Ted Bunn’s Blog

I like to bore anyone who’ll listen with the fact that human space flight, and the International Space Station in particular, are lousy ways to do scientific research, so in fairness I thought I’d point out that NASA has put out a document providing information on the science performed on the ISS.

Much of the information is hard to interpret. For instance, there are graphs quantifying the number of “investigations” performed as a function of time, but it’s hard to know what to make of this, because I don’t know what counts as an investigation.

Here are the research highlights listed:

• Virulence of Salmonella microbes increases in space; researchers have used this discovery to create an approach to develop new candidate vaccines.
• Nutrition studies conducted on the space station show that diets rich in Omega-3 fatty acids are correlated with reduced bone loss.
• Candidate treatments for a form of muscular dystrophy and for testicular cancer have been developed based on space station research results.
• Space station research has involved over 1.2 million students in the U.S., and 40 million more have participated in educational demonstrations performed by astronauts onboard ISS.
• Capillary flow experiments on the space station have produced universal equations for modeling the behaviors of fluids in space.
• The space station serves as a platform to monitor climate change, disaster areas and urban growth on Earth.
• Recent plant studies conducted on the ISS indicate that some of the root growth strategies that had always been thought to require gravity also occur on orbit. This finding provides fundamental insight into the processes of plant growth and development on earth, as well as contributing to our understanding of how best to grow food in space and other novel environments.

I could make snide remarks about some of these, but I won’t. You can decide for yourself how impressed to be. Bear in mind that the cost of the ISS is estimated at $100 billion.

Here is perhaps the most useful quantitative data: scientific publications resulting from ISS research:

If you assumed that the primary purpose of the ISS was to do science, then each journal publication coat about $170 million ($100 billion divided by 588). Even if you assumed that the ISS is 1% about science, it’s $1.7 million per publication, which is an insanely large amount compared to “normal” scientific spending.

The moral of the story: the ISS, and human space flight in general, are not about science. Any science done on them is a side show. I think it’s worth repeating this regularly, because in many peoples minds Space = Science. In particular, I worry that, when people think about the federal budget, more money spent on things like the ISS will mean less money for science.

Daniel Sarawitz, in Nature:

Actually, the bill doesn’t say or imply anything at all about replacing peer review. It doesn’t give Congress new powers over the NSF, nor does it impose on the NSF any new responsibilities. Yes, it requires that the NSF director “certifies” that projects funded by the agency are “in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare”, that the research “is of the finest quality, is ground breaking” and so on. But these vague requirements merely rearticulate the same promises that scientists and government agencies use all the time to justify their existence.

…

In other words, it’s not a very good bill, but neither is it much of a threat.

Sarawitz’s larger point in this article is quite unclear to me. If you want to know what he’s getting at, you’ll have to read it yourself, because I don’t understand it even well enough to summarize it. But at least he’s not spreading the “killing-peer-review” panic.

but it’d be even better if he didn’t suck at it.

His latest NY Times column uses trends in the use of various words over time, measured from Google’s NGram data set, as evidence that certain social changes have occurred. Here’s his first main point:

The first element in this story is rising individualism. A study by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile found that between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases.

That is to say, over those 48 years, words and phrases like “personalized,” “self,” “standout,” “unique,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself” were used more frequently. Communal words and phrases like “community,” “collective,” “tribe,” “share,” “united,” “band together” and “common good” receded.

Similarly, Brooks claims, trends in the use of various words indicate the “demoralization” and “governmentalization” of society: apparently we don’t talk about morals and values anymore, and we  talk more about government.

Coincidentally, these are three of Brooks’s favorite social ills to wring his hands over.

And of course that’s the problem. There are tons of things you could choose to measure, and it’s very easy to convince yourself that you’re seeing evidence for those things you already thought were true. I don’t see any way to turn this sort of playing around into a controlled study, so I don’t see any reason to take this seriously.

Brooks, to his credit, acknowledges this problem. Here’s the last paragraph of his piece:

Evidence from crude data sets like these are prone to confirmation bias. People see patterns they already believe in. Maybe I’ve done that here. But these gradual shifts in language reflect tectonic shifts in culture. We write less about community bonds and obligations because they’re less central to our lives.

The first half of this paragraph, it seems to me, could be summarized as “Never mind all the stuff above.”  Then the second half, citing precisely no evidence, says “But it’s all true anyway.”

Here’s a little illustration of the confirmation-bias problem. For each of Brooks’s three points, I can easily show you similar data that suggest the opposite. In some cases, these are Brooks’s own word choices, for which I can’t reproduce the trends he claims exist. For others, they’re different words with similar valences that show trends opposite to those he claims.

Point 1: we’re more individualized and less community-oriented.

Here are two of the words Brooks claims illustrate this:

See how these have plummeted?

Also, you’d think that along with this trend toward indiviualism we’d be less family-oriented:

Point 2: We don’t talk about morality.

But apparently we do talk about ethics.

Point 3: Government is taking over.

I’m not actually claiming that any of Brooks’s claimed trends is false, just that this is a more than usually silly way of thinking about them. Words come in and out of fashion. Maybe the fact that we talk about morals less and ethics more is telling us something about ourselves as a society, but maybe it’s just linguistic drift.

Nature ran a column by Colin Macilwain under the headline “Driving students into science is a fool’s errand.” Here’s the subhead:

If programmes to bolster STEM education are effective, they distort the labour market; if they aren’t, they’re a waste of money.

(In case you don’t know, STEM = “Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics”.)

The key part of the argument:

Government promotion of science careers ultimately damages science and engineering, by inflating supply and depressing demand for scientists and engineers in the employment market.

Start by asking why no such government-backed programmes exist to pull children into being lawyers or accountants. The obvious answer is that there is no need: young people can see the prospects in these fields for themselves. As a result, places to study these subjects tend to be fiercely competitive. But in many science and engineering disciplines, college places are ten-a-penny after decades of sustained government efforts to render them more attractive.

The dynamic at work here isn’t complicated. By cajoling more children to enter science and engineering — as the United Kingdom also does by rigging university-funding rules to provide more support for STEM than other subjects — the state increases STEM student numbers, floods the market with STEM graduates, reduces competition for their services and cuts their wages. And that suits the keenest proponents of STEM education programmes — industrial employers and their legion of lobbyists — absolutely fine.

In short, if we let the free market handle everything, won’t it lead to the optimal number of STEM graduates?

Although my worst grade in college was in Econ 101, I understand the general argument that letting markets freely set prices leads to optimal allocation of resources. I also know that there are a bunch of exceptions to this rule.

In discussions of education, the usual exception people talk about is positive externalities. The general principle is uncontroversial: when an action has benefits that accrue to someone other than the actor, the usual supply-and-demand argument doesn’t properly account for those benefits, and the socially optimal amount of that action is larger than what the market will naturally lead to. You get some benefit from vaccinating your kid against whooping cough, but so do your neighbors. Even if the cost of the vaccine isn’t worth it to your family, it may be worth it to society. The solution is to subsidize or legally require vaccinations.

(Of course there are also negative externalities, the classic examples being pollution and traffic congestion. In those cases, the actor doesn’t bear the full cost of the action, so to attain the socially optimal outcome the government must tax or regulate.)

We don’t leave education up to the free market — we legally mandate it and publicly fund it — at least in part because of the belief that education has positive externalities. People who can read are better citizens, which benefits us all.

Sometimes (e.g., in Wikipedia, but I’ve also seen it a bunch of other places), people say that a positive externality of education is that it makes people more productive workers:

Increased education of individuals can lead to broader society benefits in the form of greater economic productivity, lower unemployment rate, greater household mobility and higher rates of political participation.

Italics added. Presumably if you want to counter Macilwain’s argument with an externality-based argument, you’d emphasize that sort of thing.

Maybe I’m betraying my ignorance of economics, but I don’t understand how those two (high productivity and low unemployment) are externalities. It seems to me that those should be priced into the free-market calculation. That is, if STEM graduates have high productivity, they’ll command high salaries. This benefit accrues to the STEM graduate, so it’s not an externality, and the classical free-market economics argument should hold. I’m pretty sure that’s what Macilwain woulds say, and I don’t think he’s wrong about that.

I actually don’t think that positive externalities are the best argument in favor of programs to encourage STEM education. The real reasons, it seems to me, have to do with the sorts of things behavioral economists like to talk about.

Old-fashioned economics, including the argument that the free market optimally allocates resources, is based on a model in which individuals act rationally to optimize their own self-interest. If an engineering degree will lead to the greatest possible happiness later in life, then you’ll choose to get an engineering degree. If not, not.

Behavioral economics is based on the obvious observation that people don’t really act in their own rational self-interest all the time. I think that the best argument in favor of programs to steer students toward STEM education is based on this observation. Some students might not realize that a STEM career is a good option (or even a possible option) for them, especially early on in their education. If that’s true, then the free market will underproduce STEM graduates (compared to the socially optimal level), and we should find ways to bump up the numbers.

I haven’t been able to work up much umbrage over the proposed move by  Republican Congressman Lamar Smith to change the way the National Science Foundation grants are awarded. I think that the proposed changes are a bad idea, but would have much less practical effect than some people claim.

Via Phil Plait, I see that the Canadian government seems to be actually doing what people hyperbolically claim the Smith bill would do:

The government of Canada believes there is a place for curiosity-driven, fundamental scientific research, but the National Research Council is not that place.

“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value,” John McDougall, president of the NRC, said in announcing the shift in the NRC’s research focus away from discovery science solely to research the government deems “commercially viable”.

I don’t know enough about Canadian science, or Canadian government workings in general, to be sure, but this sounds exactly like what Lamar Smith wants to do in the US. The difference is that it appears to be actually happening in Canada, whereas even if Smith’s bill were to pass, I don’t think it would have the effect he’s aiming for.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about this is that it’s being done with the approval of the head of the National Research Council, who actually said

“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value.”

It’s easy to imagine this sentence coming out of the mouth of a member of the US Congress,  but not from the head of, say, the National Science Foundation.

Phil Plait on why this is wrongheaded:

This is monumentally backwards thinking. That is not the reason we do science. Economic benefits are results of doing research, but should not be the reason we do it. Basic scientific research is a vast endeavor, and some of it will pay off economically, and some won’t. In almost every case, you cannot know in advance which will do which.

In the 19th century, for example, James Clerk Maxwell was just interested in understanding electricity and magnetism. He didn’t do it for monetary benefit, to support a business, or to maximize a profit. Yet his research led to the foundation of our entire economy today. Computers, the Internet, communication, satellites, everything you plug in or that uses a battery, stem from the work he did simply because of his own curiosity. I strongly suspect that if he were to apply to the NRC for funding under this new regime, he’d be turned down flat. The kind of work Maxwell did then is very difficult to do without support these days, and we need governments to provide that help.

 

 

I’ve always liked Feynman’s quote about the relationship between science and beauty. (I mentioned it once before.) Someone’s made an animation to go along with the original audio of Feynman saying it. Check it out:

The New Yorker has a piece up about how Lamar Smith’s new bill will get rid of peer review at the National Science Foundation. As far as I can tell, the bill would do no such thing.

Currently, proposals are evaluated through a traditional peer-review process, in which scientists and experts with knowledge of the relevant fields evaluate the projects’ “intellectual merits” and “broader impacts.” Peer review is a central tenet of modern academic science, and, according to critics, the new bill threatens to supersede it with politics.

This paragraph would be fine, if it were followed by a clear statement that the last sentence, while it may be true “according to critics” is not, you know, actually true. There’s nothing in the text of the bill that can reasonably be described in this way.

If I were full of nostalgia for the glory days of the New Yorker, I’d say something at this point about William Shawn spinning in his grave, but I’m not, so I won’t.

(Just to shore up my anti-Republican bona fides, let me repeat some things from my earlier post. Despite the fact that this bill is being mischaracterized by its critics, it’s still a bad idea, and Lamar Smith and many of his fellow Congressional Republicans are indeed Enemies of Science.)

Phil Plait has a pretty good jeremiad on the infamous Creationist 4th-grade science quiz:

The thing that gets me is not the issue of legality here, nor necessarily who is promoting it. What really makes my heart sink is the reality that this is actually being taught to young children. Kids are natural scientists; they want to see and explore and categorize and ask “why?” until they understand everything. And we, as adults, as caretakers, have a solemn responsibility to nurture that impulse and to answer them in as honest a way as possible, encouraging them to seek more answers—and more questions—themselves. That’s how we learn.

But this? This isn’t learning. It’s indoctrination. It’s the exact opposite of inquisitiveness: it’s children being told what the creationists want the answer to be, despite the evidence. And it’s not just that these children are being told something that’s wrong; it’s that they are also told to simply accept it and deny the actual evidence they come across.

If you haven’t seen the quiz, you can go to Snopes, among other places, for details. Snopes is of course the cataloguer and debunker of urban legends. They have a piece about this because, when the quiz first started circulating, lots of people thought it was a hoax. It always seemed utterly plausible to me that it was real, unfortunately.

In addition to lamenting, Plait provides some links to useful resources about evolution and creationism, including one from Nature called 15 Evolutionary Gems, which I hadn’t seen before and which looks good.

On a related note, Eugenie Scott, longtime head of the National Center for Science Education, is retiring. Plait again:

Genie has been a tireless fighter against nonsense; for years as head of NCSE she kept up with and kept after people who try to wedge religious indoctrination into schools. Whether it was creationism or its mutant offspring Intelligent Design, she was always there, in the courtroom or on stage or writing about it. The NCSE is a shining example of what needs to be done in this never-ending affair.

That reminds me that I haven’t sent any money to the NCSE for a while. I’m going to do that. You should too.

Most of the time, when someone gives a post a title that’s a question, they have an answer in mind that they’re trying to convince you of. This one is a sincere question, to which I don’t know the answer.

Science bloggers are erupting at the moment over a draft bill proposed by Lamar Smith about National Science Foundation funding. Here’s Phil Plait, for example:

To start, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who is a global warming denier, by the way, is the head of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He has recently decided that the National Science Foundation—a globally respected agency of scientific research and investigation—should no longer use peer review to fund grants. Instead it should essentially get political permission for which research to fund.

(Incidentally, if you’re not reading Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog, you should be.)

This story, sadly, is extremely credible. Many Congressional Republicans, very definitely including Smith, are pushing an anti-science agenda and would love to take science funding decisions out of the hands of scientists. But when I went looking for the actual language in which Smith advocates removing peer review, I couldn’t find it.

The journal Science‘s piece on this would seem like a good place to go, especially as it links to a draft of Smith’s proposed legislation. The legislation would require the NSF director to certify that all grants are

1) “… in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science;

2) “… the finest quality, is groundbreaking, and answers questions or solves problems that are of utmost importance to society at large; and

3) “… not duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.”

I can’t see anything in here to justify the claim that the legislation goes after peer review. If the legislation passed, the NSF director would presumably have to change the criteria given to the peer reviewers, not eliminate peer review or even alter it all that much.

That’s not to say that the legislation is a good idea — it definitely isn’t — but the response to it seems quite overblown. The first two criteria actually seem mostly harmless: I don’t think that the NSF director would have any trouble certifying that funded projects “advance the national … welfare … by promoting the progress of science” or that the various superlatives in item 2 apply. NSF could rephrase the current “intellectual merit” criterion to include both of those without changing much of anything about the review process. The “not duplicative” language in item 3 is arguably the worst part — some duplication is good — but I suspect that very few purely (or even mostly) duplicative grants get funded anyway, so as long as there’s a bit of leeway in interpreting the language I don’t think that this would make much difference either.

I’ve looked at a bunch of other pieces on the subject, and they generally repeat the “attacking peer review” claim without citing specific evidence. Hence the question in the title, to which I would sincerely like to know the answer.

I feel a bit bad about even raising the question, as it feels like I’m giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And I use the term “enemy” advisedly: there is a strong anti-science contingent in the US Congress, housed almost entirely in one political party, who do want to do very damaging things. But I’d still like to know.

I’ll give xkcd the last word:

Scientific American has a piece about a study from a year or two ago about the belief systems of conspiracy theorists. It has some good information in it, but one aspect of it is misleading, in the same way as a piece I wrote about last year on the same subject.

For example, while it has been known for some time that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are also likely to believe in other conspiracy theories, we would expect contradictory conspiracy theories to be negatively correlated. Yet, this is not what psychologists Micheal Wood, Karen Douglas and Robbie Suton found in a recent study. Instead, the research team, based at the University of Kent in England, found that many participants believed in contradictory conspiracy theories. For example, the conspiracy-belief that Osama Bin Laden is still alive was positively correlated with the conspiracy-belief that he was already dead before the military raid took place. This makes little sense, logically: Bin Laden cannot be both dead and alive at the same time.

That’s a misleading description of what the study actually found. The actual finding was that people who believed that Bin Laden might still be alive are more likely to believe that he might have been dead before the raid.

Those beliefs are, in my opinion, stupid and wrong, but they’re perfectly consistent with each other. Even if statements A and B contradict each other, there’s no contradiction between the statements “The probability of A is significantly different from zero” and “The probability of B is significantly different from zero.” (Unless “significantly different from zero” means “greater than 50%, but there’s no indication in the study that that’s how participants thought of it.)

With this in mind, I don’t think that the positive correlation is the least bit surprising. Both beliefs presumably spring from the same source: a belief that the standard mainstream view is wrong. If that’s your starting point, then it’s only natural that your assessment of the probability of a bunch of different non-standard stories would go up.

As the authors of the original study put it,

The monological nature of conspiracy belief appears to be driven not by conspiracy theories directly supporting one another but by broader beliefs supporting conspiracy theories in general.