Zoinks! There’s a new Skeptics’ Circle up at Mike’s Weekly Skeptic Rant, and given the Scooby-Doo theme, there might just be a Scooby-snack in it for you as well as the excellent round-up of skeptical posts.
(Fred is still a tool, though.)
Monthly Archives: July 2006
The burden of addressing institutional problems.
I’ve been having a great email exchange with another blogger about the current flare-up of the battle over women in academic science, and he brought to my attention a bothersome feature of this New York Times interview with Dr. Ben A. Barres:
Q. How does this bias [that men have an innate advantage in science over women] manifest itself?
A. It is very much harder for women to be successful, to get jobs, to get grants, especially big grants. And then, and this is a huge part of the problem, they don’t get the resources they need to be successful. Right now, what’s fundamentally missing and absolutely vital is that women get better child care support. This is such an obvious no-brainer. If you just do this with a small amount of resources, you could explode the number of women scientists.
Q. Why isn’t there more support for scientists who have children?
A. The male leadership is not doing it, but women are not demanding it. I think if women would just start demanding fairness, they might get it. But they might buy in a little bit to all this brainwashing. They are less self-confident. And when women speak out, men just see them as asking for undeserved benefits.
(Bold emphasis added.)
Dealing with plagiarism once the horse is out of the barn.
Not quite a year ago, I wrote a pair of posts about allegations of widespread plagiarism in the engineering college at Ohio University. The allegations were brought by Thomas Matrka, who, while a student in the masters program in mechanical engineering at OU, was appalled to find obvious instances of plagiarism in a number of masters theses sitting on the library shelves — paragraphs, drawings, sometimes whole chapters that were nearly identical, with no attribution at all to indicate a common source.
Pretty appalling stuff. But back in November 2005, the OU administration didn’t seem to see it as a big problem — at least, not as of problem of the magnitude Mr. Matrka saw. But Mr. Matrka’s efforts have finally had some effects. Chickens are coming home to roost not only for the students who plagiarized in their theses, but for the faculty members who seemed willing to let this conduct slide.
Women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine — get interviewed.
Yami at Green Gabbro puts out a call for interviewees for a book project on women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM).
While the status of women in STEMM has improved in the past few decades, it has been a slow process with many ups and downs. Programs aimed at girls interested in science and Title IX, which prohibits discrimination in universities, have helped increase the number of STEMM degrees awarded to women. But the number of women is still shockingly low in some disciplines, such as physics and computer science, and at the highest ranks in all fields. Where the Girls Aren’t explores the many factors contributing to this, including subtle and not-so-subtle gender bias that begins in childhood and continues throughout a STEMM career; the isolation of women in fields full of men; and the challenges of balancing marriage and a family with a career in STEMM. The book also looks at what the studies of gender and intelligence really say about possible genetic influences on scientific and mathematical ability.
Go check out the post at Green Gabbro to read more about the project and see if you fit into one of the categories of interviewees sought. If you do and you’re interested in being interviewed, Yami will put you in touch with the author.
Cool book for curious kids.
The World’s Fair asks:
Are there any children’s books that are dear to you, either as a child or a parent, and especially ones that perhaps strike a chord with those from a science sensibility?
I’m going to offer one current favorite of the sprogs’: The Coolest Cross-Sections Ever by Stephen Biesty. This is not a book for sitting down and reading all the way through. Rather, it’s a big book where kids can flip to a page that grabs them and read through (or have someone older read to them) all the description and labels on the detailed cross-sectional diagram.
The cross-sections range from modern cities, 14th century castles, space ships, geographical features, to human anatomy, including — the perennial favorite — the digestive system. Also, it seems to have gotten the sprogs to thinking a little about the challenges of representing a three-dimensional world in two dimensions.
It’s a big book, though, so you probably need to find room for it on the top shelf of your bookcase, and you’ll want to be careful not to drop it on your toe.
Things non-scientists can do to improve communication with scientists.
One of the things that happens when I lay out a problem (say, the difficulties for scientists in communicating with non-scientists about scientific matters) is that my excellent commenters remind me not to stop there. They press me for a solution.
I started, in my earlier post, to gesture toward an answer to the question of how to improve communication between scientists and non-scientists:
… because non-scientists count on scientists as a source of reliable knowledge on a whole range of issues, non-scientists have a stake in improving communication with scientists. This means part of the burden of improving this communication falls on the non-scientists. They have to listen to what the scientists are trying to explain. They have to ask questions when things aren’t clear. Perhaps, they even have to try asking questions of the sort science can answer, rather than the broad questions to which science can hardly ever provide a simple answer.
There’s still a lot of work for the scientists to do here. But the non-scientists have to start being active participants engaged in a dialogue rather than a passive “audience” waiting to have the relevant facts poured into their skulls.
But vague gesturing isn’t enough. So VisualFX presses me:
As an individual non-scientist, what can I do? What would you, as a scientist, like to see someone like me do?
Who am I? I am a non-scientist who has a keen interest in the scientific world. I am a computer graphics artist/3D animator/video editor/DVD author. I can do a lot with moving images using computer graphics technology. I have a keen interest in science and technology ever since I was a kid. I feel I have a decent understanding of science in general as a layperson. But, I am completely out of my league when it comes to actually being able to understand the vast majority of the scientific literature. I do read a lot of stuff in popular publications such as Scientific American and popular books such as by Brian Green and Richard Dawkins but, that is where it ends for me.
I may be pretty easy compared to the large majority of the population here in the US. I feel I do have a basic, albeit, incomplete understanding of how science works, what scientists do, what constitutes a scientific theory, etc (thanks in no small part to Sb btw). However, what about my mother-in-law, the woo-woo queen of all time? What about my sister-in-law, the “There is no objective reality” liberal arts graduate? What about my father, the conservative, Catholic, retired from the business world philanthropist who feels there it not enough God in the classroom? — All of who have almost no concept of what science is or how it works beyond what they see in the movies and on TV. How do you reach them? What would you like to see them do to participate?
These are really good questions. So, I’m going to try to give some answers.
The consequences of a chilly climate in the academic workplace.
After my post yesterday suggesting that women scientists may still have a harder time being accepted in academic research settings than their male counterparts, Greensmile brought my attention to a story in today’s Boston Globe. It seems that almost a dozen professors at MIT believe they lost a prospective hire due to intimidation of the job candidate by another professor who happens also to be a Nobel laureate. Possibly it matters that the professor alleged to have intimidated the job candidate is male, and that the job candidate and the 11 professors who have written the letter of complaint are female; I’m happy enough to start with a discussion of the alleged behavior itself before paddling to the deep waters of gender politics.
But first, the story:
MIT star accused by 11 colleagues
Prospective hire was intimidated, they say
By Marcella Bombardieri and Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | July 15, 2006
Eleven MIT professors have accused a powerful colleague, a Nobel laureate, of interfering with the university’s efforts to hire a rising female star in neuroscience.
The professors, in a letter to MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield , accuse professor Susumu Tonegawa of intimidating Alla Karpova , “a brilliant young scientist,” saying that he would not mentor, interact, or collaborate with her if she took the job and that members of his research group would not work with her.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they wrote in their June 30 letter, “allowed a senior faculty member with great power and financial resources to behave in an uncivil, uncollegial, and possibly unethical manner toward a talented young scientist who deserves to be welcomed at MIT.” They also wrote that because of Tonegawa’s opposition, several other senior faculty members cautioned Karpova not to come to MIT.
She has since declined the job offer.
Who’s grilling today?
It’s been warm in these parts lately. In weather like this, by evening the indoors is stiflingly hot, while the outdoors is just staring to cool down. So, it makes sense that we’d be driven outdoors. Perhaps it makes less sense that, after escaping the heat indoors, I’d build a blazing hot fire over which to cook.
Life is full of mysteries.
Anyway, while I’m working on the promised post about what non-scientists can do to improve commuications with scientists, I’m curious to find out who else runs to the grill, and how you do it. If you want to consider this a meme, you should also consider yourself tagged!
Are we going to keep pretending women who want to do science and math aren’t treated differently?
Here is the U.S., especially, we love to think the ivory tower is a meritocracy, and that the tribe of science is objective in all things — including how it treats its members. A nice little pile of data runs counter to this picture, however. A quick roundup:
Friday Sprog Blogging: gross stuff makes learning fun!
Dr. Free-Ride: Hey, can you get your slime lizard [a plastic lizard embedded in slimy goo] off the table before dinner?
Elder offspring: Sure.
Dr. Free-Ride: Why do you two like gross stuff so much?
Younger offspring: I don’t know.
Elder offspring: We just do.