Yesterday, while transporting the sprogs to Science Scouts aquatic training maneuvers, I caught a few minutes of a City Arts & Lectures interview with Lewis Black. In the part of the interview I heard, Black discussed his efforts (over the course of eight years) to make it as a playwright, and he revealed a couple ways in which that career path might not be so different from that of the scientist:
Category Archives: Doing science for the government
Scientists and non-scientists need to talk.
In a guest-post at Asymptotia, Sabine Hossenfelder suggests some really good reasons for scientists to communicate with non-scientists — and not just to say, “Give us more research funding and we’ll give you an even smaller iPod.” She really gets to the heart of what’s at stake:
Unpacking Nature’s ‘Where are they now?’
Abi at nanopolitan nudged me to have a look at Nature‘s recent article on what has become of targets of recent scientific fraud investigations. He notes that, interspersed with a whole bunch of poster boys for how not to do science, there are at least a couple folks who were cleared of wrongdoing (or whose investigations are still ongoing) which seems, to put it mildly, not the nicest way for Nature to package their stories.
So, I’m going to repackage them slightly and add my own comments. (All direct quotations are from the Nature article.)
Cover-up at Air and Space!
We (and 90% of everyone else in the vicinity of Washington, D.C.) went to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum yesterday. The crowds notwithstanding, it was a pretty good time. But a close inspection of the Apollo program exhibit yielded evidence of shocking obfuscation.
Space-ready foodstuffs, as every kid can tell you, are a staple of museum displays about space programs. (They’re right up there with the useful post-prandial capacities of old-timey space suits.) So naturally, the food-in-tubes would be part of the display for the Apollo/Soyuz Test Project exhibit. As you’ll recall, in 1975, the Apollo capsule and the Soyuz capsule docked in space, allowing for the mingling of American and Soviet crews for a couple days of experiments, photo-ops, and hanging out.
What’s your legislative agenda for the first hundred days?
The 110th Congress has been elected. Whether it’s the crowd you voted for or not, there’s quite a lot of talk now about a new direction, a new civility, possibly even a new pony (but I might not have heard that last part right).
So, given that the Congresspersons will be looking for our votes again in another two years (along with a third of the Senators), this seems like a good time for the people (i.e., you all) to put together an agenda for these elected representatives of ours. To streamline things a bit, and in keeping with the overarching themes of this weblog, let’s restrict the wish-list, at least for the moment, to issues to do with science, education, and matters of ethics — broadly construed. It would be good if you could provide a brief description of why your agenda item should be a priority, and whose needs or wants it will serve. If you’ve got a clever plan for funding it, so much the better.
If we can hammer out some good science/education/ethics goals for the legislative branch, I’m prepared to launch a letter-writing campaign to communicate them to the legislators, and a Congress-watch to keep track of how well they do at achieving these goals.
Seems to me that they ought to care what we want even after they’ve gotten our votes. Let’s make sure they know what that is — and that we’ll be watching!
Career pressures (working for the feds edition).
I’m working against a deadline today in the three-dimensional world, but the Union of Concerned Scientists has just released the results of a new survey of scientists working for the Food and Drug Administration, and I thought it was worth passing along. I’m never sure what to make of the proportion of the people who get a survey that actually respond to it; UCS sent this survey to almost 6000 FDA scientists and only about 1/6 of them responded. Will the statistics mavens pipe up to tell us whether (and how) this should influence our interpretations of the results?
The UCS press release after the jump.
The duties that come with knowledge and uncertainty.
While I hope this hurricane season is a lot less eventful than the last one, it’s always good to be ready. To that end, I’m brushing off (and bringing together here) two “classic” posts from the 2005 hurricane season.
As we look to the scientists to tell us what nature may have in store for us, we need to remember how scientists think about uncertainties — and especially, how important it is to a scientist to avoid going with predictions that have a decent chance of being false. Being wrong may seem almost as bad to the scientist as being under 10 feet of water.
Meanwhile, the scientists need to remember that non-scientists ask the scientists for predictions so they can act on these predictions to make prudent decisions. (Except, of course, in the cases where the people who control the resources find it convenient to ignore the relevant scientific information.)
Federal money comes with strings.
Yesterday I blogged a bit about how the rollback of NIH research funding may impact scientists at research universities. In light of those comments, here’s another news item worth your attention.
The Boston Globe reports that Yale University may be in some amount of trouble for accepting lots of federal research funds but then not accounting for its use in ways that satisfied the funders:
Federal authorities are investigating how Yale accounts for millions of dollars in government research grants, school officials said Monday.
Yale received three subpoenas last week from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Defense Department and National Science Foundation seeking grant documents dating back as much as 10 years.
Authorities also have been interviewing university employees about accounting issues.
The school has acknowledged problems with its accounting procedures. In an e-mail to faculty and staff on Friday, Yale President Richard Levin urged employees to cooperate with investigators.
“Regardless of the outcome of the current investigation, we must get all our processes right and make sure that we are good stewards of the funds entrusted to us by the federal government,” Levin said in a statement released Monday. “We know that we have more work to do.”
This sounds like tons of fun for the Yale faculty and staff. Who doesn’t like taking time out of his or her day to cooperate with federal investigators?
Hey, where’d that gravy train go?
From Inside Higer Ed, there are reports that the end of regular increases in NIH funding (such that there will soon be a double-digit decline in the purchasing power of the NIH budget) are stressing out university researchers and administrators:
At Case Western Reserve University, a decline in NIH funds contributed to a budget shortfall of $17 million below projections for the 2006 fiscal year. NIH funds are key at Case — and at many institutions the NIH is the largest outside source of research support.
While NIH officials have touted the fact that the number of new competitive grants will increase next year, they are slower to point out that a decline in the number of renewals for existing projects more than offsets the increases. Some projects that researchers thought were shoe-ins for refunding, such as the university Alzheimer’s Center that had been supported by NIH since 1988, are among those that lost NIH funding.
Why are officials always slower to point out the bad news?
Just because they’re out to get you doesn’t mean they don’t have a point. (One from the vault.)
Wrestling overgrown rose bushes out of the ground may be harder than wrestling gators. (At the very least, it seems to take longer, while provoking less sympathy).
Anyway, while I’m recovering from that, here’s a “classic” post from the old location. It was originally posted 5 January 2006, but the ethical issues are still fresh.
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Since I’m in the blessed wee period between semesters, it’s time to revisit some “old news” (i.e., stuff that I had to set aside in the end-of-semester crush). Today, a story from about a month ago, wherein the Rick Weiss of the Washington Post reports on the University of North Carolina’s troubles obeying animal welfare regulations in its research labs.