The first time gas was edging up towards $3 a gallon locally, I got into a conversation with colleagues about how high prices would have to go before people started changing their driving behaviour. I estimated that people would continue to complain, but wouldn't start to seriously change their driving habits until gas prices reached $6 or $7 a gallon.
Gas is now well over $3.50 and edging towards $4. But I have to say, prayer doesn't count as changing your behaviour.
I'm still waiting to see evidence of people doing something different in how they drive. I'm terribly disappointed my university has done nothing to encourage carpooling, say.
I'm thinking about this quite a bit, as I want to make more trips to the Coastal Studies Lab for research this summer, and there's a meeting of The Crustacean Society in Galveston that I'll be attending. Luckily, I'll be driving the friendliest car in the world which gets good highway mileage, but suddenly these in-state trips take on more significance.
"Are you going away for summer?" and all its variations.
What with the two summer classes I'm teaching, two manuscripts I'm revising, two grants I'm managing, multiple students I'm supervising, and tasks backlogged out the wazoo...
We've had a couple of campus-wide faculty meetings over the last week, concerning salaries. Only a small fraction of the faculty were there, which is perhaps surprising given that everyone gets paid. It is exam week, I suppose.
The topic at hand was salary compression and inversion. This is a nation-wide problem. Basically, across the country, the wages of faculty members are going up about 3% per year. The starting salaries of new hires are going up substantially higher -- I think I heard an estimate of something like 10% a year.
Consequently, new faculty are making relative more than senior faculty (compression). In extreme cases, new faculty make more in real dollars starting out than senior faculty (inversion).
The best strategy if you want a raise? Quit your job and get a job at another institution.
It's the end of the semester. Most of my colleagues are frantically grading. I am frantically trying to go back and get to the many tasks that have been getting stuck in cracks. Some have fallen through and cannot be retrieved. For instance...
I had a workshop application form that has been sitting on my desk. I didn't get to it right away, because it needed a CV. My CV was out of date (stuck in the crack), so I didn't finish and ship the application. I picked it up again today, googled the time of the workshop (which wasn't on the application form), and found out that the workshop was happening... yesterday through tomorrow.
Nope, can't make that one.
Also just discovered that I missed the early registration deadline for a meeting. That was yesterday.
It will be interesting to see how many things have slipped through the cracks and how many are merely stuck there.
The nail on the right side reached a point where it got loose and I had to trim it off. It's now grown back out to the edge of the finger on the right side, but not so much that I've been able to trim it, hence the slightly rough appearance you can see. The left side wasn't hit as hard originally, and you can clearly see dividing line where I trimmed back the loose nail on the right.
Then, behind the remains of the actual bruise, there's a section where the nail growth seems a little swollen. But it's flattened out further. So I'm expecting all traces of the bruise to be gone maybe in July or August, and the entire fingernail tp be back to normal in, say, October.
The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) is predictably upset about not being allowed to offer Master's degrees in science education.
They have now issued a press release announcing that they have put their entire application on-line. The title of this press release?
"Academic freedom in the balance."
I'm going to give a serious answer before tossing off a one-liner.
Academic freedom is an absolutely essential part of academic life, much discussed, but it is easily misinterpreted. In the United States, pretty much the gold standard for defining academic freedom was made back in 1940. My own institution still refers to it in our handbook of operating procedures. It's a statement from the American Association of University Professors. It's short, readable, and online here.
The statement is all about protecting teachers. It describes academic freedom in terms of a relationship between individuals and their institutions. Everything concerns what an individual is allowed to say without risk of losing her job.
This is substantially different from what ICR is talking about, which is a relationship between an institution and an accrediting agency. Accreditation is a very different matter than tenure. So really, crying "foul" about academic freedom misses the mark.
That's the serious answer.
The one-liner is that "academic freedom" is not code for, "Validation of any random idea that you happen to have have."
de Bruyn PJN, Tosh CA, Bester MN. 2008. Sexual harassment of a king penguin by an Antarctic fur seal. Journal of Ethology26(2): 295-297. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10164-007-0073-9
"We report a case of interspecific sexual harassment bridging the rank of vertebrate class."
A seal. A penguin.
You can't make this stuff up.
You could, however, make endless jokes about it. But I won't, since this could devolve oh so quickly.
Unfortunately, our library doesn't have a subscription, so I can't comment in more detail. More commentary, however, can be found in the Zooillogix blog, which had this one first.
Over in the Waco Tribune, there's an funny column titled, "Religion in fake mustache." It points out the apparent split between the the THECB's rejection of the ICR proposal and the upcoming revision of the state's K-12 science standards:
Not that their functions intersect, but this development signals a clash of intentions between the coordinating board and some members of the State Board of Education.
With state science standards coming up for approval, some members of the board want to make room in them for intelligent design or outright creation theory.
The column notes that the ICR is threatening to sue THECB.
Today was a bit of a strange day. It was the last day of class. There was free lunch to celebrate the university get re-accredited (even though this happened several months back). And then the chemistry department upstairs had more free food at the end of the day as their end of year celebration. Very bad, since habits learned in grad school -- when there's free food, you take it -- die very hard.
And somewhere in between was a faculty senate meeting.
The Austin Chronicle's Naked City blog comments on the recent announcement of Kenneth Heydrick as the science director for the Texas Education Agency:
The Texas Education Agency has offered the job of science coordinator to Kenn Heydrick. That should quash the conspiracy theorists who speculated that the agency removed former coordinator Chris Comer last year to replace her with someone who supports intelligent design.
Emphasis added.
It's a little premature to conclude that, "Evolution could not have been the reason for someone's dismissal, because the position was filled by someone supportive of teaching evolution." Let's not forget that Chris Comer's forced resignation attracted national news attention negative to the state of Texas, almost all of which was extremely negative. There was some in very strong advocacy from university professors on the part of teaching evolution. It is at least conceivable that some people in hiring positions noted this, and realized that hiring anyone with weak credentials or wishy-washy views on the subject of evolution would make a lot of people look very, very bad.
This may well have been a case where vigilance worked.
I started off my research career with octopuses when I was in a landlocked prairie province. And my supervisor talked from time to time about the deep mystery that cephalopods (squids, octopus, cuttlefish) could use colour, but couldn't see colour. So this is the sort of paper I've been waiting a long while to read.
To get a tiny little taste of the remarkable behaviour of these animals, check out David Gallo's talk below; the relevant bits start about 1 minute 50 seconds in.
I like to show the TED talk first, because it's so great to hear the audience's response. But if you want to see the last bit alone...
And one more link, a PBS special on cuttlefish. The video clips here are almost as amazing as the vanishing octopus.
How do researchers start to get a handle on such glorious eye candy?
This new paper tests the idea that the colours that cuttlefish can make are similar enough to the colours found in their natural habitat that the animals don't need to see colour. That is, if you can change colour to many different shades of brown, you are not likely to stand out too much if you inhabit an area where most things are brown.
There's surprisingly little behaviour or physiology in this paper, which is unusual for this journal. The main technique the authors used was to photograph cuttlefish on various natural and artificial substrates. The digital revolution in photography is making feasible what would have been a nightmare not too long ago. It's now dead simple to take an image, put it into a computer, measure its red, green and blue values, brightness, and so on.
The team selected several spots on the cuttlefish body to measure the animal's colour, then selected several spots on the nearby substrate to measure the colour of the surrounding sand, shell grit, and so on. Some sand were commercially available sands that were... perhaps not quite natural looking (bright red), and others were collected nearby.
They then used computers to compare the cuttlefish colour and the surface. In general, it's quite a good match. Interestingly, however, the match seems to get better as the water gets deeper. If you've ever swam underwater, you know that colours change because the water filters out the light. Red light drops out really quickly, so the deeper you go, the more blue the water appears.
I had to say "seems to get better" in the previous paragraph, because the researchers didn't actually photograph in anything other than very shallow water. Instead, they calculated what they would expect to see at increasingly greater depths. Although I would normally grumble at this, the physics of light and water are probably sufficiently well understood by now that this is probably a pretty safe prediction.
The paper also presents some data on the colour pigments in the animal, but this basically confirms what people had seen by eye: there are three colours in the dorsal side of the animal, and two ventrally.
Thus, this paper hints that how to use colour while being colour blind is a problem with an evolutionary solution, rather than a physiological one. Those with the pigments that best match their local habitat will win out over generations, not in the few seconds where the animals are making those lightning fast colour changes.
Reference
Mäthger, L.M., Chiao, C., Barbosa, A., Hanlon, R.T. (2008). Color matching on natural substrates in cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis. Journal of Comparative Physiology A DOI: 10.1007/s00359-008-0332-4
Turning on the computer is typically one of the first things I do in the morning after having a shower. Yes, it's not a good habit. But this morning, I got rewarded for it.
I had just tweaked a lecture for my general biology students last night, and I knew what I was going to talk about. This was my last lecture for the semester. I had talked about viruses last week, and was going to talk about how molecules originally discovered in viruses (integrase and reverse transcriptase) were now being used in biotechnology applications, including gene therapy.
I open up my news feed this morning, and find staring back at me:
The headline is a bit over the top (the patients weren't completely blind, for instance), but the science was exactly what my lecture (in a couple of hours) was about: using a virus to deliver a modified gene to a patient. And the article even has an associated video showing some of the behavioural trials with the patients.
I love being able to bring in that newly published stuff into my class, but sadly, it's rare that you have the opportunity to do so, particularly in a general introductory class. So this was just friggin' awesome, and a great way to drive home the point that this is a great time to be studying biology.
The press release says that he has edited a biology textbook, though I can't find what it is, and that his first degree is in biology. Even more encouraging, an Austin American-Statesman Homeroom blog notes:
Heydrick has stood up to attempts to weaken teaching evolution in the past, asking the State Board of Education in a 2003 hearing on textbooks not to require changes in textbooks to water-down evolution lessons or add “nonscientific alternatives such as intelligent design.”
Heydrick, who worked as a high school science teacher for 10 years, has held several state and national leadership positions, serving as immediate past president of the Science Teachers Association of Texas and on the State Board of Education's earth science task force.
I can't resist quoting a snipe from the American-Statesman blog, though:
And his current boss at Pflugerville says he’s good at working with teachers and working with others, plus he’s got seven dogs and four cats. Because being an animal lover obviously makes him better qualified to shape the state science curriculum.
Ha!
This appears to be good news on the face of it. Certainly, there had to be the worry on whether the TEA would try to hire someone with weak credentials in biology. But he appears to have the chops.
Two major antievolution stories in Texas are ending on an optimistic note in the same week. Interesting.
The Houston Chronicle was one of the first news organizations to confirm what's already been on the blogosphere: that THECB denied ICR's MS in science education plans. A follow-up story notes there was little discussion before the vote, probably due to the public presentations made before the earlier committee vote.
The news services have been reasonably quiet about this decision.
So far, almost the only editorial comment I've seen has been from the Austin American Statesman, which wrote:
Dedicated learning in its many forms is generally wonderful. But course work must be labeled correctly. The state is right to require that a graduate degree in creation studies, which the Institute of Creation Research offers, be called what it is - a degree in religion, not science. ... Paredes and the coordinating board took a correct and principled stand in denying the creationist institute’s science course.
Meanwhile, the Daily Skiff blog from Texas Christian University reports on the ICR's press release following the decision against them:
The manner in which the hearing was conducted was characterized by viewpoint discrimination.
I wonder what "viewpoint discrimination" is. Is it something different than disagreeing?
The Texas Observer noted that there were three people who spoke in favour and seven who opposed it. If there was nobody who spoke in favour, or only one, that might be a stronger case for not having a chance to make the case.
It could also just point out that many people think that the program as proposed is just a bad idea.
The Texas Observer blog is reporting that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) supported the Academic Excellence Committee's recommendation: No science education Master's for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR).
I'm waiting to see more news coverage, but if so, this would spell the end of the main event. But given that several news stories have mentioned that ICR will follow "due process," expect a rematch.
Nature blog The Great Beyond comments briefly about the THECB committee recommendation.
And finally, the Texas Freedom Network had a press release about survey results of Texas university faculty on the ICR issue. Science faculty were against the idea.
The following is a blog post I made over at the All in the Mind blog in response to a recent show on evolutionary psychiatry. I wanted to post it here, because I've been wanting to discuss the "reptilian brain" idea for some time, as it may well be one of the most popular but wrong ideas about the evolution of nervous systems out there.
More posts on reptile brains later, I hope.
;;;;;
The basic premise discussed in this show -- that human behaviour has an evolutionary history -- is not terribly contentious. The specific model discussed in the program, Paul MacLean's "triune brain," is more problematic.
As typically expressed, MacLean's model suggests that entire reptilian brain has been conserved through the evolution of the mammals, with new brain regions essentially added on to the existing core, like suburbs being added to a city.
There are a few problems with this model.
First, MacLean's ideas seem to be highly influenced by old ideas that emphasized the "march of progress" or the "great chain of being." In particular, the MacLean model seems to be based on the notion that reptiles were the ancestors of mammals. It's debatable whether reptiles are the ancestors of mammals, however. It may be that the two groups shared a common ancestor, then diverged. It's also somewhat misleading in that it lumps all reptiles together. Snakes, for instance, appear much later in the fossil record than the earliest mammals.
Second, the suggestion that the entire reptile brain is essentially the mammalian hind brain is not supported by modern neuroanatomy. To give an example, in MacLean's model, the limbic system is characterized as a "lower mammalian" part of the brain. There is evidence, however, that reptiles have a limbic system (Bruce and Neary, 1995; Lanuza et al., 1998).
MacLean's "triune brain" hypothesis may have caught the popular imagination, but it has not proved useful in modern neurobiology.
References
Bruce LL, Neary TJ. 1995. The limbic system of tetrapods: A comparative analysis of cortical and amygdalar populations. Brain, Behavior and Evolution46(4-5): 224-234.
Lanuza E, Belekhova M, Martinez-Marcos A, Font C, Martinez-Garcia F. 1998. Identification of the reptilian basolateral amygdala: an anatomical investigation of the afferents to the posterior dorsal ventricular ridge of the lizard Podarcis hispanica. European Journal of Neuroscience10(11): 3517-3534.
More coverage this morning about the THECB's Academic Excellence Committee's recommendation in anticipation of the full Coordinating Board vote today.
The Houston Chronicle has an article that describes some of the testimony before the Committee vote:
Paredes' recommendation and the vote by members of the Academic Excellence and Research Committee followed a 30-minute public hearing, during which 10 people — most of whom said they held doctoral degrees in a scientific field — split over the issue.
"What they are calling science education has as much to do with science as reality television has to do with reality," said Paul Murray, a geophysicist from Austin.
Chris Krosschell, a former Air Force pilot, played a tape of Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, speaking as he looked back at the Earth.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," Borman said, quoting the opening passages of Genesis.
Texas Christian University's Daily Skiffsupports the committee recommendation:
The higher education board should be commended for their actions to bring this issue to a vote instead of letting a group use its own agenda to decide what is a justified master's degree program.
The Austin American-Statesman has a longer story on the THECB committee vote, including pinpoint accurate comments from Ray Paredes (emphasis added):
Paredes said the institute's catalog and other records portray as unshakable fact that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, that God created all things in the universe in six days as described in Genesis, that theories of origin and development involving evolution are false, and that most biblical miracles require a temporary suspension of basic natural laws.
"Whatever the ultimate merit of such views, they clearly stand at odds with the most basic tenets of scientific work such as observation, testing and analysis," Paredes said.
A lawyer for the Bible-based group also warned that the coordinating board could eventually face legal action for suppressing the free-speech rights of the institute.
THECB commissioner Ray Paredes is quoted:
“Evolution is such a fundamental principle of contemporary science it is hard to imagine how you could cover the various fields of science without giving it [evolution] the proper attention it deserves as a foundation of science,” he said.
Houston Chronicle has quotes from ICR director, Henry Morris III:
"It really wasn't a surprise given the current climate of opposition that exists," Morris said. "We anticipated resistance when we applied for it."
It'll be interesting to see if this ripples out into the national American and international news.
On Earth Day 2008, I drove over 150 miles in a car, alone.
I feel bad about the carbon footprint (stupid infrastructure determining my choices again), but I am happy with why: I finally was able to go out to the Coastal Studies Lab and get some data that will help wind up some experiments my student and I started back in December or so with some shrimp.
If you've ever wanted to imitate a scientist, just watch the picture below for 10 minutes.
Okay, now do that 14 more times.
The shrimp were pretty subdued and didn't do a tremendous amount of behaving for me. Which, in the context of the experiment, is actually interesting.
My Master's student Sandra successfully defended her thesis yesterday. Hooray! Now, I just hope the revision can be done in time. This could be tricky, as she was about to give birth any day now.
The Christian Post has a news story about the upcoming meeting of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Institute for Creation Research.
A e-mail update sent Thursday by Dr. Henry Morris, founder of ICR, reported that the April 23 hearing will also include an "unusual" half-hour session which will be open to public comments.
Morris told The Christian Post that his contact, who has worked with THECB for 15 years, informed him that the Board never before authorized such a public comment session.
"We have been told second-hand, through our contact, that their objection is that we are using the word 'science.' If we would just drop the word science," the approval would go through, said Morris.
Which raises the question of why they don't simply call it a degree in creation studies and be done with it. That would seem to be the "everyone wins" scenario. ICR gets their program with an honest label.
He argued that students exercise critical thinking skills when they are taught how to compare an evolutionary mindset to a creationist mindset.
"How can you be a critical thinker if you don't know what the other side is?" he asked.
Saying you are "the other dies" does not make that side equally valid. Even if it was, you have to have some confidence that alternate views are treated objectively. And the Institute of Creation Research has made it very clear that it's anti-evolution, and it does not represent the consensus view on science. It's fringe.
Regardless of the outcome this week, this is unlikely to be over this week...
The ICR has the option to appeal within 45 days and/or to reapply within 180 days if the Board rejects the application. In the case of approval, ICR will begin its effort to obtain accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
In case you saw the recent news story that a teenager corrected NASA about the probability of an asteroid impact... check here.
Besides, arguing about correct probilities over something like asteroid impacts seem to have a certain... I don't know... squishiness to it. It's not something that is going to have a definite answer, like the probability of throwing snake eyes in dice. It's going to be complex, and low probability, and highly subject to revision anyway.
Apparently, there's also been another story circulating in the US about a teenager who is doubting that climate change is caused by human burning of fossil fuels (no link now).
What is the point of such stories? In neither case is the teen rebel providing any sort of definitive evidence. They're getting press just for doubting at a slightly more sophisticated level than their peers. I'm glad they're interested in science, but shouldn't they get attention when, you know, they contribute actual data? Like all the rest of us professionals?
I really like this post over at the DrugMonkey blog about the role of authority in science. I like it even though it has South Park pictures in it, which I detest.
Near the end, the talk turns to university instructors:
Your whole professional life is predicated on you as the Authority. In the classroom, you have all the knowledge and the students have relatively little. They are explicitly seeking you out for your authority. Even within most “teaching departments” you are the sole expert in not just a narrow area but in several subfields, are you not? And...c’mon, ‘fess up. It goes to your head after awhile doesn't it? ...
Is it any wonder you develop into a know-it-all who cannot conceptualize anyone else having valid opinions or rationales? Any wonder you start to broaden the scope of your claimed authority? After all, nobody challenges you in your day to day life. And for the most part, you are right. But not all the time, my friend, not all the time.
I think this is one of the reasons that extreme deference in my students drives me absolutely insane. I hope that at some level, I want to be challenged.
Having authority should mean recognizing challenges as challenges (in the best sense of the word) , not threats.
This video of Chris Comer describing her firing is up at an National Center for Science Education website devoted to the film Expelled. I haven't been blogging about Expelled, because many, many people have repeatedly identified it as a highly suspicious propaganda film. Not all that much to add there.
No new information there, really, but worthwhile to hear the story from Ms. Comer.
Also, the position she used to hold at the Texas Education Agency is still showing as vacant.
One of the things I occasionally get in my mailbox is updates from the National Science Foundation, since it is the agency that I look to most and have worked with most for funding. This morning, a link to a report about the NSF's "human capital" came in. I thought it was about science careers generally, but it turns out to be very specific to NSF employment. I did catch one interesting point:
While NSF’s workforce has grown by eight percent between 2001-2007, during that same time period, proposals submitted to NSF for competitive review grew 40 percent.
So, as expected, more and more people are looking for a piece of a pie that isn't getting any much bigger in a hurry.
Only nine days to go until the Institute for Creation Research's application to grant Master's degrees in science education is taken up by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. It's on the agenda for the 24 April meeting. Item IX.H.
You may be wondering about the local reaction to stories like this one:
The Bush administration is bulldozing environmental laws to build a controversial fence designed to block illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican border. ... In southern Texas the fence will run along flood-control levees between 100 and 1500 metres from the Rio Grande, creating what critics call a "no-man's land" between fence and river.
This section of the fence will cut through rich wildlife reserves, including the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Alamo, the Sabal Palm Audubon Center and most of the Nature Conservancy's Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve near Brownsville.
And it may surprise you that there really isn't much local reaction. I've seen occasional posters around campus saying "No border wall," but they're rare.
Additional: Of course, I write something like this and then discover there's going to be a forum about the fence held on campus tomorrow. Still, as I said, it's been very low key promotion.
Earlier this week, I was involved in reviewing a proposal for a new textbook aimed at introductory biology students. The book was trying some different things in the way it was structured, and was trying to integrate mathematics throughout. All very smart, well-meaning stuff. But sometimes, you wonder if textbook authors forget the conditions on the ground.
Last week, I had a student come into my office who reminded me. He said he had been in the wrong class for the last two and a half months. He asked if he could make up the missing work.
Now, I had better provide a little context. I teach three classes in a row. Originally, I was slated to be in one room for the first class, then move down the hall for the next two. This seemed silly, so I asked the lecturer down the hall at the time of my first class if we could switch. That was fine. Signs on the doors of both classes were up for many weeks explaining that the class had moved.
The student had a class list at the start of the semester that listed all the rooms, and followed it. The printed list he had was not updated with the room switch.
The class he had been sitting in since the beginning of the semester wasn't even a biology class. Not even in the same discipline as class he was supposed to be taking.
(One person refused to believe this student's explanation. To which I replied, "If that's the story this person said to look good, what's the real story going to be like?")
I want to make something clear here: I am not laughing at these students. The point is that such students remind me that all the time I spend thinking about how to better explain gamete formation... or how to better use clickers... or to integrate quantitative mathematical into my lectures... is just not going to matter for a lot of students.
I just don't know that I can do anything to make it right for those people.
But, in the words of ZZ Top, did it know how to use them?
The BBC is reporting on this wonderful fossil. (There's a video here.) This is an old finding I wasn't previously aware of, but it's great to see how technology is getting ever better at making the unseen seen. The BBC link seems to indicate this will be appearing in the French journal Comptes Rendus Biologies.
Just like cloning mammals arrived sooner than most people expected and left people scrambling for how to deal with the situation, I'm starting to think that we'd better start doing some serious thought about the legal ramifications of robotics.
I'm thinking much the same thoughts after reading this story and accompanying video.
To me, it's no surprise that people will respond emotionally to robots, because people tend to treat everything as alive. Watch the amount of attention people give to their cars sometime. I can't remember if I blogged about it, but I saw some time ago an interview with a researcher who found that the further people were from their computers, the more likely they were to use profanity in describing it -- that is, they were being polite to the computer.
Theodor Boveri was a developmental biologist, who did some important early work on cell division using Ascaris, a species of parasitic nematode worm. I wasn't familiar with his work, but scanned this recent review article.
The article ends saying that Boveri actually became infected with these parasites late in life, leading him to write:
It is mean when the beasts you have worked on, now start working on you.
At lunch today, we official (re) installed a chapter of Beta Beta Beta in my department. This is a national honor's society for biology, which support undergraduate student academic success and undergraduate researchers.
Being Canadian, where the practice of fraternities and sororities has never been strong on universities, I had a certain suspicion about a society with so many Greek letters in it. But the students wanted a chapter, and I wanted to support the students, so I said I would be the advisor for the chapter and help get them off the ground.
So we had Ron Humphery, the regional director, down to officially start the chapter. It turned out that this was bringing a chapter back to our institution. We had a chapter way back in the 1980s, apparently -- our tech Tom was a member back then. But somehow, it lapsed and there hasn't been one for a long, long time.
Dr. Humphrey was actually a little surprised by how much the national office sent down for our new chapter, particularly a huge tablecloth with the Beta Beta Beta seal, which made the various bits on display (the charter for the chapter, the coat of arms, membership book, candles, etc.) look pretty darn classy.
And now we are chapter Nu Omega, with a few new members and high hopes. We'll see how it goes.
There's a new talk by Al Gore on TED today. I found it very interesting, particularly the analyses of where climate change sits on the food chain of the media.
Then my eyes strayed down to the comments.
Wow.
You hear about terms like "culture war" bandied about, and sometimes you wonder, "How bad is it really?" And then you see the absolute opposition, catcalling, insults, and appeals to conspiracy and cultism in something like this. Which, I have to point out, is about a topic that isn't scientifically controversial.
I think maybe Jimmy Wales got it right. The real culture war isn't over politics: "It's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks."
In this age of comments, reviews, and all of that which is supposed to be part of Web 2.0, the maddening thing is how easy it is to be a jerk. To hop onto a site and give a one start review with a one line dismissal to a book you've never read. And it creates such a caustic environment. Who wants to stand in the middle of a yelling contest?
And as much as I want to be one of the people reaching out to talk about science and education and my profession, seeing the jerks in action make me worry of getting burned.
Additional: And this is why comments here are moderated, incidentally.
The peacock's tail is the example of a feature that seems to have evolved not for survival, but for attracting mates. And it is truly spectacular, as the video clip shows.
One explanation for the great size of the tail is that if females prefer mating with males with large tails, those males will have greater reproductive success. Thus, there will be selection for the large spectacular tails that peacocks have.
This paper is getting a fair amount of attention (e.g., a mention on the latest Science podcast) because it counter intuitively argues that females do not prefer males with larger tails.
There's something important to know about this paper: The authors didn't do any experiments. That is, they never actually changed the tails of males in any way to see if this changed their courtship or mating success.
Instead, they watched peacocks and peahens mating in a free-ranging population in Japan (268 matings, if you're curious), and measured the peacocks' tails in various ways from photographs. Then, they looked to see if there were any correlations between tail shape and mating success.
No correlation between the length of the tail and mating success.
No correlation between the number of eyespots on the tail and mating success.
And this is where this being a study rather than an experiment makes the interpretation difficult. The authors worked simply with what they found in their field setting. And there was very little variation in peacock tails. If there's no variation, it's very difficult to make any conclusions about choice.
Image a situation where you have to pick between numerous $1 bills. You pick a $1 bill more or less at random, and the researcher concludes that value plays little role in your decision making process. The peahens may not have had much to distinguish the peacocks here, so other factors may become more important.
Indeed, the authors found correlations between behaviour called "shivering" and mating success. When the authors put all these factors to try to explain mating success in a single year, however, not much is explained.
They also found a correlation between tail length and predation -- although few peacocks were preyed upon. Although many individuals were identified using leg bands, the authors say very little about the age of the individuals they were studying. One could image a situation where the oldest mails have the longest tails, but because they are old, they are the most vulnerable to predators.
The authors propose that the peacock's tail is a relic. That is, it was important once, but is mostly unimportant now. This is an interesting idea, as are several others that they float in the discussion. But ultimately, I wish they had done some experiments.
Reference
TAKAHASHI, M., ARITA, H., HIRAIWAHASEGAWA, M., HASEGAWA, T. (2008). Peahens do not prefer peacocks with more elaborate trains. Animal Behaviour, 75(4), 1209-1219. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.10.004
I never offer extra credit in my classes any more, but a lot of my colleagues do. And we've all noticed that students will sell their grandmothers for tiny amounts of extra credit. Amounts that almost never impact on their final letter grade.
All in the Mind has an interview this week with author Dan Ariely, who wrote Predictably Irrational. He talks at some length about the persuasive power of “Free!” People will make bad decisions when something is free. A $1,000 discount on a car may not means as much as a few free oil changes – even though that may only total a hundred dollars in value or so.
I suspect that “extra” does much the same thing for students. Somehow, something “extra” has more weight than regular points, even if their tiny.
I’ll let you students in on a secret. You will never, ever be able to talk a professor into changing your final grade is he or she offers extra credit. If you were close to the dividing line and you didn’t take the extra credit, the professor will say, “Your fate was in your hands – you could have got the better grade if only you'd taken the extra credit.” If you did take the extra credit, the professor will say, “Look, you didn't make the grade even with all that extra credit you took.”
Why take irreplaceable objects like the Lucy fossil out to display publicly?
One answer might be the magical belief that there's some sort of "essence" to the thing. That the real fossil stirs us in a way that no copy ever can. Another might be that there are little details that are not readily appreciated in reproductions or at a distance. I have a small collection of sketches and original comic art, and I do love seeing little changes that were masked in the final printed page. An artist's quick sketch on the reverse of the paper, an editorial change where the art was covered over and redrawn. And I definitely get a better appreciation for the sheer size and scale of a dinosaur when I see a complete mounted skeleton of an Allosaurus and its trio of wicked meat hook claws.
I went to the Houston Museum of Natural Science because I probably wouldn't have another chance to see the Lucy fossil again. I'm not sure if I went because of the first reason or the second. Being an evolutionary biologist, it seemed somehow important for me to take this opportunity. And it was a good excuse to get out of town for a weekend.
The Lucy fossil was part of a much larger display on Ethopia. I found this very interesting, because I knew next to nothing about the history of the region. I had never heard of ancient cities like Aksum and Gondar, so I appreciated the exhibit greatly.
But as for the Lucy fossil itself... I don't know that seeing the original Lucy fossil really enriched my understanding or appreciation of human evolution. Although renowned for being so complete, it is still really fragmentary. This makes it hard to pull much of a sense of anything. And because I don't know much about vertebrate morphology, I couldn't make sense of even something simple like how this skeleton is distinctly female, or how it differs from other early hominids. My ignorance was simply too vast.
Still, despite my personal ambivalence, I don't oppose the exhibition of the fossil, as some have. Because I am an evolutionary biologist, perhaps I had too much information in some ways so that what would be new and unusual to other people were things I already knew. And hopefully others will be struck by little details and gain some deeper understanding of Lucy that they didn't have before.
Spent the entire day at the Houston Museum of Natural Science -- and didn't quite get through everything! Even leaving out the two special displays you had to buy separately. This is an excellent museum, with lots of wonderful things to see.
The most unexpected pleasure was the gem gallery. I would never make a specific trip to see a gem gallery, but this is really excellent, with all manner of stunning minerals in shapes that almost defy belief.
Also saw the Imax movie Galapagos 3-D, which may well be one of the best Imax films I've seen yet. Really amazing footage on th land and underwater. The close-ups of some of the giant tortoises and marine iguanas are particularly effective, with the combination of the huge Iamx screen and the 3-D really making you almost feel like you're kneeling right there.
The star, and the ostensible reason I made the trip up, Lucy? More about that in a later blog post.
The Dallas Observer has a lengthy article about the upcoming revision to the Texas public school science standards. For those who have been following this, there is not a tremendous amount of new material here. And are a few minor mistakes. But this doesn't detract too much from the piece.
This post over at Uncertain Principles argues that the problem with introductory physics classes are that they're too much like high school physics classes. Students are bored and have seen it all before.
The same argument could probably be made about any first year introductory science class. I'll slide this over to introductory biology rather than physics for the rest of this post, because I think the issues are so similar.
First, there's an empirical question of how similar those really are. And if they are similar, it is because they represent core concepts students need to progress?
Second, even if the subject matter of the classes are similar, does it hurt to revisit the basics? After all, expertise is not something that one develops over their last year of high school -- it takes years of practice and effort. And even if students have seen something before, they may not have seen it "my way." Give two instructors the same material, and one can take it and create something intriguing and entertaining, and the other can suck the life right out of it.
Third, are students bored because they know it already? If so, you'd expect very high rates of success -- which is not what most introductory university science classes see. Hugh failure rates in introductory science classes are the norm, not the exception. Sad but true. This suggests that if students are bored, it's not because they "know it."
But for the sake of argument, if the author is on to something, there may be a deeper problem in addressing it. It's highly doubtful that university instructors know what is being taught in high schools. Most university level instructors may have only vague ideas of the conditions "on the ground" in the schools their students attended.
I have, almost without exception, really enjoyed working with every textbook publisher salesman that has visited our campus.
Even though the job of these reps is to make the sale, many of the companies send their reps to our department to visit regardless of whether we are currently using any of their books. They'll be visiting even if there's not a prospect of us using one of their books for several years.
Another thing I appreciate is that I've found most textbook reps are quite interested in teaching. They want to know how we instructors are teaching, what our challenges are. They often have very thoughtful things to say about the thought and design process that went into a book that are not immediately obvious.
Textbook reps have a very unique perspective on the state of teaching. They are probably among the few people who go from institution to institution and actually talk to different instructors about their teaching.
It does not hurt that when they are here, they often feed us lunch if they think there's a sale to be made. And even when there isn't, they'll often bring cookies.
I'm running up to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The main reason (excuse?) is to see the Lucy exhibition, which features one of the most famous fossils in the world, which is shown very, very rarely. And travels even less.
Many lament the lack of scientific knowledge of those outside of the field -- the general public, the lay audience, etc. A new report of cable news networks gives one possible indication of why that might be.
Amount of time spent on reporting on science and technology on cable news networks:
Less than 1%.
Okay, but lots of people have pointed out problems with cable news network coverage, particularly in the U.S. They have 24 hours to fill, must be on air, and have very little time for reflection or investigation.
And indeed, the broadcast news networks fare better.
2%.
What about newspapers, that bastion of investigative journalism, thoughtful reflection, and longer attention spans? Also 2%.
But what about the internet? I mean, the whole internet is based on science and technology, was first put to practical use by universities...
1%.
And remember, this is science and technology. If you took out coverage of computer stories -- announcement of a new iPod, Google buying... anything, maybe the HD DVD Blu-Ray war is counted in there -- I shudder to think what the values would be. I think there would be a few zeros between the decimal and the number.
Only one science-related story -- global warming -- made the top 10 stories in any of those four media, with an astonishing 1% of coverage on network news. Astonishingly low, that is.
I was going to make a graph of this, but it was too depressing. Is it any surprise that people do not have a good understanding of science when they hear so little about it?
And yet, the contacts list for the TEA Science Unit still shows no replacement.
Now, hiring someone in a bureaucracy can take a long time. I've been a search committee chair in a university -- I know this firsthand. But I wonder how long it will take to fill? Will it fill before the science standards are reviewed? Will there be any attention from the media, blogosphere, and the like when it does fill?
I was going to let this go, but it's been bugging me too much. This New Scientist article is an interview with Michael Heller, who’s won a major award that is geared towards “spiritual realities.”
Here’s part of it, where the interviewer asks:
What do you make of the current debate between science and religion, in which the two are often presented as mutually exclusive?
The question bothers me. A lot. I'm disappointed that Heller took it as posed.
It assumes that there is this unitary, singular point of view called “religion.”
This does a tremendous disservice to the wonderful breadth and variety of religious beliefs out there. Of course, “religion” for most Westerners means “Christian” – or possibly one of the other monotheistic religions. But you have Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, the beliefs of First Nations of North America, the aboriginals of Australia, to people who don't have any well articulated system of religious thought but just feel "spiritual" – just to name a few.
Is it not possible that some religious beliefs really are mutually exclusive with science? And is it not possible that some religious beliefs are completely compatible with science?
Which means Good Friday is next week. Which means there are no classes Friday. Which means that I can't do the lectures I planned to do next week. Which means I have only a few days to think of something for Monday's lecture.
See, my lectures are organized by week. They are very highly structured. Normally, I do have a "short week" lecture I fit in around the holiday near the end of semester, be it American Thanksgiving or Easter.
But Easter moves around the calender. And in the six years I've been teaching, this is the earliest it's been. Usually, I have one, maybe two, weeks of lecture before I hit the short week.
Excuse me. I have to go think of something to talk about.
Two interesting articles that I want to point out.
The first is a Psychology Today article on magical thinking. This, to me, is another way of looking at the more fundamental question about the basic nature of belief, which fascinates me. Why do people believe something or not? Are there limits to what we can believe? And as a teacher, how can I affect what people believe -- or should I?
Second is a Time article looking at research into expertise. As a teacher, I want to pass on expertise. As a researcher, I want to hone my expertise. How do I do that?
Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving.
The switch to daylight saving is kicking my butt. It's a good thing that there are no classes this week, because I'm sleeping later than I'd like and arriving to work later than I'd like -- if there were classes.
Something that may interest a few readers: a news aggregation service called Alltop has a fairly decent selection of science news feeds, and not the usual combination of science and computing / IT news.
The Nature podcast has an featured editorial (link opens an mp3 audio file; editorial starts 14:24 in) on the Institute for Creation Research's application to grant Master's degrees in science education in Texas.
Nature news editor Alex Witze paints a none-too-pretty picture of Texas and Texas scientists. She wrote for the Dallas Morning News for nine years, so she is familiar with the place. She essentially says, "Texas is about the only place where the ICR's application wouldn't be laughed out of the office."
I think incredulity doesn't do justice to the situation. There are several good reasons why ICR application isn't being laughed out. It's no fly-by-night operation, they've done the requisite paperwork, and they have shown a nasty tendency to sue.
She chastises scientists for not talking to people. If only we scientists got out of our ivory towers, creationism wouldn't have such a hold on people and would not be seen as credible.
I have two objections to this.
First, I am not sure what venues she thinks scientists should be doing all this communicating in. Are we supposed to walk door to door with a copy of On the Origin of Species in hand and as people, "Have you considered the benefits of rational empiricism to society?" Stand on a soapbox in the town square and announce to passers-by, "The Earth is ancient! Humans evolved!"? I blog for just this reason, but gone are the days where a spot on the web would guarantee an audience tooling around.
Finding venues for meaningful communication is not a trivial problem.
Second, she claims, "If you want regular Americans to understand why science trumps creantionism, you need to get out of your ivory tower and talk to people. They're ready to listen."
Are they ready to listen? Just yesterday, I wrote about how people's trust of experts varies depending on the perceived values of those experts. For many people, they don't believe in evolution not because they don't have enough information about it -- it's part of their values. These are people who want to be "a good person" and have decided that following a particular form of Christianity is how they can be a good person. And part of that package is that evolution is atheism, therefore evolution is bad, and evolution leads to moral decay, breakdown of the family, homosexuality, drug use, and genocide. And let's not forget that fossils are the handiwork of the devil.
So I really have to question how many people are ready to have a serious conversation about why evolution trumps creationism.
The reliably fascinating Science Show had some interesting comments about how people evaluate things that they know nothing about. In this case, the example is nanotechnology. Interestingly, according to Dan Kahan:
(A)lthough most people don't know very much about nanotechnology, they're still pretty opinionated about it.
Wait. How can someone hold an opinion on something they know nothing about?
What we found is that that very quick visceral reaction was driven a lot by emotions. So just the term 'nanotechnology' or even a very brief description of it can give somebody an initial sense of whether it's risky or beneficial.
So people are making snap judgments based on very limited information.
(A)s people start to learn about nanotechnology they don't form a uniform opinion. In fact they become culturally polarised. There's a body of research and cultural cognition is the mechanism that describes the phenomenon that shows that people tend to conform their beliefs about risks to their values. So if you're somebody who likes commerce and industry and private initiative you tend to be very sceptical about environmental risks. If you're somebody who believes that commerce and industry does bad things and creates inequality, you'll embrace findings of risk. We found that people who have values like that, when they're exposed to even just a little bit of information about nanotechnology they divide along those lines.
And the thing that interests (and scares) me most is how people viewed expert opinion.
We did an experiment where we created fictional experts, and we found that people, just by looking at them and by reading a mock CV, would impute to them values just about how society should be organised. Then we assigned to those advocates positions on nanotechnology just randomly -- suspend it pending more research on risk, allow it to continue pending more research on risks -- and we then saw how people reacted to the arguments of these fictional experts. It turned out that people would adopt whatever argument on nanotechnology was being advanced by the experts whose values were closest to theirs.
Emphasis added. And a big factor, which the piece talks about later, is religiosity. You don't have to look very hard for evidence of that in America. They call it the culture war.
This, to me, is a very depressing set of facts, but Dr. Kahan did leave me with a little bit of optimism:
(Y)ou shouldn't just assume that people are going to form beliefs about nanotechnology that match the best scientific understandings out there. In the normal course they're going to form beliefs that fit their cultural predispositions but then don't assume that's inevitable. In fact it is possible to devise communication techniques that can help to counteract that bias.
Most people are inclined to think that the universe is teeming with life, because the universe is just so darned big. But if so, where are they? That's the question physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, and has since become known as Fermi's paradox.
One of my first articles concerned the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. It has been interesting to see new knowledge come in on that front since I wrote that article over a decade and a half ago. This article in the New York Times provides a nice overview from a more recent perspective, such as the discovery of extrasolar planets (none were known when I wrote my original article).
Took the plunge and bought the world's friendliest car. I almost literally got mobbed by five people at a gas station asking about it, with one girl taking pictures of it. For a hermit like myself, the level of attention will take some getting used to.
It all started when I saw this segment on Top Gear.*
I'd never seen a Smart of any sort before. And I absolutely sympathized with the team's assessment of the Smart Roadster: they want to hate it, but it's just such a giggle to drive. As I mentioned before, I used to drive an MG Midget.
British cars. The jokes are just too easy. “Two hours in the garage for one hour on the road.” “Why did the British never get into manufacturing computers? Because they couldn't figure out how to make them leak oil.”
But that MG was so. Much. Fun to drive. You can't fall out of love with an MG, despite how completely annoying the engineering was when you had to fix it. (And you would have to fix it, trust me.)
Fast forward to seeing an article on CNet a small electric car being sold by Zap motors. (Update, 8 March 2020: Defunct, as described here.) While tooling around their website, I see that they are importing these small little Smart cars.
Weirdly, soon after reading that article, I see one driving around on UTPA campus.
The Zap website had an article a lawsuit over the Smart cars, and Google eventually leads me to a website describing plans to bring Smart to America. Which leads me, ultimately, to reserving one and buying one, for reasons I've mentioned before. If all goes well, I'll be driving back from San Antonio in a new car tomorrow.
But why am I blogging about it? After all, this is allegedly a science blog.
I'm blogging about it because so much of doing science revolves around and is impacted by things that, on the surface, have nothing to do with doing science.
One of the reasons I took this job was that I am a comparative biologist. Looking at diversity of organisms and finding new behaviours is what winds my crank, scientifically speaking. That my institution has a lab on the beach (the Coastal Studies Lab), where I could have access to a whole variety of different species of crustaceans for collecting, seemed like a great research opportunity.
Since taking this job in southern Texas, my research has progressed... differently... than I originally anticipated. And part of that has just been because of cars.
I live in a two person household in a region that is a veritable hymn to the offspring of Henry Ford.
Absolutely everything revolves around cars, and absolutely everything assumes you have a car. Everything is strung out vast distances, where any two points you'd want to go are probably about hours of walking apart (if not much, much more). One of my colleagues went for a walk, and someone literally stopped and asked, "Are you okay?" That's right, if you are walking, something must be wrong; the concept of walking for enjoyment is quite alien. It's too hot and dangerous to bicycle. You won't see a taxi anywhere. And forget you even heard about public transportation.
The Coastal Studies Lab is about 80 miles from the main campus. If I drive there, that would in all likelihood means that my partner could not, say, go to work. So rather than being able to go out with any regularity, I end up not going out to the lab for months and months at a stretch.
One car means few trips to the lab which turns into fewer animals which means less research accomplished.
So that why I'm blogging about getting a car.
Although I wanted a small car as a second vehicle, I am glad that I didn't have to go to this extreme...
* Interestingly, memory cheats. I totally had forgotten this was the Roadster, not the regular fortwo model.
The first time gas was edging up towards $3 a gallon locally, I got into a conversation with colleagues about how high prices would have to go before people started changing their driving behaviour. I estimated that people would continue to complain, but wouldn't start to seriously change their driving habits until gas prices reached $6 or $7 a gallon. 
