Innovation must be accompanied by education

When Apple launched the iPod, the company had to put a lot of effort into educating people about digital music.

Mr. Jobs pulled the white, rectangular device out of the front pocket of his jeans and held it up for the audience. Polite applause. Many looked like they didn’t get it.

That was just fine with Mr. Jobs. They’d understand soon enough.

Apple had to inform the mass market that digital downloads could be legal (remember Napster?). They had to let people know how much music you could have with you. They had to let people know about the iTunes store. Without all those pieces of the puzzle, the iPod would have tanked.

I was reminded of these scene when Timothy Verstynan asked:

Why can’t we have a scientific journal where, instead of PDFs, papers are published as @ProjectJupyter notebooks (say using Binders), with full access to the data & code used to generate the figures/main results? What current barriers are preventing that?

I follow scientific publishing at a moderate level. I write about it. I’m generally interested in it. And I have no idea what Jupyter notebooks and binders are. If I don’t know about it, I can guarantee that nobody else in my department will have the foggiest idea.

This is a recurring problem with discussions around reforming or innovating in scientific publishing. The level of interest and innovation and passion around new publication ideas just doesn’t reach a wide community.

I think that this is because those people interested might undervalue the importance of educating other scientists about their ideas. Randy Olson talks a lot about how scientists are cheapskates with their communications budgets. They just don’t think it¤s important, and assume the superiority of the ideas will carry the day.

I’ve talked with colleagues about open access many times, and discover over and over that people have huge misconceptions about what open access is and how it works. And open access is something that has been around for a decade and has been written about a lot.

Publishing reformers drop the iPod, but don’t do the legwork to tell people how the iPod works.

So to answer Timothy’s initial question: the current barrier is ignorance.

What defines a brain?

A side effect of my bafflement yesterday over how lobsters became some sort of strange right-wing analogy for the rightness of there being winners and losers (or something) was getting into a discussion about whether lobsters have brains.

That decapod crustaceans are brainless is a claim I have seen repeated many times, often in the service of the claim that lobsters cannot feel pain. This article, refuting Jordan Peterson, said:

(L)obsters don’t even have a brain, just an aglomerate of nerve endings called ganglia.

This is a bad description of ganglia. It makes it sound like there are no cell bodies in ganglia, where there usually are. Here are some. This is from the abdominal ganglion of Louisiana red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii):

These show cell bodies of leg motor neurons from several species (sand crabs and crayfish, I think; these pics go back to my doctoral work).

These are neurons in a ganglion from a slipper lobster (Ibacus peronii), where those big black cell bodies are very easy to see:

And these are leg motor neurons in slipper lobster:

And there is substantial structure within that alleged “not a brain” in the front:

And we’re know this for well over a century, as this drawing from 1890 by master neuroanatomist Gustav Retzius shows:

So ganglia are more than “nerve endings.” So putting that aside, are there other features that make brains, brains?

Intuitively, when I think about brains, I think of a few main features. Two anatomical, and one functional:

1. Brains are big, single cluster of neurons. Even though there may be many neurons in, say, the digestive system (and there are not as many as some people claim), it’s so diffuse that nobody would call it a brain.
2. It’s in the head, near lots of sensory organs. In humans, our brain is right next door to our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, which covers a lot of the old-fashioned senses.
3. It’s a major coordinating center for behaviour.

Decapod crustaceans (not to mention many other invertebrates) meet all those criteria. Sure, the proportion of neurons in the decapod crustacean brain may be smaller than vertebrates, but I have never seen a generally agreed upon amount of neural tissue that something must have to be a brain instead of a “ganglion in the front of the animal.”

I have a sneaking suspicion that some people will argue that only vertebrates can have brains because we are vertebrates, and vertebrates must be special, because we are vertebrates. That is, people will define brains in a way to stroke human egos.
 And, as I implied above, some people make the “no brains” claim out of self-interest. I don’t think it’s any accident that I see “lobsters don’t have brains” coming from institutes that have close ties to commercial lobster fisheries.

I suppose that some could argue that limiting the word “brain” to vertebrates is a way of bringing recognizing that vertebrate and invertebrate nervous systems are structured very differently. They are, but why only do this for one part of the nervous system? This is a little bit like saying “invertebrates don’t have eyes,” because they have compound eyes instead of our camera-style eyes. We routinely give things in invertebrates and vertebrates the same names if they have the same functions.

And in practice, I see people referring to octopus brains all the time. They do so even though, like other invertebrates, a large proportion of the nervous system sits outside the brain. From memory, roughly half the neurons in an octopus reside in its arms.

In practice, I am far from the only person that calls the clump of neurons at the front end of decapod crustaceans, “brains.” From this page:

So, fellow neuroscientists, if you don’t think invertebrates can have brains, why not? What is your dividing line?

Hat tip to Hilary Gerstein.

I was unaware of how lobsters got sucked into an all-encopassing conspiracy theory

Miriam Goldstein and Bethany Brookshire burst my cosy bubble of ignorance. Today I learned  Jordan Peterson, a current darling of conservatives, drags lobsters into his mish-mash of writings to make white dudes feel good about themselves. Allow me an extended quote from this Vox article:

The book is a kind of bridge connecting his academic research on personality and his political punditry. In it, Peterson argues that the problem with society today is that too many people blame their lot in life on forces outside their control — the patriarchy, for example. By taking responsibility for yourself, and following his rules, he says, you can make your own life better.

The first chapter, about posture, begins with an extended discussion of lobsters. Lobster society, inasmuch as it exists, is characterized by territoriality and displays of dominance. Lobsters that dominate these hierarchies have more authoritative body language; weaker ones try to make themselves look smaller and less threatening to more dominant ones.

Peterson argues that humans are very much like lobsters: Our hierarchies are determined by our behaviors. If you want to be happy and powerful, he says, you need to stand up straight:

If your posture is poor, for example — if you slump, shoulders forward and rounded, chest tucked in, head down, looking small, defeated and ineffectual (protected, in theory, against attack from behind) — then you will feel small, defeated, and ineffectual. The reactions of others will amplify that. People, like lobsters, size each other up, partly in consequence of stance. If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently.

“Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back,” he concludes, in one of the book’s most popular passages.

The lobster has become a sort of symbol of his; the tens of thousands of Peterson fans on his dedicated subreddit even refer to themselves as “lobsters.”

This is classic Peterson: He loves to take stylized facts about the animal kingdom and draw a one-to-one analogy to human behavior. It also has political implications: He argues that because we evolved from lower creatures like lobsters, we inherited dominance structures from them. Inequalities of various kinds aren’t wrong; they’re natural.

“We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones,” he writes. “There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.”

Foul!

The logical fallacy is appeal to nature.

As analogies go, comparing humans to lobsters is... not a good analogy. This article provides a pretty good response, so I don’t have to. (Though I say lobsters have brains. But that doesn’t detract from the main points.)

Additional, 19 May 2018: Bailey Steinworth argues the diversity of marine invertebrate behaviour does not support Peterson’s ideas, either.

External links

Jordan Peterson, the obscure Canadian psychologist turned right-wing celebrity, explained

Psychologist Jordan Peterson says lobsters help to explain why human hierarchies exist – do they?

The impossibility of species definitions

Sad news about the death of Sudan, the last northern male white rhino, prompted some discussion about whether the northern white rhino is a species or a subspecies. The TetZoo blog has a nice look at this specific issue. I’d like to take a broader look at the whole problem of why defining species is so hard.

Arguing over what defines a species is a long-running argument in biology. It’s practically its own cottage industry. There is much effort to define species precisely, for all sorts of good reasons. And that desire for clear, precise definitions often appears on websites like Quora. Questions come up like, “If Neanderthals bred with us, doesn’t that mean, by definition, they are the same species?”

But as much as we want clear definitions in science, there is a problem. You can’t always draw sharp dividing lines on anything that is gradual. (Philosphers know this as the continuum fallacy.)

To demand a precise definition of species is like demanding to know the precise moment that a man is considered to have a beard. For instance, I think we can agree that Will Smith, in this pic from in After Earth (2013), does not have a beard:

And that in Suicide Squad (2016), Smith pretty clearly does have a beard:

But does Smith have a beard in this pic? Er... there’s definitely some facial hair there.

What is the exact average hair length that qualifies a man to be “bearded”? There isn’t one. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t meaningfully distinguish After Earth Smith from Suicide Squad Smith.

It’s a problem that Charles Darwin recognized. In Darwin’s view, speciation was going to result from the slow, gradual accumulation of tiny, near imperceptible changes. Darwin recognized that speciation was a gradual process, and he  frequently made the point that “varieties” could be considered “incipient species.” At any given point in time, some groups would be early in that process of divergence, and some would be further along.

That’s why we shouldn’t expect there to be clear, consistent species definitions that apply across the board and are helpful in every case.

External links

The last male northern white rhino has died
How Many White Rhino Species Are There? The Conversation Continues

The last round of the year

Reason I love the AFLW competition, number 2,749:

Going into this last round of the home and away season, five out of eight teams had a shot at the grand final. And no team was guaranteed a slot in the grand final.

And the mighty Demons are well placed to be one of the two teams in the final. Go the Dees!

It's going to be a series of nail-biting games, and I love it.

“Mind uploading” company will kill you for a US$10,000 deposit, and it’s as crazy as it sounds

Max Headroom was an 1980s television series that billed itself as taking place “20 minutes into the future.” In 1987, its second episode was titled, “Dieties”. It concerned a new religion, the Vu-Age church, that promised to scan your brain and store it for resurrection.

Vanna Smith: “Your church has been at the forefront of resurrection research. But resurrection is a very costly process and requires your donations. Without your generosity, we may have a long, long wait... until that glorious day... that rapturous day... when the Vu-Age laboratories perfect cloning, and reverse transfer.”

That episode suddenly feels relevant now, although it took a little longer tan 20 minutes.

On Quora, which I frequent, I often see people asking about mind uploading. My usual response is:

So I am stunned to read this article about Nectome, which, for the low deposit price of US$10,000, will kill you and promise to upload your mind somewhere, sometime, by a process that hasn’t been invented yet.

If your initial reaction was, “I can’t have read that right, because that’s crazy,” you did ready it right, and yes, it is crazy.

In fairness, it is not as crazy as it first sounds. They don’t want to kill you when you’re healthy. They are envisioning an “end of life” service when you are just at the brink of death. This makes it moderately more palatable, but introduces more problems. It’s entirely possible that people near the end of life may have tons of cognitive and neurological problems that you really wouldn’t want to preserve.


How do they propose to do this? Essentially, this company has bought into the idea that everything interesting about human personality is contained in the connectime:

(T)he idea is to retrieve information that’s present in the brain’s anatomical layout and molecular details.

As I’ve written about before, the “I am my connectome” idea is probably badly, badly wrong. It completely ignores neurophysiology. It’s a selling point for people to get grants about brain mapping, and it’s a good selling point for basic research. But as a business model, it’s an epic fail.

And what grinds my gears even more is that this horrible idea is getting more backing that many scientists have ever received in their entire careers:

Nectome has received substantial support for its technology, however. It has raised $1 million in funding so far, including the $120,000 that Y Combinator provides to all the companies it accepts. It has also won a $960,000 federal grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health for “whole-brain nanoscale preservation and imaging,” the text of which foresees a “commercial opportunity in offering brain preservation” for purposes including drug research.

I think it is good to fund research of high speed analysis of imaging of synaptic connections. But why does this have to be tied to a business? Especially one as batshit crazy as Nectome?

Co-founder Robert McIntyre says:

Right now, when a generation of people die, we lose all their collective wisdom.

If only there was some way that people could preserve what they thought about things... then we could know what Artistotle thought about stuff. Oh, wait, we do, it’s called, “writing.”

I can’t remember the last time I saw a business so exploitative and vile. And in this day and age, that’s saying something.

Update, 3 April 2018: MIT is walking away from its relationship with the company. Good. That said, Antonio Regalado notes:

Although MIT Media Lab says it’s dropping out of the grant, its statement doesn’t strongly repudiate Nectome, brain downloading idea, or cite the specific ethical issue (encouraging suicide). So it's not an apology or anything.

Hat tip to Leonid Schneider and Janet Stemwedel.

Related posts

Overselling the connectome
Brainbrawl! The Connectome review
Brainbrawl round-up

External links

A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

How many learning objectives?

I am teaching an online course this semester, and I had to undergo training and review of the class before it ran. In preparing it, one of the key things that the instructions stressed was the importance of having learning objectives.

All that material gave me good insight into how to write a single leaning objective, there was almost nothing about how to put them all together.
And right now I’m struggling with what a good number of learning objectives is. But so far, the only direct answer I’ve seen to that is:

How many learning outcomes should I have?
This is tied to the length and weight of the course
How many learning objectives should I have?
This is tied to the number of learning outcomes.

You’re not helping.

Most courses track lessons in some standard unit of time. A day. A week. Surely there has to be some sort of thinking about what a reasonable number of learning objectives is for a given unit of time. It’s probably not out of line for me to guess that one hundred learning objectives in a single day would be too much. On the other hand, a single learning objective for a week might be too low.

Right now, I have some weeks that have ten or more learning objectives. I’m wondering if that’s too much. And I’m just lost. I have no way of knowing.

It might sound it’s just a matter of looking at student performance and adjusting as you go. But in a completely online course, it is so hard to adjust. You have to prepare almost everything in advance, and you can’t easily go faster or slower in the way that you can when you meet students in person.

I’m not sure how much student feedback will help, because everyone’s tendency is probably to say, “Yes, give me fewer objectives so I have more time to master each one.” And sometimes students aren’t good at assessing what they need to learn.

Maybe this is a gap in the education literature that needs filling.

Picture from here.

How anonymous is “anonymous” in peer review?

Last time, I was musing about the consequences of signing or not signing reviews of journal articles. But I got wondering just how often people sabotage their own anonymity.

As journals have moved to online submission and review management systems, it’s become standard for people to be able to download Word or PDF versions of the article they are reviewing.

The last article I reviewed was something like 50 manuscript pages. There was no way I was going to write out each comment as "Page 30, paragraph 2, line 3," and make a comment. I made comments using the Word review feature. And all my comments had my initials.

As more software uses cloud storage for automatic saving features, more software packages are asking people to create accounts, and saving that identifying information along with documents. Word alerts you with your initials, but Acrobat Reader's comment balloons are little more subtle.

Ross Mounce and Mike Fowler confirmed that this happens:

Yep. Metadata tags are great. 😀 Even simply the language setting can be a giveaway: Austrian English is a huge clue in a small field [real, recent example!]. "Blind" peer review is not always effective...

Having wondered how often authors do this, I wonder if editorial staff ever check to make sure reviewers don’t accidentally out themselves.

Picture from here.

Signing reviews, 2018

Seen on Twitter, two days apart.

First, Kay Tye:

Dear everyone! You don’t need to wonder if I reviewed your paper anymore. I now sign ALL of my reviews.
Inspired by @pollyp1 who does this and I asked her why and she said “I decided to be ethical.” I do it to promote transparency, accountability and fairness. #openscience

I particularly noted this reply from Leslie Vosshall: (the “@pollyp1” mentioned in the prior tweet).

Open peer review would instantly end the dangerous game of “guess the reviewer.” This happens all the time with senior people guessing that some junior person trashed their paper and then holding grudges. But usually they guess wrong and inadvertently damage innocents.

Second, one day later, Tim Mosca:

Since becoming an assistant prof, I’ve reviewed ~ 12 papers. Signed one. Received a phone call from the senior (tenured) author asking, “Who do you think you are to make anything less than glowing comments?” So there are still dangers for young, non-tenured profs when reviewing.

The threads arising from these tweets are well worth perusing.

I’ve signed many reviews for a long time, and nothing bad has happened. I used to be much more in favour of everyone signing reviews, but long discussions about the value of pseudonyms on blogs, plus the ample opportunity to see people behaving badly on social media, significantly altered my views. But the problem is that everyone will remember a single bad story, and not pay attention to the many times where someone signed a review and everything was fine. Or cases where something positive came out of signing peer reviews.

How can we weigh the pros of transparency with the cons of abuse? I don’t know where that balance is, but I think there has to a some kind of balance. But the underlying issue here is not signing reviews, but that people feel they can be vindictive assholes. Univeristies do not do enough to address that kind of poor professional behaviour.

Once around the earth

Gordon Pennycook asked how far people have moved in pursuit of their academic careers. I’d never added it up before. I found an online distance calculator, and off I went.

From my high school town of Pincher Creek, Alberta to the University of Lethbridge for my bachelor’s degree: 100 km

From Lethbridge to the University of Victoria for my graduate work: 1,268 km (driving)

From Victoria to Montreal for my first post-doc: 4,732 km (driving)

From Montreal to Melbourne, Australia for my second post-doc: 16,755 km

From Melbourne to Pincher Creek, for a brief period of unemployment: 13,874 km

From Pincher Creek to Edinburg, Texas to start my tenure-track position: 3,476 km

And from Edinburg to an undisclosed location, where I am on leave: 3,090 km

Grand total: 45,295 km! For comparison, the circumference of the Earth is 40,075 km.

You may now judge me on my carbon footprint. I would hate to start adding in the miles for conferences on top of that.

Update, 5 October 2020: Refreshed link to distance calculator.

Tuesday Crustie: Know your Lamingtons

Canada has butter tarts. Australia has lamingtons.

But because Autralia is the lucky country, it not only has lamingtons as dessert, but Lamington as a bad ass crayfish:

I loved this description (my emphasis):

One of Australia's most unusual creatures, the Lamington spiny crayfish, lives there and has been known to startle bushwalkers by confronting them in battle stance, clicking claws and warning hiss.

It’s like this crayfish is trying to live up to this description of Australia from Douglas Adams:

Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner.

External links

Feisty crayfish surprise in rainforest

Dessert pic from here; crayfish pic from here.

The economy of crayfish

While searching for crayfish news (as you do), I stumbled across this description of the value of crayfish.

• Crayfish are the most popular dish in China.
• Crayfish support five million jobs in China.
• Crayfish are a US$22 billion market in China.

Besides the size of the market, I am surprised because I am willing to bet that it is all invasive species, Louisiana red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii. That’s what the pictures look like, anyway.

This shouldn’t surprise me, considering I remembered this from an article about crayfish in CHina from years ago.

This novel perspective on invasive species was perhaps most elegantly stated as we made small talk with a taxi driver in Wuhan. As we explained our research through an interpreter, the taxi driver smiled and asked, “Can they really be considered a problem if people eat them?"

Yet somehow, I doubt most people would be able to guess just how much money there is in crayfish in this one country. This page (dated 2012) estimates that in Louisiana, one of the biggest American producers of crayfish (hey, it is the Louisiana red swamp crayfish) :

The total economic impact on the Louisiana economy exceeds $300 million annually, and more than 7,000 people depend directly or indirectly on the crawfish industry.

External links

Crayfish was China's most popular dish in 2017
China's crazy love for crayfish created jobs for 5m in 2016
Louisiana Crayfish: Good, Bad and Delicious

Picture from here.

Goodbye, Storify

Storify is shutting down soon. Which is a shame. There was a point where I, and others, were using is a lot. It was a nice way to compile lots of internet resources into a single coherent timeline.

This has some relevance to matters of scientific publishing. On lots of sites like Quora, I see variations of, “Why can’t scientific articles be free to read?” Heck, here are some:

• Why can't research papers be made public?
• Why is Elsevier charging money for access to research that was publicly funded?
• Why haven't university-owned journals overtaken private journals?
• Why do scientists use journals for publishing papers instead of publishing them for free online?

Online services — like Storify — may contribute to the lack of understanding that publishing is not free, regardless of whether the reader pays or not. They make stories, it costs them only a sign-up information, and they wonder why scientific publishing can’t be the same.


People do not understand that services that are called “free” are only free to them, not free across the board. Someone is paying bills. Preprint servers get millions of dollars in support to keep them running.
 
Or, you have operations that are not able to make a go of it, and close up shop, like Storify is now doing. Or like Google Reader did. (That one still makes me sad.)

The closing of Storify shows one of the reasons “free” is not a good way to think about scientific publishing. “Free to read,” sure. But as much as I love me some free to user online services (like Blogger, which has powered my writing here for over a decade and a half), they’re not a good model for scholarly publication.

I am playing with Wakelet as a replacement for Storify.

Hat tip to Carl Zimmer for the news about Storify.

Switzerland’s lobster laws are not paragons of science-based policy

What are you thinking, Switzerland?

At the start of this week, I saw a news story about new Swiss regulations for the handling and killing of lobsters. (Coincidentally, it came very shortly after this very good article about similar issues around fishes.) This started with a motion by Green Party politician Maya Graf. She wanted to ban lobster imports into Switzerland outright, but Switzerland already had a trade agreement with the European Union that ruled that out.

This is the short version of the Swiss law (auto-translated from German):

The lobster is better protected in the future

Lobster and other crayfish may no longer be transported on ice or in ice water. This is important for the import to Switzerland. All species living in water must always be kept in their natural environment - this also applies to the lobster. In addition, crayfish must be stunned before being killed. The usual dipping in the gastronomy not stunned lobster in boiling water is therefore no longer permitted.

Further information: Articles 23 (1), 178 and 178a of the Animal Welfare Ordinance .

 A Q and A document says:

New scientific evidence shows that crayfish are just like vertebrates, sentient and capable of suffering.

But it does not summarize what scientific evidence was examined and used to justify this decision. However, the Swiss website links to a document from the Australian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), which implies they agency agrees with the material contained within. The RSPCA document does have a reference list of research papers, with the most recent references dating to 2015.

The RSPCA document is not intended to be a scientific literature review. But that it does cite scientific papers can give an impression of greater certainty and consensus in the scientific community than is perhaps warranted.

For context, and in the interests of full disclosure, there are very few research groups have published empirical behavioural data about crustacean noceiception. One is led by Roger Elwood, and another is led by me. There are a few other papers from other places.

First, two research labs is a small fraction of the crustacean research community. Even if those two labs were entirely in agreement about the data (the two labs have contradictory results on one effect) and the interpretation of those data, two labs should not be taken to represent a broad scientific consensus. A 2014 book on crustacean nervous systems and behaviour alone has somewhere around 30 authors, none of which are from the two labs I mentioned.

Second, the RSPCA document cites only Elwood’s papers. (In fairness, the most relevant paper I co-authored on this subject was in 2015, the same year as the newest paper in the RSPCA document. That paper may have been too new to make it into the RSPCA document.)

Third, not all researchers examining the data are in agreement, even those with expertise in the relevant issues. In her book Can Fish Feel Pain? (reviewed here), Victoria Brathwaite describes having long conversations with Elwood about this topic. Despite Elwood’s arguments, Braithwaite concluded that lobsters do not feel pain. Joe Ayers (who was an examiner on my Ph.D.) also disagrees.

Fourth, the papers cited by the RSPCA do not claim that lobsters (and other large decapod crustaceans) are sentient, nor do they claim that they suffer. The papers are appropriately cautiously worded, and say the results are consistent with crustacean pain. Elwood has said this when speaking to scientists. “Consistent with” means “not ruled out.” It doesn’t necessarily mean likely. But when speaking to the general press, Elwood has said lobsters probably feel pain. As quoted above, the Swiss Q and A goes even further and says lobster pain has been shown.

And thus do we move from “possible” in data, to “probable” in the public eye, to “definite” in law.

The specifics of the policies are also puzzling. It forbids lobsters from being transported on ice. It is not clear in my translation (“Direct contact with ice or iced water can cause cold in the animals damage arises.”) if this is because of concerns about “pain”. A paper I co-authored in 2015 that showed crayfish do not avoid very low temperature stimuli.

The law seems to require that lobsters and crayfish are anaesthetised before being killed (Google translates the word as “stunned,” but this doesn’t seem to refer to electrical stunning). But when you ask crustacean biologists how to aneasthetize crustaceans, one common answer is, “Put them on ice.” Even the Q and A recommends cooling lobsters before killing them. It’s not clear why cooling is recommended but ice is illegal.

I don’t agree with this article that mocks the Swiss law, saying:

(T)here’s no scientific evidence to support the position.

The material quoted as being from the Lobster Institute is, like the Swiss law, far more confident than the data suggests. The article pulls out the “lobsters have no brain” myth. We have known for more than a century they do have brains. Absolutely nobody knows what the minimal amount of nervous system is for generating “pain.”

The recommendations for killing lobsters in the RSPCA document are generally consistent with what I do when using decapod crustaceans for research. (Image also shows up here.) The image at the top of this post shows how I was taught to sacrifice decapod crustaceans in a humane way. It is not the only way, but I think it is reasonable and fairly easy.

I agree with the goals of this law. You should be careful in handling and killing animals rather than careless. But it’s not a strong model for science informing policy.

P.S.—One interesting tidbit I learned in perusing the Swiss documents is that Crustastun (which I wrote about eight years ago; see also here) makes no equipment, according to the Swiss Q and A document.

Related posts

What we know and don’t know about crustacean pain
Crustacean pain is still a complicated issue, despite the headlines

External links

Revision of various regulations in the veterinary field (Hat tip to Taking Apart Cats on Twitter)
Questions and answers about lobster (PDF in German)
Humane killing and processing of crustaceans for human consumption (PDF in English)
Swiss ban against boiling lobster alive brings smiles — at first
Do lobsters feel pain when we boil them alive? (Contains earlier version of image I created from top of page.)
Switzerland bans boiling lobsters alive, grants other protections to the crustaceans
Lobsters 'very likely' feel pain when boiled alive, researcher says
Fish feel pain. Now what?
Science Pushed to Back Burner, as Swiss Outlaw Live Lobster Boiling
Another country has banned boiling live lobsters. Some scientists wonder why.
Switzerland rules lobsters must be stunned before boiling
The Swiss Consider the Lobster. It Feels Pain, They Decide.

Tuesday Crustie: The river of woe

Surface dwellers, meet Cherax acherontis. Cherax acherontis, meet surface dwerllers.

There are plenty of burrowing crayfish in Australia, but this crayfish from the island of New Guinea is the first cave dweller, not just in the region, but south of the equator. That's quite remarkable, considering that the Pacific is a hotspot of crayfish biodiversity, and there are southern hemisphere crayfish in Madagascar and South America.

The name is from Acheron, one of the rivers the ran through the underworld of Greek mythology.

References

Patoka J, Bláha M, Kouba A. 2017. Cherax acherontis (Decapoda: Parastacidae), the first cave crayfish from the Southern Hemisphere (Papua Province, Indonesia). Zootaxa 4363(1): 137-144. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4363.1.7

Twice in a lifetime: South Texas snowfall!

Last time, I only saw the aftermath.

This time, I got to see it happen.

Snow!

There hadn’t been snow in a century before 2004, and now twice in less than 20 years? This is crazy.

It started around 9:00 am, and ran for a couple of hours. It was big fluffy flakes that was coming down quite thick at one point.

I asked everyone I saw, “Are we having fun yet?!” Everyone was having fun. Everyone was happy. One student said, “This is the best thing that could have happened during finals!”

There were snowball fights outside the library.

Alas, it dod not last long. After a couple of hours, it had stopped. But there was so much snow on the trees, that as it melted, it sounded like a downpour.

Last time, I made a snowman. This time, I made something different:

A South Texas snow angel!

I can’t believe I got to see snow twice in South Texas during my time there. Today was pretty magical.

I’ve been inside for an hour now, and my fingers are still numb.

Related posts

Something wonderful
After the (snow)fall
Once in a lifetime

End of a project

Eight years ago and three months ago, I started a project to accommodate Jessica Murph’s request to do fieldwork (she was a student in the NSF REU program I ran then). It was a simple project to try to figure out some basic biology of the local sand crab species, Lepidopa benedicti.

Jessica finished her year in the program, and I kept going. And going.

Along the way, the project yielded three papers (Murph and Faulkes 2013, Faulkes 2014, 2017). The last paper covered up this project from 2011 to the end of 2015, and I have gathered two more years of data, making it seven calendar years of continuous monthly samples.

It’s a project where I genuinely felt I learned a lot. There was, at the start of this project, very little known about any species of this family. This project was a good first step in understanding the natural history not just of L. benedicti, but the family. And I found a species that had never been documented in the area before.

There were times when things got crazy when I could just think to myself, “I have to go to the beach.” They were good opportunities to decompress.

That project came to a close for the foreseeable future yesterday.

Posting here has been slow this semester, because I stuff that I didn’t want to blog about. It’s good stuff, not bad! I have some big plans that start early next year that I am very excited about.

But for every door that opens, one closes. These projects will be taking me away from South Texas, and I’m not going to be able to visit my field site for a while. I can’t go collect and measure “my” sand crabs.

I’ve had other projects that have ended before, but I can’t think of another that ran so long. It’s tough knowing that I still have questions that I will only be able to answer by collecting, and not knowing if or when I might be able to pick up the project again. Even if I do, I won’t have the bragging rights of a nice, continuous record.

On the plus side, I do still have two more years of field data in the can that I can analyze. I hope that I might be able to squeeze one more paper out of this project.

But I’m still a little sad.

References

Faulkes Z. 2014. A new southern record for a sand crab, Lepidopa websteri Benedict, 1903 (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Crustaceana 87(7): 881-885. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685403-00003326

Faulkes Z. 2017. The phenology of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae). Journal of Coastal Research 33(5): 1095-1101. https://doi.org/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-16-00125.1

Murph JH, Faulkes Z. 2013. Abundance and size of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae), in South Texas. The Southwestern Naturalist 58(4): 431-434. https://doi.org/10.1894/0038-4909-58.4.431

Photo by Karren Faulkes. Thanks, mom.

Tuesday Crustie: Lawdy, lawdy, look who’s 40!

Sometimes we underestimate how long our pets might live.

This female pet hermit crab, Jonathan Livingston Crab (name given before sex determined), is at least 40 years old.

Ths article is great. I love this part:

Jon’s great age is an amazing accomplishment, but can you really have a relationship with a crab? Ormes says Jon can tell her apart from other people, and he clearly seeks out her company. “He follows me places. When I’m out on the lanai [enclosed porch] on my computer he comes out there and climbs on my feet, if I go to the morning room he comes out there and walks around the table,” she says. “If I go out and leave him out of his tank, I come home and he’s at the front door.”

Hat tip to Frank Dirrigl.

External links

The 40-Year-Old Hermit Crab

Throwaway lines

For one student, it was, “Keep it simple. Science is hard enough as it is.”

For another student, it was, “It’s a skill, like anything else. You can learn it and get better at it.”

There were both things I said to students in part of bigger conversations about something else. I thought were throwaway lines. But these students told me that those comments were important to them.

One student kept going back and thinking, “Simplify.” And had success when he did so.

The other student had a “fixed mindset”: that there was a certain amount of skill you had, and when you reached that point in a subject, you were done. Your intellectual ladder was only so tall, it only let you climb over so many walls. My throwaway line helped her switch to a “growth mindset”: practice. Work at it. You can improve.

Sometimes, as an educator, you put a lot of work into the content of courses. You have to write learning objectives, figure out how to explain some tricky concept, work on grading rubrics... and sometimes, the course content is absolutely not the thing sticks with the students.

Sometimes, it’s the random, tangential comments that students tell you later were the things that mattered to them. And I think are highly undervalued in education. You can’t predict or plan for those. But they can happen in the little unscripted moments, particularly when you have a good working relationship and dialogue with students.

For me, it was, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” It was reading an article or letter in a journal someplace, but that became a mantra for me when I was working on manuscripts. I realized I was waiting too much to make things just so when they were never going to get that way. It was a throwaway line that dramatically changed my productivity.

I come to bury the GRE, not to praise it

I’ve seen a few graduate programs announce that they are not going to require students submit GRE scores any more. These announcements are widely met with praise. The GRE has minimal predictive value in long term grad school success, and it is biased against a lot of groups. And the costs stops a lot of people from applying to grad school.

Interestingly, at the start of last year, the dean of our graduate college announced that several programs were being required to add the GRE to their admission requirements. This was imposed on at from outside the institution at the state level. I can’t remember if it was UT System or the THECB.

Full disclosure. When I became the graduate program coordinator of our master’s program, I pushed and got our department to start requiring the GRE. My rationale at the time was that this was the “industry standard.” We wanted our students to go into doctoral programs, and we reasoned that we would be helping students pave the way for doctoral work by having them do it sooner rather than later.

Also, I was reacting to students who would come in the day before classes started and say, “Can I be a grad student?” At the time, there was no application deadline. And students who did that tended not to persist in the program. So requiring the GRE forced students to plan ahead, not go to grad school because there was nothing good on television that day.

I have since come around to see the many problems with the GRE. But I don’t think our department would be allowed to get rid of it, seeing how many departments were forced to require it.

But this is something I think about.

The GRE tried to solve a couple of problems. It failed to solve them, but those problems still exist. And I don’t know how to solve them. The problems are:

• Grading policies vary wildly across institutions. (See this blog post.)
• People interpret the same grades in different ways depending on the institution’s perceived rigour and prestige. (See this blog post.)
• Recommendation letters are usually uniformly glowing.
• People tend to trust recommendations “in network” from people they know either personally or by reputation.
• The recommendation letter requirement reinforces power dynamics that leave early career researcher at the mercy of bullies and other poor supervisors. (Added 3 December 2018)

Students from famous universities who have rubbed shoulders with famous professors and can convince them to send a form letter get deep advantages in grad school acceptance. In other words, we end up selecting for students for grad school who already have a lot of “social capital.” If we want to diversify science, this is not the way to go about it. Diverse students come from diverse institutions, as Terry McGlynn has noted.

In theory, the GRE could have acted as a leveler for the playing field. It didn’t. But the problem it could have tackled is one that we still need to tackle. What can help level the playing field for students against “prestige”?

Related posts

What grades should look like

The “Texas transcript” is a good idea, but won’t solve grade inflation

External links
Students, Rejoice — Standardized Testing May Soon Be Dead
Nine types of admissions bias