Category Archives: Science-general

Don't Sleep Through This

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Giving a Good Talk over at Life as a Physicist.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) there is a lot more to giving a good talk than just a good deck of slides. I think the number one thing for me is “tell a story.”

Some good tips to check out. A couple to add:

Don’t make your graphs too complicated and the admonition of death-before-yellow-on-white applies here as well. Also remember that (red/green) color blindness is not all that uncommon, so — especially if you’ve used red and/or green — point out which line you’re discussing, rather than just saying “the red line represents X”

I’ve heard a common critique that the presentation slides should be cartoonish, but I rarely find them funny, so I use a different description — simplify. The text should be the highlights, not a transcript. If you’ve followed the advice about fonts (I say minimum size ~18), you won’t be able to fit everything you say on the slides, anyway. You shouldn’t be speeding along any faster than about one slide per minute. And remember to breathe.

The Illusion of Knowledge

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Over at Backreaction

Current illusions such as the idea that if it’s on the internet, and especially if it’s in an oft-visited location, then it must be true (argument from popularity), if it can’t be explained in a short presentation, it must be false (argument from incredulity), if it’s not on the internet then it must be false, newer information is always better, and others.

I think some of this is a remnant of the idea that if something appears in print, it must be true — print used to be instant credibility in part because print was relatively expensive. The cost aspect was especially true in the earliest days, and you wouldn’t bother to commit something to writing unless it was very important, but before mass-printing, that was often spiritual truth rather than scientific truth. But with the advent of printing, thanks to Gutenberg, more information could be shared at less cost, so knowledge was put down on paper and distributed.

But it’s still largely driven by economics, and the illusion was present even back in the day. As long as a lie is profitable, and this could mean power and control, as well as money, putting it in print has a payoff. And as the cost of print goes down, the wider the illusion spreads. Today, of course, electronic print is dirt cheap. There is almost no threshold at all to making misinformation available, and even sending it to you — hey, you’ve got spam! Every crank and their inbred cousin can have a web site that “teaches” us how relativity is a conspiracy, quantum mechanics has a connection to the mind and body, the earth is 6000 years old, etc.

One danger, to which Bee alludes, is that if you’ve been hoodwinked into thinking a solution has been achieved, you aren’t as likely to support further investigation — legitimate, scientific investigation — into the problem.

The problem is not lack of knowledge. The problem is the Illusion of Knowledge that comes with an overabundance of unstructured information. It fosters the public manifestation of unfounded believes, stalls scientific arguments, and hinders progress.

Required Reading

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The Nerd Handbook

OK, it’s a little bit slanted toward the computer nerd, but many things apply to general geekage.

Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates. When your nerd is staring at a stranger, all he’s thinking is, “I have no system for understanding this messy person in front of me”. This is where the shy comes from. This is why nerds hate presenting to crowds.

The skills to interact with other people are there. They just lack a well-defined system.

The Strange-ness Attractor

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Female Science Professor makes an observation about random scientific inquiries made to universities

In some cases, the questions are easy and quick to answer — for example, some people call with a question about something they heard on the news. In some cases, people stop by the department (with or without calling first) and expect assistance. At least 62%* of these people are very strange. On several occasions, I have had random people call me and tell me what I should study in my research. Apparently I have been studying the wrong things. I have not yet, however, been tempted by any of these new and creative ideas, 100% of which have been bizarre.

[…]

Do some departments attract more wackos than others, or do all/most academic departments have their own special kind? Someone should study this

I know that in grad school, we had a folder of crank inquiries kept in the department’s main office, and one of my fellow students was once tasked to inspect some gizmo a random person had brought in to show one of the professors (I suspect at that point it’s better to do this than simply send the person away) because he was convinced it was an over-unity device. It wasn’t, BTW. In physics, most of the crackpots fall into three main categories: perpetual motion, anti-relativity, and anti-quantum mechanics. There are other meta-crackpots that just rail against the whole process of doing physics, claiming it’s flawed.

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A Paper From Professor Obvious?

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Using examples to teach math

[C]ollege students who learned a mathematical concept with concrete examples couldn’t apply that knowledge to new situations. But when students first learned the concept with abstract symbols, they were much more likely to transfer that knowledge

In a third experiment, the researchers presented 20 students with two concrete examples and then asked them to compare the two examples and write down any similarities they saw. After this experiment, about 44 percent of the students performed well on the test concerning the children’s game, while the remainder still did not perform better than chance.

If I’m reading this correctly, my response is, “Duh!” Maybe it’s just a bad press release, but it sounds like teaching by giving an example isn’t as good as teaching by giving the general concept, and then perhaps reinforcing it with an example. So we look at the paper

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Let's Teach Science in Science Class

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I agree that finding that half of polled students can’t identify that “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” is true doesn’t imply that the other half are creationists, given that other science questions also garnered less-than-spectacular results.

However, it also doesn’t mean that all of the negative response is due to insufficient science education, nor would a general improvement in science education necessarily imply an improvement in biology, et. al, if crappyscience™ is what gets adopted be school boards, or actual science education is discouraged.

Blake Stacey has an excellent post in which he has compiled a collection of incidents of educators and others being harassed and hounded by people who didn’t like the conclusions at which science arrives.

Open your mouth about evolution around the wrong people, though, and you can find yourself harassed, ejected from your job and even beaten in the street.

Just ask these people.

The recognition that our science education needs to be improved has to be tied in with admitting that things won’t get better if we don’t actually teach science in science class.

No, They Isn't

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Is our children learning science?

Science Indicators: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t

Science literacy, or, to be more precise, the lack of science literacy.

The wrong answers to all these questions are idiotic, but they’re not idiotic in a religious way, unless I’ve been missing the public lobbying from the First Church of the Acousto-Optic God. The problem isn’t religion, or political lobbying, or idiot celebrities peddling quackery– the problem is that we do a piss-poor job of teaching science, period. All fields, all areas, people are not getting the science education they need.

Excellent point.

Update: I had missed something important in originally posting this. from Sheril’s summary

The universe began with a huge explosion. (True)
Male 40
Female 27*

* that right folks, almost 3/4 of female respondents answered incorrectly

Um, not necessarily. It’s a crappy question — characterizing the big bang as a “huge explosion” is is way too ambiguous, IMO. Most people think of an explosion in the sense of setting off some dynamite, or something similar, and it wasn’t: it was a rapid expansion of spacetime. A question where understanding more may actually reduce the score.