In browsing through my photo library, I stumbled on pictures from my last trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium of a jellyfish I haven’t blogged yet, the Mediterranean jelly (Cotylorhiza tuberculata). I consulted the Monterey Bay Aquarium Online Field Guide and discovered that it isn’t listed.
That hardly seems fair!
Stories about the honeybee crisis and colony collapse disorder (CCD) keep turning up in the news (at least here in California, where we grow so many big cash crops like almonds that rely on honeybees to pollinate them). But it turns out that getting to the bottom of CCD is made more difficult by the the gaps in biologists’ knowledge about the wild bee populations. (A lot of the bees pollinating food crops are commercially kept rather than wild.)
But, as reported in an article in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist [1], the Great Sunflower Project is enlisting the efforts of citizen scientists to fill in some of those gaps.
The congresscritter in question being Sherwood Boehlert, who represented New York’s 24th Congressional district (1983-2007), and chaired the House Science Committee (2001-2007). Boehlert offers this advice in a video called “Speaking for Science: Bringing Your Message to Policymakers,” available for download from the American Chemical Society website.*
The video presents two scenarios in which a group of scientists meets with their Congressional representative (who happens to be a member of the House Science Committee, played by Boehlert). As you might guess, the idea is to contrast the effective meeting with the disastrous one.
Do not claim to have earned a degree (or degrees) that you did not in fact earn.
Degree-granting institutions maintain records of degree recipients. Eventually, chances are good that someone will check.
And even if your talents are worth more to your position than a degree could be, your dishonesty will be held against you.
Go with talent and integrity over talent and pretend credentials. Those who employ you will appreciate not being played for chumps.
The elder Free-Ride offspring drew this lovely rat in a thought-bubble. The critter who is dreaming of an encounter with this rat is revealed below.
As I mentioned yesterday, the elder Free-Ride offspring will be participating in the school science fair this year. Last night at the dinner table, the Free-Ride family started brainstorming project ideas.
Elder offspring: I was thinking about seeing how well plants grow in different kinds of water.
Dr. Free-Ride: That might be interesting.
Elder offspring: I could use tap water, water from the Brita, mineral water, …
Younger offspring: Soda.
Dr. Free-Ride: OK, you might find something out from that comparison. But I’m not buying bottled water from the garden — not even in a deep drought.
Younger offspring: Why not?
Elder offspring: It’s expensive.
Back in June, I wrote a post examining the Hellinga retractions. That post, which drew upon the Chemical & Engineering News article by Celia Henry Arnaud (May 5, 2008) [1], focused on the ways scientists engage with each other’s work in the published literature, and how they engage with each other more directly in trying to build on this published work. This kind of engagement is where you’re most likely to see one group of scientists reproduce the results of another — or to see their attempts to reproduce these results fail. Given that reproducibilty of results is part of what supposedly underwrites the goodness of scientific knowledge, the ways scientists deal with failed attempts to reproduce results have great significance for the credibility of science.
Speaking of credibility, in that post I promised you all (and especially Abi) that there would be a part 2, drawing on the Nature news feature by Erika Check Hayden (May 15, 2008) [2]. Here it is.
In this post, I shift the focus to scientists’ relationships within a research group (rather than across research groups and through the scientific literature). In research groups in academic settings, questions of trust and accountability are complicated by differentials in experience and power (especially between graduate students and principal investigators). Academic researchers are not just in the business of producing scientific results, but also new scientists. Within training relationship, who is making the crucial scientific decisions, and on the basis of what information?
The central relationship in this story is that between Homme W. Hellinga, professor of biochemistry at Duke University, and graduate student Mary Dwyer.
The elder Free-Ride offspring, having entered fourth grade this year, will be participating in the school science fair in the spring. The elder Free-Ride offspring is very enthusiastic about the whole science fair thing.
Meanwhile, I’m having a very hard time.
There’s a neat article [1] in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist (although sadly, this particular article seems not to be online) in which Brian Hayes discusses the Monty Hall problem and people’s strong resistance to the official solution to it.
Now, folks like Jason have discussed the actual puzzle about probabilities in great detail (on numerous occasions). It’s a cool problem, I believe the official solution, and I’m not personally inclined to raise skeptical doubts about it. What I really like about Hayes’s article is how he connects it to the larger ongoing discussion in which scientists engage:
Not the financial market, but the market for highly trained folks in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In particular, why do people keep talking about the need for a larger talent pool in STEM when so many Ph.D.s and postdocs are having a rough time finding permanent positions?
Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about what demographer Michael S. Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes of this apparently paradoxical state of affairs: