Saving even the species we hate

Sure, we’ll save this species:

Or this:

But this?

Not only do we not try to save the latter, we’re actively trying to wipe it out.

A recent article notes that one of the effects of breeding endangered species in captivity is that organisms that live on them can suffer. The black footed ferret (top picture) had a louse species specific to it that is probably gone forever. The same holds true for the California condors (second picture from top) bred in captivity, then released into the wild. The captive-bred animals were, perhaps, too healthy... from a certain point of view. Lice that lived on the condor were removed systematically, and as far as we know, that species is now extinct. These do not appear to be the only examples.

Those cases might be unintended consequences. It is possible that the people involved did not know about the parasites that lived on those species, and may have though they were general parasites, rather than ones that specifically lived on those species.

But it raises an interesting ethical issue about how much we value living species.

The third picture in my series is Dracunculus medinensis, also known as the Guinea worm. The Carter Center, founded by former American president Jimmy Carter, is spearheading a campaign to eradicate this species. Admittedly, Guinea worm is a human parasite that has caused a lot of misery to a lot of people over the millennia. Nevertheless, it is as irreplaceable a life form as much as a ferret or a condor. 

I have never heard anyone suggesting that we might want to consider saving this species.

I can see the case for wiping out this species if it was an obligate human parasite, and there was no other way for this thing to live than infect human beings. But Muller (1972) showed decades ago that this species can be reared in captivity, in a non-human host. Some sources suggest it has a fairly wide host range (but haven’t been able to confirm that with peer-reviewed journal article yet).

If you think that conservation of biodiversity is a good thing, should someone start a Guinea worm captive breeding program? The goal might not be to reintroduce the species into the wild, given the harm it causes. Instead, the goal could to preserve it in perpetuity, both for scientific research and because of its intrinsic worth as part of the life on our planet.

Maybe we should have a parasite bank to go next to our seed banks.

Additional: Parasitologist Mark Siddall calls the expected loss of the Guinea worm something to celebrate in this New Yorker article. Mark and I tweeted back and forth on this quite a bit, and I am glad to have his article, with a personal touch, as a counterpoint to my little armchair essay.

References

Jørgensen D. Conservation implications of parasite co-reintroduction. Conservation Biology: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12421

Muller R. 1972. Maintenance of Dracunculus medinensis (L.) in the laboratory and observations on experimental infections. Parasitology 64(1): 107-116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0031182000044681

External links

Save the parasites!
Conservation biology of parasites (Surprisingly thorough Wikipedia entry)
Carter Center Guinea worm eradication program
Which endangered species would you save?
More harm than good intentions

No wildlife charity campaigns to save parasites. But they should (Added 9 February 2017)

Ferret picture by USFWS Mountain-Prairie on Flickr; condor picture by Pacific Southwest Region on Flickr; both used under a Creative Commons license. Guinea worm picture from Wikipedia.

Tuesday Crustie: Back of the line!

The segment above (from the BBC series Life Story) shows hermit crabs exchanging shells in a rather remarkable way. I wondered if this had been documented in scientific literature. I’ve read a fair number of papers on hermit crab shell choice, but not this queuing behaviour. And with a little searching in Google Scholar, voila!

Lewis SM, Rotjan RD. 2009. Vacancy chains provide aggregate benefits to Coenobita clypeatus hermit crabs. Ethology 115(4): 356-365. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0310.2009.01626.x

Rotjan RD, Chabot JR, Lewis SM. 2010. Social context of shell acquisition in Coenobita clypeatus hermit crabs. Behavioral Ecology 21(3): 639-646. http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/3/639.abstract

Hat tip to Emily Anthes and io9.

Comments for first half of November 2014

The Vaquero controversy and what this means for UTRGV women’s teams. (They won’t be “Lady Vaqueros.”)

Jon Tennant, Mike Taylor, and Jacquelyn Gill all look at conference tweeting.

“If you’re in your house, why are there elevators there?”

I’m fascinated by how we make and hold beliefs, often in the light on contrary evidence. You see how easy it is for us to have false belief in many patients with brain injury. Many have false beliefs and explain away contradictory evidence effortlessly, which is called confabulation.

This is one of my favourite examples of confabulation, heard by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga (from Gazzaniga 2000):

In one patient I had, the patient was a woman who, although she was being examined in my office at New York Hospital, claimed we were in her home in Freeport, Maine. The standard interpretation of this syndrome is that she made a duplicate copy of a place (or person) and insisted that there are two.

This woman was intelligent; before the interview she was biding her time reading the New York Times. I started with the ‘So, where are you?’ question. ‘I am in Freeport, Maine. I know you don’t believe it. Dr Posner told me this morning when he came to see me that I was in Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital and that when the residents come on rounds to say that to them. Well, that is fine, but I know I am in my house on Main Street in Freeport, Maine!’ I asked, ‘Well, if you are in Freeport and in your house, how come there are elevators outside the door here?’ The grand lady peered at me and calmly responded,

‘Doctor, do you know how much it cost me to have those put in?

Gazzaniga goes on to explain the reason for this woman’s false belief, due in part to a lesion in her brain:

Because of her lesion the part of the brain that represents locality is overactive and sending out an erroneous message about her location. The interpreter is only as good as the information it receives, and in this instance it is getting a wacky piece of information.

It’s easy to think of this as just an amusing story of someone with brain injury. I think we all have the same mechanisms in our brain that are making sense of the world as best they can. We can all have beliefs that make perfect sense to us, but seem bizarre to outside observers.

Reference

Gazzaniga MS. 2000. Cerebral specialization and interhemispheric communication: Does the corpus callosum enable the human condition? Brain 123(7): 1293-1326. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brain/123.7.1293

Photo by Boston Public Library on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

“Stop flirting, I’ve still got a job to do here,” heard at comet landing

A lot has been written about Matt Taylor’s shirt that he wore during the livestream of the Philae touchdown (links at bottom). I’d like to point out another moment from the P67 comet landing, starting at 6:15:14 in this YouTube video (click text link to go straight to the bit I’m talking about):


The speaker of the moment, Johann-Dietrich Wörner, chairman of the board of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), reveals a P67 polo shirt on stage after the landing.

The presenter, Monika Jones, says, “I want that polo shirt!” Something happens off screen that catches her attention, and she continues, apparently addressing Wörner offscreen, “Not now, we’ve got a few minutes. Change? Stop flirting, I’ve still got a job to do here.”

Now, she said it with a smile, so it’s hard to tell if the presenter was actually offended, or taking it in a spirit of fun. But I had a moment of, “Did she just have to say that?”

Maybe it would have slipped by me if I hadn’t been aware of the shirt issue. But after the shirt issue, and Matt Taylor also talking about Philae coming down for “the kiss,” (also not reported much) I cringed a bit.

Given that I’d seen a bunch of stuff about Matt Taylor’s shirt, I was also saddened when I saw the composition of the audience at the livestream.

I count about five women out of about 35 faces in this one screen grab.When it panned around, the proportion of women in the audience seemed even lower.

Such a stark contrast to the famous pictures of the Indian Mars mission not so long ago:

Update, 14 November 2014: Matt Taylor apologizes for the shirt. This is positive. I do wish he’d also have acknowledged that some of his comments were a bit cringe-worthy, too.


External links

New requirement for scientists: You cannot be a sexist pigdog
Sometimes, a shirt is not just a shirt
Confessions of a teenage dirtbag: Thoughts on shirtstorm
That shirt
Why women in science are annoyed at Rosetta mission scientist's clothing 
Shirtstorm reaction bingo card
Shirts, science communication, and why appearances can be important

Tuesday Crustie: Sponge-worthy

Periclimenaeus echinimanus is a small sponge-dwelling shrimp from the Red Sea that was only described a few years ago. The species name means “sea urchin hand,” because it has spines on its claws that some of its relatives don’t have.

Monday morning quarterbacking the UTRGV “Vaquero” decision

The University of Texas System is confirming that the mascot for the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley will be the Vaquero.

I feel sorry for UTRGV president Guy Bailey (third from left; pic from here).

There was just no decision that was going to make people happy. There were a lot of people in Edinburg and McAllen who wanted to keep the University of Texas Pan American’s mascot, Bucky the Bronc. But that choice would have ostracized everyone who had ties to University of Texas at Brownsville.

One of the last surveys showed a lot of people wanted some sort of compromise. That came though in the colour recommendations: UT system orange, plus green from UTPA, plus blue from UTB.

I think Bailey was hoping that “Vaquero” would be that compromise. The word “vaquero” is thought to have morphed into “buckaroo.” Bucky, buckaroo, and there’s a whole horse motif going on... I bet Bailey thought this would be the way to assuage the “Save Bucky” brigade. “There’s still a horse!”

From his opening comments, it was clear that Bailey saw “Vaquero” as Americana that nobody could object to. “Nothing more iconic than a cowboy” is pretty close to what he said in his comments.

While Bailey might have expected that nothing would keep the Bucky fans happy except Bucky, I don’t know if anyone could have anticipated the flames that started pretty much the instant he announced the recommendation.

Having watched this process from the very first meeting at UTPA,“Vaquero” was a name that people suggested. It did not come out of the blue. It was not a random choice from Bailey, or the Board of Regents.

But when it was mentioned as a possibility, I never got, from any of the discussion, a hint of the fury that emerged over the decision. It wasn’t just that people were mad about losing Bucky (which I expected), but the charges erupted almost immediately that the name was racist – and, to a lesser degree, sexist.

I was disappointed to see how fast people trotted out negative Hispanic and Mexican stereotypes on Twitter. Out came the taco and sombrero jokes. I documented a lot of them in my Storify. For me, this was a low point:

Really? I get being upset with the decision. But that? That art’s not okay.

I was also upset by the number of people who said they either would not come to, or wanted to leave, UTRGV because of the mascot. As a faculty member, it bothers me that a foam rubber suit means more to students than the work my colleagues and I do in trying to perform the best possible research and do the best possible jobs of giving students a top notch education.

If the mascot means more to you than the quality of the faculty and staff, I invite you to re-examine your priorities.

I have problems with this choice of mascot. I deeply dislike that it’s “cowboy,” which overlooks that about 60% of UTPA students (and, I’m guessing, UTB students) are female.

There’s already been complaints that people (including Bailey) don’t pronounce it right. Wiki says it’s “baˈkeɾo,” with a B, which makes the connection to “buckaroo” make more sense.

Finally, I think it’s just too obscure a name. I spent years explaining to people where UTPA was. Now I have to look forward to years of explaining what a “Vaquero” is.

It’s interesting to contrast to the decision to name of the institution, where UTRGV bubbled up pretty quickly and had wide community support.

 “Vaqueros” made nobody happy, judging from polls in local media, which show even more rejection of the name than my own. Here’s radio station KURV:

The local newspaper, the McAllen Monitor:

Bailey admitted there was no consensus on the mascot, which must have made his job tough. (Results of one of the last surveys is here. 45% said “none of the above” to the suggested names.) But now, I worry that Guy Bailey has just burned up any support or trust that he might have had from the community.

I wish there had been images like this to go with the announcement. Because, damn, that’s a cool image, and a reminder to me that maybe, just maybe, this name could work.

Update: The UT System has just put out a press release that is, frankly, a little more honest about the pushback than I would have expected.

While the selection drew support from many... it also spurred a backlash on social media, primarily from those who wanted to keep UT Pan American’s nickname, the Broncs.

It then goes on to the “Rah rah rah!” tone more typical of press releases.

Update, 7 November 2014: As I suspected, Bailey argued in the video below that “Vaquero” honors the legacy of the “Bucky” nickname:


External links

Vaquero chosen as UTRGV mascot
The UT-RGV Mascot Saga Ends with The Vaqueros and Apparently Nobody Is Happy 
It’s official: Vaqueros approved as UT-RGV mascot
Opinion: Former school changing mascot, and I’m disgusted

Watching the UTRGV Vaqueros controversy

Instant controversy: just add Vaquero!

Well, that escalated quickly.

I’m tracking the reaction to the recommendation to have the UTRGV mascot be “Vaquero.” Here’s a Storify:

Bucky is gone - move on!

The mascot of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley will be the Vaquero (Spanish for cowboy).

The announcement happened just at the start of my General Biology class, so I streamed the announcement, and did a quick poll. The choice got more “Boos!” than anything else.

UTRGV president Guy Bailey noted in his remarks that there was no consensus on the mascot. Judging from my Twitter feed this afternoon, that’s an understatement. I don’t think I have seen a single tweet enthusing over the decision yet. And this was a trending topic on Twitter:

I think Bailey is going to have to do a lot of public relations before people are okay with his decision.

I’ve written about the prospect of “Vaquero” before, and I stand by those comments. In particular, I’m surprised at the choice when another institution, Santa Barbara City College, already has that as its mascot.

I’m even more baffled when I consider the colour choice. The choice of colours was UT system orange (which had to be there) along with UTPA green and UTB blue. As I noted before, one potential mascot that had both those colours: the green jay!

But I am pleased that one way or another, the campaign to #SaveBucky is over. Bucky is going away. Whether you’re pro, con, or indifferent to Vaqueros, let’s move on. It’s a new university with a new identity.

Update: A local television station poll shows little support for Vaqueros.

Related posts

In search of an identity for UTRGV, or: why Bucky must go
The great UTRGV mascot debate continues

External links

UT-RGV mascot recommended to be the Vaquero
UTRGV President recommends “Vaquero” as athletic nickname for new university
UTRGV president recommends "Vaqueros" as school mascot

The man they named my high school after

I went to Matthew Halton High School in Pincher Creek, Alberta. I had never heard the name “Matthew Halton” before attending the school, though while there I learned he was a journalist in World War II. But that was about all I learned.

If I remember right, I even won an award named after Matthew Halton for promise in writing. I took high school awards off my CV years and years ago, so I can’t remember what year I won, or even if I did, for that matter. (Update: My parents confirmed that I did win this award in Grade 12, back in – ugh – 1984!)

For that reason, I was very interested in this interview with David Halton, who carried on his father’s tradition and was a journalist with the CBC. David Halton has just released a book about his father called Dispatches from the Front: The life of Matthew Halton, Canada’s Voice at War.

The interview has got all sorts of great little details, such as that Matthew Halton’s father was the man who cleaned Pincher Creek’s toilets, and Matthew Halton was teased in school as “Shithouse Halton.”

Then there’s the fight between Halton and Ernest Hemingway over Hemingway’s sex scenes...

External links

Matthew Halton audio clips in CBC archives

Picture from here.

Tuesday Crustie: Democratic choice

Vote!

From here.

Tuesday Crustie: Twentieth anniversary

It’s been almost 20 years since the Fallen Empires expansion of Magic: The Gathering appeared. It included a race of lobster creatures called homarids. Perhaps because the Fallen Empires set was kind of a dud, this article notes:

The naming team felt that Homarids were unpopular enough to warrant a name-change in Alliances, hence “Viscerid.” Their reasoning? “They evolved.”

Happy birthday, Steve Ditko!

While I was updating the Neuroethology webpage today, I got sucked into watching this excellent retrospective on Steve Ditko, whose birthday is today.

Almost any person claiming to be familiar with comics will recognize Steve Ditko as the original artist of The Amazing Spider-Man. I also knew that Ditko was well known as retiring from the public spotlight. That helps make this documentary completely fascinating, because there is so much about Ditko that just is not widely known. I was particularly fascinated to learn about the character of Mr. A, an Ayn Rand inspired character.

While it seems odd to wish a birthday to someone so famously quiet and retiring (but not retired), I hope Mr. Ditko enjoyed the day.

Comments for second half of October 2014

Mathbionerd has a look at different funding sources.

Tuesday Crustie: Yeti crab crushes Kremlin!

It’s fair to say I’m a fan of yeti crabs, since I’ve had the yeti crabs on this feature a few times before. (And then there’s the dancing yeti crabs playlist...)

I’m also a big fan of the SyFy series FaceOff, which has its season finale tonight. Last week, make-up artist Cig got into the finals with this kaiju creation:

Cig had never seen a yeti crab before, and decided to make something decidedly more simian than crustacean, keeping in the giant monster tradition started by King Kong.

While I did enjoy Cig’s take on the yeti crab, I have to confess that I am pulling for Dina tonight! She captured my attention with this creation on episode 1 of this season.

And she’s held it ever since. I particularly loved her aquatic Aphrodite (middle row, third from left):

Should you reply to spamming students?

A colleague, who is a new assistant professor, asked on Facebook, if he should reply to an “endless” stream of emails from international students.

I know the kinds of letters this person is asking about. Many show the candidate has extremely limited ability to express him or herself in written English, the tone is often obsequious, and the letters are often clearly “form” letters sent to who knows how many institutions.

What’s the right course of action? On the one hand, there is an actual person on the other end. A person who has probably gotten bad advice, but still. On the other hand, it can take up a huge block of time to reply to all of these.

If someone sends you a cut and paste inquiry, it’s okay a cut and paste response. Signs of a cut and paste from a student include the opening, “Dear Sir / Madame,” or discussing research interests that are nowhere near the kind of stuff you do.

Only if someone has clearly written a personalized inquiry to you, that shows they understand what you do, should you spend the time to write a personal response.

I don’t have an endless stream of these letters - and I am the grad program coordinator - so I do reply. I send links to our entry requirements and program FAQ, and answer any direct questions in the letter.

Tuesday Crustie: Welcome wagon

It’s always polite to welcome a new family to town! Nicolai Roterman tweeted about his new paper:

If you like fossils and yeti crabs, then this is definitely for you!

It’s like he knows me!

Nicolai’s new paper in Scripta Geologica erects a new family, Pristinaspinidae, to accomodate the fossil Pristinaspina gelasina, shown as a line drawing in the upper left corner here. The other four pictures are its living relatives, yeti crabs, which remain in the family Kiwaidae.

And yes, this is another excuse to remind you that I curate a dancing yet crabs playlist on YouTube.

Reference

Ahyong ST, Roterman CN. 2014. Pristinaspinidae, a new family of Cretaceous kiwaiform stem-lineage squat lobster (Anomura, Chirostyloidea). Scripta Geologica 147: 11. http://www.scriptageologica.nl/16/nr147/a11

Tracking one hundred students

I am a romantic, I guess. I would like to see universities as places where everyone can thrive regardless of their background. A leveler, if you will, which provides an opportunity for people to improve their lot in life. My current university helped do that: UTPA has been credited with creating a middle class in South Texas.

So this graph is important:

It shows that American universities are more often than not reinforcing existing class structures instead of minimizing them.

It’s also important in thinking about in terms of our graduate programs, and the sort of people who make it through the bachelor’s to have the chance to earn a higher degree.

Additional: It just so happens that the New York Times has an article about the “glass floor problem”, which is related to the article above. It emphasizes that the affluent have opportunities to hoard resources, preventing a leveling of the playing field.

“(U)npaid internships... have become more commonplace and, in many cases, an important first step on a lucrative career ladder. As they are unpaid, they automatically favor the affluent. Effectively unregulated, they can also be handed out to the children of clients or friends.”

View the interactive version of this graph here. Hat tip to Joshua Hatch.

The Zen of Presentations, part 66: What do you want your audience to feel?

A common piece of advice for technical presentations is to figure out what your “take home message” is. People will only remember one or two things, to you should figure out what those will be. “The elevator pitch” is also about focusing down your information to a concise, under a minute format.

This is good advice, but it is typical of academics: it focuses on the “head.” It’s a question about information. Lots of people who have thought about presentations have concluded that if all you are doing is relaying information, there is no point to having a presentation. If all you want to do is convey information, send an email. A presentation should be about more than that.

Besides figuring out what you want your audience to remember about the information you presented, ask yourself what you want your audience to feel about what you presented.

Do you want them to feel happy? Sad? Inspired? Amused? Agitated? Concerned? Horny? (Okay, maybe that last one is a little unlikely to be a goal of a presentation.)

This does not mean that you can’t have multiple feelings in a talk. Something can be funny one minute and heart-rending the next. But like your take home message, you should think about the main emotion you want to convey.

Once you’ve decided what you want them to feel, you can start taking steps to enhance that emotional core of your talk. For instance, do you have slides with dark, sober colours? Probably not what you want if you want people to leave feeling uplifted.

This might not be a critically important consideration if you are giving a scientific talk to other scientists, who are also very “head centered.” But this could be very important when you are talking to people from outside your particular research field. Emotions are understandable to everyone, and are so much more contagious than concepts.

There is an quote from Maya Angelou that’s overused, but appropriate:

(P)eople will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

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

When your name changes

People change their names for all sorts of reasons. Marriage is only one. What can you do to make sure people can find your scientific papers if you change your name?

When you’re talking about your own CV or website, the task is trivial. All it takes is a note mentioning the name change.

The problem is that many people look for papers through search engines: Google Scholar, Web of Science, PubMed, and so on. If they only know you by one name, they will not find papers you authored under the other name.

This is not something that you, as the author, can solve, as far as I can tell. A stopgap is to create as many profiles about your research as you can, so that if someone finds your research on through your own website or similar, they are more likely to see the complete list of papers.

It should not be your problem to solve. This should be a problem for the search engine services to solve. It seems that if there was widespread adoption of ORCID, there is a shot at making this a non-issue.

Comments for first half of October 2014

Terry McGlynn looks at external reviews for tenure and promotion decisions. This has been a contentious addition to our procedures at UTPA recently.

Neuwrite San Diego blog looks at science crowdfunding, and has a list of websites.

How Gilmore Girls changed my teaching

More than a decade after it debuted, Gilmore Girls is experiencing a renewed burst of interest after arriving on Netflix this month.

When I saw Gilmore Girls, I was impressed by the speed and density of the dialogue. Joke, pop culture reference, joke, joke, pop culture reference... the writing kept coming at you, at a rapid clip.

But it did so in a way that you never lost track of the plot. Even if you didn’t get any particular one-liner, you were able to follow the story. And there would be another clever bit in a minute or two.

It just so happened Gilmore Girls started just before I took up the position I had, and I was teaching classes from stem to stern for the first time. When I started, students were always kvetching about slides going down before they could finish transcribing them. So I ended up going slow.

Watching Gilmore Girls, I realized that people could handle a lot of information quickly. And that I could talk faster. I could put in more jokes, references, tangents... as long as I kept the main point that I was making front and center. If someone didn’t get one reference, I didn’t worry, I just kept on going.

My lecturing strategy become to make a point quickly, but repeat it often, rather than make a point slowly and ponderously just the once.

I don’t know if my lecturing style is better because of Gilmore Girls, but it certainly made it a lot more lively and fun for me. I just hope that my greater enthusiasm is contagious, and that students pick up on it.

Hat tip to Gilmore Girls fan Ed Yong, whose tweets about the show prompted me to write this.

Remain calm

Calm people solve problems. Panicked people cause them.

(Inspired by Adam Savage, who said, “Calm people live,” in the Mythbusters episode, “Duct tape canyon.”)

Tuesday Crustie: Hoax

Does this need to be said?

Yes, apparently, someone does need to say that there are not crabs wider than two or three cars are long. And that someone was Dr. Verity Nye:

(I)t is not inconceivable that new species could be found, but I laughed when I saw this picture.

The news article is being kind to call this a “a well-doctored hoax.” A good hoax should have some plausibility to it. This one is ridiculous.

External links

Is 'Crabzilla' real or not? Leading marine biologist rules picture of giant crab lurking in shallow waters must be a HOAX

Hat tip to Carin Bondar.

“We’d probably have [insert thing needed now] if not for budget cuts”

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said about the prospects for an Ebola vaccine:

Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.

Collins's statement gives me the heebie-jeebies. I kind of doubt that an Ebola vaccine is something we’d “probably” have by now, funding or not. (Though I am too far away from vaccine development to have a good sense of the state of play - maybe research on Ebola is more advanced than I think.)

We should not base arguments for science funding on specific promises for specific goodies, because a lot of things science promised never materialized. People will never stop asking where there jetpacks and flying cars are. More seriously, people ask why we still can’t cure cancer, more 40 years after President Nixon started what became known as the “war on cancer.” Unmet promises burns scientists.

Perhaps a better argument (which I saw on Twitter, can’t recall who): We need the NIH to develop things like Ebola vaccines, because private industry probably has no profit motive to do so.

Additional: Of course, I wrote all of the above before I saw that a Canadian-led Ebola vaccine is now in human trials. Maybe Collins’s statement was based on better knowledge than I had.

But darn it, it still sounds like a fairly calculated ploy to use current events to lobby for a bigger budget.

More additional, 14 October 2014: Michael Eisen reaches a similar conclusion to mine:

(I)t’s time to call this for what it is: complete bullshit. ...

(E)ven if you believe the only thing holding up development of the Ebola vaccine was funds, it’s still false to argue that with more money we’d have an Ebola vaccine. Vaccine and drug development just simply doesn’t work this way.

Update, 16 October 2014: Justin Kiggins points out that Collins’s argument backfired in an entirely predictable way. A major international newspaper and an American politician has pulled a trick American politicians have used for years:

1. Look through titles of grants.
2. Find grants that look obvious or silly.
3. Do not contact researchers in charge of grants or read grants.
4. Argue that agency wastes taxpayer money.

Sigh.

Update, 19 October 2014: Other officials in the NIH are disagreeing with their director. This quote is from Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, this morning:

“I don’t think you can say we would or would not have that. Everything has slowed down but I would not make that statement” that higher funding would have led to a vaccine by now(.)

Related posts

Promises versus trust

External links

Ebola Vaccine Would Likely Have Been Found By Now If Not For Budget Cuts: NIH Director
NIH Director Francis Collins’ ridiculous “We would have had an Ebola vaccine if the NIH were fully funded” meme
NIH Director throws basic research under the bus to score Ebola points. It backfires.

Watch out for UTRGV’S Phase II

Inside Higher Education has an article about the hiring process for University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Twenty-five faculty from UTPA and UTB did not get offered their jobs back yet.

The article goes into quite a bit of detail about the Phase I hiring process, and list all the reasonable concerns about the new university being used to remove tenured faculty for questionable reasons.

What the article barely mentions is that there is a Phase II in the hiring process. I sat through quite a few discussions about this, and I got the impression that Phase I was more or less a rubber stamp. Not being selected in Phase I was certainly not the end of the process. It just indicated a little more vetting would be done. That doesn’t strike me as crazy or unreasonable, though it certainly could be implemented in an unreasonable way.

The outcome of Phase II will be a much better indicator of the direction that UTRGV is heading than Phase I.

External links

Voted off the island

Opening the funnel to make “better citizens of the world”

Fellow crustacean neurobiologist Eve Marder has an opinion piece in eLife arguing against the notion that we should limit the number of doctoral students.

Why might we have a discussion about limiting the number of doctoral students? Because the number keeps expanding. Here’s a relevant figure from about a year ago.

Marder argues we should not try to reduce the number of doctoral students, because some of them will be great scientists, and we can’t pick who will be those awesome scientists in advance.

(I)f we significantly decrease the number of entries into PhD programs, we risk losing some of the most exciting, dedicated and creative young scientists(.) ... Admissions committees are bad at predicting who will end up deciding to stay in science.

If admissions committees are bad at picking prospects, perhaps we should follow this logic through. An open door enrollment policy for graduate school probably wouldn’t work because faculty resources are limited. Maybe we could just admit students by a lottery system. It would save students all that arduous writing and transcript tracking needed to complete an application, and save faculty the time spent reviewing them.

Marder has an academic variation of the “sales funnel” in mind:

Big scientific discoveries are like business sales: there are steps that lead up to the sale, but every step suffers from attrition. Businesses try to widen the funnel through advertising and marketing. All other things being equal, more people entering the funnel means more sales at the end.

“A wider funnel means more world-changing discoveries!” has some logic to it. But the analogy to the sales weakens substantially. Advancing through every step in the academic funnel is long, and thus costly, to the people in the funnel.

And whether you advance in the sale funnel is almost entirely dependent on you as a customer: sales people don’t try to block you from buying their product. Whether you advance in the academic funnel depends on other people (glamor magazine editors, hiring committees, promotion committees, deans, administrators), who may well try to block you from going into the next level of the funnel.

Marder tries to put a bright shiny face on the personal costs of pursuing a doctorate that leads to a career that doesn’t need a doctorate:

Society would be enriched if more of the people making decisions in industry, law, medicine, education and politics had lived through the rigors of a PhD program, and knew first-hand how difficult it is to extract knowledge from our imperfect measurement and analytical tools. ... (G)raduate students will be better citizens of the world because of whatever time they spend confronting some of the deep mysteries of the universe.

“You didn’t get the job you thought you were being trained for and worked hard for over a decade to get. But it’s for the greater good!”

That’s cold comfort.

In biology, most people start doctoral programs because they want to be academics. I would far rather have a win-win situation where the type and amount of education and training people receive matches the career they eventually end up in. Underemployment – people in positions that do not require the higher degrees they have – is a lost opportunity as surely as keeping someone out of a doctoral program could be a missed opportunity.

I might agree with Marder that it would be great to have more people in decision making positions with research experience. But does that have to be a seven year doctoral degree? What if the recipient of a two year master’s degree with thesis could accomplish 90% of that societal good done by the average doctoral recipient? If you think that number is too high, what if a master’s degree could even achieve 50% of that societal good?

In fairness, Marder seems to recognize this:

Of course, we could devise a much shorter curriculum to enhance those skills, and probably should.

My impression, however, is that graduate programs want to add to the amount of formal training, not reduce it. (Ethics! Patent law! Accounting! Presentation skills!)

In any case, I suspect Marder need not worry about the number of doctoral students being restricted. There are far too many incentives now for faculty, administrators, funding agencies, and politicians to keep recruiting and producing more doctoral students.

Reference

Marder E. 2014. Looking out for future scientists. eLife 3: e04901. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/elife.04901

Hat tip to Bjorn Brembs.

The editor’s influence

A Salon article about the importance of editors in literature surprised me when it took a turn in discussing scientific publishing.

But surely the most endangered editorial role is, not coincidentally, also the most ineffable. In a recent post, Kent Anderson of the Scholarly Kitchen, a blog about academic publishing, reports that scientific and scholarly journals are now spoken of as if peer-reviewing were the only significant part of their editorial process: “one of the most important roles — that of the editor-in-chief or senior editor — seems to have been lost.” Of late, some journals have even been launched without any main editor at all; editorial and advisory boards, combined with peer review, have been deemed sufficient. There is no leader to be held personally accountable for the journal’s choices, and the publication loses something else, as well: vision, character, a personality all its own.
Anderson argues that in scholarly publishing — although the same goes for journalism and book publishing — a good editor-in-chief provides much that is crucial if also intangible.

Annoyingly, there is no link to the “recent post” mentioned in the paragraph above. I’m guessing it’s this one.

In neither post is there a specific example of a journal “without a main editor.” I’d guess that that Anderson had in mind one of his favourite punching bags, PLOS ONE, as an example. Taking that as an example, let’s see what editors are supposed to be providing.

Vision. Yes, an editor can articulate this, but editors are not the only ones who can. There has never been any doubt in my mind what the vision of PLOS ONE was: to provide a venue where science is judged on competence rather than perceived importance, and to publish open access. PLOS ONE has had advocates who have been as effective in articulating that vision as any editor.

Character and personality: This can be provided by a clear mission statement about what a journal will consider publishing. Yes, someone needs to write that statement, but I don’t think it has to be a single editor in chief. Besides, I don’t care all that much about the “character” of a journal, because journals are not the major way I find relevant articles any more.

In his post, Anderson writes:

First and foremost, the senior editor provides a strong signal to the market about who stands behind the journal, what level of scrutiny works will receive, and what disciplinary emphasis the journal is pursuing.

(Tangent: It’s interesting that that Anderson refers to the “market” instead of “researchers.”)

Who stands behind the journal: I think Anderson is saying it’s important for there to be a person who says, “The buck stops here.” I have not seen many editors who are willing to take that position. The recent STAP cell problem was a great example. Nature’s editors claimed there was no way they could have identified the problems from the reviews they received. The reviews that they actually received paint a rather different story, with one commenter calling the reviews to Nature “blistering.” There is a real debate to be had about just how accountable editors should be in these situations.

What level of scrutiny works will receive: I cannot figure this out from knowing how the editor is. The level of scrutiny is dependent on the reviewers, who vary. It’s dependent on how many reviews the article gets. It’s dependent on whether the review process is single blind, double blind, and so on.

Disciplinary emphasis: See my comments on “Character and personality,” above.

Anderson goes on:
 

The personality, reputation, and work habits of the lead editor play major roles in setting the editorial tone.

This can definitely be true, but it’s debatable whether than is always a good thing. There is also such a thing as institutional culture. We create institutions, like journals, to ensure that there is continuity that is not dependent on single indidviduals.

To be clear, I actually do think good editors are very useful. But I am less convinced that a single individual need be the one performing those jobs.

External links


The incredible vanishing editor: What we can learn from Martin Scorsese’s new documentary
The Editor — A Vital Role We Barely Talk About Anymore

Hat tip to Rebecca Skloot.

Hand waving about technology and teaching

Our incoming president UTRGV president, Guy Bailey, said at a presentation this morning:

I wouldn’t think students would have to be traveling throughout the Valley with technology.

I’m getting frustrated. Every time we hear questions asked about the UTRGV having multiple instructional sites, some almost a hundred mile apart, and how students will cope with that, multiple adminstrators, advisors, and politicians have all had the same answer.

“Technology!”

If all you’re saying is “Technology!” in response to questions about teaching, you might as well be saying, “Magic!”

What does “technology” even mean in this context? Bullet trains to take students from site to site? Online course through Blackboard? Google hangouts? Skype calls? Low emission bus systems? Those are all “technology.”


I think that what all these people are thinking is that we’ll have video conferencing capabilities and online courses.

But let me tell you, as someone who live online: you have to be careful about this. I think in the time from when UTRGV was conceived to now, we’re already move through a hype and bust cycle with massive online courses (MOOCs). There is evidence accumulating that they work for a small subset of students, who are highly prepared and motivated and already pretty well educated.

That is not the majority of our undergraduate student population.

Online courses in the sciences face even more problems, because we have labs. And those labs are important.

My big fear is that administrators and politicians genuinely don’t have a plan, won’t ask for input on a plan, foist the problem off on lower levels, and then complain when something that faculty said would not work does not, in fact, work.

The known knowns: we know everything about the physics of everyday life

I would like to thank Sean Carroll. Sean made me appreciate something that I think is quite profound, and that should be much better known than it is: that we understand, at a fairly deep level, how the everyday world works. It’s a theme he’s returned to often in his blogging and writing, but here are a couple of key posts that lay it out.

• The laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood
• Seriously, the laws underlying the physics of everyday life really are completely understood

I cite these two blog posts a lot when I’m answering questions on Quora, because they squash so many questions and speculations about psi and paranormal phenomenon. There is no room for “mysterious unknown forces” that might explain phenomenon.

For instance, for telekinesis to work, you’d need some sort of force that affects large objects (like a brain). But I do not need that hypothesis. We have forces that have been tested, repeatedly, and they explain everything we have ever been able to observe about everyday objects.

I think that I never grasped that we understand everyday object so completely because physicists tend to stress the limits to what we know. We don’t know how gravity connects to quantum mechanics (long standing problem), we don’t know what dark energy or dark matter is (newer problems).

It’s worth taking a moment to think about that achievement. I tend to think of modern empiricism starting around the time of Galileo, which is a little over 400 years ago. While Galileo didn’t start from zero, to go from as knowing as little as he did to a complete description what makes our world, as we know it, tick? That is an astonishing triumph for humanity.

Tuesday Crustie: Impressions

This gorgeous impressions were left by a species of Dithyrocaris, a phylocarrid crustacean.

Photo by James St. John on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Cognitive dissonance, science careers edition

On the one hand...

HESTEC is starting on my campus this week. I had honestly forgotten, which is an indication of how much the event is run from administration at the top instead of being orgazed more by faculty at the grass roots. The Twitter #HESTEC2014 hashtag is filled with “We must get more and more and more students in STEM!”

On the other hand...

Also in my Twitter feed this morning is this article from The Boston Globe: “Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in science.” (Incidentally, for those of us in the business, it hasn’t been that quiet.)

(U)niversities have expanded the number of PhD students they train — there were about 30,000 biomedical graduate students in 1979 and 56,800 in 2009. That has had the effect of flooding the system with trainees and drawing out the training period.

I doubt you’ll hear a single politician at HESTEC (and there’s quiet a few here) mention this issue.

External links

Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in science

Photo from here.

Incoming: The Complete Guide to Science Blogging

I am a big fan of “Nerdy” Christie Wilcox, Bethany “Scicurious” Brookshire, and Jason “Needs a catchy nickname” Goldman. They have all appeared on this blog in one form or another, and I on theirs.

The three of them have combined their forces, and the result is like this:

These three fantastic writers have edited The Complete Guide to Science Blogging, which will be out next year from Yale University Press.

I am not just a fan of this book, I am also a contributor. I do not, however, know much more about the book yet. I am looking forward to seeing who the other authors are, and what their chapters are about! These are slowly being revealed on the book’s Facebook page.

Next year seems to be a year for book chapters for me... although I think I am done with book chapters after the ones I’ve finished come out.

External links

The Complete Guide to Science Blogging Facebook page

Every scientific introduction ever

“Hi, I’m [name], working in [lab] at [institution].

“I’m a [disciplinary title] in [research field] focusing on [topic]. In particular, I’m [looking at / interested in] [topic] using [species or system name] as a model.”

Then, describe your research in a way that sounds almost exactly like you memorized it from a journal abstract, starting with a bland generalization (“Beetles are a speciose group,” “Sauropod dinosaurs were the largest land animals,” “Climate change will create conservation challenges”) before drilling down to your specific question after about 1-3 minutes.

Once you start listening, it is surprising how consistent this pattern is.

What ever happened to Open Lab?

I have been thinking about the Open Lab anthology the last couple of days. The annual anthology used to be something that generated excitement in the science blogosphere. People advertised for nominations, hundreds of entries were submitted, and there was a lot of noise when the finalists were selected.

Then, Scientific American publishing took it over for the 2012 edition, and changed the name. That was supposed to be the start of a wider distribution of the anthology. But 
I had to think hard to remember if there had been a 2013 release. (There was, at the end of February.)

And I haven’t heard anything about whether there is going to be one for this year. When you look at the Open Lab page at the Science Online website, the last mention is the release of the 2013 edition. Nothing about 2014.

Maybe this reflects the emergence of new social media. A lot of science conversation that once might have happened on blogs moved to Twitter and elsewhere.

Maybe it reflects the death of Google Reader and other RSS readers. I know my blog reading habits have never recovered since Google Reader shuttered.

Maybe it reflects increasingly professionalized, with an upswing in blog networks by established media brands. There’s no longer the sense that blogs have a credibility problem that needs a showcase to show it’s not just people writing in their pajamas mouthing off, or that blogs are ephemera where the good stuff needs to be archived. Maybe science blogs have just become too routine.

Update, 10 October 2014: Well, now we have an answer, of sorts. A sad one. The Science Online organization is done, no more, and the planned 2015 Science Online conference is cancelled.

The announcement is here.

Knight Science Journalism Tracker has a summary here.

Another update, also 10 October 2014: John Hawks makes some interesting points about blogging in a post-mortem of Science Online. His points relate to whether there was a continuing need for Open Lab. (Emphasis in original.)

ScienceOnline... never really evolved beyond the time when blogs were new. Blogs were quick and nimble mainly because they were small, with few layers of editorial decision-making. This gave them an unmatched power to respond to events, but has limited their reach. The leaders of online science have gone beyond the blog, exploring many other avenues of creativity.

The great UTRGV mascot debate continues

“It’s like Springfield versus Shelbyville.”

I was chatting over the weekend about the still undecided mascot for The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. I’d heard that Edinburg city council had passed a resolution in support of keeping the current mascot, the bronc.

What I hadn’t known was that Edinburg’s resolution had prompted counter resolutions, by a lot of local organizations and councils, either supporting or condemning the Edinburg resolution. And the split is generally the McAllen metro area (Edinburg, McAllen, Pharr) versus the rest of the Rio Grande Valley. A Texas Monthly article noted:

Ultimately, this will come down to power and politics, as much as anything, which is presumably why the anti-Bucky crowd is concerned: UTPA is the larger and more powerful of the schools, and Edinburg is by a substantial margin the wealthier of the two communities, compared to Brownsville (Edinburg's median household income is more then 30% higher than Brownsville's).

It is surprising to me the amount of political heat that mascot names generate, but the UTRGV mascot situation is far from unique. At the national level, we have the Washington Redskins being pressured to change their name. And a few years ago, the change of another university mascot, from a plantation owner to bear, got national attention.

Dan Solomon has been covering the mascot debate at Texas Monthly. He arrives as similar conclusions to my own about the shortlist. Having reflected on the short list some more, I am coming around to like “Tortoises.” A tortoise reflects tenacity, resilience, and maybe even wisdom. The Texas tortoise has character:

If the University of California Santa Cruz can have a banana slug as a popular mascot, why not a tortoise?

Update: Same day I posted this, I get an email about another survey on the UTRGV mascot. Interestingly, some of the options were not on the previous shortlist of ten. I see “Green Jays” and “Vaqueros” as choices (which I’d heard before), “Storm” (what? – another seemingly random surprise option) in addition to “Phoenix.”

Update, 6 October 2014: Brownsville has gotten in on the action, joining the “Anything but Bucky” campaign. The Texas Monthly wryly observes:

(T)he resolution highlights how sensitive everyone can be when it comes to debating pagan-like animal worship.

Update, 28 October 2014: The Texas Monthly considers the biggest sporting debate in Texas right now to be, “Are you for or against Bucky?” The article raises the specter of this being a bellwether for constant infighting over the direction of UTRGV.

Related posts

In search of an identity for UTRGV, or: why Bucky must go
Bland mascots

External links

UT-RGV Has Narrowed Its Search For a New Mascot Down to the Final Ten Contenders 
The Debate Over What The Mascot For The New UT-RGV Campus Is Getting Heated, Y'all  (Quotes this blog)
And then there were 4 
Brownsville city leaders request ‘new identity” for UT-RGV 
Get Bucky

Tortoise pic by Sara Viernum on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments for second half of September 2014

For Dorothy Bishop, two peer reviewed papers a year means you’re “totally disconnected from mainstream science.”

Science of the South examines which area has historic campus buildings statisically.