Notes from a pandemic: Not a time to jump into science communication

I’m seeing a few people bemoaning the lack of science outreach from professional scientists during this COVIC-19 pandemic. Efra Rivera-Serrano wrote:

Still amazes me that some principal investigators (PIs) and leaders can write whole pages on their grants proposing “outreach activities” but haven’t moved a finger to educate the public when it is mostly needed.

Jen Heemstra chimed in:

Science faculty, part of our job is teaching science. What better time than now to share our science knowledge with everyone? Even better, support students and postdocs who want to learn and participate in #SciComm!

I love me some science communication, but I worry. Something we have seen repeatedly during this pandemic is that very smart people, but who are not experts or have any practical experience, in epidemiology, public health, or modelling, think they have something worthwhile to contribute. And they make some model or prediction or say something else that is badly flawed.

As a personal example, I was in a meeting Friday where one of my colleagues opined that COVID-19 probably wouldn’t too bad in South Texas because of our geographic isolation. That wasn’t a crazy thing to say, but it was said, perhaps, from a limited point of view. An article the next day indicated that was not a good prediction. Culture matters.

(Local health authorities) have begun to notice something else particular to South Texas: strong family ties are exacerbating the virus’ spread.

“We have large households and these large households, they like to visit with other members of their family,” (Dr. Emily Prot, regional medical director of the Texas Department of State Health Services’ Region 11) said.

That needs to stop, she explained.

“We need to really avoid that and stay within one single household. So, no visiting tias, tios. No visiting the mother-in-law. That has to stop. We’re seeing too much spread right now within those family groups,” Prot said.

Prot hammered home the point, adding, “Those interactions are leading to more spread and we’re seeing that at a regional level.”

The Valley as a whole is at higher risk for seeing patients needing acute critical care, or who experience serious complications from the virus, Prot said.

“Well, we have more rates of diabetes in our region, and most of them (deaths caused by COVID-19) are due to older age, but we also had in Laredo, one of the deaths was in his 40s,” she said.

We need people with relevant expertise to provide that information. But I am deeply worried about people deciding, “I need to do science communication!” when do not have the relevant expertise, are unpracticed or untrained in communication (or both).

I would like all scientists, especially science communication novices, if their planned science communication in the time of COVID-19 passes the Craig Ferguson test for science communication.

The three things you must always ask yourself before you say anything:
Does this need to be said?
Does this need to be said by me?
Does this need to be said by me now?
Three fuckin’ marriages it took me to learn that.

(From Does This Need to Be Said? Epix, 2011)

Or, as I put it when I was curating the @IAmSciComm account, “When it's not your area of expertise, shut the hell up.”

External links

DSHS: Majority of RGV cases are young people

Three words that could use a rest in fandom

I have gotten tired of these three words (okay, two words and one phrase) in discussions of genre fiction.

1. “Plot hole.”
2. “Retcon.”
3. “Canon.”

First, those three give “realism about the fictional world” too much weight in judging artistic works. They make is sounds as though the best feature of any story is how well it mimics the consistency of reality.

You can see this same obsessive drive to try to find absolute perfect consistency in world-building in classic geek questions like, “Who’s stronger, Hulk or Thor?”, or “What is the speed of the White Star spaceships?” (I mention the last, because Joe Straczynski would reply, “They move at the speed of plot.” Which I imagine must have been a very frustrating answer for some fans. Flat out refusing to play the game.)

I remember loving technical manuals and handbooks that tried to list things like the height, weight, and eye colour of every character in the fictional world.

All of that is fun. But increasingly, I’m finding that discussions over story consistency overshadows analysis of character, emotion, humour, thoughtfulness, or any of the other myriad of things people might want to experience a story for.

Second, these three feed into a bad geek habit: always trying to show how smart you are. Watching a story becomes a protracted game of, “I’m smarter than the script writers, because I thought of this thing that they clearly didn’t.” Needing to show how smart you are is not an attractive part of nerd culture. (I say this as someone who has often been guilty of this bad habit.)

The NSF GRFP problem, 2020 edition

The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) awards were announced today. And the familiar “Matthew Effect” pattern continues.

• The entire University of Texas system, with 167,028 undergraduate students, gets 55 awards (0.03% awards / student).
• The entire California State University system, with around 484,300 undergraduate students, gets 39 awards (0.008% awards / student).
• Harvard University, with 6,788 undergraduate students, gets 22 awards (0.3% awards / student).
• Yale University, with 5,964 undergrad students, also gets 22 awards (0.3% awards / student).
• MIT, with 4,530 undergraduates, got 68 awards (1.5% awards / student).

The success rate of Harvard and Yale is about ten times higher than the Texas system and about 45 times higher than the California State University system.

If you want a GRFP, go to an Ivy League university. Or some other well-resourced east coast university.

You can download the NSF GRFP data here. Scroll down and search for “Export options” to get an Excel spreadsheet.

It has been five years since Terry McGlynn did the important job of first pointing out how slanted the playing field is. It’s been four years since NSF announced changes to their rules to try to create more diversity. But the same pattern keeps happening.

Is this NSF’s fault? Not necessarily. The NSF doesn’t release data on how many applications come in from each institution (as far as I know), and that is almost certainly extremely uneven. The missions of something like the California State University system is very different from that of an Ivy League institution.

I still think we need to call the NSF on this every single year. Something like an NSF GRFP is the sort of thing that can make a career happen. An award from a national funding agency creates so many opportunities that it’s not clear that the goals of the NSF are best served by those award going to students from extremely well-resourced institutions,

They’re two years old now, but if this question interests you, please do see these two amazing posts by Natalie Telis.

• The price of a GRFP, part 1
• The price of a GRFP, part 2

This concentration of GRFP awards is puzzling given that for regular awards, NSF does think about its overall portfolio of awards and is aware of the problems with concentrating many awards in a few institutions. It considers factors like whether a grant is coming from an EPSCOR state, which is essentially a measure of how successful a state has been at getting NSF funding.

Related posts

Fewer shots, more diversity?
The NSF GRFP problem continues

Notes from a pandemic: Scholarship stoppages

Among academics, there is a particular anxiety about being stuck at home. It’s a touchy subject. Productivity and overwork is always a sore spot in academia.

A lot of people are saying, “Academics’ cult-like worship of productivity is insane. It’s unreasonable to expect to be productive in a global crisis.”

And some people are pushing back, saying, “I need routine and work helps take my mind off that we are in the middle of a global crisis. Leave me alone.”

Whatever people’s personal feelings about continuing to do academic work, a lot of people are asking, “What is my university’s expectations about research?”

A couple of administrators and some scientists have basically said, “Keep getting data so we can keep papers and grants coming.” There’s a real worry about how this compromises social distancing and the safety of researcher. And it’s probably stressful for a lot of people to be told, “Keep working like nothing has changed.”

Most institutions have said that the fact that this has been a “pandemic year” will be taken into consideration at annual review time.

Some institutions have said they are going to “stop the clock” for tenure, which relieves some people but scares others. A year delay in review means a year delay in promotion and the raise usually associated with tenure.

Looking at data from Texas, the average salary increase between assistant and associate professor is over $8,500. Because that baseline is often used for various kinds of salary adjustments, the hit to someone lifetime earnings is much more than $8,500 for that one year.

I bring all this up because I encountered an unexpected obstacle to continuing with my academic scholarship. I have a project where I have all the data. I am starting to write up a manuscript about it. so I need to read the prior work. I find a book that looks highly relevant to the topic, and my library has it on the shelves. Excellent.

That’s when I discover the library isn’t lending out its books.

And even though the library is nominally open, the stacks are closed, so I can’t even go in and read the volume in the library itself.

That’s a little obstacle I should have expected to writing up articles, but didn’t.

There are going to be tons of obstacles, large and small, even for someone like me, who is not particularly affected by social distancing measures and working from home.

Notes from a pandemic: Inching closer

Fifteen days, huh? Longer than I thought.

It was fifteen days ago that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, my university announced it was extending spring break and moving all instruction online for the remainder of the semester and until further notice after that.

At the time, there were no confirmed cases in our area. But based on what I knew and based on conversation, I thought, “There are people infected here.”

And predictably enough, people testing positive started to pop up in the lower Rio Grande Valley. But today things went to a new level when one of our Brownsville students and a faculty member tested positive for COVID-19.

Friday, March 27, 2020 :: Office of the President

Dear Campus Community:

UTRGV learned today that one of our students and one of our faculty have each tested positive for COVID-19 (coronavirus). Our student tested positive after traveling out of state and our faculty member after returning from international travel. Please join me in sending positive thoughts to these Vaqueros for a speedy recovery.

Meanwhile, a few people in the science online community are starting to say, “Hey, I’ve got COVID-19.” Folks like Clement Chow and Adam Rutherford.

It’s an epidemic when people you don’t know get sick. It’s a pandemic when people you know get sick.

External links

UTRGV COVID-19 Case Update

Notes from a pandemic: Misanthrope report

Occasionally, when someone I know asks how everyone is doing (particularly on social media like Facebook or Twitter) how they’re doing working from home / self quarantined / social distancing, my response is usually something like:

“Misanthrope reporting in. What is everyone bitching about? Social distancing is the best thing ever. I’ve never been happier in my life!”

This statement is about:

• 50% true.
• 40% joking for the sake of joking (also known as me being a smartass).
• 10% false bravado.

I am pseudo-extrovert. I can dial up the energy level and sometimes even charm for a presentation, conference, or teaching, but it takes it out of me. I recharge by getting away from people. This is one more reason why, as I said before, my life has been disrupted much, much less than many other people.

Part of me is digging the fact that nobody expects me to go to meetings in person. That traffic is now relatively light all the time. I don’t have to generate as much small talk.

That false bravado, though, is real. As in, really false.

Not long ago, I stumbled across the TV series Alone, and watched season 2 - partly because it was set on the north end of Vancouver Island, Canada, which is close to where I used to live. (Victoria is on the south end of the island.)

Participants film themselves. They have no film crew. They have nothing but a “panic button” to connect with the outside world.

The show is kind of an ode to boredom, punctuated by rare moments of crisis.

Watching the show, what became obvious was that for some participants who made themselves reasonably secure physically did not mean they were okay psychologically.

One participant said something like, “If you have an unresolved issues, they are going to bubble up and consume you, because there is nothing else to distract you and beat them back down.”

I’ve felt a very tiny little bit of that in the last couple of weeks.

Now, to reiterate my point earlier: I’m all right! But even we introverted, slightly misanthropic human beings are usually social animals, and we need something to keep ourselves occupied besides our own thoughts.

I am super glad for the internet and my pocket friends. I’ve said for years, “Online conversations are real conversations.” Online friendships are real friendships. This will be something that will save a lot of people from falling into bad places in their own minds.

Notes from a pandemic: “Research that actually matters”

On Monday, a now deleted tweet from Andrew Timming said something along the lines of, “This crisis is a wake-up call. COVID-19 shows how much academic research is just castles in the sky. ‘Moving forward, let’s do research that actually matters to the world’.”

Andrew has deleted the tweet, so I can’t confirm the exact wording. That last part – “research that actually matters to the world” – is an exact quote. I don’t think Andrew deserves hate, which he says he received, but I do think his comment deserves commentary. Maybe even critical commentary.

I get the sentiment. I do. In times of crisis, a lot of people feel useless.

Timming was making a variation of an old, long-running argument about “basic verus applied” research. Now, I’ve heard a lot of retorts to this. I like, “If we only ever did applied research, all we’d have would be better mammoth traps.”

According to (probably untrue) legend, a politician once asked Michael Faraday what good electricity was.

There are two versions of the story of Faraday’s reply.

1. “One might as well as what good is a new borne baby.”
2. “One day, sir, you may tax it.”

(I like the second one.)

But the next day, I was listening to Maddie Sofia interviwing Ed Yong on ShortWave. It shows the COVID-19 pandemic itself shows the problem of focusing research on what “actually matters in the world.” (My emphasis.)

SOFIA: So one thing that I found really interesting in your article was the state of coronavirus research in general and how that plays into how prepared we are right now. Like, this is a big group of viruses that cause a decent bit of disease throughout the world. But one researcher you talked to said that until recently, not that many people were studying coronaviruses.

YONG: Right. So a very small group of people - maybe, you know, several dozens of researchers - have focused on coronaviruses for a few decades now. But it really has been a very, very niche field, even among virologists. When SARS classic first emerged, I think coronavirus researchers were really shocked that the things that they were studying were suddenly of public health importance.

SOFIA: Right.

YONG: And they are even more flabbergasted now.

SOFIA: And so because of that - because even after SARS, there wasn’t a huge uptake in how many people were studying this, we don’t necessarily have surveillance networks in place for coronavirus like we do for the flu.

YONG: Right. A lot of our preparedness measures in general have been focused on flu as the most likely next pandemic - and for good reason - because flu actually is the most likely next pandemic. It just so happened that this time, it was a coronavirus. And we don’t have surveillance for coronaviruses. We know, actually, surprisingly little about coronavirus biology. And all of those deficiencies have contributed to this dire situation that we’re facing when we don't know enough but we're forced to act as quickly as possible.

Arguably, the situation we now find ourselves in with the COVID-19 pandemic is not despite the view that researchers should do work “that actually matters to the world,” it’s because of it.

From a rational assessment of risk, need, whatever, I’m sure people argued in grant agencies that we should not invest much money and resources in coronavirus research. The best estimates were that coronaviruses didn’t pose much of a threat, so we should put that money into influenza or something else.

This isn’t even the first time we’ve seen this happen in the last decade.

Remember when people were freaking out about zika? (I know, it seems like something that we read about in history books instead of only four years ago, in 2016.) The CDC director tweeted this picture of every paper about the zika virus published in the world to that point.

It was pretty short freakin’ stack of paper. And the headline was that scientists were caught “flat-footed.”

I’m sure that on September 10, 2001, there would have been a lot of people in the US arguing that universities should think about shuttering programs in, say, contemporary Islamic thought or Arabic language studies.

If we discovered an comet, asteroid, or meteor on a collision course with Earth tomorrow (and given how 2020 is going, I feel like we should be watching the skies more), the headline would probably again be that scientists were caught flat-footed. Even though people have known this is a possibility for decades.

Hell, Hollywood knew this well enough to make a movie about it in 1979. And Sean Connery disaster from space movies are the best disaster from space movies. (Don’t @ me, Armageddon and Deep Impact viewers.)

Things are only irrelevant until they’re not. And then people complain, “Why wasn’t anyone studying this?!” Society pretty much told us not to. Society told us that we weren’t doing research that “actually matters.”

External links

Why is the coronavirus so good at spreading?
One tweet that shows how the Zika virus caught scientists flat-footed

Notes from a pandemic: Coronavirus campus

These pictures of UTRGV were taken Monday, 23 March 2020, when I went to campus to feed my crayfish. You could be forgiven for thinking they were taken the first day of spring break rather than the first day after spring break.

There were a few people on campus, but not many.

And frankly, I’ve always loved campuses when there are not many people around. I like the calm, and it was kind of beautiful.

Through a weird series of events, I am probably one of the people least affected by the COVID-19 pandemic I know.

Because I had spent the better part of the last two years mainly working on the Better Posters book:

I had been teaching online courses for the last couple of years. My teaching load was anywhere from mostly to exclusively online for the last few semesters. I had only one face-to-face class this semester, my neurobiology class. That course didn’t have a lab component. I had a good idea of how to move its course content online from my other online class experiences.

I didn’t have a lab to shut down. Because I was writing from home, I wasn’t taking students. My lab space (with my consent) got reassigned to another group of researchers from another department. I didn’t fight it because I wanted to be a team player, and I was working on the book anyway. So I thought, “No problem, I’ll get lab space once the book manuscript is done and out of the way.” Getting new lab space had taken longer than I expected, and I was getting antsy about it. But this has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since I didn’t have to go through a process of putting everything away, worrying about trainees, and so on. I only have some crayfish to feed occasionally.

Unrelated to book writing, there’s one more thing that makes my life much less disrupted than many other people.

I don’t have kids. I feel for people who suddenly have kids at home and not at school.

Which is to say:

I’m all right!

Look after yourself and others.

It’s going to be a rough ride.

The @IAmSciComm threads

This post is a collection of threads I wrote during my week curating the IAmSciComm Twitter account.

Monday, 16 March 2020

• Introducing your host
• Taking over in a crisis
• Show me a poster
• Better posters means better academia
• The future is visual
• Posters in a time of crisis

Tuesday, 17 March 2020

• RTFM
• Getting to the point
• Online poster sessions
• Writing a title
• Lessons from Shaun the Sheep

Wednesday, 18 March 2020

• Decisions plus empathy
• Buy new fonts, cheapskate
• Reading gravity
• Type size

Thursday, 19 March 2020

• White space
• Type choices
• Academic camping and clothing choices
• Setting up an online poster session
• How to present a poster

Friday, 20 March 2020

• Public intellectuals
• Lessons from crayfish headlines
• The “kiloauthors” story
• How doing SciComm affected my scientific career
• How to build a science career while doing SciComm

Saturday, 21 March 2020

• Mission Mangal review
• Poster critique: Employee placement
• Poster critique: Fur seal populations
• Poster critique: Penguin metabolism
• Poster critique: Glucose toxicity
• Poster critique: Children's confidence
• Poster critique: Visual storytelling
• Poster critique: Asteroid impact
• Writing Better Posters: the book
• Peace out

External links

I am SciComm home page

Find me on Amazon!

I am getting ready for the forthcoming release of the Better Posters book! I now have my own author’s page on Amazon!

Find me at: https://www.amazon.com/author/zenfaulkes

My Kindle edition of Presentation Tips and the Freshwater Crayfish anthology I helped edit are already there.

@IAmSciComm next week!

From 16-21 March, I will be hosting and curating the IAmSciComm Twitter account!

My schedule:

Date	Topic
Monday, March 16, 2020	Why posters matter; show me your poster!
Tuesday, March 17, 2020	Planning your poster
Wednesday, March 18, 2020	Designing your poster
Thursday, March 19, 2020	Presenting your poster
Friday, March 20, 2020	SciComm while sciencing
Saturday, March 21, 2020	The randomizer!

When I signed up months ago, I was thinking primarily about starting to do content that would enhance awareness of my upcoming book about posters from Pelagic Publishing. And I have decided to stick with that original plan, since that was my pitch to the Twitter account’s head honchos.

Little did I know that the US would be in the grip of the global COVIC-19 pandemic. It is going to be an interesting time to talk about science communication. Crises are times where the need for excellent communication becomes absolutely life-saving. And we are not seeing from many offices and institutions that have traditionally done much better.

External links

I Am SciComm home page

Time Higher Ed feature article on authorship disputes

I’m busy copyediting the Better Posters book and grading and teaching, but I wanted to stick my head out of my hole to point to a great feature article in Times Higher Education on the subject of authorship disputes.

I have a few quotes in this article. It’s clearly an outcome of the paper on authorship disputes I published over a year ago now. (Sometimes, you’re so busy with one project you forget about the “long tail” of earlier projects.) I was also lucky that I’ve talked to journalist Jack Grove before and was in his email contact list

I’m rather amused that while I chose to illustrate these conflicts with a picture of chess pieces, the Times chose... hockey. As a Canadian, I can do nothing but approve.

External links

What can be done to resolve academic authorship disputes?
Whose Paper is it Anyway? A Discussion on Authorship (Illustration)

Related posts

You think you deserved authorship, but didn’t get it. Now what? 
How wasting time on the internet led to my new authorship disputes paper

What’s worth stealing? Academic edition

I heard someone ask this recently at a conference, “What if someone steals your ideas?”

I have good news:

Nobody wants to steal your ideas.

Especially in academia. As I’ve said before, ideas a cheap. Not worthless, but not worth much. Once you have been in academia a while, there are so many ideas floating around that you will quickly realize the list of ideas you want to put into action vastly exceeds the ones that you can put into action.

I think this is why concern about “stealing ideas” surfaces with early career individuals or novices. They are still at the point where they don’t know the map of the territory. They don’t know what has or has not been done, so they don’t have a clear idea of where the fertile ground for ideas lies or what is practical. It’s sort of like kids who think “Everything has been invented already.”

Stealing ideas isn’t worth it.

When you look at what problems around intellectual property in academia, it’s usually about someone stealing completed work.

Stealing data, plagiarism, duplicate publication, or insisting you be added as an author to a paper you did not contribute to – all of those stealing completed work. That’s what you need to worry about and protect. Not your ideas.

Related posts

Ideas are cheap

Is this a real journal?

A student of mine went to conference, then got an email from unknown journal. The student asked me if this was normal and whether the journal was legit. Here’s the process I went through to evaluate the journal and try to help the student.

I googled the journal title. First thing I noticed was the domain name. The publisher's name is not a correctly spelled English word, which either means the publisher is trying to be gimmicky or using a non-English spelling. Neither makes a good first impression.

The sidebar lists journal information, and I see “Year first Published: 2019”. So even if this is a legitimate journal, it has no track record and probably no reputation. And journals are all about reputation.

Nor does the journal info sidebar say anything about the journal being indexed anywhere, like Web of Knowledge or Scopus. Most aspiring legitimate journals at least mention indexing, whether they currently have it, because most authors want their work to be findable in academic searches.

The second paragraph of the journal description has a glaringly obvious typo about the type of research the journal publishes (“-olog” instead of “-ology”). This suggests that someone is not paying attention to the home page. This could be because they are a fly-by-night operation that is only interested in charging authors, or that they’re new or inexperienced and can’t be bothered to proofread.

So this looks like either a scam (likely) or something made by careless amateurs. Neither’s good.

Accreditation agency lies to support ICE sting operation on foreign students

Accreditation of universities means that they self police and peer review each other to ensure there is a certain level of quality assurance. That they are real educational institutions that are not going to vanish.

I am in shock to learn that one accreditation agency was complicit in a terrible hoax.

The Detroit Free Press is reporting that the US government, via Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), created a fake university, the University of Farmington.

Attorneys for the students arrested said they were unfairly trapped by the U.S. government since the Department of Homeland Security had said on its website that the university was legitimate. An accreditation agency that was working with the U.S. on its sting operation also listed the university as legitimate.

There is a lot going on in this story, and it’s not clear to me who this “sting” was intended to target. The story mentions “recruiters” have been charged, but their role is not clear.

But I am sort of stunned by the arguments the officials running it are making:

Attorneys for ICE and the Department of Justice maintain that the students should have known it was not a legitimate university because it did not have classes in a physical location. ...

“Their true intent could not be clearer,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Helms wrote in a sentencing memo this month for Rampeesa, one of the eight recruiters, of the hundreds of students enrolled. “While ‘enrolled’ at the University, one hundred percent of the foreign citizen students never spent a single second in a classroom. If it were truly about obtaining an education, the University would not have been able to attract anyone, because it had no teachers, classes, or educational services.”

But another part of the story says:

The school was located on Northwestern Highway near 13 Mile Road in Farmington Hills and staffed with undercover agents posing as university officials.

So it’s not as though this fake “university” was just a website.

In any case, I am kind of against the whole “They should have known” argument when this fake university was listed as accredited. This is supposed to be the whole point of accreditation: to protect people from scams. Accreditation should protect people from profiteering scams and government entrapment scams.

The accreditation agency that participated in this should be ready to answer a lot of questions. I think this was extremely problematic behaviour on the part of the accrediting agency. It calls into question every other accreditation decision. If a government can warp the accreditation process for a sting, what other ways can “accreditation” be had?

External links

ICE arrests 90 more students at fake university in Michigan

The crackpot index, biology edition

Amanda Glaze wrote:

Can someone with some free time create a crackpot index for biology like the one that exists in physics?

At the very top of that index there needs to be a section for making arguments that foundational research in a field is completely wrong and using a clip art PowerPoint displaying your own theory based on no research whatsoever as a viable alternative.

Challenge accepted!

The likelihood of someone making revolutionary changes in biology:

1. A -5 point starting credit.
2. One point for every statement that already addressed in TalkOrigins.
3. Two points for every exclamation point!
4. Three points for each word in ALL CAPS.
5. Five points for saying that “theories” are less likely to be true than “laws” or “facts.”
6. Five points for every mention of “entropy” or “Second law of thermodynamics.”
7. Ten points for each use of the words “Darwinism” or “Darwinist.”
8. Ten points for arguing a discredited individual should be taken seriously because they were “nominated for a Nobel prize.”
9. Ten points for saying that “Scientists are the ones who aren’t following the evidence.”
10. Ten points for arguing that historically documented events are “statistically impossible.”
11. Ten points for saying a current well-established theory is “only a theory.”
12. Ten points for calling the current theory “a theory in crisis.”
13. Ten points for asserting that evidence only counts if personally witnessed, in real time, by a human being.
14. Twenty points for saying that then things that current theories predict should not happen are huge problems for the theory because nobody has seen them happen.
15. Twenty points for listing people - whether they have any training or experience in the field in question - who “dissent” from current ideas.
16. Twenty points for finishing any claim or argument with the word, “Checkmate!”
17. Twenty points for saying, “Darwin was wrong.”
18. Twenty points for every other scientific discipline that must be wrong in order for your claims to be correct.
19. Twenty points for asking, “Then why are there still monkeys?”
20. Thirty points for asking, “Where are the transitional fossils?”
21. Thirty points for suggesting that scientists on the brink of death recanted their ideas.
22. Thirty points for calling any scientist an “industry shill.”
23. Thirty points for claiming any scientist holds a view “just to keep the grant money coming.”
24. Forty points for taking quotes of a famous scientist out of context so that it appears to support your position (“quote mining”).
25. Fifty points for claiming that your views are being suppressed while writing on a social media platform, blog, or website that is not only discoverable, but lands on the first page of search engine results.

External links

The Crackpot Index

Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart for neurons

Blame Michael Hendricks and Adam Calhoun and Twitter.

Journal reviewing celebration

Recently, I completed a review for journal number fifty. Not fifty articles – fifty different journals I have reviewed for. Some only once and some multiple times.

Since you’re invited to review papers, and I usually say yes whenever possible, the list is kind of an interesting way to see what other people think I know. Mostly crustacean stuff, but I’m pleased that behaviour, evolution, nervous systems, and even internet stuff has worked its way into the list of thing I’ve reviewed.

Acta Ethologica
American Midland Naturalist
Animals
Aquaculture Research
Aquatic Invasions
Behaviour
Behavioural Processes
BioInvasions Records
Biologia
Biological Invasions
Biological Journal of the Linnean Society
BMC Evolutionary Biology
Brain, Behavior and Evolution
Bulletin of Marine Science
Diversity
Drug Discovery Today
Environmental Management
Facets
Fisheries Research
Freshwater Crayfish
Herpetological Natural History
ICES Journal of Marine Science
Invertebrate Reproduction and Development
Journal of Coastal Research
Journal of Crustacean Biology
Journal of Ethology
Journal of Experimental Biology
Journal of Experimental Zoology, Part A: Ecological Genetics and Physiology
Journal of Medical Internet Research
Journal of Natural History
Journal of Neurophysiology
Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)
Knowledge and Management of Aquatic Ecosystems
Management of Biological Invasions
Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology
Marine Biology Research
Nature Ecology & Evolution
Neuroscience Letters
North-Western Journal of Zoology
Open Journal of Molecular and Integrative Physiology
PeerJ
Physiology and Behavior
PLOS ONE
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Royal Society Open Science
Science Advances
The Biological Bulletin
Zoolgischer Anzeiger
Zoology
Zootaxa

How academic publishing is like a really nice bra

In my jackdaw meanderings around the internet, I stumbled on this thread from Cora Harrington.

Sometimes I like to look at lace prices on sites like Sophie Hallette. It’s good for giving perspective on how, even if the cost of lingerie was just fabrics (and it’s not because people should be paid for their labor), many items would still be expensive.

She gives many examples, of which I will show just one (emphasis added):

The Chloris reembroidered lace is around $1600/meter.

And that isn’t the most expensive one. Cora concludes:

When someone says “There’s no way x could cost that much,” keep in mind that there are fabrics - literally just the fabrics - that can cost 4 figures per meter.

And the labor - the expertise - involved in knowing how to handle these fabrics is worth many, many times more.

This made me think a lot about academic publishing. Because I am always fascinated by people who say something like undergraduate textbooks or journal subscriptions or article processing fees for open access publishing costs “too much.” When someone says something costs “Too much,” that means they have some notion in their head of what the “right” price is.

But as this example shows, people don’t always have a clear conception of the costs involved. And people complaining about costs sometimes tend to assume that the labour involved is simple, quick, and not worth paying a decent wage for.

This is not to say prices can’t be too high. But at least as far as academic publishing goes, I’ve only seen one attempt to work out what costs are. That is, apart from publishers themselves, who have conflicts of interest in calculating and disclosing costs.

Who co-authored the most read paper in JCB? Me.

Yes, I know there are all kinds of problems with mystery metrics. Yes, I know this reflects the new paper I co-authored being, well, a new paper with no paywall. Yes, I know that this won’t necessarily reflect the long time impact of the paper.

Still. It feels nice.

Far too often, publishing academic papers feels like shouting into a vacuum. Or the most agonizing of slow burns, where it takes years to know if other people will pick up on what you’ve done. So a little short term feedback like this is pleasant.

Victoria Braithwaite dies

I was saddened to learn about the untimely death of Victoria Brathwaite. Victoria was a pioneer in research on nociception in non-mammals (fish, specifically), culminating in her book Do Fish Feel Pain? (reviewed here).

I was fortunate to have her as one of the speakers for a symposium I co-organized for Neuroethology in 2012. She was a fine speaker, and I’m sorry I won’t get more chances to interact or learn from her.

External links

Penn State community grieves loss of biologist Victoria Braithwaite

Climbing the charts

A new preprint of a forthcoming paper I collaborated on dropped in Journal of Crustacean Biology last week.

Today, it’s in the journal’s “most read” list.

I have no idea how the journal calculates this list or how often it updates it. But this makes me happy. Not bad, eh?

The paper is open access, so anyone can read it. So please, help us bump off that Artemia eggs paper off the top position!

Reference

DeLeon H III, Garcia J Jr., Silva DC, Quintanilla O, Faulkes Z, Thomas JM III. Culturing embryonic cells from the parthenogenetic clonal marble crayfish Marmorkrebs Procambarus virginalis Lyko, 2017 (Decapoda: Astacidea: Cambaridae). Journal of Crustacean Biology: in press. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcbiol/ruz063

Science as a process and an institution

In a response to a poll that showed Canadians’ trust is science might be weakening, Timothy Caulfield tweeted:

Trust in science falling. People seem angry at institutions. But science isn’t a person, a place, an industry, or an institution. Science is a process. Science is a way of understanding the world. If not science, what?

Caulfield is technically correct (which, as the saying goes, is the best kind of correct). Science is a process. But this is an overly abstracted view of science – a view taken from 30,000 feet, as it were.

Science, as currently practiced, is done by people, in places, as an industry, by institutions.

Science is a profession (although it is not practiced as a working profession by many people). Most people don’t get to publish scientific papers or make new discoveries.

Science is predominantly carried out in cities in some way.

Science has its own infrastructures of technical supplies and publishing and it creates a product (knowledge distributed in technical papers).

Science is associated with universities and a few businesses.

Saying, “Science is a process” ignores how concentrated the community is and how the practitioners are invisible to a very large section of society. Saying, “Science is a process” ignores that, as currently practiced, science has many characteristics of an industry or institution.

Calling science a process is like calling politics “a process.” Sure, in theory anyone can participate and is participating in politics, but in practice, most politicking is done by professional politicians and civil servants in capital cities participating in government and a few other organizations.

“Politics” as practiced can be seen as isolated and corrupt and untrustworthy because of how it it organized. Same with science.

If we want trust in science, we can’t fall back on these sorts of idealized dictionary definitions of science. We have to embrace the reality of how science is practiced in reality. And the reality is that science can feel closed and confusing and haughty for many who have minimal connections with that community.

Tuesday Crustie: Philately

Australia has issued a set of crayfish stamps!

Hat tip to Dr. Crayfish.

External links

Set of Freshwater Crayfish stamps

Lessons from sport for science

Two of my interests recently intersected on ABC’s The Science Show.

As regular readers might know, I have been fascinated with the creation and ongoing development of the women’s competition of Australian Rules Football (AFL). (I am a card-carrying supporter of the Melbourne Football Club’s women’s team!) When I lived in Australia, it was clear that there were women who loved the game, but as spectators. The game was very much seen as being for blokes. I don’t think I ever heard about women playing in the time I was there.

Fast forward to a women’s league that is growing and making international waves, and that is expanding the audience for this sport significantly. The brilliant picture of the atheleticism of Tayla Harris (shown) and her subsequent poor treatment over it made news in the US. That was the first time I think I ever heard AFL on the news since moving here.

Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel talks about how this new league teaches us a lot about how creating opportunities makes a difference for people. And that science could learn from this (my emphasis).

So let’s go back and think about women’s AFL in the year 2000. (A year I lived in Australia! - ZF) If you were a schoolgirl in Victoria, you couldn’t play in an AFL competition once you hit the age of 14. Why not? Because there was no competition open to teenage girls. You had to wait until you were 18 to join the senior women’s league, and that league was a community competition, without sponsors, played on the worst sports grounds, in your spare time, at your own expense.

On the other hand, your twin brother with the same innate ability would be nurtured every step of the way. And by the time he turned 18, he could easily be on a cereal box and pulling a six-figure salary. Very few people in the AFL hierarchy seem to regard this as a problem. ...

(N)ow when a teenage girl has a talent for football in 2019, she has got role models on TV, she’s got mentors in her local clubs, she’s got teachers and friends who say it’s okay for a girl to like football. In fact it’s great for a girl to like football. She’s not weird, she's not an alien, she is a star. You can see that virtuous cycle starting to form: the standard of the competition rises, it attracts more women and girls, the standard of the competition rises. And we wonder why it took us so long to see what now seems so obvious: second class status for women in sport is not acceptable.

Second class status for women in science isn’t acceptable, either.

External links

Science should emulate sport in supporting women

This week on The TapRoot podcast...

I had the great fun of talking to Ivan Baxer and Liz Haswell for The TapRoot podcast!

We chatted about my two most recent contributions: a paper on authorship disputes, and my letter to Science about grad programs dropping the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). When I wrote those two articles, I didn’t have any connecting thread between them, but I found one for this roundtable:

(N)othing in academia makes sense except in light of assessment and how awful it is.

(And yes, I’m channeling Theodosius Dobzhansky via Randy Olsen.)

Confession time: I had never listened to Taproot until Ivan contacted me about being on the show. To prepare, I listened to a bunch of episodes. I became increasingly excited about the prospect of being one of the guests. Because The Taproot a damn good podcast. The discussion is great and the production values are excellent.

If you are a scientist, I recommend subscribing to The TapRoot – and not just because I’m on it! It’s on all the usual subscription services.

The recording process was not easy, though. Because I was mostly working at home at the time, we tried a test run of recording using my home wifi. Horrible. Awful delays, choppy audio, and just generally unusable audio.

Then I went to my university and used that wifi. You would think an institutional signal in the middle of summer with low use would be better, but nope. It seemed to be an issue with my particular laptop.

We finally solved the problem by using a LAN cable. I can’t remember the last time I had to use a physical cable to connect to the internet, but the old tech still works!

The screenshot is from audio editor JuniperKiss, who did a great job of making me sound more articulate than I am.

Please give the pod a listen or a read, since there’s a full transcript available!

P.S.—I mentioned in this interview that my department wanted to move away from using the GRE. That was no initiated by me, since I stepped down as our graduate program coordinator a while ago.

Dropping the GRE was the plan. I learned after this episode was recorded that our department’s attempt to drop the GRE as an admissions requirement was blocked by administrators up the chain. I think, but an not sure, that it was the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. As I understood it, they wanted data to show that the GRE was not predictive of success in our program.

I was surprised, because there are no shortage of peer-reviewed papers on this, some of which I cited in my #GRExit letter in Science. BUt I maybe should not have been surprised, since the Coordinating Board had required some master’s programs in my university add the GRE a few years ago.

I wonder why there is this desire to keep the GRE at the state level.

P.P.S.—I’m sorry I said “guys” as a generic for people.

External links

Taproot S4E2: The GRExit and how we choose who goes to grad school

Taproot Season 4, Episode 2 transcript

The TapRoot on Stitcher

The TapRoot on iTunes

Destination Mars

You too can send your name to Mars!

Interstellate goes international

Caitlyn Vander Wheele showcased the latest iteration of her Interstellate magazine project today! It is featured in the French magazine L’ADN, the their theme issue, “Game of Neurones.”

(Americans will not fully appreciate this pun, because Americans say the name of brain cells as “neuron,” with a short “o” – rhymes with “brawn.” Europeans have tended to favour pronouncing the name of brain cells as “neurone,” with a long “o” – rhymes with, yes, “throne.”

I couldn’t be more pleased that somehow, my contribution from Volume 1 snuck into the issue! You can see the abdominal fast flexor motor neurons of Louisiana red swamp crayfish in the upper left.

Merci, L’ADN! Je suis très heureux d’être dans votre magazine!

External links

Interstellate, Volume 1
Interstellate, Volume 2

A project will never be “perfect,” but...

A project will never be “perfect,” but it can be “done.”

“Follow the rules like everyone else” is not punishment

Because I curate a collection of stings and hoaxes, I have been following the so-called “grievance studies” affair by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindasy, and assistant professor Peter Boghossian (the only academic of the trio). They sent hoax papers to journals. Many people have sent hoax papers to journal (hence my anthology), but Pluckrose and colleagues described it as an experiment and published it.

Inside Higher Education reports:

Boghossian was ordered last year to take research compliance training; he has not yet done so, the letter states. Because Boghossian has not completed Protection of Human Subjects training, he is forbidden from engaging in research involving human subjects or any other sponsored research.

In other words, “Follow the same rules as everyone else.”

Just by way of comparison, and to give you an idea of what research with humans normally entails, I did an online survey for a couple of research papers (here’s one). That’s less intrusive than what Boghossian and colleagues did. I had to:

• Go through “research with human subjects” training.
• Submit a proposal to an institutional review board and have it approved.
• Include detailed descriptions of the potential benefits and risks to anyone viewing the survey.

So “Take training before you do more research” is what anyone should do.

But some reporting makes it sound like Boghossian is being treated arbitrarily (emphasis added).

• PSU punishes prof who duped academic journal with hoax ‘dog rape’ article
• Portland State bans professor from research for getting ‘grievance studies’ hoaxes published
• Portland State bans ‘grievance studies’ prof from doing research “banned from both human-subjects and sponsored research by the public university”

My prediction is that this is going to become a talking point in the American culture wars, with some trying to paint Boghossian’s letter as a dire consequence that has a chilling effect on academic freedom, is political correctness gone mad, continue buzzwords until exhausted.

Unfortunately, the language of the letter Boghossian got was pretty severe, which will contribute to the impression that the consequences for Boghossian are bad.

And it is bad, of course. It’s embarrassing to get called out for your actions and told you didn’t do the right thing by this institution and your profession.

But I bet a lot of people wish their punishment for something was a letter saying, “Follow the rules.” I’m sure some teenagers would like that more then being grounded.

The failure of neuroscience education

In every field of science, there are certain basic facts. These are the facts that if you get them wrong, mark you as naïve at best and foolish at worst.

In chemistry, one of those facts might be that everything is made of atoms.

In astronomy, one of these facts might be that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way round.

In geography, geology, and astronomy, one of those facts might be that the earth is round and not flat.

These basic sorts of facts are often used to assess people’s scientific literacy. We consider it important that people be educated in these.

But neuroscience has failed in conveying its most basic facts. Case in point:

The myth that “We only use ten percent of our brain.”

People believe this. I mean, they really believe it.

I’ve heard multiple people mention it at public scientific lectures. I’ve answered dozens of questions about this on Quora, where some version of it crops up every few days.

And that damn Luc Besson movie didn’t help.

From a neuroscientist’s point of view, saying “We only use ten percent of our brain” is as big an error as saying, “The earth is flat.”

A few moments of thought should show why it can’t be true. We never hear a physician say things like, “Well, the bullet went through your skull, but luckily, it went through the 90% of you brain you never use.” It has no basis in reality.

If you go to the Society for Neuroscience to see what scientists say about this, you might find their  outreach page. There, have to navigate to their “Brain Facts” page (which should be “About Brain Facts”, not the actual landing page for “Brain Facts”), dig down to their “Core concepts” and under “Your complex brain” you can read:

There are around 86 billion neurons in the human brain, all of which are in use.

So the leading professional society for neuroscience counters the 10% brain myth with a sentence fragment that is hard to find and weakly worded.

If I was leading neuroscience education, my goal would be to make, “We use 100% of our brain” the sort of bedrock scientific fact that we expect people should know.

Postscript: The 10% myth probably dates back to 1936, when American writer Lowell Thomas wrote the foreword to one of the best all-time sellers, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Thomas was summarizing an idea of psychologist William James: that people have unmet potential. Most of us could learn Russian, but don’t. We could learn to play a musical instrument, but don’t. We could learn how to repair a 1963 MGB sports car, but don’t.

Thomas added a falsely precise percentage: “Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only ten per cent of his latent mental ability.” Somewhere along the line, “mental ability” became “brain.” This isn’t surprising, since the notion that “Thoughts come from our brain” is a scientific fact that is widely known. That’s our “Sun is at the center of the solar system” fact.

External links

Do we really only use ten percent of our brain?

“Teach the controversy” image from a super cool T-shirt from Amorphia.

A sad story about the first moon landing

(This post contains material that some may find distressing; specifically, suicide.)

I’m too young to remember the moon landing.

(Continues below the fold.)

More multimedia: Crustacean pain and nociception talk

Last year, I gave a talk at Northern Vermont University about crustacean pain. It was recorded by the local public access television station, Green Mountain Access TV, and is now up on Vimeo.



Current Topics in Science Series, Zen Faulkes from Green Mountain Access TV on Vimeo.

Big thanks to Leslie Kanat for hosting me and for Green Mountain Access TV for recording it!

Audiopapers

Corina Newsome! This is your fault! You have to go and say:

Can we get scientific journal articles on audiobook? Please?

There is a long thread that follows about possible solutions. But two things emerge:

1. Software to read papers aloud automatically doesn’t do a very good job.
2. Quite a few people want these.

Following my long standing tradition of, “What the heck, I’ll have a go,” I’d like to present my first audiopaper! It’s a reading of my paper from last year on authorship disputes.

I decided to do this because I wanted to get more mileage out of a mic I’d bought for a podcast interview (forthcoming), and because I still have this discussion in the back of my head.

I often tell students, “Always plot the data”, since different patterns can give same summary stats. How could I help visually impaired students do something similar?

And the answer is that while there have been experiments in sonification of data, it seems to have stayed experimental and never moved into simple practical use. It got me thinking about how little we do for visually impaired researchers.

I picked my authorship disputes paper for a few reasons.

1. There are no bothersome figures to worry about describing.
2. The topic probably has wider appeal than my data driven papers.
3. The paper is open access, so I wouldn’t run afoul of any copyright issues.
4. The paper is reasonably short.

I wrote an little into and a little outro. I pulled out my mic, fired up Audacity, and got reading. My first problem was finding a position for the mic where I could still see the computer screen so I could read from my paper.

I broke it into sections (slightly more sections than headings the paper). I think it took between one and two hours to read the whole thing. It’s not quite a single take, but it’s close.

I’ve since figured out that I can probably do longer sessions, because I worked out how to identify sections I want to edit out because I stumbled or mispronounced words. After I screw up a sentence, I snap my fingers three times. This creates three sharp spikes in the playback visualization that is easy to see. That makes it easy to find the mistake, then edit the gaffe and the finger snaps out of the recording.

I learned that it can be surprisingly hard to say “screenplay” correctly. And I curse my past self who wrote tongue twisters like “collaborative creator credit.”

Editing the recording also took about an hour. Besides cutting out my stumbles and finger snaps, I cut out some longer pauses and occasional little background sounds. The recording was a bit quiet, so I increased the gain a few decibels.

Will I do more of these? It completely depends on the response to this experiment. I probably picked my single easiest paper to read and turn into an audio recording. It would only get harder from here. And I have other projects that I should be working on.

If people like this effort, I’ll see about doing more, maybe with better production. (I wanted to put in some music, but that was taking too long for a one off.)

External links

Resolving authorship disputes by mediation and arbitration on Soundcloud