The Candidates Talk Science

Yesterday, I mentioned how important it is to pay attention to what a candidate promises, because those promises are often kept. If you haven’t already, it’s time to go see what the presidential candidates had to say about the top science and technology issues they’ll likely face over the next four years.

Pay attention to how they say science shapes their policies, not just how many words each of them spends on a question. Pay attention to whether they make reality their priority. If you have the knowledge, pay attention to whether they make promises they can’t keep or are telling you they haven’t bothered to study yet. For example, see Romney on space exploration:

America has enjoyed a half-century of leadership in space, but now that leadership is eroding despite the hard work of American industry and government personnel. The current purpose and goals of the American space program are difficult to determine. With clear, decisive, and steadfast leadership, space can once again be an engine of technology and commerce. It can help to strengthen America’s entrepreneurial spirit and commercial competitiveness, launch new industries and new technologies, protect our security interests, and increase our knowledge.

Rebuilding NASA, restoring U.S. leadership, and creating new opportunities for space commerce will be hard work, but I will strive to rebuild an institution worthy of our aspirations and capable once again leading the world toward new frontiers. I will bring together all the stakeholders – from NASA and other civil agencies, from the full range of national security institutions, from our leading universities, and from commercial enterprises – to set goals, identify missions, and define the pathway forward.

The ScienceDebate team started out by advocating for a live debate on these issues back in 2008. I personally prefer this sort of statement from the campaigns. I don’t need my president to be able to deliver a mini lecture on demand, but I do need to know how they relate to the issues raised by science and what role it has in their administration. The answers to these questions go a long way toward telling me what I need to know.

The Candidates Talk Science
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Disassembling the Magic Button

This weekend, The New York Times once again demonstrated that one can say basically anything in print as long as it’s confined to the opinion pages. In this case, it was yet another theory of autism.

In autistic individuals, the immune system fails at this balancing act. Inflammatory signals dominate. Anti-inflammatory ones are inadequate. A state of chronic activation prevails. And the more skewed toward inflammation, the more acute the autistic symptoms.

Nowhere are the consequences of this dysregulation more evident than in the autistic brain. Spidery cells that help maintain neurons — called astroglia and microglia — are enlarged from chronic activation. Pro-inflammatory signaling molecules abound. Genes involved in inflammation are switched on.

These findings are important for many reasons, but perhaps the most noteworthy is that they provide evidence of an abnormal, continuing biological process. That means that there is finally a therapeutic target for a disorder defined by behavioral criteria like social impairments, difficulty communicating and repetitive behaviors.

It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? A cause that points us toward treatment! It’s all in the immune system, and it can be cured by dirt. Well, parasitic worms in the dirt, which is kind of gross, but hey, hope! We can lick this autism stuff!

Of course, we’ve been promised that before. Continue reading “Disassembling the Magic Button”

Disassembling the Magic Button

Motivated Research on the Wage Gap

Science is our most reliable means for learning about the world–when it’s done right. However, because science has rightly gained a good reputation in these matters, there are plenty of people who want to borrow that reputation for their own ends. It’s not hard to do. All you have to do is do science poorly.

Remember that when you hear about studies that “prove” the wage gap between the sexes isn’t due to discrimination. Bryce Covert takes apart one of these studies in The Nation.

I would love to agree with Ramesh Ponnuru’s latest Bloomberg column, in which he argues that the gender wage gap—in which women on average still make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes—is not caused by discrimination. Ponnuru argues that, rather, it’s caused by different choices women make in their career paths and family formations. Wouldn’t it be great if the gap didn’t exist because women are held back and given less, but because they simply want different things? And it’s certainly true that the fact that women are congregated in a different set of jobs and often have to leave the workforce when they have children plays a role. But even this can’t explain away the gap.

Ponnuru cites research by conservative economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth and a consulting company showing that the gap all but disappears when factors such as women working fewer hours, going part-time or taking breaks from their careers are taken into account. But the Government Accountability Office has already examined this question. The GAO tried to figure out just how much of the gap could be explained by these sorts of factors. To do so, it first performed a quantitative analysis using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a nationally representative longitudinal data set. It also supplemented that work by interviewing experts, reviewing the literature and contacting employers.

What did the study find?

That was when Covert started bringing the reputable data. It was comprehensive and it was beautiful. Check it out, and save the link for the next time you run across these wage gap “studies”.

Motivated Research on the Wage Gap

Female Privilege and Scientific Qualifications

It’s always so much fun to see how others see me. A little over a year ago, I had a post published in the Scientific American guest blog called “The Politics of the Null Hypothesis“. It discussed the tendency to default to genetic explanations of differences in IQ and the resistance that is shown to any research findings that demonstrate environmental or transient influences on IQ scores. I also noted in this post how odd this tendency is when all of the direct evidence we have is for environmental or transient influences and the replicated evidence for a genetic influence comes from studies that aren’t well-designed to distinguish between environmental and genetic influences.

As you could probably guess, this post didn’t go over well with everyone. In particular, Bryan Pesta, who has a long history of suggesting I shouldn’t talk about IQ and a brief history of studying racial differences in IQ, took it as another opportunity to tell me I should shut up. He tried to credit me with several statements I hadn’t made, attacked a bunch of irrelevancies, and went with the “How can you question decades of science?!” stance.

That’s become a favorite tactic of Pesta’s since then. “Who are you to question how things are done?” “Ooh, better get that into a peer-review journal right away so you can set the entire scientific world straight!” [I paraphrase.]

Recently, he took this one step further. Continue reading “Female Privilege and Scientific Qualifications”

Female Privilege and Scientific Qualifications

The Long, Slow Build

Pacing is always a concern for storytellers. You don’t want to go too quickly, lest you skip something important. You don’t want to get bogged down in the details, lest your readers yawn and wander off somewhere.

There is an extra concern when you’re talking about real-world events and cannot control the order in which they happened or the spacing of the interesting bits, as in telling stories about science. When your science writer in question is talking about events that happen at–literally–a geologic pace, things get even harder.

Dana Hunter has just finished a series on her Scientific American blog, called “Prelude to a Catastrophe”, that proves she’s up to the task of meeting all these challenges. It helps that she loves her topic, and it helps that we all know that there is an explosion coming. Still, the talent is all Dana’s.

The topic of her series? Continue reading “The Long, Slow Build”

The Long, Slow Build

In a Violent Context

When the incomprehensible happens, we are much happier if we can reduce the event to a single cause, put it in its little pigeon hole where it can’t disturb us as much. Attributing mass violence like the shooting in Aurora, CO to mental illness fits this bias of ours very comfortably. Of course, that doesn’t mean that mental illness really is the answer–or the only answer.

Daniel Lende of Neuroanthropology started a discussion on this topic when Jared Loughner shot Gabby Giffords and several others. With this new act of mass violence that we are attempting to explain away instead of understanding in all its dimensions, he’s focused his thoughts more. The questions he prompts are fascinating, particularly for those familiar with how much cultural context–what we collectively accept and reject as civilized behavior–determines diagnoses of mental illness.

Continue reading “In a Violent Context”

In a Violent Context

Stereotype Threat: "A Problem That Does Not Exist"?

A couple of weeks ago, Ophelia highlighted a proposed (since cancelled) Skeptics in the Pub talk by someone who is “skeptical” that any inequalities still exist that disadvantage women. From the description of the talk:

Leeds psychologist Dr Gijsbert Stoet finds no evidence that women under-perform through internalising false stereotypes, a recent major review reveals no sex-discrimination in academia, and ground-breaking field research shows that it is actually in favour of women in recruitment; so why is it women tend not to ‘get to the top’?

The Stoet paper on stereotype threat is available by request from his university, so I read it for myself. Who would like to guess whether it shows “no evidence” of stereotype threat? Who would like to guess whether the existence of stereotype threat is even the research question the paper addresses?

Continue reading “Stereotype Threat: "A Problem That Does Not Exist"?”

Stereotype Threat: "A Problem That Does Not Exist"?

Broken Chromosomes and Damaged Brains

I really appreciate Cristina Rad recording and posting some of the panels from SkepchickCon/CONvergence this year. In addition to providing one more place where new people can see for themselves the Rebecca Watson Evil Cootie (Ugh!) Effect, this exposes us to audiences we don’t get at the convention itself. That, in turn, brings up questions and criticisms we don’t get at the panels themselves.

A prime example of this has been the reaction to two statements on the “Vive le Difference” panel, which covered gender and sex differences. (You can view the session itself here. If you like it, consider giving it some YouTube love. That RWECU Effect I mentioned above means that this hour-long video already had several downvotes less than an hour before it went up.)

The first statement, called sexist by many viewers, was Heina Dadabhoy’s comment that the Y chromosome is a broken X chromosome. The other, called outrageously sexist, was Greg Laden’s statement that the male brain is a female brain that has been damaged at various times throughout development by testosterone. The question is, however, are these statements true?

Continue reading “Broken Chromosomes and Damaged Brains”

Broken Chromosomes and Damaged Brains

Ask the Experts

We frequently ask one another what we can do to encourage kids’ interest in science. One of the people submitting questions for my interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson (okay, it was my husband) would like me to ask him. And we generally don’t have a shortage of opinions on the topic, either.

Desiree Schell had a somewhat different take on the topic for LogiCon. She put together a panel of kids and asked them. Marie Claire Shanahan reported on the results, some of which confound our expectations.

This theme of not giving students what they need was carried over into a discussion of role models. A physicist in the audience asked the students what people like him could do to be better role models for young people in science. It’s a common solution proposed for encouraging and maintaining student interest: provide more and better role models. All four panelists, though talkative and eloquent, were silent. They looked at each other, raised their eyebrows, and shrugged their shoulders. Desiree rephrased the question asking them who their role models are and why they are good role models. Not surprisingly the ones they listed where people in their lives, mostly family members and teachers. The justifications, though, were a little more surprising and explained their confused silence. The students didn’t focus at all on the what the role models were like, other than they should be generally nice people. It wasn’t about the role models; it was about what the role models did for the kids. Good role models challenged them just enough. They asked good questions, and most importantly, let the kids find out the answers. Each student repeated essentially the same answer. Role models should encourage and inspire questions and exploration, that’s all. The kids themselves need to do everything else. There were no comments about having role models that were like the students or role models who broke stereotypes or role models who had overcome challenges and no indication that they really wanted to learn from someone else’s experiences. There was instead a lot of reinforcement that the process of role modelling isn’t modelling at all, it’s all about what the kids get to do and it’s really easy to forget that. Alex said it clearly, “You just want to prepare many many paths for students and let them take them.”

It sounds like it was an interesting panel. I don’t know that I would take everything the kids had to say at precisely face value (there’s a reason we do blinded studies on topics), but their voices are an important part of the discussion, particularly where they challenge us. Find out what else they had to say.

Ask the Experts

Does the G-Spot Exist?

According to Dr Petra, that’s the wrong question to be asking. She makes a good case for her position, too.

Each time studies on the g-spot have been published the media has reacted as though
– these are groundbreaking studies
– the do they/don’t they have g-spots issue is the most pressing topic in sex research
– these studies require no critical attention

And in all these cases journalists – including health and science correspondents – have responded to these studies in one simple way. To frame their stories with the question ‘does the g-spot exist?’ Continue reading “Does the G-Spot Exist?”

Does the G-Spot Exist?