Carnivals for June 2011

Encephalon #87 is up at Cephalove.

Carnival of Evolution #36 is at Greg Laden’s Blog.

Blog carnivals are falling upon hard times, with several long-running ones shutting up shop. So I am unsure as to how often I will have the opportunity to do these little round-ups of the carnivals related to the main topics in this blog.

What the Coburn report has in common with arsenic life

Last week saw two big science stories hit that at first glance are unrelated. But I think they are symptomatic of the same underlying attitudes and problems.

First was Senator Coburn’s report on the National Science Foundation, which I covered here.

In response, the Los Angeles Time ran this excellent article about “Duh science.” It talks about why people often resist “what everyone knows.”

(C)onsider the case of Harvard sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler, who has spent about $3 million over the years demonstrating over and over that doctors who don’t get enough sleep make mistakes on the job. ...

Everyone had an anecdote. Czeisler had data. “It was dismissed out of hand,” he said. “They use the same argument over and over, even when we”ve tested it. It drives me up the wall.”

The researcher who built the treadmill for the shrimp, David Scholnick, explains (defends) his research in this article in The Toronto Star.

Second was the publication of a series of technical comments on the “arsenic life” paper by Wolfe-Simon and colleagues (editor’s comment here). Lots of commentary has emerged, again, but I was particularly struck by Ericka Check Hayden’s article in Nature, where several people bluntly say that they don’t want to replicate the work.

(M)ost labs are too busy with their own work to spend time replicating work that they feel is fundamentally flawed, and it’s not likely to be published in high-impact journals. So principal investigators are reluctant to spend their resources, and their students’ time, replicating the work.

“If you extended the results to show there is no detectable arsenic, where could you publish that?” said Simon Silver of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who critiqued the work in FEMS Microbiology Letters in January and on 24 May at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans. “How could the young person who was asked to do that work ever get a job?” Silver said.

I think there’s something unstated in Silver’s quote. He’s probably asking, “How could someone doing that work get a tenure-track job in a major research university?” Not everyone aspires to that goal.

Refuting another scientist's work also takes time that scientists could be spending on their own research. For instance, Helmann says he is in the process of installing a highly sensitive mass spectrometry machine capable of measuring very small amounts of elements. But, he says, “I’ve got my own science to do.”

This is bad news for science all round. This entry by PZ Myers beat me to it:

I'm suggesting that they are symptoms of something rotten in the world of science. Testing claims ought to be what we do. If the journals are going to fill up with positive claims thanks to the file-drawer effect, and if nobody ever wants to evaluate those claims, and if negative results are unpublishable, the literature is going to decline in utility for lack of rigor and evaluation.

And even if researchers are willing to do the replication, journal editors don’t seem to see this as important. An excellent recent example detailed by Ben Goldacre was the publication of findings that seemed to suggest precognition. The author, Daryl Bem, correctly realized this was an extraordinary claim, and in his paper, stressed the importance of other labs trying to repeat the finding.

The journal wouldn’t publish the papers. The journal seemed to have a blanket policy (informal or not, I don’t know) not to publish replications.

I’ll add this. Of all the papers I’ve published so far, by far the hardest one to get into print was a replication.

The common link to these two stories?

Both are about the tension between wanting breakthroughs and the reality that science usually progresses in slow, hard fought, millimeter by millimeter increments.

Politicians wants breakthroughs because they see anything else as a waste of taxpayer money. Consequently, it’s easy to look in and see a single research project as stupid because you have no context.

Scientists want breakthroughs because discoveries can make careers. It’s no accident that the arsenic tolerant bacteria’s name is an acronym for “Give Felisa A Job.”

Lots of people (including editors) overwhelmingly want the breakthrough, the identifiable “Eureka!” moments. We need tell more stories of scientific progress that unfolds over years and decades, which is a great opportunity for bloggers.

Related posts

Tales to astonish
Original and transformative
My posts on arsenic life here, here and here.

Photo by quarksteilchen on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments for second half of May 2011

Biochem Belle takes on acronyms.

Eva Amsen at the Expression Patterns blog asked if people preferred giving talks or posters. The winner, by about a three to one margin, was a talk. Since I’m the guy writing the Better Posters blog, you know I’ve got something to say.

Mo at Neurophilosophy has nice coverage about what early mammal fossils tell us about the evolution of brains in that group.

Gerty Z at Balanced Instability wonders if a new faculty members should spend time writing papers or grants. She also wonders how to hire post-docs.

Looniechemist asks how often we Ph.D. types swing around our big fancy academic titles.

Pro-Like Substance nails the importance of reminders for academics.

Dr. Micro O is plenty steamed by Senator Coburn’s report on NSF spending. Steve Silberman also comments about it. Namnezia also shows what it reveals about the political understanding of science.

Mike the Mad Biologist offers advice on posters. Something so important, it should have a blog of its own.

Neuroself looks at author Jonah Lehrer and concludes he is not a neuroscientist. Chad Orzel then tackles some of the conclusions within that post and finds them wanting. Criticism is the only antidote to error. And that’s why I like both posts.

Texas intelligent design bill is dead

Bill Zedler’s bill to protect university professors doing intelligent design research went nowhere, according to the National Center for Science Education.

Update, 15 April 2013: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Tuesday Crustie: Treadmill superstar

This species has been the subject of renewed interest since the release of a report last week criticizing the National Science Foundation, as shrimp research was something of a poster child for “questionable” projects.

What species is the shrimp in the video? According to the abstract, it’s probably Litopenaeus vannamei (formerly Penaeus vannamei), a Pacific shrimp.

If you’ve seen one of the shrimp on a treadmill videos, you know this animal is not always clear. This particular one is, I suspect, very young, which is why it is transparent. It’s been well fed, which you can tell from the fact that you can see its entire digestive system running through its body.

Photo from here.

How my ethics of brain scanning paper was overtaken by events

I know my most recent paper is probably going take some flak as being naïve.

This is the price you pay for trying to expand your horizons. An invert neuro guy writing an ethics paper? About brain scans? In humans? With spies? The potential to look foolish is huge.

But since I’ve gone and done it anyway, let me tell you how it all came about.

This paper started about three years when I ran into my colleague Cynthia Jones at lunch at the student union. I actually hadn’t seen her for a while. She looked rather different than when I’d last seen her, and she thought I didn’t recognize her (this had been happening to her a lot), but I was just feeling particularly grumpy then. She had just launched an ethics center.^* Over my sandwich and chips, she started telling me about this ethics conference that she was organizing about the intelligence community. Less formally, this is the spy community.

I mentioned my interest in brain scans and the possibilities for extracting information. After all, I’d already given a Brain Awareness Week talk about it in 2006. (Indeed, if you listen to the talk from five years ago, you’ll hear some very similar phrases to those in the paper.) Cynthia invited me to give a presentation at the conference.

The conference took place in November 2008, which I wrote about here.

It was always the plan collect papers from the conference in theme issues of Global Virtue Ethics Review, which has its editorial office at my university. For various reasons, the editorial process was... lengthy. I submitted the manuscript over a year ago.

Because of that lead time, my manuscript was overtaken by events.

In a lot of cases, that time from submission to publication actually wouldn’t matter very much. But because the research on brain imaging is so abundant and moving so fast, I knew this paper would have a “use by” date. Indeed, on the first page, I wrote:

(T)his review is only a single snapshot of a rapidly moving target.

But even I didn’t expect some findings coming out that would be so relevant, and, had I known then what I know now, would have substantially dampened the tone of my article.

Many people think that brain scans are being oversold, and that a lot of distinctly dodgy stuff is being pushed out there about what brain scans are able to do. My paper seems fairly optimistic in comparison about the future potential of brain scans to detect covert information.

I’m feeling rather less optimistic these days. In particular, a paper by Ganis and colleagues (2011) showed that there are some dead simple countermeasures that will make the detection of deception way more difficult than I thought.

You can also see similar limitations in this interview with Jesse Rissman (my emphasis).

We could tell quite reliably whether people thought each face was familiar or new, but we couldn’t tell the true status of the memory. When we tried to distinguish faces the person had seen from those he hadn’t, we were correct less than 60 percent of the time. ... The idea that our brain contains a veridical record of our experiences is, I think, fanciful.

This runs counter to some research I cite in my paper that suggested it might be possible to distinguish true from false memories. (In fact, that was the finding by Slotnick and Schacter in 2004 that first got me tracking brain imaging research at more than a casual level.)

If I were to rewrite the paper now, many of the arguments would stay the same, but the tone of the paper would be much more pessimistic about how soon or even how likely it is that we could move out of the pure research stage on the detection of deception.

Still, another new paper that just hit (Shirer et al. 2011) pushes me back to thinking this might truly be a viable enterprise. (I just found the reference as I’m writing this, so can’t comment in detail on it yet.)

Nevertheless, there is still a lot that I’m very happy about in my new paper. For instance, I like a bit where I argue that fMRI is already acting as a “mind reader,” from a certain point of view. Since then, I’ve drawn the distinction between “mind reading” (determining a subjective mental state) and “telepathy” (determining someone’s stream of conscious verbal thought), a distinction I wish I could have got into the paper.

While I may be able to make some excuses for scientific naïvite on lead time and new research, I know I am still taking a risk on the ethics side. I hope that the discussion there is reasonably sophisticated, but I am now ready to take any lumps thrown my way regardless.

Additional:  The same day my article went online, Nature reported that the American Department of Homeland Security has been testing devices to detect people’s intent to carry out a “disruptive act.” This swings me towards the cynical again, as even at my most optimistic, I would not be field testing something like this yet.

References

Faulkes Z. 2011. Can brain imaging replace interrogation and torture? Global Virtue Ethics Review 6(2): 55-78. http://www.spaef.com/article.php?id=1266

Ganis G, Rosenfeld JP, Meixner J, Kievit RA, Schendan HE. 2011. Lying in the scanner: Covert countermeasures disrupt deception detection by functional magnetic resonance imaging. NeuroImage 55(1): 312-319. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.11.025

Rissman J, Greely HT, Wagner AD. 2010. Detecting individual memories through the neural decoding of memory states and past experience. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107: 9849-9854. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1001028107

Shirer W, Ryali S, Rykhlevskaia E, Menon V, Greicius M. 2011. Decoding subject-driven cognitive states with whole-brain connectivity patterns. Cerebral Cortex: In press. DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhr099

Slotnick S, Schacter D. 2004. A sensory signature that distinguishes true from false memories. Nature Neuroscience 7(6): 664-672. DOI: 10.1038/nn1252

Photo by by scott ziegler on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

^* It’s officially a “collaborative,” because apparently “center” has some special administrative meaning.

Texas State Board of Education looking for a new chair

The Texas State Board of Education will need a new chair, according to the Dallas News. The current one, Gail Lowe, wasn’t approved by the Texas senate. This appears to be continuing fallout from the last few years of the Board’s K-12 education standards, which attracted national attention for their unabashed conservative nature and the often unusual processes used to pass them.

Lowe was less vocal than previous chair (and sound bite master) Don McLeroy, but was solidly voting along the same lines on issues before the Board.

Sexy eyes? Estrogen in the visual system

Neurotransmitters get all the glory as the most interesting molecules in the nervous system. They are responsible for the fast signalling between two neurons; things that are all over in a few milliseconds.

But the nervous system is awash in chemicals, which influence neurons in many ways. Hormones, for instance, influence behaviour by acting on nervous systems.

It’s a little unusual, though, to think of brains making their own hormones. Oh, sure, the pituitary gland sits right next to brains in mammals, but it’s still generally considered an endocrine gland rather than neural tissue.

I was therefore intrigued by a new paper showing that the visual cortex in mice makes estrogen, which is a classic sex hormone, and responds to it. The evidence is quite straightforward for some of the story. Jeong and colleagues used fluorescent labels for messenger RNA for the chemical to show that neurons make it (left column in figure), and another fluorescent label for the messenger RNA of estrogen receptors to show that the neurons were able to detect it (middle and right columns).

The production of the estrogen doesn’t seem to be dependent on, or affected by, by visual experience. Mice raised in the dark had the same density of estrogen-producing neurons in three different areas of the visual cortex. Similarly, there was no change in that density when mice were given different degrees of visual stimulation after being placed temporarily in the dark.

What is this brain-produced estrogen doing to vision? Not clear yet, but there seem to be analogs in other brain regions. Estrogen affects auditory cortex in mice, and can alter the physiology of neurons in the hippocampus. The effects may be subtle, and might not have noticeable perceptual consequences for the mice.

Reference

Jeong J, Tremere L, Burrows K, Majewska A, Pinaud R. 2011. The mouse primary visual cortex is a site of production and sensitivity to estrogens. PLoS ONE 6(5): e20400. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0020400

My latest cameo

I make an appearance at the start of the 18 May edition of Dr. Karl’s weekly call in show on Triple J. Sort of.

In the previous week’s show (12 May), a caller asked if insects had pain receptors. Karl said he expected that they did, but he didn’t know any peer-reviewed papers on the subject.

As soon as I heard that on my iPod, I hopped on to Twitter and sent Karl the link to this paper:

Tracey WD, Jr., Wilson RI, Laurent G, Benzer S. 2003. painless, a Drosophila gene essential for nociception. Cell 113: 261-273. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0092-8674(03)00272-1

Karl was kind enough to mention this at the start of the show. Another crisis averted!

Here’s a direct link to the mp3 of the “answer” podcast; my thing is literally the first. The “question” show is here.

Before you attack science, could you at least learn to use Google?

Here we go again.

It is a long established trick of politicians in opposition to mock research funding as a waste. The latest in this depressingly regular sideshow comes from Tom Coburn, who is weirdly aided by ABC news, labelling his criticisms as “exclusive.”

And yeah, it’s kind of personal for me. Because their first example is... crustacean research. And it’s even kind of related to locomotion, which is what I did my Ph.D. on.

You've probably heard of shrimp on the barbie, but what about shrimp on a treadmill?

The National Science Foundation has, and it spent $500,000 of taxpayer money researching it. It’s not entirely clear what this research hoped to establish, but it’s one of a number of projects cited in a scathing new report from Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, exclusively obtained by ABC News.

“Not entirely clear”? Your interns have let you down, ABC, so let me Google that for you! Shrimp on a treadmill is a full-blown internet meme thanks to a variety of musical remixes of the researcher video.


There were at least 60 of these a few years back; who knows how many there are now.

But what about the science? Is the reason for the research buried behind a paywall in an obscure journal somewhere?

No. In fact, because of the popularity of the shrimp music videos, the research was covered all over the place: in The Telegraph, MSNBC, and Live Science, to name just a few.

The researchers were on the Today Show talking about this, for crying out loud! Do you know how many crustacean researchers get to be on nationally televised morning shows? Not many. These two may be it. (I’m jealous; I would love to have that kind of opportunity.)

Or, for that matter, did anyone think of looking at the NSF’s award page to find what the researchers wanted to accomplish? Because a little search of “shrimp performance” plus the popular press clippings led me straight to this abstract that says exactly what the researchers wanted to achieve.

It is expected that these studies will show that, at least among crustaceans, the immune response itself may make it more difficult for an organism to respond to hypoxic environments or to engage in significant physical activity. While engaged in this research, which addresses questions related to the health of ecologically and economically important species, these investigators will continue to teach, train and publish with students from four primarily undergraduate institutions in the US.

The researchers want to study how sick shrimp are able to move around and do stuff.

So what? We want healthy shrimp so we can eat them. The shrimp fishery is a multi-million dollar industry in the United States alone. This research clearly has implications for the management and health of that fishery, and therefore, the jobs of all those who catch shrimp and prepare shrimp.

The abstract also points out that this research didn’t just pay for the shrimp and the treadmill; it supported undergraduates from four different universities to get them involved in research. It wouldn’t surprise me if a large chunk of that money was to employ students.

This is the second time in recent memory that crustacean research specifically has been selected as a target. Former presidential candidate John McCain made fun of lobster research. It’s weird that they keep picking on research that is easily related to things like fisheries; the NSF funds things that are way more esoteric.

Are you just bitter, ABC, because NBC beat you to the story?

Are you just bitter, Republicans, because the shrimp on a treadmill videos get more YouTube hits than yours do?

Additional, 27 May: The Science policy blog has an analysis of the report.

But the report, The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope, is itself filled with errors and questionable analyses, say science lobbyists.

More additional, 27 May: More scientists defending their research.

Still more additional, 31 May: We have lost.

Update, 30 May 2014: This has apparently appeared in the U.S. House of Representatives again, so I’d like to remind people that the treadmill in question was built from $48 in spare parts.

External links

Why it’s important to study shrimp on a treadmill

A quick in-class critical thinking demo

In one of my recent classes, I wanted to start off with a quick exercise to get people thinking about hypothesis testing and critical thinking. I used a demo that are used to hawk balance and power bracelets and “applied kinesiology.”

In brief, you have someone stand on one foot with both arms extended sideways. You press down on one arm, and they tend to fall over. Then, you give them a gizmo of some sort (I used a rubber band), and repeat the test, and people find they don’t fall over anywhere near as easily. A video is below; another quite good one is here.


The trick is a very slight difference in the direction you press. To make them fall off, you press slightly outward from their body; to keep them balanced, you press every so slightly towards their body.

I did this in class, having seen the video but never having done this before. I went through four or five different volunteers, and was able to get the effect every time.

Nobody believed that my rubber band was the cause of the difference. When I asked people for ideas as to what was going on, several of them could be easily tested on the spot. One person suggested I had placed my hands in different locations in the two tests. I got a new volunteer, placed my hands very precisely in the same spot, and was able to tip or not tip them at will.

One suggested a placebo effect. Problem: None of the people I gave the rubber band to believed the rubber band was the cause, which made it hard to argue that it was a placebo.

We also talked a bit about the mechanisms that some bracelet makers propose for how their bracelets are supposed to improve balance. Some invoked things like “natural energy fields” or “life energy,” which was a great lead in to talk about how living things differ from non-living things. Do living things have some sort of energy that non-living things don’t?

Eventually, one person near the very front of the class figured out what I was doing. I think that with a little practice, though, it would be very difficult to detect.

In summary, this is easy to do, requires nothing but a student volunteer, and is a great jumping off point for all kinds of discussions about hypothesis testing, evidence, mechanisms, and lots more.

That you get to push people around is just a bonus.

More for those that have the most?

A little more evidence that institutions are not interested in a level playing field.

Larry Faulkner, the former president of UT-Austin... wants more funding for the great universities.

Not all universities. The great ones.

That’s from a report on a panel discussion about research universities in Texas in The Texas Tribune.

Not only are people saying that the institutions with the most money should get even more money, they also want the most promising talent pool funneled into them too:

Rex Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil... argued that there was a need to “differentiate” in terms of placement of students in universities — i.e., to make sure that the best students go to well-funded, top universities, as opposed to trying to help everyone equally.

... He added: “If we want to take advantage of our great research universities, we cannot burden them with remedial education.”

A reason that teaching is seen as a “burden” is because there are not enough professors. Open up tenure-track positions. Many hands make light work. (I understand this is not a popular option for universities right now, because there is a push to cut instead of invest.)

Ray Bowen, the chairman of the National Science Board and the former president of Texas A&M, said that Texas faced a “unique problem,” because many of our brightest students go out of state as a result of the state’s lack of research universities.

I’d be interested to see the data supporting that statement. I doubt the vast majority of high school students are looking around going, “I dunno, that department didn’t have enough Nature papers over the last five years...”

It is always interesting to watch those with power and money argue that they need even more power and more money.

Related posts
Inclining the playing field
Balkanizing small universities
To have and have not. Mostly not.

Tuesday Crustie: Work of a master

Apparently someone attacked its weak spot... for massive damage!

Although many crustaceans are beautiful, it’s rare to find them as subjects of art, particularly paintings by the masters. This particular rendition by Van Gogh of a brachyuran crab is fairly anatomically accurate. It’s unfortunate he immortalized the crab in such an uncompromising position.

You can see the framed versions of these works in photographs here and here.

Third 3 Quarks Daily blogging contest

3 Quarks Daily is once again accepting nominations for their regular science blogging contest. A thousand dollars (presumably American ones) for the winning entry!

Nominations close 31 May.

Catching a fly with a dragonfly eye

Dragonflies are visual predators, able to catch other flying insects in mid-air, mid-flight, as the video below shows.



They don’t miss very often. Dragonflies hit what they aim at.

What makes this visually guided, in flight navigation even more remarkable is that you and I might look at a typical dragonfly environment and see something like this (and yes, there is a dragonfly in there):

A dragonfly looking at the view might see something more like this:

This is about one sixtieth the resolution of the original. Dragonfly eyes are probably even lower resolution than that.

To catch prey as they do, dragonflies have a series of neurons in their brains that are highly tuned to specific properties in their visual field. A lot of progress has been made studying these cells with very abstract, precisely controlled visual stimuli in the lab. But the real world that the dragonfly has to navigate is one of booming, buzzing confusion. How do these neurons compute in such messy real world settings?

Wiederman and O’Carroll examined this with a visual neuron given the descriptive but uninspiring name of Centrifugal Small Target Motion Detector 1 (CSTMD1). Using 360° pictures of a woodland and a parking garage (‽), they placed a small black square that was predicted to drive the visual neuron bonkers. There were also some natural “distractors” in the image, and Wiederman and O’Carroll were able to photoshop those out to see the difference in response.

These sorts of results are probably best appreciated in relatively raw form (slightly modified version part of their Figure 2; click to enlarge). There's a lot going on here, but I’ll walk you through it.

At the top is the picture they used. There are three “targets” expected to make CSTMD1 fire at high frequency, indicated by the three vertical lines. The first on the left is a set of leaves, the middle one is a tree stump, and the right one is the “perfect” stimulus added by the experimenters to the scene.

The three boxes with red and black tick marks show when the CSTMD1 neuron is firing an action potential. Each row is one pass of the photograph. Each animal was tested multiple times, and each animal’s data is grouped together by alternating colours. All the recordings from one animal are in black, the recordings from the second animal are grouped together in red, and the recordings from a third animal are back in black again.

The lines on top of the boxes show the averaged firing rates of the neuron.

The CSTMD1 has a little spontaneous activity, but you can definitely see the responses on the neuron as the visual field passes over the targets. Keep in mind that the CSTMD1 neuron in an interneuron in the brain, not a simply sensory cell in the eye. It is receiving and integrating input from many photoreceptors in the eyes, which is why the response to the targets is wider than the targets themselves.

These data show that this neuron is able to filter out a substantial amount of visual “noise” from the environment.

The second box is interesting, because it shows the response to the tree stump is enhanced when the “perfect” target that the experimenters added is taken out of the picture. The reason for this seems to be that the left CSTMD1 neuron gets inhibited by the right CSTMD1 neuron. Again, because these neurons integrate information over a wide field, the presence of a strong target on the left side can dampen the response to a stimulus on the right side.

The authors don’t have an explanation, though, for why the response to the tree stump gets smaller when the leaves are retouched out of the photo (third box). There are obviously some other influences on this neuron that haven’t been documented yet, and Wiederman and O’Carroll suggest this is a good reason to keep making computer models of these circuits to track all these influences.

This paper is a nice demonstration of how neuroethological research can slowly move from completely artificial lab settings back into the things that we want to know about: behaviour in a natural setting. We’re not there with dragonflies yet, but we’re getting closer. The next step would be to present dragonflies with naturalistic video instead of just still pictures, especially videos with moving prey items flitting about. Or better yet, take the recording rigs outside and do some science in the sun.

Related posts

Neurons in the wild
For new brain cells, go to the wild

Reference

Wiederman S, O'Carroll D. 2011. Discrimination of features in natural scenes by a dragonfly neuron. The Journal of Neuroscience 31(19): 7141-7144. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0970-11.2011

Photo by freeform systems on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 41: Consistency

I spend a fair amount of time reviewing students’ PowerPoint presentations. The thing I probably spend the most time fixing is not their science, but their friggin’ lists of bullet points.^*

I often see bulleted lists like this:

• Readers distracted by content of a page when looking at its layout.
• Lorem Ipsum Looks Like Readable English.
• Now default for desktop publisher and web page editors

Two points have sentence casing; one has headline casing. Two have periods; one does not. For a list of short points, it doesn’t matter if you put a period at the end of each point or not. But could you at least do it consistently?

To make matters worse, people often end up changing typefaces without realizing it. And point size. And sometimes colours. Longer pieces of text will be ragged right on one slide and justified on the next.

Consistency becomes harder as you add more slides. I often see a series of slides with the title containing some abbreviation of “continued”. But sometimes it will be “Con’t”, sometimes “cont”, then “Con’t.”, followed by “(con't)”. I think I have seen every permutation of four letters and punctuation marks that it is possible to make.

Maintaining consistency becomes downright treacherous when you are creating presentations with several pieces of software. For instance, you might use Verdana as a typeface throughout your PowerPoint slides... but then forget that your Excel chart has the axes labelled in Arial.

Does anyone notice? For scientific or technical presentations, the answer is almost certainly, “Yes.” The audience is going to be filled with people whose livelihood depends on obsessing over details.

You want your audience to believe that you are someone who cares about details. Being consistent in your typography and slide design shows you are paying attention.

Pick a style and stay with it!

^* I try to tell them to get rid of all those damn lists that everyone hates, but they’re all too scared. Wusses.

Photo by britl on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Tuesday Crustie: But did it wear loud shirts?

Next month, The Crustacean Society will be holding its summer meeting in Hawaii. While nobody would be surprised by the number of crustaceans in the waters around Hawaii, there is something surprising about the islands’ crustaceans.

There are no land crabs.

This is surprising, because land crabs are common on other Pacific islands. Is Hawaii just too young for crabs to have invaded the island and evolve into a terrestrial form?

Hawaii is young geologically, but it’s not that young. There are no land crabs on the island now – but there used to be.

The picture above shows a new species found on Hawaii, Geograpsus severnsi. (Scale bar is 1 cm.) I use the term “new” only in the sense of “new to science.” These are actually fossil remains, dating back to before human colonization of Hawaii a few thousand years ago. The fossils are found inland at quite high elevations, indicating that this was primarily a terrestrial species.

Based on the fossils, Geograpsus severnsi appears to have been an offshoot of Geograpsis grayi, which still survives and is found across much of the western Pacific. Geograpsus severnsi seems to have been abundant on Hawaii before humans arrived, but promptly took a nose dive into oblivion once humans arrived on the scene. Coincidence? While humans may not be directly to blame for the crab going extinct by hunting them to extinction, those early settlers may have brought in rats, dogs, or pigs that could have contributed to the end of this species.

Reference

Paulay G, Starmer J. 2011. Evolution, insular restriction, and extinction of Oceanic land crabs, exemplified by the loss of an endemic Geograpsus in the Hawaiian islands. PLoS ONE 6(5): e19916. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019916

Who might be reviewing Texas science supplements?

The Texas Freedom Network is reporting on the list of reviewers of supplemental biology materials for Texas K-12 science classes. A PDF of the list of nominees is here.

Some people are educators, both at the university and K-12 level, several of whom have expertise in biology. Other nominees, to my untrained eye, seem... odd. We have as suggested reviewers people whose affiliations are Dell, retired (no indication of experience), and “Law offices of Albert Wai-Kit Chan,” and “Accudata Systems.”

The Texas Freedom Network, who watches these things more closely than I, pegs three of them as creationists.

If you want to peek at supplemental material that has generated the most discussion, Mother Jones shows a picture from the proposed supplemental material from International Databases. So does Care 2. Even putting aside the content issues, the presentation looks amateurish.

And finally, we have another case of where all of this maneuvers are making the state of Texas look bad – even when it isn’t deserved!

Bill Allen at The Huffington Post repeats this untruth about Texas:

After all, this is the State where that political board proposed, among other things: (snip)

6. To mandate that teachers give the religious-based, factually-bereft fiction of creationism equal footing with evolution, the basic organizing principle of all modern biology.

That is false, if Allen is referring to what has been happening in the last four years. There was never any mandate to put creationism into the Texas K-12 science standards. Indeed, Don McLeroy (former chair of the Board) was said:

McLeroy insists he doesn’t have any desire to have creationism taught in classrooms. “It’s a religious philosophy,” he says. “It doesn’t belong in schools. Same with intelligent design. Evolution is the scientific consensus, so we’ll teach that.”

Yes, the Board of Education weakened the standards on evolution in ways sympathetic to creationism and intelligent design. The creationists on the State Board of Education were quite adept in their dealings with the science standards.

The point is that Texas is perceived as a place where the teaching of creationism has been officially approved by the state. This is not a good perception for a state that wants to attract high tech business. And I fear that eventually, some poor teacher is going to think it’s okay to teach creationism, and is going to get sued.

Supertouch

The superhero Daredevil had few powers. His fighting abilities and roof-running were the result of Matt Murdock’s athleticism and a technological ingenuity (DD’s self-made billy club). His true superpowers were his hyper-keen senses (click to enlarge):

The irony, of course, was that the bad guys never knew they were getting taken down by a blind man.

Daredevil’s story follows the belief that if you lose one sense, the others become more sensitive to compensate. This belief is old and common, and in a way, shows that we must have had some inkling about brain plasticity much more than 20 years ago.

If this is so, how does that compensation happen? Is it just a case that those brain centers used for vision automatically repurpose themselves for other sensory modes? Or could it be something more mundane? Blind people are better at some sensory tasks because they practice, practice, practice.

To test this, Wong and colleagues examined the ability of three groups of individuals to detect changes by touch: sighted people, people who were blind, and people who were blind and read Braille.

Of course, this is a simplification, because the blind participants were a very mixed group. Some had been blind since birth, while others had been born with normal vision. Not everyone was equally proficient with Braille.

The test they used was to determine the position of a slotted rod (right). All three groups performed this touch test using their fingertips, and with their lips. (I’m assuming that’s what’s shown in the lower right... though I have never personally seen lips quite that shape.) Using the lips provided a way to test if any differences in touch sensitivity of the Braille readers were due to an increase in touch sensitivity across the board, or if any improvements were found only in the fingertips.

The myth of blind people having sharper senses? Plausible.

There is not an overall enhancement of touch across the board. Blind people did better on the touch task for the fingers, but not with the lips. Further, the more proficient the blind person was with Braille, the better they performed on the task. The results pointed to practice being an important factor – maybe the most important factor – in this increased sensitivity.

Because this paper is in The Journal of Neuroscience, you might expect it to present some data on how the brains of these groups differ. I expected to see some fMRI scans or something similar. To my surprise, there are no brains or neurons or spikes in the methods or results of this paper. It’s straight psychophysics. Next paper, maybe?

This paper is good news for everyone who wants to be a hero. It says that you don’t need to lose your sight to an accidental mysterious toxic waste spill to improve all your other senses. You need dedicated practice. And that’s something that anyone can do.

Reference

Wong M, Gnanakumaran V, Goldreich D. 2011. Tactile spatial acuity enhancement in blindness: evidence for experience-dependent mechanisms. The Journal of Neuroscience 31(19): 7028-7037. DOI: 10.1523/​JNEUROSCI.6461-10.2011

Comments for first half of May 2011

Dr. Micro O looks at the concept of academic pedigrees.

Michelle at C6-H12-O6 does a nice job explaining how mosquitoes withstand the heat of the blood they drink.