Category Archives: Science-general

Buy You a Drink?

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Science Is Interested in You

Are you worried about global warming? Should you be worried about global warming? Understanding the dangers posed by climate change and evaluating policies toward it require some understanding of science. How do we know the Earth is warming? What will happen when the temperature increases? What can be done to mitigate or avoid the problems? These are essentially scientific questions.

What about bird flu? MRSA? AIDS? Pandemic disease is something that can only be understood and combatted through science. Are we all going to get wiped out by some disease? What steps should we take to avoid being wiped out by disease? These are essentially scientific questions.

If you have no interest in science and being informed, then you can only blame yourself when you get conned by someone peddling antiscience, or swept up by FUD.

No Pain, No Gain

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Real Advice Hurts

We can’t get good at something solely by reading about it. And we’ll never make giant leaps in any endeavor by treating it like a snack food that we munch on whenever we’re getting bored. You get good at something by doing it repeatedly. And by listening to specific criticism from people who are already good at what you do. And by a dedication to getting better, even when it’s inconvenient and may not involve a handy bulleted list.

This is precisely why teachers assign homework problems for their students to work out. You get better at physics by applying it to unknown situations and figuring out the answer. Not by having someone work multiple problems for you.

My own method when someone explains some concept to me is to try and come up with a nontrivial example and give the result, trying to explain myself, and see if I have figured out the application of the concept.

I compare/contrast this with behavior of people who say they are trying to learn (level of sincerity unknown) and who just want to be spoon-fed the answer, without knowing the path to the answer. And who often complain that it should be easier.

[A] subscription to a magazine about taekwondo will only be as useful as your decision to drag your fat ass into a dojo and start actually kicking people. Over and over. Otherwise, you’re just buying shiny paper every month.

Stir, Stir, Stir

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Thursday I stirred the pot and linked to some dredged-up Larry Summers controversy (It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time); I was dealing with a cold and didn’t include commentary while my head was foggy.

But I’m starting to feel better, and Cherish has raised some points and so here’s what my thinking behind this was.

One of the confounding issues here is the source amnesia that is going on — we remember statements made by non-credible sources, and forget the source before we forget the statement. We remember things not because they are true, but because they are repeated, and with that comes myths and falsehoods stuck in our memory. We all “know” Al Gore invented the internet, but fewer know that Gore didn’t actually claim that. The Summers controversy is similar. (And when I taught, I discovered that my students had a “not” filter: if you told them “X is not true,” the first thing they would do is forget the negation and thereafter believe that “X is true.”) So the first order of business is to read what he actually said, rather than rely on what we remember, or what others repeatedly told us he said.

Secondly, a disclaimer. Sexism and discrimination exist. Of this I have no doubt. I’ve seen it happen, both in academia and elsewhere (Sheesh, I was in the military, which is (still) a bastion for such behavior). I don’t like it, and try not to be a practitioner. Nothing in this should be misconstrued to think I’m denying or condoning such behavior.

The problem is this: there are times when the discussion about disparity of representation in areas of STEM (particularly academia) begins and ends with sex discrimination, and I have a problem with that. What I don’t understand why how other scientists don’t take issue with dismissal of requests to look at the situation scientifically, as with an attitude of not looking at other data, or how raising a question of “Have we looked at X?” is shouted down.
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It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

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It’s Thanksgiving, so why not stir the pot?

Larry Summers debacle, resurfaced over at incoherently scattered ponderings, (in response to a freakonomics blog post)

Do this simple experiment – go around and ask people to tell you in their words what was it that Summers said that got him in trouble. It’s an interesting Rorschach-test type question with a wide spectrum of answers. Then go to google and find the full transcript of his speech.

Political overtones aside, the question of whether there is a greater variance of certain skills in males or females is a legitimate scientific question, the one that can be answered with data, without all media hysteria. Since there are studies that show that males also vastly outnumber women on the low-IQ tail of the spectrum means that this hypothesis is not so outlandish after all. This may also be related to the fact that males are much more likely to be involved in risky (e.g. criminal) behavior.

Since I am not an expert in this field, I can’t take sides in this discussion, but the argument often presented by anti-Summers side that merely asking a hypothetical scientific question about origins of differences in cognitive abilities between genders is sexist seems very un-scientific and dangerous to me.

(edit: fixed link)

Disrupting the Spacetime Continuum

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If only I were Michael J. Fox, a letter I would send back in time.

Letter to an Older Scientist

I see that you were funded throughout your career by the National Science Foundation. So while some researchers at well funded schools have access to your paper, the amusing thing is that the people who paid for your work, also known as tax payers, don’t have access to your work. A public good that’s no longer public, because somehow the academic community has decided to let a company charge way too much for work they did not perform.

I Can't Follow This

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How to give directions

According to Alycia Hund and colleagues at Illinois State University, there are two ways to give directions. One is using a so-called “route perspective”, as in the example above. This adopts a first-person spatial perspective and is characterised by references to turns and landmarks. The other is a so-called “survey perspective”, which gives directions as if looking down upon a map. This type of direction giving is characterised by references to cardinal directions (North, South, East and West) and precise distances.

The Quality Factor

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Interesting question over at Incoherently Scattered Ponderings: How do you measure “quality” of education?

Part of it is the assumption that you get a better education at certain schools — the feedback loop of good schools having the ability to be selective in both the faculty and the students it accepts. And that’s probably valid — if the quality of the faculty hired is based on how well they can educate. There are schools that have grad students teaching the classes, and professors who do research and view teaching as an annoyance.

But how to measure this is a different issue. Surveying faculty for where they got their education reinforces the notion that being in academia is “success.” And in a way somewhat related to Chad’s recent discussion on student-athletes, one has to recognize that, in a broader sense, education is not just what you learn in class.

H-1B or not H-1B? That is the Question.

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Solving the H-1B Visa Issue

I think the solution to the problem is really simple. The US should grant permanent residency to anyone who graduates from a qualified four year university with a computer science degree. If you are concerned about people gaming the system, you can start out by limiting it to people that receive a post-graduate degree. Of course, you can easily extend this beyond computer science (e.g. physics, chemistry, etc.)

When I was an undergraduate at MIT, a meaningful percentage of the student body was from other countries. It never even occurred to me that these folks were “different” and didn’t “belong in our country.” Some of my best friends in college weren’t US citizens and I was baffled by the hoops they had to jump through even back then to work in the US. In the past eight years, this has gotten dramatically worse and it’s time we got in front of this.

As I implied in my previous bit on H-1B visas, I think this attacks a symptom — the shortage of tech workers — but does nothing to solve the underlying problem. What happens when foreign students can get good jobs back in their own countries, and don’t want to stick around? This does nothing to foster education of our own citizens, and by having a large supply of workers, it drives salaries down. Businesses love it, of course, because the talent pool is deeper and cheaper. I don’t think we should swing all the way to full-blown protectionism, but I also don’t think unrestricted handing-out of visas to all graduates is the answer.

This brings to mind another issue. The US does educate a lot of foreign students. As with the author, I was friends with a number of them when I was in school. I was also frustrated that some of the finite supply of student support money, coming from taxes, was doled out to foreign students and to the exclusion of US citizens — I knew a few people who went without support for a year in the hope of landing a TA or RA, while the foreign students were supported. There’s something about that that strikes me an inequitable.

Pay Attention to the Woman Behind the Curtain

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Check out Allyson’s guest post at Cocktail Party Physics for one of the main reasons for my recent observation

I didn’t see any glitches except for one or two instances of technical difficulties, which speaks volumes for the organizers and support staff, because you just know there were issues, and since they didn’t become visible it means they were solved quickly.

Allyson was the awesome conference secretary, and gives an account of her unique perspective on how you can help get science done without actually being a scientist.

And they’re all weirdly grateful when I pick up a gauntlet and call the accounting department to explain that they’re to call me with the bullshit questions, because when they tie up my scientists with a four dollar discrepancy on a rental car, SCIENCE IS NOT HAPPENING, JACKHOLE.

You betcha we’re grateful when we find people who are part of the solution, rather than being part of the precipitate problem.

A Little Help

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Pictures of Numbers

Pictures of Numbers is a book-project-in-progress, consisting of practical tips and techniques for busy researchers on improving their data presentation, and is updated in intermittent bursts of regularity

In particular, there are

Better Axes

A good rule when making graphs is to remove needless impediments. Every extra act of interpretation we ask of the reader is a chance for them to misunderstand, be baffled, or get frustrated and move on. There should be as little standing between the reader and the data as possible. One level of interpretation all readers have to grapple with is the humble axis

Fixing Excel’s Charts, which need fixing, and

Reflections on the Planets, which improves a plot of the albedo of the solar system’s planets

via Kottke