Category Archives: Social commentary

Graduate school, Politics, Science, Skepticism, Social commentary

House Republicans Hate Science

11 December 2010 josephshoer 8 Comments

I wish I were kidding. I really, really, do. I recognize that the way political parties supposedly work is to offer different solutions to problems – not “good” or “bad” solutions: they are all patriotic, and none of them are evil. They’re just different.

However, when it comes to things like this, I don’t feel like I’m exaggerating: Congressman Adrian Smith is launching a “citizen review” of “wasteful” NSF projects.

The way incoming Republican Whip Eric Cantor’s web site explains the idea is:

We are launching an experiment – the first YouCut Citizen Review of a government agency. Together, we will identify wasteful spending that should be cut and begin to hold agencies accountable for how they are spending your money.

First, we will take a look at the National Science Foundation (NSF) – Congress created the NSF in 1950 to promote the progress of science. For this purpose, NSF makes more than 10,000 new grant awards annually, many of these grants fund worthy research in the hard sciences. Recently, however NSF has funded some more questionable projects – $750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.

(And, of course, Rep. Smith’s introductory video makes reference to those terrible “university academics” who receive this money. But the whole issue of why learning, academia, and universities are becoming more and more vilified in the political arena is a discussion for another day.)

At the bottom of the web site, there’s a form in which you can enter an NSF award number and comment on how that award is wasting your money. Anyone with an email address can do this. The thing is, while I do believe that transparency is a good thing, I don’t think that the average citizen is going to give any NSF grants the full consideration that they would need to devote to them before decreeing the grant a “waste” or not. They are more likely to make snap judgments based on descriptions like “$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players.”

What do I find so objectionable and anti-science about this?

First and foremost, this is a gross oversimplification. Scientific findings can have applications across many different fields that may or may not have anything to do with the original study or proposal. So, it’s entirely possible that the $750k grant had nothing to do with soccer, but the study turned out to have applications to analyzing soccer-player dynamics. And it’s entirely possible that a materials science group was interested in mechanical models of acoustic waves, but that research was more likely to be funded if done in partnership with a Hollywood effects studio than not, so they got $1.2 million to investigate the sounds of breaking objects. But even if the grants were explicitly for the study of soccer players or improved smashing noises in movies, they still might be worth doing because those findings might have applications to something that matters in our everyday lives, cures disease, enables new technologies, or opens up some other field of endeavor. In fact, every NSF grant proposal must include a substantial section on the “broader impacts” of the research in question, and many proposals get rejected for suggesting research that is too narrowly focused. Rep. Smith is asking people with a few minutes to kill to evaluate what NSF committees with many more qualifications have already evaluated and judged sufficiently broad-ranging.

Here’s an example of research that sounds crazy but has useful applications: a group of collaborators in Canada published a paper on the mathematical modeling of a zombie outbreak. (The paper is available online here, and is a hilarious read for anyone familiar with scientific writing!) Your first thought might be that this is a terrible waste of money, effort, and university resources; or perhaps that the journal ought to be discredited for publishing such a paper; or perhaps you think that this was a total failure of the peer-review process and that all scientists have lost their sense of perspective. But here’s the thing: the zombie modeling research actually has real-world applications. From the paper’s discussion section:

The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally, but possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.

This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first mathematical analysis of an outbreak of zombie infection. While the scenarios considered are obviously not realistic, it is nevertheless instructive to develop mathematical models for an unusual outbreak. This demonstrates the flexibility of mathematical modelling and shows how modelling can respond to a wide variety of challenges in ‘biology’.

[Munz, Hudea, Imad, and Smith, “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection,” Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress, 2009]

So, yes: these scientists recognize that they worked on a project that is, on the face of it, somewhat silly. The important thing, though, is that these researchers got together, thought it would be interesting to apply their methods to a problem, and got results that have multidisciplinary impacts.

Another great example is the study of synchronicity. Scientists in the fields of mathematics, biology, physics, engineering, and computer graphics have been interested in synchronicity among many discrete entities and how it could arise without central control, just from a few simple rules that each entity follows. An example is “flocking” behavior, exhibited by groups of birds or fish. A computer graphics expert named Craig Reynolds published a paper in 1987 explaining how three simple rules could explain how birds flock together. One of the dramatic consequences of this research was better computer modeling of large groups of animals, which, of course, found its way straight into the special effects industry. Here’s a famous example that uses computer simulation of flocking behaviors to make more realistic animated animals:

So, by Rep. Smith’s logic, if any synchronicity research received NSF funding, he could put it up on the Republican Whip’s web site and say, “university academics got hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to develop computer graphics of a wildebeest herd for a Disney movie.” Shameful, right? The thing is, this application is one aspect of the research. There are many more, ranging from behavioral biology to architecture to sociology to crystallography. Yes, applications include better computer renderings of schools of fish in “Finding Nemo.” Yes, applications include being able to explain how humans at a concert can all clap in time with one another. But this research also gives us better bridges, self-assembling chemical structures, and more capable robotics. You don’t have to take my word for it – here’s a fantastic TED video of Cornell Prof. Steve Strogatz, a gifted communicator, talking about the study of synchronicity and its many applications.

Second, people submitting NSF awards to the Republicans through this program are going to end up nominating as “wasteful” awards that have to do with policies they disagree with. One of the tricky things about science is that scientists don’t get to choose what results they get; sometimes they get results that they – or politicians – don’t like. But that doesn’t mean that those areas of study aren’t deserving of scientific attention!

Anyone with an email address can submit an NSF award to this Republican web site. It would take about 30 seconds for a lobbying corporation to get a Hotmail or Gmail address that wouldn’t be traced back to the company and submit all kinds of grants that have the potential to damage them politically. How many fast food chains do you think will nominate NSF-sponsored studies relevant for obesity prevention? How many oil and gas companies will nominate research into solar cell technologies or further confirmation of climate change? How many religious nutcases will nominate research that impacts evolutionary biology? How many companies will use this as a means to try to shut down research that might make their products obsolete or less desirable?

Humans have a natural tendency to try to ignore problems unless they pose a clear and present danger. This is probably a survival instinct: focus on what’s in front of you, solve the problems you can, and whatever goes on over there is someone else’s issue. However, at some point, we do have to recognize when an issue goes from “not our problem” to “we need to solve this.” Climate change is a perfect example: among the scientific community, there is no doubt that it is happening (though there may be disagreements about the details). But for a politician, it would be unwise to say, “yes, climate change is real; no, I don’t think we should do anything about it.” A statement like that would run the risk of sending voters the message, “I don’t care about you.” Much easier (and safer at the polls) to say, “no, it’s not happening at all.” As such, these politicians will latch on to any tiny weakness in the scientific work, so that they don’t have to commit to a course of action. So how many NSF-sponsored projects into determining what the impacts of climate change might or might not be get submitted to this web site, not because we shouldn’t find out about those impacts, but because some people don’t want to know that a problem exists?

On a related note, one thing that NSF does is fund some of our programs to identify near-Earth asteroids. These are the kinds of asteroids that we have to worry about – the kind that could crash into our planet and destroy things in a cataclysmic way. What are the chances that that could happen? Any astronomer will tell you that they are, well, astronomically tiny. Still, there is value in the search – because if an asteroid is on its way to impact the Earth, we had better know about it! If we ignore the problem, then there’s a large chance that nothing happens but a small chance that we all die. If we address it, then we can try to mitigate the issue. But how many ordinary citizens will look at these programs and think, “I don’t even know what asteroids are. Are they real? What is this? My tax dollars are paying for this. Why should they?”

Third, NSF-funded research pays for graduate students! We cost money – not just our meager stipends, but also our university tuition, university overhead, and mandatory health insurance for those of us who work in labs. We also need capable computers and precise equipment to do our research. And we need to present our findings to the scientific community at research conferences. Even if our current project happens to be on better modeling of the sound things make when they break, and even if the obvious applications are in the movie and gaming industries, that’s not what we’re going to spend our whole career on. We’re learning advanced skills – skills this country desperately needs to develop. We’re pushing the boundaries in advanced fields – fields that are relevant to a wide range of applications.

What if the grad student modeling the sounds of breaking objects goes on to develop software that can analyze a terrorist’s tape of demands to determine what other activities are going on in his cave, and lets us pinpoint him and stop him? (Yeah, that’s right, I just called House Republicans soft on defense because of this NSF-skewering project!) What if the grad student modeling soccer players is talking with a friend who is doing medical research, and finds out that his soccer-player algorithms could help his friend develop a cure for cancer?

Even if our research project has limited applications, it still has the function of giving us grad students the skills, tools, and abilities that we need to become fully-functional scientists and engineers in our own right. Today, I work on algorithms to control reconfigurable modular spacecraft. But if I never touch another spacecraft-related problem again in my life, I have still learned a lot about computer programming, mathematical modeling, control strategies, physics, critical thinking, project management, systems engineering, technical paper-writing, and communication. Whether or not I keep working on spacecraft, all those things will continue to be useful. Maybe someday I will even become a professor and start making little baby scientists of my very own. And regardless of what research projects they work on, no matter how silly it seems, there is value in simply teaching them to be scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and thinkers.

For science to work properly, scientists need to be able to proceed with free and open inquiries. They need to be able to exercise their wits and apply their knowledge to all sorts of problems. Science is about looking at something in the world, watching it, and thinking, “if I put my mind to it, I can figure that out!“ It doesn’t matter if the phenomenon in question is how soccer players move on the field, why things make the sounds they do when they break, why fish school together, or even how hypothetical zombies spread their infection. It also doesn’t matter if the research has immediate applications to movies, video games, sports, or anything else. We can explain the phenomena of the universe. Working to expand the scope of our knowledge enriches us, little by little, for as long as the human race exists.

That is a philosophy that the House Republican leadership opposes with this NSF review site. If your congressperson has anything to do with it, I urge you to write them about it.

People, Skepticism, Social commentary

Atheist Vuvuzelas Making Noise in Texas

7 December 2010 josephshoer Leave a comment

I sometimes find myself a visitor to College Station, TX and have, over the course of those visits, made a few acquaintances. Today, I checked out an item from the Bryan/College Station local news that involved one such acquaintance: Keri Bean, who has organized the Brazos Valley Atheist Vuvuzela Marching Band and done something…rather adventurous, shall we say? Video below.

What really struck me about this story was the first quote that was critical of Keri and her compatriots. From the web article:

“Wasn’t exactly happy about the Christmas Parade this year, I spent many years teaching my children to love and respect other people and to love the fact that they were children of God and I don’t feel that they should be influenced in any other way especially not at a Christmas parade,” said Tina Corgey, who is a lifelong Bryan resident.

I’m not surprised that there were people in Texas who were disturbed by an atheist group marching through town. However, I couldn’t help but get hung up on the statement, “I spent many years teaching my children to love and respect other people…I don’t feel they should be influenced in any other way,” because this unhappy Bryan resident then went on to criticize the beliefs of other people and criticize that they had expressed those beliefs. The Atheist Vuvuzela Band wasn’t antagonistic or offensive in exercising their First Amendment rights; they went about this with a healthy dose of humor and respect. So is Corgey saying one thing and doing another?

The thing is, I agree with Corgey’s sentiment – at least, her spoken one. I am happy that she’s taught her children to love and respect other people. I also think it would be wonderful if nobody ever influences her children to dislike or disrespect others. If she believes that these ideals derive from all people being children of God, that’s okay, too.

A marching band advertising themselves as atheists (or one playing vuvuzelas, for that matter) does not encourage her children to be disrespectful, or even encourage them to turn away from God. It merely announces that atheists exist. Corgey went on to say:

“If you have younger children they weren’t going to understand but I have older children, a teenager, 8-year-old and they were curious and they asked questions and it was hard for them to believe and understand that there are actually people out there that don’t believe in God,” Corgey said.

It is hard to acknowledge and understand ideas, theories, and beliefs that aren’t compatible with those that we accept. And it is also hard to explain to young or inexperienced minds that it’s okay for other people to believe something other than what you believe, as long as they treat others with respect and their beliefs don’t lead them to harm others. (That’s an ideal I celebrate about America!)

It’s hard, but not impossible. It’s hard, but not unnecessary. In our modern, free, and open society, it is essential that we accept differences of opinion without reducing them to tit-for-tat soundbytes. We must grapple with difficult issues in a considerate, respectful, and open-minded way.

That’s the reason why I’m glad that Keri and the Brazos Valley Atheist Vuvuzela Marching Band did what they did: because it caused Corgey’s children to be curious. They asked some questions to find out about other viewpoints than their own. Corgey may have struggled to answer their questions, and that’s okay – they are hard questions to answer. But the most important thing is that we keep asking them! Sometimes, questioning our ideas is the best way to strengthen or understand them. Sometimes, questioning our ideas leads us to something better. And sometimes, questioning our ideas leads us to something that is simply…different. But if we do not question, then we go nowhere. Curiosity should be celebrated! If the Athiest Vuvuzela Marching Band caused Corgey’s children to be curious enough to wrestle with questions that adults find difficult to engage, then they did a very good thing.

Food, Gadgets, People, Science, Skepticism, Social commentary

Disconnects

8 November 2010 josephshoer 2 Comments

Tonight, a friend of a friend came over to my apartment so we could all make chili together. During this process, we came to a point when we needed to defrost a bunch of ground beef. When I moved to the microwave to get that going, Friend-of-a-Friend says to me, “You know, you can also defrost meat in a bowl of warm water. That’s healthier for you.”

Usually the method I choose by which to defrost meat is governed by how long I feel like waiting for dinner, and how much I am thinking ahead. But I was curious about this new rationale, so I asked Friend-of-a-Friend to explain how the warm-water method is healthier than punching the “defrost” button on my microwave. “Well,” this person says, “one is cooking with radiation, and one isn’t.” Then they shrug and make a waffling gesture with their hands. “Ehhhh…” The implication was clear.

Something about this situation bugs me. Here is a person who has enough scientific knowledge to see that there is a connection between microwaves, radiation, and certain health concerns – but not enough knowledge about these things to realize that they have constructed a problem or fear that has no justification.

Microwave ovens work by bouncing radiation with a wavelength of a few centimeters or so around in a cavity. This wavelength lines up nicely with some of the vibration modes of water molecules, and the vibrations thus excited get passed along to food as heat.

Ionizing radiation can cause health risks in a number of ways, including killing things outright at high enough doses. However, the more relevant concern at the low levels of radiation found in a household appliance would be that the radiation could damage the structure of some cells’ DNA, and those cells would run amok – becoming cancer.

However, microwave radiation is non-ionizing: it is not energetic enough to do much more than excite molecular modes or maybe kick a few electrons into a valence band. It can’t cause any more direct damage to you than a walkie-talkie does by blasting you with radio waves, or a household radiator does by bathing you in infrared radiation. Furthermore, it can’t cause any damage to the DNA or cell membranes in the steak or pork chop or broccoli cut or baked potato or whatever else you put in your microwave oven. Even with ionizing radiation, irradiating the steak doesn’t make it radioactive. The result you get is a hot steak, not a carcinogen.

So, here is a person who knows that microwaves work by radiation, and that radiation causes cancer. But this person doesn’t realize that the physical mechanisms in each case are different, that the food cannot transfer the effects of radiation to you by being eaten, and that there is no syllogism here. But I wonder just how pervasive this kind of thing is: would this person be surprised if I shined a flashlight on them, and then announced – accurately and truthfully – that I was irradiating them? And how many other people are out there with similar misconceptions?

It strikes me that this sort of incomplete knowledge is a little dangerous, because it creates fear where none should exist. And there are many forces out there that would love for us to receive only partial knowledge, because then we can be driven by those constructed fears. If only more people could be motivated to pursue a fuller understanding of science…

NASA, Politics, Social commentary

Risk

3 September 2010 josephshoer Leave a comment

So, there’s been another explosion on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. This got me thinking about risk and risk management.

In the engineering sense, “risk” refers to the chance that a particular system will fail and how heavily we weight the consequences of such failures. Risk is present in any design, any system, any process. There’s no way anyone can drive risk to zero, because nobody has perfect knowledge of any system and nobody can predict the future with 100% accuracy. The question is how unlikely and how inconsequential a failure must be to represent an acceptable risk. A complimentary question is how well we plan to deal with those failures when they happen.

BP undoubtedly performed some sort of risk analysis on the Deepwater Horizon platform before it began operations. Engineers must have, at some level, looked at the drilling hardware and procedures and decided that the chance of a catastrophic failure was such-and-such percent. They must also have looked at the cost of dealing with those failures, and come up with so many billion dollars. But all this gets weighed against the potential benefits: if the Deepwater Horizon platform brought in revenue of only a thousand bucks a year, but had an chance of failure of 50%, and the cost to the company of that failure is $20 billion, then BP probably would not have set up the platform the way they did. But if the calculation came out with a one-in-a-million chance of failure, a $20 cost of failure, but revenue of $50 billion per year, then of course they’d go ahead with the project.

The failure of the actual Deepwater Horizon system could mean any one of several things. It could mean that all BP’s risk estimates were correct, and they just got supremely unlucky with that one-in-a-million chance: unlikely, but possible. It could also mean that their analysts made some error: they may have put the chance of failure too low, or the consequence of failure too low, or the potential benefit of success too high. The real trouble with this sort of thinking is that we can’t know for sure where the analysis went wrong, if it did.

However, when we look at BP’s horrendous safety record, the facts that came out about how blasé other oil companies were about drilling, safety, and cleanup in the Gulf, and this second explosion on a platform owned by another company with a dubious safety record (at least, so I heard on NPR), I tend to think there was a problem with the risk analysis. These companies are engaging in higher-risk behaviors in order to get higher payouts. In short: they are getting too greedy. This might not be a problem in some industries, but here, the cost of failure isn’t just borne by the risk-taking companies, but also by the residents of Gulf Coast states (along with the rest of us taxpayers). I hope that these incidents cause the companies in question to revise their risk analyses to be more conservative, especially now that there is wider recognition in our society of the costs of such risky behavior to the wider economy, environment, and climate.

Now, there are good reasons to pursue more high-risk activities, if the potential benefit is high. For instance, there’s my favorite kind of engineering: spacecraft engineering! I would love for NASA to take much greater risks than it currently does!

Current NASA policy, for instance, dictates that any mission should present zero risk to the safety of astronauts on board the Space Station. This policy, which appeared after the Shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry, makes little sense. Remember what I said before about zero risk? It does not and cannot exist. Yet, that’s NASA policy – and the policy has caused NASA to nix some pretty exciting missions for posing, for example, a one in 10⁸ chance of collision with ISS. The chance of Station astronauts getting fried by solar flare radiation or baking when ISS refrigeration units fail or losing their air from a micrometeoroid are likely to be much higher than 1 in 100 million – so what’s the problem? These missions don’t add any danger compared to the dangers that already exist.

Besides, we’re taking about spaceflight. It’s not safe. I mean, we’ve made it pretty safe, but still – it involves strapping people on top of tons of high explosives, pushing them through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, jolting them around repeatedly as rocket stages separate and fire, and then keeping them alive in a vacuum for days, weeks, or months at a time. Honestly, it’s astonishing that we managed to pull off six Moon landings with only a single failed attempt – and a nonfatal one at that!

I would argue that those tremendous successes in the early space program came from high-risk activities. For the first American manned flight into orbit, NASA put John Glenn on top of a rocket that exploded on three out of its five previous launches. The Gemini Program pioneered the technologies and techniques necessary for a lunar landing (and that we now take for granted in Space Shuttle activities) by trying them out in space to see what happened – that program nearly cost Neil Armstrong and David Scott their lives on Gemini 8. The Apollo 8 mission, which was supposed to orbit the Earth, was upgraded to a lunar swingby – the first time humans visited another planetary body – mere months before launch. But these days, to hear NASA brass and Congressional committee members tell it, no such risks are acceptable. NASA must use “proven technologies.” NASA must accept no more than bruises on its astronauts when they return from missions. NASA must not chance any money, material, or manpower on a mission that might not succeed, even if such success could give us the next great leap forward. And so we end up with manned “exploration” of only low Earth orbit for thirty years, an Apollo reimagining to succeed the Space Shuttle, and, if the House has its way with President Obama’s proposed NASA budget, a space program dedicated to building The Same Big Dumb Rockets That It Already Built for the forseeable future.

Fortunately, we still get to see some envelope-pushing on the robotic exploration side of things. Missions to Mars have only recently broken through to a cumulative success rate greater than 50%, thanks to a string of high-profile successes, and that’s partly because of the ambition involved in landing something on another planet. It’s wonderful to see the progression from the Sojourner to Spirit and Opportunity to Curiosity rovers – but remember that the Beagle rover, Mars Polar Lander, and Mars Climate Orbiter all crashed into the Red Planet. These failures cost money and effort, and perhaps a direction of research in a few academic careers, but not lives, which makes them more acceptable to bear back on Earth. Even if the risk is high, the cost of failures is acceptable compared to the benefits.

Still, there could be more room for audacity (is audacity = 1/risk?) in robotic space exploration. Take the MER mission, for example: a pair of vehicles designed to last for 90 days have been operating for over six years – and counting. In one sense, this is a great success. But in another, it shows that spacecraft engineers are far, far too conservative in their designs. Imagine if they had actually designed the MER rovers to run for 90 days: everyone would have been happy with the mission, and the rovers would have cost less and taken less development time to the tune of something like the ratio between ~2200 and 90 sols. Or, conversely, consider if NASA had been ambitious enough to design a five-year rover mission from the start. That might have seemed laughable when the MERs were launched, but now we know that duration to be well within our capabilities. Because, in fact, we design space missions that rarely stretch those capabilities, since we do not tolerate risk.

This risk aversion in spacecraft engineering is one reason why I (and so many other people) are excited to see companies like SpaceX and Scaled Composites – which aim to turn a profit, something NASA doesn’t have to do! – doing the things they are doing. SpaceX, especially, which had to launch its Falcon 1 rocket several times before it succeeded, but used that experience to pull off a big Falcon 9 launch and secure the largest commercial launch contract ever. It’s also one of the reasons I was so excited about President Obama’s plan for NASA: it looked like NASA would be sticking its neck out for unproven technologies again.

How is it that we as a society tolerate tremendous risk when it comes to activities that affect thousands or even millions of lives on Earth, but we balk at the slightest chance of failure when considering space travel? It’s a puzzle to me.

People, Science, Social commentary

Impressions of Scientists: Before and After

25 June 2010 josephshoer Leave a comment

Ten years ago, a seventh-grade class did an intriguing project. The students drew pictures and wrote descriptions of what they thought scientists were like. Then the entire class visited Fermilab, a US accelerator physics lab. After the visit, the students created a new set of drawings and descriptions of scientists.

The results are here, on a Fermilab outreach page.

Almost all of the “before” pictures drawn by these students show a man in a white lab coat holding a test tube. Many of the scientists depicted are balding, wearing glasses, and have a shirt pocket stuffed full of pens. The accompanying written descriptions talk about people who are “kind of crazy, talking always quickly,” “a very simple person . . . simple clothes, simple house, simple personality;” someone who “never got into sports as a child; he was always trying to get his straight A grades even higher,” is “brainy and very weird,” and “has pockets full of pens and pencils.” The descriptions from female students are particularly fixated on the stereotyped image of a geeky guy in a lab coat. Many of the students described someone who does try to do good things, who tries to make the world a better place, but they are still a person who is ultra-smart in some obscure way that does not relate to the students.

The “after” drawings and descriptions were quite different. Gone were the lab coats, test tubes, and glasses. Some of the background items like desks or computers remained, but the students drew men in jeans and tee shirts and women in ordinary blouses. Suddenly, “scientists” are people who “are interested in dancing, pottery, jogging and even racquetball” and “are just like a normal person who has kids and life.” The scientist “doesn’t wear a lab coat” and “got normal grades in school.” Scientists “come in all shapes and forms,” “aren’t very different from everyone else,” “played sports, still play some sports or still watch and go to games,” “are really nice and funny people.” One of these seventh graders “even saw a person with a Bulls shirt on.”

In the new descriptions, I saw that many of the students realized that scientists were not driven to science by their intelligence, by social rejection, or by an innate need to best everyone around them in intellectual gamesmanship; but by a passion to discover, to create, to invent, to explain, and to improve our everyday lives. Scientists chose their careers because they love science and are dedicated to answering the questions they pose. And that love remains with them. They are pursuing a dream, doing what they want to do and have wanted to do for much of their lives. In the words of one student, “if you want to be a scientist, be like these wonderful people and live up to your dreams.”

Many of these students also came away with a new sense that with this passion and dedication, they could be scientists, too. While few of them put the idea in those words, a number of descriptions echoed the phrase “they are just like you and me.” Some thought that “a scientist’s job looks like a lot of fun” because “they can do whatever they want and they still get paid for it.” One girl in the class even went so far as to say “Who knows? Maybe I can be a scientist!” I was particularly glad to see the work of the girls like Amy, who started with a fairly stereotyped image of the balding, nearsighted man in a white coat, but ended up with a woman in ordinary street clothes who has a full set of hobbies along with her love of science. Even if Amy didn’t write “I could be a scientist, too,” her after-visit picture probably looks a lot more like she thought of herself in seventh grade.

The “Who’s a Scientist?” page was last updated in May 2000. Now that those students are old enough to have graduated from college, I’d love to see someone get back in touch with them to see how many pursued science in college and how many of them have gone on to advanced studies or to scientific careers!

I love the idea of this project, and I wish more schools in this country would do similar things. It would be incredibly valuable for our students to see that it’s not just brains that make a scientist, and the required brains don’t crowd out all the other qualities that make people interesting or friendly or outdoorsy or social or anything else these students might want to be. We physicists and chemists and astronomers and biologists and geologists are not merely adult versions of the stereotypical middle-school nerds!

(Those are the computer scientists.)

Science, Skepticism, Social commentary

science and morality

23 March 2010 josephshoer Leave a comment

I’ve been getting a lot of my subject matter from Ryan lately, it seems…

Well, in any case, he put a link on Twitter to Sam Harris’ TED talk about science and morality, and how science could feed into morality. It’s well worth looking at and thinking about a little.

Morality has to do with distinguishing “right” from “wrong,” and Harris has a very good point that scientific methodology could be applied to help make that distinction. However, while I listened to his talk, a very important point came to mind. Let me set this up with the statement that many concepts or measures in this universe don’t come out to binary extremes. (Quantum states of spin-1/2 particles, for instance, are an exception.) In most cases, it’s not a question of just being on one side or the other; it’s a question of how far towards one side or the other your measurement comes out. I think the same is true of morality: how right is one thing compared to another? How wrong are the alternatives?

In answering such questions with scientific processes – not an idea I disagree with, in principle – we would likely end up at some kind of optimization problem. Given all the scientific data about the possible reactions and effects of a particular decision, how can we make the most “right” decision? That’s a pretty straightforward problem to approach scientifically. However, we must be careful about how we define “most!”

As an example, if you drive you have probably had the experience of getting stuck at a stoplight somewhere, getting frustrated, and saying to your passenger or yourself, “Wow, these lights are stupid. I’d love to meet the guy who designed them, they could be a lot better than they are.”

The operative word there is “better,” and the question is, how do you tell which stoplight timings are better than others? Probably, the guy who designed them actually chose the best timings. But what he considered “the best” is maybe not what you consider “the best.” Maybe he maximized the traffic flow on the main street instead of the cross street. Maybe he minimized the average number of red lights cars encounter along a certain route. Maybe he found the timing that gave the least amount of wait time at certain intersections, while also giving the highest possible rate of cars through the intersection, during rush hour on average Thursday mornings. Which one of these definitions of “best” is best? And why is it so? There is an assumption underlying the process here, and it can have a dramatic effect on the results.

I think we have to keep that point in mind while considering Harris’ points. We have a lot of data on actions and consequences. We can use scientific processes such as optimization to try and synthesize that data into a decision about what is right and what is wrong. But we have to bear in mind the assumptions that underlie that process, be up front about them, and be willing to entertain other possibilities.

Politics, Skepticism, Social commentary

terrifying influences on school boards

17 February 2010 josephshoer Leave a comment

I am reluctant to bump “Conference” down on my front page with this can of worms, especially now that my readership has been on the up-and-up, but hey, it’s my blog….

Yesterday I made the mistake of trolling around the New York Times web site for a few minutes between a lunch meeting and getting back to work. It was a mistake because I discovered this magazine article on the influence of religion in textbook revisions. It caught my attention with its headline, but it’s not really about how Christian the American Founding Fathers were. It’s about how Christian the Texas state school board thinks they were.

It’s a long article, and it covers a lot of ground. And I find a lot of it, honestly, terrifying.

I’m not just talking about the despicable attempts to get Christian creationism into science classrooms. (Side notes on semantics: “intelligent design” is a form of creationism, so I will not distinguish between the two; also, I will generally use the word “creationism” as a shorthand for “Christian creationism” – a necessary distinction, as there are hundreds of religions, each with their own creation story, to choose from.) Nor am I talking about the insidious efforts to insert the beliefs and practices of specific Christian sects into our government. I am talking about the repeated references to concepts like manifest destiny – the idea that American history has been guided by divine providence, that westward expansion was an effort to bring the One True Religion to the inferior heathen natives, that God has chosen America for divine purpose. It’s the divine right of kings all over again. And it’s the very reason why we have the First Amendment. A lot of that article made me so angry that I couldn’t do any useful work for about half an hour. Continue reading terrifying influences on school boards →

People, Science, Social commentary

got off easy

7 October 2009 josephshoer 1 Comment

A judge has sentenced Dale and Leilani Neumann, Christian fundamentalists who were convicted of negligence in the death of their diabetic daughter when they prayed for her healing rather than contact any medical professional. They get six months in jail, to be served one month out of every year for the next six years. I think they got off easy. They are guilty in my mind of criminal insanity and hubris, and at the very least, their two remaining children should now be wards of the state.

One purported definition of “insanity” is to repeat the same action or set of actions, over and over again, seeing the same result each time but somehow expecting a different one. When their daughter felt faint, the Neumanns prayed. When she could no longer walk, the Neumanns prayed. When she could not eat, the Neumanns prayed. When she could no longer even speak, the Neumanns prayed. And when her breathing came in ragged, shallow gasps, the Neumanns prayed. Only after her breath and pulse stilled did they think to contact EMS; by then, of course, it was far too late. These parents have demonstrated that their convictions are more important to them than the safety and health of their children. They have also demonstrated an inability to form a workable understanding of the world from observable phenomena. Insanity that endangers lives: these people should be put away for psychiatric evaluation.

I’m reminded of that pseudo-joke – or, more appropriately, the modern parable – of a man with devout beliefs who hears on the evening news one day that his city is in the path of a terrible hurricane. “I’m not worried about that,” he says to himself, “because I know that God will save me.” The hurricane hits, and as trees and power lines crash the ground around his house, a policeman comes to his door. Yelling over the wind and rain, the officer offers the man a ride out of town. “No, thank you,” says the man, “I trust in God to save me.” Hours later, the city floods and the man flees to the roof of his house as the water level rapidly rises. He sees a family paddling down the whitewater of their street, and they backpaddle for a moment to draw closer to the man. “Come quickly!” they cry, “we have room for one more! We can save you!” But the man refuses again, telling them that he knows God will save him from this predicament. The water continues to rise, and the man eventually drowns in the ruins of his home. His soul finally comes in contact with the God he always believed in, but, his faith shaken by the hurricane, the man cannot help but shout, “God, I believed in you all my life! How could you leave me on that house to die?” God retorts, “What are you talking about? I sent a TV newsman, a police officer, and your neighbors, all to help you!”

This brings me to my second point: for the Neumanns to refuse to contact medical professionals is arrogance, pure and simple. They were, in essence, refusing to admit that their fellow human beings could help their daughter. Not only were they refusing their fellow men and women, but the were refusing their daughter – putting their own beliefs, even in the face of dwindling supporting evidence, as more important than her life. If there is a God who created people in the image of God, then people and their capabilities are at least representatives of divine power. Even if you take issue with that statement, then you must admit that people do have the capability to treat type 1 diabetes, which caused the Neumanns’ daughter’s death. So, unlike in the parable I reproduced above, there was no uncertainty to the outcome in her case – without insulin, she would die; in the hands of medical professionals, diabetes would be easily identified and treated. She would still be alive. Her parents refused a course of action that would have kept their daughter alive in favor of a course of action that they could plainly see was allowing her condition to deteriorate. This level of pride, to “stay the course” when a quick, easy, and known solution exists but would require some ideological capitulation, is staggering.

I have type 1 diabetes myself. I know that my treatment regimen revolves around human ingenuity and technical proficiency. God did not create the insulin pump that keeps me alive. God did not hand down to humans the techniques for cajoling pig pancreatic cells to produce human insulin. And God certainly hasn’t waved a mighty hand to miraculously cure me. No, for those first two items and hopefully for the third, human intelligence is responsible. Human training. Human learning. Human teaching. Human experimentation. Human courage. If a God is in any way responsible, it is solely in allowing human brains to evolve such that we could produce the advances in science, medicine, and technology that would lead to insulin production, glucose monitoring techniques, subcutaneous insulin infusion pumps, and the education of those who must treat themselves. For me to rely on wishful thinking to hope my diabetes away would be negligence. If someone else was responsible for treating me, for them to rely on wishful thinking to hope my diabetes away would be criminal negligence.

Quantum Rocketry