Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

Many of you may have heard that the University of California system is in a battle with Nature Publishing Group (a publisher of widely-read and widely-cited journals) over subscription costs.  They are urging UC faculty to not submit manuscripts to journals published by NPG.  As an alum of the UC system, I pledge to do my part by not publishing any papers in Nature journals.

Since my research is not hot enough for their journals, this should be an easy pledge to keep.

By Thoreau

I agree with everything that Eric Martin says here.  Team Blue fanboys are invited to leave 150+ comments below.

Patricia McConnell reminds us that the “positive” in positive reinforcement is defined by the recipient, not the giver:

One [example of creative rewards] is from Karen London, Ph.D.. CAAB, (who writes a great blog for Bark by the way). She was out in the country with her newly acquired lab cross when they flushed a deer. She called Bugsy to come just before he sprang off in pursuit, and to her joy and amazement he turned and ran back to her. Alas, she had no treats to reward him, and couldn’t even take off running to let him chase her because she was in cross country skis in cross country ski tracks, facing the wrong way. But, ever the quick thinker, Karen reached into her pocket and took out a used tissue and gave it to Bugsy when he arrived. Viola! Her dog was thrilled at this acquisition, and Karen’s creative thinking laid a foundation for a solid recall for years to come.

The original explains how sheep poop fits in. As a bonus, you get pictures of a puppy trying to convince a cat to play. Way way back in Unqualified Dog’s puppyhood, we still had a living cat, who had preceded UD into the family. (For any unlikely latecomers to the blog, “Unqualified Dog” is the sobriquet of the beautiful border collie adorning the masthead. RIP.) This meant a number of things:

Unqualified Pup was initially deathly afraid of the cat, once hiding from it under the wooden rocker in the living room;

Unqualified Pup for a time seemed to take the cat as a role-model, trying to do cat things that never quite worked out – certain kinds of jumping; playing with balls of string.

But best and of most relevance, I’ll always cherish the memory of coming into the dining room and seeing the cat on the table, looking disdainfully down at the puppy who: was on her hind legs below, holding a tennis ball in her mouth, looking at the cat with great enthusiasm. No, Srsly, she seemed to say, though dogs had not learned to say “Srsly” back then, we could play! With this ball! Together!

That pitch was actually less successful than the play-bow on the Professor’s site linked above. As you’ll see from the photo sequence, Dr. McConnell’s cat actually moves a little as part of rejecting the overture. In the incident I recount, our cat was not nearly so forthcoming.

By Thoreau

My students’ final assignment for the quarter was to propose a project on something at least vaguely related to the class material, submit it to their peers for review, then revise and resubmit to me for a grade.  Since they are juniors, I told them to write this with an eye toward Senior Project.  I said that it doesn’t have to be feasible with resources at our school; as long as they describe the resources required and show that they’ve thought it through, I’m fine with it.  (After all, lots of people do research in collaborations.)

Well, one of my students found a paper proposing an experimental test of an alternative gravity theory.  The physics community has a long tradition of publishing experimental tests of established and alternative theories in top journals, as long as the tests are conducted rigorously and the experimental precision is high enough to either establish stringent limits on alternative theories or detect violations of accepted theories in conditions that hadn’t been probed previously.  So I encouraged him to write a proposal to do this test.

He just did the calculations, and he’ll need a spinning ring larger than the earth.  Oops.

On the plus side, I think he’s shown pretty conclusively that this theory isn’t really testable in a terrestrial experiment [bold correction added].  So, instead of writing a proposal to do a test, he can write a paper on why somebody else’s paper is nonsense.

I just realized that my student’s analysis is wrong.  Never mind.

By Thoreau

The FBI is worried that terrorists may start planting bags that don’t have bombs, in order to get us to respond and freak out.

That, or they realized that graduates of today’s terrorist training programs can’t even manage to set gasoline on fire, so maybe actual explosives are beyond their ability at this point.

UPDATE: In the comments, KCinDC reminds us of an awful day in American history.  All of this has happened before.

By Thoreau

John Tierney has decided to get himself some attention by writing about the hypothesis that gender differences in science careers can be explained by the variance in mathematical ability distributions being wider among men than women.  This hypothesis is almost certainly wrong*, but not for some of the reasons often offered.  Remember when I took on the race/IQ theorists, and noted that their detractors often over-simplify and thus weaken the pro-equity case?  Well, the detractors of the variability hypothesis do something similar.  Generally they sum up the hypothesis as “Women are bad at math.”  This is an over-simplification of a wrong idea.  The problem with the over-simplification is that it then gives the purveyor of the wrong idea the satisfaction of being able to sit back and say “That’s not what I said” and conclude that his opponents are driven by politics rather  than reason.  I don’t want to give them that satisfaction, so I’m going to present the variability hypothesis in its least bad form and then attack it.

First, the hypothesis is not a blanket statement about women and men, suggesting that every woman is deficient in mathematical ability and every man has an inherent biological advantage.  Most of the opponents of Tierney and Summers get that, but they still sum it up as “Women are bad at math.”  It is instead a statement about distributions, looking at the number of women and men at each level.  The hypothesis is that women tend to be closer to average, with fewer above average but also fewer below average, while men are more likely to have outliers on the high and low sides, with more men at the bottom of the math class and at the top.  Some framers of this hypothesis even suggest that women might actually have a slightly higher average, but because fewer women deviate significantly from their average there will still be fewer women at the top of the mathematical game.

Overall, this is a hypothesis that is only favorable to men at the highest levels.  Unfortunately for the framers, it’s also a hypothesis whose statistical support is questionable at best.  However, I’ll let people who are more immersed in the statistics take up that issue.  Instead, I’ll focus on the “So what?” question:  Even if this hypothesis were (for the sake of argument) correct, does it have any use in explaining disparities in scientific careers?  I’ll argue “no” for 3 reasons:

1)  This hypothesis is, if true, most applicable at the far ends of the distribution.  However, your average college science or engineering classroom isn’t drawn from the very top of the bell curve.  Not every science or engineering department is at Caltech or MIT, alas.  You can go to a science or engineering class at a substantially less selective university and still see a substantial disparity.  If we see this disparity in a group that is closer to the center of the bell curve, you can’t attribute it to the variance hypothesis.  You have to attribute it to other factors.  And since we have seen changes in the demographics of science and engineering over time, and since those changes have coincided with social changes, social variables are a far more plausible explanation than biological ones.

2)  At the upper end, innate intellectual aptitude for abstract reasoning is certainly part of the game.  So is creativity.  So is determination.  So is luck, or, more precisely, the ability to seize on good luck when it happens while riding out bad luck (more of a personality trait than an intellectual trait, in the phrasing of this non-expert).    So is communication ability (since getting ahead in basic research or industry is in part about persuading people that your approaches are good).  And a host of other traits.

Certainly raw talent for math is part of it, but hardly the only part.  The highest echelons of science and engineering are dominated by people who have the total package, and no two people have the exact same mix in their packages.  Some are weaker on one part than another, but they bring enough of each to the game, and they use what they bring, and they get where they go.  A great American engineer and scientist spoke of 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.  Which is not to say that smarts don’t matter, but that a person could be slightly closer to the center of the bell curve by some measure of smarts and still win by perspiration.

So, knowing how a particular trait is distributed tells you little about how many people have the complete package.  It would be like looking at manual dexterity to the exclusion of all other factors, and trying to predict a person’s career path.  The  most dextrous person around may very well become a heart surgeon.  Or he may become an auto mechanic.  Or an engineer.  Or a sculptor.  Some of those paths have far more money and prestige than others, but looking solely at manual ability would tell you little about that person’s ability to go far and rise in the world.  You’d have to look at the total package.  In fact, even if you looked at a room full of medical students, manual dexterity might tell you who becomes a surgeon, but it wouldn’t tell you who becomes a famous surgeon.  Or who makes the most money.  The one who goes down the R&D path might become famous for an invention, but the one who goes into plastic surgery and makes the right connections in high society might make 10x as much money.  And the one who is just really, really good with his hands but not very inventive or charismatic might go into a less lucrative specialty and never become famous at all, despite having the best hands in the entire class.

The bottom line is that even if (for the sake of argument) this hypothesis regarding the extremes of the distribution is correct for one particular trait, it tells us little about how many people of each gender will be able to succeed in science and engineering.  And it tells us nothing about the vast majority of people trained in science and engineering, who are smart but not on the extremes.

*By writing “almost” in front of “certainly” in a post on a provocative topic I do run the risk of being paraphrased as “I absolutely cannot rule out…”  Let’s try to avoid that.

By Thoreau

Two Christian dudes from California, upon hearing of plans to build a mosque near the site of the WTC, got so upset that they got on a plane to fly to NYC and protest along with the rest of the angry mob.  However, there was one problem:  These Christian dudes just happen to be Egyptians who speak Arabic. That didn’t go over so well with the angry mob.

At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.

“Go home,” several shouted from the crowd.

“Get out,” others shouted.

In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque.

“I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.

But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.

“I flew nine hours in an airplane to come here,” a frustrated Nassralla said afterward.

I know that the other protesters probably won’t learn anything about racial tolerance from this incident, but let’s hope that maybe the two Egyptian guys learn something about trying to join angry mobs.  I suspect that if Jesus came to NYC He’d be less upset about the mosque (after all, the Muslims also revere him as a prophet) and more  upset about the angry mob, not to mention all the money-lenders engaging in shenanigans a few blocks away.

By Thoreau

Screw it, I’ll just go ahead and Godwin this right now:  If the allegations in this report by Physicians for Human Rights are accurate, then we’re talking Mengele stuff here.

I would just note that when I wanted to try doing something different in my class to see how it works and possibly report on it (short version of the outcome:  hard to get any generalizable conclusions from it), I had to go through a training course on human subjects research, get IRB approval, and have students sign consent forms.  We’re talking about a significant amount of paperwork and ethical screening hurdles just so students can do something different on their projects and I can tell the world whether it worked or not.  Yet these nazis (yes, I said it) will get off with no consequences for conducting torture experiments on prisoners.

By Thoreau

I’m slowly reading through Nixonland.  On page  171 I learn that they were doing the “Look!  Painted schools!” line in 1967 in regards  to Vietnam.  I assume that when I’m an old man we’ll be in some other pointless clusterfuck, and some idiot will again be saying “Look!  Painted schools!” as if that makes all the bombing OK.  Let me just say in advance that I support all of the brave hunter-killer robots that will be fighting for my freedom in [insert country here] 30 years from now.

UPDATE:  Pages 206-207 are like a time machine to 2002-2005.  Lies about the cost of war.  More painted schools and orphanages.  Declaring democracy-building a success merely because an election happened, never mind whether the winners do anything to liberalize.  Pro-war astroturf.

Anyway, I’m sure we’ll repeat these mistakes yet again.  So, let me just say that I support the  flying killer robots defending our freedom in [insert country here] in 2040.  It’s for our freedom, and totally different from the last time.

By Thoreau

Where else in the world can you have a pr0n actor threaten to kill himself with a samurai sword when accused of murder, and then jump over a cliff when the SWAT team moves in?