The quality of science is not strained

Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber illuminates another reason to support open access of scientific journals:

[O]pen access could, at least in the long run, contribute to closing the global inequalities in access to education. And it can also help to improve the quality of the papers being produced by scholars living and working in the South, which in turn increases their chance of being published in what we consider quality journals, which would be good not just for their careers, but also for global dialogues.

Pretend you’re a scientist in a developing country. You’re doing experiments in a lab where the electricity goes out regularly, you’re trying to stay up-to-date with other scientists’ work but you can’t afford to subscribe to the journals, and when you submit your own articles you don’t get published because your write-up doesn’t sound the right flavor of “professional.”

Open access wouldn’t solve all of your problems, but it would certainly help. Not to mention helping the rest of us, who need science to move forward based on everybody’s best thinking, not just the folks with lots of money.

In praise of journalism

What a terrific use of the bully pulpit by New York Times business columnist David Leonhardt. Recipe: Take one commonly-discussed government statistic (unemployment rate). Add one part historical background and two new data sources, and analyze. Result: A newly illuminated phenomenon.

(In this case: One new frame for thinking about the recent upswing in “non-employed” people whose existence is invisible in the regular unemployment statistics.)

Over the last few decades, there has been an enormous increase in the number of people who fall into the no man’s land of the labor market[...]. These people are not employed, but they also don’t fit the government’s definition of the unemployed — those who “do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work.”

Consider this: the average unemployment rate in this decade, just above 5 percent, has been lower than in any decade since the 1960s. Yet the percentage of prime-age men (those 25 to 54 years old) who are not working has been higher than in any decade since World War II. In January, almost 13 percent of prime-age men did not hold a job, up from 11 percent in 1998, 11 percent in 1988, 9 percent in 1978 and just 6 percent in 1968.

There are only two possible explanations for this bizarre combination of a falling employment rate and a falling unemployment rate. The first is that there has been a big increase in the number of people not working purely by their own choice. You can think of them as the self-unemployed. They include retirees, as well as stay-at-home parents, people caring for aging parents and others doing unpaid work.

If growth in this group were the reason for the confusing statistics, we wouldn’t need to worry. It would be perfectly fair to say that unemployment was historically low. [...] Instead, these nonemployed workers tend to be those who have been left behind by the economic changes of the last generation. Their jobs have been replaced by technology or have gone overseas, and they can no longer find work that pays as well.

Read the whole thing.

Don’t tell me I’m stupid

“Girls can’t do science.” “Asians are better at math.” Yup, it’s stereotype time. Studies have long shown that people do worse on tests when they’re reminded that they’re not supposed to be smart. It’s called stereotype threat. Just having students mark a box for Male or Female is enough to trigger the effect, meaning that people do badly on tests even when they know the material.

Good news. New research suggests that a few small changes — like moving the “What is your gender?” checkbox to the end of the test, and announcing to students beforehand that the test is gender-neutral — can dramatically improve students’ scores. Read the full post, complete with practical suggestions for teachers.

(Via.)

Shame does not make you healthier

Ten experts in teen sexual and reproductive health have signed a letter beseeching Congress not to fund abstinence-only education. It’s simple and clear, so I advise you to go read it.

Everybody agrees that it’s a bad thing for teenagers to have to deal with unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Some people think that the best way to avoid this is to tell teenagers that they shouldn’t have sex, ever, until they get married. Many of those people also think we should lie to teens about how well condoms protect against disease. Other people think that the best way to avoid this is to give students factual information about how pregnancy and disease occur, and how your chance of getting pregnant or getting a disease can be reduced (not eliminated).

On top of these two sets of core beliefs are a whole bunch of fears and assumptions — about whether talking about sex means we are giving teenagers “permission” to have sex, whether they will have better or worse adult (and/or married) sex lives as a result of this information, how accurate the information they are getting from other people is, and whether they are ever likely to be the victim of unwanted sexual contact. Most of all, this is a profound disagreement about respect: Whether teenagers should be obedient to their elders’ wishes, or whether they should be respected as (semi-)independent human beings.

But here’s the thing: long-term, careful reseach studies are showing that abstinence-only education does not prevent those bad results. In other words, teenagers who are told “Don’t have sex until you get married” aren’t behaving any differently, and often they are taking more dangerous risks because of that ignorance.

We’ve studied it. We’ve been fair. The time has come to say that we shouldn’t spend any more taxpayer money on abstinence-only education.

We should rename it, too. It’s really shame-based education. Because the only thing it’s doing is making young people too ashamed to properly prepare for, or get health treatment after, the beginning of their sexual lives.

Please go read the letter. And then send it to your Congressperson.

With liberty and open access for all

Have you ever heard of open access? It means “even people who aren’t in college should be able to read the results of our country’s best researchers and thinkers.” Well, not literally. But that’s the general idea.

Think about the parents of a child with a rare disease, who want to read the latest medical journal articles. Or a small-town journalist struggling to understand the implications of a local enviornmental problem. Or even an amateur enthusiast who wants to see the research published by this year’s Nobel prize winners.

If you’re not a college student or professor, you’re largely left out in the cold when it comes to vast amounts of useful information (much of which we as taxpayers have helped to fund). For example, my own alma mater will not allow alumni to purchase access to their library databases for any price. (For $200/year, you can sit in the library and look at a printed book, but millions of journal articles and other electronic resources are forbidden.)

Even if you are in college, costs can be an issue. I remember being shocked that a “bulkpack” of readings for one of my classes cost $70 — and that was years ago. For students who are on scholarship and/or working their way through school, expensive coursebooks and readings are a significant barrier to getting the class materials they need, promptly and effectively.

The good news is that some passionate and visionary people have been working to change the current, locked-down system. Go read one of them now.

When incentives collide

Today I am wondering how to change the academic world so that researchers are rewarded for actively telling people about their work. Or, to be grumpy about it, so that they are punished if they do not share their research results more broadly.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work for two people who care very much about adding to the world’s store of knowledge. This means that they say “Yes” when asked to participate in research projects.

Having these folks as models is good for me, because most of my personal experience of researchers is negative, and left to my own devices I would probably be politely unavailable.

As it is, I try to accommodate the requests I get. There aren’t too many, and they’re not very onerous, so I’m not making a big sacrifice.

Recently it was a public health student. We met in a coffee shop, where I gave him a sixty-minute monologue. He scribbled while I worried about whether the noisy backdrop of rock music and coffee machines would interfere with good notetaking.

A few months later I got an invitation to the presentation of his thesis. This was remarkable on two counts: first, he’d apparently finished something, and second, he was bothering to tell his research subjects. I was slightly impressed.

There were seven people at the presentation, along with two unopened boxes of donuts. I sat through 40 PowerPoint slides with a better-than-usual narrative flow. It helped that the researcher was personable, and that the topic is relevant to my work.

Afterwards I asked about his plans for disseminating the results. Had he translated it into another language (this being a major point in both his research and his final recommendations)? Well – sheepish grin – no. Had he made arrangements to speak with the school district, local elected officials, or other policymakers (all governing some aspect that was addressed in his research)? Well, no. He had invited a few here today, but….

Was he going to speak with any community members, through mosques or churches as he himself had recommended? Well…it was better to leave that to community leaders who command more authority and respect.

I figured that was it, but then a man got up and introduced himself as the student’s advisor. He asked the student to leave the room, and then asked the audience to evaluate his work. Apparently our comments were to inform the advisory committee’s grading of his thesis.

Most people said nice, slightly generic things. I began by noting how scrupulous he had been in his interview process. Then I said if it were up to me to grade this project, I wouldn’t give it a grade until an effort had been made to share its results more broadly. I gave a few specific suggestions-masquerading-as-examples.

The student was summoned back and a condensed version of the comments read to him. I was moderately surprised that the general point about dissemination was mentioned.

I walked away feeling somewhat cynical that anything much would happen. It seemed that the advisors had to submit a grade quite quickly (it already being late May) in order for the student to graduate.

Moreover, there was a distinct lack of energy among both student and advisors about the ideas proposed. Visit a church to present your data? Meet with community members in someone’s living room? Approach the school board? Give a background briefing to legislative staff? I might as well have asked him to sew his own graduation robe – he quite clearly saw it as not his task.^[1]

At first I was angry, as much at the sheer wastefulness as on moral grounds. Then I started to think about why this response might be natural given the way the academic system is set up. Read the rest of this entry »