Scientific Funding: Where do we draw the line?

Tall, Dark and Stable*, an article in the science and technology section of The Economist ed. July 14 - 20, 2012, discusses a study by David Kille, Amanda Forest, and Joanne Wood at the University of Waterloo, Canada. This team took 47 romantically unattached undergraduates and set half of them on a slightly unstable chair next to a slightly unstable table; the other half sat at identical, though stable, furnishings. They were then given a survey evaluating the perceived stability of various celebrity relationships. The wonky-chaired students perceived others' relationships as less stable than the straight-chaired students did. Furthermore, the wonky-chaired students valued "stable" qualities in potential partners (like being funny or trustworthy) more than "unstable" qualities (like spontaneity and adventurousness). So, apparently, sitting on wonky furniture makes you value stability while enhancing paranoia (i.e. reducing their perception of stability)? 

I was unfortunately unable to find this study in Psychological Science, the journal it will be published in, so I can't evaluate their scientific methods. But I CAN say that I am generally pretty skeptical of such experiments. I'm sure their data turned out exactly as they said it did, but is it repeatable with another set of students from another place? Is it repeatable with non-student volunteers? Did they balance people's opinions out by giving the survey before and after placement on the wonky chair?

Furthermore, this article in The Economist mentions (without reference to the actual study) that people who are sitting in chairs leaning slightly to the left tend to be more receptive to liberal ideas. REALLY?! You mean Obama could rig the election by sending out his supporters on "night patrol" to break into people's homes and sandpaper off a couple millimeters on the left of their chairs? Do right-leaning chairs make people more conservative? I see a huge scandal in the making.

In my search for Kille's study in Psychology Today, I found another study by him: When Social Networking is Not Working (Psychological Science March 2012 vol. 23 no. 3 295-302). In this study, they were trying to determine whether social networks like Facebook were generally beneficial to people with low self-esteem--people who normally feel inhibited about providing personal information, and who therefore have unfulfilled social lives. They found that people with low self esteems generally posted comments with low positivity or high negativity, eliciting "undesirable responses."

I found this interesting, because I have just finished a discussion about "real life" persona versus internet persona on a social network for book-lovers called LibraryThing. One of my online friends on LibraryThing is a very active member of the group and is well-liked. However, he doesn't hide the fact that in "real life" he is anxious in society and is horribly shy. So, again, I have to wonder about the study...how meaningful is it? Certainly, I can see how the study's conclusions would be true of some people, and not of others...but how much should we really trust psychology studies like this? Do they really add something helpful our sociological table? How much of our tax money is going in to paying for these studies?

The House has passed an amendment to cut the NSF funding to political science because they feel that political scientists are generally unsuccessful in predicting huge political changes in the world. (There's a  recent New York Times opinion article by Jacqueline Stevens on this subject.) And I'm sort of starting to agree...perhaps we DO need to be a little more careful about what kind of studies our tax money is going towards. Perhaps we should use some of our money to create a study to determine criteria for potentially useful areas of research, versus potential dead ends.

It hurts me to say that, because I know the pain of trying to get funding for a project that has no immediate medical value. (I DID work in hibernation research for 4 years!) And I certainly don't think huge cuts in scientific funding is what our economy needs right now. And I TOTALLY understand that sometimes studies that don't have much potential (as gauged by the critical eye) serendipitously stumble upon the world's greatest breakthroughs. So where do we draw the line? I don't know, because I'm not an economist. I'm a scientist who really WANTS everyone to be funded...but is that really for the best? 

Ah! The torture of ambivalence! :(

*I can't get the link to work, but you can find it on The Economist's webpage. Just search for the title Tall, Dark and Stable.

Is the collection of biometric data from Afghans ethical?

I just finished reading The Eyes Have it, in the 7Jul - 13Jul issue of The Economist. Afghan soldiers are collecting retina scans of "suspicious" individuals. But they don't stop there. They're stopping buses arbitrarily and scanning all men, they're even scanning entire villages! This information goes to a database that can then be shared internationally. It can be used to track suspicious movements and to scan the bodies in a suicide bombing to find database matches. The article says that "American officers praise the technology as a helpful counter-insurgency tool."

Do I think potential terrorists need to be identified and stopped? Of course. Do I think retina scans of an entire population is going a bit far? Probably. But Afghanistan isn't my country, the situation is different, the culture is different. I can accept that. 

But it made me think...in this week's The Week, I read that the Taliban is causing difficulties for the Polio vaccine program in the Pakistani-Afghan border regions. I don't blame them! After the CIA used a Pakistani vaccination drive to collect genetic data in the search for Osama bin Laden, and with biometric data being collected arbitrarily from the Afghan public, who could blame the Taliban for suspecting that the Polio vaccine is yet another ploy of the Americans to spy? It is a shame, since this region is one of the few in the world that still has an active Polio problem. Subterfuge and lack of privacy leads to distrust--Sad, but true. 

Newsweeklies: Which is best?

So it turns out that I have been specially chosen by The Week to be on their "free list." That's right, I'm specially entitled to 7 free issues of The Week. Yippee! I'm so special! I have to admit though, I was impressed with this week's issue. The Week is a unique type of newsweekly because it doesn't seem to perform its OWN journalism. It sifts through thousands of OTHER news sites/magazines and then provides the week's news by summarizing snippets of what other news sources have said. Upon first blush, I scorned this lack of "true" journalism. But after reading through the magazine, I realized that it was actually a very useful source of information. I, certainly, don't have time to sift through all these news sources myself. By doing that work for me, The Week provides news commentaries of different opinions on each topic. How interesting to know how news source B disagrees with news source A. This is something I wouldn't know if left to my own devices. So I'm going to keep my free issues coming for now, so I can make an informed decision about this magazine in a few weeks. :) 


The Week also reviews books, movies, TV shows, art shows, theater, and albums. It has some basic gossip. (I didn't know we still cared about Mary Kate Olsen??? I had forgotten she even existed!)  

I contrast The Week to another weekly magazine I've been receiving: Time. I got a year's subscription to Time for free, so with much grumblings I accepted its arrival in my mailbox and even tried reading it for a few months. Why grumble, you ask? Because back when Yasser Arafat died I had a PAID subscription to Time, which I had been faithfully reading. I was excited when I saw the issue, because I knew very little about Arafat as a man. I figured: here is a good chance to find out more about him. After all, he may not have been perfect, but at the very least the Nobel committee thought he had an impact on the world. Much to my dismay, none of the articles taught me anything interesting about Arafat. They were all wailings about how pathetic Arafat was, how not even the Palestinians mourned his death. (FALSE--I happened to know some Palestinians at the time). This quote bothered me particularly: 


One of the last images he left to the world--the brief video clip showing the Palestinian leader, shriveled and frail, wearing blue pajamas and a knit cap before he left the West Bank for medical treatment in France--did not reflect the stylings of Yasser Arafat the revolutionary. (Source: The Eternal Agitator, by Lisa Beyer. Time 22Nov 2004).

I'm sure Ronald Reagan spent a lot of time lounging around in his pajamas when he was DYING too!


I felt cheated by Time's coverage of Yasser Arafat. I wanted to learn something about him, but what I learned, instead, was that Time doesn't like Arafat. I have since then come to the conclusion that they're not fond of Arabs in general. In summary,Time has one, maybe two, articles that I find interesting each week--but those generally aren't the "weekly news" articles. The rest I am either not interested in, or feel annoyed at their angle. I have decided to cancel my free subscription to Time. If they won't cancel it, the magazine will descend immediately into my recycling bin henceforth.

The Economist is a newsweekly that I am very happy with. It has fantastic coverage of world news. However, I want another newsweekly to supplement The Economist because it covers US news from an angle that would be most interesting to the world...I need to have some USentric news, as well, so I feel informed about things most Americans care about (and let's face it, most Americans don't care about the world). Then again, I suppose if I wanted to read what MOST Americans cared about, I'd be stuck reading celebrity gossip. Yick! /shock But I think you get my intended meaning, anyway. :) I don't like JUST reading the daily news, because the report-as-it-comes news takes some sewing together to see the whole picture. Newsweeklies are nice in that they do that work for me.  

If anyone has suggestions about other magazines I might enjoy, please do tell. /please

Columbine, by Dave Cullen

2012 Book 55: Columbine, by Dave Cullen (3/31/2012)

Reason for Reading: It was there

My Review 4.5/5stars

Cullen provides an in-depth look at the events leading up to and following the tragic school shooting at Columbine. He fleshes out the personalities of the people involved, especially focusing on the two shooters. He debunks the myths that confounded the Columbine story for years. This is an amazing work of journalism, as well as a moving narrative. Tears came to my eyes several times while reading. My only qualm about this book is that at the very end Cullen provided some gory details that weren’t necessary. I’m not squeamish, but I think providing those details wasn’t necessary to emphasize how tragic the events were, and gore is much more disturbing when you’re thinking about the real people involved. However, this was only a very short section of the book…and I guess journalists will be journalists.