On becoming (naturalised, half) British

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

I am undertaking ‘a journey to citizenship’ and happily (thankfully) I just passed the test and can apply for citizenship soon.
Fortunately I can be a US/UK citizen; the UK isn’t particularly concerned with dual citizenships and the US wants to keep us:

In order to lose U.S. citizenship, the law requires that the person must apply for foreign citizenship voluntarily, by free choice, and with the intention to give up U.S. citizenship.

Broadly meaning that unless you actually denounce your U.S. citizenship, or become a citizen of certain (mostly communist) countries – having dual citizenship is ok as was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1952 (Kawakita vs. the US)

My mother, like I assume many Americans, didn’t know this- she sent me an email:

Are you applying for British Citizenship? I am surprised but understand if that is what you want to do.

As if I was telling her I was joining a fascist regime.

I reassured her that if I had to choose I wouldn’t do it – I would stay American. Why?
Because I am from “GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD”!

Ok, I am actually kidding about that (yes, really) but this sure is what you learn growing up in the US- We are great Great GREAT and everyone wants to be like us. As embarrassing as it sounds now, I definitely grew up believing this. If the US is good at nothing else it is damn good at indoctrination. Its like Disney, its easy to make fun of Disney when you are old and wizened but as a child it was magical – the wonderful world of Disney with singing birds and dreams that came true.

I wouldn’t say I am particularly patriotic but I am rather attached to my country – its a visceral thing – and I am proud of the idea and indeed ideals of the USA (even though I think we don’t often live up them) – the Constitution is an amazing document. I am also pretty attached to the UK and in particularly to England – I have lived here for a while and plan to stay. I wouldn’t describe myself as an Anglophile, I don’t have a particular love of all things English but I am fond of England and there is alot I like about it.
For example:

1 – Tolerance – England is an incredibly tolerant society
2 – Gentleness – the Police here are amazingly gentle; the Doctors and Nurses at A&E’s here are wonderful – and they have a certain gentleness about them in a way that just doesn’t happen in the US from either public service (in my experience)
3 – the availability of books – books galore, cheap books, good books… everywhere everywhere –
4 – Newspapers – Newspapers in this country are great, relatively
5 – the BBC – which has REAL documentaries – REAL
6 – Cheap food, in grocery stores here you can get decent veg for a decent price even in places like Tesco’s
7 – Trains
8 – you can have a pint in the pub and read a book and people leave you alone.
9 – Manners and moderation – if you don’t appreciate the scrum queue at a pub, go to the US in a crowded college bar on a weekend

The Quiet Pint

There are so many more things I could list. But what I find curious, from an outsider’s point of view, is that most of the English people I know are quite shy about telling me what is good about England – in fact many of them have nothing good to say at all, its like a negative patriotism and wonder why on earth I would want to move here
My butcher summed it up the best:

“You paid over a £1000 to live HERE?!?!?!”

And I am aware that to any point on my list a negative example can be provided- like ‘Yes but the bloody trains are never on time’ and ‘we aren’t that tolerant, look at the BNP’.

Why does patriotism have to be a bad thing? Just like you can be a patriotic American and not be Sarah Palin, can you not be a patriotic English man or woman and not be a member of the BNP? I think you can. There ARE some exceptional things about England and I think alot to be proud of if you are English. And it doesn’t mean you have to turn into someone who is worried about
“the immigration invasion of our country’ or ‘the threat to our security posed by Islamism”

You really don’t. Being an American, which is hardly the nationality du jour if you live just about anywhere in the rest of the world , I am attached to the idea of ‘take back the patriotism’. Why not? It seems reasonable to me that you can love your country and hate some of the things it does.

I am really excited to (hopefully) be becoming a UK citizen, though I doubt I will ever refer to myself as British (though it might be fun for the irony as I have a definite Southern US accent), or go out waving a flag at the upcoming Royal wedding – I am very proud of becoming a part of this country, a country which, in my opinion, has alot to be proud of.

Posted in America | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Peer review – a bad example

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

Cameron Neylon has published one of 2 posts defending his opinion of peer-review –
standing by the quote ‘it makes more sense in fact to publish everything and filter after the fact’ though he admits this is somewhat of an over simplification.

What Neylon doesn’t suggest is what the alternative actually is yet – hopefully he will cover this in Post 2.

Meanwhile back at Occam’s Typewriter, Austin Elliot gives a nice balanced view of peer-review, in my opinion, with its pluses and minuses.

But I’d like to add something that is perhaps a bit orthogonal ( the picture below shows orthogonality; the blue lines are orthogonal to the red curves at the points they touch each other (or intersect) …

Orthogonal curves

The metaphoric example which Neylon uses in his blog post of the UK government giving money to a business isn’t, I don’t think, really equivalent or applicable to the majority of scientific publication.

He starts the argument as such:

“The UK government gives £3B to a company, no real strings attached, except the expectation of them reporting back. At the end of the year the company says “we’ve done a lot of work but we know you’re worried about us telling you more than you can cope with, and you won’t understand most of it so we’ve filtered it for you.””

First – companies and scientific research aren’t the same thing – this is a confusion between science and industry. Industry gives deliverables and science industry develops technology – basic science isn’t the same thing – you never know where discoveries come from in basic science AND basic science research doesn’t always lead to the conclusion you want it to. Its not really possible (if you are doing basic science) to say we will absolutely get this result, this is much easier to do in industry.

When you write a grant you DO have to put in milestones and goals and objectives – its not just a matter of here’s some money – do what you want. Also these are checked at many grant funding institutions, you have to write a progress report to get the rest of the money each year or 1/2 through the grant for example the ERC (European Research council).

With regard to publishing a paper the statement ‘we were worried about telling you more than you can cope with and you won’t understand most of it?’ I think is a bit of a fallacy

Do most scientists do this? I don’t think so – I never assume when I am writing a paper that the reviewers ‘won’t understand it’ and leave out data they ‘won’t understand’.

But I do ‘filter’ if that is what you want to call it as I don’t present every single piece of data I collect. Why? Not because most people can’t ‘understand it’ or can’t ‘cope’ but because alot of it is redundant information, and doesn’t enhance or detract from the central results.
Also you can add more detailed information into ‘supplementary materials’ which you can attach to many publications, and many people routinely do this!

So a real life example – I have a paper in a journal called Angewandte Chemie – it is a generalist journal for chemistry research so covers ALL of chemistry – its for a pretty wide audience. The article in question is a communication and there are rules for how much information you can put in an Angewandte Chemie Communication; roughly – maximum size is 3 to 4 figures – 4 pages – about 10,000 characters per article total – other stuff can be put into supplementary information for the more ‘specialist audience’ (which I have also done).

So I am not sure that I understand what the alternative would be? – I guess this is the ‘can’t cope’ argument however, to a generalist journal which covers lots of subjects – do you get rid of these journals, which have short papers? Or do you fill a whole journal with loads and loads of data figures for each paper – is this a realistic alternative?

Even if I didn’t have my doubts about this argument – how would the alternative to peer-review deal with leaving out data? If its out its out whether you publish it in a peer-reviewed or non-peer-reviewed journal.

The other thing he goes on to use in his example is that of a reporter asking the fictitious business dude the question:

Reporter: “So you’ll be making the whole record available as well as the stuff that you’ve said is most important presumably? I mean that’s easy to do?”

Business dude: “No we’d be worried about people getting the wrong idea so we’ve kept all of that hidden from them.”

Do most scientists keep things hidden when submitting a paper for peer review? I don’t think so – this is part of the supplementary information and the email addresses (usually the Senior Author’s email address is included in the publication for further queries) available both to the people doing the reviewers and the people that read the paper later. Having participated on both sides of the peer-review process often referees DO ask for additional information or even experiments.

Also again, even if this is a good argument for finding an alternative to peer-review – how is this alternative going to deal with ‘hidden data’ ?

He concludes in his example the following:

“Well we can’t show any evidence that the filtering is any good for deciding what is important or whether it’s accurate, but our employees are very attached to it. I can get some of them in, they’ll tell you lots of stories about how its worked for them…”

You also can’t show any evidence that ‘filtering’ is bad at deciding what is important, or can you? I may have it around my neck on this one – I don’t know or couldn’t find any studies that say this..
Neylon also accuses those who are proponents of peer-review of being un-scientific about believing in peer review – but I would counter that peer-review and its benefits are indeed hard to measure. For instance, I have a peer-review response which I think is helpful and think that it makes the quality of my research better and tunes me into other research going on out there- how do I measure this empirically? Survey? If we need data on this, I think we need to think carefully about how to get it – and if there is data, I am hoping that Neylon will cover it in post 2. Moreover, what is wrong with stories about how ‘it worked for them’ in fact there is a whole scientific discipline about people telling stories about how things worked for them and how they feel – its called psychology – and you can come up with measures to quantify this.

The problems I have with Neylon’s example is that to me it seems to imply that scientists routinely try to cover up things ‘they don’t think other people will understand’ or think others ‘can’t cope with’ and I don’t think this is the case.

I worry over my publications, I try to quadrupole check everything at the minimum. Do my publications (even after peer-review) contain mistakes that I myself didn’t catch? Of course – normally they are small, misspellings or my graph isn’t quite right, or I mis-referenced something by complete accident – but does this fundamentally change my scientific results? Nope not at all

What if it does? What if I missed something essential – I can issue an erratum, retract the paper, apologize, publish a new paper explaining the difference, there are options – and again how is an alternative to peer review going to deal with this?

I have made a somewhat big mistake in a paper before, which didn’t change my actual results or my interpretation of my results but definitely needed to be fixed – so what did I do? I published an erratum, which are available in most journals; likely because they do understand that people make mistakes.

Publishing scientific results, whether with peer-review or not, entails a certain amount of trust – if I look at a graph produced by a research group, I have to trust they did the actual experiment and are showing a graph of something they actually measured and mistakes, especially small ones, aren’t easy to catch – either before or after publication, either in peer reviewed literature or something I publish on the web myself. So in this respect I don’t understand how the argument for changing peer-review will help with most if any of the issues that Neylon brings up in his metaphorical example – but I am looking forward to his second post on the matter to clarify further.

Posted in Peer review | Tagged | 11 Comments

Peer review here we go again

Posted on January 22, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

Once again the peer-review vs. science online debate appears!

In an article by Peer review: Trial by Twitter – Apoorva Mandavilli talks about a lot of things but it mentions that science is getting ‘torn apart’ in the online media… which is ‘scary’ @rpg7twit (aka. Richard P Grant) has a nice response to this in the F1000 online magazine Naturally Selected from The Scientist…

OK maybe it is ‘scary’ but, sorry this, as a scientist is part of your damn job, presenting your work. It isn’t always pleasant going through peer-review, but it is a part of the process of presenting your science. And if your science makes it into a spot in one of the ‘big’ journals – like Nature well you want people to read it, or you wouldn’t have put it there in the first place. And like movie stars, you can’t have the fame without the Paparrazzi – that is you can’t only have praise with no critique, sorry life doesn’t work that way. Science is about, for better or worse, proving your hypothesis, it has to stand up to the test of time. It occurs to me perhaps the ‘test of time’ is just accelerated by the social media/internet process. This is a GOOD thing – maybe not for the scientist who got something wrong, but wake up – scientists get things wrong.

And it seems to me, as has been said, all this ‘taking apart of papers online’ just shows the public what scientists actually do – they take apart – or agree with – other’s work and this leads them to retest or look for new phenomena – that is a part of what we are supposed to be doing as scientists.

A few years ago in a field related to my own – somebody published a finding which said that liquid water (as opposed to being a tetrahedral network as most people have measured that it is) was not tetrahedral but actually linear. This, most people in the field thought, was crap. But instead of them all just sitting around and saying online it was crap – which they did – they also went back and re-measured and retested old data on liquid water. And as a much respected colleague of mine said at the time – this probably wasn’t such a bad thing for our field it shook it up and got people really explaining in better detail than before WHY the data showed what it WAS.

tetrahedral ice

But this isn’t actually why I am writing this blog post.

One thing that seems to come up in this debate often is something that is advocated by Cameron Neylon quite strongly which is:

‘it makes much more sense to publish everything and filter after the fact’

And this is where I’d like to archly raise an eyebrow myself.

I really cannot see, nor have I heard a very good argument as to why this makes more sense?

Its hard enough trying to filter through all of the work IN peer review journals if people just publish everything, imagine the volume. And imagine the volume of crap – as I pointed out in a blog post about a year ago – the internet now, and just the newspapers in the past already sometimes serve this function – look at the cold fusion story – where the science never even made it to peer review.

Also what if a ton of people think its crap but it really isn’t crap – which would be sort of opposite of the recent arsenic story.

This sort of implies and it has been implied that peer-review as it stands now is a bad thing
Why do so many people think everything is wrong with peer review? Perhaps it is these articles we see on Twitter – the ones where we see where the peer review process has missed something, but there are far more stories about where this doesn’t happen, I would suspect, you just never hear about them.

Does peer review go wrong? Yes
Do we hear about where peer review failed in the news? Yes – think of the recent example of arsenic.

Are there problems with the peer-review process? Of course.. look at Jan-Hendrick Shoon and recently Amil Potti

Do most peer-reviews articles NEVER make it to the news? Yes

But will publish first filter later make this better? I really doubt it.

Peer review is a team of people who are ‘experts’ in your field who look at your work and assess it – why is this altogether a bad thing?

In fact it can be, and largely is, a good thing. I have written papers – especially my first papers as corresponding author, where I was so focused on the forest I didn’t just miss the trees I actually, unknowingly, cut down the trees. After these manuscripts were peer reviewed – it was clear to me, from the reviewer’s comments – that they had no idea what I was talking about. Why? Because I wasn’t at all clear – so I had to fix it and as a result had a better paper. I have also had reviewers suggest work to me by other that I wasn’t aware of, often in agreement of what I was saying. That not only strengthened what I was saying in a particular paper but also my research in general.

If everything was published first – would be people take the time to even look at my piece of research to tear it apart? I am not an FRS or a Nobel prize winner, nor am I likely to be, but when I submit my paper to a suitable journal I have the same equality as anyone else in getting it read (this isn’t true for all journals, but specialists journals, certainly) – and I want it to be ‘torn apart’ to see if my science withstands the test because THIS is the point, whether it scares me or not.

Posted in Peer review, Trial by Twitter | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

Gun Laws and banker’s bonuses

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

Two issues which have dominated this week’s news; both are damn near impossible to legislate, no matter what the public desire.

First the guns:
In case for some amazing reason you missed it – Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford has been shot along with six others who have been killed – one of which was a nine-year old girl. Which has understandably brought forth (again) the debate about US and gun laws.

Many in the UK think this lack of gun control in the US is crazy – or in the words of @cromercrox ‘I’m really quite perplexed by the US of A’. Cromercrox brings up in his blog ‘Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Picturesque Seaside Town of Cromer’ dealing the perplexity of US gun laws – where even the ‘quite normal Americans’ engage in what he calls gunsplaining – eg annunciations of the reasons why guns are here to stay – unlike rock and roll which is apparently dying.

Cromercrox suggests banning guns altogether, or in his words ‘get rid of the guns’ – which is never going to work in the US.
So at the risk of being termed a gunsplainer, or seeming not quite normal – here is my view on the perplexity.

Many Americans know that gun control issues are near as damn it dead issues in the US of A – despite the recent shootings. However lots of people also explain this by evoking the 2nd amendment or the constitutional right argument. The right of the people to ‘keep and bear arms’ as written in the Bill of Rights is really a pretty crap, weak argument.

Constitutional amendments have been added and overturned since the US government was born. The Constitution states that slaves are allowed to be owned and only represent 5/8ths of a human (for census purposes) which was repealed by the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. The constitution also had a prohibition amendment (the 18th) passed in 1919 which was repealed by the 21st amendment in 1933 (when people really needed a drink).

And prohibition is good example of why a gun control amendment (or even a mere federal law) would never work. Did people stop drinking because alcohol was illegal? No. Think speakeasys and moonshine liquor. So by the US imposing some kind of gun law, would this work, would people suddenly give up their guns? No. How exactly would you round up all of those guns? US gun ownership is estimated to be around 300 million with around 45% of US Citizens owning some type of gun. And these are just the registered ones. Do you think people will just turn them in? A large number of people own guns for hunting (just like you can in Britain) as well, do you deny them their guns?

So say you regulated guns down to British levels, with no automatic weapons – where only permit holders and criminals and the police had them, this would reduce the number of gun deaths but they would still happen and I think the effect would be marginal. Because this is assuming that by some kind of legislation you could ban guns and collect them, guns are already there, good luck trying to get ’em out. People that are not very likely to mow down the general public with their automatic weapon (or hand gun for that matter) would be the only ones turning them in- which wouldn’t reduce gun crime significantly I would think.

As an aside, contrary to popular belief many UK police officers do have guns: just take a stroll around London where many police at high security locations are posted with machine guns (something you don’t see so often in the US – police with machine guns, they usually have hand guns). Gun deaths do happen in Britain.

Now the banks:

Do you really think regulating banker’s bonuses will make them stop making money or feel remorse. Watching footage of the treasury select committee interviewing Bob Diamond – he was asked questions like ‘Are you grateful to the British Tax payer?’ and ‘Are you going to resign your job?’. These are just sort of non-questions which might make the MP questioning him look like he is being ‘tough on bankers’ but are useless in reality. Of course the man isn’t going to resign his job, Barclay’s emerged relatively unscathed from the banking crisis (Bob is one of the big banking dudes that wasn’t fired) and who cares if he is eternally, externally grateful, even if he said it.

So say you did cut banker’s bonuses, would they really not find some loop hole to still make money? Instead of cash bonuses maybe they would get stock options, or a new car, or a new Persian rug? Financial guys can easily find their way around regulations – If you read the book ‘The Road from Ruin’ by Michael Green and Matthew Bishop, two British authors (launched in the USA but available in the UK after February) – they cover this topic quite nicely.

Regulation, in both of these cases, isn’t going to be effective, and is moreover not cost effective to any government. And in these financial times, the later is a pretty persuasive argument.

In both cases – ‘ban all guns’ and ‘stop banker’s bonuses’ you are treating the symptom rather than the underlying problem, and it provides no real solution. How to regulate the financial sector is a lot more complex than the relatively small example of bankers bonuses – which seem like a lot to us mere mortals but represents tiny amounts of money on a large scale (there are some good suggestions for real effective financial regulation in the Road from Ruin).

Ban all guns or even some won’t decrease violence in the US and won’t really ever be effective, as the gun ban would yield marginal returns. How to stop violent crime in any country is a difficulty and one I have no idea how to solve (along with scads of politicians world wide)

Posted in bankers bonuses, gun control | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Science Funding cuts are political not a reflection of elitist science

Posted on January 3, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

In the US and the UK governments are making or threatening science education and funding cuts, is that partly the fault of scientists being ‘elitist’ ?

Today is the first day of the new Republican Majority Congress in the US – with Eric Cantor taking the reins as House majority Leader …

One of Cantor’s first ‘targets’ of attack to stop the ‘overspending’ by the US government is the National Science Foundation – which is roughly equivalent to a research council in the UK – that is scientists write for competitive grant funding from the NSF to do a variety of scientific research. Cantor and Co. have set up a website called You Cut which asks the general public to search on the public NSF website here to find funding which they deem ‘un-necessary’ – Why Cantor chose the NSF if he really wanted to cut money is beyond me – the 2011 budget request for NSF is $7.4 billion out of a total of around $3.5 trillion is about 0.2% of the total US budget – as opposed to say Social Security or Defense (both around ~20% of the US federal budget) – so if you cut two or three $1 million projects (at 0.00002 % of the federal budget each) then you can work out the real financial savings this makes – zilch.

Similar to the budget cuts in the UK – the reasons for this attack are almost certainly political not financial. Cantor himself says that much of what the NSF funds is ‘useful’. Both deficit reducing policies want to be seen as tackling the deficit and ‘looking’ out for how government wastes money, thereby saving the tax-paying electorate from profligate spending. There are obvious similarties with the US Republican Congress under Gingrich (after Clinton’s first mid-term in 1992) with its attack on the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts). The NEA, which has a relatively tiny budget (155 million as of FY2009 – 0.004% of the US federal budget), was attacked because, in a nut shell, some of the funded art was deemed to have anti-family and Christian values.

But the NSF doesn’t really cross loggerheads with many social conservative issues, so why attack the NSF? Why attack science budgets in general? (as has also been happening in the UK – see all of the coverage of the Science-Is-Vital campaign)

One of the arguments for WHY science is under attack is because there is a public perception that scientists are ‘elitist’. The last UK government was concerned about this perception, Labour launched a campaign to reduce the public perception of scientists as elitists in January 2009. Science, like art, should be for all and for the benefit of all, but is this why it is under attack? Because it is perceived as an elitist activity? Because people feel like you have to be a ‘genius’ to engage in science? Is it the fault of scientists, who ‘don’t communicate’ but stay in their ‘high-brow’ ivory towers, feeling so superior to the rest of the plebeian world?

I don’t think that science communication or scientific elitistism (Yes some scientists are ‘elitist;, but I would argue most aren’t) has much to do with it, except in the sense that the arguments for science funding may lack public support. It is a political attack and may or may not work in the next US congressional session (it is too early to tell), but because it is something that is not seen as ‘essential’ to the public it is an easy attack. It is also a tiny bit of the budget, but a single program which could be cut and not effect but a few (in the short term) in comparison to say Medicare which has a big chunk of the budget and its dissolution would effect alot more people in the US.

Do scientists need to communicate better? Absolutely, but we are working on that, and science communication IS getting better, especially with the advent of social media and the blogosphere. It needs to get better because science is important and needs to garner support when these crazy cut ideas come from any government but, again, I don’t think ‘elite science’ or bad communication is responsible for the current cut scare, short-sighted governments are and it is indeed more political in flavour than purely anti-scientific.

The good news is that the NEA has survived, since attacks since the 1980’s; let’s hope the NSF does too.

Posted in politics, science communication, UK Science policy, US government | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

On humanism and Christmas

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Sylvia McLain

Humanism – What is humanism ? Go to the British Humanist Association website and have a read, there are some nice things in there. I have listed some of the definitions of Humanism from their website:

* Humanism is a naturalistic view, encompassing atheism and agnosticism as responses to theistic claims, but is an active and ethical philosophy greater than these reactions to religion.
* Humanists believe in individual rights and freedoms, but believe that individual responsibility, social cooperation and mutual respect are just as important.
* Humanists believe that people can and will continue to find solutions to the world’s problems, so that quality of life can be improved for everyone.
* Humanists are positive, gaining inspiration from our lives, art and culture, and a rich natural world.

These are fantastic – I agree with alot of it myself – improving quality of life and especially with respect to ‘individual rights and freedoms’ and ‘mutual respect.’ this is great. But is religion not included in an individual’s right and freedom? You can choose to believe in God or the Easter Bunny or Fairies if you wish to. Isn’t that part of an individual’s right?

If the humanists really want to be a counter to religion and believe in improving life on earth for themselves and for others why do they go out and purposely attack religions? This doesn’t seem like mutual respect to me.

I find this truly disappointing.

Today on the Richard Dawkins website I found this article about promoting atheism in the US and how it has caused ‘protest and ire’. This usually happens when you go out and purposely attack people for what they believe in.

Well they probably cause IRE because the billboards (really guys Billboards? Like Visit Rock City See 7-States for humanists) which say things like:
“The Bible: ‘A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach authority over a man; she must be silent,” “Humanism: ‘The rights of men and women should be equal and sacred .’

Or
atheist billboards

If these guys had done their homework they would have remembered that few modern Christians take a literal meaning of the Bible and that Christianity got somewhat up dated, in their opinion, after the Old Testament.

Admittedly many of the adverts don’t directly attack religion such as

But in either case these adverts are either intentionally set up to attack religion or convince religious people that atheists are moral too. Its like some kind of weird mud-smearing/convincing the world that atheists ‘don’t eat dead babies’ campaign. In the former case this is not at all dissimilar to what ill educated Americans say about Muslims, for instance and in the later, do you really care what religious people think about you if you are an atheist? Perhaps you might but if you do, do you really think an advert on the side of a bus will convince anyone?

It seems like humanism might ‘combat the religious overtones of Christmas and Hannukah’ by just offering another way, a way which didn’t intentionally attack something people have a cultural, visceral attachment to. A way which says, I hate going to church on Christmas Eve too and am not sure I believe but lets all have dinner at my house instead and talk about something else – but that something else doesn’t have to be religious people are stupid and control the world – it could be – how can we make a difference, and how can we celebrate the year to come and improve the world for humanity? This I think would send a better message and actually be non-religious as humanism is, in principle, meant to be.

Posted in Atheism, humanism, religion | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Big news, US protects its own self interests and is often a bit nasty about it

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Sylvia McLain

AND?

I, like billions of other people, spent a large portion of yesterday evening trawling through some of the wikileaked US diplomatic cables. I found myself somewhat, well disappointed. Is that it?

The secure yet unsecured diplomatic network the US government is the most troublesome part in my mind, and why is it open to so many? This seems pretty dumb on the part of the US State Department; given the system is so insecure, it wouldn’t be implausible that many foreign nations had already been privy to this information as one of the leaked cables tells us China has become pretty good at hacking.

Perhaps the exception is the revelation that the US is obtaining biometric data from UN officials – we don’t know if they successfully obtained said information, just that they want it. Spying on your friends at the UN is pretty naughty and stupid, but are we really surprised by this? I’m not, I am surprised the leaks didn’t reveal something much worse..

True whistle-blowing is necessary and even a part of Democracy – free speech, free press. A perfect example was the Iran-Contra affair in 1986 where Col. Oliver North took the fall for illegal sale of weapons to the Iranians. Who ever blew this whistle revealed that the US was illegally selling arms to Iran (under an embargo) to supply secret funds to the Contras in Nicaragua. North took the bullet which was aimed at Reagan though nothing ever officially attached Reagan to the affair, I personally still have my doubts. As an aside Col. North made out OK in the end given that he now is a host on the History Channel and writes books and is more famous than he ever would have been if he hadn’t done something illegal. Go American justice.

Oliver North

But do these recent Wikileaks of US cables count as true whistle blowing? I don’t think so, as one Max Boot of the US Foreign Policy thinktank Council on Foriegn relations said:

“The WikiLeaks files only fill in details about what has generally already been known. Those details have the potential to cause acute embarrassment — or even end the lives of — those who have communicated with American soldiers or officials, but they do little to help the general public to understand what’s going on…”

Many of the leaked documents are not official policy but opinions of diplomats (which they didn’t really ever think we would be reading) and maybe it reflects some US foreign policy attitudes and maybe it doesn’t. It’s hard to tell how much it does or doesn’t, I don’t think the US State Department is going to let us know somehow. For example, an official’s assemesnt of French president Nicholas Sarkozy is that he is “thin-skinned and [has an] authoritarian personal style.” and that Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is described as “feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader.”

Is anyone really surprised that someone thinks this? Do we really expect people to always be nice about each other in their opinions? But what this isn’t, I don’t think, is whistle blowing. I would personally be curious to read official diplomatic opinions about George W. when he was in office. But presumably other governments aren’t so stupid as to let this information be as widely accessible and I think we all have a pretty good idea of, for instance, what the French thought of W.

The other big revelation is that States in the Middle East are worried about Iran having a nuclear weapon, which I would agree is worrying, but I am not sure the release of this information is not actually harmful, if there are already tensions in the Middle East don’t you think this might make things worse? Maybe not, I hope not…

And there is evidence that the US is trying to take out Al-Qadea – but did we not already know this?

There is nothing, in my opinion that I would consider true whistle blowing, such as maybe the US government is still engaging in something like the Tuskegee syphallis experiments; if you want to be truely appalled at something nasty the US government has done go and read about this, where US Heath Department ‘tracked’ untreated syphallis in African-Americans, where they NEVER TOLD the subjects they were infected – this is a truely horrific page in US history and like most States there are many others.

Tuskegee victims

Was Assange right to leak this? I am not sure, possibly because I am a bit biased against the man, I think he is arrogant and self-aggrandising but that isn’t a good enough reason to condemn him. Really I think the US should know better than to make these things so accessible if they really want them kept private, with so many people having access to these documents why they haven’t been leaked earlier is beyond me.

Posted in Cablegate, politics, US government, Wikileaks | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Brief thoughts about academic honesty

Posted on November 26, 2010 by Sylvia McLain

Always tell the truth – they tell you when you are a kid – I think I quickly learned that ALWAYS telling the truth is not always the best idea – lies of omission (especially to my mother) save a lot of pain all around and are sometimes diplomatically the best way forward.

Recently an academic at Duke, Anil Potti, resigned and retracted several science papers because his work couldn’t be reproduced by himself or other scientists in his field. Potti also had apparently lied on his CV saying he was a Rhodes scholar when he wasn’t although he later explained he was a Finalist as a Rhodes scholar.

What I wonder about this story is if this is a combination of overselling your scientific results and spinning your CV too much or actual academic misconduct. I think the results are out still, but this incident is worrying none the less.

When I think about the lovely art of CV writing, and that bit of grant writing in that distressing section where you basically have to convince the reviewers you are the greatest thing since sliced bread, I always have a little shudder. I hate writing those things, largely because sometimes when you write them down they don’t sound quite right. For example, I was a fisheries feild technician when I was 22, which sounds a whole lot better to me than the actual job of hauling around heavy equipment in the woods and counting fish.

OK so you obviously can’t lie as in I have 50 papers in Nature that all have been cited at least 400 times (though some people do this, and actually get away with it (at least in the short term)) but where do you draw the line?

For instance, I held a grant where I was the PI, however the post-doc on the grant was almost entirely supervised by the co-PI. While I had a central role with supervision of our student, do I say I supervised the post-doc? Do I give some lengthy boring explanation about how our management structure works? The opposite also happens, you may not be a *formal* supervisor but turn into one through the course of a collaboration. Do you list this? Keep in mind you only have 2 pages (at most) to list how wonderful you are.

I realize that these are boring examples and this isn’t really dishonesty per se but this is where the hard part lies sometimes. Do you make it sound better or worse? One of the problems I believe is that as an academic your specific roles aren’t always clear – lots of us interact and collaborate with alot of people and writing it down on paper isn’t necessarily always easy. And if you try to be humble and under sale yourself – you probably won’t get funded. Its like getting a house, its hard to make that first step onto the ladder these days, and hard to get funded (its getting harder). And though I have held a few grants, I don’t currently have one and as a result I don’t currently have any of my very own students or post-docs but I desperately need some if I want my research career to continue.

And this is part of the problem – desperation to get funded, while MOST academics (I believe) don’t intentionally lie, someone might disagree with your assessment of something so dull as ‘she didn’t really supervise that post-doc’ – and then if you make a mistake in your scientific research years later would it come out as “Charlatan scientists claims control over other people’s resources” ?

I have a feeling that Potti’s case is probably more complex than this, given that he has made the news in the New York Times and has actually resigned. Scientists do make mistakes and do own up to them and retract papers without loosing their jobs. Most famous example I can think of is Stephen Hawking – so something seems strange about Potti’s story.

But as @DrAustPHD said on twitter: Pressure system enough: people will short cut (& worse).

This is a frightening thought in some respects but I think on the whole most people DON’T fudget their results (though they do make mistakes) and most people are honest about what they say about themselves. And the good news is, if you out and out lie? You often get found out in the end….

Posted in Academic dishonesty, science ethics | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The dangers of unconscious bias

Posted on November 16, 2010 by Sylvia McLain

Its around us everywhere, unconscious bias, in the media, in the government infrastructure, in academia.

I have read several articles lately about bias and inequalities in academic science – such as a blog post “What women think” by Athene Donald which highlights, amongst other things that academic women might be less likely to be supported by their line managers and have a harder time getting promoted in a male dominated environment. Similarly, Imran Kahn has written an online article in which he expresses concern about higher education cuts leading to a decrease in diversity in scientific fields which are already predominantly ‘Pale, male and stale’.

In a seemingly non-related article – the Home office has announced a new ‘stop and search’ plan allowing the police to stop people based on what really seems to amount to racial profiling.

So could the new Conservative ‘Big Society’ in the UK, which is supposed to mean we all love each other, really signify an increase in gender and racial inequalities across all government departments?

Perhaps, but I also think that the people making these decisions probably don’t think they are doing anything of the kind. They probably think that this is just ‘common sense’ and has nothing to do with racial profiling or any sort of discriminatory bent. What it more likely signifies is unconscious bias. And everybody has unconscious bias, it is part of being human.

I was born during civil rights era in the not so deep South in the US, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated when I was about 6 months old. Growing up in the post-civil rights era, I learned that racism was uniformly bad, and a thing that was apparently perpetrated by many of my ancestors. This is a horrifying realization as a kid and you vow to yourself you will NEVER be a racist and I sincerely hope that in actual fact I am not.

But the other thing I learned is that legalities certainly don’t make racism just magically disappear. Just because the Civil Rights Acts (1965 and 1968) said ALL men (and women, but here I use men as these are the historical words ) are created equal and have certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, didn’t necessarily mean that racism evaporated in a puff a smoke, that there were group hugs all around and it was over. It’s much more complex than that.

In many people’s minds, racism is the KKK and sexism is people who just think women are dumber than men. Even though people that think and say things like this obviously do exist (such as Professor Richard Lynn), it is not very often we hear things this overt from day to day. It is worth noting that Prof. Lynn himself thinks he is just ‘observing the facts’ and talking common sense in a sort of ‘some of my best friends are women but…’ kind of way.

It is rare for us to see bias in ourselves, and most people I think would say they are decidedly NOT racist (or any other ist). Because unconscious bias is unconscious.

I think most people that consider themselves rational, evidence-based, scientific, humanitarians believe that they are well free from any sort of unconscious bias. If you are trained as a scientist, you are trained to try and look at the facts as objectively as you can. This is easier said than done. Have you ever had to let go of a pet theory because it was wrong? This ain’t easy.

But what I find myself seeing over and over again in science blogs and rationalist thinking articles is lots of unconscious bias – against the very things that the authors believe are biased and intolerant themselves.

For instance, I saw recently in an article about atheism embedded in a science blog the following statement:

“One thing that always surprises and disgusts me about so-called christians is their willingness to hate those who have different beliefs than they; those with other faiths or (especially) no faith at all.”

In my mind, this is a pretty vitriolic statement about hatred and it is also not a universal truth, even though it is stated as if it is, which is a prime example of unconscious bias. I know plenty of Christians who do not ‘hate’ people with other beliefs but simply think that they are wrong and are rather more tolerant of different beliefs than some ‘rational-thinkers’ I know.

I have deliberately NOT included a link to this article because I don’t believe the author is being consciously overtly biased, and I am sure they don’t believe that they are. I am also certain that they have frustrations with many of the christians they have met.

I have to admit, I have a fear of fundamental foot-washing Baptists, the minute someone tells me they are a Baptist I not only want to run screaming but also have a full-set of preconceptions about what kind of person I think they are (some of it not so nice). But a healthy part of this reaction is my very own bias AGAINST people that have a particular belief I don’t agree with.

Bias is almost never overt, it is almost always covert and I think we should all take the time to stop and see where it comes from in ourselves before we condemn others for the very beliefs we have and often hate in ourselves.

Posted in rational thinking, science ethics | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

It’s not about you, its about the data!

Posted on November 10, 2010 by Sylvia McLain

Or why I think the passive voice is actually GOOD for science

There are advocates of ‘plain language for scientists’ for example Harvard Health blogs who suggest Med journals should write more like Micheal Crichton and Evidence Soup who wants medical journals to ‘stop with the passive voice, already’. The summary being that scientists write far too much in the passive vs. the active voice (in English that is) and science would be easier to understand if it were written in the active voice. There are also suggestions that ‘passive-voice science writing’ is elitist.

I disagree on both counts but first a quick grammar review, what is the difference between active and passive?

In the active voice the object receives the action of the verb as in:

“Cats eat fish (active).”

In the passive voice the subject receives the action of the verb:

“Fish are eaten by cats (passive).”

Which is great for cats and fish but what about scientists?

One of the arguments for ‘active English’ in science writing is that if English isn’t your first language, reading in the passive voice is more difficult. A couple of French, Bangladeshi and Dutch friends have confirmed this. On the other hand, an Italian scientist friend of mine told me it is actually easier to read in the formal passive voice, because it is closer to the way science is written in Italian. In her opinion, ‘plain English’ initiatives never help non-native English speakers, she believes it is mostly for those of us that already speak English. So I would say just from my unofficial straw poll that active English being easier for foreigners is still up for debate.

Regardless of which is easier to read, the passive voice is a construct of English, not of science and for better or worse English has become the de facto lingua-Franca of modern science, at least in the West. If we based the ‘language of science’ on the most abundant language in world-wide science, that would be Chinese, which may be preferable as Chinese has no verb tenses.

And English, well, is odd. English is written and indeed spoken in a complex combination of active and passive voices. This doesn’t only happen in science articles; this even happens in the Daily Mail. Take for instance the following excerpt from an article published in the Daily Mail:

EastEnders star Steve McFadden has been arrested and bailed (passive) over claims that he harassed a woman (active) believed to be the mother of his baby girl.

The 51-year-old actor was picked up by police in Haringey, north London, on Wednesday (passive).

After being questioned by officers he was released on bail to return to a police station early next year (passive) .

It is understood that McFadden – who plays EastEnders hard man Phil Mitchell – was arrested following a complaint by former partner Dr Rachel Sidwell (passive).

The pair have a daughter, Amelie Tinkerbell, now 17 months old (active).

Now if you translate that all into the active this is what you get::

Police have arrested Steve McFadden. The court released McFadden on bail. The police and the court acted on claims that McFadden had harassed a woman believed to be the mother of his baby girl.

The police picked up the 51 year old actor in Haringey, north London, on Wednesday.

Police questioned Steve McFadden. The court released McFadden on bail to return to the police station early next year.

It is understood that the police arrested McFadden – who plays EastEnders hard man Phil Mitchell – following a complaint
by former partner Dr Rachel Sidwell.

The pair have a daughter, Amelie Tinkerbell, now 17 months old.

OK so this is ‘plain english’ but in the active version the story becomes all about the police not about Steve McFadden which is what the story is intended to be about – Steve McFadden is the object receiving the action by the police, who are the subject.

And this is the point! As scientists we teach our students to write about the data – which are the object of any experiment. Why? Because the science is about the data and the data are INDEPENDENT of who did the experiment (well except if there is fraud). Science is about the physical world around us which is exhibited by the data and not the person doing the experiment.

Explicitly, in technical science journals you will see things like:

‘The data were collected’ (passive) which is about the data.

Rather than ‘I collected the data’ (active) which is about YOU collecting the data in the first person
or if you prefer the 3rd person ‘The post doctoral researcher collected the data’ (still active) which, again, is about the person collecting the data.

And about the charge of being ‘elitist’ I would say no more than the English language is elitist. Let me repeat, data should be written about as if it is independent of the people doing the experiment. Science is and should be about the data and it is damn nigh impossible to write about data in the active voice because data don’t collect themselves. (N.B. Data is plural, unlike Data the Star Trek dude who is singular) Of course someone collects it and makes the figures for papers, but, again, science isn’t about the researchers, its about the data.

If you are a native English speaker I challenge you to speak only active English for the day. Or even write entirely in the active voice. In reality science papers, like most English writing is a hodge-podge of active and passive English.

Maybe advocates of the active voice in science writing really need to just teach scientists better English writing skills. I would argue that perhaps technical scientific papers are difficult to read because they are simply badly written regardless of voice.

Posted in plain English, science communication | Tagged , , , | 19 Comments