Back in August 2007, pretty much by accident, I stumbled across an ongoing series of podcasts – the series was named Open Views. There are 43 episodes recorded/uploaded between October 2006 and December 2007. When I found the series, the most recent upload was episode 37.

The first four episodes that I listened to were:-

30 – Open Views – David Lipman, National Institutes of Health

10 – Open Views – Mark Patterson, Virginia Barbour, Public Library of Science

12 – Open Views – Richard Poynder

and

16 – Open Views – John Wilbanks, Science Commons

At that juncture, I was only six months into my foray into all things Open Access so listening to the above was extremely helpful.

So, who was behind this and what is KRUU.fm ?

The person who put these episodes together was a guy called Sundar Raman.

And from http://kruufm.com/about

Who We Are

KRUU-LP 100.1 FM is a solar-powered, open source, independent, non commercial, listener-supported, grassroots community low power radio station, broadcasting 24 hours/day and 7 days/week since September 30th, 2006 from Fairfield, Iowa. 99.7% of the programs at KRUU are produced by some 100 volunteer hosts who create 80 shows a week. Only one program is not produced by KRUU hosts.

KRUU-FM – Giving Fairfield a Voice

The mission of KRUU is to give Fairfield a voice, and strengthen the community by encouraging creativity, dialogue and community involvement. KRUU is an open, inclusive, diverse forum for music, creative expression, information, and entertainment with a strong emphasis on locally created produced programming.

Very, very interesting….

Being the proactive person that I am, I submitted an entry to the SPARC Open Access Forum to alerts users about Open Views. I then contacted Sundar by email and received a lovely reply. Having told him a bit about my background, I sent him a copy of my Open Access Contact list which he was grateful for.

Quite by surprise, he asked if I would be interested in doing an interview !! McWOW… I gratefully accepted. I also assisted in connecting Sundar with Peter Suber and shortly thereafter, Sundar interviewed Peter Suber and I back to back.

And so it came to pass that episode 38 was:-

- Open Views – Peter Suber, OpenAccess

Whilst eagerly awaiting to hear my own interview, I helped to set up two others being:-

Episode 42 – Open Views – Matthew Todd, The Synaptic Leap

and

Episode 43 – Open Views – Matthew Cockerill, BioMedCentral

Episode 43 turned out to be the final one.

Sundar and I kept in touch and towards the end of the year, he emailed me a link to the unedited recording of my own interview. In January 2008, I uploaded a small section of the interview here and linked to it on my old blog here.

Finally, by July 2008, I got round to uploading and blogging the full edited version.

Anyways, enough about lil’ ole me….

Whilst it’s unfortunate that the series ended there, it still remains a fantastic online resource….

Open Views is an exploration of open-source and free-culture movements around the world, stretching beyond the limits of software. The show’s purpose is to provide a view into the rich world of collaborative development, open ideas, independent media, and new business models. This is a revolutionary time, with tools to aid the world, and collaboration possible from every corner of the globe. Open Views talks to the people at the front lines of this renaissance.   SOURCE

Click here for a short description of all of the episodes and here for a more in depth one

Listen to and download archived episodes of Open views by clicking on this link.

The abstract of our paper on the matter reads as follows:

Observations of magnetic field effects on biological systems have often been contradictory. For amphibian eggs, a review of the available literature suggests that part of the discrepancies might be resolved by considering a previously neglected parameter for morphological alterations induced by magnetic fields – the jelly layers that normally surround the egg and are often removed in laboratory studies for easier cell handling. To experimentally test this hypothesis, we observed the morphology of fertilizable Xenopus laevis eggs with and without jelly coat that were subjected to static magnetic fields of up to 9.4 T for different periods of time. A complex reorganization of cortical pigmentation was found in dejellied eggs as a function of the magnetic field and the field exposure time. Initial pigment rearrangements could be observed at about 0.5 T, and less than 3 T are required for the effects to fully develop within two hours. No effect was observed when the jelly layers of the eggs were left intact. These results suggest that the action of magnetic fields might involve cortical pigments or associated cytoskeletal structures normally held in place by the jelly layers and that the presence of the jelly layer should indeed be included in further studies of magnetic field effects in this system.

The tennis ball effect is illustrated in its Figure 1:

The new manuscript (of which I just know the title and abstract) deals with a mechanism for such cortical reorganizations, which also occur physiologically as part of amphibian embryonic development. In our paper, we could only speculate on the mechanisms, so I am very interested in getting an update on this front and would very much like to be involved with reviewing the paper.

However, there is a problem: while both my thesis and the paper on the effect are available under CC BY licenses, the journal that invited me to review is run by Elsevier (who, by the way, are getting their toes wet with opening up their peer review process) and charges readers US $ 39.95 for access to its articles.

This inaccessibility makes it incompatible with my pledge over at Research Without Walls, which reads:

Effective 1/22/2012, I will assist in the peer review process (as a reviewer, board/committee member, chair, editor, etc.) only for conferences, journals, and other publication venues that make all accepted publications available to the public for free via the web under a license compatible with reuse on Wikipedia (i.e. CC0/PD, CC BY or CC BY-SA).

Normally, I’d just send editors such a brief explanation (or, more recently, simply the link to the pledge), but a recent conversation inspired me to make this case public as one more data point regarding access to scientific research.

I will thus email the editor the link to this blog post and invite him and the authors to comment here.

He accompanied his announcement with an open letter (WebCite) to the faculty that had rejected his tenure application, referring to the well-known (and typically unaddressed, at least by the powers-to-be) problem that the only thing that counts for career advancement in science are formal peer-reviewed publications. Incidentally, this was also the main reason why Paul Ginsparg – the founder of the arXiv – had to leave Los Alamos, which prompted the comment that ”Evidently their form didn’t have a box for: ‘completely transformed the nature and reach of scientific information in physics and other fields’.”

Steven has not reached that stage yet but he was on a good track to transform the teaching of Physics by doing it in the open. In conclusion, Steve wrote

I’m not done trying to improve science and maximize the impact of our taxpayers’ research and higher education funding.

and Bill Hooker commented “UNM has missed an opportunity to be ahead of the curve.”

Below, I am pasting in a copy of his letter (with one typo corrected) and a copy of the letter that the global open science community had prepared in support of his application for tenure. Both documents have been released under CC0/ Public Domain.

March 29, 2012

Dear Provost Abdallah, Senior Vice Provost Dougher,
and Members of the Provost’s Tenure Sub-Committee:

As you know, following the negative tenure decision by the Arts & Sciences Dean’s office, I was permitted to obtain the redacted documents related to my tenure case. I did so last week, planning on writing a detailed rebuttal of the criticism, in order to fight for a chance of the decision being reversed in the Provost Office. However, upon reading through the assessments by individual Physics & Astronomy faculty members and members of the A&S Tenure & Promotion committee, I have changed my mind and have decided to write this note instead.

It is overwhelmingly clear that both the P&A tenured faculty (in the majority) and the A&S T&P committee (unanimously) do not wish to promote me.  I believe if their decision were to be overridden at this point, there would be extraordinary disdain and potential waste of political capital from the Provost’s office.  So, in short, I am not asking any members of the sub-committee, the Senior Vice Provost, or the Provost to risk any of their relationships within the University by overriding the College’s decision.  On the contrary, I would rather you use your political capital to help the university become a leader in 21st century research and higher education. The Provost writes the most thoughtful weekly letters of any administrator I’ve served since I’ve been at UNM or Sandia.  So I believe he and those reporting to him can help perpetuate the positive changes I’ve seen happening during my time here and perhaps transform UNM into a true leader of 21st century research and higher education.

There are many examples of where this power can be applied.  To highlight just one avenue: I have been tremendously impressed by the cutting edge and, truly, revolutionary changes the UNM Library has been making.  Please keep giving the UL institutional support to drive this change!  (Actually, please divert much MORE support to the UL!)  I was introduced to the Library by Johann van Reenen a couple years ago and have been honored to work with personnel there ever since.  While with the UL, Johann had a great vision for how 21st century research could become so, so much more effective.  The library interactions he initiated for me have easily been the most productive, eye-opening, and exciting during my time at UNM–and I am talking about all aspects of my work: undergraduate education, graduate education, AND dissemination and maximization of impact of laboratory research.

To conclude, from many redacted letters I learned how agonizing this decision was at various levels of the T&P process.  There is no need for further agony.  As Michael Nielsen clearly describes in his captivating book, “Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science,” (http://goo.gl/q7Vgd)  peer-reviewed publications ARE gold for Tenure & Promotion.  I knew this, and I knew how to get tenure:  Deprioritize teaching (especially of undergraduates), deprioritize mentorship (especially of undergraduates), deprioritize EVERYTHING except for writing peer-reviewed publications and grants.  I made a conscious and informed decision to do otherwise.  I’ve already been given the extremely valuable gift of the opportunity to teach, serve, mentor, and do research for 6 years.  I was fortunate to have an extraordinarily supportive chair, Bernd Bassalleck, who helped me achieve a lot in these areas. I feel a genuine reward from the boost I’ve given to hundreds of undergraduate students, however small it was.  I’m rewarded by the tremendous growth I’ve seen in all my mentored Ph.D. students–and both of those who’ve already graduated have jobs!  I’m rewarded by what I view as overwhelmingly positive external support letters as well as tremendous support from the global open science community (whether you believe in it or not!).

I’m not done trying to improve science and maximize the impact of our taxpayers’ research and higher education funding.  During my terminal contract, I will work hard to mentor my remaining graduate students through their Ph.D. defenses.  I will work hard to make sure their excellent research and the excellent research of students before them has maximum impact and survives beyond my time at UNM.  And I will also strive to do an even better job teaching Physics 102 and 308L–both of which are a delight to teach. Please don’t agonize about not giving the gift of tenure.  I have already been given the gifts I describe above and I am truly looking forward to the next step in my career.

Sincerely,

Steven J. Koch

Faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy

Physics and Astronomy
1919 Lomas Blvd. NE
MSC07 4220
Albuquerque NM 87131-0001

September 30, 2011

RE: Steve Koch Tenure and Promotion

Dear Faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy,

We, the undersigned, write to express our strong support for Dr Steve Koch’s application for tenure at UNM.

By virtue of Steve’s “open notebook” approach, we are his colleagues in the enterprise of science.  We have provided feedback on experimental design and data, read and commented on drafts of papers and theses and grant applications, and discussed with students the day-to-day practical business of doing research for a living. In turn we have benefited from Steve’s contributions to our own research through his technical insight and unique expertise in social and teaching technologies, microscopy, and biophysics.

We can speak with particular clarity to the quality of Steve’s teaching and mentorship, because we have been privileged to be part of it.  The whole world is Steve’s TA, and his students are able to interact directly with working scientists and associated professionals from the very start of their careers.  Between this opportunity and Steve’s infectious enthusiasm for science, you will not find a more engaged, enthusiastic group of students anywhere.

We are a diverse group: biophysicists, biologists, physicists, chemists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, librarians, editors, and technologists working at universities, public research institutes, private for-profit companies, and not-for-profits across the globe.  We bring to Steve’s tenure case a wide range of expertise and resources, from a few lines of code to full-scale collaboration.  We can provide anything from insight to reagents, from advice to instrument time.

The idea of openness, of information and knowledge as public goods, is spreading rapidly through multiple walks of life.  Open Access scholarly publication, Open Data from governments and corporations and Open Education resources from schools all over the world are some examples that will be familiar.  The same co-operative, collaborative spirit is taking hold in research; it is coming to be known as Open Science, and Steve’s lab is very much in the vanguard of this movement. By making the process of discovery open to anyone, the resulting research will proceed more quickly, and the use of resources will be more efficient (because one minimizes duplication of effort). To do science this way is groundbreaking. We believe Steve has shown a genuine spirit of innovation in the way he has run his laboratory.

Steve and his students are changing the way science works — much for the better.  We are pleased and proud to be able to help in this, and we believe that your department could not make a better or more timely tenure appointment.

Sincerely,

LIST OF SIGNATORIES

Bill Hooker
Sr Scientist, Calypte Biomedical
cwhooker {at} fastmail.fm

Heather Piwowar
DataONE Postdoc,
National Evolutionary Synthesis Center
hpiwowar {at} nescent.org

Pawel Szczesny
Assistant Professor, University of Warsaw, Poland
Research Scientist, Polish Academy of Sciences
szczesny {at} ibb.waw.pl

John Dupuis
Head, Steacie Science & Engineering Library
York University, Toronto, Canada
jdupuis {at} yorku.ca

William Gunn, PhD
Head of Academic Outreach
Mendeley

Daniel Mietchen, PhD
EvoMRI Communications & Open Knowledge Foundation Germany
Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science
daniel.mietchen {at} evomri.net

J. Daniel Gezelter
Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, University of Notre Dame
Director, The OpenScience Project
gezelter {at} nd.edu,  gezelter {at} openscience.org

Carl Boettiger
Population Biology Graduate Student, UC Davis
cboettig {at} ucdavis.edu

Christina K. Pikas
Librarian, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
christina.pikas {at} jhuapl.edu

Andrew S.I.D. Lang
Professor of Mathematics
Oral Roberts University
alang<at>oru.edu

Mario Pineda-Krch
Research Associate
Centre for Mathematical Biology, University of Alberta
mpineda {at} math.ualberta.ca

Cameron Neylon
Senior Scientist, Biomolecular Sciences
Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK
Editor in Chief, Open Research Computation, a BioMedCentral Journal
cameron.neylon {at} stfc.ac.uk, cn {at} cameronneylon.net

Björn Brembs
Heisenberg Fellow
Institute of Biology – Neurobiology
Freie Universität Berlin
Germany
b.brembs-at-fu-berlin.de, bjoern {at} brembs.net

Mark Hahnel
PhD Student
Imperial College London
mhahnel<at>imperial.ac.uk

Graham Steel
Patient Advocate
graham<at>science3point0.com

Matthew Todd
Senior Lecturer in Synthetic Organic Chemistry
The University of Sydney
Australia
matthew.todd {at} sydney.edu.au

Michael Nielsen
UNM Physics and Astronomy alumnus, 1998
mn {at} michaelnielsen.org

Jonathan A. Eisen
Full Professor
University of California, Davis
Department of Evolution and Ecology
Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology
UC Davis Genome Center
Adjunct Scientist, Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute
Academic Editor in Chief, PLoS Biology

Scott Edmunds, PhD
Editor, GigaScience
BGI Shenzhen, China
scott.edmunds {at} genomics.org.cn

Dorothea Salo
Faculty Associate
School of Library and Information Studies
University of Wisconsin at Madison

I became aware of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) in early 2007 and immediately established contact with its Co-Founder, Rufus Pollock.
Certainly within the last year or so, I have been more actively engaged with the OKFN and have been virtually attending their monthly Open Science Working Group meetings during that period.

A few weeks ago, I spotted this tweet on Twitter alerting people to OKFN’s “first” [1] meet-up in Scotland.

Attn Edinburgh folk – OK event on March 13th bit.ly/wPf2h8. Come discuss all things #OKFN @Scotland‘s 1st Meet-up! #OpenDataEDB

— Naomi Lillie (@NaomiLillie) March 1, 2012

Being a resident of Glasgow, with the meeting being held across in Edinburgh, I immediately added myself to the attendee list here.
Upon arrival at the venue on the day itself, being slightly early, I was the first to arrive followed shortly by Prof. Roderic Page who I met briefly at Science Online: London last September. Next to arrive was the organiser, Naomi Lillie who I met at the Open Research Reports hackathon in London last December. With her were Laura Newman and Sam Leon also from the OKFN. After a quick drink, the ‘flock’ of attendees present in the bar were ushered upstairs where a broom-cupboard majestic room had been booked for us.
Wowsers – WHAT a venue. Chosen by Naomi despite having never been to the Ghillie Dhu before !!

After a brief introduction and welcome by Naomi, Mark MacGillvray was the first of eight of the individuals present to give a lightening talk.

Mark talked a bit about openbiblio.net which went Beta late February 2012 and already contains over 30,000 records. Reference was also made to http://bibserver.org/which looked equally interesting.

Next up was Roderic who introduced himself as a Professor of Taxonomy at Glasgow University.

Rod’s talk was about the “Bibliography of Life” which contains 5 – 10 million species !!

His talk was swiftly followed by that of Mahendra Mahey.

Mahendra spoke about DevCSI which has been developed over the last three years. He advised that there are around 5,000 programmers/developers involved in the project here in the UK. There have been around 2,500 attendees of DEV8D events over the last four years with 7 future #DEV8D events planned for the future.

Dev8D: The best of Dev8D from UKOLN on Vimeo.

Our next speaker was Laura Newman (who did a grand job speaking publicly for the first time).

She mentioned that OKFN has around 7,000 members and has approximately 20 working groups including International groups based in 5 Continents.

Laura then told us about the Open Data Handbook.org initiative and that version 1.0 recently went online.  Straight after that, she told us about P2P University which in February had announced their School of Data venture. Around 200 people have already signed up.

A short break was had around this moment in time before Ewan Klein took to the floor.

Ewan gave a general overview of Open Data and cited the likes of the 1901 Census Data and spoke of the importance of making Institutional data open. Mention was also made of Semantic Web mini-projects.

Shortly after Ewan, we heard from Sam Leon.

Sam kicked off his talk by telling us about Public Domain Review.org which was about “open cultural knowledge and to promote the value of public domain, thus enriching society”. He described it further as a “commons of knowledge that can be drawn from”. Fascinating stuff !!

Next followed two impromptu talks, the first one by Etienne Posthumus.

Etienne talked to us namely about Iconclass.org and the work being done in the Netherlands in relation to linked open data. With reflection, I knew that I had seen Etienne before, albeit not IRL. Ah, yes, it was this short clip on Vimeo where he talked about some of the work he is currently involved in.

Bibsoup: Interview with Etienne Posthumus (developer) from Bibsoup Project on Vimeo. Etienne is a developer on the JISC/OKFN project Openbiblio2. Here he explains his role and what he works on.

The second impromptu talk and the last speaker of the event was given by Wilbert Kraan.

Wilbert’s talk included showing us three projects being http://prod.cetis.ac.uk/ ,  http://kasabi.com/ and
http://www.jiscmu.ac.uk/

We still had around one hour left of the time allocated to us in this room at the Ghillie Dhu so it was a great opportunity for us all to have a blether about out mutual interests in Open Data and so on.

After a bit of sheep herding (yes, this literally involved some baaaa-ing), Naomi successfully managed to herd us back downstairs to the (public) bar where the chat continued for the remainder of the evening.

Many thanks to OKFN and DevCSI for putting this event together. I found it very enjoyable & informative and the informal relaxed nature of the event worked extremely well.

VIVA LA OPEN DATA !!!

[1] Quoting from this OKFN blog post:- “It turns out there was an event in Scotland in 2010, according to people who have been on the scene longer than I… see here for comments on the Open Biblio blog post which highlight previous activity, and many thanks to the people who kindly contributed this information. Here’s to the next one”.

This is the kind of question that is being addressed in a series of eight YouTube videos that convey a two-part videotaped lecture given in 2002 by Albert Bartlett, a retired professor of Physics at the University of Boulder.

He discusses growth curves, carrying capacities, Hubbert curves and Peak oil, starting and concluding with the observation that

“the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”,

particularly as it applies to exponential growth of populations and economies and to the corresponding exponential depletion of natural resources.

75 min altogether. Well worth the time, even if you already understand exponential functions because in that case, the lecture is a very good example of presenting a topic engagingly, so that the brains in the audience have good food for thought.

So take a look at your plans for tonight or the weekend and replace one item in there by watching this video (and if you don’t have plans yet, that’s an imperative!). Then grab what makes you comfortable, watch it, and let the world know what you have seen or thought during the event, or done afterwards.

Thank you.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

I’m reposting this because it still stands. There seems to be a lot of fuss about a re-match between Patriots and the Giants. Apparently, I’m supposed to hope the Giants win. Once some family drama ends, I’ll get back to science.

I like the junk food and parties associated with the SuperBowl – I’m just not invested in the game. The day before a Super Bowl party, I do a bit of research so I don’t sound like a complete idiot around those who know all kinds of fancy stats. As I get ready to learn a bit about this year’s game, I wondered if this is how some people approach science. Pick up a few facts but then go with your gut.

Because I don’t have the interest in American football, the stats can be overwhelming. I have no context so the information just goes in one ear and out the other. I’m not adverse to sports knowledge because I can rattle off hockey stats with the best of them. (If I’m honest, I can do the same with curling – yep, I’m probably sharing too much.)

I don’t really know the best places to go for information on American football so I just search for interesting articles. I have no idea if I’m looking at reliable information or just some crazy babbling. If it is easy to read and seems official, that’s good enough for me.

If I get to a Super Bowl party and someone starts ranting about how I’ve picked the wrong team, I try to make my way across the room. They will often  start throwing lots of data at me to explain why my choice is wrong. I know they are excited but I don’t have the framework for all that information so it just sounds like gibberish. If someone is willing to have a conversation and build on what I know, I’m happy to learn. Different approaches make a difference. Learning about American football at a Super Bowl party may be too little, too late but I’m open to learning more; I don’t hate football, it just isn’t a priority.

Does the same thing happen with science communication? I’ve had people admit that they have googled a current controversy to learn a few factoids and/or get an opinion before they attend an event where a science topic may be discussed. it may not be their favourite topic yet but they are willing to discuss the ideas.

We often bemoan that people aren’t interested in science and we can’t figure out why they don’t see the wonder. I understand that hockey (or curling) may not be the sport for others – so why do I want everyone to think science is cool?

One difference between sports and science: we generally don’t make large life decisions based on our sporting knowledge. For example, deciding whether or not to vaccinate your children can use input from science. Should we wait for people to find the information based on interest or should we try to generate the interest?

Of course, sports are generally more popular and accessible in regular society. Do we need to start televising science competitions? The comparison also made me wonder if we could have parties with junk food spreads and beer for science. What event could we celebrate?

What do you think? I don’t have answers but wanted to share my approach to last-minute cramming of a topic that is low priority for me.

Off to go learn about tomorrow’s Super Bowl.

Note: one sad thing about being in Canada for the Super Bowl is that we don’t get to see the awesome ads.

There are lots of ideas on how to move forward, but for today, I’ll close with a view out of the window, taken during the signing procedure.

CLICK ON FULL SCREEN

Add The Music chosen by Arikia Millikan, Anton Zuiker (well sort of) and Graham Steel. :-

Track one chosen by Arikia

Track two chosen by Graham

Track three chosen by David Dobbs via Anton

–

Lots of #scio12 images, videos, podcasts & blog posts are on http://scio12.com/

NOTE: These pictures were taken by Lou Woodley and have been published here with permission.

But, that doesn’t mean that science doesn’t belong there.

Writing science for women’s (and men’s) magazines and not being ashamed of it, dammit! was the topic of Maryn McKenna and Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn’s session at the recent Science Online 2012 meeting held last weekend in Raleigh, NC.  Overall, I found the message to be quite positive.  For one, women’s magazines seem to be a cash cow for science writers as the pay rate is generally higher than other, more traditional scientific publications and websites.  More importantly, Maryn made it clear that women’s magazine readers are “an enourmous, dedicated, and loyal audience who may be more sophisticated than people realize, and are ready for scientific messages.”  This, along with the fact that women’s magazine editors are desperate for writers who know what they are talking about (as per Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn), just screams for more science in these types of publications.

One can possibly argue that if women wanted to read about science, they would just go and pick up a science-themed magazine, or seek science out on the internet.  While some women do look specifically for science publications, the statistics reflect an overwhelmingly male readership for most scientific magazines.  For instance, Mariette DiChristina, Editor in Chief of Scientific American, provided some stats for her magazine over Twitter:

To quote Carl Zimmer, “Science magazines, if you look at the numbers, are actually men’s magazines.”  But, still, this doesn’t answer why science should be a mainstay in traditional women’s magazines like Redbook, Self, Glamour, Cosmo, etc.  The same can be said about online venues that serve women (FYI a “health” section is not really a representative sampling of science *cough*Babble and BlogHer *cough*).

I suppose that there are two ways to interpret this issue.  The first way, mentioned already, is to just assume that women aren’t generally into science, because if they were, they would go and seek it out.  The second argument would be that women are into science and want to know more about science, and therefore, women’s magazines (since they cater to women) should satisfy that demand.  As Emily Willingham suggests, there is an unfulfilled niche where moms, sisters, aunts, cousins, grandmothers, girlfriends, wives, etc., live and they are yelling “Please, please, PLEASE tell me something that is relevant, awesome, and/or just plain weird in the world of science!”  And, to be clear, I believe in the latter.

Yet, there is another potential issue (for writers) regarding writing for women’s magazines and online forums: do writers want to be associated with a publication that often promotes vanity, poor body image, and maybe even pseudoscience?  Perhaps the pinnacle example of publishing real science in a traditionally non-scientific space is Carl Zimmer’s profiling of Neil deGrasse Tyson in Playboy.  Is writing about science for a venue that makes a living on objectifying women good or bad for science (and women in science)?

These very issues were raised by Arikia Millikan, technology maven and community manager at Wired.com.  While I see this point, my feeling is that for every science article one can shove into the women’s magazine repertoire, that is one less article that focuses on “how to get him to notice you,” or “5 [often unscientific and usually unrealistic] tips to shrink that belly fat.”  Plus, it is an article on science!  And, believe you me, I know that women like (if not LOVE) that sort of thing.  For instance, I think that it is wonderful to see Christie Wilcox – PhD student and scientific voice of reason – on the Dr. Oz-associated site Nutrition Wonderland, especially because she will accurately present scientific topics that are often misrepresented or even skewed to fit a desired viewpoint. (For the record, Arikia does advocate getting the science out there in any way possible, including women’s magazines and Playboy!)

This session was extremely successful and I can confidently say that there are at least 50 ready and willing scientists and/or science writers who were sitting in that room, all looking for a chance to present facts and critical scientific explanations to a population that needs it.  The remaining question is: what will the women’s magazines and online forums do about it?

For the storify on this session, check this out.

This post, which is a response to Alice Callahan’s Momday guest post, was first published here.  Please note: the author is not advocating distrust towards doctors, scientists and the medical community.  Rather she advocates that clear rationale and logic should be the basis for making important decisions.

I recently read a blog article by a fellow scientist turned stay-at-home-mom on why she chooses to vaccinate. Although we both agree to vaccinate our children, I disagree with her reasons on why as a scientist and a mother, I should let a doctor stick a needle into my defenseless baby and inject foreign substances into their bloodstream.

The premise of this article is that the author trusts scientists and doctors because she, herself, is a scientist and she is aware of the all that goes into scientific research.  The author trusts the scientists, medical community, and scientific committees and believes that since she can’t know everything, she places a certain amount of “faith in humanity” and “trusts others who know more [than her].”  But questions remain: How do you know which doctor or scientist to trust? After all, there are so many and they are not all in agreement.  Also, how do you know that the doctors (or scientists) you have chosen to trust are experts in the field?  There are scientists that may never have published, others that may have only published twice (that’s me) and still others that may have published hundreds of articles in peer-reviewed, highly-acclaimed journals.  Surely these scientists do not all have the same level of expertise and therefore worth your same level of trust.  In a world where everyone seems to proclaim that they are an expert and where people may even take deliberate measures to fool the public into thinking they are experts, its hard for me to say to someone to trust doctors and scientists.  In fact the author of this article admits that she herself has trouble trusting the experts when it comes to cord-clamping, going so far as to bringing research and documentation to a meeting with her doctor to have a discussion about delayed cord clamping.

As a scientist and a mother, trust is just not good enough. Training to be a scientist, I was taught to question, which in and of itself is in direct opposition to trust. Add that to the realization that doctors do get payments from pharmaceutical industries, bad science does get published and people do have agendas – no, trust is just not good enough for me. As a mother, biologically-speaking, my sole goal on this planet is to raise my children to reproductive age. I am going to question things, I am going to worry, and most importantly, I am going to do what I believe is best for my children – not trust that someone knows what is best better than I do. It’s just a natural instinct and I’m not going to try to fight years of evolution.

Taking trust out of the equation would leave me without much reason to vaccinate my children (as per this author’s blog post). So why do I choose to vaccinate?

First, some background on myself. I am a scientist – a basic scientist. I earned my doctorate from the University of Maryland, College Park, working on protein kinetics. My strengths are microbiology, cell biology, and biochemistry. After earning my doctorate, I went on to a position at the Cleveland Clinic. I started doing loads of experiments with radiation and then found out I was pregnant. Everyone told me that I can work safely with radiation, and while I don’t necessarily disagree with them, I just figured, why risk it? I left and became a stay-at-home-mom.

My first child was born before I could really get into the amount of vaccine research out there. I was forced to operate blindly. I questioned the vaccine schedule, I questioned my doctors and I questioned vaccines in general (I’m a scientist, would you expect anything else?). My first child was born at the start of 2010, when Wakefield’s MMR paper had yet to be officially retracted. Every instinct in my newfound maternal arsenol of instincts screamed NO, don’t vaccinate! But years of studying microbiology challenged these instincts and I eventually went with some sort of delayed vaccination schedule.

Then my pediatrician handed me a book. It was written by Paul Offit, pretty much the foremost leader of vaccine research in the world. After reading this book, I was reminded that as a scientist, we look to logic for making our decisions. We question, gather evidence, analyze that evidence and attempt to draw logical conclusions (Note: there is nothing in there that says trust). So I poured into vaccine research. Luckily it didn’t take long to realize that there is overwhelming research supporting vaccines and the vaccine schedule as it stands. I mean just go to the library and look at Vaccines, 5th Edition. The weight of that textbook speaks volumes.

But wait, Offit is a scientist and doctor that develops vaccines. He is a person and he has an agenda. Why would I trust him and his book? Well first of, I don’t trust him and I didn’t trust his book. His book reminded me to search for logical reasons when making a decision. When it comes to vaccinations, the absolute only logic comes from looking at the evidence, all the evidence and weighing that evidence. This is a hefty undertaking and slightly more work than relying on the anecdotal stories the anti-vaccine movement throws at us. I went to the research and read that research and started writing blog posts to disseminate my new understandings. I emailed Offit and talked with him personally.  I read many chapters in the Vaccine textbook and I came to a logical conclusion that the evidence is there to support vaccines.

Some people will say that Offit works with the pharmaceutical industry to develop vaccines. Naturally, this suggests a logical reason to distrust the man, distrust the research and distrust vaccines – I do not disagree.  But wait, let’s get more information about Offit before we jump to the conclusion that Offit’s agenda is something akin to sinister. Offit is playing a large role in the rotavirus vaccine development. Rotavirus is the virus that leads to severe diarrhea and dehydration that kills a half million (450,000-600,000) children every year, worldwide. But, get this, the consequences of this disease are not felt here in the United States. It’s felt in some of the poorest countries of the world. This vaccine will most likely be donated to these countries. Does this man seem to have an agenda to make money by his rotavirus vaccine? The evidence suggests otherwise. No, I have to conclude that this man has an agenda to help people.

Feelings of distrust are in all of use and as I argue, possibly the strongest in a new mother. We can’t hide those feelings and certainly, reading an article about a scientist that trusts other scientists is not going to change those feelings. No the only way to conquer distrust is to search for truth. And the only way to search for truth is to turn to logic. So to moms everywhere strive to look for logic in things. And when it comes to vaccines, the evidence points to vaccinations. Trust me.

About the Momday Author:

Anna K. Eaton is a former research scientist who currently teaches part-time at a local community college.  She writes science lessons for chemistry, biology and math students at her Science Matters blog and enjoys writing about her experiences as a new mother at her own personal blog, Anna K. Eaton, Ph.D., SaHM.

About Momday:

It is no secret that the communication of science is an art that has yet to be perfected.  In an attempt to leave the echo chamber, I have decided to take advantage of the extensive overlap between science and motherhood with Momday on The Mother Geek.  Momday will feature wonderful moms (bloggers and non-bloggers alike) on a regular basis with the hope that we will be able to be more effective at exchanging information, including that which revolves around science.  To help make science communication a two-way street, I am issuing an open invitation to moms everywhere – if you would like to write a post to be featured on my blog, please contact me.  In exchange, I request that you check out what’s happening in the world of science.

I came across this video yesterday and thought it was quite funny (mostly because it is true).  As I sat doing my cell culture, some more shit scientists say just started flowing:

“I have to feed my cells.”

“I have to check the plugs in my mice” or “My mice won’t mate!”

“My favorite gene…”

“Hmm, sounds like abetalipoproteinemia.”

“Her phenotype is most similar to her dad’s” (about your kid to your friends who are not scientists).

“I am 23% Neanderthal.”

“Knock it out!” (regarding a gene)

“Can you spare a microliter?”

“BLAST that shit, yo!”

Now, these are mostly applicable to the typical biologist.  If any physicists, chemists, geologists, ecologists, mathematicians, or other proud nerds have any other suggestions, do share!

The cosmetics store is as brightly lit as an operating room. It is starkly designed, save the posters of beautiful young women with perfect skin, their tomato-red lips expressing the joy of their youth. In no form does the clientele resemble the posters – soar-faced teens with women in mom jeans and holiday themed sweatshirts, a group of girlfriends in their seventies, and me, in sneakers, jeans and a t-shirt, my hair air-dried.

I lose track of time at a lipstick display until a clerk approaches and offers her service. When she blinks I am transfixed by her Macau colored eyelids. “Can I try your Mineral Make-up?” “Sure, take a seat. Do you have any make-up on right now,” she asks. No, I am not wearing any make-up; I never wear make-up. What am I even doing in a cosmetics store?

According to Dr. Barry J. Babin, Marketing & Analysis Department Chair at Louisiana Tech University, a cosmetics store is an emotionally complex environment. Dr. Babin conducts marketing research with an emphasis on human behavior. Researchers in his field study how our surroundings affect our purchasing tendencies.

“Everything we experience in a store changes our perception as a shopper. Background music can change the way a consumer reacts to a product. Colors have a significant affect on the consumer.”

As does smell, Dr. Maureen Morrin, Professor of Marketing at Rutgers University, studies the affect a scented shopping environment has on buying habits. Her research has shown that a pleasant smelling room boosts our retention and recall of information. (Is that why I can’t shake the image of that holiday sweatshirt?) If that memory is a satisfying shopping experience we are more likely to return to a certain retailer.

Color, scent and sound are all vital in the market place because they have the ability to influence our mood. And when we are happy, we are more likely to buy something. Even if it is something we don’t always need, like say, more make-up.

“A make-up counter is the pinnacle of consumer experience,” says Dr. Barbara Kahn, Professor of Marketing at Wharton School of Business, “Take a store like Sophora, it is a place where sound, smell, color and taste (through flavored lip balms, for instance) are combined to give the feel of drama and excitement. It is a perfect example of selling the sizzle and not the steak. It is meant to be an engrossing experience.”

Sophora is also a store that offers considerable variety. Throw variety into the stew of the senses and retailers have the upper hand. “Think of food at a buffet,” says Dr. Morrin, “just the fact that there are more choices will lead people to consume more.” This correlation holds even when there is actually no variability in a product. “We have conducted studies where assortments seemed to have more variety, but the variety was actually held constant,” states Dr. Kahn. Selection, being given a choice, makes us feel our desires are being met, like the retailer had us, exactly, in mind when they created their product.

Cosmetics marketing successfully sends the message that they are all about you. Dr. Babin mentions the Clinic lab coat, “it give the image that this is an exact business; it is precise and made for you.”

What hope does a girl have against these psychological power plays? I used to wear make-up, back when I had a regular 9-to-5 (it was academia, more like 9-to-4). On the days that I lectured I tried to put myself together; however, when I was in the lab I kept it to a minimum. Hauling a gas cylinder, turning a torque wrench, and operating a gas chromatograph were not activities enhanced by even skin tone.

And when I stopped working to stay home with my two boys, I initially styled my hair and put on make-up to bring them to the bus stop. Now I keep it to a minimum. I realized fixing a snack, pitching a kickball game, and refereeing an argument are not activities that are enhanced by even skin tone. But sometimes I just want to feel pretty; I want to feel like I haven’t spent the day cleaning-up after the kids and the dog. Sometimes I want to feel like a different person.

And that is the final fingernail in the cosmetics buyer’s coffin. Dr. Morrin states, “The purchase of make-up is loaded with emotion; a customer is hoping it will have a transformative effect.” Dr. Babin considers, “Wasn’t it Revlon that said, ‘We’re not selling make-up, we’re selling hope.’ ”

All of this explains why the MAC store in the mall is always crowded and why I can never resist a visit. I didn’t end up getting Mineral Make-up. Instead I opted for lipstick. I picked out an unorthodox color and sampled it on the back of my hand; I liked it. When I am feeling bold I’ll put it on and wear it to the bus stop to retrieve my kids. Standing there talking to my neighbors, I picture the movement of my tomato-red lips and I feel simultaneously liberated and ridiculous.

Rebecca Guenard Ph.D. enjoyed being a Chemistry Professor (NTT) at Temple University for five years before the complexity of dual careers resulted in her staying home. Now she is having a blast as a freelance science writer. Her everyday science blog is Atomic-o-licious.

About Momday:

It is no secret that the communication of science is an art that has yet to be perfected.  In an attempt to leave the echo chamber, I have decided to take advantage of the extensive overlap between science and motherhood with Momday on The Mother Geek.  Momday will feature wonderful moms (bloggers and non-bloggers alike) on a regular basis with the hope that we will be able to be more effective at exchanging information, including that which revolves around science.  To help make science communication a two-way street, I am issuing an open invitation to moms everywhere – if you would like to write a post to be featured on my blog, please contact me.  In exchange, I request that you check out what’s happening in the world of science.

Educators, policy makers, and many local organizations have made it their official mission to instill a greater sense of confidence in young girls when it comes to STEM.  While many of their efforts are proving to be effective, or at least they are a good start, I wonder why more is not done, and not just in terms of science and technology.

STEM is not the only area where women need a boost in confidence.  As someone who has spent their most impressionable years growing up in the 90s – the era when stick figures like Kate Moss were the epitome of beauty – I become angered when I see major advertising companies playing off of society-created female vulnerabilities, especially when it comes to how they look.

Take the standard beauty commercial.   The message almost always follows the same blueprint: woman has flaw, product will cover/cure flaw, woman achieves beauty.  You’re going grey?  Well, grey is apparently unattractive, so COVER IT UP!  Getting wrinkles?  You old hag!  Hide that shit before you look at that baby or you will make her cry!  (This is not to say that I am against hair dye; I just don’t like thinking that I need to cover greys.  If I want to dye my hair, it will be because I feel like changing my hair color).

But it doesn’t stop there.  The very reason I am thinking about this in the first place is because I watched a Nabisco commercial about a fiber-filled brownie.  In this commercial, there were many women (who were clearly of a healthy weight) rejoicing in a super secret supermarket location, NO BOYS ALLOWED, about being able to eat a brownie, guilt free!  To me, this commercial was offensive as I felt it suggested that women should be starving themselves and that women should be ecstatic about something that will [allegedly] keep them skinny – but not in a good way.  See for yourself.

This is not the first time I am writing about my distaste for the portrayal of women in advertisements.  And to be fair, men aren’t exactly represented justly either (take this awful frozen pizza commercial for example).  Why do we accept such a level of gender stereotyping?  Why do we perpetuate the idea that women have to constantly work toward a completely unreasonable and often physically unattainable standard of beauty or that men are fat and lazy bums?

I’m sick of objectifying computer-generated images.  I don’t’ give a crap that Snooki lost a gazillion pounds and now has the curvature of a twelve year old boy, because that is NOT what life should be all about.  Even more importantly, the concepts of beauty and sexuality should not trump being intelligent or having a strong work ethic.  Where are the advertisements endorsing smarts and hard work?  If we want our girls to be more confident in general, we need to quit emphasizing the idea that women are inherently flawed and must strive towards the unrealistic and completely ridiculous societal definition of perfection.

My thoughts and feelings on this topic are not novel.  There are many who not only feel this way, but are also doing something about it.  For instance, Miss Representation is a great film and campaign that sheds light on gender inequality in the media, helping to curb sexism in advertising.  Another great video satirizing the portrayal of women in beauty ads comes from Jesse Rosten (show this video to every female you know!), highlighting the ramped use of Photoshop in advertising (thanks to Joanne Manaster for sharing this!).

Don’t get me wrong.  There is nothing the matter with wanting to look good because often, when you look good, you feel good.  However, feeling like you need to constantly fix something about yourself is not healthy.  If we are going to do these things, it should be for ourselves and no one else.

Illustration by Adrian Forrow

I’ve just read the great piece (and very interesting comments thread) “Scientists, Share Secrets or Lose Funding: (by) Stodden and Arbesman” It reminded my of a bizarre incident that I came across myself a few years ago that I started writing about a few days ago and it ties in rather well.

Some background context

In my spare time, I acted as Vice-Chair for a small UK Charity 2001 – 2005.  Like many other such organisations, we didn’t have an official HQ other than (in our case) “the office” which was a spare bedroom in one of our Trustees place of residence.

We met on a bi-monthly basis at

• UK CJD Surveillance Unit – Edinburgh
• Irwin Mitchell Solicitors – Sheffield
• UCL Institute of Neurology – London

As I reside in Glasgow, travelling through to Edinburgh was a breeze.  Getting to Sheffield was OK, travelled either by car or by train. With regards to London, back then, I would normally fly down as opposed to train these days.

By year three of my four year stint, whilst I was settled into my routine, it occurred to me that rather than flying all the way down to London and back for a two – three hour long meeting, wouldn’t it save time and money simply to join in the discussion remotely by webcam?

Given the fact that the majority of these discussions (in all three locations) were largely pretty much routine/informal in nature, this made perfect sense to me, and all my fellow Trustees fully agreed.

SOURCE

So this would surely proceed along the lines proposed.

WRONG

I was advised by one of our three Co-opted Members (our Medical Advisors)  at that time that a certain Prof John Collinge – Director of the MRC Prion Unit also based at UCL Institute of Neurology – London strongly objected to this !!

I don’t recall the exact words as to why, but it was along the lines of “John does not allow camera’s in here”.

                       SOURCE

Armed with hindsight, I should have challenged this right away and to this day, don’t know why I didn’t.

Why was this objection so wrong?

1. Our meetings at UCL (as the did in the other two venues) took place in a meeting room, not in a wet/dry lab room
2. I is no grass spy
3. All Trustees of the Charity were members of the public who has lost a relative to the disease in question who were working to a common good
4. I could go on…

Part of the reason I think can be explained by the well known (to those who know the disease well) fact that there has been an ongoing feud between certain researchers at the Unit’s in London and Edinburgh going back over 25 years or so. Cue this Lancet piece by James Butcher in 2004. 

Now if this is how Collinge (and others like him) view members of the public, heaven only knows what his/their views are an how they treat other scientists, generally.

Moreover, it took Collinge & colleagues several years to reveal the unpublished data from their failed PRION-1 Clinical Trial  – initially at a Conference in 2007 but it took a further TWO YEARS to actually publish the data behind a paywall, naturally.

–

To me, the pull quote from the Stodden/Arbesman piece is:-

“As Jon Claerbout, a professor emeritus of geophysics at Stanford University, has noted, scientific publication isn’t scholarship itself, but only the advertising of scholarship. The actual work — the steps needed to reproduce the scientific finding — must be shared”.

PLEASE DON’T HIDE YOUR DATA !!

SHARE IT !!

Little Birdie. Captured and edited using the HDR filter on the iPhone app Camera+

Sunset over Roosevelt Island. Again, iPhone, Carmera+, HDR filter.

View from 62nd Street. You guessed it…Camera+ HDR.

Winter Moon. This one I captured using a real camera and no filter!!

SOURCE

Over the weekend, I received an email from a researcher at Scripps which read:-

“Hi Graham,

Nothing unusual about that you might think.

Interestingly, I had no idea who it was from until I did a quick bit of searching and I have never had any contact with them before.

SOURCE

I’ve had contact with A LOT of researchers in this field spanning over a decade. In terms of making contact, this has always been one way traffic. Pretty certain this marks the FIRST time that someone has made contact with me !! INTERESTING

I was curious to know two things. How did they know the field of research in question was of personal interest? The second question answered itself after I found out the answer to the first one.

As such, I email the individual and asked:-

“Hi Yervand,

Thanks for sharing this with me.

Purely out of curiosity, how do you know of my interest in TSE’s? I don’t believe we’ve been in contact before.

Best,

Graham

They replied pretty much straight away with:-

“Hi Graham,

Small critical RNAs in the scrapie agent

Yervand”

Having done a bit of rummaging since then, I note that the researcher has two publications indexed in PubMed, the most recent one being a PLoS ONE Manuscript.

If we go back to the thread on FriendFeed that they found, the discussion (and a very interesting one at that) was namely about the possible “pro’s and con’s” of having a pre-print archived in the likes of Nature Preceedings (NP) rather than the actual science in question. After all is was NPG’s Hilary Spencer (that’s not Hilary below BTW, simply a “confused face” on Flickr) who started the conversation there.

                                                      SOURCE

Having an item indexed in the likes of NP can be useful (I’ve used it once before) to “get your stuff out there” but just how visible is it to potential readers as opposed to having an item accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed Journal? I don’t know. Do you?

So, thanks to the “power” (and how things are indexed in) of Google, this person found someone who potentially would be interested in reading their stuff and sent an email. I hope they found others too.

Now surely, there must be some way of using systems to do this for you. Whilst the likes of Mendeley recommends other research papers, it also can suggest other researchers of interest. I know that ReadCube are also planning to do the latter shortly (personal communication on Twitter).

–

Also this weekend, I spotted a link to Collabgraph on Twitter and gave it a quick spin.  I tweeted a link to my Mendeley/Collabgraph generated data which look very interesting. If you can’t see the data on your browser (doesn’t appear to work on IE or iPhone), I saved the 3Meg .svg file to DropBox here.

The issues here also tie in quite well with this recent thread on Google+ and these three associated blog posts.

Whilst I won’t be at Science Online in North Carolina later this month, I willl as always be following events in real time and I’m sure some of the issues in this post will come up at some point.

Having a PhD in science makes my job as a mother easier, but maybe not in the ways that you might expect.

My PhD is in Nutrition, so you would think that getting my kid to eat well would come easy for me. Unfortunately, that has not been the case.

I’ve logged more than two years of postdoc research on fetal programming, which is basically how the uterine environment affects outcomes in babies. You might think that this has helped me to do everything right during my pregnancy. Instead, I think it just led to more worry about all of the ways I might be damaging my unborn child. Stress! Sugar! BPA! Lab chemical exposure! OMG! More stress!

Sure, I have had access to more scientific information than the average mother. Sometimes this is helpful.  But sometimes it is not.  For instance, knowing how to do a literature search to answer my parenting questions often leads to further sleep deprivation, especially since slogging through Pubmed hits leads me to come out on the other side with more confusion.  Sometimes my drive to find scientific answers for my parenting questions just distracts me from my instinct – not that my maternal instinct is all that amazing, but I do know my baby better than anyone else in the world.

So how does being a scientist make parenting easier for me? As a scientist mother, I trust other scientists. And I trust doctors.  I even trust government agencies, which bring together the best scientists and doctors in a field to review the research and make recommendations for the good of public health.

I trust scientists and doctors because I have worked side-by-side with them for a decade, and I know that they are not only knowledgeable, but by and large, they are overwhelmingly good people. At some point, you have to trust someone. For me, those “someones” are scientists and doctors.   

I trust scientists because I know that the vast majority of them are just underpaid nerds who are really passionate about what they do. They are driven by the desire to find the truth about a question and work, day in and day out, in that pursuit.  In addition, I know that scientists don’t always agree, so when there is a general consensus among the majority of scientists about something, such as vaccine safety or global warming, I feel confident with the majority conclusion. Contrary to many claims on the Internet, scientists are not in bed with Big Pharma, conspiring make millions at the expense of your child’s health. They are in bed with their husbands and wives, probably chatting about their latest failed cell culture experiment.

I also trust science because I understand the peer review process all too well. Although it has its flaws, and as maddening as it is when I am the one being reviewed, I have confidence that the peer review process is highly effective at weeding out the kooks and pseudoscientists and the conflicts of interest. (Unfortunately, there are a few kooky psuedoscientists out there with serious conflicts of interest, and it just so happens that one of them managed to publish fraudulent research linking the MMR vaccine and autism. Many studies have since shown that such a link does not exist, but it took 12 years for Andrew Wakefield’s Lancet paper to be retracted. How many dollars have been spent and how many people made sick or worse in the continuing fallout and confusion about this public health scare? When the peer review system fails, it can be truly devastating.)

I trust doctors because I know that most of them are, first and foremost, humanitarians at heart, especially those that have chosen to work in primary care. I know how hard doctors work to become competent in the vast ocean of information about pathologies of the human body. I know how seriously they take their responsibility of our health. I especially trust pediatricians. They have chosen one of the lowest-paid specialties simply because they love working with kids. I know that every pediatrician, at some point during her training or career, has likely cared for a child who was dying of a disease that could have been prevented by vaccination, and that memory haunts her as she faces parents afraid of vaccinating their children. Doctors are not conspiring against us. They want to help us make the best choices for our children, more than anything in the world.

Because I trust scientists and doctors, I didn’t question the CDC’s vaccination schedule. I didn’t pore over vaccine research or agonize about the decision to vaccinate my child. Instead, I trusted that the committees of experts at the CDC and AAP carefully make the best recommendations possible based on the data available. Maybe that is naïve. Maybe I am a lazy mother for not trying to become a vaccine expert before I allowed those first needles to enter my daughter’s thigh. Or maybe not.

What would be naïve is for me to think that I could become an expert on vaccinations.  It would be naïve for me to think that I could understand the vaccine field better than the committees of scientists and doctors who have made this their life’s work. I know how much work it took me to become an expert on one or two corners of nutrition and fetal physiology. It took thousands of hours of reading textbooks and journal articles, sitting in lectures, attending conferences, and struggling at the lab bench before I started to feel even a little bit comfortable calling myself an expert in any field. So I think it is naïve for a parent to think that she can become an expert on vaccines by spending some time on the Internet reading questionable sources, almost all of which have some agenda. I accept that I can’t know everything, and I have enough faith in humanity that I trust others who know more than me.

It is not that I don’t question scientists and doctors. I do. For example, I recognize that government agencies and medical organizations often have a lag time for adopting the latest science into their recommendations. I recognize that tradition, culture, politics, and economics all influence those recommendations, and they are not without fault. I certainly question my doctors because I know they are each fallible human beings and they can’t know everything.

For example, I brought a stack of journal articles to my OB to convince her to delay cord clamping at my delivery. I did so much research on infant iron nutrition and came to my daughter’s 9-month checkup with so many questions that my pediatrician looked me in the eye and said, “You’re worried enough for both of us about BabyC’s iron.” Although I question my doctors, I also trust that they are adept at discerning fake science from real science. If I bring my doctor the sources I am using to inform my questions or concerns, she should be able to judge whether or not they are trustworthy and have a real discussion with me about factors that I may not have considered.

In truth, I do follow the vaccine debate closely, but not because I wonder if I am doing the right thing by vaccinating my child. I follow the vaccine debate out of interest for how misinformation can explode in a way that creates a public health crisis. I find myself increasingly concerned about the low rate of vaccination in my own community. I worry for the newborns in our town who have not yet had a chance to be vaccinated and for the individuals who cannot be vaccinated due to health conditions. I am starting to feel like I have a responsibility to share accurate information with mothers and fathers struggling with the decision of whether or not to vaccinate, because misinformation is doing real harm.

It is good to question our parenting decisions and in doing so, become more educated about them. However, as a scientist, I’m happy to defer to other scientists about some of the biggest parenting decisions I have faced. I am grateful for their decades of research forming the foundation of our understanding of child health and for the good-hearted doctors who care for my family. They have made my job as a mother a lot easier. I can spend less time worrying and more time playing with my daughter and soaking up the time with her as she grows up way too fast.

Thanks, science, for making it easier to be a mom.

Momday Author Bio:

Alice Callahan is a research scientist turned stay-at-home mom. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband and 14-month-old daughter. Alice writes about the science of parenting, as well as her adventures in mothering, at Science of Mom.  You can also find her on Twitter as @scienceofmom and on Facebook.

About Momday:

It is no secret that the communication of science is an art that has yet to be perfected.  In an attempt to leave the echo chamber, I have decided to take advantage of the extensive overlap between science and motherhood with Momday on The Mother Geek.  Momday will feature wonderful moms (bloggers and non-bloggers alike) on a regular basis with the hope that we will be able to be more effective at exchanging information, including that which revolves around science.  To help make science communication a two-way street, I am issuing an open invitation to moms everywhere – if you would like to write a post to be featured on my blog, please contact me.  In exchange, I request that you check out what’s happening in the world of science.

@David_Dobbs David Dobbs

The story in question involved a lot of emails, a few phone calls and I can’t be bothered reading through all the emails again, but I’ve glanced through most of them and recall the story in ma head anyways.

In late 2006/early 2007, I established contact with Feature Writer, Janyce Hamilton in America. I provided her with some useful information for a piece she was working on at that time.

Her next piece which is the one this post relates to was going to be one on Prions and dentistry which she was working on to have published in the prestigious dental journal, California Dental Association (CDA).

After review, the piece was accepted for publication and she was sent 100 glossy reprints and I agreed to assist her in the dissemination process at least here in the UK.

We then discussed the fact that this snail mail method was a tad web 0.0 so what could we do collectively to come up with a better methodology?

The CDA at that time was Toll Access (it flipped to Open Access later that year as I blogged here) so neither of us at stage one of the dissemination process had an electronic copy. <sigh>

Janyce shipped me 10 reprints so it was my intention to snail mail these to my relevant contacts at The Department of Heath, CJD Surveillance Unit, Health Protection Agency and so on.

Stage two. Dang, we could sure do with a PDF copy. Hhhm. My scanner was defunct and the one we had at work was out of bounds.

So I sent a reprint to a colleague in the UK, but they were in America at the time.  A relative of theirs however, scanned a perfect high res. copy for me and emailed me it. BINGO !!!

Stage three. In the meantime, Janyce was in touch with the CDA to see whether or not they would send her the actual PDF and after much ado they did.

However, she received three conflicting emails.  I can’t recall in what order but

• “here is the PDF but we only allow you to email it to Prof. Stanley Prusiner“
• “we don’t want our copyrighted PDF flying about everywhere”
• “Go ahead. We’re working on opening access to the Journal so that everything older than six months will be available to everyone”.

In the end, the “official” PDF which was identical to our “home made version” WAS emailed to Prusiner, I emailed a large volume of copies in bulk dumps to loads of contacts. For a bit of fun, we both listened simultaneously to “Push The Button (Galvanize)” by The Chemical Brothers when I did this…. As you do

A day or so later, Janyce said:-

“Phase 4 completed today:

More than 100 copies of the article were snail-mailed to every single U.S. dental school dean today, as well as most of the dental editors of journals in the U.S. (and one in Canada). They will get that mailing by Friday. It was an expensive investment in terms of postage and copying costs.

I’m about done with the phases, as I’m sure you are in terms of this article”.

Man, this whole reprint thing was/is a right pain in the arse and to me is simply another money spinner for Journals especially so in the digital age we live in (well most of us).  Science is digital, baby….

The subject matter is not really important in terms of this post, but here is Prions: Transmissable Spongiform Encelphalopathies and Dental Transmission Risk Assessment   This article looks at the complex questions around the implications of emerging data on the abnormal prion protein and infection control during hospital-based procedures as well as dental and oral and maxillofacial surgeries.
Janyce Hamilton

And my response, also published in the CDA.

To illustrate this milestone, I checked for the most viewed image from PLoS ONE on Wikimedia Commons in December, and it turns out that it was the Open Access File of the Day on December 27, now also serving as the Picture of the Week on the Czech Wikipedia and featured on its homepage.

So here we go, featuring it again:
 

• Fig. 4 of the article Common Avian Infection Plagued the Tyrant Dinosaurs by Ewan D. S. Wolff et al. (2009) in PLoS ONE.
• Licensed CC BY. Drawn by Chris Glen, The University of Queensland.

So included in the New Years Honours 2012 is a certain Mr Lester Firkins or as he is now known, Lester Firkins OBE.

“Lester Firkins. Chairman, James Lind Alliance, Strategy and Development. For services to Medical Research. (Nr Ipswich, Suffolk) “

During 2001 – 2003, Lester acted as Chairman of the Human BSE Foundation, and I was Vice-Chair 2001 – 2005.

We parted company. Lester went off to get involved in other things and in 2004, he was involved in setting up the James Lind Alliance whilst I went off and Co-Founded the CJD Alliance. Thankfully, we’ve kept in touch since then and I received a DM tweet from him only a few hours ago.

Lester is a busy man in respect of what he does in Patient Advocacy work and I’m very proud to know him in person. I do hope our paths will cross again sometime soon.

Until then, many congratulations @LesterFirkins on receiving this award. You thoroughly deserve it mate !!!

As mentioned on this page on BBC News:-

Patients’ alliance

“A father who helped found a medical research charity after his son died of variant Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease has been appointed OBE.

Lester Firkins, from Playford near Ipswich, helped set up the James Lind Alliance in 2004, three years after his son Ellis, 21, died.

It brings patients and clinicians together to promote what they believe are the areas most in need of funding for medical research.

Mr Firkins said: “I had always assumed the things that were important to patients and clinicians were the things that got researched, but they weren’t.

“As often as not it was what universities and leading academics decide they want to look at, and that seemed back to front.

“Close to £1bn of taxpayers’ money is spent on medical research and we leave it to the patient and clinician group to take [their recommendations] to the funders [at the Department of Health].”

It came with a personal message on the first page:-

“Graham,

I dedicate this book to your collaborative actions and enjoy watching you in action !

Tony”

It’s a great book and I can highly recommend reading it.

Yesterday on Google+, I spotted a post by Tony which read:-

“I’ve had a number of people ask me for some guidance about how scientists can use some of the available tools to brand themselves as a Digital Citizen and expose their activities online. This is a first draft presentation”.

There is a link to this page which reads:-

“There are many social networking tools for scientists that can be used to share information, engage the social network and move information about activities across the web. This presentation provides an overview of some of the tools available and how they can be used by scientists to expose their activities, manage their profile publicly and participate in the network”.

And here is the presentation…..

Here’s an excerpt:

Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 68,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Filed under: Uncategorized

I spent Christmas in New Zealand one year. Sure, it was summer but as a Canadian, I thought I’d fit in well in another Commonwealth country. I’m sure there were more similarities than differences but there were times that I was out of place…

The first thing that stuck out was the party atmosphere for Christmas Eve. In my part of the world, Christmas Eve is a quiet family event. In Auckland, we went out drinking; we started with my boyfriend’s family but then the parents headed home. The younger people got home around 5 am – in Vancouver, we would be getting up to open presents, partly because we go to bed early (all that family time).

Only 2 hours after we got home – yes, 7 am – we were woken up by the kids so that Christmas celebrations could get started. And the first event was a huge English breakfast… with every older member of my boyfriend’s family. This was the first time that I was meeting most of them. A quick shower and all was good (right?).

Everyone was so nice. My boyfriend’s mom had made pancakes so that I could show everyone how to use the maple syrup from Canada. Conversation was a bit strained because it was a large family gathering and many people needed sleep.

I had gone to Fiji before New Zealand and there had been delays on the flight from Fiji. While I was waiting, there had been an annoying guy bothering me. At the breakfast, we started talking about funny airport stories. One of the older relatives asked me how I dealt with the annoying guy and I responded:

“Well, he wouldn’t leave me alone so I finally just blew him off and moved to a corner.”

The entire table went silent – I think someone dropped their fork. I was confused until my boyfriend’s grandmother (who was direct from central casting for a sweet white-haired grandmother) replied:

“What do you do when you like someone, dear?”

The boyfriend started to explain to his family that the phrase has two meanings in Canada, including the innocent explanation of dismissing this man. Everyone started to giggle nervously and I think my face was red for 3 days.

I tell this story to show that even when people are speaking the same language, they may be making different assumptions. It is a lesson to keep in mind when we are explaining scientific concepts and impacts. We might think we are being perfectly clear but others might be hearing a completely different story.

OK, time to share – any good holiday stories from you?

I have no external reason to be depressed. I’m aware of no precipitating event. If I reach, general anaesthetic might be a factor because I had operations within months of each depressive episode.

But my genetic load is probably a bigger influence. My family history is full of depression and alcoholism. In 1st-degree (siblings, parents) and 2nd-degree (grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews) relatives, 11 of 12 people have been treated for depression and/or alcoholism. If we move to 3rd degree relatives, the absolute numbers get higher but the proportion is similar. [Note: I won't draw my family tree to maintain a bit of privacy for my family.] I’d also like to point out that my family members continue their high level careers without compromise unless hospitalization is required.

In my family, depression and alcoholism go together and this co-morbidity is recognized in general society. The Mayo Clinic includes a family history of alcoholism as a risk factor for depression. The predisposition to both alcoholism and depression running throughout families has been recognized since the early 1990s (reviewed in Nurnberger et al. 2002). Why would this happen? Some explanations:

• depression can lead to self-medication and resulting alcoholism (On a personal note, I normally don’t drink alcohol but it can suddenly make me feel ‘normal’ and this has been an early warning sign that depression is coming.)
• alcoholism could come first and depression could result from organic brain injury
• there could be common genetic factors between the two disorders

Because depression and alcoholism are common disorders and both are heterogeneous (different forms and risk factors), it will be difficult if not impossible to determine single mechanisms. I’ve spent hours trying to determine a simple way to explain the genetics of depression (or alcohol) but the research is still messy and contradictory.

The study of inheritance of alcoholism seems to be a bit clearer so I’ll share some interesting points. First, twin studies suggest heritability to be 40 – 60% (remember, heritability is the measure of how much  variation within a population is due to genes) suggesting some genetic factors. There have also been adoption studies; they’ve shown that adoptees were more likely to become alcoholics as adults if their original biological parents, not their adoptive parents, were alcoholics (Cadoret et al. 1980). There is continuing research but nothing conclusive – the initial studies into the genetics are still at the interesting indications phase.

My experience with depression

Everyone experiences depression in a different way. There are some great descriptions in this cartoon from Hyberbole and a Half and writing by Rob Delaney. There are also some good films and I like the movie Helen – yes, an Ashley Judd movie that speaks to me.

I don’t get sad when depressed. I just turn from a ‘busy bee’ into a sloth. It also happens slowly so I don’t notice when I’ve started to withdraw from events and people. I know when I’m depressed when I stop sleeping. I don’t have trouble falling asleep but staying asleep is an issue. It has been so bad that I can only sleep for an hour or so at one time. I’m not anxious or anything – just can’t sleep. Of course, the lack of sleep makes me tired and it speeds up the laziness.

The other big sign that I’m depressed is that suicide becomes an idea – nothing planned or defined but it starts as a whisper. I usually plan out my day every morning = eat breakfast, give class, write report, etc. and when depressed, I go through the same thing but there is an addendum ‘or you could kill yourself’. Luckily for me, I have always recognized these big signs and sought help.

In this past episode, the laziness has been extreme. I didn’t eat for two days because it seemed like too much work. It made me wonder if that is the reason that people have more energy before suicide – because I certainly wasn’t organized or motivated enough to make toast, let alone anything with planning.

Despite days of inactivity lately, I’ve managed to do the minimum amount of work but I still feel guilty about the time wasted. It is time now to start doing more (for example blogging). I now have some medications that seem to be working and my behaviour is getting more positive.

If you think you are experiencing depressive symptoms, please talk to somebody. Your family physicians are a good starting place. And if someone you know is depressed, please give them a break – they can’t just snap out of it but there are some experts out there who can help with some steps to wellness.

References:

• Boden JM and Fergusson DM (2011) Alcoholism and depression Addiction 106, 906-914.
• Nurnberger JLJr, Foroud T, Flury L, Meyer ET. Wiegand R (2002) Is there a genetic relationship between alcoholism and depression? Alcohol Res Health 26(3):233-40.
• Cadoret FJ, Cain CA, Grove Wm (1980) Development of Alcoholism in Adoptees Raise Apart from Alcoholic Biologic Relatives Arch Gen Psychiatry 37(5), 561-3.

A few notes: I am not against epidurals.  I think that they are a marvelous tool and can certainly add to the birth experience.  For me, however, I know that I do much better without them.  I am not trying to demonize epidurals by any means!

For some supporting resources, you can read about the science behind fertilization, how pregnancy tests work, and of course, the ever famous mucus plug over at my other cyberhome Double X Science.

During the tour, we were able to witness, firsthand, how vaccines are physically inspected.  All of the vials were hand inspected using a very thorough protocol, and I was extremely impressed by the level of attention each and every vial received.  But, I don’t think there was much more that could increase my confidence and belief in vaccines.  Perhaps it would have been time better spent speaking with parents who are on the fence.

Fortunately for those of us born during or after the 1960s, our childhood memories are not, in part, shaped by visualizations of crutches, wheelchairs, and iron lungs.  Because of the Salk and Sabin vaccines against the poliovirus, the incidence of this disease is virtually non-existent in most countries.   Even better is the fact that we can say the same for a great list other infectious diseases that would have otherwise claimed the health and lives of many if widespread immunization were not a reality.

However, there is one drawback to living in an age where a majority of the population is vaccinated: most of us have no memory of what it is like to wonder if our children will fall victim to polio, smallpox, measles, rotavirus, pertussis, diphtheria, meningitis (Hib type B), rubella, hepatitis B, etc.  Death due to infectious disease is no longer a “fact of life” for many types of illnesses.  And this is because of vaccines.

Trends in Infectious Disease Mortality in the United States During the 20th Century. Source: JAMA, January 6, 1999—Vol 281, No. 1

Yet, despite accomplishing the greatest public health story of the twentieth century, an increasing number of parents either choose pseudoscience over the tried and true variety, or fear the very rare side effects associated with some vaccines and forgo vaccinating their children.  If this were a phenomenon that pertained only to the child not receiving the vaccine and was therefore isolated, I’d be (slightly) more willing to turn the other way.  But, it is not isolated and the choice to waive vaccinations for yourself and your children can have deadly consequences for others.

The concept of herd immunity is one that has saved the lives of more people than we can ever really know.  The basic idea behind herd immunity is that if enough people are vaccinated against a certain disease, the chain of contagious infection will be stopped, thereby protecting those who are ineligible for vaccination, such as infants, pregnant women, and the immunocompromised.  However, we must achieve a very high threshold of vaccination if herd immunity is going to be maintained.  For instance, in order to stop the chain reaction of measles transmission, 83-94% of the population needs to be vaccinated against measles.

Herd Immunity – How it works from Chain of Protection on Vimeo.

The existence of vaccine skepticism is not new.  Even in the early days of vaccines, there were many who feared them, and vaccine propaganda was not uncommon.  For instance, the vaccine skeptics of the 1800s suggested that your cowpox vaccination would result in cows growing from your limbs.  Sounds ridiculous, right?  Well, today’s vaccine skeptics are no different and shamelessly promote an unhealthy blend of pseudoscience and fear mongering.

Given the lack of a strong public health infrastructure, combined with funding deficits, many countries in the developing world do not have vaccines readily available like we do in the USA.  In other words, there are hundreds of thousands of children who die every year from vaccine preventable diseases.  And, honestly, each time I hear a parent describe vaccines as “poisoning their children” I want to pay for their airfare to a place like the slums of Malawi or Kenya – let them see first hand exactly how far their beliefs are from reality and truth.  But, alas, I am only one person who receives the typical salary of a postdoc.

However, there is something that can be done.  Right now, the American Red Cross is accepting donations intended to help fund widespread measles vaccinations in places that do not have exposure to regular health care.  To make it easy for you, the JAYFK and its editor in commandment, Dr. Rubidium, are spearheading a vaccine drive (the following excerpt is from Dr. Rubidium’s post on Double X Science):

What will it cost?

• vaccinations for 25 childern: $25
• vaccinations for 50 childern: $50
• vaccinations for 100 childern: $100
• vaccinations for a village: $500

Forget getting your best friend Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3! Get 50 vaccinations instead. In that holiday card to your boss, let them know they’ve vaccinated 25 kids. Splurge on that flat-screen TV with your tax return next year. For now, vaccinate a village–A WHOLE VILLAGE!How do you do it? The Red Cross has made it ridiculously easy! A pull-down menu let’s you select 25, 500, 100, or whole village vaccinations and a few clicks later, you’re buying vaccines online from the Red Cross.

I encourage you to join in helping spread the gift of health.  And please spread the word!!

Disclosure: I did not receive and monetary compensation from GSK for my visit to their vaccine packaging facility in Marietta, PA.  However, I was provided with room and board for my less than 24 stay in PA.  

These days, I travel from Glasgow to London several times a year now. For a variety of reasons, I prefer to travel by train (Virgin Express only takes around 4 hours 15 mins).

I book in advance, choose a table seat with a power socket for my mobile devices, sit back and surf the web/read a book, iPod Nano for music etc. etc.

By default, I tend not to spark up a conversation with the person(s) opposite simply for “idle chitter chatter”.  However, should they decide to start a conversation,  I’ll happily contribute to it (if it is of interest, or I’ll switch off).

Last week, I was sitting outside Euston Station awaiting my train back home after spending two days in London for the Open Research Reports SWAT4LS Hackathon. In light of the fact that Peter Murray-Rust (see last link) has already written a fairly comprehensive write up of the event, I don’t intend to add to that.

The BibSoup cluster (anticlockwise) : XX, Naomi Lillie, Tania Gray, Mark McGillivray, Jenny Molloy, Gilles Frydman, Graham Steel

I found out via Twitter (and by phoning a friend who was stranded in Motherwell and had just seen a bus stop shelter flying by) that there were severe weather conditions in Scotland and that train speed restrictions had been enforced across large parts of Scotland to 50 mph. Our train did leave on time, but we were informed that the service would be subject to delay after Preston.

Like all passengers on board, myself and the two other in our (seat) cluster of four were aware of the impending delayed journey. Of the three of us, one was the most up to speed on things for two reasons. I was the only one connected to the web and secondly, I had been following #hurricanebawbag on Twitter. Not only was this very informative, it was equally amusing. According to this page on Wikipedia, the storm was officially named Cyclone Friedhelm.

++ADDENDUM++ That hashtag apparently was trending globally around the time.

I soon became an Oracle of Information in this regard which my fellow passengers found most useful. The polite elderly lady sitting beside me was only travelling to the Lake District, so her interest in the storm was only passive. The young woman sitting opposite like myself was travelling to Glasgow so the two of us chatted together a bit more.

Whilst I didn’t catch her name (let’s call her Lucy), the free flowing conversation between Lucy and I was rather engaging and lasted throughout the duration all the way into Glasgow. Lucy was a 23 year old woman from England who was a 1st year undergrad at Glasgow University studying the Life Sciences.  She had been to London to stay with family, and when she asked me why I had been in London, I said for a Hackathon. She gasped “what like computer hacking?”. I explained when most people hear the work hacking, they think of “the dark side” i.e. Computer Hacking as opposed to Hacker (programmer subculture).

I explained in a bit of detail what the 30 or so of us had been doing at the Hackathon and she seemed fairly interested.

She recommended two websites for me to check out, PowerBase and her favourite Journal, Antipode. I had a quick look at the latter on the train. The first thing I wanted to know was whether or not the Journal was Open Access. Lucy said “What is Open Access?”.  I then gave a mini “lecture” about STM publishing. As she’s part of an Institution, she takes it for granted that she has access to the Literature and uses her brother’s library card to do the same when she is in London.  A quick navigation of Antipode confirmed that it is published by Wiley, is Toll Access and the subscription prices are on this page.

Since I was wearing my PLoS Hoodie, I gave her a whirlwind overview of PLoS and their mission.

Lucy asked “Is Open Access material peer-reviewed?”.  I said that this was a common question and “yes it is peer-reviewed”.

As I tweeted later when home:- “Had a fab convo today with a student from Glasgow Uni. who hadn’t heard of #OA but supports it 100% – She got an unused cool #PLoS tshirt”. !

During the conversation, the name George Monbiot came up. Lucy is a fan of his. I advised that I had recently done a podcast at The Guardian and that we discussed Monbiot during that.

—–

At that time, I was looking at new Tweets and right on cue was this one from Alok Jha.

“Results of publicly funded research will be open access – science minister”. LINK

David Willetts, the science minister, said the government wants to move to open access while protecting peer review. Photograph: Anna Gordon/Guardian

“The government has signalled a revolution in scientific publishing by throwing its weight behind the idea that all publicly funded scientific research must be published in open-access journals“.

MAJOR piece of news and perfect timing for the conversation.

———–

Later on, out of interest, I asked Lucy if people of her generation bought CD’s. “Never” she replied. “Why download stuff from i-Tunes when you can get it for free via The Pirate Bay and other sites like that”. A bit of an eye opener for me. Cue a previous post from my old blog “There’s Evian, then there’s tap water”.

By this point, the elderly lady had vacated the train, so we were able to have a slightly more liberating conversation.

Some of the #hurricanebawbag tweets were fucking hilarious and not repeatable when the polite elderly lady was present. It was also becoming clear that the storm had largely now passed, yet despite this, the train was travelling at 50mph as opposed to the normal 125mph. We were delayed overall by 1 hour 45 minutes. #ARSE

Lucy has only tweeted a couple of times, doesn’t find it useful. I explained that I use Twitter all the time and how for example the use of Hashtag’s works and how very useful this is when following particular events/conference’s etc.

Some of the #hurricanebawbag Tweets were (as it later transpired) clearly exaggerated such as “River Clyde has burst it’s banks in the centre of Glasgow”.  When I relayed some of the tweets to another passenger, he said something along the lines of “Twitter? you can’t trust anything on that”.  I do beg to differ.

Another question I thought would be interesting to ask Lucy was if her generation use email much these days. For her, other than booking a flight and formal things like that she said “No, never”. Facebook and the like are the default method of communication.

We got to Glasgow and off we went to brave the conditions of a very battered City. A lengthier than expected journey made interesting with the Web at hand…..

McDawg 3.0

I wanted to participate in one of these, but I wasn’t exactly basketball material, nor did I have much of an interest.  However, my years in karate had conditioned me such that I was quite limber and strong.  Effortless were handstands and splits.  Balance was never a problem.  And, I was a pretty decent gymnast, proficient in cartwheeling, hand-springing, and round-offing.

Many of the “cool” older girls were cheerleaders and I was entering a stage where I longed for acceptance into the popular clique.  I thought I had enough going for me to try out for the cheerleading team, so in fourth grade, I was present at the infamous September tryouts of 1988.

Held in our dilapidated gym with weird rubber flooring, almost the entire female student body from fourth through eighth grade showed up to this two evening event.  On the first evening, we all worked together to learn a specific routine, which, on the next day, would be individually performed by each and every girl present, in front of each and every girl present.

It took a little while for me to become coordinated, but, by the end of the first evening, I was able to perform the choreography.  However, I had a hard time projecting my voice while maintaining the required ear-to-ear smile.  And for hours that evening, as well as before, during, and after school on the next day, I practiced and practiced and practiced.  Like every other girl there, I really wanted to make the cut.

My reasons for wanting to be on the team may not have been the right reasons; however, they were certainly normal reasons.  You see, many of the cool older girls were on the cusp of puberty – they started wearing bras, getting their nails done, and some even began their periods.

I, on the other hand, had been perfectly content with wearing undershirts and participating in a regular routine of corner-to-corner boundary manhunt.  I played stickball in the street, being sure to yell “CAR!” when someone had the audacity to interrupt our game.  I spent hours playing double dutch, and rested in between sets by playing spit on our stoop.  Fence hopping and ‘kick the can’ were  also popular past times.  Before the fourth grade, I had no concept of what it meant to be girly.  But, suddenly, I longed to fill a bra.  I started doing my hair.  I went to Leroy’s, the drug store around the corner, and bought nail polish.  I wanted to be like the cool older girls.  Being a cheerleader seemed like my best bet.

I showed up to the second night of cheerleading tryouts feeling one part confident and 99 parts anxious.  There were about a hundred girls there, and because we had no bleachers or formal seating, we just sat around the perimeter of the gym floor.  The cheerleading coaches simply started at one end and, one by one, each girl walked to the center of the floor and performed her heart out.  When it was my turn, I felt as if there was a lead brick in my gut.  Feeling like all two hundred or so eyes were piercing me with their stares, I slowly walked to the designated starting point.  The room quieted.

I took a deep breath and began the routine.  I could tell that my voice wasn’t really projecting the desired cheeriness and, mid-routine, I decided that I would more than compensate with some pretty fresh gymnastic moves as my grand finale.  During what I had hoped to be a smooth transition from the end of the cheer into a series of handsprings, I lost my footing and went tumbling (not in a good way).

How did that just happen?  I was absolutely mortified, but I wasn’t going to just lie there and admit defeat.  There I was, flat on my back and unsure if my arm was broken, I thought fast and propped myself up as if I was about to do some sort of crab walk and kicked up one of my legs as if I had meant to do all of it – on purpose.

The girls who weren’t gasping with surprise were laughing in hysterics.  And because of the terrible acoustics, this laughter devastatingly echoed as it reached my auditory canals.  I stood up in a daze, looked at the stunned faces of the judges, took a bow, and as proudly and calmly as I could, made my way to the gymnasium exit.  As soon as I made it out, I ran to the bathroom and proceeded to cry my eyes out.  One of the judges, Eileen, recognized that I might have hurt myself and came running after me.  She gave me hugs and an ice pack and told me that I did a great job.  But, really, I didn’t.

I waited until the end of tryouts, holding on to some shred of hope that my name would be included on the squad roster.  It wasn’t.  And for days, everyone whispered and pointed when they saw me.  Some of the boys, once they caught word of what happened, would even get down on the floor and clumsily stick up one of their legs, mocking my “grand finale.”  I tried to be a good sport and laugh with them, but on the inside, I was totally crushed.  The days and weeks passed and the teasing eventually wore off.  But I don’t think I could ever forget that feeling.

Why bring this up?  Well, yesterday, I received word that I did not get the job for which I interviewed some weeks ago.  You know, that really REALLY awesome job with a great location and an even better paycheck?  Yeah, that one.  I wanted that job more than I wanted to be on the cheerleading team.  But, as I sat digesting the email, which thanked me for my time investment and informed me that, “we have selected another candidate whose qualifications are more appropriate for our needs,” I thought about that September evening in 1988.  And I was thankful that this rejection did not arrive in front of a hundred other girls.  At least now I could drink some beer.  And so I did.

I wanted to participate in one of these, but I wasn’t exactly basketball material, nor did I have much of an interest.  However, my years in karate had conditioned me such that I was quite limber and strong.  Effortless were handstands and splits.  Balance was never a problem.  And, I was a pretty decent gymnast, proficient in cartwheeling, hand-springing, and round-offing.

Many of the “cool” older girls were cheerleaders and I was entering a stage where I longed for acceptance into the popular clique.  I thought I had enough going for me to try out for the cheerleading team, so in fourth grade, I was present at the infamous September tryouts of 1988.

Held in our dilapidated gym with weird rubber flooring, almost the entire female student body from fourth through eighth grade showed up to this two evening event.  On the first evening, we all worked together to learn a specific routine, which, on the next day, would be individually performed by each and every girl present, in front of each and every girl present.

It took a little while for me to become coordinated, but, by the end of the first evening, I was able to perform the choreography.  However, I had a hard time projecting my voice while maintaining the required ear-to-ear smile.  And for hours that evening, as well as before, during, and after school on the next day, I practiced and practiced and practiced.  Like every other girl there, I really wanted to make the cut.

My reasons for wanting to be on the team may not have been the right reasons; however, they were certainly normal reasons.  You see, many of the cool older girls were on the cusp of puberty – they started wearing bras, getting their nails done, and some even began their periods.

I, on the other hand, had been perfectly content with wearing undershirts and participating in a regular routine of corner-to-corner boundary manhunt.  I played stickball in the street, being sure to yell “CAR!” when someone had the audacity to interrupt our game.  I spent hours playing double dutch, and rested in between sets by playing spit on our stoop.  Fence hopping and ‘kick the can’ were  also popular past times.  Before the fourth grade, I had no concept of what it meant to be girly.  I just knew how to be a kid.  But, suddenly, I longed to fill a bra.  I started doing my hair.  I went to Leroy’s, the drug store around the corner, and bought nail polish.  I wanted to be like the cool older girls.  Being a cheerleader seemed like my best bet.

I showed up to the second night of cheerleading tryouts feeling one part confident and 99 parts anxious.  There were about a hundred girls there, and because we had no bleachers or formal seating, we just sat around the perimeter of the gym floor.  The cheerleading coaches simply started at one end and, one by one, each girl walked to the center of the floor and performed her heart out.  When it was my turn, I felt as if there was a lead brick in my gut.  Feeling like all two hundred or so eyes were piercing me with their stares, I slowly walked to the designated starting point.  The room quieted.

I took a deep breath and began the routine.  I could tell that my voice wasn’t really projecting the desired cheeriness and, mid-routine, I decided that I would more than compensate with some pretty fresh gymnastic moves as my grand finale.  During what I had hoped to be a smooth transition from the end of the cheer into a series of handsprings, I lost my footing and went tumbling (not in a good way).

How did that just happen?  I was absolutely mortified, but I wasn’t going to just lie there and admit defeat.  There I was, flat on my back, unsure if my arm was broken.  I thought fast and propped myself up as if I was about to do some sort of crab walk and kicked up one of my legs as if I had meant to do all of it – on purpose.

The girls who weren’t gasping with surprise were laughing in hysterics.  And because of the terrible acoustics, this laughter devastatingly echoed as it reached my auditory canals.  I stood up in a daze, looked at the stunned faces of the judges, took a bow, and as proudly and calmly as I could, made my way to the gymnasium exit.  As soon as I made it out, I ran to the bathroom and proceeded to cry my eyes out.  One of the judges, Eileen, recognized that I might have hurt myself and came running after me.  She gave me hugs and an ice pack and told me that I did a great job.  But, really, I didn’t.

I waited until the end of tryouts, holding on to some shred of hope that my name would be included on the squad roster.  It wasn’t.  And for days, everyone whispered and pointed when they saw me.  Some of the boys, once they caught word of what happened, would even get down on the floor and clumsily stick up one of their legs, mocking my “grand finale.”  I tried to be a good sport and laugh with them, but on the inside, I was totally crushed.  The days and weeks passed and the teasing eventually wore off.  But I don’t think I could ever forget that feeling.

Why bring this up?  Well, yesterday, I received word that I did not get the job for which I interviewed some weeks ago.  You know, that really REALLY awesome job with a great location and an even better paycheck?  Yeah, that one.  I wanted that job more than I wanted to be on the cheerleading team.  But, as I sat digesting the email, which thanked me for my time investment and informed me that, “we have selected another candidate whose qualifications are more appropriate for our needs,” I thought about that September evening in 1988.  And I was thankful that this rejection did not arrive in front of a hundred other girls.  At least now I could drink some beer.  And so I did.

Woah.  She was right!  But, alas, this was an episode dating back to the time when there was an unfortunate set of expectations for women, and the glass ceiling was so low you had to crawl.  I suppose that, in some way, this was a justifiable excuse (but really, it isn’t).  Nonetheless, I am left wondering exactly how things have changed.

Now that my daughter has inspired me to sharpen my focus, I started to pick up on the not so subtle portrayal of women in advertisements.  There seems to be a common theme, especially when advertising to women who have families: woman takes care of household duties while children and/or spouse are in some (fun) way occupied.

For instance, in the Campbell’s Chunky Soup “Meat and Potatoes Guy” ad, the loyal woman is shown serving her man a plate of mashed potatoes, which is rejected until a can of Chunky Soup is added.

It gets even worse when entering the world of the almighty cleaning product ad campaign.  Unless I have somehow missed it (and I doubt it), I have yet to see a man actively using a Swiffer Sweeper or Lysol-ing the toilet in any print or television ad.  This seems a bit ridiculous, if for no other reason than the fact that many men, including my own husband, are responsible for many of the household chores as well as supermarket purchases.

I don’t know about you, but I’d be prett-y pissed if my husband and kids sat around whilst I cleaned up after their every whimsical mishap.  In my book, this Bona ad is a major fail.

Vintage 1920s ad from Good Housekeeping. Bona could have saved some dough by just using this picture.

While we are no longer depicted as pearl-necklace and apron-wearing women with perfectly set hair, the likes of which would make June Cleaver tremble with envy, have we really come that far?  Sure the pictures have changed, but the message still remains the same.  And that is unacceptable.

Well, what else is a wife good for?

From now on, I will try my best to avoid purchasing ANY item that uses a sexist advertising campaign.  Now, I’m not saying that a picture woman enjoying new furniture or even a remodeled kitchen is sexist.  Hell, I’d LOVE a new Viking gas range (because I enjoy cooking) or a new living room set.  What I will not contribute to is any product using an image or idea that shines women in a subordinate light, however subtle.  My hope is that I will not be relegated to concocting my own cleaning solutions (though I can easily do this, if I had the time).  If it does come to that, I will certainly share my recipes.  I mean, what else is a woman good for – at least according to the media?

For some more incredibly sexist ad campaigns, check this out.  Bring your barf bag.

9.   Apple products.  Regardless of what the science says, I really think that I am in love with my iPhone.

8.   Rain boots.  There is nothing worse than having to work all day with wet feet.  The trick is making sure you check the weather before leaving the house.

7.    Feminism and those who practice it. 

6.   Related to the previous – life lessons from my Great Aunt June.  Although she has been gone for almost a decade, June was the one to teach me that I could do anything if worked hard at it.  “Take no crap, especially if that crap is related to your being a woman.” She lived and died by that rule.

5.   Health Insurance.  This is obvious, but can be stressed even further here.  I just cannot understand why health insurance isn’t considered a basic human right in the USA.

4.   A job.  Even cooler that it is a job in science.

3.   An American Passport.  Yes, things could be better here in the states.  But it also could be worse.  If we all took a second to pull our heads out of Megyn Kelly’s ass and take a look at the rest of the world, it would be quickly realized that we have it pretty darn good here.

2.   New York City.

1.   My husband and daughters.  What is the point of all that other stuff if I can’t share it with them?      

, via Wikimedia Commons”]

Thalia – Muse of Comedy. Jean-Marc Nattier [Public domain

September 29^th, 2011 marked the last time that my daughter suckled from my breast.  I felt that 27 months and 11 days of breastfeeding was a solid offering of immune boosting nutrition, warmth, and comfort, the likes of which can only be provided by a mother.  The end of this breastfeeding era was bittersweet as it signified the official transition from baby to child.  However, this date also marked the beginning of the end of what I considered to be a pretty sweet rack.

Ever since I began to procreate, I have been an outspoken advocate for long-term breastfeeding.  I’ve shared stories about the spontaneous soaking of my blouse during a meeting and how I refuse to apologize or feel embarrassed for nursing my toddler.  I’ve experienced an indescribable happiness as I watched my girls feed from my bosom, and have also had the “why the hell am I doing this” type thoughts race through my mind, especially on the fifth feeding of the night.  Nursing has been a HUGE part of my child-rearing approach to date, reaching a grand total of 45 months.  And now, it appears as if my boobs have deflated.  And I say, so what!

Apparently, it ruffles a few feathers to talk about this phenomenon.  After Sam Bee (of The Daily Show fame) spoke about the imminent disappearance of her “boob-meat” as a consequence of nursing cessation, she was accused of perpetuating the fear that breastfeeding changes the size and shape of a woman’s breast.

Given my own dwindling cup size, along with my love for all things funny, I am on team Sam Bee.  But, I wondered how science weighed in on this issue.  Alas, I was only able to find one study on this subject, but at least it is something.  In the report entitled “The Effects of Breastfeeding on Breast Aesthetics,” published in the 2008 issue of Aesthetic Surgery Journal, researchers concluded that “A history of breastfeeding was not found to be associated with a greater degree of breast ptosis in patients presenting for postpregnancy aesthetic breast surgery.”  In other words, nursing does not appear to cause saggy boobs (ptosis).

However, there are some notable weaknesses regarding this study.  For one, the patients were not randomized to breastfeeding and non-breastfeeding groups.  In addition, the study only included 132 patients – a number clearly not large enough to represent the population at large.  The authors acknowledged these issues and stated that a larger, well-designed prospective study is necessary to truly figure out the effects of pregnancy and breastfeeding on breast size and shape.  Despite these issues, there is currently no scientific basis for nursing-induced booby shrinking.

Yet, here I am, unable to fill the bras that once beautifully clothed my girls and suddenly, I am reminded of the “ironing board” teasing tactics from my youth (I’m looking at you, Kevin Murphy).  But honestly, I could care less.  I am so proud that I was able to share this experience with my children, and for me, that is worth any amount of body change.

I should also add that breastfeeding is a personal choice.  While breast truly is best, it isn’t the only option.  Many a baby, including all of my mother’s children, do just fine on formula.  If a woman chooses to breastfeed, that’s wonderful.  If she doesn’t, that’s cool too.  The important thing is that women are provided with the information that allows them to make the best choice for them.  Period.

I guess what I am trying to say is: lay off it.  I don’t see a problem with Sam Bee poking fun at herself for her “A minus cups.”  Honestly, her post has helped me realize the comedic potential of my new itty bitties, and for that, I am thankful.

With that said, does anyone want to buy some impeccably maintained Chantelle and Aubade lace braziers?  Size 32C, always hand washed and air-dried.  Someone might as well enjoy them…

Happy Thanksgiving y’all!

Even though correlating sexual activity to level of happiness seems logical in a normal, healthy relationship, a Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University professor, Adrienne Jackson, decided to give that idea some statistical weight.  However, she limited her cohort to the population over 65 years of age.

Using surveys to assess the happiness level of 238 married individuals over the age of 65, it was found that the frequency of sexual activity is directly correlated to both general and marital happiness.  And to clarify the meaning of “sex” in their survey, the study authors included “By ‘sex’ we mean vaginal, oral, or anal sex.”  Just in case you were wondering.

But, there is still the chicken or the egg argument.  Though this study linked sex to a state of emotional wellbeing, it is not possible to determine if happy seniors have more sex, or if seniors who have more sex are happier.

Regardless of order, I commend Adrienne Jackson for tackling this issue.  Given that the senior citizen sector is one of the fastest growing age groups in the United States, it is imperative to know as much as possible about how sexual function changes with age and age-related illnesses.  It is also important to be informed if there is a treatment for your sex-related condition.

Seriously though, I never met two happier people than my grandparents.  Perhaps the horizontal mambo really is better than any dance you can do on the dance floor. (Anyone have a graphic imagery eraser I can borrow for my brain?)

You can find Adrienne Jackson’s report here, which was presented at The Gerontological Society of America’s (GSA) 64th Annual Scientific Meeting in Boston.

Yes, there are many men, including Ed Rybicki, who suffer from ED.  But, I do have some shred of hope in humanity and I would like to think that for every misogynistic dickhead, there is at least one man who is almost entirely gender blind (I say “almost” because, you know, we are only human).  These guys look at every person for who they are and what they have to offer, completely sans expectations associated with the “get in the kitchen” philosophy of yesteryear.  To rephrase Leslie Goshko (from this article in the Huffington Post), smart is smart, and assholes are assholes.

So, instead of writing about the unfortunate affliction that is ED, I would instead like to take this opportunity to thank the many men in my life who have never made me feel inadequate because I was born with two X chromosomes.

Thank you to my husband for realizing my utter hatred for grocery stores and shopping malls – I am glad one of us knows our daughters’ shoe sizes (hint, its not me).

Thanks to my awesome boss who has never EVER questioned my ability as a scientist or devotion to my craft because I needed to stay home to take care of a sick kid.

Thanks to my little brother who has always seen me as a beacon of inspiration, fully knowing that I will do my best to help him find the answer to any pressing question.

And thanks to all those guys out there who see their women colleagues, wives, sisters, mothers, aunts, cousins, and friends for the people they actually are, independent of gender.

If you would like to read more about #Womanspace, here is a great list (surely to grow as time passes):

• Compound Eye (Alex Wild): Nature Publishing Group’s New Journal
• Doing Good Science (Janet D. Stemwedel):In which I form the suspicion that I am not Nature’s intended audience.
• Context and Variation (Kate Clancy): What Does it Mean to Do the Right Thing? Time to #OccupyNPG
• Highly Allochthonous (Anne Jefferson): Dear Nature, You got a sexist story, but when you published it, you gave it your stamp of approval and became sexist too.
• The Biology Files (Emily Willingham): Hey, Nature–the 1950s wants its sexist prose back
• Science Sushi (Christie Wilcox): The Charismatic Misogynist
• On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess (Dr. Isis): What Womanspace Really Looks Like (And Why Nature Can Suck It)
• Drug Monkey: Sexist nonsense at Nature Publishing Group’s Laddie Magazine
• Nature (response from Ylaine Gerardin & Tami Lieberman): Women: Sexist fiction is alienating
• Nature (response from Pieter van Dokkum): Women: Latent bias harms careers

One thing at a time, though: What is SciFund? A “Kickstarter for science“, “the model charities have always used (bundling lots of donations to do good works), with an internet/social media twist“, “the first concerted effort at crowdfunding research“, plus an intensive course on science communication between researchers and the public.

As part of that, participants are invited to write blog posts on a number of questions, and the theme for this week is “If this was how science funding worked in the future, would that be OK?” If this were a polar question, my answer would be “No”, but so it would for the currently prevailing traditional modes of funding, so digging a little deeper is probably in order.

The SciFund homepage provides answers as to what the SciFund Challenge is, who participates, and when and where it takes place – somewhat implying how. From an evolutionary psychology perspective (cf. Tinbergen), why questions are typically more interesting, so missing out on them raises a flag, and others were also wondering. Fortunately, two participants have already blogged their views on that, which boil down to eligibility criteria for classical research funding (including age), budgetary constraints on science funding in general, ”always working on someone else’s projects and and they reflect someone else’s creativity“, plus a desire to engage with the public and to have fun doing so. I share all these views (and so did others) but would like to add some different ones, which are the main drivers behind my participation.

The first one is best expressed in a 2007 Cochrane review on the peer review procedures for grant applications, which concluded:

There is little empirical evidence on the effects of grant giving peer review. No studies assessing the impact of peer review on the quality of funded research are presently available. Experimental studies assessing the effects of grant giving peer review on importance, relevance, usefulness, soundness of methods, soundness of ethics, completeness and accuracy of funded research are urgently needed. Practices aimed to control and evaluate the potentially negative effects of peer review should be implemented meanwhile.

Running such a missing test of grant peer review efficiency is an idea that I had been pondering for a while – initially without knowing about the Cochrane study – since I have had ample opportunity to see good research proposals rejected, with no apparent reasons why others went through. Similarly, a recent commentary by John Ioannidis in Nature started out with

The research funding system is broken: scientists don’t have time for science any more.

and went on to mention that 

the research behind 30% of the pivotal papers from Nobel laureates in medicine, physics and chemistry was done without direct funding

and

the imperfections of peer review mean that as many as one-third of current grants are effectively being awarded at random

and that

It is a scandal that billions of dollars are spent on research without knowing the best way to distribute that money.

On the occasion of a 2009 study aptly entitled “Cost of the NSERC Science Grant Peer Review System Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Qualified Researcher a Baseline Grant“, I did not just blog my comments but also set up a draft for a grant proposal but it never got submitted because the confidential and informal reply to my pre-submission inquiry stated clearly that this kind of research would stand no chances of being funded through this “Europe and Global Challenges” scheme.

I gave it another try last year when I submitted a proposal in response to a call for “[p]roblems that, if solved, would advance the knowledge and capabilities in an area of your research” (link now rotten) but the jury chose another project, as usual behind closed doors. I had also approached several funders – VolkswagenStiftung, DFG, ERC, ESF, Wellcome Trust, European Commission – as to whether they wouldn’t have an interest in funding such a study on the efficiency of the way they distribute their funds, but I am too small a fish in those ponds to receive any more than some politeness in response.

So when I heard of the SciFund Challenge, I immediately signed up and thought I would submit something along these lines, hoping that the problem of the missing test of this crucial element of the research system might get a bit of attention this way. But as the preparations for the SciFund launch on November 1 unfolded, I became aware that the budgets likely to be in reach of such a crowdfunding endeavour would not make for a good case in comparison to the billions spent the classical way, and I realized that the group of finally 49 projects would in itself represent such a test: whatever the amount finally raised by the SciFund Challenge, there will be very few classically funded research projects that could be said to have a higher impact in terms of communicating science to non-scientific audiences (I’m a Scientist comes to mind but this isn’t classical research funding either), in particular before the start of the funding period – and quite possibly even in terms of scientific impact. The current total is embedded below (courtesy Jarrett Byrnes).

This brings us back on topic – the graph is updated on an hourly basis, so it allows to follow the process of the overall SciFund budget evolving. A key aspect of Open Science is to make the processes visible, so as to allow others to follow, comment, contribute, replicate or otherwise engage with the research. In principle, any data-based figure destined for publication could publicly evolve this way throughout the data acquisition phase of the corresponding research projects. Some researchers already keep their lab notebooks open this way.

Open scientists also write grants in the open. It was thus a logical fit to have Jai Ranganathan present the SciFund Challenge at the Open Science Summit last month (three initiatives at microfunding science had been presented there last year). I followed the event remotely (my talk is here) and enjoyed Jai’s talk very much, so here it is again:

Given that SciFund takes place in public, it is in effect a public dataset that could, in itself, be used to study correlates with and possibly even causes of successful crowdfunding campaigns for research. The dataset comprises the graph above, along with its counterpart for all the individual projects, and all the blog posts, tweets and other public mentions of the initiative or its projects. However, very few of these items are clearly labeled as being openly licensed, so any reuse comes with the pitfall of potential copyright problems later on. In fact, the Panton Principles for the sharing of scientific data recommend that data be put into the Public Domain, so as to avoid such problems right from the start.

Beyond data, I keep saying that all the steps in the research cycle can in principle be performed in the open, the exception being funding decisions, and here we are at SciFund again – everyone can easily find out which projects are part of the competition, how much money they raised (and from whom) and whether they met their target. For the situation in classical research funding (where normally only the winners are announced), let me quote an old post on the matter:

Science funding, in a sense, is like some kinds of sports (think figure skating) in that decisions are being made by a committee. However, the science funding committees evaluate only planned choreographies (though they take into account edited records of actual performances in the past). What is more, participating athletes (let alone the public), and often even committee members do not know each other’s identity, and the whole process of selecting a winner is secret. What would you think of a sports champion elected that way? Or, the other way round, wouldn’t it be interesting to be a spectator in the science funding sports, rather than reading hype-cycling “scientists found out” reports? After all, this is supposed to be a venue for creativity and sharp minds, both of which stand good chances of attracting attention.

Science funding is also supposed to spur innovation (like combining ice skating and elements of ballroom dance to what is now known as ice dancing). But if ice dancing has never been performed before, people who are experienced in either ice skating or ballroom dance, or in areas yet further away, are to decide whether such a new kind of choreographies stands any chances of winning in future major championships. How good are their chances to perform well on this task? Well, I don’t know, but they are certainly drastically slimmer than those of identifying which of a set of published articles (which contain the edited records of ice dances whose original choreographies got indeed funded) are going to be considered a masterpiece three years later. This latter experiment has actually been performed by Wellcome Trust researchers, and although the committee members performed well overall in their predictions, they missed a lot of jewels too.

So SciFund is important for Open Science because it fills the last major gap in the open version of the research cycle with some initial data. Perhaps not surprising, this is where the SciFund project comes in that I have submitted in collaboration with Fabiana Kubke at the University of Auckland. Its outlines have already been presented here on this blog in a series of posts in spring, but we found that the label of a GitHub for science that Marcio van Muhlen used for a closely related idea might not fly with the general public, and so we framed the project as Communicating research the Beethoven way, alluding to the following quote from a letter Beethoven had sent to one of his funders:

There should be only one repository of art in the world, to which the artist would donate his works in order to take what he would need

In short, we plan to get away from the current state of the scientific literature with its millions of static stand-alone articles describing research from months or years ago, take a suitably licensed (CC BY) Open-Access slice of it and turn that into a set of evolving and interlinked articles that reflect both the history and the state of the art for their topic and can be adapted immediately as research proceeds in a way readable by humans and machines. Such a system unites aspects of electronic notebooks, libraries, archives and museums and implements the Criteria for the journal of the future as well as the Five Stars of Online Journal Articles.

This would allow any researcher, research funder, patient, teacher or lay person to stay abreast of research on any topic and to interact with others that share their interests. In order to be useful for researchers right from the start, integration with workflows all along the research cycle is key, albeit the publishing step will be steadily decomposed on the way towards micro- and nanopublications (thereby making the least publishable unit obsolete). Perpetual public peer review will obviously be facilitated by this system, data and code shall be integrated with classical text and multimedia content, forking shall be easy, and we are pondering ideas like using automated searches over semantically enhanced content as the basis for identifying knowledge gaps and proposing new research projects.

Getting all of the above crowdfunded in this first go was not realistic, so we chose to scale the project down to a prototype with just a few evolving review articles, focusing on the development of the software and its application to a few expected use cases, and budgeted accordingly. Given the workings of RocketHub, it may have been a better crowdfunding strategy to go for an even more scaled-down version – with a smaller funding goal – and to prepare for funding overshoot, but this would have made the proposal less credible. Public proposals like those in the SciFund challenge (especially if they provided a bit more detail) would expose weaknesses of this kind much more than the traditional non-public proposals. But then again, I would personally favour a system in which the appropriateness of budget use would by default be judged after the research has been performed, rather than before – with severe penalties for misuse of funds, and with special provisions for projects that require pre-research investments in infrastructure that is not commercially available.

Entering an Open Science project into the SciFund Challenge also affects the range of rewards that can be offered to supporters of a project: while many projects offer privileged information to supporters, there is no such thing to offer in projects run entirely in the open. Open projects could in principle offer more opportunities for the public to interact with the research, but RocketHub – the crowdfunding platform through which SciFund projects are seeking support – does not really seem conducive to engagement beyond financial transactions. For instance, very few if any fuelers comment on the projects they funded – intuitively, I would expect way more comments than money transfers. 

Are SciFund participants themselves engaging in Open Science beyond putting their research proposals out here in public? Well, at least Lee Worden (Mathematics of direct democracy) has an open notebook and released his SciFund video under CC BY, and I know that many of them have published in Open-Access journals. For instance, Shermin de Silva (with whom I am collaborating on vocal production in elephants, sadly in a rather non-open project) of Elephant research was the lead author of a paper on the dynamics of social network in groups of female Asian elephants, which is licensed CC BY and could well serve as the seed of an evolving review article on the topic. Similarly, Patty Brennan published a CC BY-licensed paper that laid the foundation for her SciFund project “Force of Duck“, and Zen Faulkes (Amazon Crayfish) has at least one CC BY paper too (his video is under CC BY but I don’t think that is appropriate, as he was using screenshots of materials that were copyrighted by others). 

Have we now covered the topic of interactions between SciFund and Open Science? Not quite. For instance, I only mentioned that having proposals out in the open facilitates peer review, but haven’t gone into that and indeed will leave it for another post (for preview, take a look here and here). Another aspect as yet untouched is how the open materials produced for and throughout the challenge can be reused later (e.g. in teaching) or how the experiences gathered through the initiative can be integrated with advice on getting grants.

With regard to the actual SciFund blogging theme of whether the SciFund approach could be a model for future research funding, I would like to expand a bit on my “No” from the introduction by quoting from the Ioannidis commentary cited above, which does not mention crowdfunding (nor does the Cochrane review, by the way) but puts the classical funding schemes into a wider perspective:

Although detailed proposals may be indispensable for some projects, such as rigorous clinical trials and large-scale collaborative research, ideas abound for more efficient ways to fund general research. Some organizations are already experimenting. Multiple options could co-exist, with portions of the budget earmarked for different schemes.

I will leave the details to a later blog post too – for preview, take a look here.

Ioannidis, J. (2011). More time for research: Fund people not projects Nature, 477 (7366), 529-531 DOI: 10.1038/477529a

Demicheli V, Di Pietrantonj C. (2007). Peer review for improving the quality of grant applications Cochrane Database Syst Rev, Apr 18 (2) : 10.1002/14651858.MR000003.pub2

My bill for services received.

A few weeks ago, I fell and had to get stitches in my lef palm (here is a neat video of me getting them removed). My ER experience was a total of 6 hours, 5 of which I spent sitting and waiting. However, for a combined 1 hour, I was able to get an X-ray, speak to several nurse practitioners, and have an orthopedic surgeon stitch me up. For the pain, I was given prescription strength ibuprofen and one hydrocodone bitartrate and acetaminophen tablet (USP 5 mg/500 mg), also known as Vicodin. Yet, somehow, this experience ended up costing over $1700. Luckily, I am not responsible for this cost, but that does not suggest that this price tag is reasonable. Seriously, AYFKM?

Despite the delay in posting this storify (related to this), I think this is quite a useful post.

Cross-posted from Alex Holcombe

For Open Access Week 2011, which starts today, I’ve made a video, a draft pledging website, an inspirational website, am giving a talk, and co-written a group letter. This post is about the letter.

As discussed in my last post, there’s a web-based course called “Responsible Conduct of Research” that many thousands of researchers are required to complete each year. Brad Voytek spotted this question that seems a bit hostile (although quite possibly unintentionally) to new forms of scientific communication outside traditional journals.

I suggested we should write to the organization responsible for the course, and a few people commented on my post to indicate that they agreed. A few tweets later, we had a draft letter going. It’s been really cool to see how social media was able to quickly get a bunch of like-minded scientists together to achieve a goal. This in and of itself undermines the question that we wanted to question Below see our letter- we emailed it to CITI and they responded promptly to thank us for the feedback and to say they’d consider the issues we raised.

———————————————————————————-

Dear Professor Braunschweiger (CITI co-founder) and Professor Ed Prentice (CITI Executive Advisory Committee chair):

We write to challenge the answer to one of the questions in the “Responsible Conduct of Research” online course. The question reads “A good alternative to the current peer review process would be web logs (BLOGS) where papers would be posted and reviewed by those who have an interest in the work”. The answer deemed correct by your system is “False” and the explanation provided includes the assertion that “It is likely that the peer review process will evolve to minimize bias and conflicts of interest”.

We question these claims for two reasons. First, we see real examples of rigorous science happening outside of the traditional system of journal-based peer review. Second, we believe that the future path of scholarly communication is uncertain, and indicating to young researchers that such an important issue is closed is both inaccurate and unhelpful to informed debate.

As an example of science that does not fit the mold suggested by the phrase “the current peer review process”, consider the use of the arXiv preprint server in certain areas of astronomy and physics. In these areas, researchers usually begin by posting their manuscripts to the arXiv server. They then receive comments by those who have an interest in the work. Some of those manuscripts subsequently are submitted to journals and undergo traditional peer review, but many working scientists stay abreast of their field chiefly by reading manuscripts in the arXiv before they are accepted by journals.

Even in areas that are more tightly bound to traditional journals, there are recent examples where both effective peer review of science [1] and science itself [2] have occurred primarily via blogs and other online platforms. In these cases, the online activity appears to have resulted in more rapid progress than would have been possible through the traditional system. A growing body of research suggests that scholars use social media in ways that reflect and produce serious scholarship [3][4][5].

As for the future path of the current mainstream peer review model, we believe it is speculation to say that “It is likely that the peer review process will evolve to minimize bias and conflicts of interest”. The current peer review process may be under considerable strain [6] and unfortunately there is little evidence that it significantly improves the quality of manuscripts [7]. This raises the possibility that big changes are required, not just modifications to reduce bias and conflicts of interest. Furthermore, the question presupposes that the future entity into which peer review will evolve does not involve blogging. No one can see the future clearly enough to make that assumption.

We encourage discussion of this important topic, and would be interested in the inclusion in your program of material that sparks such discussion. However, we believe a true/false question on this topic to be inappropriate, as it limits rather than promotes discussion. All of us wish to see the development and optimization of rigorous systems, both new and traditional, for scientific scholarship. Requiring young researchers to adopt a particular position on this controversial, multifaceted issue may hinder open discussion and future progress.

Sincerely,

Bradley Voytek, PhD, University of California, San Francisco Department of Neurology

Jason Snyder, PhD, National Institutes of Health, USA

Alex O. Holcombe, PhD, School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Australia

William G. Gunn, PhD, Mendeley, USA/UK

Matthew Todd, PhD, School of Chemistry, University of Sydney, Australia

Daniel Mietchen, PhD, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany

Jason Priem, School of Library and Information Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Heather Piwowar, PhD, DataONE/NESCent, Canada

Todd Vision, PhD, Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Cameron Neylon, PhD, Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK, Editor in Chief, Open Research Computation

[1] Online experimental peer review of the “Arsenic Life” paper that recently appeared in Science: http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html

[2] Open Science is a Research Accelerator, M. Woelfle, P. Olliaro and M. H. Todd, Nature Chemistry 2011, 3, 745-748. http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v3/n10/full/nchem.1149.html

[3] Groth, P., & Gurney, T. (2010). Studying Scientific Discourse on the Web using Bibliometrics: A Chemistry Blogging Case Study. Presented at the WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, Raleigh, NC: US. Retrieved from http://journal.webscience.org/308/

[4] Priem, J., & Costello, K. L. (2010). How and why scholars cite on Twitter. Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting. Presented at the American Society for Information Science & Technology Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh PA, USA. doi:10.1002/meet.14504701201

[5] Weller, K., Dröge, E., & Puschmann, C. (2011). Citation Analysis in Twitter. Approaches for Defining and Measuring Information Flows within Tweets during Scientific Conferences. Proceedings of Making Sense of Microposts Workshop (# MSM2011). Co-located with Extended Semantic Web Conference, Crete, Greece.

[6] Smith R. Classical peer review: an empty gun. Breast Cancer Research 2010, 12(Suppl 4):S13 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/bcr2742

[7] Jefferson T, Rudin M, Brodney Folse S, Davidoff F. Editorial peer review for improving the quality of reports of biomedical studies. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2007, 2:MR000016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/14651858.MR000016.pub3

“Peter Binfield, PhD, publisher of PLoS ONE, discusses the scholarly journal and open access publishing at the Stanford Summit @ Medicine 2.0 on Sept. 16, 2011″.

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And a brief discussion (thus far) of this on Google+

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DUH!

To help his chem class remember the difference between metals and non-metals, my husband tells the following joke:

A metal and a non-metal are walking down the street.  The metal gets struck by lightening and says “oh no! I think I lost an electron!” The non-metal says “Are you sure?” The metal responds “I’m positive!!”

There are so many iterations of these memes to help kids (and adults!) remember the scientific properties of whatever it is they are studying at the moment. (Kind of like OIL-RIG: oxidation is losing; reduction is gaining).  But, last night, I was brought back to high school with a barrage of awful science jokes.  I have included them in this blog post for your dweeby pleasure!  Enjoy…

Today’s Momday post is brought to us by one of my dearest friends – Camille Aubecq-Hottlet.  Though we are on opposite sides of the pond, we went through pregnancy together, with our daughters born two months apart.  Camille is super awesome and her article on raising a bilingual child reflects that!  So, go ahead… READ!!!

If I had a Babel fish in my ear…

I was six when my parents announced that we were leaving Annecy (French Alps) and moving to New York.  I did not realize at the time what this meant nor did I understand how it would fundamentally change my life.  All I thought back then was that we would be living in a forest of skyscrapers, surrounded by cowboys and Indians.

And off we went, in December 1982, my parents, my two older brothers (11 and 9), my little sister (2) and I, looking like immigrants ready to board the boat on its way to Ellis Island.  Ok, so, we took the plane and landed at JFK, and made our way to the town that would soon be known to me as home for the next 16 years: Larchmont, NY.  No skyscrapers, no cowboys, no Indians in sight, but a quaint little piece of suburbia and a new chapter in our lives, and a major one at that.

I remember that when we arrived, I did not understand a word of English, aside from the words our father had taught us.  I remember him reading us bedtime stories in English, and then translating them in order for us to understand.  Our parents signed us up at the French-American School of New York, in Larchmont, which had opened its doors just two years earlier.  I actually remember my first day at school. So, like I said, I remember the time when I didn’t speak English, and then, the time when I did.  The learning phase is just a blur –rather normal for a six-year-old kid, you’ll say.  What I do know, from what my parents told me, is that I was speaking fluent English less than six months after our arrival.  You can imagine my mother’s surprise and delight when she heard my two-year-old sister having a conversation in English with one of my Dad’s American colleagues.  Then, in 1984, my little brother was born.  From the outset, he spoke two languages: French and English.  I mean, how cool is that?!

So, from the very start, I knew that the best time to learn a language was as soon in life as possible.  And there was never a doubt in my mind that the day I would have children, no matter where we’d be living, I’d be speaking to them in English (or French, had I been living in the US).  In my mind, being able to teach a child more than one language is a priceless gift.  I now live near Paris and work as a trilingual translator, my third language being Spanish.  More often than you’d imagine, I meet people who speak four, five or even six languages fluently!  Imagine my envy!

I also have plenty of mom and dad friends where each parent speaks a different language to their child. And, without exception, their kids speak both languages.  Granted, there can be certain mix-ups during the learning years of childhood, but the foundations are there and the child will strengthen his/her languages over the years.  Yet, you’d be surprised to learn of the number of people who have told me that speaking to a child in two languages from the start will never work.  And, of course, the very same people are people who have raised their children in a monolingual environment.  Heck, having grown up in a bilingual environment, what do I know?

In August 2009, our little Isabeau was born.  While her father speaks to her in French, I speak to her in English.  The one rule I’ve set myself is that I always speak to her in English, never in French.  Although she hears me talking in French with others, she knows that I speak to her in English.  I believe she mustn’t think that she has a choice; otherwise, she’ll choose the easiest solution with me.  And, so, living in France, she’d probably choose French.

She just turned two on the 16^th of August and what a joy it is to see her discovering the world… bilingually.  True enough, as she learns new words, a majority of them come out in French (living in France will do that), but we’re also hearing a few in English.  The latest new addition is “turtle”.  Plus, there is no doubt she understands everything I tell her in English.  Yet another example, another element of proof that newborn children are universal receptors who soak up everything around them.  It is so much easier to learn something at a young age –like learning a language– than later on in life.  So, having the capacity to do so, how could I possibly have passed on the opportunity?

It’s so wonderful to hear Isabeau react to what we tell her, no matter what language we say it in.  Heck, I just wish I could teach her another!

Camille and little Isabeau

About the Momday author: Camille Aubecq-Hottlet is a trilingual translator.  Of French nationality, she grew up in New York from age 6 to 22.  She and The Mothergeek met in college.  She currently lives in Paris, France, where she works for an international law firm.  Over the last 12 years, she’s translated texts in a variety of different fields, including sports, cinema, cosmetics, non-profit organizations, law, etc.

“Everything?” Watch/read on.

“Kirby Ferguson is a quirky New York-based filmmaker with an interesting idea” says Gregg Gordon, President and CEO of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). I bumped into Gregg on Twitter the day before this weeks rather excellent (Third) International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference which took place at Freie Universität, Berlin #pkp2011

I was unaware about this event until I saw a tweet from Gregg and followed events as best as I could via Twitter. Being off work for the week, I was hoping that something of interest would pop up so this was great stuff.

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So let’s cut quickly to a) this SSRN blog post by Gregg that caught my attention b) a more recent and extremely interesting SSRN blog post entitled “Remixing Scholarly Research” by Gregg that assisted in me composing this and c) the following amazing videos from Kirby Ferguson which prompted this post.

Everything Is a Remix Home Page

Check these out folks…..

The final part of this series of four videos is due out in October 2011.

www.michaelnielsen.org

So, several months ahead of my most recent trip to London for this years Science Online: London Conference in September, I put on my proverbial thinking cap.

IMAGE SOURCE

Let’s cut to the chase and I’ll explain thereafter how I/we managed to pull this off put this together.

00:00 – 03:09 Intro

03:09 – 13:27 Discussion about the background of the Guardian’s Science Weekly Podcast
13:28 – 17:44 How much science literacy can you assume in your audience when reporting on science?
17:55 – 32:07 Churnalism.What is it and how common is it in terms of Journalism and Blogging?
32:10 – 36:10 Including links to Science Manuscripts in online news articles
36:11 – 42:15 George Monbiot’s Guardian article “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist”
42:16 – 52:01 The change in the landscape/ecosystem of science blogging over the last 12 months or so
52:07 – 52:44 The use of social media during the recent riots in London and elsewhere
52:50 – 58:37 World’s first clinical trial of stem cells to treat strokes is set to move to its next phase

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Whilst I’ve contributed to two podcasts previously, I’ve never really thought about actually doing one myself until earlier this year.

1) Setting the scene

Since I already knew some folks at The Guardian, the first stage was to contact them and ask if they would willing to spend about an hour being interviewed for a podcast. Thankfully, I received a positive response from all three of the chaps I contacted. We fixed a date (Sept. 1st) and rough time.  GAME ON.

2) Recording equipment

This 1-Bit 10 y/o Sharp Mini-disc Recorder and top notch Omnidirectional mic. of mine would have probably sufficed. However, due to DRM, the device does not allow you to digitally transfer data (even it it’s your own !!) and you have to resort to analog. *shakes fist*

So, a few weeks before the recording was set to take place, time for another thinking cap moment.  Whilst I had never had any contact with James O’Malley, Editor of the brilliant The Pod Delusion before, I sent him a tentative email to see if he might be interested in providing some technical assistance. To my delight, he replied immediately in a most positive fashion. GAME ON.

3) The days before

I put together a few suggestions for questions/discussion points and used social media to crowd source others.

Before arriving in London, as planned, I re-contacted all involved to make sure everything was in place.  It transpired that of the three chaps from The Guardian, one did not receive my reminder email (my fault) and could not make it.  Another had forgotten but despite being off work that week, was still able to make it.  This was still doable despite being one man down.

4) Off to London

The night before leaving Glasgow, I sent out a tentative tweet to (now) Guardian blogger, Moheb Constandi to see if he might be willing to take part. He was. Excellent despite such little notice.

On the train journey down, a number of emails/tweets/calls/texts ensued to iron out some last minute details/technical issues.

As planned, James met me at Euston Station and we arrived at The Guardian ahead of schedule. We were greeted by:-

James Meikle

Mo

and then, Alok.

5) Recording It

James (O’Malley) duly set up his gear and having sent our guests the questions in advance, we recorded for just under one hour.

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Several take home messages here for a novice Podcaster like myself (namely do much better organizing in advance, not at the last minute).

Cue this post/BBC video from The Pod Delusion blog.

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This special Podcast was brought to you by The Pod Delusion and Science3.0

Joyce Cacho, PhD

It seems as if every other word used at the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting had something to do with the concept of “sustainability.”  Given the rate at which the human population is growing, finding innovative ways that would allow our society to endure (and to do so comfortably) is no small task.  However, there are many pieces to the sustainability puzzle, including that which is associated with food supply.  And this is exactly what Joyce Cacho, PhD, Chief Sustainability Officer at Novus International, Inc., is addressing on a global level.

Joyce is well versed on the subject of agribusiness – a blanket term used to describe all the different aspects of food production – having earned a PhD on the very topic.  She has also served on a number agribusiness committees, such as the USDA/USTR Agricultural Policy Advisory Committee (APAC), and consulted for The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

This extensive background, along with her solid grasp of the realities surrounding the international food supply and the related social, economic, and environmental (SEE) impacts, has afforded Joyce the capacity to develop key strategies aimed to strengthen the sustainability framework for her company.  Dubbed the Triple Bottom Line principle, Joyce hopes that by considering all three SEE components, a synergistic effect leading to the advancement of both the company and the individual farmer will be achieved.

I am generally skeptical when I hear large companies claim to have the best interest of the little guy at heart, so I asked Joyce to explain how their approach allows for growth in one of these areas without having a significant negative impact on the other(s).  She stated that she doesn’t even consider a business plan unless there is data showing that at least two of the three parts of SEE will be positively affected.  She added that she would be willing to do a happy dance for a viral YouTube campaign if someone hands her a plan that would provide a simultaneous positive impact on social, economic, AND environmental sustainability programs!

While these initiatives seem noteworthy, my experience with agribusiness (read: none at all) leaves me unable to go into depth regarding the ins and outs of this industry.  However, Joyce’s efforts are not at all limited to that which revolves around her company’s bottom line.  Having lived in Kenya for six years, she has seen firsthand many of the inequities that African women face, in particular African women farmers, who carry out approximately 60-80% of the agricultural work required for household subsistence.

As our population grows by leaps and bounds, the speed at which the issue of food security is propelled into the limelight is ever increasing – something that has been one of the major focuses for Joyce and Novus International, Inc.  However, here in the US, we do not equally share this burden with our fellow human beings who live in developing nations – at least, not yet.  Our brothers and sisters in Africa are once again experiencing life-threatening famine conditions and “business as usual” tactics can no longer suffice.  According to the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), there must be a major shift in mindset when it comes to tackling this enormous issue, especially when it comes to the inclusion of women (PDF report):

A key failing of past efforts to reduce hunger and increase rural incomes has been the lack of attention paid to women as farmers, producers and farm workers – both wage and non-wage.  It’s not too late to integrate the lessons we’ve learned and avoid the pitfalls of the past. To move forward, however, the world community must make a significant shift in its thinking about women, food security, agriculture and the global marketplace to see women as key economic agents of change in rural communities who in their own right contribute to local, national and global food security and economic growth.

Though women make up a significant portion of the agricultural workforce in Africa, there exists many barriers for their economic and social empowerment.  For instance, an excruciatingly small percentage of African women farmers have access to the tools and technology, such as a multi-purpose cultivation instrument, that would increase farming efficiency and output.  Furthermore, it is next to impossible for women to obtain any financial assistance.  These inequities arise from a variety of factors, including a severe cultural norm whereby women are generally considered to be second-class citizens.  Yet, research suggests that this chokehold on women’s progress in Africa affects more than the individual.  These issues are linked to food shortages as well as a significant delay in the adaptation of new technologies.

Given these data, Joyce and Novus have teamed up with the Gender and Diversity Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the implementation of African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) – a partnership that represents the first private sector collaboration for CGIAR.  The AWARD program, which obtains a majority of its funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, selects women scientists from multiple sects of the agribusiness discipline to help “build an effective and transferable career development program for women in agricultural research and development in sub-Saharan Africa.”  To date, Novus has accepted two AWARD research fellows and plans to continue these efforts.

The situation in Africa might be foreign to many of us but I dare anyone to remain stoic when hearing of the issues that effect African families.  Given the nature of my conversation with Joyce, it was difficult for me to not think of my own children and our overwhelmingly fortunate lives.  Sometimes I lose perspective and complain that my home is too small or that my wardrobe doesn’t live up to my expectations, but I try to realize that having clean, hot water and the ability to give my children a high-quality education is something that only a portion of mothers on this planet can provide to their families.  And through this segue, we got to discussing what it means to be a mother.

I was actually quite moved by Joyce’s words, who broadly defined motherhood as a state in which a woman cares and nurtures for a child, and does her best to provide every opportunity for betterment.  “You don’t need to give birth to someone to be that person’s mother,” she exclaimed.  “There are so many children who go without and any continued effort to help them advance and excel is deems a woman worthy of being called mom.”  And with that, I suddenly realized that we can all do more.  Whether it is by doing simple things at home or by contributing to major efforts abroad, mothers can help change the world.  Though we hear of many strategies because of their scale, even small contributions will make a difference.  “We can’t just sit around and let utopia come to us; it is our job to create a world that makes utopia more accessible for those who come after us.”  These were Joyce’s parting words, which are indeed words to live by.

Kids need fewer facts, more crap detection – by Jenny Morber

Life with a 3 year old is full of questions.

“It’s time to put on your underpants.”

“Why?”

“Because we need to leave in 10 minutes.”

“Why?”

“Because if we don’t leave by then we will be late”

“Why?”

“Because time moves ever forward and it takes some time to get there”

“Why?”

“Why does time move forward?”

“Yes. “

“Why can’t we stop time?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Now that, kid, is a good one. Let’s discuss it in the car.”

Many mothers I suppose grow tired of their children’s incessant questioning. But as a scientist-mother I love it. To me, the opportunity and the challenge of my child’s questions are one of the best parts of parenting. My son’s questions remind me that we are still looking. They remind me to look around and ask questions myself. Why is that the way it is? Why do people say those things? I learned that in school, but is that really true? And because my son is only three, his questions require me to be creative. I have to distill the concept into the simplest yet accurate form. It’s quite a bit like science writing.

Though his “whys” sometimes seem more like a tic than adorable curiosity, and my mouth has on more than one occasion gone dry, I try to answer every question. If I don’t know the answer I’ll tell him. And then I tell him why I don’t know. And then we explore possible answers. We discuss how not even the smartest, most knowledgeable people know all the answers. Including me. And sometimes, just to make sure he’s listening, I’ll make up a silly answer and then ask if that makes sense. Sometimes I think that I must be crazy to encourage my son to scrutinize my answers, to scrutinize ME, but if it doesn’t start now, then when?

He’s not likely to learn in school.

Until recently, rhetoric and logic were required subjects in the majority of public schools, taught alongside history and math. A subject that flourished in ancient Greece, rhetoric – defined as the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion –not only cultivates excellent written and spoken communication skills, but requires that the student critically examine an issue. The study of rhetoric also helps a student to identify its use in others. Logic, among other valuable lessons, teaches us how arguments that at first make perfect sense can hide layers of complexity or trickery. Logic forces us to confront instances in which our instincts are incorrect. It’s an important lesson.

Now as a mother and a scientist I see a need for logic and rhetoric to return to schools. I worry that education is stuffed with facts and lacking in crap detection. More than ever, children are flooded in information. When I needed an answer, I would check an extensively edited encyclopedia for answers. Now kids with questions go online. The trouble is that Wikipedia, Random Guy’s Post, and Raging Against  X Opinion sites are just as accessible (often more!) than those written by field experts who actually know. How is a child to understand what information to trust and what information to ignore when he has never been given the skills?

Science is codified crap detection. A scientist has a question and does everything she can to find the answer. The scientists must set up the experiment to try to rule out factors that will hide the truth. She must anticipate flaws and complications. She must convince others that her experiments are useful and her methods are sound (rhetoric). She must evaluate results carefully and dispassionately (logic). Then she must wait for others to try to find her incorrect.

This is why many scientists are growing discouraged. We see deceptions and foolery and we become frustrated that others cannot. But we have been trained. How can we expect the same of others who have not?

Eventually, the untaught student grows up and finds or feels that she has been misled, tricked by a parent or politician or trusted authority and loses faith in all experts.  She reads conflicting science news articles on internet media sites. She hears nonsense results on TV. Since she doesn’t know how to critique the research, it seems as if the researchers have no idea what they are doing. Is this diet the answer? Is chocolate really good for me? Is TV harmful? Are vaccinations poisoning our children? Is evolution still under debate? Waffling reports in the news media makes scientists seem untrustworthy, or worse, willfully deceptive. Behind the scenes, studies find more subtle answers than a short headline can report, and some have methods so flawed that any results should be thrown out. But without the ability to discern this interplay, without the skills to critique and assess and take only the trustworthy, many become disillusioned with scientists, with science, with government and authority in general.

We trust experts because there is no way that we can learn everything that we need to know to understand every issue that affects us.  We put our trust in those who offer good work. But how do we decide who those experts are? Without the ability to discern who are trustworthy, people increasingly rely on pedigree, place trust in experts whose conclusions align with pre-existing beliefs, or reject experts completely. But don’t take my word for it.

Polls show that Americans hostility toward government is growing. In March of 1998, the Pew Research Center reported:

Americans continue to distrust the government, although there are signs that hostility toward government has begun to diminish… The national mood and trust are both up from the mid-1990s, but still just 20% of Americans are highly satisfied with the state of the nation and only 34% basically trust the government…Public desire for government services and activism has remained nearly steady over the past 30 years. And distrust of government is not fostering a disregard for the nation’s laws, eroding patriotism or discouraging government service. About as many people would recommend a government job to a child today as would have in the early 1960s, when there was much less distrust of government.

But by April 2010, as reported by NPR:

Pew surveys dating from 1997 show that an average of about 55 percent of Americans typically express frustration about the federal government, with the exception of a temporary spike in trust after Sept. 11. In the current survey, 56 percent say they feel frustrated by the federal government. The big difference this time, according to the Pew survey, is the growing numbers who expressed “intense anti-government views.” The proportion of Americans who say they are angry has doubled since 2000. Now at 21 percent, it tops the previous high of 20 percent in 2006. ”The percentage who are angry is still small,” Kohut says, “but it’s twice as much as it was back in the late 1990s.

Research published in September 2010 shows that Americans trust researchers, but only those whose results align with their beliefs. (An article/podcast on the paper here.) Where is the critical evaluation of the research – of ourselves? And while in 2007, a press release from the University of Wisonsin Madison cautioned, “When it comes to forming opinions on controversial scientific issues, Americans show a strong deference to the views of the scientific community”  Just three years later (as reported by Yale University)  a survey that compared Americans’ trust in experts between 2008 and 2010 found:

…lower public trust in a variety of institutions and leaders, including scientists. For example, Americans’ trust in the mainstream news media as a reliable source of information about global warming declined by 11 percentage points, television weather reporters by 10 points and scientists by 8 points. They also distrust leaders on both sides of the political fence.

So I teach my son to trust me, yes. He trusts my answers. I am his authority. But I teach him to evaluate what I say. I want him to trust me because I earn it, not because I demand it. So I show him if he doesn’t understand. I provide evidence, and I tell him when I don’t know. I love his “whys,” though they never seem to end, because I feel that each one is an opportunity to teach. If I succeed as a parent, I won’t just teach the facts – hell the facts change – I’ll teach him critical evaluation. And when the time comes when he says, “Are you sure about that? Where did you get that information? Let me take a look,” I will know that I’m doing my job.

Jenny Morber and her wee one.

Jenny Morber is a freelance science writer with diverse and eclectic interests. She holds a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering with a focus on the intersections between nanomaterials, magnetism, and biotech. She formerly worked as a writer and editor for PNAS (The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), a top peer-reviewed general sciences journal where she covered economics, anthropology, genetics, crystallography, medicine, and any other science topic she could get her hands on. Earlier in her career, Dr. Morber worked as a consultant and co- grant writer for nano-enabled defense technologies. Based in Fairfax Virginia, she is somewhat in love with Washington, D.C. and often takes her young son to appreciate the art, architecture, and wealth of information available there.