Taking research out into the wild

Like others, we believe that science is a little bit WEIRD — much of research is based on a certain type of person, from a very specific social, cultural, and economic background (WEIRD stands for Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic; Henrich, Heine, Norenzayan, 2010).  We want to use the web and the help of citizen scientists to start changing that.  In the next few months, we will be launching an initiative called Making Science Less Weird (stay tuned).

As part of Making Science Less Weird, we have proposed a panel presentation at the SXSW conference next year.  Here, "we" includes the team at gameswithwords.org but also at testmybrain.org and labinthewild.org.

In order to be selected, however, *we need votes*. To support Making Science Less Weird and help us increase diversity in human research, please go to this link to create an SXSW account:

https://auth.sxsw.com/users/sign_up

Then go to this link and click on the thumb’s up (on the left under “Cast Your Vote”) to vote for us:

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/20525

Thanks for your support!

Broken but not yet Dead

I became fairly ill on my last trip to Russia in August. The disease itself was fairly nasty if generally treatable, though it came with a not insignificant chance of developing fatal complications. Meanwhile, it took me a day to convince any of my friends that I was sick enough that I needed to see a doctor (they all wanted me to take various berries or herbs instead). Having gotten one friend on board, it took him a day to find a hospital that was open (one was closed because of a power outage, and several were open but all the doctors were on vacation). I eventually got to a doctor who gave me the necessary meds. Within a few days my fever was low enough I could get around reasonably well, and though I still felt like shit for a few weeks after that, I was able to fly home on schedule.

I was reminded of this story by Dr. Isis's harrowing account of her recent, nasty bout of mosquito-born infection. Her story is much more compelling than mine (one reason I didn't have a full post on mine before) and worth reading in its own right. What I picked up on in particular was the following:

Health care in the United States might be broken, but at least we have health care.  I spent the last two weeks teaching medical school in a country where much of the population doesn't have access to running water and access to fresh food is limited.  41% of children under four are iron deficient.  There are 60 times more low birth weight infants per capita than in the United States.  There is a hospital in the capitol city, but no CT, MRI, or dialysis. It has two intensive care beds. Nine ambulances service the entire country.  Medical record keeping is problematic and there is a shortage of technicians, doctors, and nurses.

That's absolutely true. It's also a reminder, though, that things broken -- if left without repairs too long -- eventually decay away. Right now it is nice that our (American) health care system is still better than that in the developing world ... but it's worrisome that it's not as good as that in the rest of the developed world. If we wait long enough without fixing it we may wake up one day and find that we are no longer in the developed world.

If this seems far-fetched, consider that among developed nations, we're in the middle or back of the pack in health care, primary education, income equality and especially Internet infrastructure. In most of these areas (perhaps not primary education) we've beens steadily losing ground for decades (we're also losing ground in fields where we're still technically ahead, like science). If that continues, we will eventually be left behind.

Bad News for Science Funding

NIH expects to have to cut the percentage of grant applications that are funded from 20% to a historic low of 10%. Let's point of for the moment that 20% was not very high, but 10% is rough. The expected outcome is that some labs will close, and those that don't will have to do less research, if for no other reason than that they will spend more time writing grants and less time doing real work (guess who pays the researcher's salaries while they write grants: NIH. So this also means that less of the money in the remaining grants will go to actual research).

The reason for the expected cutback is the Republican vow to cut discretionary civilian spending to 2008 levels. I understand living within one's means. I have a fairly frugal household (in graduate school, my wife attended a university-sponsored seminar on how to manage on a graduate student budget, only to discover that the recommended "austerity" budget was considerably more lavish than ours; we promptly started eating out more). But focusing on discretionary spending seems like someone $100,000 in debt clipping coupons: it's maybe good PR but as a solution to the problem, it's hopeless. This graph says it all:



Go ahead and cut all discretionary spending: you get a 16% reduction in the budget (which is in the neighborhood of our current deficit) at considerable cost. So maybe the coupon example isn't the right one. This is someone who, with a $100,000 debt, lets his teeth rot in his mouth because he's saving money on toothpaste.

Vote!

The best thing I can say about the last two years is that Democrats have made real investments in science. After eight years of stagnant or falling funding, it was like a breath of fresh air.

Luckily, Republicans are back to suck the air (and life) out of us again. After the complete clusterfuck that was the Bush administration, I don't know why anyone would be willing to call themselves a Republican, much less vote for one. But if I knew everything about human nature, I wouldn't have to run experiments. 

I wish Obama and the Dems had been doing more to fix up the wreckage left behind by Bush, but at least they don't seem hell-bent at destroying the economy. I hope you all enjoyed the respite.

In the meantime, vote. Just in case.

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For previous posts and more details on Republican and Democratic science policies, read this, this, this and this, among others.

Science, Grime and Republicans

Every time I go to Russia, the first thing I notice is the air. I would say it's like sucking on a car's exhaust pipe, but -- and this is key to my story -- the air in American exhaust pipes is actually relatively fresh. You have to image black soot spewing forth from a grimy, corroded pipe. Pucker up. [That's the first thing I notice, unless I'm in St Petersburg -- In many parts of Petersburg the smell of urine overwhelms the industrial pollution. And I say this as someone who loves Petersburg.]

So whenever I read that regulations are strangling business, I think of Russia. The trash everywhere. My friends, living in a second floor apartment, complaining how the grime that comes in through the window (they can't afford airconditioning) turns everything in the apartment grey. Gulping down breaths of sandpaper. The hell-hole that oil extraction has made of Sakhalin. Seriously, I don't know why more post-apocalyptic movies aren't shot in Sakhalin. Neither words nor pictures can describe the remnants of clear-cut, burnt-over forest -- looking at it, not knowing how long it's been like that, since such forests (I'm told) will almost certainly never grow back. It's something everybody should see once.

At least Russia has a great economy, thanks to deregulation. Or not. New Russians, of course, live quite well, but most people I know (college-educated middle class) are, by American standards, dirt poor. And even New Russians have to breath that shitty, shitty air.

Reality

Listening to people complain that environmental regulation is too costly and largely without value, you'd be forgiven for thinking such places didn't exist. You might believe that places without environmental regulations are healthy, wealthy and wise, rather than, for the most part, impoverished and with lousy air and water.

This is the problem with the modern conservative movement in the US, and why I'm writing this post in a science blog. Some time ago, conservatives had a number of ideas that seemed plausible. It turns out, many of them were completely wrong. The brightest of the bunch abandoned these thoroughly-discredited ideas and moved on to new ones. Others, forced to choose between reality and their priors, chose the priors.

The most famous articulation of this position comes from an anonymous Bush aid, quoted by Ron Suskind:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Even More Reality

It doesn't stop there. Discretionary government spending, one hears, is the cause of our deficits, despite the fact that the deficit is larger than all discretionary government spending. Tax breaks for the rich stimulate the economy, whereas infrastructure improvements are useless. Paul Krugman's blog is one long chronicle of absurd economic fantasy coming from the Right.

Gay marriage harms traditional marriage -- despite the fact that places where gay marriage and civil unions exist (e.g., New England) tend to have lower divorce rates and lower out-of-wedlock birth rates.

European-style medicine is to be avoided at all costs, despite the fact that the European medical system costs less and delivers better results than the American system.

Global warming. Evolution. And so on.

A Strong Opposition

I actually strongly believe in the value of a vibrant, healthy opposition. In my work, I prefer collaborators with whom I don't agree, on the belief that this tension ultimately leads to better work. Group-think is a real concern. There may be actual reasons to avoid a particular environmental regulation, European-style health care, a larger stimulus bill, etc. -- but to the extent that those reasons are based on empirical claims, the claims should actually be right. You don't get to just invent facts.

So in theory, I could vote for a good Republican. But even if there were to be one running for office now -- and I don't think there are any -- they'd still caucus with the self-destructive, nutters that make up most of the modern party.

This is not to say Democrats have no empirical blind spots (they seem to be just as likely to believe that nonsense about vaccines and Autism, for instance), but on the whole, Democrats believe in reality. More to the point, most (top) scientists and researchers are Democrats, which has to influence the party (no data here, but I have yet to meet a Republican scientist, so they can't be that common).

So if you believe in reality, if you believe in doing what works rather than what doesn't, if you care at all about the future of our country, and if you are eligible to vote in the US elections this Fall, vote for the Democrat (or Left-leaning independent, etc., if there's one with a viable chance of winning).

Tenure, a dull roar

Slate ran an unfortunate, bizarre piece on tenure last week. FemaleScienceProfessor has a good take-down.  Among problems, it repeats the claim that the average tenured professor costs the average university around $11,000,000 across his/her career -- a number that is either misleading, miscalculated, or (most likely) an outright lie. But, as FemaleScienceProfessor points out, tenure itself costs next to nothing, so anyone who says eliminating tenure will save money really means cutting professor salaries will save money but doesn't want to be on the record saying so.

If this seems like deja vu, it is. I just wrote a post about a similarly confused feature in the New York Times. That post is still worth reading (imho).

Which raises the question of why tenure is under attack. I have two guesses: 1) it's a way of ignoring the progressive defunding of public universities, or 2) part of the broader war on science. There are possibly a few people who genuinely think tenure is a bad idea, but not because eliminating it will save money (it won't), because it'll soften the publish-or-perish ethos (yes, the claim has been made), or because it'll refocus universities on teaching (absurd, irrelevant, and beside the point). Which leaves concerns about an inflexible workforce and the occasional dead-weight professor, but that's not on my list of top ten problems in education, and I don't think it should be on anyone else's -- there are bigger fish to fry.

Friends of science in government

The Democratic congress continues its support of American basic research. The House subcommittee recommended a 7.2% increase for NSF in the coming year, despite general belt-tightening hysteria. It's not as much as is needed, but it's still a nice change from 2001-2008. Hopefully it'll survive the rest of the legislative process.

Lie detection: Part 2

I wrote recently about whether fMRI should be used for lie detection in court. US Magistrate Judge Tu Pham says "no". Science reports:

But while Judge Pham agreed that the technique had been subject to testing and peer review, it flunked on the other two points suggested by the Supreme Court to weigh cases like this one: the test of proven accuracy and general acceptance by scientists.

What I find interesting about this argument, as noted in my previous post, is that it's not clear that commonly-accepted "evidence" passes those tests: fingerprinting and eyewitness testimony are two good examples.

Lie detection

A few pioneering lawyers have been attempting to use fMRI-based lie detection tests in court. I don't have any broad numbers, but it seems most neuroimagers I talk to are deeply skeptical of such tests, at least at the current stage of technology (and whether such technology can ever catch pathological liars is yet another question).

At a recent talk at Harvard, Michael Gazzaniga related the following argument from a colleague on the law end of things: whether fMRI-based lie detection is "good enough" is not a scientific question but a legal one. After all, the law allows all kinds of scientifically-suspect "evidence" into the courtroom as is (eye-witness testimony, fingerprinting, etc.). Present all data (along with information about how reliable it is) to the jury and let the jury sort it out.

That's one conclusion that could be drawn. Another is that perhaps it's time to step back and come up with a broad policy for how evidence is introduced into the legal system.

Science blogging and the law

The Kennedy School at Harvard had a conference on science journalism. Among the issues discussed were legal pitfalls science bloggers can run into. Check out this blog post at the Citizen Media Law Project.

NSF budget

It seems the current director of the National Science Foundation thinks it's unlikely NSF will get much of a budget increase this coming year (if any), despite Obama's pledge of an 8% increase. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

Max Planck entering South Korea

 Germany's Max Planck Institute is starting a partnership with an institution in South Korea. This comes on the heels of another joint institution in Shanghai. Max Planck already has other full-fledged institutes in Europe outside Germany proper.

I'm a big fan of the Max Planck institutes, in that I think there is a place for relatively small, focused research institutes outside of academia, and I'm happy to see that they continue to expand. I hope some day they consider opening Max Planck Boston -- preferably focused on language acquisition, since an institute dealing with particle physics wouldn't be as useful to me.

Briefings: New Science Budget

Details on Obama's 2011 science budget are now available. The last issue of Nature has a run-down. The news is better than it could have been -- and certainly better than the disastrous Bush years.

Cancellation of the Constellation program (the replacement for the Shuttle) and the moon mission made the headlines, but despite that, NASA's budget will increase slightly. The end of the Constellation project would have seriously increased the amount available for science, but in fact a lot of the money budgeted for that will be spent stimulating the development of commercial rockets.

NIH is getting a $1 billion increase -- which only amounts to 3.2% because NIH is the biggest of the US science programs. Because the NIH received $10.4 billion in stimulus funds, the number of grants they will be able to give out in 2011 will fall considerably. One nice piece of news is that stipends for many NIH-supported doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows will rise, showing the administration's continued focus on supporting young scientists.

The DoE's budget is getting a significant boost of 7% to $28.4 billion, with money going to energy research and eveloment, nuclear weapons and physical sciences.

The NSF -- the smallest of the non-defense research programs but the one that funds me and most psycholinguists -- is getting a small hike up from $6.9 billion to $7.4 billion.

Most of what I've seen in the science press has been relative contentment with the budget, given that many other programs are being cut. That said, it's worth keeping in mind that the last decade saw the US losing steady ground to the rest of the world in science and technology; whether small increases will help remains to be seen.

Vote!

I know it's snowy out there, but all of you in Massachusetts: go out and vote!'

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laserstars/ / CC BY 2.0

What does a professor do all day?

Readers of this blog will remember Dick Morris's strange claim that professors don't do anything except teach -- it's not even clear he thinks they have to prepare for class or grade papers. This raised a considerable backlash on the Web, in which many pointed out that teaching is, for many professors, only one pursuit (and often not the main one).

Around the same time, but apparently independently, a professor of psycholinguistics, Gerry Altmann, listed how he had been spending his time. In the space of 2.5 weeks, sent out 18 manuscripts for review (he's a journal editor), wrote 51 action letters (telling authors what decisions had been made), reviewed 7 NIH grants (interesting, since he works in the UK), and visited collaborators in Philly to discuss a new project (presumably part -- but not all -- of the 3677 miles he reports having flown).

How do I feel about open-access journals? The president wants to know.

The White House is requesting comments as it formulates a policy on open-access publication, at least according to a recent email from AAAS:

The Obama Administration is seeking public input on policies concerning access to publicly-funded research results, such as those that appear in academic and scholarly journal articles. Currently, the National Institutes of Health require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. The Administration is seeking views as to whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented.

The comments are being collected in phases. Right now (Dec. 10 - 20) they are asking

Which Federal agencies are good candidates to adopt Public Access policies? What variables (field of science, proportion of research funded by public or private entities, etc.) should affect how public access is implemented at various agencies, including the maximum length of time between publication and public release?

Next up (Dec. 21 - 31) is

In what format should the data be submitted in order to make it easy to search and retrieve information, and to make it easy for others to link to it? Are there existing digital standards for archiving and interoperability to maximize public benefit? How are these anticipated to change?

Finally (Jan. 1 - 7) they are interested in

What are the best mechanisms to ensure compliance? What would be the best metrics of success? What are the best examples of usability in the private sector (both domestic and international)?

I'm glad they are thinking seriously about these things.

Science in the classroom

Science Magazine recently profiled a new website that links up scientists and classroom teachers in order to improve science education. It looks like a great project, and definitely something needed.

Vaccination and the Assault on Health

I had always though that refusal to get a flu vaccination was relatively harmless masochism. Refusal to vaccinate one's own children, on the other hand, should probably be prosecuted as child abuse, but at the least the negative consequences stay close to home.

Yesterday, however, I read two articles on vaccination. One in Slate looks at the risks the unvaccinated pose to people with immunity problems (she's unable to get childcare for her child, who is undergoing cancer treatment, because the risk of being around unvaccinated children is too high). If that seems like a parochial problem ("my kid doesn't have cancer; why should I worry about vaccination rates?"), the other article, appearing in Wired, is feature-length, and focuses on the anti-vaccine movement and the dangers it poses to the health of everyone.

Both note the rise in non-vaccination and the concomitant rise in outbreaks of the scourges of yesteryear. And they were scourges:

Just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b caused Hib meningitis in mor ehtan 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage...

But refusing to vaccinate is more than just a convenient way of decreasing the probability you'll have to pay for college (and that your neighbor's kid with leukemia will survive). This is because the un-vaccinated put the vaccinated at risk.

The Risk to Us All

As told in the Wired article, an unvaccinated 17-year-old Indiana girl picked up measles on a 2005 trip to Bucharest. When she returned, she went to a church gathering of 500 people. Of the 50 attendees who had not been vaccinated, 32 developed measles. Any adults who got measles had at least made the choice to take on that risk, but the children had not.

Even worse are the two people who had been vaccinated but nonetheless got sick. They had been responsible and protected themselves, but this reckless 17-year-old and her parents endangered their lives. First, though, three cheers for vaccines. Of the unvaccinated, 64% got sick. Of the vaccinated and those with natural immunity, only 0.8% got sick.

But still, vaccines don't always work. Sometimes they don't take. Sometimes your immune response may have weakened (for instance, through aging). Or you might just have bad luck. A 2002 study in The Journal of Infectious Diseases determined that you were safer as an unvaccinated person in a well-vaccinated country than as a vaccinated person in a largely un-vaccinated country.

People who refuse vaccines aren't just risking themselves, and parents who refuse vaccines for their children aren't just risking their children, they are risking you and me.

Baby-Killers

What makes this even worse is that every baby is initially unvaccinated. Children have to reach a certain age in order to get vaccines. What protects babies is that everyone older is healthy (i.e., vaccinated). So adult vaccine-refuseniks made it through infancy partly thanks to everyone else getting vaccinated. But they aren't willing to give other babies the same chance.

Do people have the right to choose for themselves whether they want vaccines? Sure -- as long as they live on top of a mountain or on a deserted island away from contact with anyone else. Mandatory vaccination**, and now!

(**With medical exceptions, of course)

My First Radio Interview

In my brief career as a freelance travel & culture writer, I conducted a number of interviews. I had never been interviewed for anything real prior to just finishing a phone interview with a journalist who is considering writing about my birth order research.

Harvard being Harvard, many of my friends have been interviewed by multiple TV and radio shows, and there are periodically camera crews on my floor. But my lab's research is less media-friendly (no dancing parrots), it's not something we normally deal with.

I admit the experience is somewhat disconcerting. I expect my birth order research to be controversial. And while there is really no point in publishing something that is then ignored, the one advantage of being ignored is nobody's likely to send angry emails, feel I misrepresented their findings, or criticize the methods or conclusions. So while I do seek out publicity for these findings (hence the blog, and also an upcoming article I'm writing for a mainstream science magazine), success in achieving that publicity is at least as worrisome as failure. So we'll see how this goes...

Do Americans Value Science? New Numbers

A recent Pew survey finds that more Americans think scientists contribute a lot to society (70%) than do doctors (69%), engineers (64%), the clergy (40%), journalists (38%), artists (31%), lawyers (23%) or business executives (21%). The apparent statistical tie between scientists and doctors may be explained, however, by the fact that many people seem to conflate the two. When asked for an important scientific achievement, about half referred to a biomedical advance.

The survey contains a great deal of information and is worth reading in full. A few other things stand out to me: 49% of scientists, but only 17% of the public, think American science is the best in the world. The objective numbers are that American science is the best in the world. True, this has been rapidly changing, which may explain scientists' pessimism. But why is the public unaware of America's huge historical scientific advantage on the world stage? At the very least, this indicates poor PR on the part of US science.