Author Archives: jstemwedel

Can science help the picky eater? Interview with Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic (part 1).

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This summer, I reviewed Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate by Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic. This month, with the approach of the holiday season (prime time for picky eaters to sit with non-picky eaters at meal time), Stephanie and I sat down for lunch at Evvia in Palo Alto to talk about pickiness while sampling foods that had previously been in our “no go” categories. (For me, this included dolmathes, for Stephanie, grilled octopus.)

In this segment of the interview, we discuss some of what scientists think they know about pickiness and why it matters. We also dip our tasting spoons into the steaming cauldron of early upbringing and cultural influences on the foods we like or don’t like, and chew on the idea that a kid’s pickiness can be developmentally appropriate.

Janet D. Stemwedel: The first question I have is about the expectations you had when you set out on this project, researching the book, about what you were going to learn about the science — whether you started out thinking science probably had a nice, neat explanation for why people are picky eaters, of whether you started out with the assumption that it was going to be a big old complicated thing?

Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic: I did not think science had the big answer, honestly. I thought science could answer the supertaster question for me personally, but that was the only answer I expected to get. In the meantime, I knew that I could ask scientists and psychologists and psychiatrists questions along with that. But I knew from what I was aware of already, the articles out there — I mean, they’re usually pop-culture articles, and they don’t always tell the science correctly or fully — I knew that science had some answers. I knew that there were so many avenues that could be explored, I really didn’t expect there to be a full answer. What I found, though, were more possibilities, like “this could be a possible reason — being a supertaster could be a reason, but it’s not the only reason.” Being exposed via breast milk — which I was not; I was a formula-fed baby — is maybe linked to being less picky, so maybe being formula-fed contributed to my pickiness. You’re never going to get an answer with 100% agreement behind it, because it’s still evolving. And science, as evidenced by Duke doing this study, for the adults at least, they don’t know what’s causing it, they just know that there are a lot of contributing factors. And, when they’re looking to treat it, it’s more like, “Well, let’s get really in-depth into what the possibilities might be that contribute to it, and let’s try to fix them” on sometimes just the psychological level.

JS: It’s an interesting kind of thing that something that goes along with studying a phenomenon like being a picky eater is the scientists saying, “And we’re going to fix it!” Like it’s something that needs to be fixed rather than just part of normal human variation. Why problematize it?

SL: Well, Dr. Nancy Zucker at Duke said what they worry about — less in my case, personally; more other people’s cases — they’re finding, if you’re a child, your development could be affected if you have what they call severe food refusal. They left the adults alone for a while, but now they’re discovering that maybe adults’ health and social lives are severely impaired by this problem, because they’re not eating the things maybe they’re supposed to be eating that can extend their lives or make them healthier, or if they don’t want to go out to dinner with friends and family, if they don’t want to be around friends, that’s a problem. So, that’s why they want to “fix” it, or at least help.

JS: So, it’s not necessarily, “We will find the picky eaters. They will all be cured. It will be a happy utopia.”

SL: I think the picky eaters have to want the help to be “cured”. While I got over it, I don’t believe that there’s going to be a cure. It’s very individualized. You really have to want to get over it, and to be fair to picky eaters who have it worse than I do, I don’t mean to say that all picky eaters want to live that way. But you have to have a very strong impetus to push you to do it. It’s a really scary thing. A lot of picky eaters will tell you it’s not a won’t, it’s a can’t. They can’t get over it.

JS: You interacted with lots of scientists who study many different aspects of pickiness in lots of different ways. You discovered that it’s complicated. Is your sense that the scientists feel like they may be getting near a place where things start seeming less complicated, where things start falling into place? Or was your sense, talking to them, that every corner they turned, they found a new way that it’s more complicated?

SL: I think the second. I think that as they gather information, especially about the adult picky eaters — because the adults are more forthcoming about what they don’t like and why or what they remember; you don’t necessarily reason with kids when you’re trying to treat them, you just treat them — so I think that they’re finding more nuances. It’s not just about the individual foods at all. It’s the reasons, if they can figure them out. So I think, when I spoke to scientists about my own personal experience and how I feel like I got past it, for some of them that was new information. To hear about my reactions to foods, or how I went to culinary school, some of it was like, “Oh, that makes sense. You learned how to cook and that demystified the food. That makes sense, on a psychological level, that that could have helped you.” But I think it’s still such a mystery because many people struggle with how to explain a dislike. You have to be pretty introspective to do it, and you may just be unable to explain it. “I don’t know why I don’t like it; I just don’t like it. I don’t know if it’s the texture or the flavor or what.” Some people haven’t thought very hard about it. They just know they don’t like it. I’m not sure it’s that complicated of a thing, except that humans are so complicated, and pickiness is more of an internal than an external issue. That makes it pretty complex.

JS: So scientists aren’t even expecting that it’s going to end up shaking out to be like three main ways to be picky.

SL: You know, I don’t know, because when I asked Dr. Zucker, who was heading up the Duke study, what they hoped to achieve, she was very careful to say that they were in the beginning stages of just assessing information with this online survey. I will say, they were surprised at the response. I’m remembering she said in a radio interview we were both part of that she expected around 3,000 people to fill out this form, and they got like 30,000. So I think the breadth of that response, what they’re learning about how many people out there might classify themselves as picky, as having food issues — and again, they were just amassing the information, they hadn’t yet begun to process it. Maybe they’ve started that now. Because I will say, also in that same interview, I always asked the question, is there a difference between men and women. That could have been something, potentially, I talked about in the book. Although I didn’t write about it, I personally found that of the people I’ve met who are former picky eaters, who have gotten past it, more are women than men. Men I’ve met who are picky eaters seem to just be OK with their state. They deal with it and they don’t really need to change it. We could go into philosophical reasons about women being social, or feeling judged, to explain why they might be more likely to try to get past it. But anyway, when I asked if there’s a difference between men and women, [I found out] there are studies with kids found that males may be more likely to reject a new idea than females. But Dr. Zucker did say in this one interview that they are starting to find out that there might be a difference between the sexes in pickiness itself. I wanted to talk to her about it more, but I couldn’t on the radio. Anyway, some interesting correlations are emerging.

JS: But then untangling what’s going on with those, whether it’s genes or environment, figuring out if there’s a cultural component to it …

SL: Whether there’s a cultural component is something I’ve been asked about a lot in interviews. It was something I did not feel equipped to cover, because it was just so big. I could have taken on the history of picky eating — it was something my editor wanted me to do — but I wasn’t even sure how to begin tracking the history of it. On the cultural side of it, you get a lot of people saying, “Well, in India babies eat spicy foods.” Yeah, they do; that’s what’s there, what they’re used to. That’s their normal. But I also had someone tell me about being an American in North Korea, working (yes, it can be done). They went out to lunch with their Korean counterparts, and the menu had a western side and a Korean side. The western side was all pastas, pizzas, whatever, and the Koreans at the lunch thought that was absolutely disgusting food. So, it’s all about what you’re used to. It’s not that Americans are predisposed to be picky because we live in this huge country of largesse. People in different countries are going to have different reactions to different kinds of food. What might be gross to someone who’s never had Japanese food before almost certainly has an American counterpart that someone in Japan would find gross. It’s a huge topic that I couldn’t even begin to get into.

JS: It makes you wonder. I would not describe my own upbringing as full of lots of different styles of food, or of foods from lots of different cultural traditions. My parents were from the midwest. I was growing up basically in the ’70s and ’80s, and that was not necessarily a time of astounding creativity among home chefs.

SL: Not just in the midwest, it wasn’t anywhere. I’m from Minnesota, and I grew up the same time you did. It was a lot of frozen vegetables for me. Badly prepared.

JS: With the hell boiled right out of them.

SL: Right! So there was no way they were going to end up being anything good. Now, I could blame Minnesota for our lack of access to better food, but I’ve talked to a friend of mine who grew up in California —

JS: And it was the same thing?

SL: Yes. She said, “We just didn’t have the same access that we do today.”

JS: Huh!

SL: She’s a former picky eater turned foodie and food writer, and she said it wasn’t until she went to college that she was opened up to more food. Maybe it is all about what your parents are bringing home. My husband grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and his mom always loved to cook, so she sought out the best recipes and there was more of that emphasis for him; even if they didn’t always have access to non-frozen vegetables, there was an attempt. I grew up on Chinese food and Vietnamese food, because we had a lot of it around, and I loved it, but I didn’t grow up around stuff I love now, like Ethiopian food or Afghan food. In this day and age, even in the midwest, there are more corner grocery stores that are going to have the ingredients, there are more restaurants, there’s more of an emphasis on the food culture than when you and I were growing up.

JS: Maybe that will have an impact on our kids. But, then again …

SL: It’s one thing that might help.

JS: Yeah. I have a kid who, as a two-year-old, cried inconsolably when, after her third helping of garlic broccoli, we ran out (and couldn’t get more, since it was Sunday, and the Thai restaurant down the street that we had gotten it from was closed). We said, “Child, you are not supposed to like broccoli this much!” And before that, when she was a baby, of course, every time my head was turned at the playground, she’d eat a handful of sand, I think just on principle. So, not what I would have called a super-picky child. But now, for her, there’s like a 15 minute window in which she’ll count a banana as ripe.

SL: I don’t blame her!

JS: And beyond that, she says, “It makes me gag.”

SL: Bananas are pernicious!

JS: It’s hard to know how much of this has to do with this is where her palate is right now (and it’s a moving target), and how much of it is, here’s a way to stick it to the parent.

SL: Speaking personally, I was the middle child, so I was always trying to be good. I was not ever trying to piss off my parents or run counter to them. And even my older sister, who was more the rebel, rebelled in other ways. I will say she became a vegetarian for a while, maybe to make a point — she was a teenager — but I also believe it was to avoid certain foods that neither of us liked. Speaking as a kid who grew up picky, I never consciously thought of my pickiness as a way to thwart my parents. I hated fighting with them about it.

JS: Yeah, I’m not even sure this would be a conscious thing. Once they’re thirteen, they don’t even know all the ways they’re trying to fight authority.

SL: Sometimes they’re disagreeing just to disagree.

JS: I think it’s part of demonstrating that you’re an autonomous human being; you have to reject every good idea that comes out of your mother’s mouth.

SL: Which is exactly what they’re doing around eighteen months. This is why it’s normal to see picky eaters at toddler age. It’s developmentally appropriate — they should be picky eaters. It’s the first time they can take control and say “No” and “You can’t put this in my mouth because I can now feed myself.” So yes, I learned that they’re little teenagers when they’re toddlers, with the same kinds of hormonal fluctuations going on.

JS: Well, it’s totally fun to get to do that twice with each child. Development kind of sucks.

SL: Yeah.

Competing theories on the relation between Santa and the elves.

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For many, this time of year is the height of hectic, whether due to holiday preparations or grade-filing deadlines at the end of the semester (or, for some of us, both of those together). Amidst the buzz and bustle, sometimes it’s a gift to slow down enough to find a quiet moment and listen to the people in your life. What you might hear in those moments can be a gift, too.

During a pause in my grading, my eldest child (age 13) related this conversation to me, which I am sharing with her permission.*

On a recent drive to a trumpet lesson, my father and I were speculating the social role of Santa Claus as compared to his elves. We managed to come up with two different possible theories that took account of the many different factors that were present in Santa’s supposed habits.

My dad’s theory was that Santa was a zombie. Not one of those brain-munching decomposing corpses that constitute the modern definition of zombies, but a zombie in the voodoo sense. Basically, a flesh puppet; a person under mind control that was being used to perform a task. He came to the conclusion that the elves brought Santa back every year to play a leadership role. According to my dad, resurrecting Santa was all the elves could do autonomously.

You can read more about how to make an old-school zombie in this excellent post from the archives of Cocktail Party Physics. Kids, be sure to get a parent’s permission first!

My theory was a bit more complex, and seemed more feasible to me. I hypothesized that Santa and his elves were like an ant or bee colony, with Santa as the “queen” and the elves as the workers. I proposed that milk and cookies were like the royal jelly. If an elf was given milk and/or cookies, it would metamorphose into another Santa and would challenge the existing Santa’s dominance. What would follow would be an intense and potentially disastrous Santa-on-Santa battle.

So my kids haven’t exactly outgrown speculating about Santa, but that speculation seems to have gone in an interesting direction. One wonders how many scientific careers can be traced back to childhood conversations where a grown-up was willing to spin theories with a kid.

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*Not only did she give her permission for me to share it, but she typed it up herself.

Are scientists obligated to call out the bad work of other scientists? (A thought experiment)

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Here’s a thought experiment. While it was prompted by intertubes discussions of evolutionary psychology and some of its practitioners, I take it the ethical issues are not limited to that field.

Say there’s an area of scientific research that is at a relatively early stage of its development. People working in this area of research see what they are doing as strongly connected to other, better established scientific fields, whether in terms of methodological approaches to answering questions, or the existing collections of empirical evidence on which they draw, or what have you.

There is general agreement within this community about the broad type of question that might be answered by this area of research and the sorts of data that may be useful in evaluating hypotheses. But there is also a good bit of disagreement among practitioners of this emerging field about which questions will be the most interesting (or tractable) ones to pursue, about how far one may reasonably extend the conclusions from particular bits of research, and even about methodological issues (such as what one’s null hypothesis should be).

Let me pause to note that I don’t think the state of affairs I’m describing would be out of the ordinary for a newish scientific field trying to get its footing. You have a community of practitioners trying to work out a reasonable set of strategies to answer questions about a bundle of phenomena that haven’t really been tackled by other scientific fields that are chugging merrily along. Not only do you not have the answers yet to the questions you’re asking about those phenomena, but you’re also engaged in building, testing, and refining the tools you’ll be using to try to answer those questions. You may share a commitment with others in the community that there will be a useful set of scientific tools (conceptual and methodological) to help you get a handle on those phenomena, but getting there may involve a good bit of disagreement about what tools are best suited for the task. And, there’s a possibility that in the end, there might not be any such tools that give you answers to the questions you’re asking.

Imagine yourself to be a member of this newish area of scientific research.*

What kind of obligation do you have to engage with other practitioners of this newish area of scientific research whose work you feel is not good? (What kind of “not good” are we talking about here? Possibly you perceive them to be drawing unwarranted conclusions from their studies, or using shoddy methodology, or ignoring empirical evidence that seems to contradict their claims. There’s no need to assume that they are being intentionally dishonest.) Do you have an obligation to take to the scientific literature to critique the shortcomings in their work? Do you have an obligation to communicate these critiques privately (e.g., in email correspondence)? Or is it ethically permissible not to engage with what you consider the bad examples of work in your emerging scientific field, instead keeping your head down and producing your own good examples of how to make progress in your emerging scientific field?

Do you think your obligations here are different than they might be if you were working in a well-established scientific field? (In a well-established scientific field, one might argue, the standards for good work and bad work are clearer; does this mean it takes less individual work to identify and rebut the bad work?)

Now consider the situation when your emerging scientific field is one that focuses on questions that capture the imagination not just of scientists trying to get this new field up and running, but also of the general public — to the extent that science writers and journalists are watching the output of your emerging scientific field for interesting results to communicate to the public. How does the fact that the public is paying some attention to your newish area of scientific research bear on what kind of obligation you have to engage with the practitioners in your field whose work you feel is not good?

(Is it fair that a scientist’s obligations within his or her scientific field might shift depending on whether the public cares at all about the details of the knowledge being built by that scientific field? Is this the kind of thing that might drive scientists into more esoteric fields of research?)

Finally, consider the situation when your emerging field of science has captured the public imagination, and when the science writers and journalists seem to be getting most of their information about what your field is up to and what knowledge you have built from the folks in your field whose work you feel is not good. Does this place more of an obligation upon you to engage with the practitioners doing not-good work? Does it obligate you to engage with the science writers and journalists to rebut the bad work and/or explain what is required for good scientific work in your newish field? If you suspect that science writers and journalists are acting, in this case, to amplify misunderstandings or to hype tempting results that lack proper evidential support, do you have an obligation to communicate directly to the public about the misunderstandings and/or about what proper evidential support looks like?

A question I think can be asked at every stage of this thought experiment: Does the community of practitioners of your emerging scientific field have a collective responsibility to engage with the not-so-good work, even if any given individual practitioner does not? And, if the answer to this question is “yes”, how can the community of practitioners live up to that obligation if no individual practitioner is willing to step up and do it?

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* For fun, you can also consider these questions from the point of view of a member of the general public: What kinds of obligations do you want the scientists in this emerging field to recognize? After all, as a member of the public, your interests might diverge in interesting ways from those of a scientist in this emerging field.

Thoughts on the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre.

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On December 6, 1989, in Montreal, fourteen women were murdered for being women in what their murderer perceived to be a space that rightly belonged to men:

Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

They were murdered because their killer was disgruntled that he been denied admission to the École Polytechnique, the site of the massacre, and because he blamed women occupying positions that were traditionally occupied by men for this disappointment, among others. When their killer entered the engineering classroom where the killing began, he first told the men to leave the room, because his goal was to kill the women. In their killer’s pocket, discovered after his death, was a list of more women he had planned to kill, if only he had the time.

Most of the people who believe women do not belong in science and engineering classrooms, or in science or engineering jobs, or in other domains that used to be exclusively male, will never pick up a gun to enforce their will.

But, there are plenty who will send women the clear message that they are not welcome as equal participants in these domains.

There are plenty who will assume — and proclaim loudly — that women have unfairly gained access (due to affirmative action or quotas or political correctness), that they cannot possibly perform at the same level as men (despite evidence that the women they scorn are doing just that), that they have taken the place of some anonymous deserving man who really needed that job or that spot in the class.

There are plenty who will remind women, with words and deeds, that they will always be seen primarily in terms of their sexual desirability (or lack thereof) by the men who are their classmates and teachers, their colleagues and bosses. Women in these male precincts who have the temerity to object to leering and ass-grabbing and unwelcome sexual advances can expect to be told that they are sucking all the joy out of the professional or educational environment, and that this is how it has always been (and if you wanted to be part of this world, you should take it as it is rather than ruining it), and that they should just toughen up.

There is no amount of toughening up that would have saved these fourteen women from the bullets that were fired at them for the crime of being female in a male domain.

And, when men speak passionately against women leaving their proper place to invade male dominated fields — when they go beyond placing the burden of proof on women to show they should be allowed to participate (rather than giving them the same opportunity as men to prove themselves) and argue that women’s full-scale participation will ruin science and engineering for everyone who matters — we cannot tell, just by looking, which of them may someday feel entitled to act on their convictions with weapons more deadly than words.

Book review: Cooking for Geeks.

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Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food
by Jeff Potter
O’Reilly Media, 2010

We have entered the time of year during which finding The Perfect Gift for family members and friends can become something of an obsession. Therefore, in coming days, I’ll be sharing some recommendations.

If you have family members and friends on your gifting list who are interested in science or interested in food (or interested in both science and food), then Cooking for Geeks is a book to give them that will have an impact that lingers for much longer on the palate than your run-of-the-mill book.

Partly this is because Cooking for Geeks is organized more like a manual (with sections on equipment, “inputs”, relevant variables for different cooking methods, etc.) than a linear narrative. Indeed, the book is also an astounding collection of fun things to try, whether with ingredients, cooking methods, equipment, or your own taste buds. There are at least a hundred science fair project ideas lurking within these 432 pages — although good luck to the kid who tries to pry this book away from the grown-ups, who will want to try the potential experiments themselves. Jeff Potter’s clear and engaging descriptions of issues like the chemistry and mechanics of leavening, strategies for adapting the kitchen equipment you have to perform the tasks you want to perform, or ways to avoid foodborne illness are interspersed with his interviews with food geeks of various sorts sharing their expertise, their recipes, and their enthusiasm for digging deeper and learning why things work the way they do. Basically, it’s almost a transcript of what I imagine would be the geekiest dinner party ever, and an invitation to recreate a piece of it in your own kitchen with your own friends.

There is so much good stuff in here that it’s actually a bit overwhelming. Here’s a tasting-menu of some of my favorite features:

  • A hands-on way to compare the levels of gluten in different kinds of flour (page 220).
  • Discussions of different culinary solvents, including the use of alcohol and water to isolate different compounds from the same raw materials in a bitters recipe (page 296), and the use of “fat-washing” alcohols (page 292).
  • An algorithm to optimize your cutting of a cake into not-neccesarily-equal slices in such a way as to satisfy the desires of N people hoping to get a slice of that cake (page 257).
  • An examination of factors relevant to the multiplication of bacteria in our food, shedding some light on what makes the “shelf-stable” items in the pantry less deadly than they might otherwise be — plus an exhortation to remember basic physics when deciding how to safely store foods in the refrigerator (page 162).
  • A discussion of why marshmallows made with methylcellulose melt when they are cooled rather than when they are heated (pages 316-317), including a recipe so you can try this at home.
  • A graph (page 159) comparing cooking methods by rate of heat transfer (plotting minutes to raise the center of uniform pieces of tofu 54 oC versus the temperature of the cooking environment). There’s something about a good graph that is deeply satisfying.
  • An examination why it matters what the bowl is made of when you’re whisking egg whites in it (page 253), as well as recipes for French Meringue and Italian Meringue which discuss why a slight difference in method can lead to a pronounced difference in texture (page 255).
  • In the eternal batter between weight and volume, a persuasive empirical case for measuring ingredients by weight (page 62).
  • Lots of discussion of the five primary tastes (bitter, sour, umami, sweet, and salty), including charts with suggestions on what to add to a dish to increase each of them — and another chart with suggestions for how to counteract a primary taste with which you’ve gone too far (page 115).
  • A discussion of the basis vectors for wine-food pairings and how to isolate them empirically (using lemon juice, sugar water, tea, and vodka) to taste your dish and figure out what kind of wine will go well with it. (page 89)
  • The recipes for crepes (pages 68-69), pumpkin cake (page 249), and chocolate panna cotta that uses agar rather than gelatin (page 311).
  • Suggestions for compounds you can play with (including lactisole, miraculin, and the humble Peppermint Lifesaver) that will mess with your taste receptors in interesting ways (pages 109-110).

A lovely feature of this book is that it makes no assumptions about the reader’s level of comfort or competence in the kitchen. Rather, it presents food and cooking as a realm where the newbie can learn some important principles (that also happen to be cool) and where the experienced cook can learn even more. Maybe the experienced cook has a larger store of “common wisdom,” but Potter puts lots of that common wisdom to empirical test to see just how wise it is. Moreover, the newbie may be in a better position to violate recipes and use methods “the wrong way” to discover what happens when you do.

As well, Cooking for Geeks makes no assumptions about just what kind of geek the reader might be. There is certainly a lot of real chemistry, physics, and engineering in this book (not to mention a healthy dose of biology), but all of it is presented in an accessible way, inviting the reader who is not (for example) a chemistry geek to use food as a reason to start taking chemistry more seriously.

Cooking for Geeks would make a fabulous gift for a curious person who’s interested in food or cooking. It pairs nicely with Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate and a quad-ruled notebook.

DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students 2012 update.

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We’re less than four days from the end of this year’s Science Bloggers for Students drive, the last moments of Friday, November 9. And, I wanted to bring you up to date on the little post-Sandy challenge I issued last week. You may recall that I added three projects to my giving page from hurricane affected area:

Soil test kits for Dr. Charles E Brimm Medical Arts High School in Camden, New Jersey, to help students in an environmental science class with their urban gardening project. — FULLY FUNDED!

Calculators for a math-intensive Earth Science class at a high school in New York City. —Needs just $135 more to be fully funded. So, so close!

A human body torso display model for a middle school biology class in Carteret, New Jersey.–Needs $653 more to be fully funded. A little harder, but still do-able by the end of the drive.

Remember I said that for each of these new projects that we got to full funding before the end of the drive, I would donate $25 to the American Red Cross for Sandy relief? You got one to full funding, which puts $25 from me into American Red Cross for Sandy relief. We have another project almost to full funding — which means I’m poised to kick another $25 to American Red Cross for Sandy relief. If get that third project that’s still in need of $653 fully funded, I’ll donate $100 to the American Red Cross for Sandy relief.

And, don’t forget that there’s still a dollar-for-dollar match from the DonorsChoose Board of Directors, good through the end of the drive on Friday (unless we blow through all $50,000 first, which would be awesome). Just enter SCIENCE in the “Match or gift code” field at checkout, and every dollar you give up to $100 will be doubled.

Way to be awesome, science fans! Let’s finish strong.

Science education: Am I part of the solution, or part of the problem?

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In my blogging career (and even before), I’ve spent a fair bit of time bemoaning the low level of scientific education/literacy/competence among the American public. Indeed, I have expressed the unpopular opinion that all college students ought to do the equivalent of a minor in some particular science as one of their graduation requirements. I tell anyone who asks me (and a lot of people who don’t) that science is fun. Some of the very best teachers I know are science teachers.

But I wonder sometimes whether my exhortations are any help in turn the educational tide, or whether I’m just letting the current drag us in the wrong direction.

You see, I teach a philosophy of science course. (Actually, I teach multiple sections of it, and I teach it every semester.) And, at this university, that philosophy of science course satisfies the upper division general education requirement in science.

Yes, that’s right. Students can dodge taking an actual science course by taking a philosophy of science course instead. This yields throngs of students who are scared silly of anything scientific, and who know exactly one fact about philosophy: it’s in the Humanities college. (Humanities = fluffy, unthreatening classes where you read novels or watch films or look at paintings, and it’s all about what you think is going on, with no right or wrong answers. At least, this is what certain of my students assume before enrolling for this course.)

How on earth, given my aforementioned peevishness about science-scared students and community members, can I live with my role enabling the flight from learning some science?

It doesn’t hurt that some of the other options for filling this upper division science general education requirement have well-earned reputations for being “gut” courses (or as some like to say, “science-lite”). Notably absent from the list are many of the standard, science-major-y fundamentals. Instead, the list is heavy on physics for musicians, nutrition and exercise, and astronomy for people who will not do math under any circumstances. (The main exception: the offerings from geology and meteorology seem significantly more undiluted and rigorous ways to fulfill the requirement. Go earth and atmospheric scientists!) My course, I’m told, is actually kind of challenging. So even if the students are escaping a class in a science department, with me they’re not escaping work.

Also, the general education requirement was structured specifically to make students pay attention to the scientific method, to understand the difference between science and pseudo-science, and to understand science as an endeavor conducted by humans that has impacts on humans. As a former science student who took only the hard-core science courses intended for science majors, my experience is that we saw a lot of patterns of scientific reasoning, and we learned to extend these patterns to deal with new problems … but we didn’t have loads of time to get reflective about the scientific method. For me, that reflective awareness didn’t really happen until the semester I (1) started doing research, and (2) took a philosophy of science course. (Yes, both of those things happened in the same semester. I wish I could say I planned it that way, but it was serendipity.)

For the brief span of years in which I would have counted as a scientist, I think what I got out of philosophy of science made me a better scientist. (That I fell prey to philosophy’s charms and left science is another issue for another post.) And, the small cadre of science majors who take my course (perhaps because they’d be embarrassed to take a “physics for poets” kind of course) seem to get something useful from the course that they can bring back to their science-department understanding of science. In short, the science-y folk seem to think the course gives a pretty reasonable picture of the scientific method and the philosophical questions one might ask about its operations.

But what about the scared-of-science folk?

I can’t deny that there’s a part of me that wants to sign them up for intro chemistry (and biology, and physics). But I know full well that their hearts would explode from anxiety before they even got to the first quiz. Indeed, some have told me to my face that they think it’s “diabolical” for me to explain concepts like intertheoretic reduction or procedures for hypothesis testing using actual scientific examples (mentioning Boyle’s law and the details of the kinetic theory gases to boot). It’s hard to imagine these students willingly exposing themselves to courses where the scientific examples are the whole point. And, sadly, were they to confront their fears enroll in science courses, some of their instructors would decide up front that some of them were simply not smart enough to learn science.

I’m hopeful enough to think even the ones who are scared of science can come to understand something about the way scientist try to connect theories and evidence. I’m persistent enough to ask them to think about how scientists make decisions, and to make them do exercises where they have to try to think like scientists. I’m audacious enough to make them do research in the scholarly scientific literature, and to ask them to make some kind of sense of some of the articles they find there.

They may start out seeing my course as a way to dodge science, but by the end many of them are not as scared as science as they were at the beginning. (Or perhaps, they’ve shifted their fear to philosophy instead …)

Lately, though, there have been rumblings that maybe the upper division general education requirements — including the science requirement — should be scrapped, as a way to shorten the time to graduation (and, not coincidentally, to reduce the amount of money the state is putting up for the education of each of these students in our state-supported university system). There is not, to my knowledge, any plan to replace the learning objective-focused general education requirements with anything like a distribution requirement that might, for example, require everyone to take at least three courses from the sciences (and three from the social sciences, and three from the humanities or arts) in order to graduate without specifying which courses one should take. I would be wildly enthusiastic about this kind of distribution requirement … but the landscape that seems to be looming ahead is one of “less”. There would be less pressure for students to engage with material or ways of thinking outside their comfort zones, less expectation that a college graduate would have broad knowledge rather than specialized skills.

And, there would be even less opportunity to use a harmless looking philosophy course as a stealth weapon of science education.

So, while there’s a part of me that worries that my philosophy of science course enables the evasive maneuvers of students who are trying to avoid engaging with science instruction head-on, there’s another part of me that feels like I’m holding the line and helping more students to engage — and doing so in a time when the bean-counters are losing sight of whether it’s worth it for a state to pay a little more to have its population better educated about how science works.

DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students 2012: helping classrooms in the aftermath of Super-storm Sandy.

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Super-storm Sandy did major damage to the East Coast, especially New Jersey and New York City. The offices of DonorsChoose are in New York City. Their fabulous staff is safe (and mostly dry) and their computer servers are up, which means the Science Bloggers for Students drive has been operational and ready to receive your donations. However, a bunch of potential donors to the drive have probably been kind of distracted keeping their own selves safe and dry.

So, a few things we’re doing about this situation.

FIRST, we’re extending the drive through next Friday, November 9. This gives our East Coast compatriots who are waiting to get power back a chance to join in the fun. The dollar-for-dollar match from the DonorsChoose Board of Directors will be extended to the end (unless we blow through all $50,000 first, which would be awesome). Just enter SCIENCE in the “Match or gift code” field at checkout, and every dollar you give up to $100 will be doubled.

SECOND, I’ve added three projects to my giving page from hurricane affected area:

Calculators for a math-intensive Earth Science class at a high school in New York City.

Soil test kits for Dr. Charles E Brimm Medical Arts High School in Camden, New Jersey, to help students in an environmental science class with their urban gardening project.

A human body torso display model for a middle school biology class in Carteret, New Jersey.

In the event that we get these fully funded before the end of the drive, I’ll add more.

THIRD, for each of these new projects that we get to full funding before the end of the drive, I will donate $25 to the American Red Cross for Sandy relief. If we get all three fully funded, I’ll donate $100 to the American Red Cross for Sandy relief. If we fully fund additional Sandy-affected-area projects beyond these three, it will be an additional $25 out of my pocket to the American Red Cross for each of them.

If you hit your $100 limit on the matching funds, I know you’ll lean on your family and friends who care about science education.

We can do this!

We dodged the apocalypse, so let’s help some classrooms.

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We’re coming into the home stretch of our annual DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students drive:

Science Bloggers for Students: No Apocalypse in Sight (Transcript below)

And, now until the end of the drive, you can get your donations matched (up to $100 per donor) thanks to the generosity of the DonorsChoose.org Board of Directors. Just enter the match code SCIENCE in the “Match or gift code” field as you check out.

By the way, the DonorsChoose.org Board of Directors has put up $50,000 in matching funds, so once you’ve hit your match code limit, you might want to nudge your family, friends, and social media contacts to give to worthy projects and get their donations matched.

My giving page for the challenge is here. You can find other giving pages from Scientific American bloggers here.

Thanks in advance for your generosity!

Transcript of the video:

Today is November 1, 2012, which means that the prediction that the world would end in October of 2012? Didn’t happen. Now what?

After your hard work laying in emergency supplies for the apocalypse, a new day dawns … and there’s stuff to do: dishes to wash, rabbit runs to clean, and public school classrooms that still need help getting funds for equipment, field trips, even basic classroom supplies.

Here’s where DonorsChoose comes in: Pick a giving page from the Science Bloggers for Students challenge. Check out the projects and find one that matters to you. Give what you can, even if it’s just a buck. And now, until the end of the drive, you can use the match code SCIENCE to double your donation, up to $100. Give a dollar, the project you’re funding gets two dollars. Give $100, the project gets $200.

The world didn’t end — this time. So take this opportunity to do some good and help some kids before it does.

The danger of pointing out bad behavior: retribution (and the community’s role in preventing it).

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There has been a lot of discussion of Dario Maestripieri’s disappointment at the unattractiveness of his female colleagues in the neuroscience community. Indeed, it’s notable how much of this discussion has been in public channels, not just private emails or conversations conducted with sound waves which then dissipate into the aether. No doubt, this is related to Maestripieri’s decision to share his hot-or-not assessment of the women in his profession in a semi-public space where it could achieve more permanence — and amplification — than it would have as an utterance at the hotel bar.

His behavior became something that any member of his scientific community with an internet connection (and a whole lot of people outside his scientific community) could inspect. The impacts of an actual, rather than hypothetical, piece of behavior, could be brought into the conversation about the climate of professional and learning communities, especially for the members of these communities who are women.

It’s worth pointing out that there is nothing especially surprising about such sexist behavior* within these communities. The people in the communities who have been paying attention have seen them before (and besides have good empirical grounds for expecting that gender biases may be a problem). But many sexist behaviors go unreported and unremarked, sometimes because of the very real fear of retribution.

What kind of retribution could there be for pointing out a piece of behavior that has sexist effects, or arguing that it is an inappropriate way for a member of the professional community to behave?

Let’s say you are an early career scientist, applying for a faculty post. As it happens, Dario Maestripieri‘s department, the University of Chicago Department of Comparative Human Development, currently has an open search for a tenure-track assistant professor. There is a non-zero chance that Dario Maestripieri is a faculty member on that search committee, or that he has the ear of a colleague that is.

It is not a tremendous stretch to hypothesize that Dario Maestripieri may not be thrilled at the public criticism he’s gotten in response to his Facebook post (including some quite close to home). Possibly he’s looking through the throngs of his Facebook friends and trying to guess which of them is the one who took the screenshot of his ill advised post and shared it more widely. Or looking through his Facebook friends’ Facebook friends. Or considering which early career neuroscientists might be in-real-life friends or associates with his Facebook friends or their Facebook friends.

Now suppose you’re applying for that faculty position in his department and you happen to be one of his Facebook friends,** or one of their Facebook friends, or one of the in-real-life friends of either of those.

Of course, shooting down an applicant for a faculty position for the explicit reason that you think he or she may have cast unwanted attention on your behavior towards your professional community would be a problem. But there are probably enough applicants for the position, enough variation in the details of their CVs, and enough subjective judgment on the part of the members of the search committee in evaluating all those materials that it would be possible to cut all applicants who are Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook friends (or their Facebook friends, or in-real-life friends of either of those) from consideration while providing some other plausible reason for their elimination. Indeed, the circle could be broadened to eliminate candidates with letters of recommendation from Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook friends (or their Facebook friends, or in-real-life friends of either of those), candidates who have coauthored papers with Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook friends (or their Facebook friends, or in-real-life friends of either of those), etc.)

And, since candidates who don’t get the job generally aren’t told why they were found wanting — only that some other candidate was judged to be better — these other plausible reasons for shooting down a candidate would only even matter in the discussions of the search committee.

In other words, real retaliation (rejection from consideration for a faculty job) could fall on people who are merely suspected of sharing information that led to Dario Maestripieri becoming the focus of a public discussion of sexist behavior — not just on the people who have publicly spoken about his behavior. And, the retaliation would be practically impossible to prove.

If you don’t think this kind of possibility has a chilling effect on the willingness of members of a professional community to speak up when they see a relatively powerful colleague behave in they think is harmful, you just don’t understand power dynamics.

And even if Dario Maestripieri has no part at all in his department’s ongoing faculty search, there are other interactions within his professional community in which his suspicions about who might have exposed his behavior could come into play. Senior scientists are routinely asked to referee papers submitted to scientific journals and to serve on panels and study sections that rank applications for grants. In some of these circumstances, the identities of the scientists one is judging (e.g., for grants) are known to the scientists making the evaluations. In others, they are masked, but the scientists making the evaluations have hunches about whose work they are evaluating. If those hunches are mingled with hunches about who could have shared evidence of behavior that is now making the evaluator’s life difficult, it’s hard to imagine the grant applicant or the manuscript author getting a completely fair shake.

Let’s pause here to note that the attitude Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook posting reveals, that it’s appropriate to evaluate women in the field on their physical beauty rather than their scientific achievements, could itself be a source of bias as he does things that are part of a normal professional life, like serving on search committees, reviewing journal submissions and grant applications, evaluating students, and so forth. A bias like this could manifest itself in a preference for hiring job candidates one finds aesthetically pleasing. (Sure, academic job application packets usually don’t include a headshot, but even senior scientists have probably heard of Google Image search.) Or it could manifest itself in a preference against hiring more women (since too high a concentration of female colleagues might be perceived as increasing the likelihood that one would be taken to task for freely expressing one’s aesthetic preferences about women in the field). Again, it would be extraordinarily hard to prove the operation of such a bias in any particular case — but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that it is having an effect in activities where members of the professional community are supposed to be as objective as possible.

Objectivity, as we’ve noted before, is hard.

We should remember, though, that faculty searches are conducted by committees, rather than by a single individual with the power to make all the decisions. And, the University of Chicago Department of Comparative Human Development (as well as the University of Chicago more generally) may recognize that it is likely to be getting more public scrutiny as a result of the public scrutiny Dario Maestripieri has been getting.

Among other things, this means that the department and the university have a real interest in conducting a squeaky-clean search that avoids even the appearance of retaliation. In any search, members of the search committee have a responsibility to identify, disclose, and manage their own biases. In this search, discharging that responsibility is even more vital. In any search, members of the hiring department have a responsibility to discuss their shared needs and interests, and how these should inform the selection of the new faculty member. In this search, that discussion of needs and interests must include a discussion of the climate within the department and the larger scientific community — what it is now, and what members of the department think it should be.

In any search, members of the hiring department have an interest in sharing their opinions on who the best candidate might be, and to having a dialogue around the disagreements. In this search, if it turns out one of the disagreements about a candidate comes down to “I suspect he may have been involved in exposing my Facebook post and making me feel bad,” well, arguably there’s a responsibility to have a discussion about that.

Ask academics what it’s like to hire a colleague and it’s not uncommon to hear them describe the experience as akin to entering a marriage. You’re looking for someone with whom you might spend the next 30 years, someone who will grow with you, who will become an integral part of your department and its culture, even to the point of helping that departmental culture grow and change. This is a good reason not to choose the new hire based on the most superficial assessment of what each candidate might bring to the relationship — and to recognize that helping one faculty member avoid discomfort might not be the most important thing.

Indeed, Dario Maestripieri’s colleagues may have all kinds of reasons to engage him in uncomfortable discussions about his behavior that have nothing to do with conducting a squeaky-clean faculty search. Their reputations are intertwined, and leaving things alone rather than challenging Dario Maestripieri’s behavior may impact their own ability to attract graduate students or maintain the respect of undergraduates. These are things that matter to academic scientists — which means that Dario Maestripieri’s colleagues have an interest in pushing back for their own good and the good of the community.

The pushback, if it happens, is likely to be just as invisible publicly as any retaliation against job candidates for possibly sharing the screenshot of Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook posting. If positive effects are visible, it might make it seem less dangerous for members of the professional community to speak up about bad behavior when they see it. But if the outward appearance is that nothing has changed for Dario Maestripieri and his department, expect that there will be plenty of bad behavior that is not discussed in public because the career costs of doing so are just too high.

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* This is not at all an issue about whether Dario Maestripieri is a sexist. This is an issue about the effects of the behavior, which have a disproportionate negative impact on women in the community. I do not know, or care, what is in the heart of the person who displays these behaviors, and it is not at all relevant to a discussion of how the behaviors affect the community.

** Given the number of his Facebook friends and their range of ages, career stages, etc., this doesn’t strike me as improbable. (At last check, I have 11 Facebook friends in common with Dario Maestripieri.)