Daniel Schorr passed away today. The legendary journalist was, to use his own words, “a living history book”. Meeting him two years ago at the Cosmos Club was one of the high points of my life. He was both brilliant and funny. I’ll miss his commentaries on NPR, but the real loss is for American journalism. They’ve lost a giant.
Tenure as an economic proposition
Over at the Atlantic, Megan Mcardle writes about tenure in starkly economic terms. You can read the blog entry here.
Money quote:
Imagine I offered you one cell phone contract for two years at $100 a year, and another for 50 years at $90 + inflation. Would you really consider the second contract “cheaper”?
David Geletner on what passing the Turing Test would really mean
So what if a computer eventually can feign emotion enough to fool you. Will it experience emotion? Not according to Yale computerscience maven David Geletner. Click the link above.
Getting a PhD and an MD–the MSTP Program
This is a program that I was very familiar with during my time in graduate school at Michigan. Here at Science Careers Blog is an excellent overview of the NIH funded MSTP program to create physician-scientists. It’s unusually candid about the challenges.
Saving the Bay
The Chesapeake Bay is an enormous estuary of the Atlantic Ocean and plays a crucial role in life here in the Mid-Atlantic States. I spent this weekend on its waters and was reminded often (the depth rarely goes over 20 feet) that it’s really a flooded river valley and is hence very vulnerable. As editor of The Biological Bulletin, I am struck by the incredible biological diversity of the Chesapeake Bay and the relationship between that diversity and the Bay’s overall health. Yet, many of the animals and plants of the Bay are facing increasing threats from, among other things, polluted water run-off, particularly from large scale agricultural operations, but also from a host of other activities, many of them anthropogenic.
Two contrasting visual memory images from this weekend: the first, a Cownose Ray breaking the surface of the Bay in the vicinity of Oxford Maryland. The second, an empty can of soda floating nearby.
Why is this a given?
Apparently a new study reveals that there is an inverse relationship between a department’s scientific productivity and the amount of energy it puts into training its students to be teachers themselves. The link is here. Why should this be so?
It seems to me that at one level, there is no doubt, research productivity represents an opportunity cost. But it also seems to me that there must be innovative ways to combine research and pedagogical training that ends up being synergistic. Let’s put away the notion of “teaching assistant” and think outside of the box!
Black Swan Robustness
In the New Statesman, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s prescription for avoiding another financial crisis is here.
His central point: we should take our lessons from the natural world around us.
What is science?
When I’m reading the popular media (as opposed to talking with other scientists), I’m often struck by the apparent disconnect between the intelligent lay public view of science and the understanding of science held by most practitioners. In particular, there is a real confusion between technology, applied science and basic science. And then secondarily there is, among many members of the public, little understanding of the scientific method itself.
With regards to the first confusion, I would define technology as the material and sometimes non-material artifacts, built by human labor, that facilitate or enable some portion of human behavior. Thus the wheel is certainly technology, but so also is the Google search algorithm. By the same token, the I-Phone is technology, but so too is the Pub Med database of journal articles. But these things, material and non-material, are not science. Even though Pub Med contains scientific data and is used by scientists, Pub Med, from my point of view is technology.
Applied Science, on the other hand, is scientific research that can more or less, lead directly to the invention and deployment of new technologies. Thus, I view much of biomedical research (translational research in fact) as applied science because it can be used to develop new practical therapies to advance the public health. In the same way, agent-based modeling, applied to economics, potentially offers decision makers new computational tools for predicting and avoiding systemic risk. The key difference here is that while a prototype technological artifact may emerge from the practice of applied science, a mature technology generally does not.
Basic science, in contrast, is scientific research aimed at understanding the rule-set of the universe–usually by the hypothesis-based practice we call the scientific method.
It is this scientific method, that I think deserves a much better public explanation–it may well help to depoliticize public policy decisions that are based on scientific research, especially basic research. Most discussions of the scientific method, inevitably refer to Karl Popper. Popper’s key point was the the centrality of falsifying a hypothesis. That is, the aim and design of scientific experiments is to produce data which can serve as a test for an underlying hypothesis being true.
Thus, science is constrained by questions that are in fact testable. The ones that aren’t testable (and they are surely out there) aren’t science. In my opinion, it is this notion that’s terribly important for decision makers to understand: a policy issue, sub served by an implicit theory that can’t be tested, is a bad match for scientific research, applied or otherwise.
One last thought: there is a lot of good science out there that is non-hypothesis based. It’s exploratory science–the Human Genome Project was an excellent example of this. Exploratory science aims at adding to our knowledge of the universe, not by gleaning its rule-set, but rather by collecting and curating its facts. And with the technology of modern databases, collecting and curating may offer great practical utility.
Back from vacation
Today I’m back in the office after a week off. The construction outside seems to have advanced, not only here on our building, but all around the Mason campus where new buildings seem to sprout like mushrooms. We are making plans already for three conferences which will make use of the new hotel and conference center here on campus.
A shout-out is in order for our incredible administrative staff here at Krasnow, who kept things humming during my absence. They are a brilliant bunch. I’m very lucky to work with them.
Success at grant writing
This skill is often called grantsmanship. It’s quite different from scientific research itself, but success in science these days requires excellence in grantsmanship as a necessary (albeit non-sufficient) condition.
Here is a great blog entry from SCIENCE on some basic grantsmanship skills. I highly recommend it as a starting point for our junior faculty at Krasnow, in addition to interested readers.
Discoverers and Discoveries 