Showing posts with label being a scientist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label being a scientist. Show all posts

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Diversity in Science

"First rate minds try to surround themselves with first rate minds.  Second rate minds try to surround themselves with third rate minds."  That is a pragmatic point for today's topic.  Whether I'm a first rate mind myself, I enjoy being around them.  And it's obvious that science does best when we have the best people involved.  My actual starting point is the morality that it is wrong to discriminate against people for who they are.

What brings this up, and out of my usual range of posting, is events over the weekend that happened to Danielle Lee, @dnlee5, a biologist and blogger at Scientific American.  Early in the process, she gave an interview and said: “If that many people were going to come out in support of me, I’d rather it be in support of one of the missions that’s going to make me redundant. I am trying to make myself redundant, truth be told. It is a lonely place to constantly be the only one like you in science,” "  One such mission being increasing diversity in science.

Very normal for my posting is the message 'you can do science'.  But that doesn't touch preconceptions people might have about who 'you' can be (quick answer: anyone).  I've heard that the common image of a scientist is a middle-aged white man with bad hair, wearing a lab coat.  Fortunately I'm nothing like that -- I've never worn a lab coat.  I've also heard that it's better to talk about living people than people like George Washington Carver and Marie Curie (still ... go read their biographies).

I'll limit myself even further, just to people that I've met personally.  The fact that I know these people does not mean (I'm looking at the nitwits* who might have snuck in to the room) that there's no discrimination in science any more.  It does underscore the fact that it's unconscionable.  If you don't accept the moral argument, then because of the pragmatic -- these are first rate people you would be refusing to let do good work.  I won't be listing names for all, which is something of a question.  On one hand, taking away someone's name is more than a little depersonalizing and can be offensive in its own right.  On the other, I've heard more than once from people that they don't like to be trotted out to be 'the woman' or the like -- that they just want to go do good science, a privilege accorded the pale males who just want to go do good science. 
  • Warren Washington is an African-American man who has won many awards, and been a leader in climate modelling.  He was also the doctoral advisor to Claire Parkinson.
  • Claire Parkinson a woman who has been studying sea ice for decades now, and wrote a book (now in second edition) on climate modeling with Warren Washington.  Also wrote a very good book solo on the history of science and math.
  • Margaret Davidson   A woman who has been director of both NOAA's Coastal Services Center and its National Ocean Service.  She lead (we met about the time she started so I know it was her idea and plan) the CSC towards and in its approach of working with communities as opposed to issuing edicts.  (NOAA being furloughed, her bio is offline).
  • Jamese Sims An African-American woman who did her thesis on modeling hurricane intensity and now works in NOAA/NWS on relating weather information to health and safety.
  • A blind PhD cognitive psychologist.  As much as I read, I boggle at someone who takes in entire textbooks by listening.  We played cards once, which I think is hard if you can't see them.  (Braille doesn't cover the fact that you can't 'see' them all at once.)  Much better card player than me, too.
  • A gay, disabled, African-American man.  There's an article about straight white male being the lowest difficulty setting for life, by John Scalzi.  This guy has been playing on the grandmaster setting.  And has remained amazingly not-bitter.  I'd last maybe a few weeks in his place.
  • James West  an African American man, inventor of the microphone that's used in several billion devices (you probably have several yourself), member of the National Inventor's Hall of Fame.
  • Jeanette Epps is an African-American woman, astronaut, inventor, engineer.
  • A female Muslim scientist from India -- we talked, well before 9/11, about the concept of jihad and what it meant.  She talked; I asked questions and listened to answers.  She said that the jihad was an internal matter -- the struggle with yourself to live a virtuous life.  I've since heard this from a number of other Muslims.
  • A Hispanic male mathematician/oceanographer
  • A Hispanic female observational oceanographer
  • A Hispanic female numerical hurricane modeller (was also a summer student of mine)
  • A transgendered, gay, man -- another for playing life on the grandmaster setting.  Incredibly broadly talented across math/science/engineering/technology _and_ languages. (Human ones as well as computer ones.)
And many more.  This list is biased towards African-Americans and women because it was prompted by an African-American woman's experiences.  It has long been obvious to me that first rate minds come in all packages, from all backgrounds.

Second rate minds try to surround themselves with third rate minds.  They can't cope with people who are as or more talented and hard working than they are.  If they must encounter a first rater, they're the ones fastest to reach for the bigotry encountered by @dnlee5.


* I'd be using stronger language except for this blog's language standards.

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Journalists' desires

I've seen several articles one telling scientists what journalists want, and why, and some going in to how.  Most recently http://www.scidev.net/global/communication/practical-guide/what-journalists-want-from-scientists-and-why.html It's all useful advice, and the one time I was allowed to speak to a journalist, I had a very good experience.

But, one thing very lacking in these articles is discussion of what it is that scientists may expect in return, why it is worth the scientist's time, and why it is worth the potential risk to professional standing and employment.

Advice: Journalists are on deadline -- so drop everything you're doing in order to answer their questions.
Q: Ok.  It's obvious why journalists want (us) scientists to drop what we're doing in order to answer their questions.  But what is the journalist promising in return?  Accurate quoting?  Many scientists have experienced the contrary.  Being quoted at all?  Not necessarily, we might not say anything quoteworthy in the journalist's opinion.  Chance to review the article prior to publication for accuracy?  Often refused on grounds of journalistic independence.

Advice: Answer all the journalist's questions, to ensure their understanding.
Q: Makes sense if we're going to talk to a journalist at all that we do what is needed for them to understand what we're saying.  But now it is a matter of not only dropping everything we're doing, but doing so for indefinitely long period.

Advice: Speak their language.  (Not English vs. Swahili so much, but glaciologist vs. ordinary citizen.)
Q: So not only do we drop everything we we're doing, for indefinite period, but even though we were interrupted in the middle of thinking hard about some obscure part of our field, we're to immediately shift mental gears from our frame for professional thinking to speaking to random citizens?  If I'm in the midst of writing a paper or proposal -- where I have to saturate in professional language -- it's going to be a while before I come down to being able to talk understandably to my wife (a bright person, but not a professional in my field so my reference for journalists; my wife understands this, journalists don't seem to.).

Even just in the context of speaking to a journalist, there are some costs and challenges to the scientist.  But let's go a little farther in what is happening for the scientist

  • Speaking to the journalist takes time away from: writing papers, writing proposals, preparing classes, teaching classes, analyzing data, building better instruments or models, feeding the animals, etc. -- all of which are needed for keeping the job.
  • If the journalist misquotes, misrepresents, etc. your meaning, those papers/proposals/etc. can encounter worse reviews from your peers, risking your job.
  • Even if correct, peers whose work you didn't mention (because you did pay attention to the 'speak their language' advice, and the work, though good and important, is too subtle for a quotable quote) can also react badly.
  • Employers may decide they didn't like how the article came out (regardless of whether the journalist did a good job) and reprisals follow.
  • Journalists often are not up front about what their article is about or for.  This makes it much harder to answer questions, as the question being asked is seldom the real question, and is not in the real context.**
** Journalists are accustomed to a fairly adversarial setting, in which if they said what they were actually looking for, they would never get it.  It may also be that the journalist doesn't know at the time they start the article what direction they're going to take.  The problem with either is that, combined with scientists attempting to speak more general language, once the journalists moves to their final, real context, the answer is now incorrect.  We (scientists) had to do some hard work to get to a quotable statement that was also accurate -- but answers live in their context.  Once you (journalists) change the context, things we were able to leave out of our quotable statement in the original context become important -- and render our answers inaccurate, or even false.

Or a different situation occurs.  I was once interviewed by a journalist for an article on running.  She presented it to me as being a fairly technical training plan article.  So we spent 30-60 minutes talking about training technicalities.  What the article actually was, was a lightweight survey of different types of running that one might do.  If she'd told me that in the first place, she could have gotten the 'quotable quotes' from me that she used in maybe 10 minutes, tops.  And I'd have been able to provide several more.

Beyond the costs suggested above, research careers also present few if any benefits to making journalists happy.
  • Nobody gets hired to a research job because of a good journalist interview they gave
  • Nobody gets promoted for one
  • Journalist interviews are not listed/listable on CVs
So, journalists, what are the benefits -- to the researcher -- of making you happy by following the advice in these 'what journalists want' articles?  Keeping in mind that there are definite costs to the scientist in the interaction.  And there are some risks, and no benefits, from the employer or peer side.  I have my own answers, which was why I spent the several hours (ultimately) talking to the reporter in that good experience.  But though I've seen many examples of journalists saying what scientists should do for journalists, I've seen them mention little reason why it's worth the costs and risks to the scientists.

Update:
via Twitter, Matt Shipman, @shiplives, offers:
A few answers to your Q: & &

The first, I think, really answers more why scientists should be on twitter et al., which is a different matter than journalist interviews.  The third involves an experiment.  But my read of it suggests that the conclusion that can be drawn is more limited than all journalists -- just those journalists who are publishing in high profile, among your peers, media outlets.  
 

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Do scientists have special obligations to society?

The subject line comes from Janet Stemwedel, who asks the question.  There are two spots to answer, one if you are a scientist, and one if you're not.  'scientist' is defined in the articles.
 
If you're a scientist

Nonscientists' comments

I think it's a worthwhile and interesting question, and encourage you all to go answer.  Feel free to leave a copy of your answer here.  Or do some free-range commenting on the question here if there's a reason not to post it over on Janet's blogs.

Added:
Something which hasn't been brought up (yet) at Janet's blogs is this:
It is illegal to practice law without a license, to pretend to be a medical doctor, or in many states to claim to be an engineer if you don't have appropriate certification.  There's no such licensing or certification process for 'scientist'. 

Does that mean scientists have more, or fewer, or different, obligations to society than doctors, lawyers, or engineers?

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Science's Spock Problem

XKCD captured perfectly where scientists start from in terms of relating to others about their subject:
What we do, the part of the universe we study, is wonderful, fascinating, and we want to run around sharing our wonderful discoveries with everybody.  Including when it's dog vomit slime molds.  See also my niece's write up from jr. high about knight anoles.

And that's what makes the Spock problem such a problem.  What I mean by this is that there is heavy cultural (in the US at least) expectation that scientists _are_, or at least _should_ be, like Mr. Spock -- emotionless, heartless, 'rational', and fundamentally not human.  Humans, and scientists are human, do generally respond to society's expectations.  One common response being to present a public appearance of conforming to those societal expectations.  In private, it can be a different matter.  But, per yesterday's comment, scientists do tend to play in to this expectation in public and it doesn't, I think, work well in the larger society.  So public gets the wildly wrong idea in that case that scientists don't criticize each other, among other wildly wrong ideas.
One leg of the problem is that few of us humans like being around, learning from, having discussions with, aliens.  If scientists in public act like Spock, then, they render themselves largely useless as communicators, teachers, citizens.  Another, though, is that some other large number people are sufficiently taken by the Spock expectation that if the scientist is _not_ Spock-like, emotional, flat, etc., they must not be trustworthy.

The Spock problem really strikes earlier, though, as children are growing up.  Starting with the kids themselves, _they_ see that the world is fascinating and from birth are aggressively setting about learning how it works, i.e., being scientists.  Not necessarily (yet) professional grade, but scientists.  Time passes, though, and then they encounter the expectation that scientists are supposed to be Spock-like.  Whatever the kids have in mind to become, Spock is seldom it.  Science gets dropped from their prospects.  When I visited a jr. high science class some years ago, the students were astonished when I mentioned that a scientist their textbook gave a short biography of had a sense of humor and had told a couple of jokes in a presentation.

It also strikes through teachers.  They may have succumbed to the image themselves, or never really been much interested in science themselves, etc., and wind up using the Spock image in class.  The notion that the learning of and about science is emotionless, neat, orderly, and so on.  Science is much more like Mythbusters -- passionate, creative, and messy -- than Spock.  Even when teachers would avoid this themselves (as the jr. high teacher whose class I visited did), school boards and state curriculum designs can make it largely impossible to avoid the Spock approach, demanding memorization of long lists of things, demanding blind adherence to a schedule (science does not live on schedules!), and the like.

One venue that's been helping to break down the false image is science blogs.  Not all of them, as the Spock image is still very strong, but a goodly number.  You can hear from scientists directly about the things they're up to, interested in, and see the videos of their dog vomit slime mold.  Or a group of anole fans at Anole Annals.

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Scientist mutual criticism

I've been active on twitter lately (@rgrumbine).  The 140 character limit poses the problems to me that regular readers would expect.  140 words is pretty short for me.  Still, there are some good things out there (I'll be posting a raft of links from my twitter feeds Real Soon Now).  And sometimes a short comment is sufficient, but reminds me of things worth more than 140 characters.

One short comment, bizarre to me, was that scientists don't criticize each other's work.  On one narrow aspect, there's some truth to this.  That aspect being that, for example, pretty much all the people studying sea ice think that sea ice is something worth studying.  Within any given niche of science, occupants of the niche think it's important.  The thing is, each niche is very, very, small.  Occupants of every other niche are more than happy to tell the sea ice people that sea ice isn't nearly as important as their own niche.  At length and volume.  Of course the sea ice people argue back.  And so it goes.  Every multidisciplinary meeting I'm at, this is routine conversation.  Partly it's just a game.  Partly it can lead to something interesting -- say when the sea ice person (finally :-) persuades the ... let's say boundary layer theorist ... that there really is something interesting -- to a boundary layer theorist -- about sea ice.  It's for this latter prospect that I play the game (sometimes being the persuaded rather than persuader).

Yet, even within a relatively small niche like sea ice, there are sub-niches, and sub-sub-niches.  Each of these divisions, even while agreeing that sea ice is important and important to study, is in disagreement about the how, why, what about studying sea ice.  One has in any natural science a certain amount of division between observation/modeling/theory.  The observers think what's really needed is more and better observations, modellers think you need bigger and better models, theorists think we need better theories.  All are right, to some degree.  All are wrong, to some other degree.  But one thing this guarantees is that the sub-niches are ready to criticize each other.  And do so.
Go down another level, to sea ice observers.  You've got divisions between remote sensing people (satellite-users, which includes me) and in situ observers (which doesn't, yet).  Both, again, happy and active at saying theirs is the more important.  Among the observers who like to be on the ice floe seeing what's happening, in great detail, they divide again -- some saying the ocean side is more important, some the atmosphere side.  On the atmospheric side, they divide yet again, some saying that it's the turbulence that needs most understanding (you're not surprised that these are the people who observe turbulence over sea ice), some the solar and earth radiation, some the clouds, and so on.

Having burrowed down this far, to the people who observe (rather than model or build theories) atmospheric turbulence, in situ, over sea ice, we're _still_ not done with the divisions, and thence occasions for the scientists to disagree and criticize.  After all, there are different ways of observing turbulence.  Surely mine is better than yours, else I'd be using yours.  Here's _why_ mine is better (criticism of yours ensues, you, for the same reason, counter with criticisms of mine).

Even having started down in a niche that's already quite small, we've got 5 levels of subdivision.  Every subdivision being an opportunity for one group to criticize another.  And that opportunity is taken, even though all are agreed that sea ice is important.

Now, why is this kind of thing not obvious to everybody outside science?  Many reasons, no doubt.  One I'll point to is that not many people know scientists personally.  Since you're reading here and I talk about this kind of thing (the 'doing science' and 'being a scientist' tags), you're not really in that group.  But, consider the American Geophysical Union annual meeting.  About 10,000 scientists get together for a week.  I guarantee that in the course of that week, there are at least 70,000 arguments/criticisms/disagreements.  (1 per day per scientist is a very low estimate).  There are also something like 10,000 presentations.  From that huge pool of criticisms and presentations, you'll see maybe 10 articles in the media, all about the scientific presentations rather than the criticisms.  Media coverage, unavoidably, presents not even the tip of the iceberg.  More like a few particularly interesting snowflakes on the iceberg. 

Some of this leads me to some other thoughts, which involves how scientists present science and themselves publicly (it's never just one thing, not even media) that I'll take up in another post.

Update from my twitter feed:
@hurricanejim 9 Jun
Why NOAA is quite likely wrong about their projection of Atlantic hurricane activity by the 21st century

Link is to a professional paper he published.  I'll suggest that there's criticism involved in that tweet.  Check in to scientists who are on twitter and you'll see much more of this than you ever will in the media.

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Science as a method rather than conclusion

Some of us carry science with us throughout our life.  I'm one, and think we tend to have more fun in our lives.  That's the method aspect.  To my mind, the absolutely central aspect of science is "try to learn more about how the universe works".  All of us can do this, in almost any circumstance.  Some don't choose to do it, but even if you're not doing it at a professional level, you can do it.  Learning things about the world _you_ didn't know before is, still, science.

A side effect of this view is that I 'stray' from my alleged focus.  This includes field glaciology, planetary astronomy, observing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and, well, many topics that show up on my blogroll and points farther afield.

Really, though, my view is described best by one of my students.  I was teaching college physical geology (a story in its own right, but one I'll neglect here) and late in the class, after the field trip, one of my students mentioned that the class had changed how he looked at the world. 

The world is a fascinating place.  Look anywhere and amazing things are happening, or in progress, or about to happen.  To quote a different person, my niece; she went for _adventures_, not merely walks.  Just look at those ants.  What are they doing?!  Why this, and not that?!  In the case of physical geology, you can look at the river meanders that are in process of getting more (or less) extreme, the hillside that is in the process of slumping because the roadcut was too steep, and ... just amazingly many different things we can all see if we look.  The countryside is an _active_ place, always evolving to different conditions.

Related point is that my wife and I went traveling to Alaska with a pair of field biologists.  I know from nothing about biology, especially field biology.  But my wife and I had a lot of fun walking around Denali National Park with the field biologists.  She and I would see "a bunch of mossy-kind-of-stuff", being un-knowledgeable.  Our friends were seeing all kinds of amazing things.  "You don't get moss like _this_ back east!!", "Just _look_ at how thick that moss is!!".

We have tools for doing science, making more things observable, or testing ideas.  But the ground zero of being a scientist and doing science is that we realize that the universe is an incredibly interesting place.  The tools are aids, not requirements.  Figuring out the universe, the fascinating and stranger-than-we-_can_-suppose universe, is the requirement and excitement.

so say I :-)

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Career Day Educational Paths

Scientists spend a lot of time learning things, so it isn't unreasonable that the path to a career in science includes a lot of time in school. Along the way, though, remember that it is the learning things that is the important side, not so much the grades. For me this meant, for instance, taking optional classes that I was not necessarily going to get good grades in. But I learned a lot in them, more than if I'd taken the safer, easier classes. That has served me well.

College is the first part of the path. College expenses have soared since I was in school. But the method that worked for me is still available. Namely, we had very little money at home, to the point where no 4 year school was affordable. I had worked my junior and senior years of high school, not that it would have come near covering college costs, but it helped give me at least some spending money in college. The main thing was to select several schools and see who would come up with a good enough financial aid package for me to afford to attend. I wound up with the maximum in loans, the maximum in state and federal grants, the maximum in summer job earning requirement, maximum in work-study, and an aid plan that meant I'd graduate with zero dollars in savings. The rest, which was a lot, was scholarships from my school -- Northwestern University. That meant that I'd wound up at the most expensive school I'd applied to. The least expensive was my state school, which said that they'd give me much less than they thought I needed (and agreed with Northwestern about how much I and my family could come up with). Easy decision, even though they'd originally been my first choice.

Something that is more an option now than back then is to spend your first two years at a community college. Expenses are much lower, and the standard freshman chemistry/biology/physics/calculus are taught by people who are interested in teaching them, versus four year schools where it's often viewed as undesirable to teach such classes. I took Calculus III and Ordinary Differential Equations at my local community college and was very happy with the results.

As I was selecting colleges, I heard that the typical college student changes major 3-4 times. So in addition to the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that I planned to major in, I also required that the school have a good Astronomy department and one or two other things. This helped narrow the field, and it ensured that if I decided I didn't like what I started with, I could change major to something else and still be in a good department. First I changed to just Electrical Engineering. Then to Applied Math. My area of application was originally supposed to be fluid dynamics, but that sequence was cancelled. So I jumped over to Astrophysics for my application area.

A couple of things I did in college worked out very well, and even better for my sons since they didn't have to take time to figure them out after they got to college. First, regardless of what area(s) you're interested in, join up and be active in the student groups for that interest. Different fields have different personalities, so you can get clues about whether you'd be happy in that field early on. The student groups also have more information on just what the field is like. Also join the more general groups, like Society of Women Engineers or National Society of Black Engineers (two excellent groups on my campus, probably our best-run).

Second, is to make some kind of connection -- maybe a job, maybe volunteering -- to work with someone in research. This is what I did for work-study the last two years of college. It gave me excellent practice at doing science as opposed to just taking classes about science. And it gave me a good working relationship with someone active in a field I was interested in (ice ages and climate change).

Thanks to my experience working with a professor while I was an undergraduate, I realized that my graduate school experience would depend strongly on whether my adviser was someone I could work happily with. You spend a lot of time with your adviser. If you're dreading each meeting, every day, it's going to be a very long and unpleasant time in school if you even get the degree. On the other hand, there are a lot of different people and types of people, even within the department. And many different departments in the country. Again, I was not as concerned about exact area of research I would do -- the universe is interesting. At one school, I'd have been doing theoretical climatology, at another I'd have been doing numerical models of tornadoes. At the school I went to, the University of Chicago, it was polar oceanography. While I was happy enough with the people I talked to at the other schools, my adviser and several other faculty were a step above in our conversations.

After graduate school, it's likely that you'll spend time in a postdoctoral position. Almost certain in biological sciences, likely in physical sciences. I earned an unrestricted ocean modeling fellowship -- meaning that I could do my ocean modeling at any school, with any adviser, that I chose. It's a great setup, though rare. More typically, you'll be reading help wanted pages of your professional society's web site. Anyhow, during this phase, be looking for your next job starting from day one. (I waited, which was not a good idea.) Most postdocs are only a year or two, so you'll need to be looking either for your next postdoc or a longer term position.

Every two or three years, there is a flurry of reports about the 'looming terrible shortage' of math/science/engineering people. Often, they include comments about how anybody who earns a degree (or, specifically, doctorate) in these areas will be flooded with offers. These articles have been common since I was an undergraduate, and I've seen sources saying so since the mid-1960s. There has never been a shortage in the sense of fewer applicants than jobs. The major report that came out when I was in school, which contributed to a surge in graduate students in math/science/engineering, turned out to have used fewer than 3 applicants for every 2 jobs as its definition of 'shortage'. My friends who were among the 1 in 3 who did not get jobs in science disagreed with that definition. Things are better now, but there is not, and never has been, a guarantee, or a shortage. So thinking about your job hunt much earlier than I did (not until after I defended my thesis) is a good idea, basically a requirement.

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Career Day Biographical Notes

I'll be talking with a career day crowd Friday, which reminded me that many of the questions the coordinator offered for the speakers to consider are also relevant to my purposes in the blog. For this note, I'll take up the more biographical side of things.

The only thing I can suggest is universal in scientist biographies is that we all think, and did so from an early age, that the universe is very interesting. Or at least some part of it is. I wasn't very excited about insects when I was young (they're more interesting to me these days, now that I'm ... less young). But a friend who is an entomologist, with particular interest in bees, has always been. It seems common, which saddens me, for kids to be taught not to ask questions, and not to find the universe so interesting, somewhere between, say, 10 and 18 years old. Scientists are ones who never lost that interest. The proverbial childlike sense of wonder about the universe is with us still.

Often that wonder and interest translates to doing a lot of learning. Sometimes we did it in school, and sometimes on our own. Not all of us were interested in school, or got particularly good grades in it when young. If not in school, then many did their learning by a lot of reading on our own (my path) or going out and observing the world (my biologist friend). But there are also scientists who weren't terribly interested in studying or practicing science prior to college; interested in the universe, but not so much or in a way that they'd start watching the bees in their back yard, or reading their way through the library.

My path also included a small telescope, messing around with electronics, taking apart clocks (they were mechanical in those days!), playing and watching baseball, running around, swimming, watching some good TV shows, and watching a lot of bad TV shows. And I read a lot -- some math, science, and history, and a lot of science fiction and mysteries. The telescope was the sort of 'Christmas' telescope that serious amateur astronomers intensely dislike -- poor mount and not very good optics. Worse, I sometimes used it watching through the window (you can hear their wails from here). But ... bad as it was, and my use of it ... it opened a new universe to me. I could see Jupiter's moons, that Saturn was blobby (not good enough to show me rings), and a huge increase in number of craters on the moon. I was practically Galileo!

Through the end of high school, at least, I haven't noticed much difference between the people who eventually became scientists and those became engineers. All the preceding applies to both. Indeed, in high school, I'd decided I was going to be an engineer -- Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (I was going to get both degrees). Conversely, the descriptions above apply to many people I know who never went in to science or engineering. My exchange student son, for instance, went in to business and now works in IT at the Deutscher Bank.

You don't have to be good at math to be good in science. Needs saying. I was, so I do kinds of science that use a lot of math. But not everyone is, and even those who are ok with math don't always like to do it. There are areas of science that don't use much math.

Which brings up the suggestion end of things: Try a lot of different things. Try math, biology, physics, chemistry, meteorology, oceanography, just plain walking through the woods, and watching city pigeons. Make mud pies, run, play sports, learn a musical instrument, learn languages. Do some reading, some observing. Fool around with ideas from my project folder. Make up your own projects and see what happens.

For the parents, do support and encourage your kids in trying things, but don't suspend your parental judgement. The idea of trying lots of different things, without worrying about whether you're good at them, is one my mother applied in raising my sisters and me. It was one of her most brilliant ideas, which I've stolen for my own parenting. But this didn't stop her from steering me away from inventing my own rocket fuel when I (a very clumsy 10 year old) was interested in trying that.

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Logical Fallacies and Scientific Method

Cracked had a very nice article on logical fallacies -- that we all make as a matter of course.  Also some good illustrations and suggestions.  Aside from the fact that it was a humor magazine that had such a nice article on rational thought, I was struck by the fact that each of the points mentioned are ones that the practice of science has addressed.

The 5 natural fallacies mentioned are:
5. We're Not Programmed to Seek "Truth," We're Programmed to "Win"
4. Our Brains Don't Understand Probability
3. We Think Everyone's Out to Get Us 
2. We're Hard-Wired to Have a Double Standard
1. Facts Don't Change Our Minds

Let's take a look at what science method does to combat these:
 
5. We're Not Programmed to Seek "Truth," We're Programmed to "Win"

In science, the 'win' is changed to be the successful seeking for 'truth'.  Out-talking someone, as in a public debate, or out-wording them on an internet argument, or just browbeating them enough that they leave in either, is not a win.  Hence the lack of interest from scientists in 'debate'.  Putting forth an idea that is seen, eventually, to match reality better than what came before is the win.

4. Our Brains Don't Understand Probability

Therefore, we go through the occasionally ugly math to nail down the probabilities of our results.  We just can't trust our intuitions about probability -- our brains don't naturally handle it at all well.  We go back and work through that math, and then after publishing, many people read the news article and say 'everybody knew that already'.  While everybody may have thought it in the first place, we do the work because it's also common for a reader to see the same article and say 'that's absurd, everybody knows it isn't so'. We may not agree that it was obviously true, or true at all, but we can agree on whether 2 * 3 = 6.

3. We Think Everyone's Out to Get Us

In the sense, the article notes, that "If you're smart and savvy, you know not to trust anyone. This is why we can excuse ourselves for using shady or flat-out dishonest tactics to win an argument. We're sure the other guy is doing much, much worse."

So how do you work towards truth if everybody is out to get you?  One part is that when someone is found lying in their work, they're out of the field. Contrast that with, say, business or politics.  Another is to enlist the help of other people who are knowledgeable in the topic and have them read the new work to ensure that there aren't any obvious mistakes or frauds.  Peer review.  Bad papers still make it in to the scientific literature, but it improves the chances that what you're reading is not too badly flawed.  When the peer review process fails, the editors in charge usually take it very seriously.  When's the last time a corporate president resigned because a vice president let a salesman lie about their product?

A different, major, part of the method is that experiments must be repeatable.  Good enough a fake to get past a reviewer is not enough.  Somebody, somewhere, must be able to repeat your experiment and get sufficiently similar results.  For preference, someone should actually do so, but funding agencies don't like paying two or more groups to run the same experiment -- a failing in funding agencies and those who allocate funds for research.  But if the experiment is not even in principle repeatable, if the answer is 'trust me', you're in trouble.

2. We're Hard-Wired to Have a Double Standard
My science example is different than the article's, but the same principle is involved.  It is natural to consider evidence in favor of your position to be better than the evidence against it.  It is so natural that it's also natural to simply ignore the evidence against your position outright, and only look at the evidence that supports it.  Even if you have to make it up, or use for your source someone who did.

To combat this natural double-standard, in science, unlike politics/business/law*/..., you are supposed to present the evidence without regard for whether it supports your position or not.  And if you fail to present evidence that is against it, you're in trouble (#3, #5).

1. Facts Don't Change Our Minds
Being able to do this is what I called the central skill of a scientist.  It is so important because it is so unnatural to us humans.  Quoting some pieces of the original article:
....  Let's go back to the beginning for a moment, and the theory that people figured out how to build arguments as a form of verbal bullying rather than a method of spreading correct information. That means that there are actually two reasons somebody might be arguing with you: because they actually want to get you to think the right thing, and because they're trying to establish dominance over you to lower your status in the tribe (or office or forum) and elevate their own. That means there's a pretty severe cost to being on the wrong side of an issue completely separate from the issue itself. ....
So During Your Next Argument, Remember ...You won't remember this. You're hard-wired to remain entrenched, and the Internet makes it worse because your political beliefs are pasted all over Facebook and wherever else you post your opinions. Backing down means going back on all that. It means letting down your team. Every inch of your psychology will fight it.
Doread the original article in full.

* Law has its own standards on proof and approach to truth.  And it must.  My wife is a lawyer, so we've had some fun talks about the differences and where they came from.  One where it differs most strongly from science is how it handles the natural double standard.  In science, we take the side of making practitioners do the highly un-natural thing of avoiding the double standard.  Law, at least in common law countries like the US (and UK, ...), takes the opposite -- if everyone is predisposed to some level of double standard, and side-taking in their arguments, let's take it out to the extreme -- each side presents the best possible case for its own position, and only that.  Then have a judge or jury assess who made the better case.  The people deciding which is the stronger case are not the ones who make the case in the first place, so (the design hopes) they won't be subject to the double-standard problem.  In science, the same people who would be deciding which case is stronger are the ones making (some of) the cases.

The article helped me understand a conflict I'd encountered.  On one hand, doing science is very natural.  We are all disposed to learning how the universe around us works, starting from birth.  On the other hand, what I see in internet discussions bears strong resemblance to the 5 fallacies discussed above, even when the topic is scientific ("Is CO2 a greenhouse gas?").  Even though trying to find out more about the universe is natural, the methods that evolved over the last few thousand years to help us do so have required us to do it in differently than we reflexively choose.

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Undergraduate Opportunities from NASA and NSF

Last Monday was opportunities for high school, and by chance, today, I'll move up to college.  From one of my email lists:

NASA offers paid undergraduate and graduate level internships in a wide variety of disciplines.  Over 200 internships are available.  The deadline is March 1st, but offers may begin going out as early as Feb. 2nd.  Visit http://intern.nasa.gov to apply for up to 15 opportunities with a single application.

NSF offers a wide variety of paid summer research experiences for undergraduates.  To search over 600 programs, please visit:  http://www.pathwaystoscience.org/undergrads.asp

For summer research specifically in ocean sciences:
http://www.pathwaystoscience.org/oceanscience.asp

For summer research specifically in engineering:
http://www.pathwaystoscience.org/engineering.asp

For mentoring and professional development support, please take a look at AGEP alliances:
http://www.agep.us

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AMSR-E failure and fallout

Update 17 October: The meeting last Tuesday gives little hope.  There will definitely be no data for weeks.  I don't know what prevents a conclusion of never.
original:
AMSR-E has failed and is probably permanently out of commission.  For most of you, that's merely news.  Perhaps a source of amusement and interest is now gone.  For me, since I use(d) it in my day job, AMSR-E failing means some real work.  Most of that work was already planned, but now it needs to be done more speedily.

As I've often said here, and even more often in 3d, data are messy and ugly.  One sort of ugliness is that instruments do not last forever.  When (not if) they fail, you have to turn to a different instrument.  Ideally, you already have the replacement in hand and have been running it regularly and intercomparing its results with your current main system and ensured that there are no differences other than those you wanted -- like better resolution on the new instrument.  The present situation is not ideal, so, as we usually do in science, I'm making the best of it that I can.  And making notes for what to do when I have a chance to rework the immediate fixes.

Step 1 was to bring back in to service an (even) older satellite data source that I used to use.  I stopped using it because it was hearing voices, which degraded the quality of the work I did.  On the other hand, using it is far better than having no data at all.  This is in hand, and will be officially operational tomorrow.

Step 2 is to develop a 'voice filter' for the data, to get around that problem.  Fingers crossed, tests today look promising.

Step 3 is to bring a new instrument in to use.  It's newer than AMSRE, but not as high resolution.  Plus there are some issues with biases as compared to the older record.  To bring it on line, these need to be reduced (possibly substantially), or, if we're very unlucky, characterized and my downstream users warned of the change (they already know about what's happening tomorrow, at least the immediately-to-hand folks).

AMSR-E did a good job.  Its designed life span was 5 years (maybe 6), and it gave data for about 9.5.  The real problem, for me at work, was not AMSR-E, but the fact that no successor was launched in that 9.5 years.  A launch of AMSR-2 is currently (last I heard from my spies) planned for February 2012, and the spies report that there's discussion of maybe moving up the launch date.  Fingers crossed.  On the other hand, for my work, even a launch tomorrow doesn't save me from steps 2 and 3 above and the work involved.  It takes time for a satellite to reach its working orbit, to be brought up to operational status for collecting data, for the data flow system on earth to start passing out the data to some locations, and some more for the data to come down to me in a form that I can use.  These are a matter of months (optimistically) to years (pessimistically).  So, again, cross your fingers.  If we're lucky, by this time next year, we'll have AMSR-2 in my work's operations.

Irrespective of my working life, the gap between AMSR-E and AMSR-2 just by its existence degrades the quality of the climate data record.  It makes impossible the direct inter-comparison and inter-calibration between the two instruments.  A few years down the road, we're looking at a larger scale example of that, as the next set of polar-orbiting satellites (JPSS is the acronym there, now, used to be NPOESS) was delayed by the 2011 budget, and looks likely to be delayed in the 2012 budget as well. 

Bottom line message:
It'll probably be a bit before I'm back to writing normally, including how my sea ice outlooks did (pretty well, actually; the high and low, I thought were high and low (5.0 and 4.4 vs. the observed 4.6), and the two model predictions were 4.8 and 4.6, vs. the observed 4.6).

If people are really interested in the gruesome details of what I'm doing at work, that I can keep writing about.  Any takers?  (bwah hah hah!)

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Best Frenemies

A friend refers to another scientist as his best enemy.  The important thing about this is, he is not angry or upset about the other scientist.  I'll call them John and Jane, John being the one I know.  John and Jane are both outspoken people.  Consequently, at meetings the two of them spend a fair amount of time disagreeing with each other.  And they disagree vigorously.

That vigor is part of what makes Jane a best enemy for John.  John's not a quiet person himself.  So it would be easy for him to vigorously say what he thinks is true and other people to quietly agree, because no other ideas were presented, or to quietly disagree.  Quiet disagreement would be worse.  It would mean that John would not have a chance to explain the parts of his thinking that would persuade those people that he was right after all.  With a vigorous enemy, however, John can be confident that Jane will bring up those points that aren't clear to other people.  And then John can explain them.  After this, if anyone disagrees with him, there's a fair chance that it's because he doesn't really have things right himself.  And he also has a chance to change his thinking, to arrive at something even better than what either he or Jane thought were the case when the two started their discussion.

The even larger bonus is that whatever conclusion John and Jane reach personally, they're confident that the entire audience knows what is the real topic of discussion, and why they each think as they do.  This puts enough substance on the table for the audience to be making good decisions.  If John's position isn't the one that some in the audience walk away with, that's fine.  He's going to keep thinking about the topic himself and maybe decide that something closer to Jane's original position is more correct.  Or maybe he realizes that there's a better way of describing why he thinks as he does.  Either way, some scientific progress is made.

Another part of what makes it work is that their discussions, regardless of how vigorous (an uninformed observer might say 'violent'), are technical.  Both of them have serious professional reasons for their conclusions.  And it is those professional reasons they turn to, not cherry picking starting points for time series trend analysis and other dishonest or ignorant methods.

A final matter that makes it work is that neither of them is personally upset by the fact that they have professional disagreement.  Both apparently rather relish it.  After spending 8 hours at the meeting disagreeing with each other about almost everything under the sun, they go out to dinner together and chat pleasantly about other topics.

Strictly speaking, I only have 'John's view of matters.  I don't know 'Jane'.  Still, they've been doing it for decades now, and I think even of 'John' were extremely clueless about other people (and my observation is that he is fairly clueful), he'd have picked up on 'Jane's differing viewpoint. 

Names and genders may well have been changed for the purpose of the story telling.  The people and descriptions are otherwise accurate.

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Happy Anniversary ...

 ... to me and my wife.  Part of the recent hiatus is due to me taking some time off to celebrate my 5th wedding anniversary with my wife.  I've marked this as a 'being a scientist' post since being a spouse is another thing that scientists do.  I enjoy that, and others of my roles -- being a son, father, uncle, brother.  Science is another, of course, and I enjoy that too, and is the point of the blog.  But a secondary point is that scientists are people.

We took the time, among other things, to think about what we have done in the 5 years so far -- good ideas we've carried out, storms we've weathered, and so forth.  And to think about what kinds of things we might like to try in the next 5.  There's a bit of science there -- experiments.  We try things, and some we like and keep doing, and some we don't, and quit.  Probably none of these experiments are publishable, but that's not the point.  We learn what we're trying to learn.  And have a lot of fun along the way!

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Says who?

I think citations are a greatly underappreciated part of scientific works.  They also, for some of the same reasons, provide a way of assessing the strength of a source even if you don't know the topic that's involved.

My first real introduction to citations as being important was when a history teacher of mine in college was concerned that I'd committed academic dishonesty -- failed to cite a source for something she felt was obscure.  After a nervous couple of minutes for me, we had a nice chat.  What I'd done was to mention, without citation, Newton's prism experiment.  I hadn't cited it because it was something I'd been seeing mentioned for years without citation, so figured counted as 'common knowledge' and not in need of a citation.  My history teacher, on the other hand, had never heard of it before, so was looking for the citation to the person who had discovered the experiment (perhaps a citation to Newton himself; I now have the right book -- Newton's Opticks).

So that's one use of citations -- avoid annoying your teacher.  Somewhat more generally, credit people for the work they do.  That's an important thing in being a scientist, as the people you're giving credit to are your colleagues.  Conversely, your colleagues will be peeved, to put it mildly, if you fail to credit them for their work.

The use at hand, as the title suggests, is to provide the backup for your claims.  You could avoid some of that by providing full descriptions yourself, but then your article becomes impossibly long.  Instead you can write something like "The earth is round[1] and rotates[2].", where you then give the full address to 1 and 2 somewhere later in the document (in print media days) or hyperlink the words directly.  An alternate that I prefer is to provide the direct 'who' and 'when', such as "The earth is round [c.f. e.g. Aristotle, ca. 322 BC*] and rotates [Foucault, 1851]."  In this way the reader immediately sees something about who your source is, and how old it is, and retains some merit even in a hyperlinking medium.

If you could read infinitely fast, it might be doable to simply read everything from everywhere.  But for us humans, some means of trimming the candidates to manageable volumes is needed.  So, for myself at least, if I'm trying to learn about a scientific topic, I head for scientific sources, or as close to the original as I can understand.

The bibliography/citation list is a quick way to figure this out.  Places that are citing wikipedia articles, newspaper editorials, and so forth, for most of what they have to say are not strong sources.  If the topic has scientific merit, there will be scientific papers on it.  If I couldn't read, or would have a hard time finding and reading, the original scientific papers (which is true in most fields), then I want to be learning from someone who could and did.  The strong source is one which is providing me the ability to go in to the literature and start learning about the particular part of the article which caught my attention.

This last is another important purpose of citation: It helps readers learn more.  I would rather be learning the science from an author who is trying to help me learn it.

Now for the mirror test: How do my own postings hold up to that standard?  In this post, it does ok, in the sense that this isn't about the content of science; it's my opinion of some things to consider in looking for sources from which to learn the science.  In the science posts, not always as well as I'd like.  So I'll take this post as a reminder to myself to include more references and links.

In my blogroll, two that are particularly good with their citations are Skeptical Science and RealClimate, though I think almost all are pretty good -- at least better than I.

*
c.f., I translate to myself as meaning 'See, for example'.  It means that there's more than one source, and this is either the one that I used (though I know there are more), or that for some reason I prefer it.
Update: my self-translation is incorrect, see Nick and Peter's comments.  What I really want is 'e.g.', for exempli gratia  (free example is my translation here, unfortunately, it's my son who is the latinist.)

ca means 'about' (circa).
Detail: Says who?

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Internationality of Science

Comments here and at Serendipity by Kooiti Masuda remind me yet again of the internationality of science.  Not news to people in the field, but perhaps for younger readers.  And the small world that science is.

Here, Masuda observed: Precise description of the polar motion by Hisashi Kimura (who led observations at Mizusawa) was a moment of demonstration that the Japanese can substantially contribute to the international scientific enterprise.

Today, of course, it's no surprise.  But in 1899, when this was happening, Japan was new to the world science scene.  The US wasn't exactly an old hand itself.  While we'd had some individual excellent scientists before then (Ben Franklin, for instance), it wasn't until after the land grant universities (founded in 1850s and 1860s) had been at work for some decades that the US was noticeable in international science.  Japan had an even later start and more rapid run up.  Today, there are other countries going through the process of building their science infrastructures to the point of making significant contributions internationally.

Over at Serendipity, part of Masuda's comment is:


It reminded me another thought. There was a great development of computational geophysics in the latter half of the 20th century, including both climate modeling (Manabe, Arakawa, Kasahara), meteorological data assimilation (Sasaki, Miyakoda) and quantitative seismology (Aki, Kanamori), largely contributed by Japanese-American (born in Japan and emigrated to the USA) scientists. They made innovation by amalgamating the oriental tradition of precise numerical computation and the western tradition of rigorous logical mathematics. (I have not yet substantiated this interpretation, though.)

The very small world effect involved -- I have a connection with almost every person he names.  Manabe would probably even remember me :-) after our chats in the 1990s, where I'd tell him how bad the sea ice was in his model and he'd cheerfully agree and then tell me about how good his results were anyhow.  We were both right.  Miyakoda, I've never met, but he's the reason that I've had sushi.  My graduate advisor knew Miyakoda and apparently Miyakoda had a comment that nobody could be an oceanographer who hadn't had sushi.  So after I'd successfully defended my thesis, my advisor took me out to a sushi place, thereby finishing my qualifications.  Kanamori I wouldn't count except for some jr. high students.  Namely, I'd attended a presentation of Kanamori's when I was in graduate school.  Quiet a few years later, I went to talk to a jr. high science class.  It turned out they were studying earthquakes, and their textbook had a personal profile of Kanamori.  The kids were shocked/amazed/bewildered when I mentioned his sense of humor coming through in his presentation.  The notion of a scientist having a sense of humor was pretty strange to them.

Kooiti Masuda: Do you know of any English language histories of Japanese mathematics and science?  Your comment about the numerical computation tradition is interesting to me.


I also knew a Japanese-born and -educated scientist who was no great fan of mathematics -- Ted (Tetsuya) Fujita, who liked to be known as 'Mr. Tornado', and was down the hall from me at the University of Chicago.  He had phenomenal physical insight, and prided himself on using a minimum of mathematics.

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Science Fairs

Last week I had the pleasure of judging at the Eleanor Roosevelt High School science fair.  The   pleasure was only added to by the breakfast, snacks, and beverages provided by the ERHS PTSA.  Program organized by Jennifer Massagli

The main fun, as always, was talking to the students.  But I'll also make some comments here for students who are thinking about next year's science fair projects.  One part of the fun (for judges) being to talk to the students, I'll advise that students act like they're interested in their projects.  "Here is something I slapped together because the school made me." even if true, is just not the way to your judge's heart.  I also make this comment to graduate students and scientists about their presentations.  Many people don't act interested in their own work.  Trust me, if you aren't interested, we won't be either.

Fun parts of the talk include finding out what prompted the student to do their project and where they might take it in the future.  Also an important part of a professional presentation.  One student I spoke with was looking at the output of solar cells, how they depended on light sources and filters.  This is sufficient reason for the science fair project, and he explored that question ok.  But it became much more interesting to me when I discovered that he was using the solar cells as proxies for plant photosynthesis.  Plants do rely on the sun, as do solar cells, and there are degrees to which you can indeed use solar cells to map out plant responses.

A different line of interest for me is to see what the students think of to investigate, and how.  Many different sorts of things investigation, and many ingenious ideas on how to get the measurements.  Both are good areas to use and show your creativity, which is one of the areas on the official scoresheet.

The judge's worksheet we had is a fairly typical one (I've judged science fairs at several different levels and areas).  General areas are scientific thought (15 points), Creative ability (10), thoroughness/clarity (15), exhibit presentation (10).  Total of 50.

For scientific thought, the areas are:
1) The problem/hypothesis is stated clearly
2) Variables are clearly recognized and defined by the experiment
3) There is a procedural plan for obtaining a solution and the plan covered the problem completel

For Creativity:
4) The approach showed creativity in solving the problem.
5) The analysis of the data showed creativity

Thoroughness/Clarity:
6) Data and results are clearly presented and there are adequate data to support the conclusions, such as replication of experiments
7) The conclusion is justified based on the data and results
8) Project shows evidence of laboratory, observational, and computational skill needed to obtain and analyze the data

Exhibit Presentation
9) Backboard is well-designed and effective in presenting the project
10) Student is able to discuss the project clearly and concisely; demonstrating and understanding of principles involved in the research


Standard checklists don't always cover vitally important things.   For instance, though it only officially shows up as 5 points (#10), in practice it is about a million points that if you don't know what you did or why, you're not going to do well.  The 5 points is to distinguish between students who did do their own project, not to distinguish between students who did, and those who didn't.  This is seldom an issue, but it does show up from time to time.  I usually feel sorry for these students, because it's usually a matter of an over-helpful or over-involved advisor or parent.  Unfortunately, the outcome is that the student doesn't know why they were doing one thing rather than another, or even that there might have been other things to try.

Students are also usually very good at the straightforward parts of the list.  Almost everybody states their hypothesis clearly (#1) and backboards (#9) are usually very good, and several others.  An outcome of this is that simply adding up the item scores tends to be extremely close, including a lot of ties.  We judges then have to use tiebreakers not on the list, which takes us back to those issues of the student knowing why they were doing what they were doing, connecting it to other parts of science, seeing a path forward in to other researches, how to improve their own work if they were to be restarting it now, and so forth.

Regardless of all the preceding, I'll say to pursue figuring out something that's interesting to you about the universe.  Do it in a way you find interesting.  This may or may not turn out to be something that gets a lot of points.  But it will be how you learn the most.  My own science fair projects were generally not very good by the standards above, nor would I as a judge today give my projects back then a high rating.  They were usually a matter of reading about what other people had found out, rather than doing my own experiments to find out things.  Not what the judges looked for then or now, but something that I did learn a lot from.



For schools and teachers in my area: I'd be happy to come to your school for judging, or to talk with you about science and science fairs.  Comment here, or use my email -- bobg at radix dot net.  Allow some time for me to find your real email amidst the dreck I get there.

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The Invention of Air

It isn't often that I wind up able to talk about a book, science, a scientist, and my genealogy in the same post, but Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air manages that feat.

The book is a pleasure to read.  Johnson's linchpin is Joseph Priestley's life and science.  I'd always thought of him as an English scientist, which turns out to be only partly true.  He finished his life in the USA, corresponding particularly with Thomas Jefferson both in revolutionary and post revolutionary days.  The Jefferson connection (and before that, Franklin) make for some interesting reading and historical insight outside of science as well as inside.

In his writing on Priestley's science, Johnson captures some of my themes about scientists being people, having lives, and those having some influence on what work they do and how they do it.   Also nice to see was that Johnson did not take the oversimple telling of 'good guy / bad guy' for Priestley's advancing the phlogiston theory and holding on to it longer than most.

To back up, as not everybody already knows, Joseph Priestley was one of the major chemists of the 1700s, most known perhaps for 'discovering' oxygen, but also (and Johnson makes a good case that this was the more significant) that plants release oxygen and consume carbon dioxide.  His approach to his research, though, was not the stereotypical one step leading to the next with some ultimate conclusion drawing ever closer.  It was more the 'try many things and see a) what happens or b) what works'.  And he then was active in describing how it is he did his experiments, as often the method itself was the important aspect of the work.

If you know a young scientist, I'll suggest you get this for them as well and not just yourself.

The genealogy I'll put below the fold.  For here, it suffices that I'm not a descendant of Priestley's.

As I got late in to the book, I found that when Priestley came to the USA, he moved to Northumberland County, Pennsylvania.  This is about 100 miles, as the crow flies, outside Philadelphia.  Being that far away from an intellectual center, Johnson noted, greatly slowed Priestley's communications and discussions.  Which, given how Priestley worked, was a great barrier.  His reason for being so inconveniently far away was the Yellow Fever and Smallpox that were rife in Philadelphia.

At that time (call it 1800, he arrived before and died after, and shows up in the 1800 census) I have several ancestors in Pennsylvania.  One particular family is Peter White and Elizabeth Brittain, who lived in what was then Northumberland County (now Columbia).  As I make it by Google earth, about 20 miles from Priestley's location in Pilot township.

Elizabeth's father, Zeboeth Brittain (or Zeboath) died in 1790, in Northampton county -- about 50 miles outside Philadelphia -- of smallpox.  I'd have thought 50 miles was enough to be safe, but Priestley had some fair reason to be even farther away.

Alas, no prospect that Peter and Elizabeth, or Peter's father John, who also lived in Northumberland, ever met up with Priestley.  Peter and John were farmers.  John was about Priestley's age.  But 20 miles in 1800 was a 2 day trip, possibly more then due to the roads versus mountains problem (i.e. roads tended not to cross mountains, and Priestley and the Whites were in different valleys).

Still, I find it helpful to think about the notable figures, such as Priestley, versus ancestry.  Saying that he was contemporary with my 5 times great grandfather (John White/Johann Weisz) helps bring things in to a perspective better than observing that 1800 was 210 years ago.

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Kids are scientists

It's something of an article of faith in my family that children are natural scientists.  Yet another illustration is from a classroom of 8 year olds, who recently published in a professional scientific journal.  Yay!

In their case, it was a study of bees and how they identified food.  The full paper is here. A nice journalistic coverage is here.

They did have a professional scientist helping figure out things, and doing the writing, etc..  But the fundamental ideas came from the kids.

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Scientists are real people

If you are accustomed to the media representation of scientists, my subject line is something of a shock.  What, do I mean scientists aren't all junior Dr. Spock's off Star Trek?!  Contrary to everything you've ever seen on TV and films?!  Well, yes.  We're human, no less than anyone else on the planet, and unlike fictional Vulcans.

That's relevant to the post, not so much for content, but at the reason that comments and posts have somewhat gotten away from me.  There were many good comments in the What is a good experiment? thread, and I haven't commented there myself.  (I'll encourage you to go have a look.).  And there have been good comments to later notes that I, again, haven't commented on (see the list of most recent comments that's, currently, buried way to the bottom of the page).  Not that my comments are required, or any such thing.  But, since I like conversation, it pains me to not be engaging the way I'd like to be.  (Don't worry, even if I'm not commenting, I am definitely reading.  I read far faster than I compose.)

For the subject at hand, the answers are entirely mundane -- 'real person' -- sorts of reasons.  I've been doing other things.  I'm a parent with 3 kids.  And they've been doing things over the last month.  Good things for them, and me (at least to spectate).  But they do tend to mean that I'm focusing some of my time, energy, and attention in places other than the blog.  Some (many) scientists are parents (and grandparents).  Many of us are very concerned about parenting well.  Or least are seriously interested in our kids.  Even with my youngest being 20, I still think there's room, and need, for a parent.  And they're great kids, so who wouldn't want to be involved?!  Or at least sitting in the back of the audience cheering.

I'm also a spouse.  My spouse and I have been doing things together in evenings and weekends which are very good and which we enjoy together -- visiting friends, having friends over, going places, and so forth.  Good, 'real person', things, but while I'm doing those, I'm not blogging.

And I have a day job different from the sorts of things that I write on the blog.  There's a small degree of transference.  I can point out to you that my May predictions of September's ice extent are looking to have bracketed the likely result pretty well.  The high (model-based) figure was 5.13 and the low (statistically-based) figure was 4.78.  We passed below 5 in the last few days.  Probably won't be as low for the monthly average as 4.78.  But the spread between the two forecasts was fairly small, and succeeding in bracketing reality with that narrow range is ... not bad.  I'll have more to say once we get to the end of the month and see what really happens.  The day job has been showing up interesting things, which turns around to mean more time at the office, and less time taken from my lunch hour to write on the blog.

The end of the month provides a chance for me to meet up with folks who are local.  I'll be speaking at the Annapolis Science Cafe, on Thursday, the 30th of September.  More about that to come.  It'll be about ice (you're shocked, I know).

Last night I earned 'Beastmaster' status.  My wife has two dogs.  (Her dogs -- she's had them longer than she's known me.  We've only been married a little over 4 years; newlyweds.)  Both are small dogs, of, as Dave Barry said, of the 'pillow' family.  The older one, Tater, is pushing 12 and has his hair growing over his eyes -- to the point that he often can't see what is around him, like walls.  One reason that hair grows so long is that he has traditionally (I'm told) reacted violently whenever anyone approached with scissors to trim off the overhang.  Last night I sat him down, solo, and trimmed his bangs.  No sedation or armies to hold him down.  He's doing better now.  Here's a picture of him during 'snowmageddon' last February (the snow is about 30 cm, 1 foot, next to him; double that farther away from the door).  He'd just had his hair trimmed (after sedation, at the veterinarian's).  He had far less vision last night before I started trimming.

In between all that, I've been nudging an idea towards being able to submit it for serious publication.  It's difficult doing that from home.  I'm used to publishable ideas being things I work on at work.  This one, however, is not related to what I do at work beyond the fact that it involves the earth.  Not really close enough to persuade the folks who sign my paycheck that I should be devoting work time to it.  Once I've sent it off for a round of preliminary review by friends who have some good general science knowledge (to see if I've made a generally well-formed argument), I'll be thinking more bloggy things.  Not least being various things to talk about here regarding doing science and some offshoots of interest.  The climate cycles 1 post is one such already.  There are more to come.  Not least, while that first climate cycles post talked about seasonal variations, we also should take a look at daily variations.  Same as we (middle and high-latitude residents) expect summer to be warmer than winter, we (all) expect daytime to be warmer than night time.  That expectation makes it climate.  Figuring out by just how much becomes science.

And there are the usual 'real life' sorts of things -- paying bills, getting my car fixed, trying to take care of an injured shoulder, blah, blah, and very blah.  Scientists are real people, with all the same issues as anybody else.  Irritates me that so many seem to think we're Vulcans.  Plus, of course, that we stand in closets in between times of saying something or other annoying and irrelevant to the human issues at hand.  We all have the usual problems, responsibilities and joys of being 'real people'.  Some of that affects the blog.  All of it is just the usual, for scientists, same as for anybody else.  I'll be getting back to more regular writing here in the near future, as this part of my regular life becomes more active.

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The small world of science and internationality

Science is an international activity; it's also a rather small world.  I've mentioned both of those points before, I expect, but was a little surprised to be reminded of just how small a world it is.  I was in Russia for work recently, specifically St. Petersburg.  That's the story behind Dostoevsky being my summer reading.  At the meeting, of course, I met a number of Russian scientists in my area.  One of them being Dmitry Kiktev, deputy director of the Hydrometeorological Center.

Come ahead a little, and Michael Tobis (whom I know from some years of internet contact) posts a climate/weather news bit at In it for the Gold, regarding heat and fires in Russia.  The scientist quoted is ... Dmitry Kiktev.  In St. Petersburg, we experienced temperatures 20-25 F (10-12 C) above normal the whole week I was there (normal being 72-75 F, we had 95+).  The article is talking about Moscow, but to the same end -- extraordinary temperatures being observed.

A different thing which I'll get to is the Climate Doctrine of the Russian Federation, which I received a copy of when we visited the Main Geophysical Observatory in St. Petersburg.  One virtue it has (at least the English version; I don't speak or read Russian) is that it's short -- 22 pages of 5x8" (12x20 cm) text.  Not so much a story as points for discussion.  Different stories about the visit.
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