Science: October 2007 Archive Page

Business Week says there is no science education crisis; that in fact the US is producing more science experts than the market demands.

The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, "In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind." President George W. Bush addressed the issue in his 2006 State of the Union address. "We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations," he said.

Salzman and Lowell found the reverse was true. Their report shows U.S. student performance has steadily improved over time in math, science, and reading. It also found enrollment in math and science courses is actually up. For example, in 1982 high school graduates earned 2.6 math credits and 2.2 science credits on average. By 1998, the average number of credits increased to 3.5 math and 3.2 science credits. The percent of students taking chemistry increased from 45% in 1990 to 55% in 1996 and 60% in 2004. Scores in national tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the SAT, and the ACT have also shown increases in math scores over the past two decades.

Via Bloomberg:

James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize as co-discoverer of DNA's molecular structure, said he plans to retire immediately as chancellor of New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory amid a controversy over racial remarks. The lab suspended Watson from his position earlier this month after he questioned the intelligence of Africans during a book tour. Watson announced his decision to retire in an e-mail, which said he would also leave the lab's board.

I've blogged about Watson before.

From Language Log:

Much of the blame for the public's poor understanding of science must go to a little studied but culturally pivotal genre: news report headlines. Short snappy headlines provide the lazy reader with just enough information to totally misconstrue a story.

There's a reason why the writing in newspapers doesn't look like the writing found in scientific journals. 

Newspaper readers have needs and values that differ from the those of the scientific community. Scientists require a huge level of precision in order to get their jobs done, and they are used to writing for other scientists (or perhaps college students who want to be scientists).  The documents that scientists point to as examples of clear, accurate writing presume an incredible amount of prior knowledge -- not just vocabulary words and factual knowledge, but abstract concepts like the scientific method and the relationship between applied and theoretical research.  Science papers are almost completely devoid of verbs other than "is," and science papers are almost all credited to large groups of participants (even though only a small number of participants will actually have helped write the document that bears their name).  I don't note these points in order to complain -- these are just features of the scientific world.

But science is a vast subject.  While a nuclear physicist might have a good sense of whether a particular animal study experiment is well-designed, the nuclear physicist might be unable to assess the significance of this or that particular animal behavioral observation.  So while scientists rely on their own specialized genres in order to communicate with others within their specialty, even a trained scientist must rely on a good science writer to produce generally-accessible representations of knowledge generated in distant scientific fields.

I used to write for an engineering newsletter, and I saw first-hand that few scientists are gifted with the ability to explain their work in terms that Joe Sixpack can understand. Back in 1992, when virtual reality was all the rage, I interviewed Randy Pausch, the CMU professor who recently became famous for giving an inspiring talk about how he is facing his impending death. But few people of any profession share Pausch's ability to communicate. 

Often, then, the journalists are often on their own when it comes to translating a two hours of academic rambling into an 800-word news feature that attempts to make the latest scientific discovery seem relevant to the average reader. 

But Language Log's complaint about headlines highlights another problem. Reporters generally don't write their own headlines.  For large papers, there might be a sub-editor whose job is to write all the headlines, but for middle-sized papers, the layout artists are the ones with control over the page.  They may scan the article quickly and come up with a headline that fits -- both in the sense of being appropriate to the topic, and also that fills the given amount of space.  When a story is sent out over wire services, so that hundreds of regional and local papers can reprint it, each paper will probably reprint it with a slightly different layout, meaning that the headline might need to be longer or shorter to fill the given space.

So, even if science reporters meticulously research an article, and check to make sure that their own original editors don't give the piece an inaccurate headline, once that story gets syndicated, the author has no control over the headline that will appear above the story.

Journalists have to write for a general audience, and news articles tend to simplify in order to make complex subtle points seem interesting and relevant to the general reader. A reporter who is writing on a deadline is far more likely to call up an expert on the phone and get some quick quotes than to sort through scientific studies that were written for an expert audience that does not include journalists.  Even journalists who specialize in science reporting may find themselves writing about astrophysics in the morning, human cell biology in the afternoon, and plate tectonics the next morning.

I just started a unit on science reporting in my introductory news writing class.  Tomorrow we'll start discussing It Ain't Necessarily So (which offers numerous case studies of incidents in which the media have distorted the public perception of science by latching onto a partial truth, sensationalizing, and/or editorializing).  Yesterday I invited SHU math professor Josh Sasmor to speak to my class yesterday. His final take-home message was that reporters have an obligations to be critical of the statistical evidence handed to them by their sources. (He said they should take each statistic with "that much salt," miming a something the shape of a salt lick.)

Blogcosm offers a good round-up of online reaction to a NIH agency's not-so-useful method of citing a weblog.

Several bloggers noticed yesterday that the US National Library of Medicine (NLM, which is part of the NIH: National Institutes of Health) has a style guide for citing blogs... The NLM's definition of a blog isn't bad... But the guide itself is several years late and still flawed.

CNN/AP

The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most are good and help digest food.

But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix's job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.

The appendix "acts as a good safe house for bacteria," said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. Its location _ just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac -- helps support the theory, he said.

From the New Yorker:

It may seem strange that this last observation could have surprised anyone, but in Galileo's time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid--our word "galaxy" comes from the Greek for milk--and it was so bright that it cast shadows on the ground (as did Jupiter and Venus). Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name.

The stars have not become dimmer; rather, the Earth has become vastly brighter, so that celestial objects are harder to see. Air pollution has made the atmosphere less transparent and more reflective, and high levels of terrestrial illumination have washed out the stars overhead--a phenomenon called "sky glow." Anyone who has flown across the country on a clear night has seen the landscape ablaze with artificial lights, especially in urban areas. Today, a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night would be unable to discern much more than the moon, the brighter planets, and a handful of very bright stars--less than one per cent of what Galileo would have been able to see without a telescope.

While doing some advanced preparation for an upcoming unit on statistics in my news writing class, I learned something new today (from Wikipedia).  When coming across a statistic that looks like slam-dunk evidence of bias or wrongdoing, an activist will have a motivation to present that data to journalists in order to advance a particular perspective. The problem comes when the well-meaning activist does not really understand statistics, and so presents an inaccurate interpretation to a journalist. It's the journalist's obligation to check out any statistic he or she uses in a story, often by contacting an expert who is not directly connected with whatever research is being cited, so that the expert can offer an independent interpretation of the data.

One of the best known real life examples of Simpson's paradox occurred when the University of California, Berkeley was sued for bias against women applying to graduate school. The admission figures for fall 1973 showed that men applying were more likely than women to be admitted, and the difference was so large that it was unlikely to be due to chance.^[16][3]

	Applicants	% admitted
Men	8442	44%
Women	4321	35%

However when examining the individual departments, it was found that no department was significantly biased against women; in fact, most departments had a small bias against men.

Major	Men		Women
	Applicants	% admitted	Applicants	% admitted
A	825	62%	108	82%
B	560	63%	25	68%
C	325	37%	593	34%
D	417	33%	375	35%
E	191	28%	393	24%
F	272	6%	341	7%

The explanation turned out to be that women tended to apply to departments with low rates of admission, while men tended to apply to departments with high rates of admission. The conditions under which department-specific frequency data constitute a proper defense against charges of discrimination are formulated in Pearl (2000).

Space.com:

Fifty years ago this week, Sputnik Chief Designer Sergei Korolyov watched as a modified Russian missile launched into space from Kazakhstan's lonely steppes carrying a very special payload. Sputnik 1 ("traveling companion" in Russian) was about the size of a basketball and weighed about 180 pounds. It was equipped with two radio transmitters and four long antennas that broadcasted a constant beep while circling the Earth for 21 days.