Assume that there is a fixed amount of money available worldwide for any type of academic scientific research. Also, there are no borders and customs regulations or country-specific firewalls, and everyone theoretically has access to the same equipment and information. In this situation, outfitting a lab is only a matter of money. Finally, assume that any local economy benefits from well-funded academic scientific research.

WOULD YOU RATHER….

a. Spend the money on research that is carried out in institutions that are already at the very front of scientific discovery, to keep up the pace and get the newest information the fastest, but neglecting underfunded countries and institutions.

OR

b. Spend the money on supporting research and science education in second- and third world countries, to give them a chance to catch up, but risking slowing down the top labs, so effectively slowing down the stream of new information (which everyone has access to)

(NB: I am just curious, not actually responsible for the entire world’s science funding. I’d only spend it in coffee shops and bookstores, effectively supporting a whole industry of increasingly wealthy coffee bean farmers and twitchy readers and writers – but we’d soon run out of good science books.)

This news story sounds interesting but it bugs me. It looks and reads like a science or health story, but it’s just fluff.

The title, “Playoff game snack gorging linked to rise in mouth burns”, sounds like there was a study done to suggest this. Maybe two groups of volunteers, one ate vinegar chips every day for a week, the other didn’t, and the first group got mouth burns. A simple experiment that a child could have done for a school science fair.

But once you start reading, it quickly becomes anecdotal, and then descends from there to guesses.

”A Montreal dentist says…”
”We’ve had a couple of cases…”
”...patient really didn’t know what caused it”
”...perhaps the potato chips…”

Yeah. If there were science tabloids this would be on the cover. I’m not saying that there is no way that this could be true. Sure, it’s possible the chips are related to mouth burns. It’s also possible that the celebrities on the covers of the checkout counter magazines are really pregnant and depressed, but it isn’t actual news until their publicist confirms it. With the chips it isn’t actual news until there has been some sort of controlled study. Then we can worry about the chips and about our favourite depressed or pregnant celebrities.

(Part 1 )
(Part 2 )

Guys, first of all, I am so sorry about how long-winded this is. This installment only has one step!
Next time I’ll talk about the panel discussion I did at SciBarCamp. I have a problem, though: I have no notes of it, because I was moderating and was very busy with making sure the discussion was happening fairly and interestingly. I didn’t have time to reflect on what people actually said. If you were there and took notes, please send me them.

And now, part 3!

Step 6: Summarizing the poster
After the first day of SciBarCamp I was left with a poster full of individual suggestions for things people thought everyone should know about science, and the promise to hold a session the next day to talk about it. I tried to narrow down the next day’s discussion by grouping somewhat similar statements under more collective sentences, to make it easier to talk about. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to interpret underlying themes from short statements, and when I looked at the list a few days later I saw different ways of grouping everything, which would have changed the whole discussion. Due to the nature of the weekend’s events, I also ended up doing all this at 3 AM after coming home from the pub after a long day of running around. Ideal work conditions? Not so much. But another reason why this part didn’t seem to go so well is that this was the only part of the entire process where I did all the thinking myself. Everything else was collaborative. Had I had more time, in retrospect, I would have preferred to have the grouping done by a large group of people, if at all. I don’t like how this part was very much dependent on just my own middle of the night brain activity.

But just to put everything out there, this is the complete list of everything on the poster and the way I grouped it (Numbers indicate the number of people who agreed if this was more than one. So a sentence with one check mark got marked “x2’, because it was two peoples’ suggestion for something that everyone should know about science.)

Anyone can do science

• “Even my six-month old is a scientist”
• “When you go to bed every night you observe that the floor exist. You have a (subconscious?) theory that the floor will be there when you wake up. When you awake and test your theory by stepping out of bed, you have used science”
• “Science doesn’t have to be difficult, complicated, elite, or gendered” (x2)

Science does not have all the answers

• “Science-based reasoning should not be the only criteria for determining policy”
• “Science will not save the world”
• “It’s not the only way to truth and understanding” (2x)
• “There is a lot of uncertainty in science, and that is okay” (x2)

Science has all the answers

• “It’s not science’s job to save the world”
• “Science IS the only way to truth and understanding”
• “Science always wins in the end”

Practicing science is a human activity

• “Key ingredients of science are intuition and imagination” (x2)
• “Science
  Can be expressed
  As a haiku”
• “Science is a human activity, take from that what you will” (x2)

Observations and perception are not independent of the observer

• “There is nothing as an “objective fact”. We always filter perception by sensors and models”
• “Observations, like opinions, are based on frame of reference”
• “Science is a way of finding things out without (un)intentionally fooling yourself into arriving at false conclusions”

The practice of science is independent

• “That it is falsifiable, and other so-called ways of knowing are not”
• “The appearance of “design” does not necessarily imply design”
• “Science is about evidence”
• “That is based on testable hypotheses and replication” (2x)

Everyone should be aware of some basic scientific facts and principles that are undisputed in the scientific community

• “Evolution” (x3)
• “[everyone should know] Basic proven facts, like the time earth takes to orbit the sun”
• “C = π d “
• “You can’t “escape” gravity” (2x)

There isn’t one kind of science

• “Scientific knowledge is not isolated. Different scientific theories connect” (3x)
• “Science can be done in several ways. Finding a “valid” one is as much part of the “process” as any other”

Some misunderstandings about science are caused by linguistic limitations (NB – I should have used “semantic” here. Just another regret about this list.)

• “The words “theory”, “believe”, and “random” are used differently by scientists than by the general public”
• Reply to “science always wins in the end” was “what does that mean?”
• Reply to “Basic proven facts…” was “but when is something “proven”

If you scrutinize what’s in these categories, you’ll notice a few things:

• I sometimes had a very hard time coming up with the proper description for a group of statements. “The practice of science is independent” is probably the best example of this. I should have said something about “evidence” or “experimental data” there, I guess.
• Some categories might be considered more significant than others, even though they all contain roughly the same number of statements. The entire group about basic scientific facts could be considered a whole different discussion: are we talking about facts people should know, or about the practice of science?
• Some statements could have been in different or in multiple groups, or some groups could have been merged. “Anyone can do science” and “Practicing science is a human activity” are quite similar. And the statement I would much rather have put into a different group was “Science is a way of finding things out without (un)intentionally fooling yourself into arriving at false conclusions”. It should have been in the “independent” rather than the “not independent” group. I ended up crossing it out from the list I brought with me to moderate the panel discussion (more on that later), so nobody knew that I had grouped it wrong and the bigger categories stayed the same, but still…

What I could or should have done was not meddle with the things people wrote down, but pick some of the more popular statements directly from the poster and discuss those. By grouping them and giving the groups new names, I changed what people wrote, and likely influenced the rest of the discussion.

If there had been more time in between having people write on the poster and the discussion afterwards, grouping might have been done as a group. And if I may take a minute to dream about this: The whole list of suggestions could have been posted online, and people could have collectively decided how to summarize it. About a week or two weeks time between poster and discussion would have been enough time for people to digest the poster, and in a perfect world there would be a kind of interactive website where people could first suggest different categories and then a week later the website would show the suggested categories and people could visit again and drag different statements to the different bigger themes – a choice that wouldn’t be visible to other website visitors but would be tallied behind the scenes to ultimately make a list similar to the one I made by myself, but done by a whole bunch of people.

So that was the step I didn’t like. Either this type of discussion should not be done in one weekend, so there is more time to think about this part of the process as a group, or if it has to be in one weekend this step should be entirely left out.

Next time: the panel discussion!

(See part 1 for the introduction and step 1 and 2)

Step 3: Proposing session at SciBarCamp opening night
We started out SciBarCamp with an empty schedule, and on Friday night everyone was free to suggest a topic by filling out a form and putting it up on one of the boards that were spread out across the room. People milled about, talked to each other, read all the proposals, and marked which ones they liked, or left comments and suggestions on the forms.

Looking at proposed talks on Friday night

Because some people had already read my proposal on the wiki, or saw the blog posts about it, they actually asked me about it that night, and I could point them to the appropriate form.
Any votes were only for the sake of scheduling talks in the appropriate rooms, because there was enough room in the schedule to give everyone who wanted to lead a session the chance to do so.

Step 4: Presented introduction on Saturday
I actually wanted to just put up a blank poster on Saturday, and talk about it on Sunday, but found out on Saturday morning that I had an entire big time slot that I didn’t need, so I ended up giving most of my time away and only talked for about ten minutes to introduce what I wanted to do.

Saturday schedule

In this short introduction I mentioned that even though my topic was called “Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Science”, I didn’t actually have a list of these ten things, because I can’t decide that by myself. It’s something that’s easier thought about with a big group of people. I also gave some background on why I thought this was an important topic: I often spend time with people outside of science, and many of these people are very smart, and I tend to assume that they know at least some very basic things, but then find out that many people don’t know what a gene is, or that breeding is a form of genetic manipulation too. So what should everyone know about science? Should they know these facts? Or should they know something about how research is carried out or communicated?
I brought a big blank sheet of paper with the title “What Should Everyone Know About Science?” and invited everyone to contribute to it over the weekend.

Step 5: The poster
On Saturday afternoon, people had a chance to leave their thoughts on the poster, leave a mark at statements they agreed with or counter those they didn’t agree with. It was fun to see people gather round it and read and think together, or wait for people to leave and write something down by themselves.

Poster in progress, with Nature Network Sharpies clipped on

Why did I collect opinions this way? In verbal group discussions (and online as well) not every voice is equally loud. Some people have no problem sharing their views, and others are more subdued. Some people don’t feel like typing a comment on a blog, or don’t like raising their hand in public. Writing one sentence on a poster is a lot less scary, and by giving everyone a chance to write one sentence (or “second” it) it remained somewhat balanced between participants: you can’t see who wrote it, so the quietest person and the loudest person’s statements are of equal value.
People’s backgrounds aren’t taken into account either. You can’t tell by looking at the poster which statements were written by professional scientists and which statement was written by a fifteen-year old. You might say that that’s a bad thing: doesn’t a professional scientist know better? I don’t think so: by rule of thumb the general public has the same level of scientific literacy as someone in grade 9 or 10. Popular science articles are aimed at this level. It’s much easier for a fifteen year old to gauge whether something is at a grade 9 or 10 level than for someone who has been submerged in their own specialty for years. Remember, this is about what everyone should know, and most people haven’t studied science after high school. A large group of SciBarCamp participants were artists with a high interest in science. (Of course they’re interested in science, why else would they even be there?) They also know more about science than the average Joe, because they’re the ones that actually read all those popular science articles that others might line the bird cage with.
Everyone who was at SciBarCamp was more scientifically literate than most people, but not all to the same extent or in the same area of science. This variation is also a benefit: by talking to new people you suddenly find out that they don’t know as much as you thought about a certain topic. That’s eye-opening. That means that there are probably many others who don’t understand it either. I’m a huge fan of scientific outreach for this reason: it’s not just scientists teaching the public, it’s also scientists learning what the public knows or not, and finding out where the knowledge gaps are.

I wanted to use the poster as a foundation for further discussion, so I signed up for a longer time slot on Sunday, and took the poster home to summarize what people wrote on it. In retrospect, that was something I should have done differently, but more on that later.

I just wrote the second part of What happens on the internet does not stay on the internet and will put that up in a moment.
I was reminded of it tonight after I just had to leave a comment on a post on Treehugger . It’s an environment blog but far less hippie-granola than the name suggests. Commercialized (owned (?) by the Discovery Channel), but they have a team of expert writers on different topics and they’re very good at giving insightful and critical commentary as well as practical tips on urban planning, consumer goods, recycling, alternative energy, waste management, greenwashing and a range of other things.

But today they posted a series of Greenpeace posters about genetic engineering that just don’t make sense at all, and they did not point out that the posters are ridiculous.

The good news is: if you look at the comments they’re full of people who understand what Greenpeace (and Treehugger, unfortunately) did NOT. I still decided to leave my comment as well, just to add to the voices, but I’m glad that the average Treehugger reader is smart enough to recognize crazy genetic fear mongering. The first comment already drives home the point, and everyone else just elaborates.

Of course, this incident reminded me of my SciBarCamp session and prompted me to work on the second part of my write-up for that.

It also reminded me of this xkcd comic :

(This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I’m really curious. Just not really worried.)

So, Nalgene drinking bottle contain Bisphenol A, and Bisphenol A is about to be banned in Canada from baby bottles etc.

But forget the water bottles: if you work in a lab you’ll know Nalgene as the company that produces pretty much everything that’s made of plastic in your lab: plastic big beakers, measuring cylinders. There’s a big Nalgene pipette washer behind me as I type this.

If they change the composition of their plastics, won’t that affect someone’s lab results at some point? I mean, those buffers stored for months in Nalgene, for example, won’t they take up way more Bisphenol A than the water that’s in your bottle for half a day? Dialyzing antibodies in a 4-liter Nalgene beaker overnight, would that make a difference with or without Bisphenol A?

I have not forgotten about the rest of my write-up of the thing I did at SciBarCamp, but other things came up. I just finished a course on Teaching in Higher Education, and this coming weekend is my last orchestra concert of the season, and then I only have three major projects going on instead of five or six, so I’ll find some time soon.

Meanwhile, here is a practical tip for cell biologists: don’t book four hours of confocal microscope time right after a visit to the optometrist… Those pupil dilating drops don’t go well with the need to peer through eyepieces and focus on fluorescent cells.

The ten-step process of taking a discussion about “Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Science” from the web to SciBarCamp and back online, or why we still don’t know what everyone should know about science, but at least managed to have a conversation with a wide range of people.

Introduction:
In organizing SciBarCamp one of the things we wanted to do was to get the participants to think about some of the topics they might be interested in before the event itself. On the first night we would give everyone a chance to suggest a session, but we thought it might help people to get their thoughts flowing before they came in. We had a page on the SciBarCamp wiki where everyone could leave their suggestions for topics. A few weeks before the event there wasn’t much there yet, and I wanted to encourage people to leave their suggestions, so as an example I added a topic that I am interested in myself:

On a few recent occasions I found myself explaining things about science in general or about my specific field of Molecular Biology that I thought everyone knew already. I had to explain what a gene is to people who are mere months away from getting a PhD. If they don’t know, how can we expect the general public to understand all these news articles about genetic mutations that make a person more or less susceptible to diseases. And what is a mutation? Mutations are “bad”, right, like the evil mutants in cartoons and video games? Words like “mutation” and “theory” have certain meanings in daily life and other meanings when the same words are used by scientists to talk about their work. Should people be aware of that? What is it that many people may not know about science and really should know?

This is a huge question, and definitely not something I, or anyone, can answer by themselves. I don’t even think a group of just scientists can answer this, because they know too much. They’re too involved, and might overlook things that they find obvious, but which are not necessarily obvious to everyone else. You have to have some feedback from people who can take a step back and who are not “burdened” by too much knowledge of one particular field of science in trying to see a bigger picture.

The SciBarCamp audience was pretty much ideal, because there were some experienced scientists, who know what it’s like to do research, there were graduate students, there were people who work in both science and other fields, and there were a lot of people who weren’t practicing science themselves, but were at least very interested in it and think about science and scientific discoveries and research once in a while. Of course there were only a limited number of people there, so while there was a somewhat large and varied group, you can be even more diverse if you let other people in on the conversation, and that is exactly what happened here.

Step 1: Online Suggestion
In an attempt to get other people thinking about topics they might like to discuss at SciBarCamp, and to get some discussion going, I posted the following on our wiki:
”Since we have some outreach people, writers, artists, bloggers, and other communicators of science I thought we could maybe do some sort of panel discussion about things you think everyone should know about science, or about common misconceptions. (eg. use of the word “theory” in a science context does NOT mean “I don’t know, here’s a wild guess.”, or the discrepancy between science being presented as a list of finished facts/formulas in high school and the dynamics/discovery of actual research)”

Then, to draw people’s attention to the fact that I edited the topics page and that they can do so too if they pleased, I wrote the following on easternblot.net , brainstorming as I typed:
”My idea: find 4 or 5 volunteers from different backgrounds to sit on a 20 minute panel and (with audience feedback) make a list of Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Science. Since we have a wide audience, this hopefully would be a varied list. Actually, maybe we could just put up a large sheet of paper and have people write down what they think should be on the list and get back to it later.”

Step 2: Online Spread
After I posted my suggestions, Michael Nielsen hooked in on the topic with a blog post about what it means to know something and Larry Moran made his personal list of Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Science to which he got several responses in the comments, spreading the conversation further. Chad Orzel, who would not be attending SciBarCamp at all, read Michael’s post and gave his three suggestions for Things Everyone Should Know, generating many more comments on his blog as well.

What happened here is quite interesting: I suggested a topic to discuss at an event that was limited to a certain location, time, and group of participants. Yet here were people starting this very discussion online, and people from all over the world had a chance to participate at their leisure. Of course it happens quite regularly that people are talking online about conferences taking place elsewhere, but what was unique here was that some of the people online were attending the conference, and I was reading everything myself, so the discussion that started online was incorporated into the discussion as a whole, and later referred to.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, we’re not even at SciBarCamp yet. That will be step 3, in a new post, which I haven’t written yet. I just thought I’d give you something to start reading.

So, I should probably have mentioned this earlier, but Hypothesis is looking for submissions and the deadline is Monday.

Among other things, we accept essays that have previously been written for course assignments and aren’t otherwise used. (Ask course coordinator to check if you can submit to Hypothesis, but it’s fine with us that is was previously course-work)

I’m specifically mentioning this category of possible submissions, because it’s already so very close to the deadline and this is work that has already been written.

We do not accept work that has already been published elsewhere. Check guidelines for anything else. And keep in mind that everything is peer reviewed. For opinion pieces that means you need to not even begin to submit if you don’t cite your sources or use proper argumentation. Our reviewers will jump on that right away.

Anything that comes in after the deadline will automatically move on to the fall issue but will get into the review pipeline as soon as possible. So submit things even if you won’t make it in time for Monday.

P.S. we’re indexed in Google Scholar, everything is open access, and there is a small print run distributed among University of Toronto people, subscribers, and the National Library of Canada.

I’m writing an assignment for a class I’m taking and two sentences in I said “This was before Open Access, and before Wikipedia.” That’s when I caught myself: Really? Is it really? Check it! And I spent the next 10 minutes looking for the birth date of Wikipedia (2001 – easily found on Wikipedia itself – perhaps the one topic it’s a definite source on) and the birth of the phrase or idea of “open access”. I found it! The phrase “open access” comes from the Budapest Open Access Initiative officially dated February 2002, and initiated at a conference in December 2001.

The assignment I’m writing is on MIT OpenCourseWare first proposed in 2000, announced in 2001, and launched in 2002.
So, yes, it was conceived before Open Access and Wikipedia were known, but this endless fact checking is why everything always takes so long to write…