February 2008 Archives

Holly Menninger points out in a comment that Bruce Lewenstein, Professor of Science Communications at Cornell, teaches a workshop on science communications, Comm 566. Many of the blog entries will be of interest only to students in his course, but some are more generally useful.

Here are a couple that caught my eye:

• Science communication resources
• More blog/writing-for-online links
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I just learned that AAAS launched a new resourcesc at its website last week. Communicating science: tools for scienctists and engineers “provide[s] resources for scientists and engineers, both online and through in-person workshops to help researchers communicate more broadly with the public.” There are modules on describing some of the basic principles (e.gI., defining your audience and developing your message) as well as specific advice on working with reporters.

In a similar vein, the American Institute of Biological Sciences just released a booklet by Holly Meninger and Rob Gropp, Communicating Science: A Primer for Working with the Media

Recognizing that many scientists are reluctant to engage in media outreach, the Primer outlines compelling reasons for scientists to interact with the media and describes key differences between journalism and science that may not be apparent to practicing scientists. Step-by-step, Menninger and Gropp walk scientists through the entire interview process—from appropriate questions to ask when a reporter calls to practical advice for looking and sounding one’s best on-air or on-camera.

Karina writes:

A word of advice to prospective graduate students: Don’t tell graduate students anything you really don’t want their advisor to know. That’s excellent advice, and not just for prospective graduate students.

When we interview candidates for faculty positions in this department, we always schedule a lunch for them with our graduate students. We do this, mainly, because it gives candidates a good chance to ask questions about us, and they’re able to see if they get the same answers from our graduate students that we’ve given them ourselves. But the meetings with graduate students serve another purpose.

We often learn things about the candidates from these meetings that affect our evaluation of them. We are looking for colleagues who will be good graduate advisors, so candidates who don’t develop a good rapport with our graduate students have a mark against them. But candidates also have a tendency to let their guard down when they’re talking with graduate students, probably because they’re similar in age and life experience. Sometimes when candidates let their guard down, though, they reveal things about their attitude towards the department or about their approach to science that are disturbing.

Good or bad, we hear about these things — because we ask our students about them.

So whether you’re a prospective graduate student or a job candidate, just remember that everyone you talk to will contribute to your evaluation in some way. There are no times when you’re “off.”

Be honest. What do you think of when you hear the word “algae.” I'll bet you think “pond scum.” I know I do, and I know that that's unfair. There's a lot more to algae than pond scum. And a paper in the most recent BioScience by several of my colleagues illustrates why.

Zoe Cardon, Dennis Gray, and Louise Lewis have been studying desert algae. Yes, you read that right desert algae. If you've ever been in a desert, you probably noticed that the ground is covered with a fragile crust that's easily damaged. That crust includes a wide variety of organisms, cyanobacteria, lichens, bryophytes, diatoms, and green algae. As the figure to the left shows, a lot of different kinds of algae are found in these crusts. The plants that most of us know (e.g., mosses, ferns, and flowering plants) are all derived from one lineage that invaded the land (the embryophyte lineage in the figure), but algae hae invaded the land at least twenty additional times. These multiple invasions of the land provide a wealth of interesting opportunities for investigating ecological and evolutionary questions.

[M]ultiple desert green algal lineages provide independent evolutionary units for the study of mechanisms that met the environmental challenges confronting the ancestor of embryophytes when it first made the leap from water to land. Such potential tolerance or avoidance mechanisms can be tested in an explicitly phylogenetic context, separating lineage-specific from habitat-specific traits. In this overview, we expand on these two major emerging themes.

...

[C]rusts are a natural, ongoing laboratory featuring unrelated aquatic taxa that diversified to the desert habit. Ultimately, these evolutionary "experiments" could provide very interesting information about protection against the effects of extreme dehydration, a threat to all known forms of life, and photoprotection under environmental stress, a threat to major primary producers.

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Cardon, Z.G., Gray, D.W., Lewis, L.A. (2008). The Green Algal Underground: Evolutionary Secrets of Desert Cells. BioScience, 58(2), 114. DOI: 10.1641/B580206

Yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science repesentatives of the Clinton and Obama campaigns faced off in a debate about science. Thomas Kalil, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, represented Clinton. Alec Ross, Executive Vice President, External Affairs, of One Economy Corporation, represented Obama.

Here's how Daniel Engber described it in Slate:

In this battle of the campaign stereotypes, Hillary came out the clear winner. Kalil began with a series of charts depicting the decline of American research funding. Then he laid out Clinton's plan to double funding for the NIH, the NSF, the NIST, and the research arms of the DOD and DOE. She'd reverse the ban on embryonic stem cell research, triple the size of graduate research fellowships, push for the creation of an ARPA-E, and restore the authority of the presidential science advisor. And this was just “version 1.0” of her agenda. The audience seemed appreciative – if not deeply moved – by the details.

Ross responded by saying that Obama's plan is even more “detailed” than Clinton's, “both in terms of breadth and in terms of detail.” He then invited us – repeatedly – to visit www.BarackObama.com where we'd see just how often they “really get into the weeds on an issue.” Those without laptops learned only that Obama planned to double federal research funding, spend $150 billion on biofuels, and appoint a national Chief Technology Officer.

ScienceDebate 2008 also has links to coverage of the event from CQ Politics, Discover, Agence France Presse, and Science.

UPDATE (noon): Sheril Kirshenbaum has more details at The Intersection.

I admit it. I'm a plant biologist, and I think almost entirely about terrestrial ecosystems. But most of the planet is covered by water, and most of it's salty, so it's important to know how the world's marine ecosystems are doing. That's what Benjamin Halperin and his colleagues try to tell us in today's Science (subscription required).

There's good news and bad news in the results. The bad (but unsurprising) news is that all parts of the ocean are affected by human activities and that 41% of the oceans (by area) are heavily affected. The good news is that large areas remain relatively unaffected, especially near the poles. But as the figure to the left illustrates northern Australis is also relatively free of major impacts.

The analysis also identifies a few ecosystem types that have been especially hard hit: coral reefs, seagrass beds, mangroves, rocky reefs and shelves, and seamounts. To put it another way, the marine ecosystems most greatly altered by human activities are those in coastal regions. That's no surprise, since that's where people are. What may be a surprise is that the most heavily affected areas aren't necessarily near the greatest population concentrations. Look at the big, red area in the North Sea or the red areas around Iceland, for example. The impact we're having on marine environment clearly depends on how they're being used, not merely how many people live nearby. That gives me hope. It means we may be able to find ways to reduce our impact without threatening the livelihood of those who live near the world's oceans.

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Halpern, B.S., Walbridge, S., Selkoe, K.A., Kappel, C.V., Micheli, F., D'Agrosa, C., Bruno, J.F., Casey, K.S., Ebert, C., Fox, H.E., Fujita, R., Heinemann, D., Lenihan, H.S., Madin, E.M., Perry, M.T., Selig, E.R., Spalding, M., Steneck, R., Watson, R. (2008). A Global Map of Human Impact on Marine Ecosystems. Science, 319(5865), 948-952. DOI: 10.1126/science.1149345

I wrote last summer about open access in Switzerland. The recently adopted federal budget also requires that all investigators receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health deposit a copy of articles supported by that funding in PubMed Centra. Now Harvard has joined in.

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences has voted to require faculty to make copies of their research freely available through the Office of Scholarly Communications. (source)

Harvard is the first institution I know of to mandate open archiving. It's not clear how the mandate will be enforced, but

The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. (source)

It will be interesting to see how this works out.

From the Associated Press:

Europeans have long viewed the conflict between evolutionists and creationists as primarily an American phenomenon, but it has recently jumped the Atlantic Ocean with skirmishes in Italy, Germany, Poland and, notably, Britain, where Darwin was born and where he published his 1859 classic.

...

Schools are increasingly a focal point in this battle for hearts and minds. A British branch of Answers in Genesis, which shares a Web site with its American counterpart, has managed to introduce its creationist point of view into science classes at a number of state-supported schools in Britain, said Monty White, the group's chief executive.

Sometimes it's nice to have company. This time I'd rather be alone. Unfortunately, creationism is a cancer, and it appears to be spreading. Add creationism to the list of U.S. exports.

The rupture between theology and evolution in Europe is relatively recent. For many years people who held evangelical views also endorsed mainstream scientific theory, said Simon Barrow, co-director of Ekklesia, a British-based, Christian-oriented research group. He said the split was imported from the United States in the last decade.

“There is a lot of American influence, and there are a lot of moral and political and financial resources flowing from the United States to here,” he said. “Now you have more extreme religious groups trying to get a foothold.”

I've written before that the positions presidential candidates take on teaching evolution are very revealing, because “It is dangerous to have someone ... resistant to evidence and reason as President of the United States.” If you share my concern, you'll want to check the following links from Physics Today.

Q: Where do you stand on teaching evolution?

While there is no controversy in the scientific community over the basic facts of evolution, advocates of creationism continue to challenge the teaching of evolution in U.S. schools. Do you believe in natural evolution as a fundamental biological process? Would you advocate keeping creationism in its various incarnations, including intelligent design, out of public school classes?

• Democrats
  • Hilary Clinton
  • Barack Obama
• Republicans
  • Mike Huckabee
  • John McCain
  • Ron Paul

You might also find YouTube videos of Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul discussing their opinions informative.

A couple of days ago I noted that the National Academies have agreed to co-sponsor Science Debate 2008. In today's Nature, David Goldston a visiting lecturer in science policy at Harvard and former chief of staff of the House Science Committee, explains why a science debate may not be a good idea.¹ The editors of Nature agree.

What do they think's wrong witn a science debate? Well, Goldston doesn't actually say it's a mistake, but he poses 3 questions.

If you've read the IPCC synthesis report, you probably don't need more evidence to be convince that human activities are changing the climate. But here's another nail in the coffin of climate change denialists.¹

In the February 5th issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Fortunat Joos and Renato Spaluni show that “global climate change ... is progressing at a speed that is unprecedented at least during the last 22,000 years.”¹

The graph to the left tells the story. Notice the nearly vertical line at the right of (a), (b), and (c). Those lines correspond roughly to the 20th century. The change in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in the last century is almost as great as the change that happened over 10,000 years after the last glacial maximum. And the IPCC concluded that “Most of the observed increase in globally-averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.”

I've just finished reading Roger Pielke's The Honest Broker, in which he argues that recognizing a human influence on climate does not determine what policies ought to be adopted. Fair enough. But this paper provides yet more evidence that it's time to stop arguing about whether we're changing the climate and time to start arguing about what we're going to do about it.

I received the following e-mail this morning.

On Friday PBS NewsHour ran this story on us.

Then today, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine joined AAAS and the Council on Competitiveness as official cosponsors of Science Debate 2008. Together we now comprise a large portion of the American science and technology community. 64 leading universities and big-name organizations have now officially signed on.

We now have an exceptionally attractive location and a date and we hope to be inviting the candidates late this week.

We need your help to make that invitation as compelling as possible:

• Please recruit every prominent leader you know to join this important initiative in the next two days. Have them click here


• Please recruit every institution, corporation or organization you can get to to join this important initiative in the next two days. Have them mention it as an organizational endorsement.


• Keep track of our growing list of signers here:
  and here.

This is it, folks. We need you. Thanks for being a part of this historic and important initiative. Finally, please consider making an online donation here.

The team at ScienceDebate2008.com

PS: if you live in a state that caucuses this Tuesday, please consider presenting this nonpartisan resolution calling for the debate.

Like Don Kennedy, I care about how the next President of the United States will make decisions about climate change, how (s)he will choose scientific advisers, and how (s)he make decisions about regulation of genetically modified or cloned organisms.

Please join in and support ScienceDebate2008.

According to the 2007 financial report from the University of Connecticut Foundation, the Foundation had a little over $400 million in assets to support programs at the University. Now $400 million is a lot of money, but in 2006¹, there were just over 23,500 students enrolled in the University,² or just over $17,000 per student. According to the graphic at the left, that puts the University of Connecticut's endowment in the top 20% of public universities. Not too bad.

But now look at the bottom graph. The scales are wildly different. The average endowment of public universities that fall in the 10-20th percentile looks to be about $13,000. The average endowment of private universities that fall in the 10-20th percentile looks to be nearly $100,000. Why does this matter?

Universities use income from their endowments primarily to support scholarships and educational opportunities for students and to provide research support for faculty. A 10-fold difference in endowment per student means a 10-fold difference in the amount of institutional support available for university programs that benefit each student.³ As Arenson puts it in the Times article,

The result is that America's already stratified system of higher education is becoming ever more so...the growth alone in Harvard's endowment last year was $5.7 billion – a sum bigger than all but 14 other universities' total endowments.

Modern teaching, research, and scholarship is very expensive. Few would argue that students benefit when courses must enroll several hundred to balance course demand with available faculty. “Experiential learning” and “problem-based teaching” are difficult if not impossible in such settings. The best teaching integrates technology into lectures, assignments, and laboratories. But neither faculty nor technology comes cheap. Wealthy universities provide their students with opportunities that their poor cousins can barely imagine.

The same differences arise in research and scholarship. A single scientific instrument may cost several hundred thousand dollars, historians must travel to distant archives for long periods of time, and anthropologists often spend months or years in remote areas in order to understand the cultures they study. Universities encourage research and scholarship both because they are committed to advancing knowledge and because they recognize that active scholars are often the most effective teachers. Again, wealthy universities provide their faculty with research support that helps their faculty do more than those of us at less privileged institutions.

Resources mean opportunities. That's why U.S. News & World Report includes “financial resources” among the indicators it uses to choose America's Best Colleges.

Does the inequality matter? I'm convinced that bright, committed students receive an excellent education at the University of Connecticut. But with Harvard's endowment growth each year providing it with more than ten times the resources we have available through our endowment,⁴ the disparity may become so great that even the most dedicated and resourceful faculty are no longer able to overcome it.

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¹The most recent year for which I could find information on the Office of Institutional Research's website.

²16,347 undergraduate students; 7210 graduate and professional students

³It's not an across the board benefit, because donors typically direct their contributions o particular programs. As a result, even within the same university the amount of income available for support may differ dramaticaly from program to program.

⁴UConn is, of course, a public institution. But state support for public higher education is declining in every part of the country, and Connecticut is no exception. At one time state support might have substituted for an endowment, but if that was ever true, it isn't true any more. Even great public universities like the University of California, Berkeley (which has a $3 billion endowment) are feeling the pinch. Harvard added more to its endowment last year than UC Berkeley has.