Note to self: do not trust reviews in the NY Times

Tesla-Model-S

John Broder of the NY Times recently reviewed the Tesla Model S electric car, and panned it. Now I know nothing at all about this car; I’m not endorsing or criticizing it myself, and I’m not going to be able to tell you anything about the specs on this vehicle or how well or how poorly it delivers on its promises. But I can tell when someone is actively lying in a review, when evidence is provided.

The Tesla company had a device installed in the reviewed vehicle to automatically log just about everything the driver did. And the reviewer lied about what he did. It’s an appalling example of outright faking his observations — a scientific publication with that degree of fudging the data to achieve a desired conclusion would get you fired.

But now I’m wondering why — why would somebody cheat on his evaluation of a car? Personal bias? Or — uh-oh, conspiracy theory time — were there financial interests behind doing a bad review?

And now…the counterargument.

What I taught yesterday: master genes and maps

On Wednesdays, I try to break away from the lecture format and prompt the students to talk about the science of development. We’re working our way through Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and yesterday we talked about chapters 3 and 4.

Chapter 3 has an overview of basic molecular biology — transcription and translation, that sort of thing — and since these are junior and senior students who’ve already heard that a few times, we skipped right over it and they explained to me what master genes are, with specific examples of homeobox-containing genes like the Hox genes and Pax6. They caught on fast that what we call master genes are actually just transcription factors located high up in a regulatory hierarchy.

I think we also got across a less-than-naive idea of the evolution of Hox genes. There is a recognizable, conserved motif in each of these genes, but the proteins are far more than just their homeodomains, and can exhibit considerable variation — necessary functional variation, because the expression of different Hox genes are going to have distinct morphological consequences.

Chapter 4 has a general theme of maps and geography — what does it mean for a cell to be in a particular position and to have a particular fate? We also get into details. This is a very fly-centric chapter, and we get a picture of early development in the fly and the specific patterning and positional organization in the early embryo of that organism, with an introduction to many genes we’ll be hearing much more about during the course of the term. We also got enough information on vertebrate development that I could ask them to play the compare and contrast game: what’s different and what’s the same in fly and mouse development? I’m trying hard to be the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of development in this class: it’s so easy to say, “they’re the same!” and focus on common molecular mechanisms, or to say “they’re different!” and talk about the numerous quite radical innovations between them (especially in the fly, which is a weird, highly fine-tuned machine for rapid robust development). I’m trying to get across that both statements are absolutely true, and they really taste great together.

Friday is their first exam. Next Monday, class will be an overview of nematode development, to prime them for the lab exercises for the next two weeks which will be all about photomicrography of worm development and behavior, and also more details about early fly embryology to get them prepared for a couple of weeks of nothin’ but flies. I also warned them that next Wednesday we’ll be discussing chapter 5 in Carroll, just chapter 5, because I’ve found in the past that that’s usually the brain-clogger chapter, with all its talk of boolean logic and gates and circuits.

How about if we stop pretending religion is an important academic subject at all?

I was asked to promote this petition to stop forced religious indoctrination in Greek schools, and I support it and you should go sign it if you agree.

Greek public schools hold daily Orthodox prayer, schedule regular church visits as well as mandate the taking of a “religious studies” class every year. However, Greek law also allows students to opt out by submitting a simple form signed by their guardian if they are under 18. Unfortunately, many school administrators are either unaware or simply refuse to allow the exemption and ministry officials are not holding them to account.

The latest case is Stavros Kanias, School Principal in the Glika Nera suburb of Athens. Kanias is refusing to allow a middle school student to opt out even stating that his refusal is based on a desire to “follow the law of Christ”. Even though the required form has been submitted it is not being accepted. Many similar cases are often not publicized.

When Greek MP’s have raised the question in parliament, the Education Minister has simply reiterated the procedure and deferred to lower ministry officials.

But I do have one reservation: it doesn’t go far enough. It’s a good idea to give students the ability to opt out of religious instruction, but why is religious instruction in any school any where?

I’ve usually taken a pragmatic perspective on this issue before. We don’t have much choice to but to give way on minor compromises in school curricula, and this is often an easy one: if religion is taught comparatively and objectively, it’s a good tool for breaking dogma. I can’t get too irate at a school offering a “world religions” class, because I know that would be the first step towards atheism for the students (for the same reason, though, I’m suspicious. Our opponents aren’t morons, and they’d know this too — I suspect them of plotting to smuggle orthodoxy into the classroom under cover of objectivity, and for instance, knowing that a local priest of the dominant cult will often offer to teach the course.)

But here’s my major problem. It’s a useless subject. And no, I’m not one of those elitist yahoos who thinks art and philosophy are useless subjects, rejecting anything that isn’t a hard science; I mean, it is literally useless, distracting, and narrow. If right now students were getting an hour a week in a “religious studies” class, I think they’d be far better served by getting an hour a week for anthropology, or philosophy, or poetry…or sure, more math.

I know what the usual argument would be: but every culture has a religion of some sort, it’s a human universal, people find it important and we ought to acknowledge it. So? Every human culture has parasites and diseases, so why don’t we have a mandatory weekly course in parasitology? It would be far more entertaining, interesting, and useful. What wouldn’t be quite so useful, though, is a course taught from the perspective of the malaria parasite, praising its role in shaping human civilizations for thousands of years, which is pretty much equivalent to what kids get in a “religious studies” class right now.

I don’t think religion will ever disappear, but I’ll be satisfied when seminaries and theology departments all shut down everywhere for lack of interest.

Need more paleontological women

The latest issue of Priscum, the newsletter of the Paleontological Society (pdf), has an interesting focus: where are the women in paleontology? They have a problem, in that only 23% of their membership are women, and I hate to say it, but the stereotype of a paleontologist is Roy Chapman Andrews — most people don’t imagine a woman when they hear the word paleontologist (unjustly, I know!)

On the other hand, 37% of the paleontology presentations at the GSA were by women. They’re there, but they aren’t getting far up the ladder of success. They’re not achieving high status positions within the society at the same rate as men, and then there’s this skewed distribution:

genderdisparity

So women are over-represented in the student category, but under-represented in the professional category. The optimistic way to look at that is that there is an opportunity for change, and maybe that wave of current students will move on up and change the distribution ten years from now. More pessimistically, it suggests that there could be barriers that preferentially block the advancement of women in the field; if the distribution doesn’t change in the next decade, that says that there were more frustrated women who left the discipline than men.

So why would women experience greater barriers to advancement? It isn’t about evil men keeping the women down, and I wish we could clear away the resentment some men express when they hear that there are greater obstacles to women’s progress — too often I hear angry responses to accusations of academic sexism taken personally, as if it were a statement of personal criminality. It’s a product of the system, and men and women mostly contribute to it by neglect and an unwillingness to change the status quo.

What I most often see is statements of fact that I don’t disagree with, such as that women on average have lower publication rates than men, but the problem is that these advocates of blaming the inherent properties of women for their failure don’t think it through. Why do women have lower publication rates? Are there structural/cultural/professional properties that conflict and cause problems that men don’t see? And most importantly, if there are, what can we do to correct those institutional biases? Just saying that “women publish less” begs the question.

This article had a very helpful diagram illustrating the contributing factors, taken from a paper discussing a similar problems among evolutionary biologists.

womeninscicycle

Right there in the center is issue of lower publication rates in women, but it looks deeper at consequences and causes. Follow the arrows. I’ve seen similar charts before — it looks a heck of a lot like an extinction vortex, a self-perpetuating cycle of defeat.

Another article in the same newsletter describes the distribution of the leadership of the Paleontological Society. It shows steady improvement in the proportion of women in the society leadership, but still, most of the executive positions have been held by women less than 10% of the time. The more recently the position was created, the higher the proportion of women. I also noticed one outlier: 67% of the Education and Outreach Coordinators (a very new position) have been women. That’s another stereotype, too, that women are better suited to teaching. Look at the diagram above: going into teaching is also one of the factors that hurts research productivity, and as long as research is more highly valued than teaching, and teaching is considered ‘women’s work’, it’s going to skew representation of the sexes.

They have a proposal to correct the imbalance. Notice that it doesn’t involve simply declaring that they have equality of opportunity (which they don’t!) and doing nothing. Correcting these kinds of biases requires active intervention.

Societies are strengthened by incorporating diversity (of gender, of ethnicity, of abilities, of ideas, and of disciplines). As a society, we need to be aware of equity issues and take intentional steps to counteract imbalances. The recommendations below relate to increasing ALL types of diversity. So far, we have data on gender equity, but there are many other types of diversity we should work to improve. This set of recommendations applies to all of them.

Intentional nominations. Think about the excellent female colleagues you have. Now nominate at least one of them for a leadership position (we have several open this year!) or a society award. All Society positions are open nominations, so please share your ideas!

Mentoring. Establish professional relationships with young women in paleontology (students and early career professionals). Spend some extra time at poster sessions meeting some of our student members. Encourage women to submit abstracts for oral presentations. Established women, share your career stories and experiences.

New initiatives. PS Council is dedicated to increasing equity for all types of diversity in our membership. Please share any ideas you may have for initiatives with [the author] or other council members—now and in the future.

Today an egg, tomorrow the world!

Man, you give them a millimeter, they take a centimeter. We had a successful fundraiser for the Kasese Humanist School — they just wanted a chicken coop and a flock of chickens so the kids would start the day with good nutrition. And they got that. Here are these kids, grateful for an egg.

But that isn’t enough. These kids want more. Come on, guys, you’ve got an egg…it’s not enough?

No, it’s not. Now they want to own their school, which is currently on some leased property. So they’ve started another fundraiser to pay for a small plot of land — they need $7000.

I don’t know about this. First they’re getting a whole egg, and next they’re getting a school…I expect some day they’re going to be posting videos of kids graduating and getting diplomas and going off to college…scary stuff.

If you want to encourage that kind of ambition, go ahead, donate a few dollars.

Les Misery

Oh, yay, someone thinks the same way I do. I saw Les Miserables this week, and let me just say…it was the worse movie experience I’ve had since The Expendables (but for completely different reasons, of course). And just to put it in perspective, I watched Warning From Space with the @MockTM gang last week. It didn’t make me moan in pain as much as this movie did.

Anyway, the review is spot on.

At 158 minutes, this is a long musical film (it’s was a long book, and I’m talking about Victor Hugo’s, not the libretto) but I was shocked to find that it has only one song, and that’s the "Dream-de-Dream-de-Weem-de-Weem" song. The other musical numbers seem to draw their melodic inspiration from the recitatives, the kinds of tuneless tunes you might absent-mindedly whisper under your breath while you vacuum — only here, of course, they’re belted out at the tops of the actors’ lungs.

Yeah, they made a ‘musical’ with only one song, and they slugged it out early in the movie so we could spend the next two hours wondering when there was going to be some more music.

Here’s a deeply flawed parody of that one song.

It’s missing a few key pieces, like being in really intense closeup so you can see every pore and the hideous blotchy mottling of poorly applied excessive makeup splattered on a 19th century French prostitute. Also, she’s not emotional enough: you need to be able to see the watery mucus pooling in her nostrils, so you can sit on the edge of your seat through half the number wondering when it was going to flood onto her lip.

One star. In extreme closeup. With swarms of sunspots like rot corrupting the surface.

A quick desert bobcat-related note

A few days back my neighbor Teddy Quinn asked me if I’d be willing to provide a minute or so of audio on the whole “bobcat trapping in Joshua Tree” issue I mentioned this week. Said audio would be aired on his new project, Radio Free Joshua Tree, a community podcast.

He asked me for a minute and I gave him five, but he played the whole thing anyway. It’s at minute 17 of hour 2 of his variety show for February 3, the whole thing of which you should check out. My neighborhood is replete with good musicians, and Teddy is kind of a local impresario curating their work and boosting their careers.

But if you don’t have time for that, or if you hate music, I’ve posted just my audio at Coyote Crossing as well.

I was reminded, doing this, of how easy and fun audio work is. I’ve decided I want to do more. Probably mostly ruminations on life in the desert, that kind of thing. If you want to be kept in the loop, my Twitter account is probably where I’ll announce new recordings more reliably. Follow me there to be part of the in-crowd.