Fancy Footnotes for the Fearless

April 20, 2016

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April 20, 2016

Back in February, I implored you to stop using unlinked footnotes in your blog posts. The intrepid Stephen Heard [1] of Scientist Sees Squirrel fame, not the 18th century governor of Georgia pointed out that that linking is a little kludgy. The return anchor can only be at the beginning of a paragraph, so it’s not an exact jump. And in my browser, my WordPress banner overhangs the link, so I don’t actually see the line I’m jumping to. Yes, a little kludgy. But so much better than no link.

Then Stephen wondered whether it would be possible to do pop-up footnotes, like in Randall Monroe’s [2] of XKCD fame, not the former NASA roboticist “What If?” series. When you click these links, a little box pops up and displays the footnoted text. It’s slick and has a more modern feel. It doesn’t require any scrolling and is less kludgy than linked footnotes. So I looked into it, and the answer is yes! [3] Well, the answer is yes! if you host your own blog. If you’re using a free blog hosted on wordpress.COM, you’re out of luck. You get what you pay for, I guess. Sorry, Stephen.

It’s not even that hard. You have to manually add a couple pieces of code to your blog website, but doing so is a one-time deed and takes less than five minutes. Then you simply add a little HTML around your footnotes and voila! Stunning pop-up footnotes.

Here’s how on WordPress:

  1. In your WordPress control panel, go to “Appearance” and then “Editor.” You can now manually edit your blog pages. Careful here.
  2. The first file to edit is your style sheet. It will be called “style.css”. Somewhere in it (at the end is fine), add the following code [4] stolen borrowed from Randall’s “What If?” site: 
    .ref {
position: relative;
vertical-align: baseline;
}

.refnum {
position: relative;
left: 2px;
bottom: 1ex;
font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;
color: #005994;
font-size: .7em;
font-weight: bold;
text-decoration: underline;
cursor: pointer;
}

.refbody {
font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;
font-size: .7em;
line-height: 1.1;
display: block;
min-width: 20em;
position: absolute;
left: 25px;
bottom: 5px ;
border: 1px solid;
padding: 5px;
background-color: #fff;
word-wrap: break-word;
z-index: 9999;
overflow: auto;
}
  3. You can play with the values in here to customize the look to your liking. Save your edits.
  4. Then you want to edit your header template. It will be called “header.php”. In the header part of the file (right before the </head> tag is good), you want to paste in the following code: 
    <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.1/jquery.min.js">
</script>
<script>
jQuery.noConflict();
jQuery(function() {
jQuery(".refbody").hide();
jQuery(".refnum").click(function(event) {
jQuery(this.nextSibling).toggle();
event.stopPropagation();
});
jQuery("body").click(function(event) {
jQuery(".refbody").hide();
});
});
</script>
  5. Save those edits.
  6. Now you’re ready to write a post with a pop-up footnote. To do so, type the link you want (such as “[5]”) and the text you want to pop up.
  7. Switch to “Text” mode from “Visual” mode. There’s a little tab to do this in the upper right, when you’re composing a new post.
  8. Before the link, add these tags: <span class="ref"><span class="refnum">
  9. Between the link and the text you want to pop up, add these tags: </span><span class="refbody">
  10. And after the text you want to pop up, add these tags: </span></span>
  11. So, for example, my HTML for this [5] One, two, five! footnote reads <span class="ref"><span class="refnum">[5]</span><span class="refbody"> One, two, five!</span></span>

That should do it. If you blog on a non-WordPress platform and you have edit access to your blog’s files, the steps should be virtually the same. You’ll need to add CSS code to your stylesheet and the javascript function to whatever template your blog pages are derived from. The HTML tags will be the same.

And now, your readers will be delighted by their ease of reading and you will be the footnote envy of all of blogdom. [6] Until someone tells you your page looks crappy on their browser or device. Or blog posts look crazy when they arrive as email. Or… well, go ahead and tell me. That’s what the comments are for.

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/04/20/fancy-footnotes-for-the-fearless/

The hidden financial costs and risks of graduate and postdoctoral fellowships and grants in the U.S.

April 14, 2016

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April 14, 2016

Congratulations! Your proposal was successful! You’ve been awarded a fellowship or grant! These are great words to read, and overall it’s a good thing to get a fellowship or grant as an early career researcher. But there are hidden costs to these awards, both in terms of your immediate finances and the risks you take when you accept them.

To begin, I should state – or at least I assume I’m supposed to state, since all the universities do – that I am not a financial or tax professional. 1 Nothing in this post should be construed as advice, and you should consult your financial advisor before making any financial decisions. (Hahaha! You’ve got one of those, right? A financial advisor? Yeah, me neither.) This post consists of things you merely might want to consider.

The first thing to know about a graduate or postdoctoral fellowship or grant is that the amount you receive is considered personal income. That means that you are required to pay personal income tax on it. That might seem logical for a fellowship that covers your salary. But it’s true for grants, too.  A small research grant to do a pilot project? Taxable to you personally. A travel grant to go to a conference? Taxable to you personally. This is in contrast to a grant that your PI receives. When your PI gets a grant, it’s technically the university that is the legal recipient of the grant. Your PI is really just the grant administrator – she gets to use the funds in the grant, but the money is not hers. And this means she is not liable for taxes on it.

But you are. So you’ll likely need to think ahead about the tax implications. If you assume you’re taxed at about a 20% rate for the combination of federal and state taxes, then you essentially lose 1/5 of your grant money. $500 for conference travel? It’s really only worth $400. $3000 grant to do your fieldwork? Nope. More like $2400. If you’re brave, you could consider putting the amount you’ll have to pay in tax in the budget of your grant proposals. (I’ve rarely done this, assuming that the people reading the proposals are not tax-savvy and will not understand why I’m requesting extra money to pay taxes when no one else does.)

Now whether you’ve got a fellowship or grant, another important thing to know is that no one is going to automatically withhold any of your money for taxes – or even keep track of it for you. If you’ve been paid for anything more than a small job in the U.S., you know that your employer will withhold some federal and state 2 taxes from every paycheck. Then early each year, you receive a W-2 form that lists all the money you earned the previous year, along with how much was withheld for taxes. You use this form to help fill out your federal and state tax returns.

For any money you receive as a fellowship or grant, you will not get a separate W-2, and any W-2 that you do get (for TAing, for example) will not include amounts you got as fellowship or grant money. So what does that mean? It means that your grant and fellowship were not reported to the government, but that you are still responsible for self-reporting these amounts. How do you know how much you got? You’re supposed to keep track of all that information yourself. (Joy!) If you’ve been paid on a fellowship exclusively for a year, you can use your last pay statement of the year to see your annual income on that fellowship – it will say something like “gross year to date.” If you have mixed income that year – some fellowship and some paid work, your last pay statement of the year might help, if it records the different types of income separately. What I have done when that statement isn’t helpful is to very nicely ask a finance administrator to send me my total fellowship income for the year.

Where do you report it on your tax return? The amount is reported on the line that reads “Wages, salaries, tips, etc.” (i.e. line 7 on 2015’s forms 1040 and 1040A or line 1 on 2015’s form 1040EZ). You add together the fellowship amount with all the amounts you have on your W-2s for this line. And then you write on the dotted line “SCH” and the amount of your fellowship. (Yes, “SCH” stands for scholarship. The tax code is very confused about the differences between undergrads and grad students and postdocs. You can find official instructions for 2015 in IRS publication 970.)

fellowship-income-line7

Example of recording a fellowship of $30,000 on a tax form that also has $18,559 earned income.

Now: withholding. In my experience, most fellowships do not have taxes automatically withheld. But you really do want the taxes automatically withheld. If you don’t have taxes withheld, you are supposed to file quarterly taxes – that is, file your taxes 4 times per year. (Sounds like fun, right?) If you don’t withhold and don’t pay quarterly, you may have a substantial (hundreds of dollars) tax penalty to pay at the end of the year, not to mention the hefty end-of-year tax bill itself. So how do you get taxes withheld? You ask. You very nicely talk to your finance administrator and ask if you can have taxes voluntarily withheld. In my experience, most places (but not all) will allow you to do this. (If they don’t, you’re stuck with paying quarterly taxes.) Follow your administrator’s instructions on how to fill out the necessary forms.

When you do eventually file taxes for your fellowship year, there are some things you should know. First, you probably won’t (but may!) get a statement from your university saying how much you received. (If you do, it might be on a 1098-T form, so check that out if you receive one.) The total fellowship and grant amount is considered unearned income. That is: it’s like you won the lottery – someone just gave you money, and you aren’t considered to have worked for it. That means it’s treated slightly differently than income you earned (like as a TA or RA).

If you (and your spouse, if married filing jointly) only have fellowship income for the year, you are not eligible for several things. First, you can’t take the earned income tax credit. Even if you’re a single person living off a small fellowship and you’re technically living below the poverty line, you cannot claim it. (There are a bunch of other restrictions, too.) How much should you care? If you’re single and without kids, the most you can earn and still get any credit is about $15,000. If you’re married and without kids, the cap is about $20,000. If you have at least one kid, the threshold starts at around $40,000 and goes up for being married or having more kids. The credit itself (if you’re eligible) is likely to be between $50 and $300 if you don’t have kids, and between $500 and $3000 if you do. So this credit can be substantial for someone on limited income, like many grad students. Again, if your only income is fellowship, then you can ignore this credit; you’re not eligible. But if you have some other type of “regular” income (or your spouse does) in addition to fellowship, you may be able to claim this credit.

Another thing to know is that if you (and your spouse, if married filing jointly) only have fellowship income for the year, you are not allowed to contribute to an individual retirement account (IRA). Yeah, yeah, you might say, but I make too little for that anyway. But you really should be thinking about contributing to your retirement as soon as you possibly can. Because of compounding, the amount you put into a retirement account when you’re younger will be worth more than larger amounts you put in ten years from now. Try to put in a little bit each year – it adds up. Well, unless you only had fellowship income, in which case you’re not allowed to contribute to your own retirement.

While we’re on the topic of retirement, let’s consider another potential downside to fellowships (as opposed to earned income): you don’t pay social security taxes. While that’s a nice thing in the short term (you get to keep more money!), in the long term many years without earned income might mean you have to work longer into retirement age or take a lower social security payment in retirement. Is this a big deal? You can think about it like this: your social security benefits are based on your top 35 years of earnings. If you start out working when you’re 22, and have 5 years of fellowship income, that means you need to work until least 62 years of age to get fully social security benefits, which seems pretty reasonable. This assumes, though, that nothing happens in your life that causes additional years of low or no income. So while the fact that while you are on fellowship, you are losing years of social security contributions isn’t a huge deal, it is something to be aware of.

Something that is perhaps a bigger issue is the disability coverage that social security provides. This was completely off my radar until the husband of a friend was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago. He was the sole income-earner for the family of four, and he was suddenly unable to work for an indefinite period of time. If find yourself unable to work due to a disability that is going to last for at least a year, you can apply for social security disability payments. But you won’t be eligible for them if you haven’t “worked” enough recently – and fellowships don’t count. In particular, if you’re young and most of your adult income has been through fellowships or other jobs that don’t pay into social security (like many teaching jobs), you may not be eligible for disability payments at all. So if you’re on fellowships for extended periods of time, you might look into purchasing long-term disability insurance. (And while you’re at it, you might consider short-term disability insurance, too.)

Finally, one more risk and expense to consider if you’re living off a fellowship: health insurance. If you are a grad student on fellowship, it is likely (but not guaranteed) that your health insurance will look like that of your peers on TAs and RAs, and it’s likely (but not guaranteed) that your premiums will be the same. If you’re a postdoc, however, being on a fellowship can mean anything from zero coverage to full coverage, depending on the origin of the fellowship, your institution, and how that institution classifies you. I highly recommend looking into health insurance and other benefits before accepting a fellowship, because if you don’t get coverage through your institution, it may be prohibitively expensive to find health insurance on your own (which you are legally required to do). Even for fellowships that provide a health insurance stipend, that stipend is likely not enough to cover your full costs, meaning that the fellowship is worth less than its face value.

And again, none of this blog post should be considered professional advice – it’s merely things to think about. For those of you who are professors of various stripes, please do consider having your department hire a professional to come in and give a two-hour tax workshop for your grad students and postdocs once per year. The U.S. tax code is tricky for students who aren’t undergraduates (i.e. graduate students) and for those on fellowships or receiving grants, financial situations vary widely, and early career researchers often don’t have the means to hire financial advisors on their own.

1. I’m not a professional, but I have filled out more than the average number of tax returns. Having a predilection for complex systems with detailed minutia, I used to volunteer as a tax preparation assistant for AARP, helping low-income and elderly people file their taxes. ^

2. Note that not all states have a personal income tax. If you live in one of these states, you only have to worry about federal taxes. ^

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Increasing the number of women in computer science requires real cultural change, not just recruitment

April 6, 2016

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April 6, 2016

Not too long ago, NPR’s Planet Money had a segment on what’s happened to women in computer science. It really struck a chord. To summarize, women were a mainstay of computer science from its earliest years up until 1984. Then, the number of women in computer science at universities started plummeting, while the number of women in physics, engineering, and math kept going up, if only very slowly. When I was a computer science college student in the 1990’s, that was my experience – a sex ratio of between 5:1 to 10:1, men to women. I was frequently the only female student in my smaller seminar classes and one of only a handful in the larger lectures. There were exactly two female professors out of a couple dozen, and one of them was recruited away to another university right before my junior year (when I was hoping to take robotics with her, boo).

What happened in 1984 is that introductory college computer science classes began to assume some experience on the part of students. And many of the top students had it; they had had a home computer with which they had tinkered and played in the years leading up to college and had taught themselves a lot of the basics. But these students were almost universally boys, as home computers were marketed exclusively to boys and men as tech toys for tech-geeks.

I had a weird upbringing in this respect. Both my parents were in the computer industry. My dad worked for a federal contractor and would bring home the latest in computers and gadgetry on a regular basis. My mom was a programmer. She had gotten into it in the early years when there were many women in the field, and maintained a middle-level job ever after. When I was young, maybe four or five, it was the early 1980’s, and my parents bought a home PC. It sat in a common area of the house and I had free access to it (unlike many of the female interviewees on the Planet Money segment). My younger brother was little and often sick, my parents were quite busy, and I was pretty much left to my own devices. And I loved the new computer. I spent hours making ASCII art on the basic text word processor (the single program that came with it) and printing out this art on our also-new dot matrix printer.

My parents bought me video games for the computer. I had J-bird, frogger, Rocky’s Boots, and more. In 1984 – the very year that computer science began to be a boys’ domain, I was six, and the acclaimed adventure-puzzle game King’s Quest came out. It changed my world. Not only was it the most fun game I had ever played, it was created by Roberta Williams – a woman. To me, it seemed perfectly normal to aspire to be a computer game creator. It never occurred to me, as a child, that I was joining a boys club.

I told my parents that I wanted to make games, not just play them, and my mom took me to the library, where we found a 50-line BASIC program called “Trapped” in a 3-2-1 Contact Magazine. (Back then 3-2-1 Contact Magazine had a short, if sometimes buggy, BASIC program in every issue.) My parents installed BASIC on our machine, I typed in the program, and voila! I was a programmer. In the typical way of the self-taught, I then figured out what each line did, changed parts of the program, added to it, and then started writing my own. My mom remembers that when our family went to the beach that summer, I brought along the hefty BASIC syntax manual and read it lying on a towel on the beach all day. There were no how-to books back then. You figured things out by doing.

Growing up, my group of friends leaned geeky and was all girls. I discovered that though my friends were good at math and science, none of them had had much experience with computers. So I was pretty much on my own computer-wise.

In middle school, my mom found a computer science camp, and I attended it for a few weeks each summer for a few years. Around this time, I also started becoming interested in boys. So I enjoyed both the camp activities and the attention I got as one of just a few girls there among more than a hundred boys. Importantly, at this camp I was never excluded. I was just one of the guys. I got a good feel for computer-geek culture and the broad opportunities in computer science as a whole. I was more interested in the field than ever.

By high school, I had taught myself C, having exhausted the memory limits of BASIC. My preferred programs were games and animations, and I made many of both. I had taught myself rudimentary trigonometry so I could program circles, arcs, and circular movements in my graphical games. I had mastered MS-DOS. And I lurked on text bulletin boards using the top-of-the-line 9600-baud modem my parents had bought me.

But I knew I was missing out on some important things. I knew, for example, that Unix offered some great opportunities that I was unfamiliar with. I didn’t have a Unix machine and didn’t know how to get one. I was envious of the boy cliques that spend entire lunch times geeking out on some secret-to-me ways of computing. I also didn’t really understand bulletin board culture and so didn’t engage there at all. Computer science was something I did solo.

Then came college. I had never had a formal computer science course, but I was set on being a computer science major. I got a full-ride scholarship with the stipulation that I committed to being a computer science major, and worked for the scholarship granter after college. Great, I thought. No problem.

The intro computer science course was pretty easy for me, and I loved learning the new concepts that I had never self-learned (e.g. recursion, object-oriented programming). But I was also aware that the course was quite hard for a large minority of students, including almost all the women in the class.

In order to help students with little background, there was a small army of undergraduate assistants who held tutorials, office hours, and generally offered as much support and help as possible. While I think this is an overall good thing, it ended up alienating me. I didn’t need help, and so didn’t end up forming any social ties in the department – not with the other students in my class (mostly freshman), the teaching assistants (mostly sophomores), or the professors. The boys who didn’t need help found one another and formed geek-boy cliques. And for the first time, doing computer science solo felt really lonely.

I joined the women-in-computer-science club, but we were a very small leaderless band. We sat around awkwardly and wondered what exactly our club was supposed to do. Neither of the women professors seemed interested in it. After a while, the indomitable danah boyd, a student in my year, took the reins and the club gained some momentum. But then terrible things happened to her.

I always felt like an outsider in the computer science department, so I don’t know the details. You can read danah’s own account if you want it. But basically, some students formed an online forum where people posted anonymously and destroyed the reputations of whomever they wanted. danah was high on their list, and suffered badly. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that any prominent female student was going to be shredded by the caustic forum. I laid low. I took my classes. I got excellent grades. I spent as little time as possible in the computer science building and with other computer science majors. I formed my friends through the other activities I was involved with.

If I hadn’t had the scholarship, I would have switched majors. Math. Or physics. The computer science culture was just so poisonous. But I persevered and especially enjoyed the content of the higher level math-y courses – graphics, animation, cryptography, computational linguistics. My senior year, I did a senior thesis – my first experience with research – and loved it. I might have discovered research earlier if I hadn’t felt alienated from the program, as undergraduates were frequently recruited into research labs.

I left the computer science field four years after college, when I quit my well-paid telecommunications job. Three years later, I enrolled in a Ph.D. program – in ecology. What’s great is that I can now use a lot of what I learned in computer science doing ecological research. And, I work in a much, much, much friendlier environment.

But, still, I left computer science. And I should have been easy to retain. I don’t rule out the possibility of going back into the tech world one day, but seeing as how the culture doesn’t seem to have changed at all, I would do so very carefully. (Just as many people plan to one day write a novel, I plan to one day write an awesome and popular computer game.)

It may be that female computer science enrollment declined beginning in the mid-1980’s because of the self-taught-advantage effect, but it remains low because of the caustic culture. As much as I’d like to think that efforts like Google’s Made With Code project will have some impact, I really don’t think they will. Making everything pink only enforces the sort of gender segregation that led to the problem in the first place. (As early as preschool, boys and girls are sorting out what are ‘boy’ roles and what are ‘girl’ roles.)  The key to increasing women’s participation in computer science is figuring out how to retain the (potentially pink-hating) geek girls who are drawn to computer science initially, but who are later repelled by an unwelcoming and sexist culture. And that means making real cultural change.

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Reddit science AMAs for ecologists

April 4, 2016

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April 4, 2016

reddit_wordle

Word cloud produced by http://snoopsnoo.com/ using our Reddit AMA. See recommendation #3 for why our names are so prominent in it.

Last week, I ran a Reddit Science AMA with collaborators Koen Hufkens and Josh Gray on climate change, phenology, and citizen science. In the morning, a general post went up describing our research. By the time we started replying to questions at 1 pm, there were more than 100 questions waiting for us! I skimmed through them shortly before 1 pm and was really impressed with the insightfulness and thought that was put into them. Some of the question-writers were more up on their climate change research than I was! And I definitely learned some things in reading and replying to the questions.

Moreover, it was fun. The questions were wide-ranging, and generally in earnest. People really appeared to care about the answers. We answered questions for the recommended two hours and then two of the three of us kept going. By the end of the day, the post had amassed 430 comments (about 300 of which were questions) and 2400 up-votes. And we weren’t done answering questions yet! (We went back and answered some more the next day.)

UPDATE: I have since learned more about Reddit statistics. Our AMA received a total of about 3100 votes, including the week following the actual event. And the general rule of thumb is that the number of people who see a post is 10-20 times the number who vote on it. Which means that our AMA reached the eyeballs of (conservatively) 30,000 people. Not bad!

Our proximate purpose for doing the AMA was to drive some traffic to our Season Spotter citizen science project. And in this respect, it was modestly successful. We had 223 people click on over from the Reddit AMA to check it out. But if traffic is your only concern, it may be more effective to spend your twelve hours of combined effort elsewhere. Many scientists seem to do AMAs to promote their research, especially if they’ve had an important paper recently published. I think this is a great use of an AMA. Also useful is general scientific outreach and education, which is an ultimate goal of why we did our AMA. (Season Spotter was designed to be dual purpose – both science and outreach.) Thousands Tens of thousands of people saw our AMA and at least some of its content. A healthy fraction of those thousands Hundreds posted questions or commented on our answers. That’s a pretty good use of several hours in my book. (It’s about the same investment of time as a public talk I gave to 30 interested locals a couple months ago.)

Plus a third-party site called the Winnower automatically archives science AMAs, skimming off the most up-voted content, and issues them DOIs. (Here’s ours.) In other words, there is also a resulting product that you can cite in your next annual report or proposal, demonstrating broader impacts. All this for free and no effort!

Interested in running your own Reddit Science AMA?

Here’s what I would recommend:

  1. Recruit some collaborators. I am so glad Koen and Josh agreed to do the AMA with me. (Thanks again, guys!) I can’t imagine answering all those questions solo. In addition, our broader combined knowledge let us answer more questions comprehensively. And it allowed us to post multiple perspectives on complicated questions. And it was more fun!
  2. The time investment is relatively minimal, but intense. It might take an hour to schedule the AMA. (Follow the guidelines here to do so.) When the day arrives, the moderators of the science subreddit will email you a login username and password. You probably want to log in early (maybe a half hour before your scheduled answering time) and start checking out the accumulating questions and figuring out who will answer what. Then plan to spend more than 2 hours answering questions. Combined, the three of us put in 10 hours during the AMA answering questions, and a couple more hours for follow-up answers the next day.
  3. If you’ve roped in collaborators to help, you’ll have more than one person logged in to the same Reddit account. In order to know who’s responding to each question, begin each reply with your name. (If you forget, you can go back and edit your comment to add it back in.) For example: “Do you have a Boston accent?” “Margaret: Nope.”
  4. Set up a separate chat for you and your collaborators to communicate while the AMA is live. (We used Google Hangouts messaging.) The three of us were in three separate physical locations, so for us it was a must. But I can also see it being useful if you’re in the same room together. When you’re about to answer a question, copy it into the chat forum. That way you can avoid working on a question that your colleague is already answering and spread out your combined effort more. (And you can write fake answers to each other that you couldn’t possibly post on Reddit: “What was your incentive to become an ecologist?” “THE BIG BUCKS AND FAME!!!”)
  5. Bring snacks! A couple hours into question-answering, I could have used some nourishment. I dashed down to the library on the second floor where they always keep a stock of chocolate for just such an emergency, but it would have been better to be better prepared, gastronomically.
  6. Be mentally ready to answer depth and breadth. Some questions may be highly technical or scientific. Some of the questions might be from other scientists in your field or related fields! The question that rose highest in our AMA was asking us to comment on a published paper. We also had questions as wide as ‘how do I talk about climate change with my climate-denying relatives?’ and ‘what’s the best way to reduce my carbon footprint?’ to ‘how does climate change affect my garden?’ and ‘what about effects of climate change on mushrooms?’ to ‘how much do you make?’ and ‘how do you sleep at night?’
  7. Have fun! You don’t have to be a dry scientist. A little humor can go a long way.

I hope to see more Reddit science AMAs by ecologists in the future. It’s a low-investment and fun way to have a direct impact thousands of people. Give it a try!

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/04/04/reddit-science-amas-for-ecologists/

Reddit for science communication (UPDATE: now with a link!)

March 30, 2016

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March 30, 2016

If you’ve dabbled in science communication you’ve likely come across the difference between communicating AT people and communicating WITH people. Or maybe you haven’t. After all, science has historically largely subscribed to the deficit model of teaching: the “general public” is a bunch of people who are empty vessels into which we should pour in knowledge. Want to do science communication? Give a public talk! Write an article for a popular science magazine or for a newspaper! Get interviewed on radio or TV!

These things are all good. I won’t say they aren’t. Science communication can comprise many different methods. But these are all examples of communicating AT people. It’s a one-way street. It’s quite comfortable for the scientist. And it’s not clear that it’s particularly effective. I think that if we as scientists really want to engage the public, we need to start talking WITH people. And this is a lot less comfortable for us.

So in keeping with my taste for things that make me uncomfortable, I’ve recruited a couple colleagues and we’re going to do a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Thursday (tommorow!) at 1pm Eastern.

UPDATE: Here’s the link to our Reddit AMA!

reddit

What is Reddit? Apparently, it’s a well-known online place where people post links, comment, and have conversations. I just joined it. I’m obviously late to the party. But there are a LOT of non-scientists on Reddit who are really interested in science. So it’s a good place to start having these conversations.

An AMA is a particular type of Reddit discussion in a Q&A format, where someone (or a handful of people) answer questions on, well, anything. Many famous people have done AMAs, including celebrities, politicians, sports stars, musicians, etc. We are doing our AMA in a subreddit (a section of Reddit) called science which is subscribed to by millions of people. Importantly, the science subreddit is carefully moderated to suppress anti-science comments. Since I work on climate change research, this is a particularly nice feature. How it works is that starting at 8 am Eastern, people (including you!) can post questions for me and my colleagues to answer. Then at 1 pm, we will start answering them. People will hopefully keep posting questions and follow-ups to our answers. And we will have something like a discussion.

So on Thursday, come on over, ask us a question (about anything!), or just lurk and see what’s going on.

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/03/30/reddit-for-science-communication/

I am unwilling to relocate again (and it will probably cost me my academic “career”)

March 23, 2016

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March 23, 2016

Multiple moves are the norm in academia and it’s a major structural problem that gets in the way of diversity (and other) initiatives. Long gone are the days when the academic was (only) a hetero white male who was either single (and a highly eligible bachelor with his PhD in hand) or had a family of one or more dependents (in the true sense of the word) who would follow him hither and yon. And yet, academia still acts like this is how things are.

Moving causes the one-body problem. Single people may rightly not want to move to places with job opportunities for multiple reasons. The potential destination may be small and have few options for dating. This is obviously a difficult problem for people looking for same-sex partners. It is also a problem for women, whose advanced degrees are often a minus when seeking opposite-sex partners rather than the plus it is for men. For people who come from minority cultures or who identify as racial or ethnic minorities, finding a place that feels safe and welcoming where there is also a job may be quite challenging. Those who need specific types of medical care may be limited in geography to where they can get adequate care.

Moving causes the two-body problem. Whether your partner is in academia or not, moving is logistically difficult for families that depend on two incomes. Finding a second job for a partner can be difficult to impossible. No help is provided for postdocs who need to find jobs for partners. And help for tenure-track faculty ranges from non-existent to moderately helpful – but it’s impossible to know in advance what institutions offer what level of support.

Moving causes the three-or-more-body problem. In addition to the challenges faced by couples, families with children face the additional challenges of finding affordable childcare and/or appropriate schools. Like adults, children may need specialized care that can only be provided in certain locations.2 And when a family starts containing multiple individuals with different needs, finding a location that will work for everyone becomes increasingly difficult. Parents with young children, especially, need extra support from outside the nuclear family, and moves sever the connections with friends, family, and the community that are desperately needed, especially in times of illness and injury.

Moving causes tension within extended families. Most people do not move around the country or world every couple years and it can be hard to explain why you can’t afford to visit for that special holiday or event, especially when you keep missing them. For those with aging parents, the prospect of never being around to help siblings with their care can cause conflict. The prospect of rarely being around to even see these parents can cause guilt and sadness.

Moving causes mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. Academia has a mental health problem that it has so far been unwilling to acknowledge and seriously address. Part of this has to do with academic culture. But part of it has to do with the relocations. Regardless of family status, when you move, you face the very real possibility of having no friends, no relations (of any kind if you’re single or outside your nuclear family if not), and no social safety net. For people who have chronic depression or anxiety, this is a disaster and can (literally) destroy lives. For those who don’t, moves can trigger depression or anxiety. Moving and changing jobs are major life stressors. Without a social support network of some type, too many young academics have a very hard time coping with their lives.

Moving causes physical health problems. Moving – especially if you’ve got more than one or two people to move – is incredibly time-consuming and logically1 logistically complicated. Academics already work long hours and the additional complications of moving can eat up time devoted to self-care, including exercise. Upon moving to a new place, a person needs to find new venues for self-care, such as new running or biking routes, new gyms or studios or athletic clubs, and new partners or groups for engaging in these activities. New routines must emerge, and until they do, such activities are often neglected. Moving also causes an interruption in ongoing medical care, which can be difficult to resume after a move. (I have been working for three months to get one set of medical documents transferred to my new provider, to no avail so far.) Not having a long-term relationship with an established primary care provider can also lead to substandard care.

Moving causes small emergencies to turn into catastrophes. When you don’t know anyone, something that normally would be simply inconvenient or difficult can turn into a nightmare. I am so thankful that the emergencies in my life have occurred in the places where I have an established social network. What happens when newly moved parents are too sick to care for their children and there is no one to help? What happens to the dog when its single owner ends up in the hospital for an extended stay and there is no one to help? What happens when your apartment burns down and you’ve got no one to stay with?

Moving is ridiculously expensive. Young academics are underpaid relative to their skills, abilities, and credentials and academia doesn’t absorb moving costs like it should. A single person moving cross-country in their car with all their possessions packed into it and planning to camp on the way can probably manage to do so for several hundred dollars.  Moving a family that includes children cross-country can cost up to $10,000 or more. A budget of three to five thousand dollars is reasonable for many moves. And guess who pays for that? Yes, the academic. This is crazy. I’ve heard others defend academic moving by saying that other professions move regularly, too. Yes, but, those other professions PAY for the moves. Military? The fed pays for the move (up to $18,000 back when I worked for it). Contractor who requires moving? Company pays for the move. Companies that hire people who live far away? You get paid for the move and/or you get a hiring bonus. I have made many friends who move frequently. But only the academics absorb the costs, instead of demanding that the organization getting their services pay. (Dear Academia, you need to fix this. And PI’s, that means you need to include at least a few thousand dollars for moving in your budgets when you write postdocs into your proposals. Work with your administrators to figure out how to do it properly – moving allowance, start-up fee, hiring bonus, whatever.)

I have had all the advantages, privileges, support from others, and luck you can imagine. (And I’m good at moving. I’ve lived in 8 places since I left college almost sixteen years ago.) But academia has forced three of those moved: between 2010 and 2014, my then three-person family hauled across country for academic jobs (both mine and my husband’s). It has been hard, exhausting, stressful, anxiety-producing, lonely, expensive to the tune of $20K+ direct costs, scary at times, sad, and has sapped too much of my time and energy. I now have a family of four, and I’m done with moving. My last move brought me back to where I grew up, and I have remembered how wonderful it is to have family and old friends nearby and how important it is to have a social support network that can show up in-person in an emergency.

Frequent moving needs to stop being the norm for early career academics. It’s harmful in many, many ways. For me, the harm has gotten to the point where it outweighs the benefits. The more I talk to other scientists, too, the more I realize that those who don’t fit the traditional mold of scientist are opting out of academia because they don’t want to – or can’t – move. There are many things that hold back underrepresented groups. Some of those things are structural and should be addressed head-on. Moving is one of them. If we really want diversity, we need to change the system so moving is optional, not required.

1. Update 2016-03-23 5pm EDT: spelling fixed ^

2. Update 2016-03-23 9pm EDT: added link to blog post that opened my eyes about needing access to health care and how that intersects with 3+ body considerations. This post influenced my writing of this piece, but I had neglected to link to it. ^

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Feline fighter fury #2016MMM #catscandal

March 21, 2016

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March 21, 2016

Note: This post is about March Mammal Madness. Check out this year’s tournament if you’re unfamiliar with it.

 

It started:

But is it really alright? Investigators have discovered a disturbing trend in March Mammal Madness that threatens to shake the foundations of this noble tournament. Supposedly, match outcomes are determined by the flip of a coin weighted by each mammal’s seed. But one intrepid follower noticed something awry:

Cat scandal indeed. Investigative research has discovered anti-cat bias that goes back to the very dawn of March Mammal Madness. Since the first tournament in 2013, cats have entered the tournament SIXTEEN times. And not one has made it even as far as the Elite Trait.

Not one.

And it’s not like the cats are low seeds that wouldn’t be expected to advance. In the first three tournaments, there were NINE feline entries, with an average initial seed of 3.9. Two of those were division first seeds (Tiger-2013 and Cath Palug-2015), one was a second seed (Caracal-2014), and two were third seeds (Lion-2013 and Greek Sphinx-2015). That makes more than half of all cat entries as top three seeds in their diviison. We would have expected at least one — if not more — of these highly ranked cats to make it to the final two in their division. But no.

Instead five of these nine (more than half!) were victims of an upset. And none — NONE — were the winners of an upset. As a result, being a cat in March Mammal Madness meant you were likely to finish 2.0 places below your seed on average.

“It’s insulting,” opined Leopard, “I mean, a River Otter? Seriously. I’ve been boycotting March Mammal Madness since 2014.”

This year is not all that different. With SEVEN new cat entries this year, it seemed likely that cats had a greater chance than ever. But this year they tended to be more lowly seeded. Just one of these seven furry felines was seeded in the top three: Snow Leopard at seed #2. And Snow Leopard bowed out to #3 seed Wolverine in the Sweet Sixteen. This year, two-thirds of cats were victims of an upset. Unlike previous years, three were victors of an upset, with two Chill Cats, Pallas’ Cat and Andean Mountain Cat, and the Quinnipiac Bobcat beating higher ranked foes. But cats were unfortunately matched with one another, with two cats being knocked out of the tournament by other cats, including Quinnipiac’s upset win over Schoolcraft College Ocelots.

On balance, being a cat continued to be a negative, with the four-year statistics showing that cats finish 1.1 places below their seeds on average.

“A Polecat is like a fake cat, a pseudo-cat!” exclaimed Cat of the Sand after the March 11 battle between the two. “There’s no way a pretend cat beats a real cat. Tail floof, shmail ploof.”

What will happen now that these revelations have come to light? Will the tournament be embroiled in scandal? What do the moderators have to say? What does this mean for future generations of cat aspirants to March Mammal Madness? As we go into the Elite Trait this evening, we have more questions than answers.

cats

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/03/21/feline-fighter-fury-2016mmm-catscandal/

Observation as an essential ecology skill

March 16, 2016

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March 16, 2016

In the past few weeks, there have been several posts on ecology blogs about what is ecology — and science more generally. What makes us scientists? What is valued within our profession? I often think about these questions in the context of citizen science. What makes us ‘professionals’? What are we able to do that the average smart and motivated person can’t?

I think about the core processes of science as two distinct but important parts: observation and analysis. In the context of citizen science, we are often willing to cede observation to the layman, but we keep analysis for ourselves. When we talk about the value of natural history, including taxonomy, we are talking about the value of skilled observation, rather than about analysis. When we think about small local studies versus meta-analysis, the main separation is that the former include observation whereas the latter don’t. And I think it’s fair to say that as a community we value observation less than analysis.

Partly, this is justified. Many, many types of observation in ecology fall into the ‘easy’ category: counting things, measuring things with standardized equipment — things that require minimal training to do well. Many more things fall into the ‘medium difficulty’ category of methods of observation that require some training, but are fairly quickly learned by an undergraduate field assistant — things like estimating percentage cover or identifying relatively common non-cryptic species. We readily hire field assistants to make these measurements, and we guiltlessly leave them off of author lists on publications. After all, they haven’t really contributed science to a discovery. (Or have they? …)

But some of ecology really does require skilled observation. Some types of observation take months to years to learn. Growing up, I took weekly art lessons. And what you learn, if you take art classes, is that realistic drawing is not so much about learning to make strokes on a canvas (although it is that, too), but rather it’s about seeing. It’s about noticing what is actually there, as opposed to what you believe is there. This might sound weird, but try this: take a white piece of paper and crumple it up. What color is it? If you reflexively said, “white, of course,” you have looked, but you haven’t really seen. Your crumpled paper is almost certainly not white. It might be white in some places, but other areas in shadow likely look blue or purple. If you put the crumpled paper in a bright area, it may contain the reflective colors of nearby objects — green or orange or brown perhaps. It’s likely that your “white” paper is really a medley of many different colors, and it might not contain any real white at all! If you were to paint it, you likely wouldn’t use white paint, because it wouldn’t look right. It wouldn’t look realistic. Skilled observation is much more than seeing something.

Venus and Mars by Botticelli. White is not white

As an ecologist, I have gained the dubiously useful skill of being able to identify grass species of the U.S. tallgrass prairie. I learned this skill at the heels of skilled observers, who we call ‘botanists’ in this context. I first learned the parts of grasses — which parts are defining and the most different between species. As I got better at identification, I often didn’t need to get down on my knees, nose close to the dirt, to determine whether a ligule was prominent or short. Instead, I became aware of the general forms of the grasses — their gestalt — which allowed me to quickly identify the most common and most distinctive species. But this sort of learning only comes with time and repeated exposure. Ask a botanist (or birder or herpetologist or entomologist or airplane enthusiast or …) to show you how to key out species, and they can do that. Ask them to explain how they correctly identified a species from afar that they only just glimpsed, and they’ll be at a loss for words. They didn’t necessarily use a specific feature or a mental key. “It just — looked right.” Skilled observation takes a long time and a lot of practice to develop.

After learning to identify grass species, I spent a year and a half in the entomological department of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. I had several thousand insect specimens I’d collected that I wanted to learn more about. After a couple months studying insect anatomy, I attempted to identify to species my group of ants — a fairly small number of specimens in my collection with relatively large body size. I thought it would be easy. After struggling through them — it took much longer than I had thought and I was far from confident about some of the identifications — I decided that my most efficient way forward was to rely on the highly honed observation skills of the museum’s expert entomologists. I was, to put it bluntly, completely in awe of their skill. There is no substitute for the years of experience that skilled observers have.

Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a colleague about authorship practices. I was explaining that I struggle with how to acknowledge the indispensable expert help I had gotten with my insects. I had been taught in graduate school that one should consider whether someone has “made intellectual contributions” to a paper when deciding to offer authorship. This sort of cutoff excluded assistants who helped me gather field data, but included my advisors, who had helped me work through data interpretation. It had seemed simple and reasonable. My colleague said she never included taxonomists as authors, and explained that she saw them as service providers, just as she wouldn’t include as authors someone she had gotten brief statistical advice from.

But I’ve decided to include them. My newer approach to authorship is one of, “could I have done this work without this specific person’s contribution?” It still excludes replaceable field assistants, but it includes non-replaceable taxonomists to acknowledge their specialized observation skill that was necessary to complete the project.

I’m still a bit uncomfortable with the distinction, however. Where exactly do I draw the line between ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ observation? Is skilled observation an ‘intellectual contribution’? I know that there are citizen scientists that fully believe that they are doing science by contributing to citizen science data sets. Are they wrong? Are they nothing more than replaceable data collectors and processors? If so, we have been misleading them (and maybe exploiting them).

What happens when I use a dataset that could not have been created without a cadre of citizen scientist volunteers? The volunteers as a whole were indispensable – just like a helpful taxonomist. Can I say that as a group, the citizen scientists have “done science,” but individually they have not? It seems like a bizarre distinction.

And what should we do as a research community? We need observations to do science, but we don’t value them as much as analyses. We value the “eureka!” moment, the triumph of the mind. We devalue toil and physical labor, the ability to accurately describe what our physical senses tell us about the world.

One thing that I see as helpful is that datasets are now often considered products in of themselves. A carefully produced dataset is the foundation of science and rightfully should be recognized as a contribution to it.

I think we should also start to think about how to recognize multiple types of contributions to science in publications and other products. As our field becomes increasingly collaborative and as large datasets become increasingly common, I really think we need something more nuanced than “authorship” and “acknowledgments,” which traditionally more or less translates as: “played a big and important intellectual role in the research” and “played a small or non-intellectual part in the research”. (And no, I don’t think author statements of who did what are particularly helpful in this regard, because the decision still needs to be made about whether someone merits authorship in the first place.) We need a standardized way that can be indexed and searched so that people get credit for their contributions – both in scale and in type.

Right now you see a bizarre mixture. Major NutNet papers, for example, include as an author anyone who contributed data, recognizing the volunteerism, commitment, and material resources that each of those authors had to provide. Working groups frequently list a dozen or more authors per paper, recognizing the intellectual contributions of the authors, though perhaps some of them never did any work other than show up for a meeting and contribute to a discussion. With all journals now publishing online as a primary outlet and in print as a secondary outlet (if at all), the opportunity is here to formally recognize all sorts of contributions to a paper.

A modest proposal: for each paper, a list of contributors to the paper is assembled. These should include those people typically included as authors, as well as taxonomists and other skilled observers, data managers, site directors, and yes, even field techs and volunteer citizen scientists – everyone who made the research possible. And each person should be labeled using a finite list of possible contribution types. (Creation of this list is left as an exercise for the reader.) This list is then associated with the paper online, and the print version can use a minimal subset of the full list according to traditional practice, with a note saying that the full list is online.

The result: Taxonomists can get proper credit for their identifications. Data mungers get proper credit for their hard work. Citizen scientists have their contributions appropriately acknowledged. Each scientist develops a profile of their specialized ‘types’ of contribution, which could help in putting together effective research groups and ensuring that certain types of contribution are not overlooked.

We can’t do ecology without observing. But if we continue to treat it as a second-class skill, we will continue to lose skilled observers as they retire and are not replaced. We will continue to have discord between those whose primarily strength is observation and those who primarily strength is analysis. We may eventually lose the goodwill of volunteer citizen scientists if they are not validated in their acts of contribution. A straightforward way to start is to formally acknowledge the contributions of observers in research publications and other products.

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/03/16/observation-as-an-essential-ecology-skill/

Archetype solutions

March 9, 2016

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March 9, 2016

Here are my answers to the Archetype puzzle I presented last week. If you haven’t seen it yet, go read that first. This entire post is a spoiler.

Oh, and feel free to quibble with my answers in the comments.

1. Red and blue balls in an urn

Probability, combinatorics

2. Galapagos finches

Evolution, allopatric speciation or adaptive radiation

3. Alice, Bob, and Eve

Cryptography, eavesdropping

4. A spherical cow

Theoretical physics, simplifying approximation

5. Lynx and snowshoe hare

Community ecology, predator-prey dynamics

6. Brain-in-a-vat

Epistemology (Philosophy is acceptable, too), solipsism

7. “Hello, world!”

Computer science, programming

8. The monkey and the hunter

Newtonian physics, gravity

9. The babysitting cooperative

Macroeconomics, the paradox of thrift

Bonus (2 points): What follows? Up, up, down, down

left, right, left, right, B, A  (you may also include ‘select, start’ or just ‘start’ at the end)

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/03/09/archetype-solutions/

Fun and games: Archetype

March 2, 2016

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March 2, 2016

Today, a bit of fun for the academically inclined. In every discipline, there are archetypal examples that showcase important concepts. These examples are so ubiquitous that if you open most textbooks on the subject, you’ll find the same examples used for the same concepts. Sometimes these archetypes derive from the first time something was described, popularized, or discovered. Sometimes they derive from satire. Sometimes they simply aid memory of the concept, and so are reused. In any case, these archetypes are so well-known that someone familiar with the field will instantly know the concept in question from a very short description. So, the game…

With few words, I will describe an archetypal example used to teach a concept in academia. For each archetype, your task is to identify the discipline (1 point) and the concept (1 point) taught by the example. For instance, if I said, “Third generation garden peas,” you would say the discipline is “genetics” (or “evolution”) and the concept is “heredity” (or “Mendelian inheritance”). Ready?

(Oh, and it’s no fun if you google the archetypes. Try to do them from memory. I’ll post answers next week. And if you find yourself coming up with your own examples, add them here and I’ll use them for a future game.)

1. Red and blue balls in an urn

2. Galapagos finches

3. Alice, Bob, and Eve

4. A spherical cow

5. Lynx and snowshoe hare

6. Brain-in-a-vat

7. “Hello, world!”

8. The monkey and the hunter

9. The babysitting cooperative

Bonus (2 points): What follows? Up, up, down, down

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/03/02/fun-and-games-archetype/

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