Monthly Archives: June 2012

Are We Our Own Worst Enemy?

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Why the Scientist Stereotype Is Bad for Everyone, Especially Kids

To many – too many – science is something like North Korea. Not only is it impossible to read or understand anything that comes out of that place, there are so many cultural differences that it’s barely worth trying. It’s easier just to let them get on with their lives while you get on with yours; as long as they don’t take our jobs or attack our way of life, we’ll leave them in peace.

That’s very frustrating to scientists, who often bemoan the lack of public interest in what science has to say. They’re right to be frustrated: all our futures are dependent on proper engagement with science. So, how to solve this problem?

One thing to which I object is the charge that we did this to ourselves:

[T]he problem doesn’t lie with the science. It lies with the scientists. Or rather the myth the scientists have created around themselves.

The author makes several good points in the article, but never backs this one up. Which would have been nice, because I don’t see it as being true.

Same Old Story

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Same Old Story : Too Many Graduate Students

I saw this report from the NIH advisory committee. The summary of the problem: there are too many graduate studnets (sic) produced in biomedical fields for the number of academic positions that will be available for them in the future.

Same old story: ignoring the fact academia is not the only career for someone with a science PhD. The NIH report doesn’t make this mistake. From the summary (emphasis added):

The model should include an assessment of present and future needs in the academic research arena, but also current and future needs in industry, science policy, education, communication, and other pathways. The model will also require an assessment of current and future availability of trainees from the domestic and international communities.

In the actual report they note that the number going into academia has dropped, ~34 percent in 1993 to ~26 percent today. So it hasn’t been the case that most biomedical PhDs go into academia for at least 10 years. Why are people pretending that this is the case?

One thing I don’t get is the claim that graduate school does not prepare you for a non-academic career. (In contrast to my time in school, when I heard the complaint that it doesn’t prepare you for an academic career, because there was little to no preparation for becoming a teacher.) Maybe my own experience in physics is atypical, but I didn’t have to learn a whole lot about how to conduct research when I got my current job outside of academia (working in a government lab). The implication of the study is that in biology this isn’t the case, so sure, you should go ahead and fix that.

There may well be a good argument that we have too many graduate students. But comparing that number directly to the number of academic positions isn’t one of them.

More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Dominos

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You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

A domino can knock over another domino about 50% larger than itself. A chain of dominos of increasing size makes a kind of mechanical chain reaction that starts with a tiny push and knocks down an impressively large domino.

Original idea by Lorne Whitehead, American Journal of Physics, Vol. 51, page 182 (1983).

See http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0401018 for a sophisticated discussion of the physics.

One thing not discussed in the video (but the paper treats in gory detail) is that it’s not just an energy argument — you also must consider the collision between the dominos. It should be pretty obvious that the dominos can’t be separated by more than their height, else they won’t collide, but that they also need to hit the next high enough in order to exert a sufficient torque to topple it. Which contributes to this limit on the size of the next one.

Peek a Boo

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How well can the government spy on us via satellite?

[I]f [the donated satellites] had actually been used as spy satellites, what would these super telescopes have been able to see on the ground? It’s a fascinating question, and leads into a nice basic discussion of the optical resolution of imaging systems. In other words, what is the smallest detail that could be picked up by one of these telescopes in orbit?

A Moment of Science, Please

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A Moment of Science

I remember watching a TV special (probably National geographic) on Louis Leakey’s expeditions to Olduvai Gorge and the discovery of fossils of early humans. If biology didn’t require dissecting frogs, I might have gone in that direction. As it turns out, dissecting circuits and vacuum systems are more my thing. But that’s one instance I remember science grabbing me and pulling me in that direction.

The moment of science that hooked me into physics has to be constructing a version of the monkey-and-hunter experiment in my neighbor’s basement. (The target drops as soon as you fire the gun, so where do you aim?). I thought that was so cool. That was when I knew I was going to study physics.

The Mystery of Success

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How Did the arXiv Succeed?

A lot of pieces talking about the failure of open access policies to catch on more widely tend to point to the success of the arXiv in physics and math as if it’s the rule and the failure of the life-science versions are the exception. But, given that physics does not lack for high-stakes job competition, or publication pressure, I think this is the wrong way around. It’s not surprising that biologists don’t embrace preprint-sharing; rather, it’s a mystery how the arXiv managed to succeed so brilliantly.

I’m wondering if it’s structural, in terms of grants and overlap of projects. It may be easier to gear up a lab to scoop someone in other areas of science, but in the high-energy physics world, where you are scheduling experiment time on an accelerator as part of a large collaboration, I think “scooping” really isn’t posing a large problem.

Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Mantis Shrimp

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How mantis shrimps deliver armour-shattering punches without breaking their fists

The smashers deliver the fastest punch of any animal. As the club unfurls, its acceleration is 10,000 times greater than gravity. Moving through water, it reaches a top speed of 50 miles per hour. It creates a pressure wave that boils the water in front of it, creating flashes of light (shrimpoluminescene – no, really) and immensely destructive bubbles. The club reaches its target in just three thousandths of a second, and strikes with the force of a rifle bullet. Against such punches, even the best armour eventually fails.
But the mantis shrimp’s club doesn’t fail. It can deliver blow after punishing blow, breaking apart its prey without breaking apart itself.

Reaching Out

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Quick thoughts on the what and why of science outreach

I could describe my research to other perceptual psychologists, or to other cognitive psychologists, or to other psychologists, or to other scientists, each time taking a step away from the specific knowledge of the context of distance perception research. But these steps are encouraged, the journals that reach wider audiences have more credibility and more impact. But then if I take one more step beyond Science and Nature, to the lay public, all of a sudden it becomes not science but science outreach? This seems like a bit of an arbitrary distinction. Maybe it is just that Science and Nature are super competitive, and the selectivity itself is what is solely responsible for their high currency in the scientific world?

It may be arbitrary, but drawing the line at when the audience contains scientists who might use your research or are potential collaborators doesn’t seem all that unfair. However, the observation that people outside that circle might still have useful information to share is a good one. It’s not uncommon to make a “discovery” in one field only to find it’s a very well-known phenomena in another and only a matter of where you’ve drawn these boundaries of who your audience is (or in what audience you place yourself). Cross-pollination in science, by reaching a broader audience, is quite likely to yield better science.