Perception, Power and Principles: Human induced climate change and why people have trouble accepting the science

Posted March 22nd 2010 at 11:12 pm by Dave

***Quick Hit: The CAPS petition to maintain the competitiveness of a postdoctoral research career in Canada is up to 1750 signatures. For more information on why this petition has been written, read my last post and visit the CAPS website.

Perception, Power and Principles: Human induced climate change and why people have trouble accepting the science

Over the last three months in Cambridge, we have been treated to a large number of free public lectures – there is definitely something special about this place and I think that Canada has a lot to learn about engaging the public to be interested in science and its role/impact on society. My next blog entry will focus on public lectures, but for now, I want to tell you about two lectures specifically and how they made me understand why people are so divided on the issue of climate science. (and yes, this is one of the reasons that public lectures outside of one’s field are an excellent thing to attend)

Talk #1 – Nigel Lawson, British Politician, Climate Change Skeptic

Aside from general musings about how many holes there are in the data and how lots of things are ignored or exaggerated, a couple of themes struck home:

Indoctrination
Lawson made a very good point: The vast majority of people who are trained in the climate science field are told “climate change is happening and it’s man-made” and are then set onto the task of researching its effects in area/situation X. In some respects this is true, as an entire generation of climate science trainees did not partake in the original global warming discussions. We’ve all heard the line “the scientists have agreed on this for decades now”, but how many of them actually know why?

Of course, this is common in academia (I had to accept the theory of stem cells before I could learn about them, but only part way through my PhD could I argue confidently and cite why stem cells were real and important) – perhaps it is particularly bad in climate change related fields? I don’t know the answer to that, but even I’ve read a large portion of the IPCC report, and I hope that every climate scientist has at least taken down the executive summary.

Misdirected Passion and Politics
In the question/answer session, three junior climate scientists were so offended by Lawson’s diatribe that they not only asked questions like “How can you believe this?” but spent 20 minutes following the session harassing Lawson for his views.

Lawson, the seasoned politician, deflected all questions, raising general points that cast some doubt on elements of climate change and well outside the field of expertise of each individual scientist, giving Lawson’s indoctrination argument some serious merit. In many ways, as sick as it makes me feel, the climate critic came out looking pretty darn good.

But clearly… this is the politics of science, and scientists themselves have a HUGE amount to learn if there is to be any progress in policy. Some quick advice if you are making an argument in public – keep things simple, inside your area of expertise, and be direct. If you’re asking a politician a question, make it a yes or no question – people like Nigel Lawson are experts at saying what they want to say no matter what you ask, try boxing them in with logic and simplicity.

Talk #2 – Bob Watson, Chief Scientific Adviser, British Dept. of Environment

Honestly, this talk was one of the most disappointing of the Darwin College lecture series on “Risk” (which was generally quite good). Bob Watson is one of the most engaged scientists when it comes to Government and I really thought he would have a sense of “who is your audience”. Instead, his first statement was something along the lines of “right, so we know this is happening and man-made” and then proceeded to tell us all about the models from the IPCC.

He was in front of a general audience, at least some of whom are in the Lawson camp of not being sold on the climate change debate, and was four months after the “climate-gate” scandal from Bob Watson’s University (though not his department to be fair)… and instead of clearing the air at all, he just played the doom and gloom cards of what could happen.

What climate scientists really need to do whenever they give a public lecture:

Show simple slides on why the scientific community is convinced
– What are the key pieces of data? What convinced you?

Things like:
- our world is not a ball of ice because of the greenhouse effect.
- greenhouse gases and clouds are part of this process and particular gases (carbon dioxide, water vapour, methane, etc) have more of an effect than others
- increases in these gases means more radiation heats the earth

What have we observed?
1. CO2 and methane are up and rising
2. Global temperature has and continues to rise

Why do you need to do this?
Because, while it might not be new to you… the world is not convinced and until they are, the scientific community has to drill home these messages (especially the experts in the field). Simple messages… we have high confidence in X because of Y. Don’t preach that scientists have it all figured out and you should now obey our demands… that is not appealing to anyone. Be a little more savvy about your message.

Clearing the air
I do not dispute the science that says our planet is warming. I also think that there is a reasonable chance (and lots of correlative data) that humans have played a role in pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (i.e.: we have chopped down a lot of forests and burning coal and flying airplanes are pretty effective at emitting the stuff) – so if the greenhouse effect is truly what keeps our planet from being a ball of ice (which seems to be the best theory running so far), then I’m pretty sold on the need to reduce our output of greenhouse gases.

Am I sold on all the models? To be honest, I don’t understand them, so it’s tough to say. What I do understand is that that if an entire community of academics – at least some of whom I trust are very critical of the data and models – are screaming to high heaven that we need to worry about this, so I’m keen to make some serious changes. Let’s just work on getting Joe Public on board

PS: Looks like Canada is doing a great job from over here in the UK…

5 Comments

Dave, March 22nd 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in General, Science Communcation

Quarterly Summary – Trying to make sense of it all

Posted December 30th 2009 at 11:01 pm by Dave

So, in the wake of a very busy December, I realize that we only registered two blog entries this month – a noticeable drop from November’s eleven. But this is the realistic way forward if we want to tackle these issues with the time and energy they deserve, as these “issues affecting trainees” underpin many of the important decisions that are made in an academic career and give decision makers a sense of what trainees are thinking. It’s a lot of information though and in recognition of everyone else being busy as well, I thought a quarterly summary of highlights would be a good idea.

The latter parts of 2009 had four very exciting developments in the Canadian science community namely the launching of the Canadian Science Media Centre, the release of the first CAPS report detailing the plight of the Canadian post doctoral fellow, the creation of and 3000+ signatures on the Stem Cell Charter, and the first formal conference on science policy in Canada. Hopefully this kind of momentum continues into 2010…

In the interim, Beth has started by exploring “what to do with a PhD if I don’t want to be a professor” with blog entries on why PhDs leave the academy, what types of jobs are out there, and how your PhD helps prepare you and the communication of science information to the public with where people get their scientific information and what public science outreach groups are present in Canada.

I’ve been a little less focused, tackling scholarships ( tax information and tying to economic outcomes), trainee demographics, peer review, post-doctoral fellow training (saying NO to the 2nd post doc and the creation of more permanent “scientist” jobs), graduate training (cookie cutter PhDs and making the choice between degree types), and getting scientific information to government officials.

I’ve linked to all of the individual blog entries above if you want a more focused reading on a particular issue, below are what I think constitute the major trends, discussions, and highlights of our first 2.5 months:

Demographics

The trainee community is aging and, while not necessarily a bad thing, it requires us to think about its structure and function. This is critical if Canada wishes to attract and/or retain the best and brightest academics. Additionally, Nature magazine recently damned Canada as a location to do a PDF with this uninspiring blurb.

Comments from that blog entry stimulated some additional homework on top of the US stats reported initially and the numbers are not as bad in Canada as in the US with respect to degree length. The CAPS report released in November 2009 however, clearly shows that the PDF length, remuneration, and even its definition are major concerns moving forward.

Say NO to the Second PDF – good or bad?

Admittedly, I chose this title and wrote this article with the intention of stirring the pot. And stirred it was, both from personal emails that I received and from comments on the site. To be clear, I was definitely not saying that there are no good reasons for doing a second post doc (re-tooling, changing fields, wedded to a city, boss is awful, etc), but if you lack such a reason, I do strongly advocate querying whether or not another post doc will be good for you.

Most importantly though, is for senior decision makers to understand that this is a growing pool of people with a growing series of frustrations – check out the comments section from that post. Another key point in there that was made more explicitly in my first entry and flushed out in that comments section is that the answer to a shortage of jobs cannot be longer post docs, this just puts even more pressure on the system.

The numbers are not lying… the significant majority of PDFs will NOT become professors – you might not like the reality, but you have to ask if academics are not for you and start planning sooner rather than later.

Jobs you can do if you pull the plug

Beth has shared her own story about finding a job after exiting the long dark tunnel and has also compiled a list of jobs that you might consider after you complete the ol’ PhD… please do feel free to add to the list as well or comment with your story or advice to others looking for the first time.

Skills you have acquired while plugged in

Beth also did a great job identifying the skills acquired during a PhD and good ways of thinking about them when writing up your CV and doing interviews for non-academic jobs.

Cookie Cutter PhDs

I tried to encapsulate/define the sinking feeling I get when I compare medical science to a factory where the goal is to generate the data/papers instead of training the individual to be able to run a group that can generate data/papers. Much discussion was generated and there tended to be reasonable agreement that more effort needs to go into developing critical thinking skills and nurturing the curiosity that probably brought people there in the first place.

In sum, the first quarter has definitely encouraged Beth and I to continue sharing the research, ideas and thoughts of our small group of colleagues on this site and we’ll look forward to commenting on new developments as they arise. Thanks for all of the great discussion so far and the encouragement on the blog’s content. I hope 2010 brings you many good things – including an Olympic Gold for the men’s and women’s hockey teams.

3 Comments

Dave, December 30th 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Financial, General, Jobs, Science Communcation

Say NO to the Second Post Doc!

Posted November 15th 2009 at 5:44 pm by Dave

Quick Hit

I had a great chat with someone last night who put me onto two great examples of cutting edge peer review (see last blog entry ):

First, as of 2009 the European Molecular Biology Organization Journal publishes a review process file which details the correspondence between authors, editors, and reviewers – still anonymous, but WOW what an improvement… some light is finally getting into the black box

Second, I mentioned the PLoS group in an earlier post and their journal PLoS Medicine have encouraged optional open peer review, a great start, but I think that in order for this to work, you need everyone to play nice…

***

Say NO to the Second PDF

I’ll warn you in advance, this blog entry is pretty controversial… it poses some difficult questions that we don’t often want to ask ourselves, and I was further encouraged to take this matter head on by a recent comment responding to one of Beth’s earlier entries on Why PhDs leave Academia .

The United States numbers say that the vast majority (>80%) of PhDs in Science and Engineering will NOT become tenure track university professors. In Canada from the CAPS November 2009 report: “In 1986, 34% of Canada’s PhDs were university professors whereas it was 24% in 2001, a decline of 10 percentage points in 15 years. Further decreases are predicted given that enrolment in doctoral programs is far outpacing the increase in full time university professors. In 2007/2008, enrolment at the doctorate level was 40,400, an increase of 62% from 2001/2002.”

I, like others in the PhD and PDF stage, cringe at such numbers. Two major questions that I always have are:

1. Why are 100% of people being trained to become a PI when only ~20% “make it”, with a niggling follow-up of if we don’t “make it”, why do we feel like failures?

2. How many inside of this statistic actively make the choice and how many feel forced out?

The first has plagued policy makers and university administrators for years.  There are a couple of really interesting tensions that contribute:

1. Universities want more PhD students – they make more money.  And I don’t mean your tuition fees…  I mean the nice subsidy that comes from governments to have you enrolled

2. Graduate programs that provide business training (or even full fledged MBAs) to science based MSc and/or PhD students have been criticized for using public monies to fund industry training

3. Many professors want their students in the lab not out exploring alternative careers like journalism, law, or industry

The second is an even tougher one, because little of this data is ever collected and it’s extremely tough to analyze even if it is collected.  It does, however, bring us to a critical point in a PhD/PDFs career – do I make the push for an tenure track faculty spot or am I off to explore something else?  We all have to make the choice… this blog entry argues to make it sooner rather than later.

If I was to get full answers to my questions, the trend would not change, it would simply be easier to understand and eventually manage.  If I imagine the possible answers though, I can’t help but continually arrive at a significant issue that causes big trouble… I believe that the “second Post Doc” is a major source of long term parking charges (both professionally and personally) collected in the Academic Parking Lot .

Here’s why:

1. There is no degree at the end, no metric to be judged on… once you have acquired “post doctoral experience”, the difference between 3 years and 7 years is incremental at best when it comes to looking at your CV. Yes, you’re actually more experienced and more qualified and yes, there are always exceptions (i.e.: chasing a HUGE story that made you move to a different lab that could answer the question), but the difference on paper (unless it’s accompanied by a long series of papers), is minimal.

2. It takes at least 6 months (and sometimes longer) to get established in the new location – this is on top of the time block that you already lost in your first PDF and creates another gap in your record – remember… there’s even another gap waiting if you do land the professor job.

3. Most major granting councils are funding at a rate somewhere in between 15 and 20%. If you’ve been a PDF for 3-5 years and aren’t yet competitive for an academic job – is it reasonable to expect that you’ll be competitive for research grants later on in your career?

4. The second PDF is an extension of the problem that plagues far too many people in our generation – the apathetic I-can-choose-anything-but-I-don’t-know-what generation. It seems that for many of us, you go through high school, do well in science and math because that’s what the “smart kids” are good at (don’t even get me started on how wrong this type of thinking is), you go to a university that has a good chance of getting you into law school, dentistry, or medicine because those are the only careers you’ve ever heard of (really… did you just “know” you wanted to be a grad student/PDF/professor?), you land in a science faculty, realize you don’t like idea of medical school and this “research thing” might be a good route (seems flexible enough, not closing any doors), get convinced/bullied into doing a PhD right away because no big labs want to waste their time with a 2-3 year Masters student, finish that PhD ( 30-40% admittedly do jump ship ), go do a post doc, because you certainly can’t get a tenure track job yet and you’re not ready to “leave science”, and then… you’re here… in the first post doc, why not do a second (seems flexible enough, not closing any doors… right… right?). Yes, you detected some sarcasm in there.

Of course there are exceptions… because post docs are a heterogeneous bunch – some have families that keep them tied to a particular city and others get unlucky with the first post doc and need to extract themselves. The alternatives to a second PDF are plentiful and Beth will be expanding on many of the career options in her blog entries. Another great resource that might help is the National Post Doc Association’s Career Planning Resources page .

The position that I would lobby for that doesn’t exist in many institutes in Canada but is becoming increasingly popular around here in Cambridge is the staff scientist position (though it goes by many different names). In essence, this is the home for the person that loves benchwork, science, and occasionally dwelling on the bigger picture but is not into teaching at the university or supervising students and…they hate the idea of grant writing. It pays well, has as much job security as “normal” jobs, has great benefits, and doesn’t (usually!) require weekends and evenings. I don’t quite have a grasp on where the money comes from or how this is all organized (I’m looking!), but I suspect it goes back to what you can actually have covered in your grant and what sort of core operating funds are available. Check out the Sanger Job Opportunities page for an example.

Personally, I’m tickled by the idea of possibly becoming a tenure track prof, I think I’d love it and I’m setting my sights for it… but… if I’m in the lab of my first PDF and after 3-5 years I don’t even really get considered for faculty jobs, I will definitely re-evaluate and move against the poisonous trend that we are collectively undertaking…

I will say NO to the second post doc and I encourage you all to do the same.

12 Comments

Dave, November 15th 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Financial, General, Jobs

Peer Review and Publishing – the best of the worst?

Posted November 13th 2009 at 10:11 am by Dave

QUICK HITS:

  1. 1. This is RALLY WEEK for the STEM CELL CHARTER – follow their blog , twitter feed, or join their facebook group. David Eaves just made a heartfelt plea on his blog regarding the Charter – I encourage a read! 
  3. 2. TheMarkNews has been flying under my radar for some time now and I’ve just been forwarded onto it (Thanks Trevor!) – it’s a great place to see current opinions on relevant news items from a Canadian perspective. …from their site: At its core The Mark is a national movement to record Canadian ideas and propel the people behind them. It is a collection of thoughts and a tool for facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue and debate between outstanding Canadians.

Peer Review and Publishing – the best of the worst?

I need to have a Cell, Science, or Nature paper to get my academic job.

This, my friends, is what every young medical science trainee has at the front of their brain and will drive many of the topics that come up on our blog. More and more of the major journals are edited by journal editors and not academic scientists and the job relies more on finding what will sell subscriptions/advertising rather than the putting out the very best science (thankfully these groups have some overlap, but you’ve certainly heard people query – “…and how did this get into Journal X?”.

An extremely interesting component of the whole process (and the subject of this post) is peer review. It has been described as the best, but still quite lousy, system we have to assess the quality of a journal article. What was it that Winston Churchill said about democracy?? We’re still working on that aren’t we? – peer review has got to change!

At its heart, peer review, as practiced by most journals, is a system where an editor – after a first round of sometimes extensive culling – will send a paper out to 2-4 academics in a related field of research to query the importance, relevance, rigor, and merits of a particular submission. I recently attended a Peer Review workshop here at Cambridge where 50-60 grads, PDFs, and young PIs spent an afternoon debating peer review with a panel of journal editors, professors, and people from Sense About Science, the latter of whom have launched a public campaign about the merits of peer review and published some preliminary figures in Sept 2009.

One of the most heated discussions was on anonymity in the current peer review system. The vast majority of reviewers, and I can only speak from my own field, are anonymous and the paper authors are visible. The first question to be asked: “Should it be double blind” – resounding consensus was, “it wouldn’t matter, the reviewer would generally be able to tell who the person was anyhow based on their work” – it is also interesting to note that double blind studies have been done and women still come out worse off (a great series of articles are here and here, and a general website with frightening stats and stories re: women in science is here – thanks James Z from a couple of years ago!)

Back to the anonymity issue… if we can’t be double blind how about no blinding at all? This stimulated massive discussion and I came out with the overwhelming feeling that young scientists (who dominated the room and I can’t generalize about professors because they didn’t reach statistical significance…) would be a-ok with open peer review. Some nay sayers brought up potential drawbacks:

  1. 1. I’d be afraid to review someone harshly that’s got more power than me
  3. 2. I don’t feel qualified to be an expert opinion and worry about losing face for accepting an article that turns out to be terrible.

For these arguments, I have some sympathy as I want a job too, but I can’t help responding with:

  1. 1. If you make good points, aren’t personal, and generally do justice to the review, we have to believe that you’ll come out on top, otherwise the system is not worth saving and peer review needs to go… AND… for every enemy you make that has “power” there’s almost certainly a friend to be made that doesn’t like Professor Powerful .
  3. 2. If you don’t qualify as an expert – turn it down…maybe this will put the pressure on journals to find good reviewers and on scientists to stop submitting above the level where something belongs (and yes, this is a massive problem that I’ll go into in a future blog)

The benefits of public reviewers are plentiful, and there are a few ways to achieve it that range in transparency. A) We could simply have names appear only on articles that are published, B) we could publish names and the actual reviews along with the publication, or C) we could publish everything (negative, positive, etc) for the author (or the public to read). Some of these would be viewed as rather extreme, so I’ll detail just the most realistic option’s benefits, those of first method:

  • 1. Every article would have 2-4 names associated with it, giving the article extra credibility – Imagine thinking “ I think Professor X is great and so smart – he likes this article, I should definitely read it!” – this is akin to the Faculty of 1000 site for biology and medicine (though it lacks complete coverage)
  • 2. It would do well to break up networks of back scratching and I’m sure that bioinformatics and statistics folks would love to do the meta-analysis… if you notice that every paper that Professor X writes is reviewed and approved by Professor Y or the former post doc from Professor Y’s lab, then things start to look fishy.
  • 3. It would make reviewers think long and hard before putting their final decisions out there because their name is permanently affixed to the credibility of the article
  • 4. It would discourage journal editors from overruling multiple reviewers – this of course presumes that we’d be bright enough to publish a YES or NO next to the review.
  • 5. On the tail of the last point, you also get the benefit of knowing if a paper was unanimously accepted or if it was a tough sell (and you might even have the nerve to follow up with someone to see why they didn’t like it!)
  • 6. Imagine… you could publicly shame reviewers with stats like over the past 20 years Professor X has never positively reviewed an article by a female PI or first author (which I’m sure would never happen – right? right?)

* If we get into the practice of publishing the actual reviews, it would be an excellent new metric for the assessment of young scientists without extensive publication records. If you can articulate ideas clearly and identify key holes in logic/experiments, this will reflect well on you.

So… these are just some thoughts, mostly meant to stimulate discussion and let people vent about the pros/cons of peer review, anonymous or otherwise…

Next topic: Say NO to the second PDF

3 Comments

Dave, November 13th 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in General, Science Communcation