Uncommon Ground – Page 17 – Academics, biodiversity, genetics, & evolution

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What graduate students would like to tell their professors

Over at the Daily Nous (a blog with “news for and about the philosophy profession”), a post last Wednesday invited graduate students to leave anonymous answers to the question

What would you like to tell your professor(s) right now, but can’t?

There are a few answers like this

Thank you. I had a great education with you and with the whole department, and I wouldn’t be where I am now without you.

or this

Dear Professor,

you were one tough cookie, relentless and unforgiving. Sometimes it really hurt. Thank you for all that – were it not for the growing pains, I would not have grown. And thanks for all the time you spent on me – being a professor myself now, I can just ask – when did you sleep?

but more of them are like this

To my advisor:

You couldn’t possibly ever understand how much your care, friendship, and ability to consistently challenge and push me philosophically means to me. Thank you so much. And special thanks for being pretty much the only man in my life who I feel like I can trust, intellectually and emotionally, and for being interested in me for philosophical and friendship reasons and not weird sexual or fetishy or emotionally weird reasons.

…

To (nearly) everyone else in my department: it’s totally transparent that you don’t care about grad students.

Some amount of angst and conflict is inevitable in pursuing a PhD. I’ve never met anyone, no matter how smart or talented she is, who finished a dissertation without facing (and surmounting) at least one significant obstacle. Most encounter two or three. In the midst of those challenges, it’s completely normal for a PhD student to think that no one, including her advisor, cares about her or isn’t willing to give her the support that she needs. What I find so depressing about many of the comments in this post is that they were made by students after they received their PhD. I hope that when my students finish their PhDs, they look back and realize that the times when they were most discouraged and most disheartened were among the times when they learned the most about science and themselves.

Smart teachers use struggle to enhance learning and deepen engagement with their subjects. They call it productive struggle. Why would you encourage students to struggle while learning? (These answers focus on classroom teaching, but the principles generalize easily.)

It prioritizes the student-centered portion of lesson.
It builds authentic engagement.
It emphasizes that [the subject] makes sense.
It creates ample opportunity for assessment, intervention, and feedback.
It builds perseverance.

I’ve tried to use these principles in advising my graduate students, and I hope I’ve been successful. But you’ll have to ask them how they’d respond to the question at the top of this post if you want to know the answer.

kent September 12, 2016 Academics 0 Read more >

Being Bayesian won’t save you

Last week I pointed out that you should

Be wary of results from studies with small sample sizes, even if the effects are statistically significant.

Now you may be thinking to yourself: “I’m a Bayesian, and I use somewhat informative priors. This doesn’t apply to me.” Well, I’m afraid you’re wrong. Here are results from analysis of data simulated according to the same conditions I used last week in exploring P-values. The prior on each mean is N(0, 1), and the prior on each standard deviation is half-N(0, 1).

Mean	Sample size	Power	Wrong sign
0.05	10	39/1000	18/39
	50	59/1000	12/59
	100	47/1000	5/47
0.10	10	34/1000	8/34
	50	81/1000	10/81
	100	115/1000	6/115
0.20	10	62/1000	7/62
	50	158/1000	2/158
	100	292/1000	0/292

Here “Power” refers to the number of times (out of 1000 replicates) the symmetric 95% credible intervals do not overlap 0, which is when we’d normally conclude we have evidence that the means of the two populations are different. Notice that when the effect and sample size are small (0.05 and 10, respectively), we would infer the wrong sign for the difference almost half of the time (18/39). We’re less likely to make a sign error when the effect is larger (7/62 for an effect of 0.20) or when the sample size is large (5/47 for a sample size of 100). But the bottom line remains the same:

Be wary of results from studies with small sample sizes, even if the effects are statistically significant.

This figure summarizes results from the simulation, and you’ll find the code in the same Github repository as the P-value code I mentioned last week: https://github.com/kholsinger/noisy-data. Remember that Gelman and Carlin (Perspectives on Psychological Science 9:641; 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1745691614551642) also have advice on how to tell whether you’re data are too noisy for your sample to give confidence in your inferences.

bayesian

kent September 9, 2016 Statistics 0 Read more >

Thought for the day

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Henry David Thoreau, Life without principle

kent September 7, 2016 Environment 0 Read more >

Edwin Way Teale Series on Nature and the Environment

Teale 2016 Every year since the 1997 the University of Connecticut has hosted the Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series on Nature and the Environment. The series features distinguished natural scientists, social scientists, authors, artists, performers, and policy makers whose work informs our understanding of nature and the environment. The lectures are free and open to the public. Many lectures in recent years are also available online. You can find the full list of past lectures and links to videos (where available) at this link: http://lib.uconn.edu/about/events/nature-the-environment-the-edwin-way-teale-lecture-series-past-lectures/.

Here is a quick list of this year’s events:

Julien Agyeman, “Just Sustainabilities: Re-imagining e/quality, Living Within Limits”
Emma Rosi-Marshall, “Our Rivers on Drugs: Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products as Agents of Ecological Change in Aquatic Ecosystems”
Harriet Ritvo, “Wanting the Wild”
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction”
Maria Carmen Lemos, “Building Capacity for Adapting to Climate Change”
Mina Girgis, “The Nile Project”

The dates and times for the events are available on the Teale Series website. If you are close to Storrs, please stop by and join us. If you are far away or other commitments mean that you can’t join us, please check back to see if a recorded version of the presentation that interests you is available online.

kent September 5, 2016 Environment 0 Read more >

Legos and graduate school

Screen Shot 2016-09-01 at 12.49.36 PM Graduate students are very creative, and I recently learned about an anonymous graduate student in her/his sixth year at a private, West Coast university who is more creative than most – @legogradstudent. I’ve been out of graduate school for more years than I like to admit,¹ but I can still relate to the feelings @legogradstudent captures in her/his tweets. S/he has just short of 2600 followers now, but I’m sure that number is going to grow. Inside Higher Ed described her/him this way in the article that brought her/him to my attention:

Lego Grad Student has fans across disciplines, who often use some variation of “devastatingly true” to describe his experiences. Indeed, his tableaux focus not on the intricacies of his research but rather on the human experience of graduate school: feelings of being on a treadmill to nowhere, being beaten to the intellectual punch by colleagues, using sophisticated avoidance techniques during a class discussion and the horror of seeing free food disappear before his eyes at departmental events.

If you’re in graduate school, if you have friends or relatives who are in graduate school, or if you’re just interested in graduate school, you owe it to yourself to follow @legogradstudent on Twitter or Instagram.

¹34 years last June, if you must know.

kent September 2, 2016 Academicsgraduate school 0 Read more >

Inference from noisy data with small samples

From a blog post Andrew Gelman made over a decade ago that I first came across about five or six years ago (http://andrewgelman.com/2004/12/29/type_1_type_2_t/):

In statistics, we learn about Type 1 and Type 2 errors. For example, from an intro stat book:

A Type 1 error is committed if we reject the null hypothesis when it is true.

A Type 2 error is committed if we accept the null hypothesis when it is false.

That’s a standard definition that anyone who’s had a basic statistics course has probably heard (even if they’ve forgotten it by now). Gelman points out, however, that it is arguably more useful to think about two different kinds of error,

Type S errors occur when you claim that an effect is positive even though it’s actually negative.
Type M errors occur when you claim that an effect is large when it’s really small (or vice versa).

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Why should I care about Type S or Type M errors? Surely if I do a typical null hypothesis test and reject the null hypothesis, I won’t make a Type S error, right?”¹ Wrong! More precisely, you’re wrong if your sample size is small, and your data are noisy.

Let me illustrate this with a really simple example. Suppose we’re comparing the mean of two different populations x and y. To make that comparison, we take a sample of size N from each population, and perform a t-test (assuming equal variances in x and y). To make this concrete let’s assume that the variance is 1 in both populations and that the mean in population y is 0.05 greater than the mean in population x and suppose that N = 10. Now you’re probably thinking that the chances of detecting a difference between x and y isn’t great, and you’d be right. In fact, in the simulation below only 50 out of 1000 had a P-value < 0.05. What may surprise you is that of those 50 samples with P < 0.05, the mean of the sample from x was smaller than the mean of the sample from y. In other words, more than 30% of the time we would have made the wrong conclusion about which population had the larger mean, even though the difference in our sample was statistically significant. With a sample size of 100, we don’t pick up a significant difference between x and y that much more often (66 out of 1000 instead of 50 out of 1000), but only 9 of the 66 samples has the wrong sign. Obviously, if the difference in means is greater, sample size is less of an issue, but the bottom line is this:

If you are studying effects where between group differences are small relative to within group variation, you need a large sample to be confident in the sign of any effect you detect, even if the effect is statistically significant.

The figure below illustrates results for 1000 replicates drawn from two different populations with the specified difference in means and sample sizes. Source code (in R) to replicate the results and explore different combinations of sample size and mean difference is available in Github: https://github.com/kholsinger/noisy-data.

P-values

Gelman and Carlin (Perspectives on Psychological Science 9:641; 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1745691614551642) provide a lot more detail and useful advice, including this telling paragraph from the conclusions:

[W]e believe that too many small studies are done and preferentially published when “significant.” There is a common misconception that if you happen to obtain statistical significance with low power, then you have achieved a particularly impressive feat, obtaining scientific success under difficult conditions.

Bottom line: Be wary of results from studies with small sample sizes, even if the effects are statistically significant.

¹I’m not going to talk about Type M errors, because in my work I’m usually happy just determining whether or not a given effect is positive and less worried about whether it’s big or small. If you’re worried about Type M errors, read the paper by Gelman and Tuerlinckx (PDF).

kent August 31, 2016 Statistics 0 Read more >

Letters from graduate school

I recently learned of a new website that is worth putting in your bookmark list or adding to the subscription list of your RSS reader: Letters from graduate school. Here’s what they say about themselves.

For every graduate student, graduate school is a different experience filled with ups, downs, failures, and successes. The goal of Letters from Graduate School is to build a collective of graduate school experiences—your experience, in your own voice! (http://lettersfromgradschool.org)

There are four essays in Issue 1 (August 2016)

Love and abuse in graduate school, by an anonymous contributor, which makes a plea for teaching graduate students “that their love for research doesn’t have to be siphoned out of a finite pool of respect they’re allowed to show towards themselves.”
Writing on an island, by Becky Vartabedian, which describes a physical practice that helped her find her way out of the isolation that is an inevitable part of doctoral study.
Post-PhD: the jobs didn’t get and the one that I did, by A. Seun Ajiboye, which talks about how he found what profession he wanted in (and how he got there) after realizing that he didn’t want to be in academia.
Don’t check your optimism at the door, by Renee Geck, which provides some excellent advice – “Grad school doesn’t have to be a year of ignorant bliss and then a dreary trudge to the end. If you find people whom you trust to help you through the worst patches, chances are you’ll come out the other side a lot better than the people who go it alone.”

If Issue 1 is any indication, Letters from Graduate School will be a valuable resource for graduate students and graduate advisors. I look forward to reading the essays in future issues.

kent August 29, 2016 Academicsgraduate school 0 Read more >

Beloit mindset list 2020

Every year Beloit College releases its Mindset List. Although the list has its critics (http://www.beloitmindlessness.com/must-be-destroyed/) and it’s been parodied by The Onion, I always get a kick out of looking it over. It reminds me just how old I am. Here are a few gems from this year’s list:

There has always been a digital swap meet called eBay.
There have always been Cadillac Escalades.
West Nile has always been a virus found in the US.
They have never had to watch or listen to programs at a scheduled time.
Vaccines have always erroneously been linked to autism.
They have no memory of Bob Dole promoting Viagra.
John Elway and Wayne Gretzky have always been retired.

kent August 26, 2016 Academics 0 Read more >

National Park Service – Happy 100th birthday

100 years ago today the National Park Service was born. National parks are, as the Ken Burns documentary put it, America’s Best Idea. Unfortunately, I will not be able to participate in any of the celebrations today, nor am I likely to make it to a National Park this year, but I am delighted to live in a country that has placed such value on wild and beautiful places. I practically grew up in Yellowstone, and I’ve visited many other National Parks. Please take some time today to celebrate our good fortune, and if you’re close enough to a National Park or National Monument to visit, please consider taking the time to stop by and thank the Park Service employees for their service to our country.

kent August 25, 2016 Outdoors 0 Read more >

What counts? Evaluating public communication in tenure and promotion

Last Friday, the American Sociological Association released a subcommittee report entitled What counts? Evaluating public communication in tenure and promotion. It suggests that public communication of research can be assessed along three axes:

Type of content: explanatory journalism, opinion, application of research to a practical issue
Rigor and quality of the communication: peer-reviewed, edited, non-edited, effectiveness of communication for the intended audience
Public impact: number of readers, breadth of influence on policy or practice

Amy Schalet, Director of the Public Engagement Project at UMass Amherst, argues that public communication should be included in faculty evaluations, because when we include it, “we encourage [faculty] to share their knowledge with the members of society who could most benefit from it.”

I agree, but as always, the devil is in the details. Among the questions I wrestle with are:

To what extent is public communication of scholarly work an aspect of scholarly achievement?
Should public communication be regarded primarily as service in the tenure triad of teaching, research, and service?
Is public communication worthwhile only if it leads to changes in public policy or professional practice? Is it worthwhile if it leads “only” to greater aesthetic appreciation of the human or natural world?

The University of Connecticut has been recognized as a “Community Engaged” campus by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching since 2010 (ref). These are clearly among the questions that we need to answer.

kent August 24, 2016 Academics 1 Read more >