greenpass

In defense of Larry

I decided to put this one under "Science" because I think it's really a case of people reacting badly to an empirical study. As a statistician, it's true that women routinely (and statistically significantly) score in the mid to upper percentile range on tests, including maths and science tests. It's also true that men score at the very high and very low percentiles. Just because you say this out loud doesn't mean you think that women are in any way better or worse at maths and science. However, as scientists and statisticians we should be allowed to speculate on why this is. Are women genetically worse at maths? Does society lead them to doubt their abilities in the numerical arts? (from personal experience, this is a big YES.) Do women get shunted out of maths and hard sciences early on in high school and then find it impossible to catch up? (Also a YES - story to follow).

I honestly believe Summers was set up for a fall here. Here is my evidence:

--Last year there were far too few tenure offers made to women at Harvard. However, this isn't something that you can just change immediately - you can't send the departments back to the drawing board to ask them to submit more women in a week's time. The tenure process is a long one based on publication, teaching, and general scholarship, and if you want more women to get tenure you take more of them into PhD programs and post-docs and assistant professors. You can't suddenly give undeserving women tenure too early in the hope of redressing your statistics. This hurts both the students, by possibly giving them unworthy professors, and the professors themselves by leaving them wide open to accusations of insufficient scholarship and preparation. To emphasize again - the low number of women tenured ISN'T Summers' fault. (In fact, since he doesn't pick the professors who get tenure at all, if it's anyone's fault, it's the departmental chairs.)

--Summers also has a history of butchering his words, although this doesn't excuse any potential gaffes he may make.

--Knowing this, someone asked Summers to speak at this conference about women in academia. According to the Crimson, Summers was assured:
a) that it was a scientific conference
b) that it would be completely off the record precisely because of worries that comments would be misconstrued
c) that he would be there in his capacity as an economist, and not speaking as the Harvardian mouthpiece.

What actually happened was:
a) he summarized the contents of a paper that was about to be presented at the conference, which had valid statistical findings with regards to women underperforming in the sciences
b) his comments were reported in the Boston Globe
c) his comments were taken as his personal view of women
d) his comments were construed to explain the low rate of women getting tenure at Harvard
e) only one or two of the conference participants actually took offence, and that seems to be because they believed c) and d) above. Everyone else (who was actually there, unlike the preponderance of pundits who commented on the situation) thought it was totally unfair to criticize what Summers said.

Needless to say, it was an unfair witch-hunt blown completely out of proportion by the fact that he happens to be the president of Harvard. I agree that he was stupid to think that he could somehow decouple his academic persona from his administrative persona, and that he probably mangled what he meant to say and came off sounding terrible. But I also think that the conference organizers should be ashamed of themselves - if you get Summers to come by telling him it's off the record, it should be just that - off the record. It's shameful that the Globe was able to report his comments at all and had any sort of access to the proceedings.

My story: when I was in 7th grade (Year 8 at good ol' Chinese International School in Hong Kong), my maths teacher sat my parents down and told them very gently that I was a very nice girl but that I was terrible at maths - not only could I not mentally arithmetize my way out of a paper bag, but I didn't know any of my times tables. The other children had been sent to Kumon every day after school and had memorized all these things, and I was far behind the class. Perhaps she should concentrate on English and reading? my teacher said kindly. My parents went home furious, but found to their chagrin that the teacher was right - I was indeed terrible at arithmetic and the times tables. However, the next semester I was taken in hand by a wonderful Hungarian man named Mr. Lazlo Varro (who I have never been able to trace to thank for his faith that anyone can learn to do maths) and taught calculus. I beat the pants off all the kids for whom maths was memorization and not actual understanding, and now I'm at Harvard having finished my statistics degree (yay electives this semester).

Conclusions: many girls can do maths very well. Some can't. Some boys do maths extremely well. Many don't. However, schools shunt girls out of maths to concentrate on the small percentage that do extremely well, because that's how teachers are evaluated, and also because girls are routinely pushed out of maths at all levels. I think girls need more encouragement in general to do stuff, although I don't know if this is a nature or a nurture thing. A study I read last year showed a similar imbalance in women seeking office - once women actually run for office, there's no inherent bias against them, but many fewer women even bother to run initially because they are far less likely than men to get support and endorsement from political parties. This is a very interesting study, and well worth a read (Lawless, Fox. "Why don't women run for office?" Taubman Center for Public Policy, Brown University, 01/04, and shockingly, it's online in pdf format.)

Shmevolution

According to the New York Times, even when evolution is on the syllabus, teachers are afraid to teach it because of the backlash from fundamentalist Christians. I have long thought that an excellent solution to this problem in highly conservative districts is to have a class where many different creationist stories are discussed, and then evolution is discussed with all the attendant scientific discoveries and how they favour evolution. If you're going to teach Genesis, then you sure as hell better teach Brahma creating the world out of a golden egg and the Chinese creation myths where people were made out of reeds and clay by gods and the Ancient Greek myths with the Sky gods and Gaia have sex and create the Titans. Just because Genesis happens to be in the Christian scriptures doesn't mean that there aren't other scriptures that have creation myths, and once the Christian stories are set next to these other ones it becomes clear that they're just as crazy. If you give the kids a chance to decide, 9 times out of 10 I bet they'll pick evolution as the clear winner.

This reminds me of my thoughts on homophobia. There are many cases where homophobic people are shown the error of their ways, either by getting to know a really nice gay person, or realizing that one of their kids is gay, or through other similar revelations. But I find it hard to believe that a tolerant person can ever be convinced into believing that a gay person is evil and responsible for societal evils (unless they become born again, in which case they cease making their own rational decisions). I similarly think that people can be convinced that evolution is right, but very seldom into thinking creationism is right. Given the evidence any rational person will choose evolution over any creation myth, be it Genesis, Brahma, Mother Earth, or even my personal favourite, the one invented by J.R.R. Tolkien in the Silmarillion. If they're going to teach creationism, they should definitely include Tolkien's - it's much better written than Genesis.

Sunflowers for good, not evil

A fascinating discovery by a team of chemical engineers based at Leeds University has determined that with the use of two catalysts, made of nickel and carbon, they can produce incredibly pure hydrogen from vegetable oils without using any fossil fuels. The byproducts are only oxygen (which can be fed back around to power the device), carbon dioxide, and methane. They used sunflower oil, but said that any vegetable oil could be used.

I read this, and being incredibly excited about the very real possibility of having a hydrogen station on my corner someday rather than a gas station, I started to daydream. This could be a godsend for developing countries, which are often energy-poor but agriculturally productive. It could also entirely upset the current balance of energy power: the most sunflowers I've ever seen growing commercially was in Northern France - could France become the new Saudi Arabia? The US could easily become self sustaining for fuel and energy, and it could revitalize farms in the mid-west and other economically depressed agricultural areas.

Rabobank has an interesting study of oil-producing crops (sunflowers, soybeans, rapeseed and palm): oil crops are moving from North America and Western Europe to South America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, based on the need to supply soy meal for cattle ranching and other meat production. Palm and soybeans are the fastest growing crops in terms of production, because of their need for animal feed. Sunflowers are hardy and grow almost anywhere - a ticket to economic independence? How cheap would the hydrogen production system have to be for developing countries to afford? How efficient are hydrogen fuel-cell cars? Nickel producing countries would see their economies boom - Russia, Canada, Australia, Indonesia, Columbia. The balance of power shifts southwards in Asia Pacific towards Australiasia. China gets mad (again).

Conversely, if enough oilseeds had to be grown to supply the world with hydrogen, it could get out of hand - too many fields used to grow soy and rape, and not enough for other forms of food. Food prices shoot up even as cars transfer to hydrogen fuel cells. The Middle East becomes a net energy importer, but because of new restrictions on fossil fuels in Western countries, they have no financial resources to buy themselves into the modern hydrogen era.

And finally, to invoke Murphy's Law, we would end up with George Prescott Bush winning the 2032 presidential election, and by 2034 we would be invading Canada for their rich sunflower-strewn plains and nickel mines, and claiming to be rescuing them from the hands of a government in thrall to France.

Dangerous Litmus Tests

This is something I've been worrying about a lot about recently, and when John Kerry spoke approvingly of science in his acceptance speech at the convention it really rammed my brain into high gear.

Harvard, and I expect every large educational and research institution, has been going through a few upheavals the past year or so. As is natural for a big university, it has many graduate schools, some of which deal with potentially dangerous diseases (like the Med School or the School of Public Health). Combine this with thousands of grad students, a good chunk of them from countries deemed to be somewhat sketchy by the US government, and you have a recipe for serious culture clash between the boffins and the politcos.

There are a number of things that have happened that haven't gotten enough attention, but should.

1) Section 817 of the Patriot Act says that researchers from "restricted backgrounds" (translation: from the Middle Eastern or otherwise suspect countries) may not have access to certain agents.
This is a disaster for the career of any scientist deemed "restricted", and might have this additional side effect: if you have a tenured professor specializing in infectious agents, who happens to have been born and grown up in Lebanon, say, the last thing you should do is ruin their careers like this. If it was me, I certainly would take my expertise and knowledge and move to a more welcoming country, contributing to a brain drain that the US can ill afford. And if the US government REALLY pissed me off, I would know enough about infectious agents to really be able to do something nasty. News flash to the Bush Administration: if someone is barred from handling an infectious agent at an American university, that certainly won't stop them getting their hands on it from another source if they so wish.

2) New visa restrictions are making it even harder for foreign students, researchers and professors to enter the US at all. These include the Technology Alert List below, and Bush's executive order in the second half of 2002 saying "certain international students" should be barred from "sensitive areas".
This is a terrible idea. The best way to make someone question received beliefs and formulate their own opinions about the US free of imposed bias is to have them come and go to school here. Also, highly educated foreigners often return to their own countries and put their schooling to good use, helping to raise living standards, encourage political change or raising awareness of issues previously seen as unimportant or non-traditional like women's rights.

3) Something called the Technology Alert List keeps tabs on a whole range of fields deemed dodgy by the US government. Expatriate professors or researchers who are involved in any of those fields -- even ones like ceramics or theoretical number theory -- can be denied visas by virtue of their research interests and their ethnic background.

4) John Ashcroft leaned on academic jounals to self-censor anything that could potentially be used by terrorists, and to their eternal discredit 32 journals caved in. Needless to say, the lack of free exchange of information will hinder the path of scientific progress to a degree not seen since the Spanish Inquisition.

5) And lastly but most importantly, the govenment is attaching strings to its federal grants, trying to ensure ideological purity on the part of the researchers and preventing from properly disseminating their findings. Harvard and MIT have stood strongly against this utterly despicable attempt to squelch progress: Harvard has refused to accept any grant with these sorts of riders, and last year MIT made waves when it refused a $400,000 grant (for unclassified research) because the ethnic background of every researcher on the project would have had to be vetted.

This is all very well for huge institutions like Harvard and MIT. Harvard's endowment alone could keep research going all by itself, likely with some left over for a smaller university. And both universities have the name brand and the influence to lean on the government to get certain professors and students through the visa process relatively unscathed. Charles Vest and Larry Summers are doing absolutely the right thing and standing up for their respective faculties, as good university presidents should.

But as any scientist will tell you, Harvard and MIT are by no means the main source of scientific breakthroughs. Smaller institutions may be doing work that is just as important, but they can ill afford to reject huge grants in the name of scientific integrity. This hurts not only the scientific culture of the US at a time when anti-intellectualism and anti-scientific thought is running high, but also hurts the US economy. If we cannot rely on being cutting edge in all things technological, then we might as well throw in the towel and resign ourselves to watching the continuing slow bleed of jobs out of the country.

It is shameful that these restrictions exist in the first place, but it is even more embarassing that they attack the very people that could be helping the United States rehabilitate its image in the eyes of the world. Here's something for Bush to mull over: an American soldier on their doorstep is not likely to dissuade a Saudi kid from listening to an al Qaida recruiter, but his uncle the professor at Harvard that lives on Brattle Street and shops at Whole Foods will probably have a more powerful restraining effect.

Whenever I get really depressed about this stuff, I go read the Union of Concerned Scientists - it's so encouraging that people of more influence than I are just as worried about this. Let's hope that we really do get a president who "believes in science" in November, who can finally address the fact that science is not to be believed, or squelched or controlled like a flock of unruly Congressional interns: it is the underpinning of our whole world and must be cherished as such.