The Science of Recovery. Investing In Research Is Investing in the Future
Category Archives: Science-general
Whither NASA?
There is no Fun in Funding
Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research
K.’s plight (an authentic one) illustrates how the present funding system in science eats its own seed corn [2]. To expect a young scientist to recruit and train students and postdocs as well as producing and publishing new and original work within two years (in order to fuel the next grant application) is preposterous. It is neither right nor sensible to ask scientists to become astrologists and predict precisely the path their research will follow—and then to judge them on how persuasively they can put over this fiction. It takes far too long to write a grant because the requirements are so complex and demanding. Applications have become so detailed and so technical that trying to select the best proposals has become a dark art. For postdoctoral fellowships, there are so many arcane and restrictive rules that applicants frequently find themselves to be of the wrong nationality, in the wrong lab, too young, or too old. Young scientists who make the career mistake of concentrating on their research may easily miss the deadline for the only grant they might have won. Research institutes with their own funds can solve these problems, but grant holders like K. do not have any flexibility. The real world of science has no tidy banks of pigeonholes, each one occupied for a standard period by an exemplary student or a perfect postdoc.
Hey, Buddy, Can You Spare a Few Hundred Thousand Dimes?
STUDENT DEBT vs. AVERAGE INCOME
I graduated with about $10k in debt from college, much of which was deferred while in the navy and again in graduate school. I paid off the last of it more than 15 years after graduation. I incurred no debt for grad school — teaching and research assistantships paid a stipend as well as tuition. Having a few times that amount of debt would have been tough.
Reverse the Polarity!
Eerily Accurate
Wish You'd Stop Bein' so Good to Me, Cap'n
Chad’s guest post at the X-Change Files
[T]he first thing I want to do is take issue with the question’s phrasing. While it’s commonly believed that scientists lack communication skills, that’s very far from the truth.
It is almost impossible to be a successful scientist without also being a good communicator. Communicating results to other scientists, through conference talks and journal articles, is critical for scientific success. Additionally, most research funding is obtained through applications to granting agencies like the NSF or the NIH, and successful proposal writing is all about communication.
So, it’s simply not true that scientists lack communication skills in any absolute sense.
Y?
Cosmic Variance has a post linking to Why is Science Important (to which I linked back in February)
It’s worth revisiting, if for no other reason than to give this great quote from the video
“You’ve just seen me walk across red hot coals, at a temperature of over five hundred degrees Celsius. I could tell you that I’m an expert in an ancient form of meditation that lets me block out pain at will. I could then tell you that you could lead a happier life if you follow my teachings. For a small fee, of course.
Or, I could tell you the truth; that walking on hot coals doesn’t require any kind of magical powers. It’s just the case that the coals are a poor conductor of heat, and I walk so quickly that there’s hardly any time for heat transfer to take place.
Separating truth from fraudulent mumbo-jumbo is just one reason why science is important.”
Score!
One of the underlying themes that keep popping up in the “why we’re doing poorly at science” discussions is a dearth of publicly recognizable scientists. Along the lines of Tom Lehrer’s insistence that all movies need a snappy title tune to make them popular, I have the answer to this: trading cards. We need kids to be collecting and trading these cards, saying “need, it, need it, got it” as they compare their collections with the other kids.
“Rookie” cards would depict a scientist during their postdoc days, summarizing the past accomplishments of grad school. Then every couple of years a new card would come out, listing important papers, accomplishments and research statistics (Prof Jones had a Nature article and two articles in Really Important Chemistry Journal last year) and also include some trivia about the scientist (writes right-handed but pours left-handed. or Bill is a digital electronics whiz)
Recognition is the key.
The Right Room for an Argument
In an earlier post I eschewed a rant, because I figured I’d go too far afield from the original premise of teaching kids to argue. Chad’s post, The Loud Bigotry of Blog Conversations reminded me that I had this post tucked away on a shelf.
Chad makes an excellent point about blog discussions, which I think has a more general applicability:
I think the real minimum condition is a belief that both sides of the discussion are being carried on by reasonable people arguing in good faith. That is, the people on both sides are sincere in their statements, know their own minds, and are doing their best to behave in an ethical manner. They’re not taking extreme positions just to provoke people, they’re not cynically saying things that they don’t believe but think will sound good, and they’re not working toward morally repugnant goals (the enslavement or extermination of large groups of people, for example). People on both sides need to accept that their opponents are intelligent people who hold their beliefs for reasons that they find valid.
And I agree with this — there is a kind of intellectually honest argument that sadly doesn’t seem to take place very often. People long ago discovered that they can “win” an argument in more than one way, because there is more than one way of arguing.
In the Teaching Kids article the author gives the Greek labels, logos, ethos, and pathos — logic, character and emotion. Within science, we mostly use logic: show me the data, and that you’ve done a good experiment. Character isn’t too much of an issue, and neither is emotion — neither charm nor an emotional appeal is going to persuade you that my data are a good match to theory. Ethics does come into play here, though but it’s a rather steep function. If you have defrauded the scientific community in the past, you have a tough row to hoe to get back into their good graces. You can’t typically get by by being slightly less sleazy than someone else, though that seems to work in politics.
And where science crosses into politics, you get that sort of behavior. Science doesn’t boil down to popularity — 51% of the people may believe that the moon is made of green cheese, but that does not make it so. But politics does depend on this, so if you are campaigning on the “Moon Cheese Means Energy Independence” platform, convincing people that the moon is made of green cheese, in any way possible, is in your best interest. And thus enter character- and emotion-driven arguments, lacking in logic and facts.
I don’t know if this always puts science and scientists at a disadvantage, but I think it often does. It’s not a fair fight when a moderately well-crafted lie can be used to counter established facts, and those that are monitoring the discussion cannot (or will not) recognize the dishonesty.