the ladybug and the lion

On Being A Research Scientist.

You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion. 

From an answer on Quora to the question: What's it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?

Murmuration.

Starling flocks, it turns out, are best described with equations of “critical transitions” — systems that are poised to tip, to be almost instantly and completely transformed, like metals becoming magnetized or liquid turning to gas. Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition.

At the individual level, the rules guiding this are relatively simple. When a neighbor moves, so do you. Depending on the flock’s size and speed and its members’ flight physiologies, the large-scale pattern changes. What’s complicated, or at least unknown, is how criticality is created and maintained.

It’s easy for a starling to turn when its neighbor turns — but what physiological mechanisms allow it to happen almost simultaneously in two birds separated by hundreds of feet and hundreds of other birds? That remains to be discovered, and the implications extend beyond birds. Starlings may simply be the most visible and beautiful example of a biological criticality that also seems to operate in proteins and neurons, hinting at universal principles yet to be understood.

Full story from Wired. 

Elitism.

His disdain for honors and rewards was genuine. After he was elected to membership of the United States National Academy of Sciences, he resigned his membership because the members of the academy spent too much of their time debating who was worthy of admission in the next academy election. He considered the academy to be more concerned with self-glorification than with public service. He hated all hierarchies, and wanted no badge of superior academic status to come between him and his younger friends. He considered science to be a collective enterprise in which educating the young was as important as making personal discoveries. He put as much effort into his teaching as into his thinking.

Also from the NYRB article on Feynman. It makes me like him all the more.

Feynman.

The central theme of Feynman’s work as a scientist was to explore a new way of thinking and working with quantum mechanics. The book succeeds in explaining without any mathematical jargon how Feynman thought and worked. This is possible because Feynman visualized the world with pictures rather than with equations. Other physicists in the past and present describe the laws of nature with equations and then solve the equations to find out what happens. Feynman skipped the equations and wrote down the solutions directly, using his pictures as a guide. Skipping the equations was his greatest contribution to science. By skipping the equations, he created the language that a majority of modern physicists speak. Incidentally, he created a language that ordinary people without mathematical training can understand. To use the language to do quantitative calculations requires training, but untrained people can use it to describe qualitatively how nature behaves.

Full story from the NYRB. 

Women In Science.

I feel very strongly, for instance, about telling women that they can have children. To give an example, many years ago I was returning to work after having my second child, and I won some prize. They asked for a photograph of me for them to publish, and I sent a photograph of me and my two children. But the children were cut out, because this was considered to be the wrong message. This was a long time ago, it must be 22 years ago given the age of my daughter. But I think it is absolutely vital that women get the opposite message – that [having children and a scientific career] can be done, that it’s difficult but not impossible, because if young girls believe it’s impossible then it’s another reason for not pursuing science. No one says lawyers can’t do it. No one says journalists can’t do it. There are lots of reasons why it might be difficult, but no one says you can’t be a journalist and have a family. And so it’s vital that we publicise the fact that you can be successful and have a family. I feel very passionate about that. Being a role model – it’s just something that happened.

Athene Donald at FiveBooks.

The Next Marie Curie.

Via XKCD.

Sexism In Science.

They measured, for instance, how often each student responded to questions posed by professors to the classroom as a whole. At the start of the semester, 11 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was male, and 7 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was female. By the end of the semester, the number of female students who attempted to answer questions posed by a male professor had not changed significantly: Only 7 percent of the women tried to answer such questions. But when classes were taught by a woman, the percentage of female students who attempted to answer questions by the semester's end rose to 46.

The researchers also measured how often students approached professors for help after class. Around 12 percent of the female students approached both male and female professors for help at the start of the semester. The number of female students approaching female professors was 14 percent at the end of the semester. But the number of female students asking for help from a male professor dropped to zero.

Finally, when Stout and Dasgupta evaluated how much the students identified with mathematics, they found that women ended up with less confidence in their mathematical abilities when their teachers were men rather than women. This happened even when women outperformed men on actual tests of math performance.

Full story from Slate.

Women In The Sciences.

This is a reaction to a recent NYT piece.

Why does gender lead to unequal resources? Ceci and Williams accurately paint the big picture. Women drop out in ever greater numbers as they advance along the academic pipeline that leads from graduate school to first job and beyond. They often settle in jobs at lower tier schools with fewer resources and fail to even apply for publications, grants, or the best jobs at the best universities. Perhaps these women are simply choosing to have fewer resources. Or perhaps they want to have children. Ceci and Williams cite several studies showing that the conflict between female fertility and the typical tenure process is one important factor in women's access to resources. You could say that universities don't discriminate against women, they just discriminate against people whose fertility declines rapidly after 35.

But as Ceci and Williams admit, the unquestionable fact of unconscious bias, as revealed in the experimental résumé studies, is another possible reason women make choices that lead them to end up with fewer resources. Those studies show that women are subject to bias from the very start of their careers. Is it any wonder that many of them, keenly aware that their efforts are being downgraded compared to those of men, would withdraw from a competition that is systematically unfair?

This tension between experimental studies and correlational ones is not uncommon in science, but the rule is that experiments win. In this case, the experiments prove that there is bias against women—and the correlational data suggest that this bias interacts with other factors in complicated ways to influence their success. Science reporters are supposed to understand these complexities and explain them to their readers—not claim, in spite of the evidence, that sex discrimination is a figment of the biased liberal imagination.

Full story from Slate.

Sex And Violence.

Lin and Anderson hypothesize that the entanglement of brain circuits involved in sex and violence could help mice to respond appropriately to intruders, whether male or female. The neurons activated by sex, they suggest, suppress the urge to lash out against an unknown female.

"There is a need to protect their own territories against a male invader and a need to have sex with female invaders, and this is sort of built into the circuitry of the brain," says Clifford Saper, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. "It's the way animals protect their territory so they have enough room to feed their progeny."

These brain circuits could also exist in humans.

Full article from Nature.

Biology In America.

“You want to send evolutionary biologists out to rural America?” Dr. McClain asked. “On purpose?”

Full story from the NYT.