Help high school “nerds” visit the Large Hadron Collider.

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Last week, I got a really nice email, and a request, from a reader. She wrote:

I am a high school senior and an avid follower of your blog. I am almost definitely going to pursue science in college – either chemistry, physics, or engineering; I haven’t quite decided yet! I am the editor of my school’s newspaper, and I frequently write about science topics; I find science journalism interesting and possibly will pursue it as a career. 

I’m writing because this spring, 32 physics students from my high school will hopefully be taking a trip to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. We are extremely excited to make the trip, as it will allow us to glimpse some of the most groundbreaking physics research in the world. Twenty-two of the 32 students going are girls, and we are all involved with the physics department at our school. Women are overwhelmingly outnumbered in the science classes at my school, especially the tougher Advanced Placement classes; thus, taking this trip with a majority of women feels like a triumph.

My correspondent is, this year, the president of her high school’s science club, which is affectionately called “BACON: the best All-around Club of Nerds”. If you look at the BACON website, you will see that they do some pretty neat stuff. They field a bunch of teams for competitions like the Science Olympiad, Zero Robotics, and the Spirit of Innovation Challenge. And, they launch weather balloons to capture video and still photographs in a near space environment, have a day of launching model rockets and flying model airplanes, and have created a giant tank of ooblek to run across.

Basically, the kind of science-y stuff that might make high school not just tolerable but fun, which I think is a pretty big deal.

Here’s where we get to the request.

The planned high school trip bringing the 32 students from Virginia to CERN will be exciting, but expensive. So, as students have come to do for pretty much every field trip, the BACON members are doing some fundraising. Here’s their fundraising page, from which we learn:

As we speak, scientists at CERN are conducting groundbreaking research and rewriting the science textbooks for future generations. It is imperative that our students gain an interest and understanding in such endeavors. A two-day tour of CERN will surely aid in our students’ comprehension of particle physics, the study of the mechanisms and interactions that underlie all chemical, biological, and cosmological processes. But more importantly, through exposure to the leading edge of physics research, this trip is intended to excite students about scientific progress and demonstrate the power of experimentation and collaboration outside of the classroom. …

We need money to cover the cost of travel, lodging, food, and tours. Specifically, the cost breakdown per student is as follows: $1000 for travel; $300 for meals; $300 for lodging; $100 for tours and exhibits. Thirty-two students are scheduled to attend, and without fundraising the total cost is $1700 per student. Unfortunately, not all students can afford this. Any donations are welcome to lower the per-student cost and facilitate this trip for all who want to go!

For donations of various sizes, they are offering perks ranging from thank you cards and pictures of the trip, to signed T-shirts, to something special from the CERN gift shop, to a video to thank you posted on YouTube.

If you want to help but can spare the cash for a monetary donation, you may still be able to help these plucky science students make their CERN trip a reality:

Tell your friends! Share this link with others: indiegogo.com/baconatcern. There are also other ways to help us besides monetary donations. Do you have any objects, gift certificates, coupons, or other items you could donate for a raffle? Do you have an idea for a fundraising event we could host? If you want to get involved, please email us: chsbacon@gmail.com. We are really looking forward to this amazing opportunity, and we appreciate any help you can provide. Thank you!

I know I’m looking forward to living vicariously through this group (since no doubt I’ll be grading mountains of papers when they’re scheduled to tour the LHC). If you want to pay some science enthusiasm forward to the next generation, here’s one way to do it.

Meanwhile, I will inquire about whether the BACONite can share some highlights of their trip (and their preparations for it) here.

The Research Works Act: asking the public to pay twice for scientific knowledge.

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There’s been a lot of buzz in the science blogosphere recently about the Research Works Act, a piece of legislation that’s been introduced in the U.S. that may have big impacts on open access publishing of scientific results. John Dupuis has an excellent round-up of posts on the subject. I’m going to add my two cents on the overarching ethical issue.

Here’s the text of the Research Works Act:

No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that–

(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or

(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work. …

In this Act:

(1) AUTHOR- The term ‘author’ means a person who writes a private-sector research work. Such term does not include an officer or employee of the United States Government acting in the regular course of his or her duties.

(2) NETWORK DISSEMINATION- The term ‘network dissemination’ means distributing, making available, or otherwise offering or disseminating a private-sector research work through the Internet or by a closed, limited, or other digital or electronic network or arrangement.

(3) PRIVATE-SECTOR RESEARCH WORK- The term ‘private-sector research work’ means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research.

(Bold emphasis added.)

Let’s take this at the most basic level. If public money is used to fund scientific research, does the public have a legitimate expectation that the knowledge produced by that research will be shared with the public? If not, why not? (Is the public allocating scarce public funds to scientific knowledge-building simply to prop up that sector of the economy and/or keep the scientists off the streets?)

Assuming that the public has the right to share in the knowledge built on the public’s dime, should the public have to pay to access that knowledge (at around $30 per article) from a private sector journal? The text of the Research Works Act suggests that such private sector journals add value to the research that they publish in the form of peer review and editing. Note, however, that peer review for scientific journals is generally done by other scientists in the relevant field for free. Sure, the journal editors need to be able to scare up some likely candidates for peer reviewers, email them, and secure their cooperation, but the value being added in terms of peer reviewing here is added by volunteers. (Note that the only instance of peer reviewing in which I’ve participated where I’ve actually been paid for my time involved reviewing grant proposals for a federal agency. In other words, the government doesn’t think peer review should be free … but a for-profit publishing concern can help itself to free labor and claim to have added value by virtue of it.)

Maybe editing adds some value, although journal editors of private sector journals have been taken to task for favoring flashy results, and for occasionally subverting their own peer review process to get those flashy results published. But there’s something like agreement that the interaction between scientists that happens in peer review (and in post-publication discussions of research findings) is what makes it scientific knowledge. That is to say, peer review is recognized as the value-adding step science could not do without.

The public is all too willing already to see public money spent funding scientific research as money wasted. If members of the public have to pay again to access research their tax dollars already paid for, they are likely to be peeved. They would not be wrong to feel like the scientific community had weaseled out of fulfilling its obligation to share the knowledge it builds for the good of the public. (Neither would they be wrong to feel like their government had fallen down on an ethical obligation to the public here, but whose expectations of their government aren’t painfully low at the moment?) A rightfully angry public could mean less public funding for scientific research — which means that there are pragmatic, as well as ethical, reasons for scientists to oppose the Research Works Act.

And, whether or not the Research Works Act becomes the law of the land in the USA, perhaps scientists’ ethical obligations to share publicly funded knowledge with the public ought to make them think harder — individually and as a professional community — about whether submitting their articles to private sector journals, or agreeing to peer review submission for private sector journals, is really compatible with living up to these obligations. There are alternatives to these private sector journals, such as open access journals. Taking those alternatives seriously probably requires rethinking the perceived prestige of private sector journals and how metrics of that prestige come into play in decisions about hiring, promotion, and distribution of research funds, but sometimes you have to do some work (individually and as a professional community) to live up to your obligations.

Suit against UCLA in fatal lab fire raises question of who is responsible for safety.

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Right before 2011 ended (and, as it happened, right before the statute of limitations ran out), the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed felony charges against the University of California regents and UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran in connection with a December 2008 fire in Harran’s lab that resulted in the death of a 23-year-old staff research assistant, Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji.

As reported by The Los Angeles Times:

Harran and the UC regents are charged with three counts each of willfully violating occupational health and safety standards. They are accused of failing to correct unsafe work conditions in a timely manner, to require clothing appropriate for the work being done and to provide proper chemical safety training.

Harran, 42, faces up to 4½ years in state prison, Robison said. He is out of town and will surrender to authorities when he returns, said his lawyer, Thomas O’Brien, who declined to comment further.

UCLA could be fined up to $1.5 million for each of the three counts.

[UCLA vice chancellor for legal affairs Kevin] Reed described the incident as “an unfathomable tragedy,” but not a crime.

The article notes that Sangji was working as a staff research assistant in Harran’s lab while she was applying to law schools. It mentions that she was a 2008 graduate of Pomona College but doesn’t mention whether she had any particular background in chemistry.

As it happens, the work she was doing in the Harran lab presented particular hazards:

Sangji was transferring up to two ounces of t-butyl lithium from one sealed container to another when a plastic syringe came apart in her hands, spewing a chemical compound that ignites when exposed to air. The synthetic sweater she wore caught fire and melted onto her skin, causing second- and third-degree burns.

In May 2009, Cal/OSHA fined UCLA a total of $31,875 after finding that Sangji had not been trained properly and was not wearing protective clothing.

Two months before the fatal fire, UCLA safety inspectors found more than a dozen deficiencies in the same lab, according to internal investigative and inspection reports reviewed by The Times. Inspectors found that employees were not wearing requisite protective lab coats and that flammable liquids and volatile chemicals were stored improperly.

Corrective actions were not taken before the fire, the records showed.

Actions to address the safety deficiencies were taken after the fire, but these were, obviously, too late to save Sangji.

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not interested in talking about legalities here — whether for the particular case the Los Angeles DA’s office will be pursuing against UCLA or for academic research labs more generally.

Rather, I want to talk about ethics.

Knowledge-building can be a risky business. In some situations, it involves materials that pose direct dangers to the people handling them, to the people in the vicinity, and even to people some distance away who are just trying to get on with their lives (e.g., if the hazardous materials get out into our shared environment).

Generally, scientists doing research that involves hazardous materials do what they can to find out how to mitigate the hazards. They learn appropriate ways of handling the materials, of disposing of them, of protecting themselves and others in case of accidents.

But, knowing the right ways to deal with hazardous materials is not sufficient to mitigate the risks. Proper procedures need to be implemented. Otherwise, your knowledge about the risks of hazardous materials is mostly useful in explaining bad outcomes after they happen.

So, who is ethically responsible for keeping an academic chemistry lab safe? And what exactly is the shape this responsibility takes — that is, what should he or she be doing to fulfill that obligation?

What’s the responsibility of the principal investigator, the scientist leading the research project and, in most cases, heading the lab?

What’s the responsibility of the staff research assistant or technician, doing necessary labor in the lab for a paycheck?

What’s the responsibility of the graduate student in the research group, trying to learn how to do original research and to master the various skills he or she will need to become a PI someday? (It’s worth noting here that there’s a pretty big power differential between grad students and PIs, which may matter as far as how we apportion responsibility. Still, this doesn’t mean that those with less power have no ethical obligations pulling on them.)

What’s the responsibility of the institution under whose auspices the lab is operating? When a safety inspection turns up problems and issues a list of issues that must be corrected, has that responsibility been discharged? When faculty members hire new staff research assistants, or technicians, or graduate students, does the institution have any specific obligations to them (as far as providing safety training, or a place to bring their safety concerns, or protective gear), or does this all fall to the PI?

And, what kind of obligations do these parties have in the case that one of the other players falls down on some of his or her obligations?

If I were still working in a chemistry lab, thinking through ethical dimensions like these before anything bad happened would not strike me as a purely academic exercise. Rather, it would be essential to ensuring that everyone stays as safe as possible.

So, let’s talk about what that would look like.

Science and ethics shouldn’t be muddled (or, advice for Jesse Bering).

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Jesse Bering’s advice column is provoking some strong reactions. Most of these suggest that his use of evolutionary psychology in his answers lacks a certain scientific rigor, or that he’s being irresponsible in providing what looks like scientific cover for adult men who want to have sex with pubescent girls.

My main issue is that the very nature of Jesse Bering’s column seems bound to muddle scientific questions and ethical questions.

In response to this letter:

Dear Jesse,
I am a non-practicing heterosexual hebephile—and I think most men are—and find living in this society particularly difficult given puritanical, feminist, and parental forces against the normal male sex drive. If sex is generally good for both the body and the brain, then how is a teen having sex with an adult (versus another teen) bad for their mind? I feel like the psychological arguments surrounding the present age of consent laws need to be challenged. My focus is on consensual activity being considered always harmful in the first place. Since the legal notions of consent are based on findings from the soft sciences, shouldn’t we be a little more careful about ruining an adult life in these cases?
—Deep-thinking Hebephile

Jesse Bering offers:

  • The claim that “there are few among us who aren’t the direct descendents of those who’d be incarcerated as sex offenders today”.
  • A pointer to research on men’s measurable penile response to sexualized depiction of very young teenagers.
  • A comment that “there’s some reason to believe that a hebephilic orientation would have been biologically adaptive in the ancestral past”.
  • A mention of the worldwide variations in age-of-consent laws as indicative of deep cultural disagreements.
  • A pointer to research that “challenge[s] the popular notion that sex with underage minors is uniformly negative for all adolescents in such relationships” (although it turns out the subjects of this research were adolescent boys; given cultural forces acting on boys and girls, this might make a difference)
  • An anecdote about a 14-year-old boy who got to have sex with a prostitute before being killed by the Nazis in a concentration camp, and about how this made his father happy.
  • A comment that “Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin relocated to French Polynesia to satisfy his hebephilic lust with free-spirited Tahitian girls” in the 19th Century, but that now in the 21st century there’s less sympathy for this behavior.

And this is advice?*

Let’s pick up on just one strand of the scientific information referenced in Jesse Bering’s answer. If there exists scientific research that suggests that your trait is shared by others in the population, or that your trait may have been an adaptive one for your ancestors earlier in our evolutionary journey, what exactly does that mean?

Does it mean that your trait is a good one for you to have now? It does not.

Indeed, we seem to have no shortage of traits that may well have helped us dodge the extinction bullet but now are more likely to get us into trouble given our current environment. (Fondness for sweets is the one that gets me, and I still have cookies to bake.) Just because a trait, or a related behavior, comes with an evolutionary origin story doesn’t make it A-OK.

Otherwise, you could replace ethics and moral philosophy with genetics and evolutionary psychology.

Chris Clarke provides a beautiful illustration of how badly off the rails we might go if we confuse scientific explanation with moral justification — or with actual advice, for that matter.

This actually raises the question of what exactly Jesse Bering intends to accomplish with his “advice column”. Here’s what he says when describing the project:

Perhaps in lieu of offering you advice on how to handle your possibly perverted father-in-law who you suspect is an elderly frotteur, or how to be tactful while delicately informing your co-worker that she smells like a giant sewer rat, I can give you something even better—a peek at what the scientific data have to say about your particular issue. In other words, perhaps I can tell you why you’re going through what you are rather than what to do about it. I may not believe in free will, but I’m a firm believer that knowledge changes perspective, and perspective changes absolutely everything. Once you have that, you don’t need anyone else’s advice.

And good advice is really only good to the extent it aligns with actual research findings, anyway. Nearly two centuries worth of data in the behavioral sciences is available to inform our understanding of our everyday (and not so everyday) problems, yet rarely do we take advantage of this font of empirical wisdom…

That’s not to say that I can’t give you a piece of my subjective mind alongside the objective data. I’m happy to judge you mercilessly before throwing you and your awkward debacle to the wolves in the comments section. Oh, I’m only kidding—kind of. Actually, anyone who has read my stuff in the past knows that I’m a fan of the underdog and unconventional theories and ideas. Intellectual sobriety has never been a part of this blog and never will be, if I can help it, so let’s have a bit of fun.

(Bold emphasis added.)

Officially, Jesse Bering says he’s not offering advice, just information. It may end up being perspective-changing information, which will lead to the advice-asker no longer needing to ask anyone for advice. But it’s not actually advice!

As someone who teaches strategies in moral decision-making, I will note here that taking other people’s interests into account is absolutely central to being ethical. One way we can get a handle on other people’s interests is by asking others for advice. And, we don’t usually conceive of getting information about others and their interests as a one-shot deal.

On the point that good advice ought to align with “actual research findings,” I imagine Jesse Bering is taking actual research findings as our best current approximation of the facts. It’s important to recognize, though, that there are some published research findings that turn out to have been fabricated or falsified, and others that were the result of honest work but that have serious methodological shortcomings. Some scientific questions are hard. Even our best actual research findings may provide limited insight into how to answer them.

All of which is to say, it seems like what might really help someone looking for scientific information relevant to his personal problem would be a run-down of what the best available research tells us — and of what uncertainties still remain — rather than just finding some quirky handful of studies.

Indeed, Jesse Bering notes that he’s a fan of unconventional theories and ideas. On the one hand, it’s good to put this bias on the table. However, it strikes me that his recognition of this bias puts an extra obligation on him when he offers his services to advice seekers: an obligation to cast a heightened critical eye on the methodology used to conduct the research that supports such theories and ideas.

And maybe this comes back to the question of what the people writing to Jesse Bering for advice are actually looking for. If they want the comfort of knowing what the scientists know about X (for whatever X it is the writer is asking about), they ought to be given an accurate sense of how robust or tenuous that scientific knowledge actually is.

As well, they ought to be reminded that what we know about where X came from is a completely separate issue from whether I ought to let my behavior be directed by X. Scientific facts can inform our ethical decisions, but they don’t make the ethical questions go away.

_______
*Stephanie Zvan offers the best actual response to the the letter-writer’s request for advice, even if it wasn’t the answer the letter-writer wanted to hear.

Science-y books for kids.

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There seems to be a profusion of fabulous kids’ books these days, including many engaging books on scientific topics. Indeed, there are so many that I wouldn’t even know how to boil them down to a top ten list.

So, I’m going to just point you towards some of the books my kids have enjoyed, especially in the early grades of elementary school (roughly K-3).

A Drop of Blood by Paul Showers, illustrated by Edward Miller.

The text of this book is straight-ahead science for the grade school set, explaining the key components of blood (red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets) and what they do. There are nice diagrams of how the circulatory system gets involved in transporting nutrients as well as oxygen, pictures of a white blood cell eating a germ, and a step-by-step explanation of how a scab forms.

But this unassuming text is illustrated in classic horror movie style.

All the “people” in the drawings are either vampires or … uh, whatever those greenish hunchbacked creatures who become henchmen are. And this illustration choice is brilliant! Kids who might be squicked out by blood in real life cannot resist the scary/funny/cool cartoonish vamps accompanying the text in this book. The drawing of the Count offering Igor a Band-aid for his boo-boo is heart-warming.

Read an archived conversation with a younger time-slice of my kids about blood.

* * * * *
Octopuses and Squids by Mary Jo Rhodes and David Hall. Photographs by David Hall.

Seahorses and Sea Dragons by Mary Jo Rhodes and David Hall. Photographs by David Hall.

We love books with chapters, lots of photographs, and glossaries. What can I say?

These two books pair with each other nicely, since evaluating the relative merits of syngnathids and cephalopods is kind of like weighing whether you’d rather be able to fly or to become invisible. Is it better to have leafy bits on your body the better to hide in seaweed, or to be able to change color and shape to camouflage? (What if you got distracted and forgot to do it?) To keep your fertilized eggs in a cave, or to have the father incubate them in his brood pouch? To enjoy solitude in your corner of the ocean, or to be social?

Read an archived conversation with a younger time-slice of my kids about these choices.

* * * * *
How a Seed Grows by Helene J. Jordan. Illustrated by Loretta Krupinski.

This is a nifty science book for little kids. Our favorite thing about this book is that it’s all about getting empirical.

After some unassuming storybook text (with lovely illustrations) about different kinds of seeds and the different kinds of plants that grow from them, the book gets down to business and lays out an experiment for the young reader to do: Plant a dozen bean seeds and see what happens to them over time.

After planting the seeds, each in its own eggshell or other container, and watering them daily, on day 3 you dig up the first seed and examine it it. Two days later, you dig up the second seed and see what’s happening. Every few days you dig up another seed so you can observe the roots growing and developing root hairs. Once the shoots start pushing out of the soil in the containers with the not-yet excavated seeds, the kids can examine the growth of the plants without digging them up. At this point, if the kids are still interested, they can plant the bean seedlings in the ground.

The charm of this book is not just that it lays out a hands-on experiment for kids to do. It also makes it clear to the kids that there is likely to be some variation in what is observed — not only might your bean seeds grow more quickly or more slowly than the day-by-day development illustrated in the book, but that your 12 beans of the same kind might develop at different rates, even if you do your best to plant them and water them just the same. As well, the idea of sacrificing growing seeds to learn something is presented in a way that kids can handle. (If a book doesn’t give you permission, sometimes kids are a little too precious with the seeds they have planted.)

This is a fun way to get your hands dirty.

* * * * *
The Periodic Table: Elements with Style, written by Adrian Dingle, illustrated by Simon Basher. (Boston: Kingfisher, 2007)

The book introduces several representative elements from the periodic table. For each element, there’s a listing of crucial information like the element’s symbol, atomic number, atomic weight, color, standard state, density, melting point, boiling point, and data of discovery. But the real story is the first person introduction to each element’s character, tendencies, and common uses. Hydrogen says, “I am the simplest and lightest of all the elements, the most abundant in the universe, and the source of everything in it — from matter and energy to life.” Cesium pipes up, “Soft and golden, I’m way more exciting than gold.” Magnesium chirps, “I’m happy to mix in any social gathering of the elements, making friends with anyone.” Iron hollers, “I am at the center of everything.”
Clearly, there are a lot of strong personalities here.

For all the elements that appear in this book (except hydrogen), the introductions to the elements are preceded by a discussion of the group they run with — the alkali metals, the halogens, the carbon elements, and so on. The book offers a description for each of the groups in the periodic table, including the lanthanides and actinides and the transactinides (although given their instability, we don’t get to meet individuals from the latter group). The group descriptions are a little less gripping than the portraits of the elements in each group, but they do a nice job conveying which groups have elements that seems to copy each other closely and which of these periodic table cliques seem to tolerate more individualism.

Each element also has a portrait, a bold graphic that conveys some visual clue to the element’s temperament of common uses.

Of course, the book includes these portraits in periodic table layout, too. And the book includes an index and a glossary.

As a casual read, this is not a book that will leave a kid with exhaustive knowledge about all the chemical elements. However, the “personal information” about these elements comes across as quirky and compelling, and it’s hard for the young reader to resist forming some opinions about which elements he or she would like to hang out with.

Read an archived conversation with a younger time-slice of my kids about this book.

* * * * *
Big Tracks, Little Tracks: Following Animal Prints by Millicent E. Selsam, illustrated by Marlene Hill Donnelly.

This book helps kids to become “nature detectives” by getting them to look at different kinds of animal tracks for clues about the animals that left them. The presentation is pretty Socratic: What do we see in the prints? What do we know about how this animal or that animal moves about?

The approach of inferring what happened from clues is fun. There are some facts that are kind of cool to learn (e.g., seagulls run into the wind to take off, so you can tell by the direction of their footprints what direction the wind was blowing when they launched). But the ick factor for this book is pretty low. (There is a trangressive moment where cats and dogs switch places, but it’s not gross.)

Along the same lines, but harnessing the magnetic power of the gross:

Who Pooped in the Park? Great Smoky Mountains National Park by Steve Kemp, illustrated by Robert Rath.

Like Big Tracks, Little Tracks, this book gets kids interested in the inferences they can draw from their observations. However, it beats out Big Tracks, Little Tracks for the simple reason that poop (as a charter member of the Pantheon of Gross Things) is absolutely hilarious.

In fact, scat is only the bait that attracts kids (like flies, if you will) to learn about the other clues animals leave in the National Park: tracks, nibbled twigs and scraped tree bark, rocks that have been moved. This book doesn’t just talk about the particular animals that inhabit Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but it describes some of the ways they interact with each other in the ecosystem. (For example, the non-native wild hogs eat up the native salamanders.) Scattered through the book are “The Straight Poop” boxes of related facts (e.g., that rabbits eat their own scat to maximize the nutrition they get out of their food by digesting it twice).

My kids loved this book, and it gave them something intelligent to say about animal droppings we came upon in family hikes — at least, once they were done giggling.

There are versions of this book available for many other National Parks, each of which deals with the particular fauna that inhabits (and poops in) the particular park.

Fun games for science-y kids.

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There are two features of games that have always appealed to me. First, the good ones put you in a place where you are explicitly thinking out different ways the future could play out — the possibilities that are more or less likely given what you know (and what you don’t know). Second, many of them let you drag someone else (whether your opponent or your teammate) into thinking through these situations, too.

Any game where you have to make choices about what to do involves some sort of strategy, and formulating or refining strategies is a work-out for your brain. This means that games, in general, tend to be brain-friendly giftables.

It’s worth noting that many of the games which connect to qualities of mind that are useful in scientific problem-solving are fun for kids (and adults) who don’t think of themselves as having any special interest in science. I’m not saying you should use such games to launch stealth operations to get kids interested in science … but I’m not going to stop you, either.

As an added bonus, none of these games are going to shove gendered expectations down a kids’ throat

That said, here are some of the games I like best:

Continue reading→

How do we make room for pink microscopes? (More thoughts on gendered science kits.)

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As we’ve been considering the hazards of gendered science kits for kids, some have suggested that it is simplistic to paint pink microscopes as an unalloyed evil.

One response on the potential value of girls’ science kits comes from Meghan Groome at Pathways to Science:

As someone who studies the formation of science identity in middle school students, I see everyday how girls try to navigate acceptable girl identities with those teachers look for to identify science talent.  For many girls, upper elementary and middle school is a time where they are expected to lose both boisterous and intellectually curious elements of their external personalities.  Day in and day out, I observe teachers, boys, and other girls in the class act as “gatekeepers” for smart, vocal girls in science. It’s subtle but once you point it out, it’s unmistakable. …

Teachers look for somewhat specific characteristics to define a kid who is smart or good in science. Those include excelling on exams, participating in class, and showing an interest in the content.  Excelling on exams is a fairly private affair but class participation and curiosity become high-risk behavior for girls lead to them hiding their interest and talent.

All students have to make choices about who they are to the outside world, but for girls, there are fewer ways to be both a girl and someone who is outwardly interested and good at science.

So, when I originally read about girly science kits I balked at what appeared to be a gross exaggeration of girly identity.  I’ve had similar responses when I got to robotics competitions and see the all-girl teams decked out like princesses or cheerleaders.

But upon reflection, I wonder why we adults are so quick to shut down another way that a girl can navigate being a girl and being a scientist? Do I personally want to be a scientist who acts like a Barbie? No, but who am I to shut down someone who chooses Barbie Scientist over Tom Boy scientist?

I think this assessment is onto something — although my experience is that there are fewer acceptable ways to be a girl regardless of whether one is outwardly interested in and good at science. Still, it’s worth asking if the rejection of gendered science kits might function (whether intended to do so or not) as another kind of gender policing, insisting that girls who pursue science must foreswear femininity entirely.

Another response, which I take to be less a defense of gendered science kits and more an examination of the assumption built into negative reactions to them, comes from Lauren at teenskepchick:

I kind of felt like there has been a bit of pink-slagging going on.

Now, I’m not averse to pink. At one stage in my childhood I used to bemoan the colour and anything my parents chose out for me that happened to be pink. I didn’t want to be like those girls. With their pink and their cattiness and their girliness. Internalized misogyny is about valuing “masculinity” and male-ness over “femininity and female-ness, and that is exactly what I did with my dislike of pink. I got over that (for the most part) long ago, and now I’m more than happy to wear pink or stick pink things on my walls or (as my avatar would have you believe) in my hair (and if the blasted colour held well, it might still be in my hair). Which is cool! I like pink. It probably isn’t my favourite colour, but I like it and I see nothing wrong with anybody (of any gender identity) embracing the colour pink.

Except, apparently, when it came to physics. If there was any pink anywhere near my science, it could GTFO as far as I was concerned. I had become used to being incredibly outnumbered in my classes, and getting the reaction “Oh, but that’s a boy subject” when I told people what my majors were. I don’t even understand why people think that is a socially acceptable thing to say, but it happens more often than you’d think. I was tired of second-guessing my wardrobe choices for some classes, and I was tired of coming across stories about T-shirts with messages that implied girls suck at maths.

Enter the Science Babe, aka Deborah Berebichez. When I first started coming across some of her work in my journeys across the intertubes, I wasn’t a fan. The opposite. It was physics and it was pink and it was high heels and it was very gossip-y and I hated it. I’ve lately come to realise, though, that that’s okay! If that is what it takes to get more girls interested in physics, then that is awesome. Same deal with the pink science kits. The problem (well, one of them) is with how they are marketed to reinforce set gender roles, that girls need to be girly and boys… boy-y. The problem is not that pink and femininity and all of that are bad.

There are a bunch of related issues intertwined here.

There seems to be a strong societal presumption that science (and math, and related subject matter) are “naturally” of interest to boys (and men), but not to girls (and women).

There seems to be another strong societal presumption that girls are “naturally” inclined toward femininity — where femininity is described in a pretty narrow way connected to pink stuff, pretty clothes, interpersonal relationships, and the like — and boys are “naturally” inclined toward masculinity that is defined in similarly narrow terms.

Then there’s the presumption that science and math are more compatible with those masculine characteristics than with feminine ones.

Finally, there’s at least a tacit assumption that feminine characteristics and pursuits compatible with them are not as valuable as masculine characteristics and pursuits compatible with them — that the things that are linked to femininity are less than. (This is the internalized misogyny Lauren describes in her post.)

And these intertwined assumptions set up what can feel like a minefield for girls trying to negotiate the twin challenges of figuring out what pursuits interest them and of figuring out who they want to be.

On the one hand, a girl may be totally non-plussed by social pressure to be a certain kind of girl, compliant with a stereotypical version of femininity. But if this girl who resists the pressure to be “feminine” also decides she’s into science, maybe this runs the risk of reinforcing the assumption that science is not compatible with femininity — sure, here’s a girl who wants to do science, but she’s not actually a girly girl.

Indeed, if the girls one knows who are into science are uniformly those who depart from society’s picture of femininity, it may seem to the girls just working out whether to explore science that there is a forced choice between being feminine and pursuing science. And, if they’re OK with the bundle of qualities that is part of societally sanctioned femininity, they may conclude that they’re better off opting out of science (a conclusion peer-pressure may support).

Worse, the grown-ups mentoring girls, including the ones teaching them math and science, may believe that there is a forced choice between science and femininity. Among other things, they may pre-emptively decide that girly girls are not part of their target audience.

And, falling in line with society’s judgments, the girls who pursue science may assume that the girls who hew closer to the “feminine” stereotypes are less interested in or able to do science. This attitude may leave the girly girls who actually pursue science feeling rather isolated even from other girls in science.

All of this strikes me as a pretty raw deal.

In a perfect world, a pink microscope would be just as valid a choice as a blue one (assuming both have the same magnifying power). But in the world we currently inhabit, the pressure on girls to fit the stereotype of femininity is enormous, and comes from multiple sources, including (but not limited to) family members, peers, and school.

A well-meaning attempt to suggest to girls that science can be compatible with the stereotype of femininity can end up being yet another reminder that you need to conform to that stereotype. Otherwise, why the heck would every science kit in the girls’ section come in a pink box?

And lest we forget, Krystal D’Costa reminds us that boys face a parallel pressure to avoid anything that might be officially recognized as feminine:

[G]irls have the option not to choose pink, but do boys ever have the option to choose pink? Will the little boy curious about scents be isolated by his siblings and extended family if they learn what science kit he wants? Because it comes in a pink box?

To get to the point where a pink microscope does not act as yet another tool to police gendered expectation on girls (and boys) — and when women who reject pink microscopes are not used to police gendered expectations on scientists (as not girly) either — we need to figure out how to change the societal presumption that femininity and masculinity have anything at all to do with inclination towards, or ability in, science. We need to recognize opting into, or out of, femininity or masculinity as a completely separate issue from opting into, or out of, math and science. And, decisions with respect to math and science need to be seen as counting neither for nor against your opting into or out of a particular package of gendered characteristics.

After all, as far as I can tell, whether one is interested in math and science, or displays an ability for them, is an empirical question. Why not drop the gendered assumptions about who will be “naturally” suited to them and see what happens?

It would also be great if we could let kids find out who they are and how they want to be without locking them into a rigid, binary choice. If there was no pressure to be a particular kind of boy or a particular kind of girl — if the full range of options was open to everyone — I suspect it might be easier not to judge one set of options as inherently less than.

Again, I think it’s an empirical question — so let’s roll up our sleeves and create the conditions where we can actually find out.

Gendered science kits aren’t so great for boys either.

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In response to my post about science kits for girls, a reader wrote to me:

I would be really interested to see an exploration of the kits for boys from the same company. They also appeal to stereotypes that are damaging by offering only destruction, gags, and grossouts as the appeal of learning about science.

As requested, here we go!

If the selection of science kits for girls was inescapably pink, the boys’ ones have to be blue. Otherwise, how would the adults doing the shopping know that they were on the right page to find appropriately gendered gifts for the kids on their shopping lists? Surely, these adults must be utterly baffled by a webpage layout like this one:

How do you tell which are the girls’ kits and which are the boys’ ones? What’s the big idea of making kits sortable by subject-matter categories, or price, or appropriate age range? There are just too many possibilities here for interesting the gift-recipient in science!

Although maybe that’s a feature, not a bug.

Anyway, back to the WILD! Science boys’ offerings. In contrast to the girls’ offerings, which included 13 different kits, there are only six kits targeted specifically to boys. It’s unclear what the thinking is behind this disparity. Perhaps it’s that science is a harder sell for girls, requiring a greater variety of kits to grab their interest, while boys are more “naturally” inclined toward scientific pursuits and thus need less of a prodding from a kit. Maybe it’s that girls are more acquisitive of consumer goods (especially those packaged in pink boxes), thus supporting a larger stable of girls’ kits than boys’ kits.

Or possibly it’s that boys’ interest in science are so narrow that these six kits include the only plausible points of entry.

(Recall, though, that the 13 girls’ kits included enough overlap — multiple kits on crystal growth, fragrances, and soap-making — that they don’t really constitute 13 possible points of entry to their interest in science.)

One of the boys’ kits is Weird Slime Science. Its product description is nearly identical to that of the corresponding girls’ kit, Beautiful Blob Slime. One difference is that the description of the girls’ kit emphasizes the safety of the chemicals used. Does this suggest that adults worry more about (or care more about) the safety of girls than of boys? Is implied danger a selling point of science where boys (but not girls) are concerned? Either way, the big difference between the two kits seems to be that one comes in a blue box and the other comes in a pink box.

The boys also get a soap-making kit, although theirs is described as “Practical Joke Soap”. In addition to making the soap, they get to “[e]xplore … multiple stage embedding and the art of welding with soap to create realistic and gruesome soap objects like brains and eyeballs.” The girls’ soap-making kits offer no such practical instruction on practical joking.

Let’s pause for a moment to examine an assumption that seems to be built into the gendering of these soap-making kits: that girls are interested in what is pretty and fragrant (and exfoliating) while boys are interested in the gruesome (or in the hilariously shocked reactions of people who come upon these gruesome soap specimens). Some girls may prefer the pretty and the fragrant, but other girls may prefer realistically gross stuff. (I am a parent to at least one such girl.) Some boys may enjoy the gross-out, but other boys don’t. And, science kits that police these gender stereotypes run the risk of alienating boys from science, too. If you’re a boy that doesn’t like gruesome stuff, this kind of kit will not encourage you to like science. As well, it may lead to the uneasy feeling that you’re not living up to societal expectations of masculinity.

That’s a pretty rotten gift to give a kid.

This is not to say that these heavily-gendered science kits are the only source a kid has about these expectations. When I was little, I was so fascinated by creepy crawlies that I routinely picked up any earthworm I could get my hands on. Despite some pretty consciously egalitarian parenting, my younger brother was (I am told) of the view that if a girl could pick up a worm, a boy should be able to do it too. (Maybe he got this message from kids at preschool, or other relatives, or TV.) However, he was so grossed out by actually doing so that he squeezed the life out of each of the poor worms he picked up.

In other words, gender stereotypes don’t just hurt boys and girls — they also hurt earthworms!

Other boys’ offerings include a Hyperlauncher Rocket Ball Factory (with which to make superballs and explore F=ma), Spooky Ice Planet (which seems to involve crystal growth, but it’s pretty hard to tell from the product description), Perils of the Deep (ditto), and a kit called Wild Physics and Cool Chemistry. As it happens, this last kit combines the boys’ Hyperlauncher Rocket Ball kit and Weird Slime kit, which is probably why it appears in the boys’ offerings. It’s pretty striking, though, that none of the girls’ kits is identified as a Physics and/or Chemistry kit. Is it more important that boys recognize these activities as connected to well-defined science subjects in school? Why exactly should that be? And, how is this consistent with the lack of clear descriptions as to what scientific principles boys might learn from “Spooky Ice Planet” or “Perils of the Deep”?

More generally, note that the boys’ kits seem to assume that boys are interested in: stuff that’s spooky or gross, stuff that bounces, and (maybe) stuff that’s dangerous. Unlike the product descriptions for the girls’ kits, none of the product descriptions for the boys’ kits pitch these activities as ways to make gifts for family and friends, which suggests that boys are assumed to be more self-centered and less giving.

Again, these are gendered stereotypes that will only fit some boys, while ignoring the complexities of most actual boys. To the extent that these kits send subtle and not-so-subtle messages to boys about how they ought to be, they police masculinity in a way that is bound to be limiting to boys and the men they grow up to be.

And, it’s not obvious that using these gender stereotypes is a good way to get boys interested in science.

Some reasons gendered science kits may be counterproductive.

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We want kids to explore science and get excited about learning (and doing) it. Given that kids learn so much through play, rather than just by trying to sit still at a desk and to pay attention to a teacher who may or may not convey enthusiasm about science, you’d think that science kits marketed as “play” would be a good thing.

Why, then, am I skeptical about the value of science kits for girls?

Packaging “science for girls” this way is likely to teach girls as much about societal expectations as about science.

There is, without a doubt, a lot of interesting chemistry involved in making soap, perfume, and make-up. However, defining that chemistry as of interest to girls — especially pre-teen girls — conveys a message that girls are (or should be) naturally interested in grooming and cosmetics. This, in turn, conveys a message that girls ought to be exfoliating and toning and moisturizing, mastering the smoky eye and the shiny lip, and discovering a signature scent.

Here, I see two messages being sent to girls by gendered science kits.

One is that science is not so cool in itself that a girl would appreciate it if it came in a box that wasn’t pink. Instead, science is presented as cool because it can be shown to be compatible with acceptable femininity, crammed into one of the narrow boxes that contain it.

Bath bombs, after all, do not actually explode on contact with bath water.

The other, more subtle, message is that cramming oneself into the narrow box of acceptable femininity is important. This box puts constraints on acceptable appearance (at least neat, if not pretty, fluffy, and glittery), and smell (like a flower rather than a young human), and behavior (interested in making stuff, especially as gifts for others, rather than in blowing stuff up or taking stuff apart to see how it works).

In tandem, the messages conveyed by these kits seem to be saying: you can like science without transgressing the boundaries of acceptable femininity — but those boundaries are very important, and you would do well to learn where they are and stay within them. Maybe they will convince some girls that science is cool, but if they also convince those girls that they have to perform femininity in such a narrow way, is this a net win?

Here, I think it’s worth thinking in the longer term. Will buying into societal expectations about the right way to be a girl help girls succeed in science education and careers? Consider that “the right way to be a girl” has tended to be skewed against showing oneself to be good at math and science in middle school and high school. Consider as well that “the right way to be a woman” has tended to be loaded up with expectations about having and raising children, making meals, and keeping a beautiful house — duties that rather cut into one’s time in the lab or the field, if one wants to pursue a scientific career.

Plus, the phenomenon of stereotype threat suggests that girls and women recognize that society sees being female and being good at math or science as in opposition. To the extent that policing acceptable femininity strengthens this perception, whether on the individual level or the societal level, maybe we’re better off not feeding this pretty pink beast.

These kits won’t make girls who know that gendered expectations are a raw deal love science.

Amazingly, some of us weren’t pretty pink princesses when we were girls.

If we didn’t already know science was fun, packing it into a pink box and reassuring us of how feminine it could be would turn us off.

If we did already know science was fun, packing it into a pink box and reassuring us of how feminine it could be would insult us. Why would you think you’d need to give science this particular spin to make us want to do it? Why wouldn’t you give us the really good science kits — the ones they boys were getting as gifts?

Here, the folks marketing science kits for girls are making the assumption that all girls are the same. Assuming that young females are a monolithic group — especially one whose interests you perceive to be so narrow — means you are bound to alienate the girls who don’t fit your stereotype. And if it’s simply a matter of not getting their money because they aren’t buying your product, that’s one thing. However, if in the process of persuading a girl that your science kit is not for her you are also persuading her that science is not for her, that’s a harm it would be good to address.

Even girls who perform acceptable femininity without breaking a sweat may prefer a non-gendered science kit.

I have a confession to make: My youngest child, currently ten years old, is a pretty pink princess. She will wear make-up whenever she can get away with it, and embraces skirts and heels and pantyhose.

However, she would be insulted to get a “science for girls” kit rather than one with more intellectual heft. For at least a couple years, one of her favorite “toys” has been a big set of Snap Circuits, which come in a box that is blissfully ungendered. And, she does plenty of chemistry with us at home, regardless of the fact that to date exactly none of it has been aimed at creating cosmetics.

A pretty pink princess has facets.

Tying a girl’s interest in science to acceptable femininity may be a bad strategy if she outgrows acceptable femininity.

I reckon there are some girls whose pretty-pink-princess adherence to the norms of acceptable femininity is so strong that a “science for girls” kit might seem like the only way to get them to even give science a chance. And, in the process of getting groomed, perfumed, and made-up with the things they make with such a kit, they may build their understanding of some scientific principles.

However, if you’ve gotten such a girl to see science as of instrumental value (in achieving a particular sort of femininity), what happens to her interest in science if she decides that achieving that sort of femininity isn’t worth the time or effort? Can we count on that interest in science being robust?

My hunch is that tying science to a broader range of features of our world and of our everyday lives — features which are not necessarily of interest to just one gender — would be a better strategy for cultivating a robust interest in science.

Then again, I’m not trying to market thirteen different girls’ science kits this holiday shopping season, so what do I know?

Science kits … for girls.

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Via a tweet from Ed Yong, I discovered this weekend (not that I couldn’t have guessed) that purveyors of science kits for kids are still gendering the heck out of them. That is to say, there are science kits, and there are science kits for girls.

For all I know, putting science kits in pink boxes is an excellent strategy to get them to fly off the shelves, but I am not convinced that it is a good strategy when it comes to getting girls interested in science. Indeed, I worry that whatever interest in science kits like these might cultivate might come with baggage that could actually make it harder for girls (and the women they become) to pursue scientific education and careers.

I’ll try to spell out the shape of these worries in my next post. In this post, I offer for your consideration, three “science” kits targeted at girls that appeared in toy catalogues that crossed my desk five years ago. Then, I’ll take a quick look at this year’s offerings.

Archimedes got scientific insight from a bathtub, but he wasn't required to wear eye-makeup to do it.

Spa Science

The kit offers itself as a way “to cultivate a girl’s interest in science” through the making of “beauty products like an oatmeal mask, rose bath balm, and aromatherapy oils”. Besides the “natural and organic materials” to concoct said products, the kit includes “a booklet that explores how scents affect moods and memories.”

Don’t get me wrong — there is science worth discussing in this neighborhood.

But, the packaging here strikes me as selling the need for beauty product more emphatically than any underlying scientific explanations of how they work. Does a ten-year-old need an oatmeal mask? (If so, why only ten-year-old girls? Do not ten-year-old boys have pores and sebaceous glands?) Also, I’m nervous that the exploration of scents and “aromatherapy” may be setting kids up as easy marks for health food grocers and metaphysical bookstores who will sell them all manner of high-priced, over-hyped, essential-oil-containing stuff.

Maybe the Barbie-licious artwork is intended to convey that even very “girly” girls can find some element of science that is important to their concerns, but it seems also to convey that being overtly feminine is a concern that all girls have (or ought to have) — and, that such “girly” girls couldn’t possibly take an interest in science except as a way to cultivate their femininity.

Our exposed shoulders tell you that you can do these activities without being a tomboy!

Perfumery

Aimed at a slightly younger audience (of “young ladies-in-training”) than the last kit, this one promises to teach girls “the chemistry behind” perfumes. Setting aside my skepticism about how much real engagement with chemistry one is likely to get from a kit like this, notice that the catalogue blurb starts with the claim that “Everyone should have a ‘signature scent’!” (I beg to differ. My ten-year-old’s signature scent is soap, thank you very much.) Does the benefit of teaching a kid a little bit of chemistry outweigh the cost of convincing a little girl that she ought to smell like something other than a young human? Where might this lead?

And where are the boys here? Aren’t they supposed to be grooming boys to want to buy fragrances, too? Here’s a conjecture for the field operatives to explore further: Males are sold fragrances as a way to render females helpless to the males’ sexual magnetism, whereas females are sold fragrances as a way to smell acceptable. Plus, boys just naturally dig science, whereas girls just naturally dig laboring under the weight of gender roles.

Would these products make me feel as pretty without those little tubes and pots?

Creative Cosmetics

Here’s another — substantially pricier kit — aiming to teach a little science through the mixing and application of “customized skin care items”, although again the assumption seems to be that only girls have skin that requires care, or that only girls need to be suckered into caring about science. Cynic that I am, I cannot help but wonder how much of the “important skin care and wellness facts” included with the essential oils, packaging, and instructions is devoted to actual science as opposed to cultivating an unnecessary beauty regimen.

Given that this kit “teaches them to make shampoos and shower gels, makeup, creams and lotions from common household items” — which, presumably, one’s household may already have — what could explain the high price of this kit ($60)? My bet is on the little pots and tubes and squeeze bottles — which is to say, on the part that has nothing at all to do with the quality of the skin care product, and everything to do with making you want to buy it when you see it in the store.
But surely, this kit really is intended to cultivate an interest in science rather than train new generations of consumers, right?

Casting an eye to the recent crop of girls’ science kits, I get the feeling that consumerism is the intended goal.

We see thirteen distinct kits (collect them all!), four of which are centered on growing crystals. (To be fair, one of these is advertised as combining the experiments of two of the other three.) Three of the kits are focused on perfumes, although each involves different activities (making incense, or cards and “dazzling cloth hangings,” or scented gel crystals and perfumed slime). There is a “Luxury Soap Lab” kit as well as a “Beauty Spa Lab” kit with which you can make … fancy soaps. I’m guessing that these kits are separate not to keep the retail prices down, but to encourage kids (or the people purchasing gifts for them) to buy more of them.

Plus, the description of the “Beauty Spa Lab” notes that you can make “scrub soaps for dad, or exfoliating soaps for mum.” Which is to say, the gendering is pretty thoroughgoing here.

Perhaps it’s a tiny step in the right direction that one of the girls’ kits is “Beautiful Blob Slime”. Non-Newtonian semi-solids are cool and don’t in themselves cram gendered expectations down a girl’s throat. Still, the assumption is that a girl must be reassured of the beauty of the slime before she’ll play.

Honestly, I can’t think of a better way to make a girl in grade school question whether she’ll have any interest in or aptitude for science than to present her with a “science for girls” kit. The message seems to be, “Look, there’s a bit of science that will interest even you. (And go put on some lipstick!)” Heaven knows, we couldn’t even get girls interested in building Rube Goldberg machines, or launching water-rockets, or studying the growth of plants or the behaviors of animals, or blowing stuff up … except, these are just the sort of things that the girls I know would want to do, even the pretty pink princesses.

Moreover, it seems to me a kid could explore some of this same scientific territory without coughing up $60, or even $25.

As a place to start, check out the American Chemical Society’s kids’ website.

The hands-on activities include nine fun experiments with soap and detergent, three with crystals, six with polymers, and eleven with food, just for starters. These activities can be done with materials you probably already have in the house (or can find easily in a grocery store). And, as an added bonus, none of them are labeled as experiments for girls or experiments for boys. They are experiments for whatever kid (or grown-up) want to do them.

Up next, I’ll explain why I think bundling kids’ science kids with gendered stereotypes is a bad idea both in the short term and in the long run.