Am I having impact?

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Sylvia McLain

For the last few days there has been some buzz around the non-use of Impact Factors as a criteria for the UK’s Research Excellent Framework. Richard Catlow (head of the Chemistry REF panel) put it in writing here in an article in the RSC’s Chemistry World. This is a nice thing to know as an academic, your work should be judged on its quality not where it is published.

Stephen Curry is Sick of Impact factors too, where you can just take one look at the comment thread and see he’s not alone.

I have written about being concerned about impact factors before as a judgement of my worthiness as a scientist and as a relatively early career academic I haven’t stopped worrying. I have no idea what publications in high-impact vs. lower-impact journals will mean – in terms of a future career, not only for me but for my students and post-docs. I still am afraid that yes high impact publications do matter, even when I see the official reassurance. I do trust and believe my more established colleagues, but I gotta admit I immediately think is ‘what about unconscious bias’? Sort of like in the movies when some very crafty lawyer leads a witness into saying something that they shouldn’t and the judge tells the jury to ‘strike that from the record’ and that it can’t be used as evidence. Does that really ever work? This may be cynical on my part.

I just had a paper rejected from a high-impact journal this week, before it was sent out to review by the editor filter. This happens (to everyone) and I tried and I will try somewhere else. I am not feeling too bad about it. Partly because I know I am not the only one familiar with this experience, it is relatively common in academia. You tend to get rejected (a lot) for paper submissions if you try for higher impact journals; before it is even sent to review. So why do we bother? I have been asking myself this question often lately and I don’t really have an answer. But

High impact isn’t all bad. And as Homer Simpson (allegedly) says ‘If you don’t try you can’t fail’.

The reason why I sent this publication to this particular journal is because I would have liked it to be read by the particular audience that reads this particular journal. Or more realistically, the audience I want to believe reads that journal. Really. I didn’t do it for the pleasure of high-impact smugness or spin but because actually I wanted to try and get my work more widely read by a different (bigger) audience. I work at an interface of three disciplines – biology, physics and chemistry – there is no particular ‘journal’ for interdisciplinary work; as a result I am fairly omnivorous in my journal choice. That being said, there are places I can send work to get a fairly-wide readership, but I was shooting for a slightly different audience; a more general audience. It is hard to achieve that goal if the paper doesn’t even go to review.

I think having a widely-read paper in a high-impact journal is a good thing, if it is actually widely read. I doesn’t mean you are science big-wig but what it does mean your work might get read by a new broader audience – you know preaching to the choir and all that, avoided. At least I still have this hope which is, perhaps, slightly naive on my part. I do know that even if a paper is in a high-impact factor journal, this doesn’t actually mean it will get read – or indeed get more citations and as Dorothy Bishop pointed out. In fact sometimes your work actually gets less exposure and less citations in high-impact land, my most highly-cited paper is not in the highest-impact factor journal I have even published in.

But high impact can be bad, when you are judged by that alone.

I think is this is the real issue, and why we are all feeling a bit relieved in UK academia about the upcoming REF-judging statements by panel heads like Richard Catlow. But I am still on the fence about how important high-impact papers are, and honestly whether or not I want to try for them. It is a huge amount of work to re-craft a paper for a new journal, just to have it rejected before it even goes to review. Reviews are key. Equally, I do want my papers more widely read, I want other people in other fields to look at my work and tell me what they think. But I wouldn’t want high-impact papers to be the sole judge of my work . Honestly, at least in my estimation there are plenty of good papers in high-impact journals, they are not all horrid, but some really,really are. The only thing I do know for certain is that my favorite paper I have ever written is in a low impact factor journal and has a pretty low number of citations.

Posted in Impact Factor, science writing, scientific publishing | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Let me give you some advice….

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Sylvia McLain

on advice

If I were to offer a new academic advice it would be to not be afraid to take advice from your colleagues; especially with respect to writing. I was talking to one of my collaborators the other day and they told me ‘I never let anyone in the Department read my grants before I submit them; I am too scared‘. I can definitely understand this point of view. It is scary to be critiqued and expose your writing style to the world. Also, if you are working on something that is a hot topic then you may not want the rest of the world to see your creative ideas just yet.

But that grant/paper/cover letter is going to get read, by somebody, and I would rather have one of my colleagues (that I trust) give me advice than just simply leave that to an unknown committee.

My view is quite the opposite of my collaborator’s, I actively try to get people to have a look over of my grant, my publications, my cover letters – everything and anything. I would much rather have a friendly colleague tell me when my ideas don’t make any sense on paper, than a less friendly review panel. A bit of advice helps improve your writing style and conveyance of tricky topics. It also helps with clarity, sometimes when you have read something over and over again it says to you what you think it should say not what it actually does say. Someone else might read it and think – WTF? This is something you need to know.

The other good thing about soliciting advice, is you don’t have to take it. You can ask people for a read, but just because they suggest that you do something doesn’t mean you have to. Even bad advice allows you to think about exactly why you don’t want to change something and again improves your ability to express yourself.

Unsolicited advice, on the other hand, can be really annoying. As often as not, I find unsolicited advice rather useless as it seems to be given by a deliverer who just wants to tell you about how well they think and how well written they are rather than providing anything helpful. Still there is some honesty and helpfulness even in unsolicited assertions – such as on blog post comments; I have had all manner of useful advice through this venue – who says the internet isn’t useful?

Posted in science writing | Tagged , | 5 Comments

What’s in a name?

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Sylvia McLain

I had a boyfriend back in the day who wrote music semi-professionally. The best bit of composing a piece of music, according to the boy, was the creative process with another person – that toing and froing of thoughts and ideas that synthesized a great tune. His least favourite part was what happened after. Deciding who wrote what bit of the song for any subsequent royalties should there be any from the crafted creation.

It sounds a bit like publishing a scientific paper. You have an *idea*, you perform experiments, you have problems with the analysis, you talk to people. Then you do more experiments, often in collaboration with people in your lab or even external to the lab. Then you talk to more people. This is really fun, it is the good part of science bouncing ideas, coming up with solutions. Then you write a paper, where you have to decide how to order the authors on the paper.

The ordering is often straight-forward. In many subjects the post-doc or student goes first. The PI goes last with the star (‘the star’ means corresponding author). The other collaborators such as group members who did less work than author 1 go in the middle in ranking order of effort.

Leaving aside the problems of assessing the nebulous term *effort*, this process can get really complex. For instance what if there are 2 prospective first authors? What if two post-docs did the same amount of work for a manuscript? What do you do? They can’t both be first. What about if you have collaborators who have all done equal amounts of work for the paper? In my group we have that problem at the moment; I have 3 collaborators all of which contributed to the draft about equally but I have to choose what order I put them in. Fortunately I work with nice people. To make this more complex, different disciplines do it in different ways. For instance in many sub-disciplines of physics the authors are listed solely by order of contribution with the starred author anywhere in the list.

Does it matter?

It shouldn’t, but it does. If you have a famous guy (or gal) in the field on your paper, the scientific community often assumes it is the famous person’s work; not yours – even if they are safely placed somewhere in the middle. What if a post-doc has 20 papers but all of them are as 2nd author, this isn’t a good thing either, it looks like said post-doc has never really finished their own project – even if in fact they have.

It also matters for assessments – like in applying for a job or for the REF – where the REF criteria is that (or so I have been told though this may be apocryphal) order doesn’t count unless there are more than 6 authors, then it counts. It is also true, though not in my direct experience, that some people have their names on papers they have never even read! Where they have either not contributed at all or don’t even know they are an author. In my opinion this is a bad thing – but there is really nothing REF assessors can do to check this.

I am not sure how to make authorship more *fair*, if it is indeed unfair. Personally, I have never felt unfairly treated in a publication, with the exception of once when I was left off a paper as an author I did an awful lot of work for. Equally I have removed my name from papers where I don’t feel I have contributed much. In my estimation having a couple of conversations about someone’s research does not an authorship make.

Posted in scientific publishing | Tagged | 3 Comments

On portrayals of women in science(y) films

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Sylvia McLain

There is a feminist critical film theory from the 70’s that pointed out (rather astutely) that in many films women where just there to be looked at. Men did stuff, women were present either for visual pleasure, or simply as a contrast – such as the evil step mother or Mrs. Rochester.

Portrayals of female scientists in film suffer from the same problem. Just think about Elisabeth Shue in The Saint. Female physicist with a weak heart who loses her equations (kept on Post-it notes stored in her bra) after being seduced by Val Kilmer in such a clever disguise no one could ever spot it. It all worked because she had to shed her under-garments as a result of said seduction.

Similar to other films, female scientists often turn into screaming idiots in the face of danger; or are overwhelmed when a more powerful man comes along – at which point they loose all of their senses. Science Fiction is guilty of this too. Although, thankfully, I have managed to mostly avoid watching Star Trek, I do remember many o problem with difficult women were solved by a good old love fest courtesy of Captain Kirk.

There are, though, some exceptions that prove that perhaps prove the rule.

1 – Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) in Alien and subsequently Aliens was the best kind of role model a girl could wish for. Ripley was practical, Ripley survived. She survived a truly frightening predatory Alien, two times, when no one else did. She also did prance around in her underwear, a bit, but the focus was on her being the biggest tough-ass survivor ever and she never lost her cool even when she had some sexual tension with the cool marine.

Ellen Ripley
Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in Aliens

2 – Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) in Contact. Contact starts with Dr Arroway sitting in a room with head phones on listening to static for hours on end. This pretty much sums up what it means to be a scientist. Repetitive experiments, listening to noise or staring at lines on a screen – but you have to keep your eyes on the ball even when you are sick of it; and working through that tedium to find the cool results. The rest of the movie in my opinion was fairly stupid, but Jodie Foster certainly seemed like a scientist to me.

Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor Arroway in Contact
Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor Arroway in Contact

3 – Dr. Ellie Sattler (played by Laura Dern) in Jurassic Park. Up to her elbows in fresh Triceratops feces, the men around her are appalled and disgusted. Dr. Sattler is actually praised for this by the male scientists; the boys think she is amazing because she is focused on shit. It’s not a bad stereotype for a girl scientist; she’s sexy because she is smart and focused. She also outsmarts the Dinos; turning off the circuit breakers when all the men around have been wounded or are incapable; but not Ellie! Amazingly and laudably, the film itself goes on to attack the females are incapable stereotype. When John Hammond, the old guy (played by Richard Attenborough; David’s big brother) tells Ellie it should be him instead of her (because she is a woman) her response is priceless:
Look… We can discuss sexism in survival situations when I get back.

Dr Ellie Sattler
Laura Dern as Dr. Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park.

It is true that all of these women are really good looking; hence could be considered to be there to be looked at, but so are large majority of people in Hollywood films; men and women alike. These women have beauty and substance and I find that rather encouraging.

Posted in women, women in science, women in science films | Tagged , | 11 Comments

The pressure of high-impact

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Sylvia McLain

High impact papers, h-indexes and pedigree. These are all things I have been forced to think about lately. I have recently completed two grant applications. For each of them, I had to write the cringe-worthy section on myself and how great I am (and my research and my training). I had to delineate my h-index* and pedigree – yes it is called this, even though I am not a Cocker Spaniel.

Tongue firmly planted in cheek, I wrote this bit and even had many other people read it for me. (TIP: No matter how shy you feel about this, it is a very,very good idea to get other people to read your grant applications; especially the personal track-record bit, as this section is hard to write and having others help you is imperative). A few of my more helpful senior colleges sent me their ‘track record’ sections, which blew me away; high-impact papers and h-indexes to die for. It also left me with the feeling of this is what I must do to make it.

Regardless of whether the high-impact factor journal imperative is fair or will even be used in the upcoming research assessment framework (REF); it certainly feels like high-impact papers are of the upmost importance. You can feel it in the water and I suspect there are many academics out there who truly believe that 40 papers in Nature are the only mark of a good research career.

I have really enjoyed many recent blogs by senior, established academics out there about the problems with impact factors, the REF and h-indexes. Athene Donald, Stephen Curry and Dorothy Bishop have all written about this extensively and thoughtfully. Which is soothing and I find myself nodding my head in emphatic agreement.

But I am an early career researcher. I still feel the imperative to try and put my papers in high-impact journals and that that will *make* my career and that these papers will send me stream-lining past the ‘Track record’ assessment barrier for any grant funding I might apply for. Discounting my PhD research, in my own research I have a relatively few papers in what some would consider *high impact* journals; and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about this. Even though in my particular case the least highly-cited of my publications are in higher impact journals; I still feel the pressure to try and publish in Nature, Science and PNAS. I have no solid evidence for this – only anecdotal evidence at best, but it seems to me that the people with the most high impact papers are the most likely to be permanently employed and funded.

I think to be a healthier, happier researcher I would just disregard this pressure and publish all of my research only in lower-impact journals as it is quicker and easier, in my opinion. On the other hand, writing up work for a higher-impact more general publication can be really exciting as – at least for me – you have to work much harder to place your work into a wider scientific context for these journals which is fun and exciting, even if they do get rejected in the end. I think it is worth noting that not all work published in high-impact journals is horrid, there are good papers in Nature, Science or PNAS – which are general enough to be interesting to all.

Rightly or wrongly, I am under the impression that high impact does matter and it matters very much and that high-impact publications are most important kinds of paper to have when looking for funding, plaudits and the most successful scientific career – and a permanent job.

*an h-index is a measure of citations versus number of publications. For instance if you have 25 publications all of which are cited 25 times your h-index is 25. Also if you have 500 publications where 25 of them are cited more than 25 times your h-index is 25.

Posted in h-index, high impact publications, REF | Tagged , , | 32 Comments

Back in the day…..

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Sylvia McLain

The first questioned often asked in a PhD defense is ‘what was your favorite part of your PhD?’

My answer? Building an HF/F2 line. It took me almost a year to complete. I spent the better part of the first year of my PhD acetone squirt bottle in one hand, wrench in the other staring at a vacuum gauge checking for leaks. Tightening a little to stop the first leak only to find the next biggest leak and so on. I can now feather at 1/2 inch threaded tap so that only the tiniest whisper of gas flow can get through that baby. I can also pour liquids from wide mouth jars into a 10p size opening using only a pipette and not spill a drop, which is a great party trick for splitting alcoholic beverages – if you want to know; but this has nothing to do with anhydrous HF and F2.

Why did it take so long? When you are working with anhydrous HF you really don’t want a leak. HF is a gas at 19 degrees (Centigrade) – so if you get a leak (especially in the summer in Tennessee) – out it comes, with a big plume of smoke. HF is particularly dangerous because it is fat soluble and replaces the calcium in your body- which can literally melt you. Acute HF exposure leads to death as after about 10 hours you will die of organ failure. It isn’t pretty. I have had a few HF leaks, but because we were worried about this for obvious reasons, the line was built in a big walk-in fume hood and I had to wear a teflon lab coat. Which never really looked like a lab coat but more like some kind of crazy futuristic wedding dress – my labmates even made me a Kimwipe corsage to go with it. I wish I had kept it, or at least had a picture of the dress. Instead I have a picture of me(or my hands rather) using the line itself (photo op only; hence the absence of PTFE garment and gloves).

HF/F2 line

If you ever to work with anhydrous HF and it leaks the best thing to do is shut the hood as fast as you can and run away until it has all diluted itself into the atmosphere. The line design itself is in the literature in Review of Scientific Instruments if you want to read about it and why it is so cool.

The other scary bit is the F2 part. Everything burns in F2 gas. Everything. Even Teflon (which HF doesn’t attack), Everything. But that is a story for another day.

Oh and please don’t try this at home.

Posted in HF, laboratory equipment | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Gantt charts, work plans and funding research

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Sylvia McLain

I spend four hours yesterday making a chart. Really.

It was a Gantt chart. For those of you not familiar with a Gantt chart this is what they look like:
Gantt chart

According to Wikipedia – source of all modern knowledge – these charts were used in the first world war, designed by Henry Gantt (1910-1915). I am not sure why it took Mr. Gantt four years to design said chart, it is after all a simple creature the chart. Equally, while I am sure that WWI was an organizational nightmare, I am not sure we need to hold a WWI chart up as the pinacle of management organization. First of all there wasn’t much movement in the first world war; just a lot of death and destruction and pointless bloody battles. So the organization must have been largely a static one. Not to mention nobody actually *won* the first world war – in the sense most of us think of winning a war. The German Army collapased. So why did I spend four hours making a (slightly modernized) version of a WWI chart?

Funding agency requirements and a really great administrator who knows what I need to do to meet said funding requirements. (and no I am not being sarcastic – he is great). My first version was rejected – too vague. My second version still, too vague. My third version (I hope) passed the mark.

I think it is good that as academics we have to justify our time, set goals and show that we have an idea of how to organize a research group. This is essential. If someone is going to give you a sum of money to pursue research, that they want to see that you can organize said research in some kind of reasonable way is more than fair. But frankly, using a WWI organizational chart to do this, isn’t the best idea.

Scientific research is hard to put in a chart. First of all, some experiments take more time (or less) to accomplish than you assume they will – and you can’t really predict this. It is like replacing the wallpaper in a Victorian age house. You look at said wall and think, I can strip that in about 3 days, tops. Emboldened with your steamer you set about your work, then you realize that all of the plaster board is falling off. They you realize that the wall was actually patched together by someone in the 1960s with newspaper and glue. 3 day job turns into 3 week job.

This is (often) what happens with scientific research. Looking on paper at a project you say – I can do these experiments in about 3 weeks. Ok, this is not so bad, you probably can get the experiments done in three weeks but you waht you can’t say is I will understand all of the data in exactly 6 months time or I will write a research paper on this subject starting October 5, 2014 at 2 pm. But this is precisely what Henry Gantt is asking me to do. Science doesn’t work like this. It is not a static moving around of munitions but really a dynamic process. You do experiment X then often what you think next is WTF? So you have to go do about 20 more experiments to figure out what your favourite special experiment X (which you just KNEW was going to work) is actually telling you. Or maybe you think you know what the data is telling you but it is not so definitive so you have to do 20 more experiments to really know.

Now this is not to say that scientists have NO idea what is going on. Most of us know what initial experiments to run and techniques that will work in a particular instance – but what you don’t know is what the results are before you run the actual experiment; and often you dont’ get a definitive answer from said experiment.

So while I agree that explaining your work plan to get funded is a great idea, showing some kind of management savvy is essential; can we please get leave the Gantt chart back at the turn of last century where it belongs.

Posted in research funding | Tagged , | 23 Comments

Like butter over too much bread….

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Sylvia McLain

Beginning of the year Forbes published its Ten Least Stressful Jobs of 2013. Number 1? University professor with a helpful salary guide – median (US) salary $62,000/year – just in case someone decides they might want to change jobs immediately. Leaving out all of the climbing up the ladder (or pole) it takes to be a professor, I am not sure it is the *least* stressful job, but I maybe that depends on what other jobs you are comparing it to.

butter-bread

A number of quite annoyed academics responded to this – so many that Forbes published an addendum which kind of reads like, “Alright so professors may be stressed but they love their jobs so it’s OK.”

Which is what people often say about academics – they all love their job. I am here to tell you this is not true. I know many academics that don’t love their jobs (not me – my job is good) and anyway even if all academics DID love their jobs – is not really a reason/excuse for taking some kind of monster stress hit.

The thing about being an academic is that (often, but not always) you do get to do the research you want to do or there is a promise of being able to enact your research ideas or someone else’s cool ideas for that matter. This is in an ideal world. Obviously it doesn’t always happen like that. But here is the stressful bit. As an academic you have to find MONEY to do the research you want to do. Similar to politicians who have to re-apply for their jobs every few years, if you want to do research you have to keep applying for money to do that research. It rarely comes free. For the temporary contracted folk, you have to keep writing for funding to keep yourself AND your research group in a job. You have to do this even if you have a permanent academic job. You have to write for funds for supplies and often to employ others too. This is an immense responsibility and is not, no matter what Forbes says, stress-free. And it takes a lot of time, on top of other university commitments – like teaching students – which is one of the primary purposes of a higher education institution – it makes you feel ‘thin’, as Bilbo tells Gandalf you start to feel like ‘butter spread over too much bread’.

That being said, I am not sure that many of jobs Forbes mentioned are really low-stress jobs. I am sure that being the CEO of a big company is very stressful – so maybe after Wall Street a professorial job looks pretty nice and cushy – except you’d be making far less money, that can’t be fun. Take for example some others on that Forbes list. Number 5 – Medical Laboratory Technician. A good friend of mine is a Medical Laboratory Technician, she makes children’s radiotherapy cocktails for kids with Leukemia. Her job is stressful – though not particularly well paid. Number 9 – Librarian. Another good friend of mine was a research librarian. She was responsible for cutting journal subscriptions when there were funding cuts at her university. This is pretty stressful – think angry yelling academics who couldn’t lay their hands on their favourite journals.

Maybe it’s just me, but the Forbes list seems to really be a list of People-who-I-think-have-less-stressful-jobs-than-really-rich-Wall-Street guys and not much else. Or maybe it’s just bankers disease of always thinking
‘You think your job is stressful, well let me tell you what stressful is….’

Posted in academics | Tagged | 5 Comments

Books I read in 2012 – an amateur’s review

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Sylvia McLain

US Congress has just kicked the fiscal can down the road. Global debt worries are abated. Well for now anyway.

Instead of obsessively reading reports from the USofA – or in reality in addition to reading reports from the USofA – I decided to make better use of my time and write a review of some of books I read this year. I am, which will likely become painfully obviously, no book critic; so do take all this with a grain (or mountain) of salt.

1 – Game of Thrones by George RR Martin. This is the first book in a series of fantasy novels called the Song of Fire and Ice. I am actually really surprised I read it as I am not usually a big consumer of Sci-Fi/Fantasy stuff. It often just annoys me. Admittedly I do like Fantasy more than Sci-Fi – I thought The Hobbit was great – but I do especially dislike most Sci-Fi films, where we have learned that in the future (or the alien-encountering present) we will all have great bodies and run around on cat walks with drippy exposed wires everywhere. It’s also the preponderance of pods. Why are there always pods? Aliens stored in pods. People captured and stored in pods. We don’t seem to have moved on since 1979 and Alien (which I actually rather do like). But I digress…

1 – Game of Thrones by George RR Martin – 6 outta 10.

game of thrones

It was pretty good. GRR Martin has clearly read something of English history and incorporated it into a fantasy-like world – complete with lords, ladies, nasty court advisors and a particularly endearing dwarf. He also includes children and the voices of children which I believe give the book something extra-special and intriguing. There are some downsides. It is a bit simplistic/paint-by-numbers where you can mostly predict the next move, that and there are a super-abundance of characters which don’t add a whole lot to the plot just more people kicking around. I have read a few of the subsequent books and GRR’s world starts to get irritatingly complex. This is a definite downside, but over-all it is a decent, mindless escapist book.

2 – Terrestrial Energy by William Tucker – 8 outta 10.

Terrestrial Energy

This is a book about why we need to fund/use/understand nuclear energy as the best green alternative to fossil fuels out there. If you have a knee-jerk *hate* of nuclear energy, this is the book for you. It is very clear and filled with facts and statistics about nuclear energy and why it is useful. It even has an interview with Alvin M. Weinberg – granddaddy of nuclear technology. The downsides are that it has a bit of ‘conspiracy theorist’ tone – such as I have been saying this for years and no one is listening, but it does get to the point and is relatively clear. Tucker also takes a good swipe at that Flat, Hot and Crowded guy Thomas Friedman – which is amusing and well-deserved in my opinion.

3 – How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran – 9 outta 10

How to be a Woman

This book is great. It made me laugh. It is brave. It’s about Caitlin herself and feminism. She has taken stories of her life, which she writes in a humorous, yet thoughtful way and weaves those experiences in with her philosophy of feminism, this is particularly well done. The only thing I didn’t particularly like was the preponderance of sentences in capital letters, but this is a pretty minor point. If nothing else, you have to respect a woman who describes Jordan aka Katie Price as having less warmth than a ‘monitor lizard’.

4 – The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern – 4 outta 10

The Night Circus

Starts off with so much promise and excitement and then just gets silly. It is about magic and love, the magic of love and a circus. The mental images it brings forth are impressive, but I kind of get the feeling Erin copied a bit from Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. I wouldn’t buy it, but if you are bored maybe pick it up at Oxfam in a year.

5 – Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James – -2 outta 10

50 Shades of Crap

Yes I really did read this book. And yes that is a -2 not a 2. I was too embarrassed to buy it in a shop so I bought it on Kindle. Why? I was intrigued by what the big best-selling deal was. I still don’t get it. Other than maybe there was world-wide intrigue at attempting to read the most un-erotic ‘erotic’ book ever. I am glad it has made billions world-wide happy, sort of. It is not only badly written, it is hideously hideously misogynist. It’s 1000 times worse than the really crappy ‘romances’ me and my friends used to sneak from our Mom’s when we were 13 – but at least with those written in early 80’s there was some sort of ‘liberated woman’ aspect. Fifty Shades of Grey, after you get through the terminally dull sex scenes, is mostly all about ‘the right woman can change a man’s true nature’ and ‘all I want to do is please my man’ and ‘it’s OK if a man is stalky and jealous as long as he is cute’. Do yourself a favour, don’t read it – I have wasted my time doing it for you.

6 – Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier – 9 outta 10

Thirteen Moons

This is one of the best books I read this year. It is about a man who *grew up* during the time of the Andrew Jackson (it starts in the 1820s) and lived on the ‘frontier’ or what is now known as the Tennessee/North Carolina border. It is stupendously well written and pulled me in in the first paragraph. It has been criticised for being written mostly for effects rather than content and for being a bit ostentatious, but I heartily disagree. It contains a quality which I quite like with improbable situations neatly rendered probable in the story-telling. Maybe not for everyone but I liked it.

7 – The Culture Industry by Theodor Adorno.

The Culture Industry

I just started this and so can’t give it a rating. I am half way through and have realized I might be a while. Fortunately there are things like Google these days to help me decipher things like this:

Heidegger accorded a special place of honour to curiosity as an invariant feature in the ‘fallenness’ of human existence, as a fundamental existential-ontological ‘constitution’ within the ‘ontological tendency of everydayness’

I am above my head drowning in jargon I don’t know. It’s also based on Marxist thought – which I don’t know almost anything about either. So I will spare you my autodidactic take on this branch of German philosophy. At least until perhaps next year when I have high hopes I may have worked out what that sentence actually means.

Posted in Book review 2012 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Evidence-based policy is a good thing – but please proceed with caution.

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Sylvia McLain

Science is full of observable facts. Fact, when I drop a hammer off the top of the Shard, it’s going to fall to the ground. It doesn’t matter if I drop it or Brian Cox drops it (either Brian Cox) or Boris drops it, it’s going to fall. There is a scientific law written about this. The law of gravity, that was one of Newton’s. And a law of science is an the ultimate truth, right?

falling

No, not really scientific theories are not an ‘ultimate truths’. All a scientific law (or really a natural law) states is that there has never been an instance where anyone has observed anything different – not that the law is irrefutable and nothing new will ever happen. Scientific facts are observables. In principle, though admittedly not always in practice, it doesn’t matter who does the experiment or makes the measurements, observable facts are observable facts. The problem usually comes in how this evidence is interpreted.

I am an experimental scientist. I measure things. I come to conclusions about what the observables in my experiments mean. I come up with hypotheses, theories and then devise other experiments to try and test these hypotheses. In the somewhat turgid language of the ‘scientific method’, evidence is used to support or refute my hypothesis. If you peruse the scientific literature, it is full of hypotheses which are consistent with a set of data. Observable facts. Theoretical science predicts new things that might be observed but still remain grounded in observable factual evidence. This is the great thing about Higgs. He came up with the Higgs Boson, or rather the facts led him to predict this boson because it fit with the ‘standard model’ of particle physics (apologies to my theoretical physicist friends for the over simplification). This is the point of science, it isn’t about disconnected facts that we create theories about, it is about incorporating those facts into an informed evidence-based framework. This is how modern science works.

The problems usually lie in the interpretation part. This is true of science, as it is of all evidence-based methods. Our theories may fit all of the available evidence we have at the time – but they may not be a ‘truth’ per se, in the sense that many folks think of ‘truth’. They may in fact turn out to be incorrect, with new observables – many scientific theories are proven to be incorrect.

Richard Dawkins theory of the ‘selfish gene’ is a good example. Dawkins uses bits of evidence to support his idea of how evolution works through genetics – the selfish gene is his hypotheses for the mechanism of evolution. There is no definitive proof of a selfish gene currently and it is hard to think of an experiment by which this theory could be tested. Even so, Dawkins may well be right, but he may not be either. Much of the same evidence used in his book The Selfish Gene can also be and has been used to support different theories about the mechanism evolution.

There is a current trend for evidence-based policy, which overall is a good thing, in the context of separating “my pyschic says this is true” vs. “I have data that show that….”

But you have to be careful with evidence. Evidence can lead to all sorts of different theories and conclusions and when it comes to policy even more so. To put policy in the language of science, it is a very complex dynamic system. These kinds of systems are the most difficult to investigate. This is why psychology is such a difficult science, there are so many possibles and factors that effect obsevables and by extension theories of what is happening. Not to mention the evidence is ever-changing, which means the observables can lead to a myriad of different theories.

The same is true of evidence-based policy. It is not a straight-forward game. It is not as simple, usually, as I observe this, therefore we should do that. Usually the evidence is complex and difficult to interpret so while I fully support using evidence in government decisions I think we always have to think long and hard about what the evidence is really telling us.

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