Category Archives: Science and Society

Reflecting on the election results as a scientist

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Jessi and I were heaving deep sighs over our post-election coffee on Wednesday morning. Neither of us were happy about the election results: a president-elect that (among other things) denies the science of climate change and endorses misogyny. How is a woman in science supposed to feel after an election like this? I think the answer is “fired up.”

Highly educated women in science make up a minority of the electorate. How much of a minority? Earlier this week, the New York Times published a map of voter turnout (from 2012) by American education demographics, broken down by race and county. The map looks mostly blue: meaning mostly whites with little to no college education. It’s not only highly educated women that appear to be a minority here, but highly educated any-gender people that appear to be a minority.

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Looking at the map, no one would want to run an election campaign relying on a college-educated demographic. College education looks rare in the United States, dark tan appears as a small minority of geographic voting groups. However, college education is not really that rare. Roughly 65 percent of people over 25 in the U.S. have had some college, but this majority becomes hidden on maps like the one above when the 65 percent clusters geographically, mostly in and around urban centers.

How does education influence election outcomes? I ran the question by Jessi and she agreed it would be interesting if I over-layed the map of the education demographics by county with the election results by county. This is the map of the election results by county, also from the NYT.screen-shot-2016-11-09-at-1-50-00-pm

Overlaying the election results map with the education voter demographics map, looks something like this:

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The overlay map looks very pink and purple. Lots of white people with some or no college education voted for Trump.

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I think the map hints at a greater problem though, the clustering of people with similar backgrounds, education levels and ideology. This makes us diverse-phobic. When we are used to seeing people like us, we don’t know how to interact with people not like us.

I am guilty of this. I am scared of talking to people that don’t think like me. A real life example: a few weeks ago (before the election) I saw a flyer at Saint’s. img_4010

I was upset. Here’s a flyer for events to tell people why evolution is a myth. AND where are the events being held!!?!! A public high school. A public library. Places that are supposed to endorse facts and science and progressive education. Hosting a creationist!! I vented to friends at the coffee shop. I got really angry. I turned the flyers upside down so I wouldn’t have to look at them. But did I do anything? Did I go anywhere where I might have to listen to a crazy creationist and hear what they have to say? Nope. No way. I didn’t even want to imagine sitting in the room and having to listen to what they had to say. Not for a second.

And that is what I think the problem is. As we get divided on issues, like evolution, like climate science, like the fifty other things the Trump platform stands against, we have a tendency to treat disagreement with ignorance. I talk to people that also study evolution, that also work similar jobs, that also believe in the things I already believe in. I ignore the things I don’t want to hear. I stay in my comfortable echo-chamber. How do we make change? By voicing our opinions to people that might not agree with us, by listening to the “other side” so we know where their opinion comes from, by doing what’s difficult instead of what’s easy.

I feel guilty about not going to the “Busting Myths” events and voicing an alternative opinion. Was that my obligation as a scientist? Is it all of our obligation to speak up now? Or do we continue business as usual…

p-hacking and science with an agenda

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I recently read this post about p-hacking (see also: data dredging, fishing, snooping). Two things that I found to be noteworthy were an interactive example of how p-hacking works, and a description of an experiment where different research teams analyzed the same data set:

 

“Twenty-nine teams with a total of 61 analysts took part. The researchers used a wide variety of methods, ranging — for those of you interested in the methodological gore — from simple linear regression techniques to complex multilevel regressions and Bayesian approaches. They also made different decisions about which secondary variables to use in their analyses.

 

Despite analyzing the same data, the researchers got a variety of results. Twenty teams concluded that soccer referees gave more red cards to dark-skinned players, and nine teams found no significant relationship between skin color and red cards.”

 

To reiterate, all of the methods used were justifiable. There wasn’t any fudging or fabricating data. A group of skilled analysts sat down and came up with 29 defensible methods for analyzing the same data that gave different answers. To me, this is the stuff of existential crises. To quote the article, “[e]very result is a temporary truth”. Which I think is pretty concerning if you’re working in a situation where temporary truths don’t cut it.

 

Joshua Tewksbury is a biologist who spent 10 years as a professor at the University of Washington before moving to a position with the World Wildlife Fund. About a year ago, he wrote a post about transitioning to an NGO position where, he writes, “[s]cience shows up as just another wrench in the toolkit.” A deeply malleable tool, apparently. On the one hand, it’s troubling to think about making decisions with temporary truths. On the other hand, and this strikes me as almost heretical to type, if you deeply believe in your cause, maybe it’s not so bad to (ethically and with full disclosure) make subjective decisions in how you analyze your data to advance your cause.

 

After thinking about it for a while, I’m still not sure how bad my crisis should be. In the first post, one of the project leaders is quoted as saying:

 

“On the one hand, our study shows that results are heavily reliant on analytic choices,” Uhlmann told me. “On the other hand, it also suggests there’s a there there. It’s hard to look at that data and say there’s no bias against dark-skinned players.”

 

At first pass, this didn’t help me. As somebody who takes comfort in certainty (and don’t most scientists?) the “squint at it” method of assessing data is an endless source of frustration. But I’ve also realized that we might feel confident about one other thing from the soccer data set. No groups concluded that lighter skinned players received more red cards. Maybe there are some relatively permanent truths, it’s just that they don’t answer the question we set out to answer.

JFK

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Prompted by an excellent album by Public Service Broadcasting, I have been pondering a speech JFK gave on, coincidentally, the very day I was born. It was the speech that persuaded America to get into the Space Race (“We choose go to the moon in this decade, and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard“). I’ve always admired how America rose to his challenge. That was the decade when Americans were sufficiently proud of American science and its potential to invest in it properly. Or sufficiently scared of the science of others.

But another part of the speech has me thinking.

“…we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds”.

Half a century later, nothing has changed. Maybe it never will.

Is the face of academia changing or just perspectives?

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Professor. An older absent-minded white male, often found in tweed, with a few chalk or coffee stains along the sleeve edges, engrossed in his personal library of books, several of them open on his desk, is lit by a practical but decorative antique lamp as he hunches over a page, glasses on the end of his nose, referencing from his comfortable perch in the ivory tower the great works of others before him, slowly constructing his own contribution, a lengthy tomb.

Professor. A young 30-something perhaps multi-racial female, often equal parts frantic and focused but always driven, in jeans, large coffee on the desk, surrounded by a computer, smart phone, maybe a book or two as flotsam amidst a wash of printed journal articles, bright fluorescent lighting overhead as she dashes off email after email before settling down to a trampling parade of meetings, interspersed with lectures, grant writing, administrative paperwork and travel schedules to sort, and hopefully eking out just a few more paragraphs on concurrent journal articles in progress.

Photo lifted from http://www.apprise.ox.ac.uk/academic_career_paths/

Does the professor in the 21st century continue to evolve, or is it just that as we get closer to applying for professorships we have a new perspective? Some of the change in job description must also be due to a change in society, technology, and cultural norms.

I also wonder how large a role economics play. Was science a past time belonging only to the upper class (as was undoubtedly the case for Darwin, just check out his house) or is the mythical absent-minded professor just that – a myth?  Dual incomes are becoming increasingly common for a majority of American households, even with overall household incomes decreasing in recent years. Women are increasingly employed full time and are the primary breadwinners in 4 of 10 homes with children under 18, with many single mothers running their own household contributing to this figure. These numbers influence who we see in academic positions, and with attaining both jobs and grants becoming (perhaps increasingly) competitive, the daily thoughtful perusing of books seems like a quaint eccentricity of professors past. Your thoughts?

It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it

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I’ve been taught science writing should be terse and pithy. In that spirit, here is a distillation of this post: Does pressure to be both concise and persuasive drive the development of biased terminology in science?

I started thinking about this a little bit last week when the term “evolutionary rescue” came up as an aside during Dave’s talk about genetic diversity and the rate of evolution. The basic idea with evolutionary rescue is if a population experiencing rapid environmental change has a lot of genetic diversity, then some individuals can adapt rapidly to the new conditions and “rescue” the population, preventing extinction (dependent on population size and the magnitude of change).  I have become so used to thinking about evolution in a framework of parasites and drug resistance where the parasites are the bad guys that it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that in this case the drug resistant parasites would be the heroes that would “rescue” a declining parasite population under drug pressure.

There is a lot of jargon in science, some of which is certainly useful specific shorthand, and certainly some that adds unnecessary complexity, confusion, and arguably bias. I think part of this is storytelling, which I agree is an art and part of what makes science sticky and accessible to non-scientists. I attended a great lecture last year called “Making Tricky Science into Sticky Stories” and was convinced. Then again, is calling a single-celled organism “devious” (even if it’s a parasite) when it is just doing what every other life form on Earth is doing – living and reproducing – really necessary? Terms like evolutionary rescue give a positive connotation to rapid adaptation in changing conditions, and perhaps not surprisingly is used in the climate change literature where this is a pleasing and hopeful concept, but this concept is so closely tied to other rapid adaptations, such as in parasites for drug resistance, that it might be better just to spell out what we mean instead of making up a new term.

The State of Higher Education in the US: Service with a Smile?

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I’m sitting here writing this in the small town of Delaware, Ohio, where I’ll be seeing my sister graduate from college this weekend. On the 6 hour drive here, I thought a lot about college, and the state of the university system in America. And then I started thinking about the flashback-trippy scenes in Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” as the students matriculate into the meat grinder….clearly, the system’s broken. I have no concrete answers on how to fix the problem, but with mounting unemployment rate and nearly unbearable student loan repayments for recent grads, there has to be something here that’s just not working.

According to a recent survey of 4900 recent US grads published by McKinsey and Company, 2/3 of students state that “college didn’t prepare me well for my job” and state that perhaps incorporating more “life skills” into coursework would have been useful, and they seemed more dissatisfied with their lack of training in “life skills” than other skills such as quantitative reasoning, analytical writing, etc. All buzzwords aside, I’m still confused; having T.A.’d in undergrad and graduate school, the life skills that these students aren’t putting into good practice are things like motivation, time management, responsibility and a sense of interest in education. I’m starting to feel as if the students see college as a pure business transaction, and that higher education in this country has become a customer service industry, and that they’re here to get a “good degree” that will get them a “good job” that will lead them to a “good career”, and if you can’t get them that piece of paper, it’s clearly YOUR fault. You must not be a good instructor/TA. You aren’t sensitive enough to their needs, and don’t offer extra credit when a student has slacked off all semester and realizes they need to pass.

The sentiment has become all too often “YOU didn’t GIVE me an A.” instead of “I didn’t earn an A in this class, I should take more responsibility for my own education”. For a country in which we have pretty free access to information via the internet, libraries, and other resources, the motivation to take learning into one’s own hands is pretty pathetic. My generation seems to have to be spoon-fed exactly what they “need” to know in order to regurgitate the information on a piece of paper only to forget about it later. I’m aware that many of these students feel strongly against incorporating the “general education” curriculum into their time here, and that is surely a source of their lack of motivation. But even then, in the coursework required for their degrees, college students of my generation take little responsibility for their own education when it turns out the way they don’t want. The survey above states that 53% of the recent grads surveyed regret their choice of major and/or university. But the main conclusion is that the university system is responsible for changing this sentiment, and should do more to placate the needs of its customers.

This piece was a bit more of a rant than I had intended; and I’m sure you all have opinions on this issue, and where the solution lies for fixing a broken system. Yet, if I continue into academia, I’d rather not be viewed as a sales associate with a PhD that’s selling a product. In reality, there is a product, and there is capital, but, I still don’t buy the “I’m paying X amount of money, so I should get EXACTLY WHAT I WANT” argument, unless there’s some effort on the other side too.

Getting paid to learn

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A couple of weeks ago I woke up more bright eyed than usual for a Saturday morning and, feeling rather virtuous, headed out to a public lecture on “Races, faces, and human genetic diversity”. This was a fascinating talk, which left me boring others with tidbits of information for weeks. For example, did you know that the police are starting to use visual profiles of criminals based on DNA found at a crime scenes?

However, while the talk was interesting, what really amazed me was the audience. It was grim rainy morning, yet the spacious lecture hall was full. I’m sure there were a few students hoping to improve their grades, or faculty supporting a colleague, however, the vast majority of the audience appeared to be from the general community.  This phenomenon is not unique to state college. During my PhD I ran the Edinburgh branch of café scientifique, an organisation coordinating public talks on science within informal settings, which has now spread around the world.  Guest lists to events would fill in a matter of hours, with long reserve lists of people disappointed they wouldn’t fit into our venues to hear talks and discuss diverse topics from animal behaviour to string theory. It didn’t seem to matter how many events we ran, the enthusiasm, and the requests for more, never dried up.

So what makes people want to give up their valuable spare time to learn about science? For that matter why is David Attenborough one of the best-loved celebrities in the UK (and round the world, surely?), with his series’ on natural history reliably pulling in huge TV audiences? I don’t have an answer, but my best guess is that we all have an inherent interest in trying to understand the world around us. For most scientists, and I imagine non-scientists, knowing a little bit about why the landscapes we see or the animals around us are the way they are, only adds to the enjoyment in observing them. Similarly, we spend a lot of time preoccupied with our own bodies so understanding how they work, why we get sick, or how other organisms are living within them, is intrinsically fascinating. As scientists our job is to think about the questions that interest us and try and find answers, as well as to learn as much as we can about what is already known. Which all makes me feel pretty lucky to do this for a living.

Science on the Hill: How science can work with policy-makers

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Recently, a member of the House of Representaives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology made comments suggesting that human females could control internal fertilization (clip). Italian courts don’t seem to understand how to interpret a P-value. (see Katey’s post ). Politicians continue to fight about whether global climate is changing, instead of making policy decisions about whether we need to do anything about it.

There seems to be a general lack of understanding about the facts science produces, the processes by which scientists arrive at those facts, and what role science should play in policy. I find this trend deeply troubling. Scientists have clearly failed to communicate how we conduct science,  the methods we use to interpret results and the distinction between facts and opinions (interpretations of what our results mean) to policy makers. Attempting to bridge this disconnect seems impossible to me.

I have reached a place of complete frustration and think the situation might very well be hopeless. Clearly, I’m going to need help understanding the other point of view. I need to have a civil conversation with a Washington insider. I happen to know one and I think we can keep it civil. I actually love him. He is my dad after all.

Left, My father and I agree on many things. Surely we can have a reasonable conversation about a "real" issue. Right, Me at my father's desk assessing policy briefs circa 1984. Clearly, I've already had enough!

My father, Tom Cator, has worked on “on The Hill” for the last 36 years. He began as a staffer for the U.S Senate and for the last 30 years has worked as a lobbyist across a broad array of industries. We had a fairly long conversation about science on the hill this week. Here are the key points that we discussed.

“Follow the money.” Money is part of the reason that policy makers often will argue or ignore facts. For example, if most of your state’s income is dependent on oil and gas, you are not going to go on the record agreeing these industries have contributed to global warming. “Politicians often don’t come in with an open mind. Their view is often based on who paid for it and what constituents think.”

“They will try to take you down”. I posed a question, “So say a group of scientists descended on The Hill. We went door to door and we offered to answer scientific questions”.

My father responded to this with a slight sense of panic in his voice, as if he was imaging me running through the Rayburn Building with a mosquito net, “That won’t work. First, they won’t have questions for you. Presentations have to be timely, or appear timely, in a political context. Second, if your facts don’t support their agenda, they may go after you personally, attempt to impugn your credibility. They will find someone to poke holes in your research.”

“Everyone has an agenda.” This was troubling. Facts are facts. Science is objective. You can’t just poke holes in research unless there are actual weaknesses. Why don’t politicians understand that? My father continued to explain that many times politicians think scientists are playing political games. “If you came to me with data, I would want to know what your agenda is”.
I countered, “Facts don’t have an agenda.”
Do they? Well, sometimes.
Over the last twenty years, there has also been a noticeable increase in “think tanks”  in Washington. This term is broadly applied to many organizations, but some of the largest are privately funded entities. Many times politicians get their research from these sources. “Think tanks have to pay salaries and rent. It’s a business. Where do you think they get their money? Industry, organized labor, wealthy individuals, interest groups, and others.” my father points out.

“It is bleak and getting bleaker.” Over his career, Tom has noticed a disturbing shift in how business gets done in Washington. “It used to be that congressmen would get facts from lobbyists. A good lobbyist would approach a legislator with their case, represent all of the facts and facets of the issue, and then would explain why their policy position had merit. If an issue like climate change had come up 20 years ago there would have been multiple hearings with recognized experts. There would have been a long discussion about the facts. There is no longer a comprehensive look at the issue.”

There has also been a shift in how legislators define compromise. “It used to be you would find points on which you could agree and disagree and meet in the middle. Now, compromise tends to be ‘I don’t budge and you meet me here’.” This change in attitude has made debate, whether scientific, legal, or moral, stagnant.

“Nothing moves quickly”. “Policy does not change quickly. Within the next decade, Medicare is going to go bankrupt. They aren’t doing anything about that. You think they are going to jump on something like climate change? There is little effort to look at long term trends and how policy should respond. Statesmanship is needed.”

Acceptance of scientific findings is also very slow. “The system is rigged to not let real science percolate up, at least not in the short term”. We agreed that this was not necessarily a bad thing. Scientific debate and discovery moves very quickly. When we make policy decisions, we need to be very certain that the scientific debate is satisfactorily over.

“Strike back” At this point in the conversation I was not feeling particularly hopeful. How do we motivate these congressmen to listen and get something done?
“There has been a failure of science to address this issue.”

Politicians are in Washington to represent their constituents. If voters in their district care about something, then congressmen will care. “Getting the public, voters, and community leaders involved makes it much harder for a politician to walk away from facts”.

And then Tom got real personal.

“The academic community has fallen down. They don’t try to involve the public or policy makers. You live in a politically conservative county in Pennsylvania. What are you doing to educate your public on science?”

Caught off guard, I mumbled something about public lecture series.

“You can’t do it from 9 am-5pm. People work. What about continuing education at night? How about explaining how climate change is and will impact the farming industry in central PA?”.

I quipped back, “I don’t see how I can talk to people who don’t want to hear what I have to say”.

My father responded, “Find a reason for people to come and make it convenient for them. Go to a local high school science teacher and have her tell students, ‘Come to this thing tonight and you get extra credit, bring your parents and we will double it.’ Then present facts carefully and be as scrupulous as possible. Present work that has been rigorously peer-reviewed, and is complete and unbiased. Maintain objectivity and project a service. Engage them in a discussion.”

I do not feel anymore empathy for Washington, but I think this conversation did get my wheels turning. I have been going at this the wrong way. Changing the way science is viewed on The Hill needs to come from the ground up and it can start here with us. “The issue here is that we need to inspire constituents to become informed about science and communicate with their representatives.”

What if experts from CIDD gave an evening seminar series at State (or Altoona or Bald Eagle) High? What would the challenges be? Would scientists participate? Would anyone come? What topics could we cover? I have no idea how to answer these questions, but perhaps I should be thinking about them.

Fact-Checking and Science Journalism

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If you’ve been paying attention to the United States Presidential elections, you’re probably quite familiar with the term “fact-checking”; that is, the verification of the statements and claims made by candidates. Why don’t we see more fact-checking in science? The general public seems to quickly latch on to “facts” that have been “proven” by scientific studies and then reported (and possibly mangled) by mainstream media. Is the population’s lack of skepticism and critical thinking because of our less-than-stellar STEM education? Is it because somehow, the letters attached to the end of your name are directly proportional to the amount of trust invested by the general public?

I believe it is an intertwined combination of all of the above, in addition to the fact that there is a disconnect in the pipeline from manuscript to media; and the adage “if it bleeds, it leads” holds true in the case of the ongoing controversy of Monsanto GMO corn and rats developing rather nasty cancerous tumors.

In this study, researchers claim (we’re grasping at straws here) that GM corn is a causative agent of cancer in the rats. The blogosphere ignited. Here you can have a glance at the ever-so-reputable blog “Natural News” and their handle on the study, using heavy hyperbole, and citing the Daily Mail as a source. This angered me — even when I managed to push aside the fact that naturalnews.com usually nauseates me — not only because they were incorrectly interpreting the study, but because the writing was laden with self-righteousness, and reeked of “we’re right, you’re wrong, hahahahaha”.

In a frantic attempt to get a fix of rational thinking and skepticism, I found this post by Discovery News journalist Emily Sohn. Her description of the study itself and its flaws (and why they are flaws) is incredibly succinct and, although wordier than the average blog post, easily understood by educated Americans in and outside of science. This type of pop science journalism, disseminated by major media outlets, is a necessity in bridging the gap between researchers and the general public — and the responsibility rests upon both the scientists and the journalists to clearly and truthfully communicate information.

There is no perfect solution to fact-checking mainstream media reporting science. Scientists, by nature, will always be cautious of implying direct links and causation. Journalists will always sniff out the bleeding lead. However, ethical and explicit reporting of results, and encouragement of writers such as Ms. Sohn, will keep the media from repeating this incredibly fantastic template ad nauseum.

Quality control

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Delicious looking health care (photo from Wikimedia Commons).

At CIDD lunch this week, we discussed this paper by Kumar et al (2005). It’s a compilation of data from randomized clinical trials of cancer treatments in children conducted between 1955 and 1997, and it shows that on average, new treatments are no better or worse than standard care.

Although scientists are not getting better at producing more effective treatments in comparison to standard care, the overall survival rate for children with cancer has been increasing since the 1950s, which suggests that standard care has changed for the better. During the CIDD lunch, someone referred to this improvement as “moving the goal posts” for cancer treatments. In my mind, this raises the question of how standard is standard care at any given time, for any given doctor, in any given hospital?

At the end of the discussion, Andrew touched on one of the problems with standard care, which is that ineffectual or even detrimental treatment regimes can become common because of misplaced confidence in anecdotal observation. An op-ed published last August in the New York Times suggested that the solution to this problem is to throw money at it – and of course, medical researchers to spend the money. More specifically, take some small fraction of health care spending and put it towards testing current treatments.

Yet even if all treatments were well supported by data, the widespread and timely implementation of best practices is not assured, as it is a long and leaky pipeline from the NEJM or the Lancet to your general practitioner’s office. Dr. Atul Gawande wrote about this problem in the New Yorker, also published this past August. As an example of the inconsistency in standard practices, Dr. Gawande wrote about his mother’s knee replacement and the extensive variation between surgeons in all aspects of the procedures, from anesthesia to physical therapy. A solution to this problem, according to Dr. Gawande, is strict and centralized quality control, just like in the Cheesecake Factory and other chain restaurants.

Which brings me to my final question: how important is standard care? For double blind, randomized clinical trials (i.e. science) it’s quite important to know that your control group is being treated consistently but for patient care (i.e. medicine), I can see some benefits, as well as costs, from multiple approaches.

NB: My experience with health care has been largely within the U.S., which certainly colors my perspectives.

Scientists to be jailed for failing to predict earthquake

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Yesterday, seven Italian scientists were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in jail for, as many headlines asserted, failing to predict an earthquake that killed just over 300 people in L’Aquila, Italy in April 2009.

The formal details of the case are a bit more nuanced than the sound bites suggest, but that ultimate outcome is still disturbing, as a scientist. An “unidentified woman on Sky television” thought it was “just a tiny bit of justice so that it doesn’t happen again” (NY Times). I found it upsetting, that individuals would feel comforted by dumping the burden of the deaths of hundreds of people on someone for not pinpointing a natural disaster, and ridiculous that they would think this would somehow get negligent scientists back on their game. What do people think that scientists can/should do?

These scientists populated the country’s National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks. Given that the scientific consensus on the possibility of earthquake prediction seems to be something like “certainly not within a timeframe very useful for informing short term evacuations,” what did these scientists say they could do?

There are many interesting discussion points surrounding this case, beyond just the fundamental, scientific question about the extent to which different aspects of the world and life are predictable; my mind swirls with them. But I guess I’ll ask this mini-blogosphere directly if you think that this conclusion is a worrying precedent? Do you think it is likely to help or hurt more people, and, if so, how?

Other articles: 1, 2