Uncommon Ground

Uncommon Ground

Monthly Archive: October 2016

Happy Halloween!

Duarte Family Roadtrip

Duarte Design Halloween competition

It’s Halloween, and that means it’s time for the annual Duarte Design Halloween design competition. (Click on the image above to see all of the designs and to vote for your favorite.) According to the website, the winner will be announced at 1:00pm. (Presumably that is 1:00pm Pacific Daylight Time. PDT is UTC-7.) I don’t know how long voting is open, but you’ll clearly need to vote before then for your vote to count.

I didn’t vote for the design at the left. I voted for one called “The Race.” I think it’s very creative, but it is slightly risque, and since this site is on a university server, I didn’t think I should display that image here. You may not think it’s as clever as I do, but if you need a little fun this morning, head over to Duarte Design and check all of them out. If you’re there in time, vote for your favorite. If you’re not, just enjoy all of them (and see whether I picked a winner).

October 31, 2016 Miscellaneous 0 Read more >

You get what you measure

Inside graduate admissions, by Julie PosseltLast December I saw a fascinating talk by Julie Posselt.1 She described work deriving from her PhD dissertation in which she sat in on meetings of doctoral admissions committees in a variety of disciplines at several different (and anonymous) elite private and public research university. She described how overreliance on “cut points” for GPA, GRE scores, or both led to admissions decisions that favored applicants from relatively privileged backgrounds. Even though the faculty making those decisions were almost uniformly committed to ensuring that they admitted doctoral students from a wide variety of backgrounds, the pool of admitted students was far less diverse than the pool of applicants. As she put it in a piece for Inside Higher Ed earlier this year: “Despite their good intentions to increase diversity, broadly defined, admissions work was laced with conventions — often rooted in inherited or outdated assumptions — that made it especially hard for students from underrepresented backgrounds to gain access.”

Why does this happen? Partly it’s because faculty aren’t aware of advice from the Educational Testing Service on how to use GRE scores properly.2 Partly, it’s because there are so many applicants to high-quality doctoral programs that admissions committees often use numerical screens to identify the small number of applicants worthy of close scrutiny.

Athene Donald points out another way in which relying on strict numerical criteria may be harmful to everyone, regardless of what their demographic, economic, social, or cultural background may be. She argues in the context of evaluating academics that in addition to the usual metrics of publication or creative activity and grant dollars (for those in fields where external funding is important), success as an academic should also include “building teams, seeing their students thrive and progress, working with people who sparked them off intellectually and seizing opportunities to try out new things and make new discoveries.”

The challenge, of course, is that you get what you measure. If we only measure publications and grants, that’s what we’ll get. If we want to encourage team building and student support, we have to measure those things and give them as much weight as the things we traditionally measure. If we can’t find numbers with which to measure them, we still need to find ways to assess them, because helping others gain the skills they need is what education is all about.

(more…)

October 26, 2016 Academics 0 Read more >

Don’t be that dude

Several years ago, Dr. Acclimatrix (@Acclimatrix) published a list of “Handy tips for the male academic.” I just happened to run across it again this morning, and I thought I should pass it along. The advice she offers is as timely now as it was then. As she says:

Gender equality has to be a collaborative venture. If men make up the majority of many departments, editorial boards, search committees, labs and conferences, then men have to be allies in the broader cause of equality, simply because they have more boots on the ground. And, as much as I wish it weren’t so, guys often tend to listen more readily to their fellow guys when it comes to issues like sexism. I’ve also found that there are a lot of guys out there that are supportive, but don’t realize that many of their everyday actions (big and small) perpetuate inequality. So, guys, this post is for you.

The list includes 20 distinct pieces of advice. I’ve tried to follow all of them, but these are the ones I’m working on hardest right now:

3. Don’t talk over your female colleagues.

5. Make sure your department seminars, conference symposia, search committees, and panel discussions have a good gender balance.

6. Pay attention to who organizes the celebrations, gift-giving, or holiday gatherings.

7. Volunteer when someone asks for a note-taker, coffee-run gopher, or lunch order taker at your next meeting.1

15. Don’t leave it to women to do the work of increasing diversity.

19. Know when to listen. (more…)

October 24, 2016 Academics 0 Read more >

I am a snoot

I have little trust in people who don't use the Oxford comma.

From grammarly.com

Last Friday I confessed to my obsession with grammar and usage. In response, Alex Buerkle (@disequilibber) passed along a link to a wonderful article by David Foster Wallace describing the state of the “language wars” in the early 2000s. If you’ve never heard of the language wars or of the epic battle between prescriptionists and descriptionists, you may not find the article all that interesting, but it really struck a chord with me. I am a snoot.

A SNOOT can be defined as somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn’t mind letting you know it.

OK. Maybe I’m not really a snoot. I had to Google “dysphemism” – a derogatory or unpleasant term used instead of a pleasant or neutral one, such as “loony bin” for “mental hospital” – and I probably won’t brag about knowing the definition now (and I doubt that it will enter my regular vocabulary). So maybe it’s more accurate to say that I have a lot of sympathy with snoots. If you want to understand that means, I’m afraid you’ll have to read Wallace’s article. Here’s the link: http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-0070913.pdf Bottom line: Grammar and usage matter, because they convey a lot about us. The dialect we choose to use says a lot about who we are and about who we think our audience is.

October 21, 2016 Writing 0 Read more >

Reproducibility is hard

Last year, the Open Science Collaboration published a very important article: Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Here’s a key part of the abstract:

We conducted replications of 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals using high-powered designs and original materials when available. There is no single standard for evaluating replication success. Here, we evaluated reproducibility using significance and P values, effect sizes, subjective assessments of replication teams, and meta-analysis of effect sizes. The mean effect size (r) of the replication effects (Mr = 0.197, SD = 0.257) was half the magnitude of the mean effect size of the original effects (Mr = 0.403, SD = 0.188), representing a substantial decline. Ninety-seven percent of original studies had significant results (P < .05). Thirty-six percent of replications had significant results; 47% of original effect sizes were in the 95% confidence interval of the replication effect size; 39% of effects were subjectively rated to have replicated the original result; and if no bias in original results is assumed, combining original and replication results left 68% with statistically significant effects. Correlational tests suggest that replication success was better predicted by the strength of original evidence than by characteristics of the original and replication teams.

Since then, reproducibility has gained even more attention than it had before. My students and I have been taking baby steps towards good practice – using Github to share code and data (and versions), using scripts (mostly in R) to manipulate and transform data, and making the code and data freely available as early in the writing process as we can. But there are some important things we don’t do as well as we could – I’ve never tried using Docker to ensure that all versions of the software we use for analysis in a paper are preserved, I’m as bad at writing documentation for what I’m doing as I ever was (but I try to write my code as clearly as possible, so it’s not too hard to figure out what I was doing.

I need to do better, but Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) had a article in the “Working Life” section of Science that made me feel a bit better about how far I have to go. Three years ago she posted a manifesto on reproducibility. In her Science piece, she describes how hard it’s been to live up to that pledge. But she concludes with some words to live by:

About 150 years ago, Louis Pasteur demonstrated how experiments can be conducted reproducibly—and the value of doing so. His research had many skeptics at first, but they were persuaded by his claims after they reproduced his results, using the methods he had recorded in keen detail. In computational science, we are still learning to be in his league. My students and I continuously discuss and perfect our standards, and we share our reproducibility practices with our community in the hopes that others will adopt similar ideals. Yes, conducting our research to these standards takes time and effort—and maybe our papers are slower to be published. But they’re less likely to be wrong.

Barba, L.A. 2016. The hard road to reproducibility. Science 354:142 doi: 10.1126/science.354.6308.142
Open Science Collaboration. 2015. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science 349:aac4716 doi: 10.1126/science.aac4716

October 19, 2016 Open science 0 Read more >

On commas and grammar

I have little trust in people who don't use the Oxford comma.

From grammarly.com

I admit it. I am obsessed with grammar and usage. I own all four editions of Fowler, and I also own Follett, Garner, two or three editions of Strunk and White, and many other usage manuals. I am also a big fan of the Oxford comma. So I was pleased to see Kathleen Parker’s column in The Washington Post last week. Here’s why:

[Grammar] matters because good grammar conveys a great deal about a person.

Quality is in the details — and attention to commas, semicolons, dangling participles, gerunds and the proper placement of quotation marks says to the reader that this person is careful, considerate (because bad grammar is painful to the discerning eye), and (there’s that Oxford comma) competent.

“Grammar is credibility,” says Amanda Sturgill, an associate professor of communications at Elon University, where I recently spoke. “If you’re not taking care of the small things, people assume you’re not taking care of the big things.”

October 14, 2016 Writing 1 Read more >

Noise miners

I’ve pointed out the problems with small, noisy samples using simulations (here, here, here, and here). But I’ve also learned that stories are far more persuasive than facts, and I’ve learned that I’m not good at telling stories. Fortunately, there are some people who tell stories very well, and John Schmidt is one of them. Here’s how his recent story, Noise Miners, starts.

What most people don’t understand about noise is how hard it is to find the good stuff.

You can get noise anywhere; most noise is just sitting on the ground, waiting for you to pick it up. Coincidences — “coinkidinks”, as collectors sometimes call them — can be had by the dozen just outside your front door. As I arrived in this small university town, home to one of the largest noise mines in the country, I planned to see how the high-quality noise was dug, and to learn about the often-forgotten people who dig it for us.

Follow the link and read the whole thing if that piques your interest.

October 12, 2016 Statistics 0 Read more >

Plants can be endangered too!

Yes. I know that if you’re reading this, you already know that there are thousands of endangered plant species in the world. You may even know that I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to protect them and how to prevent those that have small populations from declining even further. So why the title? Two reasons:

First, Mung Balding and Kathryn Williams have a very nice article in Conservation Biology explaining why plant blindness is such a problem. Here’s the abstract:

Plant conservation initiatives lag behind and receive considerably less funding than animal conservation projects. We explored a potential reason for this bias: a tendency among humans to neither notice nor value plants in the environment. Experimental research and surveys have demonstrated higher preference for, superior recall of, and better visual detection of animals compared with plants. This bias has been attributed to perceptual factors such as lack of motion by plants and the tendency of plants to visually blend together but also to cultural factors such as a greater focus on animals in formal biological education. In contrast, ethnographic research reveals that many social groups have strong bonds with plants, including nonhierarchical kinship relationships. We argue that plant blindness is common, but not inevitable. If immersed in a plant-affiliated culture, the individual will experience language and practices that enhance capacity to detect, recall, and value plants, something less likely to occur in zoocentric societies. Therefore, conservation programs can contribute to reducing this bias. We considered strategies that might reduce this bias and encourage plant conservation behavior. Psychological research demonstrates that people are more likely to support conservation of species that have human-like characteristics and that support for conservation can be increased by encouraging people to practice empathy and anthropomorphism of nonhuman species. We argue that support for plant conservation may be garnered through strategies that promote identification and empathy with plants.

Second, Robbie Blackhall-Miles (@fossilplants) has a passionate post in Gardens (the gardening blog at The Guardian) describing just how repugnant the trade in endangered plant species is.

Buying just one orchid illegally on the internet from Indonesia or a few snowdrops dug from the wild in Bulgaria fans the flames of a trade that has dire consequences for the world’s plant life. Buying one of these plants is exactly the same as buying a carved piece of ivory, a tiger skin or a gram of ground rhino horn. Wouldn’t you think twice about doing that?

OK. I can’t help myself. There’s a third reason. When you hear the phrase “endangered species” do you think of an orchid or a cycad, or do you think of a panda, a rhino, or a tiger? If a picture of an animal popped into your head first (and not just an animal, but a mammal), it shows how much work we have to do.

Balding, M., and K.J.H. Williams. 2016. Plant blindness and the implications for plant conservation. Conservation Biology doi: 10.1111/cobi.12738

October 7, 2016 Endangered species 0 Read more >