phone in show on Triple J is an interesting case. When you listen on a regular basis, certain themes and questions emerge over the weeks. For instance, the question of "What would happen if you drilled a hole all the way through the Earth and dropped something down it?" is something that way more people are concerned about than I ever would have expected.
I'm interested that on a fairly routine basis, some listener has a go on climate change, expressing doubts about some aspect of the scientific consensus.
This puzzles me.
In understand why people dispute accepted science on medical issues. Their health or the health of loved ones are often at stake. That's a powerful motivator.
I understand why people dispute accepted science on evolution. It conflicts with some religious beliefs. That's a powerful motivator.
I understand why some people in the energy industry will dispute accepted science on climate change. They have vested interests and make their living from fossil fuels.
I don't understand why the average person on the street, so to speak, would feel compelled to dispute accepted science on climate change. What's in it for them? Which of their beliefs does man-made climate change challenge that compels them to "push back," so to speak?
Are we supposed to walk door to door with a copy of On the Origin of Species in hand and as people, "Have you considered the benefits of rational empiricism to society?"
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
