Listen to The Message Podcast on Your Long Trips This Weekend

If you are one of the 46.9 million Americans travelling more than 50 miles this weekend, I have an entertainment recommendation for you. Consider listening to a new (and recently finished) science fiction podcast, The Message. Sorry if you were hoping for the pseudo “Is this actually like Serial?” illusion, but I just don’t care about every edgy series trying to make itself seem better by hiding whether or not it is actually fiction. I’d add that marathoning the series is the best way to go. There’s only eight episodes, and aside from the last one, they’re all about 13 minutes (with a minute of intro each show) so it’s a good way to spend 2 hours while travelling. I will add, that if I attempted to listen to this one week at a time, I probably would have quickly lost interest because there just wasn’t much material in each episode to feel hooked. But listening to it for two hours straight, it actually felt like a decently paced radio play and the characters and plot were all compelling enough to make up for some clunky structure. Seriously, I skipped eating lunch or getting gas on the road for an hour because I was halfway through and didn’t want to interrupt it.

Also, against the Wired piece’s concern, it didn’t seem like a super transparent plug for GE products. Unless some of the scientists they mentioned were affiliated to GE in some way, and even then, I wouldn’t find that obnoxious. The science didn’t always make sense, but it didn’t seem like technobabble. Also, I was pleasantly surprised by what seemed to be the diversity of the science team in the universe of the story – there was even a person (Mod, though I’ve also seen the spelling Maud) who went by non-binary pronouns, and the program’s director made it clear that disrespecting them wouldn’t be tolerated. I would love to talk about it more if other people have listened to it.

 

What is the point of thesis/dissertation committees?

I ask this in all sincerity, because after talking to other students in other schools and other fields, I don’t seem any closer to an answer. Maybe it’s just because I think my department is weird, because we don’t assemble dissertation committees until we propose, and we propose fairly late (it’s pretty common for people to propose only a year before they plan on defending).

The closest thing to a consensus answer I can find is that committees exist to make sure advisors aren’t just handing out degrees. But if that is the case, it seems like there isn’t really a guarantee the average committee that doesn’t do much more than read the proposal and the dissertation would be effective at that. A group of less than half a dozen people who typically have two weeks to read a ~200 page summary of what is usually years of research can’t really independently verify the results that are presented. And if a professor really was intent on just handing out degrees to their lab, they could help make that data look more convincing. (I’m not saying this happens a lot. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so. My point is just that it seems easy to work around the supposed purpose of committees.)

I thought the point of a dissertation committee was to be a real committee, which in my mind means that at least part of it’s power comes from the fact that it is a group. Advisors can be great and all, but sometimes you need the perspective of other people to plan an experiment or help think through an interpretation of results. I thought the committee could help mediate part of the intellectual relationship between the advisor and student. Say a student wants to redo or alter some experiment but the advisor doesn’t think that it is worth the time; the student can try to convince the committee as a group of intellectual peers, and if they agree, they can essentially override the advisor’s wishes on behalf of the student. I think this is key because it can help diffuse some negative feelings in conflicts like this away from the student. (I don’t think the committee should take on issues that rise to the point of breaking up the advising relationship. Though if this works, I also think fewer issues should lead to the break up of the relationship.) I’m not sure if the converse matters as much because advisors do generally have a lot of control over what their students do, but if an advisor felt the student wasn’t doing something well, he or she could have the committee make it clearer.

So I’ll close with two questions I would love to hear answers from people in other graduate programs. First, when does you first assemble your committee? Second, what does your committee do?

 

 

Thoughts on Basic Science and Innovation

Recently, science writer and House of Lords member Matt Ridley wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal about the myth of basic science leading to technological development. Many people have criticized it, and it even seems like Ridely has walked back some claims. One engaging take can be found here, which includes a great quote that I think helps summarize a lot of the reaction:

I think one reason I had trouble initially parsing this article was that it’s about two things at once. Beyond the topic of technology driving itself, though, Ridley has some controversial things to say about the sources of funding for technological progress, much of it quoted from Terence Kealy, whose book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research has come up here before…

But also, it seems like Ridley has a weird conception of the two major examples he cites as overturning the “myth”: steam engines and the structure of the DNA. The issue with steam engines is that we mainly associate them with James Watt, who you memorialize everytime you fret about how many watts all your devices are consuming. Steam engines actually preceded Watt, but the reason we associate them with him is because he greatly improved their efficiency due to his understanding of latent heat, the energy that goes into changing something from one phase into another. (We sort of discussed this before. The graph below helps summarize.) Watt understood latent heat because his colleague and friend Joseph Black, a chemist at the University of Glasgow, discovered it.

The latent heat is the heat that is added to go between phases. In this figure, it is represented by the horizontal line between ice and heating of water and the other horizontal line between heating of water and heating of water vapor.

I don’t know whether or not X-ray crystallography was ever used for industrial purposes in the textiles industry, but it has pretty consistently been used in academia since the basic principles were discovered a century ago. The 1915 Nobel prize in physics was literally about the development of X-ray crystallograpy theory. A crystal structure of a biological molecule was determined by X-ray studies at least in 1923, if not earlier. The idea that DNA crystallography only took off as a popular technique because of spillover from industry is incredibly inaccurate.

Ridley also seems to have a basic assumption: that government has crowded out the private sector as a source of basic research over the past century. It sounds reasonable, and it seems testable as a hypothesis. As a percentage of GDP (which seems like a semi-reasonable metric for concerns about crowding out), federal spending on research and development has generally been on the decline since the 70s, and is now about a 1/3 less than it’s relatively stable levels that decade. If private R&D had been crowded out, a competitor dropping by that much seems like a decent place for some resurgence, especially since the one of the most cited examples of private research, Bell Labs, was still going strong all this time. But instead, Bell cut most of its basic research programs just a few years ago.

Federal spending on R&D as a percentage of GDP over time

To be fair, more private philanthropists now seem to be funding academic research. The key word, though, is philanthropist, not commercial, which Ridley refers to a lot throughout the essay. Also, a significant amount of this new private funding is for prizes, but you can only get a prize after you have done work.

There is one major thing to take from Ridley’s essay, though I also think most scientists would admit it too. It’s somewhat ridiculous to try to lay out a clear path from a new fundamental result to a practical application, and if you hear a researcher claim to have one, keep your BS filter high. As The New Yorker has discussed, even results that seems obviously practical have a hard time clearing feasibility hurdles. (Also, maybe it’s just a result of small reference pools, but it seems like a lot of researchers I read are also concerned that research now seems to require some clear “mother of technology” justification.)  Similarly, practical developments may not always be obvious. Neil deGrasse Tyson once pointed out that if you spoke to a physicist in the late 1800s about the best way to quickly heat something, they would probably not describe something resembling a microwave.

Edit to add: Also, I almost immediately regret using innovation in the title because I barely address it in the post, and there’s probably a great discussion to have about that word choice by Ridley. Apple, almost famously, funds virtually no basic research internally or externally, which I often grumble about. However, I would not hesitate to call Apple an “innovative” company. There are a lot of design choices that can improve products that can be pretty divorced from the physical breakthroughs that made them unique. (Though it is worth pointing out human factors and ergonomics are very active fields of study in our modern, device-filled lives.)