Citation Needed

To harp on a previously raised point:

Some studies indicate that grouping can damage students’ self-esteem by consigning them to lower-tier groups; others suggest that it produces the opposite effect by ensuring that more advanced students do not make their less advanced peers feel inadequate. Some studies conclude that grouping improves test scores in students of all levels, others that it helps high-achieving students while harming low-achieving ones, and still others say that it has little effect. (NY Times)

Would it really be that hard to add in links to the actual studies here?  Newspapers are digital entities now as much as they are paper ones.  They need to learn how to link their syntheses with the knowledge they've drawn upon.  Satisfy one reader's curiosity and you've made that reader more likely to become a repeat customer.

Science Web Shows and Science Streaming

Watching the #modelorg discussion yesterday reawakened some old thoughts of mine.  Why aren't there more science panel shows?  I feel like the DeepSeaNews folks should do one, the Scientopia folks should do one, the SciAm folks should do one, etc.  There's a lot of cool things that can be done with the format, and I've a few ideas to share:

1. A Rant About Google Hangouts

Okay so Google Hangouts aren't going anywhere.  They're easy to use, require no third-party software, are free, can be streamed, and are instantly recorded for video-on-demand (VOD) purposes.  And somehow scientists I talk to and read online seem to think it's like the coolest thing ever.

But really, Hangout sucks.  I've never had a really enjoyable experience with this service.  First, there's the giant screen showing who's currently talking, while everyone else is relegated to tiny screens underneath.  You can't see people's reactions to what others are saying.  Second, every time someone new speaks, their face pops into the giant screen, while whoever was just speaking moves into the tiny ones.  This just hurts my brain.  A good panel show should aspire to be like a conversation that you're watching between people sitting around a table.  When someone new talks, their position at the table doesn't change - you just orient your vision to the new person.  Hangout destroys this spatial component and in the process disorients the viewer.  And when someone coughs or types?  Crosstalk?  You can't tell what is going on as the visual changes dominate your attention and forces your brain to lose track of the auditory input.

A better format is to give everyone equal cam space on the screen so that the viewer's eye can naturally move from one speaker to the next.  Here's a good example (pardon the StarCraft...): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE-2MP2A830&feature=player_detailpage#t=441s

Each of the four speakers gets their own separate screen real estate, and there's a fifth larger area for presenting things like figures, web pages, a camera feed from a microscope/telescope, etc.  And this is not THAT hard to do.  You will need one person on the show to own the professional version of Skype ($) so that you can do a multi-way video call.  You will need a streaming program like XSplit ($) or OBS (free) and finally an account (free) on a streaming platform (ustream, livestream, justin.tv, youtube can stream as well but it only works with Adobe Flash Media Encoder Live or something I think).  It's certainly not outside the technical expertise of any scientist, but would take a few hours to get sorted out the first time.  Which means it will never happen, but hey, just throwing it out there.

2. What Makes a Good Panel Show

(a) Chemistry between the panelists.  People that know each other and are already friends work well for this purpose.  Funny people are good to have.  Interesting personalities are good to have.  A cast of four boring awkward scientists that don't know each other is not going to make a good show.  Building a repeat audience requires panelist chemistry.

(b) A small number of panelists.  Four or five are the magic numbers here.  Three is too few, and six gets either stilted or hectic, depending on the chemistry of the bunch.  If you want to incorporate more voices, have a call-in line (easily done with skype), or take text questions from chat or twitter.  By the way, ten people, the maximum in Hangout, is way way too many.  You can't get a good conversation going with ten people if everyone wants to speak (too much crosstalk) or if everyone is taking turns (not enough back and forth).  So don't do that.

(c) There must be a moderator/host!  This person is in charge of setting up the show, organizes the topics, and directs the discussion.  One thing that occurred during the #modelorg thing yesterday was that everyone would jump in with their own point, and many just ended up falling into a vacuum as the next person went on to make their own point and sometimes struggled to relate it to what other people were saying.  A moderator fixes that by asking the questions and soliciting reactions and comments on people's answers.

(d) The topic should be interesting.  Although it honestly doesn't have to be interesting on its face - if you already have a show that fulfills (a),(b), and (c), chances are you can make anything interesting.  In fact, I wouldn't really worry about the topic too much - not every online show has to be a roaring success.  Better to just learn by doing what works and what doesn't.

3. The Wider World of Streaming

If people do get into streaming more, there's a lot of content opportunities out there.  Here's a few obvious ones:

• Streaming experiments from your lab to several classrooms watching online and answering questions from the students as you go.
• Streaming your experiments live as you do them (where possible).  Think cameras hooked up to your microscopes/telescopes, behavioral experiments, even data analysis.  Ask the viewers to submit experiments for you to do one day.  Fun stuff like that.
• Interview shows.
• Debate shows.
• Panel shows.
• Online journal clubs.

Basically, this sort of thing is the natural next step for online communication among scientists and between scientists/science bloggers and their online audience.  So go do it!

Scienceifying Journalism

Here's a simple, stupid idea:

• All journalists must now explicitly and thoroughly incorporate citations into every piece they write
• This means every point they make where evidence, a number, a percentage, a quote, an "economists say X", an "according to current research" must be followed by a citation
• For all interviews the date, time, duration, location, medium and interviewer should be cited
• Where an interview is on the record, a recording and/or transcript will be made publicly available, linked from the reference section (regardless of whether the interview resulted in a quote within the piece or was just background)
• For all citations, paragraph and line information (or timestamp information for audio/visual data) should be given so that the reader can find the exact place in the source document that the author is referring to in the piece
• All citations and reference section will be visible by toggle only - readers can choose to read the article in a "normal" state or click a button to see the citations included

Seems common sense to me - and not that hard to implement given that we're supposed to be in the digital age now.

Bad Dramas and Worse Neuroscience

Spoiler Alert: I can't believe I'm writing this, but don't read this post if you ever want to watch the K-drama "Boys Over Flowers" (netflix, hulu).

Okay, binge television.  You and I have had some good times.  In college it was Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and Firefly.  More recently, The Wire, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad.  Hell, even Planet Earth.  I don't feel weird about these shows.

This show... this show.

But now, binge television, you had to see fit to introduce me to Korean dramas?  I mean, I normally binge on you because I don't know what's going to happen next.  Suspense, twists, etc.  But in this show, "Boys Over Flowers", I knew from the first episode I watched what the ending would be and yet I kept watching because I (embarrassingly) became way too emotionally invested in the well-being of the characters themselves.  The show is about a hardworking, spunky commoner girl, Geum JanDi, who through a stroke of fortune ends up attending high school at the elite ShinHwa Academy.  Of course, there are four rich, good-looking male heirs who attend there as well (the so-called "F4").  And yaddayadda Geum JanDi and the richest heir (Gu JunPyo) end up falling in love and whatnot.  Of course, before they can live happily ever after, there's a whole bunch of setbacks, starting from the initial courtship to the alternate love interest to the break-up phase to the make-up phase and then, just when it seems like things are finally going to work out...

(the spoiler is really coming now - if you're at all interested in watching this show, I warned you.  It is an amazing show, a terrible show, a rewarding show, a painful show, and way too guiltily addictive.)

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...there's a completely BS case of amnesia, where Gu JunPyo, after getting hit by a car, suddenly cannot remember Geum JanDi.  What???  Dear Reader, maybe this isn't connecting with you, but you have to understand the situation I was in.  It was 3 AM.  My girlfriend and I hadn't moved since like 6 PM, one-more-episoding our way until we were committed to finishing, in her words, in order to "stop the pain".  The end is in sight.  Then the dude hits his head and selectively forgets the love of his life?!?!?

It was a bit too much for this neuroscientist to handle.  You can forget *events*, but not people.  The only way for JunPyo to completely forget JanDi was if he completely forgot like two years of his life.  And there his friends were, trying to reenact specific events when they should have been like "Hey, do remember going to Macau?  Do you remember going to the ski resort?  Racing JiHoon on horseback?  What was all that about?"

The name for this general phenomenon is lacunar amnesia.  If you've blacked out from drinking too much, that episode is a lacuna (cool word).  It's pretty straightforward - we record memories of events based on when and where they happened, via brain structures called hippocampi.  If the recording is messed up, then you can lose the ability to recall that memory.  But if there's another event involving the same person, you would still know who that person was.  I mean, even if you lost all memories of events involving the person, I'd bet you'd still find them vaguely familiar, purely based on facial recognition.

So let this be a lesson to you future addictive television show writers - you can't just make a character entirely forget another.  Especially not when some of your viewers are just dying for the damn couple to be happy already!

The System is Perfect

We folks in academia complain a lot about the system we're in.  Particularly those of us in the life sciences.  Some of us are grad students obsessed with the uncertainty of the future.  Will there be tenure-track jobs for us?  I want to make decent money in my thirties and start a family - do I really want to spend eight years as a postdoc?  Some of us are those postdocs, facing the reality of making a marginally better salary than they just had, and resigned to trying again and again and again to apply for faculty jobs while keeping one eye on biotech.  Are there even any jobs left in the life sciences industry?  And some of us are faculty - they've "made it" but rarely feel that way, struggling to come up with money for their salaries from their grants because universities don't want to cover that cost.

So we complain a lot about these things.  But what will ever come of it?  As I've begun to fully confront the reality of academia (yeah yeah I should have given it more thought before my fourth year of grad school but that's a topic for a whole other post...) I have begun toying with a rather fatalistic conclusion:

The system is perfect.

Well, not for us that are in it.  But for society?  It's actually a pretty good deal.  Here's the gist of my thinking (and please tell me where I go wrong because it does feel off in places):

• The government invests public money into science.
• Science is done by people.  In fact, the more scientists you have, the more science you get out.
• You need to pay the scientists money, or they won't give you science.  But you also need as many scientists as possible.
• Lo and behold - the current system.  A great many that get paid relatively little for a small chance to get a job that pays relatively more.  Tenured faculty - $100k+, job security, and intellectual freedom.  The one position that actually requires a PhD.
• Of course, not everyone can get those jobs - they're too scarce now.  But enough do that the rest waiting and applying keep trying, sticking out year after year in postdoctoral limbo until they get their break or give up or find another direction.

In the end, the public gets a tremendous value.  Really smart people working for the lowest possible wage, providing knowledge that betters everyone.  It's not like if you double the pay of a grad student, that that student will become twice as productive (or even 10% more productive).  Current grad students and postdocs (and faculty) are already working pretty much near the limit of their productivity.

So to everyone else in academia: why should they raise our pay?  If the public gets the same science out of a $35k postdoc as they do from a $60k postdoc, what's the point?

Some people say it's not really about the pay - the pay can be "low" so long as the coveted faculty job is still there at the end of the tunnel.  Okay.  So let's increase science funding a little bit.  Change the rules at NIH so that recipient universities have to increase the number of new tenure-track faculty slots.  More jobs = better, yes?

But what if more faculty jobs simply leads to more postdocs sticking around in academia longer and more grad students electing to take a postdoc and more undergraduates picking grad school?  The size of the system gets bigger - and more science gets done - but the shape doesn't change.

Alright, let's do the opposite.  (See: DrugMonkey, rxnm). It's irresponsible to keep encouraging/admitting more grad students when we know they won't have a shot at jobs.  Decrease the grad students, you decrease the postdocs, you end up with a greater percentage of postdocs finding faculty jobs.  But if you decrease grad students (and subsequently, postdocs), you're decreasing the number of scientists.  Even if the amount of public funding stays the same, a smaller number of people are using it and so less science gets done.

And so we're stuck.  Maybe things like unionizing, making universities more efficient, and creating new kinds of academic jobs (more staff scientists / lecturers) would help on the margins.  But in the end, doesn't the public have a right to want as much science as it can get for the lowest price possible?

This Monday, an NSF contest calling for solutions to problems in graduate education closed.  I bet a lot of the submissions touched on the jobs issue.  I thought about it myself when I wrote my entry up.  But in the end, I can think of only one (really infeasible) solution: really REALLY increase science funding.

I mean double, triple, quadruple the NIH budget.  Make there be so much money available that we have a real shortage of life scientists (not a fake one [NeuroDojo]).  Make there be so much money available that students who would apply to med school think about grad school instead, so that undergrads who are thinking about majoring in economics pick biology instead.  Then, maybe you can have postdocs that make an average of $60k a year and getting faculty jobs after only three to four years.

But that's in the hands of the public.  The public has to want life science so badly that it's willing to throw more money than is needed at hiring life scientists for salaries to go up.  Otherwise, academia will be stuck in the perfect system it's in today.

Introducing the Brain Initiative

It's here!

No longer BAM (the Brain Activity Map project), but perhaps more appropriately acronymed to BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies).  Watch here as Obama officially announces the venture (with crowd shots of Big Deal neuroscientists).


(transcript)

Then read here for more official info:

• White House summary
• White House infographic
• White House fact sheet
• NIH summary

The quick rundown:

• public funding: $50M DARPA, $40M NIH, $20M NSF
• private funding: $60M Allen Brain Institute, $30M HHMI, $4M Kavli, $28M Salk Institute 

Finally, watch the Q&A with Tom Kalil, Dr. Arati Prabhakar (DARPA), and Dr. Francis Collins (NIH), which has some good nuggets in there:
  

Things I find interesting:

• The total dollar amount isn't Human Genome Project level - only ~$100M committed from public sources, and that just for FY2014.  No statement anywhere about recurrent funding, though the private foundations seem to be kicking in annual contributions.
• The money coming from NIH is being scraped together from existing neuroscience pots + a little discretionary.  So it's not like money for cancer is being diverted to neuro.
• Yeah they're still selling it on the "let's cure human diseases" thing.  Which won't happen, but hey.
• The team they've put together to decide on concrete goals looks pretty awesome.  It's also notably comprised of many names that were NOT involved with the initial planning of this venture so hopefully there will be some outside perspective.
• The fact that this team is in place suggests that they're well aware of the criticisms that the project goals were too fuzzy.  Even Partha Mitra was relieved:

@noahwg looks now like this will be a more realistic proposal to be shaped via a planning process, better chance of success
— Partha Mitra (@partha_mitra) April 2, 2013

Questions that remain unanswered:

• How will the money be distributed/apportioned/made available for grant proposal?
• What's the deal with the "brain observatories"?
• What will the reaction be?  Still not seeing anything really from the political sphere, or the media sphere. Perhaps this doesn't become an issue until Congress starts sinking its teeth into the budget.

BAM's (officially) coming!

Invited to White House by Obama for BAM announcement on Tuesday!!
— rafael yuste (@yusterafa) March 29, 2013

 Giddy times!

What I'm watching for:

How much money, for real?

We've heard $10 billion, $3 billion, and there's also that whole sequesterbudgetmess thing that could have altered the bottom line at the last minute.

Who gets it and how much goes to what?

What percentage will be set aside to establish the BAM "brain observatories"?  What percentage will be available for the general neuroscience community to apply for?  How much explicitly set aside for tech development?  People are going to either be pleasantly surprised by this, really upset by this, or annoyed that they don't explain this enough.  Probably all three.

Who pays for it?

If this means a drop in NIH funding for everyone else, people ain't gonna be happy - expect the science Angstosphere to flip a lot of figurative tables in that event. Of course, no one wants that to happen, including none of the BAM scientists themselves.  It's only the White House that can screw up the funding.

How will Obama sell it?

Really interested to see if it's still all about Alzheimer's and humans or about what the scientists are actually proposing.  Will his statement become fodder for Twittersnark or will the skeptics be impressed? 

What will the Republicans say?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen any political coverage of BAM.  From my understanding, the Republicans still aren't big fans of the President, and they really don't like spending money.  On the other hand, they don't mind neuroscience as far as I know.  So... what will their statements say?  Bland?  Harsh?  Enthusiastic? Will they say anything at all?

Will the media care?

Lead story? One minute in the nightly news?  Overlooked completely?  The media needs a comparison or they won't know how to report it.  I'm fully expect comparisons to the Human Genome Project, but the cynic in me won't be satisfied until I hear some commentator explaining how BAM is nothing like putting a man on the moon. 

And if it's going to happen - when?

Hey, I want my slice of the pie already!