Academic Mixtape 39

I loved loved loved this article by Sridhar, Chanam, and Hariharan in The American Naturalist that takes an oral history approach to key papers in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology to demonstrate the various ways that natural history underlies the origin and success these projects. You might read a paper and think that it's the scaffolding is theory and experimental design but deep down, natural history is often at the heart of the work even if it's not overt from the text.

If you look at the trajectory of papers submitted to Science, it turns out that institutional prestige, gender, and country of origin impact on the trajectory of the review process. Shocking. Who ever would have imagined. But nonetheless, having data to show a thing that seems obvious on its face is important to make the changes to fix the problem.

Speaking of which: Female Promotions and the Academic Pipeline: Evidence from a Natural Experiment: "When women do obtain tenure, the effects extend well beyond their own careers: promoting a woman to Associate Professor increases female faculty by 1.5 members after 15 years, leads to six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade, and raises the number who subsequently remain in academia and reach tenured positions."

Christopher Nolan said he based his adaptation of The Odyssey on Emily Wilson's translation. Emily Wilson delivers scores of zingers for Nolan in the London Review of Books: "As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script." This review is a great read on a superficial level if you simply want to see an academic rhetorically dismantle the work of an artist. But it's also interesting to think about the all of the choices that were made during the adaptation, and the choices that Wilson thinks are particularly ill advised. The central thesis about the movie was designed as a contemporary critique of the amorality underlying the fascist takeover of the United States over the past decade, and to get there Nolan extracts selectively from The Odyssey and adds in entire moral dilemmas that are absent from the original text. It's all very curious. I enjoyed the spectacle of the film, and I also enjoyed the spectacle of this review.

New monkey species are still being described from Central Africa. Locals have long been familiar with the likweli, but now it's they've got a latin name too (Colobus congoensis)

You know those climate "wedges" that were a thing for trimming back on CO2 emissions? Turns out that this was oil industry propaganda, along the lines of the "carbon footprint." Excellent work from ProPublica, who by the way are very much worth your subscription dollars.

Inside the new political screening of NIH grants. Oh and the cuts from last yeardisproportionately hit minority and women scientists, of course they did.

On science teaching and science teachers. From Fight For The Human newsletter.

NSF, National Science Board, and the politics of staying quiet.

A nice story about a high school student sticking their neck out to speak truth to power.

I grew up in science being told that the ginormous insects of the Paleozoic could grow so big because of the higher concentration of O2 in the atmosphere; in insect physiology I was taught that the tracheal system (which supplies oxygen directly to tissues in insects, if you aren't aware of this anatomy and physiology, it's outrageously unexpected to those with a vertebrate frame of reference) was constraining body size. A new paper says that story may not be the case, that these ginormous insects would be just fine in our current atmosphere of just 21% oxygen.

From El País: Missing and dead scientists: The conspiracy theory being investigated by the FBI and Congress and here is another piece about this in The Independent. Why am I reading about this from the media from Spain and the UK but not the US? This is weird.

Here's some details about what happened with the big Canvas hack at the end of the Spring semester. It's pretty wild.

This interesting nonprofit org caught my eye when a colleague passed this on – they do the logistics, fieldwork, and/or data collection for challenging research projects, as consultants. "Exploration, as a service." Imagine if you have a project that requires backcountry work but you don't have the personnel or bandwidth, or member of the team is disabled, or there's a thing beyond your capacity but the data would be ever so valuable. What at neat idea. I suspect there are other folks out there who do this, but this is my first exposure to it as a nonprofit.

How do you know you're a good (writing) mentor?[cw: substack] and the partner piece on wordpress from their collaborator. Bethann and Stephen are regulars around here, eh!

Cool paper in PNAS: "Our research finds that among various combinations of signals people might receive, the combined support from scientific experts and social consensus is reliably the most effective at mobilizing Americans’ actions on environmental, health, and technological challenges—even in cases where powerful actors like governments and companies vocally oppose taking action. This finding is especially useful in contexts like the United States where government and industry may oppose key solutions that are supported by scientists and the public."

And another cool paper in PNAS! Researchers looked at career trajectories of scholars in various field before and after tenure, and evaluated the stereotype of professors who coast after they get tenure. In lab-based fields, there isn't a dropoff in productivity, but there is in other fields. However, after tenure scholars are producing more novel and creative work.

Reports from inside NSF about reallocating funds to stuff that no scientist is asking for.

The Difference Between "Replicable" and "Not replicable" is not Itself Scientifically Replicable: "Aggregating replicability rates across heterogeneous literatures produces averages that conflate incommensurable regimes and lack a stable interpretation. Replicability rate is not a reliable demarcation criterion. The replication crisis, if there is one, cannot be established by the methods used to declare it."

If historical romance novels are your thing, maybe a read of the correspondence between Warren G Harding and his paramour might be on the docket as well?

Why your dog needs to be leashed during walks, but mine does not.

Cultivating “scientific identity”: insights from plant cell and developmental biology

Inside the ever curious relationship between the Vatican and Anthropic. (interesting in light of the Vatican's recent encyclical about safeguarding the human person in the time of AI, which itself is very much worth a read, it's from the Chicago Pope himself).

A piece in the LA Review of Books revisits Infinite Jest after 30 years, and the rollercoaster of public opinion it has experienced over this time: "The way we’re still arguing about Infinite Jest is probably a bad sign for the internet and literature, a sign that, in this new media environment, complex works are largely reduced to symbols, memes, and endlessly generative discourse machines, devoid of real meaning or depth. But maybe there’s a glimmer of hope there somewhere: people on the internet are still talking about literature—a lot. And the idea of reading is obviously still important to many of us, even if the very capacity to do so is slipping from our grasp, even if the people and institutions best equipped to preserve that capacity are being targeted and hollowed out. At least we’re not going down without a fight. In this way, astonishingly, the internet has returned us to some of the novel’s, and Wallace’s, biggest questions. Will addictive media destroy our souls? What happens if we lose the ability to read, to connect with other human consciousnesses? Who, and what, deserves our precious attention?"

I continue to struggle with the idiocy of some colleagues who don't see structural misogyny within the academy that is as pervasive as the air we breathe. This journal article helps understand these folks, and I think is an important read for anybody who wants to understand how gender operates in higher ed: "Based on 77 qualitative interviews with professors in higher education, this article explores the interviewees' opinions on how gender disparities in academia should be explained. We show that male professors relate women's career barriers to family factors and women's own interests and preferences. In contrast, female professors favour explanations at the university level, for example lack of recognition of women, implicit bias in evaluations, male networks and an unwelcoming academic culture. Furthermore, we identify a ‘silent standpoint’ among the participating male professors: the idea that women are generally less qualified than men as candidates for full professorships."

This is a nice piece about the beauty of soccer: "I love soccer for how it connects and how it teaches. The game can turn a crowd of 50,000 disparate souls into one living, breathing thing. It can be a foundation and a glue for loving relationships and a touchpoint to our roots. It can be a vehicle that can take us around the world, opening a window into the good and bad of different cultures, religions, places and people. At its best, it can help us better understand one another. At its best, it can push us to better understand ourselves. Soccer isn’t unique in those respects. Other sports and games and arts can all achieve those same things. Few of them are as universal as soccer, though. Few are as accessible and easily understood by the entire world. Few are as powerful. Few are as beautiful. Few are as human. Few are such a gift."

I wanted to give y'all a heads up that over the next month, I'm going to be on a glorious vacation, going straight to a conference, and then immediately moving and transitioning into new duties, so the month of August will be somewhere between very quiet and silent for Science for Everyone.