metascience

Here are some stories to entertain, amuse, or depress:

Bryan Gardiner in Wired Science profiles professional glassblowers who are dedicated to making anatomical models: "Heart of Glass: The Art of Medical Models". The products are beautiful and educational in a way computer models cannot match.

"The detection of interstellar boron sulfide" blog has "A Motivational Correspondance" from a department's astronomy faculty to their graduate students. I can't believe that it's not a parody (although it is presented as serious) because the whole thing would be such a fat target for a lawsuit.

First, while some students are clearly putting their hearts and souls into their research, and spending the hours at the office or lab that are required, others are not. We have received some questions about how many hours a graduate student is expected to work. There is no easy answer, as what matters is your productivity, particularly in the form of good scientific papers. However, if you informally canvass the faculty (those people for whose jobs you came here to train), most will tell you that they worked 80-100 hours/week in graduate school. No one told us to work those hours, but we enjoyed what we were doing enough to want to do so. We were almost always at the office, including at night and on weekends. Nowadays, with the internet, it is fine to work from home sometimes, but you still miss out on learning from and forming collaborations with other graduate students when everyone does not work in the same place at the same time.

From Nature News: "Rejection improves eventual impact of manuscripts". Apparently, articles average more citations when they get bumped from one journal and published in a different journal, irrespective of whether they get published in a higher-impact or lower-impact journal. For all those who have been tweeting the link, do note that the study has a fairly obvious bias: papers that get bumped and then never published aren't counted...

The Archaeobotanist has a detailed critique of the recent rice domestication paper: "A genome map that is not a map of origins (Rice Genetics Watch returns)". Many of the issues that are problematic in identifying "rice origins" are also problems for identifying human migrations:

The authors have concluded the the closest wild ancestors to cultivated rice are living wild populations in the Pearl River basin. The problem is that rice was domesticated not from living population but from past populations almost certainly from regions where wild rice is no extinct (technically, we would say, extirpated). This study demonstrated that big science and lots of resources do not inevitably produce answers, but that nuanced analysis and critical thinking, and in this case some knowledge of Chinese history, are necessary to direct analyses.

The post's final paragraph discusses the use of archaeological evidence as a reality check on the genetics. I don't have any commitment on rice domestication, but the arguments presented here must be understood.

Clay Shirky in Poynter discusses the media's loss of "trust": "Shirky: ‘We are indeed less willing to agree on what constitutes truth’".

Consider three acts of mainstream media malfeasance unmasked by outsiders: Philip Elmer-DeWitt’s 1995 Time magazine cover story that relied on faked data; CBS News’s 2004 accusations against the President based on forged National Guard memos; and Jonah Lehrer’s 2011 recycling and plagiarism in work he did for the New Yorker and Wired. In all three cases, the ethical lapses were committed by mainstream journalists and unmasked by outsiders working on the Internet, but with very different responses by the institutions that initially published the erroneous material.

I don't endorse Shirky's conclusions but the essay is thought-provoking.

Time magazine's "Moneyland" site has an article by Dan Kadlec: "Why College May Be Totally Free Within 10 Years". The more interesting exchange occurs near the end, where he quotes former Harvard president Lawrence Summers:

There is a reason that people pay a lot of money to go to an event like the Super Bowl when it is free on TV, Summers offers. They get more out of it by being present. Something similar is true of an on-campus education, where you may attend extra-curricular events and engage more fully with faculty and other students.

"Unbundling" college -- in the sense of unbundling a cable TV package -- is an interesting analogy raised in the article. I have heard a high-level college administrator make the same argument, that our students enjoy their campus experience and don't want to finish college sooner. I couldn't help but respond to this argument on the spot: If we allow students to spend less time on campus, we can open the educational experience to more students, including many who can't afford to spend four years marking time.

John T. Tierney in The Atlantic: "AP Classes Are a Scam".

The traditional monetary argument for AP courses -- that they can enable an ambitious and hardworking student to avoid a semester or even a year of college tuition through the early accumulation of credits -- often no longer holds. Increasingly, students don't receive college credit for high scores on AP courses; they simply are allowed to opt out of the introductory sequence in a major. And more and more students say that's a bad idea, and that they're better off taking their department's courses.

I have some experience working with the new AP biology guidelines, which were formulated following the "Vision and Change" document from the National Academies, and is guiding biology education reform at both secondary and undergraduate levels. So I don't agree with Tierney's criticisms about the "stultification" of the curriculum. But it is clear that AP courses are not treated with any consistency by universities, and results in other disciplines vary widely.

I was passed an essay today from 2008, by Martin Schwartz in the Journal of Cell Science: "The importance of stupidity in scientific research" [1].

Second, we don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying. I’m not talking about ‘relative stupidity’, in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don’t. I’m also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don’t match their talents. Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, ‘I don’t know’. The point of the exam isn’t to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it’s the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student’s weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student’s knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

The essay is tone-deaf in interesting ways. Schwartz begins by recounting a chance meeting with a female former classmate, now a successful attorney, who dropped out of graduate school because "after a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else." Instead of investigating further how her experience as a woman might differ from his, Schwartz reflects that everyone should feel stupid in graduate school. Likewise, he makes a great show of the overwhelming difficulty of science, without describing the support of colleagues. He describes, in other words, a certain kind of ideal that most science careers do not (and probably should not) match.

References

Theoretical physicist Terry Rudolph shares a story about preprints and the editorial process at a top science journal: "Guest Post: Terry Rudolph on Nature versus Nurture". In short, there was no problem posting a potentially interesting physics paper on the arXiv, and then getting it reviewed by the journal. But when the authors posted a follow-up preprint, it sabotaged the "interest" of their first submission:

While it mildly rankles that my own participation in that “wide debate” was curbed by the blurry lines of their own policies, I’m not particularly upset by the episode – perhaps indicative of my well documented own laissez-faire attitude to publishing, but perhaps because I know the result is ultimately more important than the journal it appears in.

Richard F. Wintle describes his job coordinating grant-seeking and laboratory work in a Canadian research institute: "The unsung heroes behind those big genomics breakthroughs". The subheadline is "Sometimes the best way to do an experiment is to have someone else do it for you".

Perhaps I'm fortunate in that I'm not an independent, "Principal Investigator" researcher, meaning that I largely don't have to teach, and I usually don't write my own grants. A big piece of what I spend my days doing is helping other scientists get their applications in shape, and even more importantly, helping to run a core facility to help them get their experiments done. It's a slightly unusual niche for a career scientist – not an independent researcher, not a lecturer, but more like running a small-to-medium sized biotechnology company that happens to be not-for-profit.

Science is done by those who don't teach much, and that has consequences for the kind of science we do, the kinds of questions we ask.

I was a participant in a panel here yesterday helping early-career faculty become better teachers. It is really sobering to realize just how little teaching most faculty members in the sciences do. From my context in anthropology, it is hard to imagine a new Ph.D. going straight into a tenure-track faculty position with no prior teaching experience whatsoever. Fields in the biological sciences are really varied in what teaching obligations they expect from faculty, and from my students' standpoint, it shows.

I think there's no question that teaching makes people better researchers, but there's also little question that teaching obligations make faculty publish less. There's a trade-off. I think we should prefer better research as opposed to more publications. But the linked article gives a different perspective -- the ultimate step being the "outsourcing" of research from universities altogether.