So after listening to Ira Flatow interview Lisa Randall on Science Friday last week, I was a little annoyed. I was only listening with half an ear, to be honest, the other 3/4 of my ear capability being held in reserve. After all, I do like listening to my friends and colleagues talk about our field on the radio and television, but you don’t really need to listen hard since I’ve heard everything there is to hear about how these concepts are explained…. I listen because I want to cheer them on when they do a good job; will them some suggested helpful words if they’re struggling -caught off guard, etc, which happens in radio (remind me to tell you a story about that)- and generally be supportive of their efforts to tell the general public what we do, how we do it and why we do it.

From what my 1/2 ear heard, it was pretty good. Lisa’s a nice new fresh voice to hear in the media, and she’s doing an excellent job.

Both ears came on fully at one point when I suddenly realized that Ira was….openly flirting with Lisa! And it got a bit blushy and giggly. Unbelievable. I don’t remember him flirting with Brian Greene. But, hey, I thought, in reasonable measure, why not? But then it went to another level!

At some point the phrase:

This is a woman with both brains and incredible beauty…

pops up and I’m in full listen mode. What??!! Then I hear:

Don’t you think - and I’m not trying to be chauvinist about this- you have a talent because of your looks to bring people into science who’d may be not pay any attention?

Waitaminute! Brian’s no slouch in the good looks department…. did Ira ask him that question when Brian was on the show? I don’t recall. Anyone?

Anyway, amusingly at this point, Lisa valiantly struggles to avoid acknowledging the good looks thing, but then (after a touch more than a few Planck times) she gives in and just goes with the flow. (She does actually go on to give good answers despite the major curveballs - good job Lisa!)

Another “gem” from Ira, by the way (I’m not making this up):

How do you make string theory as popular as string bikinis…?

(Lisa both chokes and laughs here…)

But that’s not what annoyed me, actually, you may be surprised to hear. Nope. Here it is: At some point -sort of a leadup to the flirt-fest above- he throws in something about Lisa being a “Jodie Foster Lookalike”. Lisa defends by saying that both her and a friend of hers get this a lot, and she surmises that it is simply because Jodie Foster played a scientist in a movie. She may well be right.

Why am I annoyed? Because (in order for me to get away from later accusations that this exchange made me come up with the idea) this exchange forces me to reveal my impression of many years -long predating Jodie Foster’s role in Contact- that we actually do have a Jodie Foster look-alike in the field (by which I mean if you part the hair differently on Foster, put on glasses, take away all the recent awful airbrushing in posters)… It’s not Lisa Randall (and there’s no slur intended), it is my string theory colleague and friend (I hope remaining so after this!) the phenomenal** Eva Silverstein.

-cvj

**Don’t take my word for it: The MacArthur and Sloan Foundations think so too.

Back at the old blog we used to occasionally chat about the notorious speech by Harvard President Larry Summers, in which he suggested that intrinsic aptitude was a more important factor than discrimination or bias in explaining the dearth of women scientists. Examples here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. There was a lot of posturing and name-calling and oversimplification on either side of the debate, of course, which tended to obscure the basic fact that Summers was, as far the data goes, wildly wrong. Two favorite goalpost-moving manoeuvers from his supporters were first to pretend that the argument was over the existence of innate differences, rather than whether they were more important than biases in explaining the present situation, and then to claim that Summers’ critics’ real motive was to prevent anyone from even talking about such differences, rather than simply trying to ensure that what was being said about them was correct rather than incorrect.

It was a touchstone moment, which will doubtless be returned to again and again to illustrate points about completely different issues. Here’s an example (thanks to Abby Vigneron for the pointer) from Andrew Sullivan:

DAILY KOS AND LARRY SUMMERS: It’s a small point but it helps illuminate some of the dumbness of the activist left. “Armando” of mega-blog/community board, Daily Kos, takes a dig at Larry Summers, and links to a new study on gender difference. I’m not getting into the new study here, but I will address Armando’s description of Larry Summers’ position. In a bid to be fair, Armando writes:

NOTE: Yeah I know Summers didn’t say men were smarter than women, he just said they had greater aptitude in math and the sciences than women. Huge difference.

This is one of those memes that, although demonstrably untrue, still survives. Read the transcript of Summers’ now infamous remarks. His point was not that men are better at math and the sciences than women, as Armando would have it. His point was that there is a difference not in the mean but in the standard deviation:

Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I’m sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper - looked at the book, rather - looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those - they’re all over the map, depends on which test, whether it’s math, or science, and so forth - but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation - and I have no reason to think that it couldn’t be refined in a hundred ways - you get five to one, at the high end. (My italics.)

Summers was addressing the discrete issue of why at the very high end of Ivy League math departments, there were too few women. His point, as the Harvard Crimson summarized it was that, in math and the sciences, “there are more men who are at the top and more men who are utter failures.” Armando is wrong; and he needs to correct the item. In fact, this is a good test of leftist blog credibility. Will he correct? I’ll keep you posted.

Ah yes, the good old standard-deviation argument. It’s the absolute favorite of those in the intrinsic-differences camp, since (1) it sounds kind of mathematical and impressive, and (2) they get to insist that it’s only the width of the distribution, not the mean, that is different between men and women, so really the argument doesn’t privilege men at all, while it manages to explain why they have made all the important contributions in human history. In a debate with Elizabeth Spelke at Edge, Steven Pinker rehearses the argument somewhat pedantically.

1. Standardized tests scores reflect innate ability.
2. Boys’ scores on certain tests have a larger standard deviation than girls’ scores, leading to a larger fraction of boys at the high end.
3. The dearth of women scientists is explained by their smaller numbers on the high end of these tests.

Now, everyone who is familiar with the data knows that point 1 is somewhere between highly dubious and completely ridiculous; Summers himself admits as much, but it would ruin his story to dwell on it, so he soldiers on. But point 3 is interesting, and deserves to be looked at. It’s a nice part of the argument, because it’s testable. Is this difference in test scores really what explains the relative numbers of men and women in science?

Summers’ data comes from the book Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes by Yu Xie and Kimberlee Shauman. Interviewed shortly after his remarks, both Xie and Shauman were quick to criticize them, using words like “uninformed” and “simplistic.” We were fortunate enough to have Kim Shauman herself as a speaker at our Women in Science Symposium back in May. She pointed out that the studies Summers refers to can indeed be found in her book, right there in Chapter Two. But if you wanted to know whether the standard-deviation differences were actually what accounted for the dearth of women in science, you would have to read all the way to Chapter Three.

Here’s the point. By the time students are in twelfth grade, there is a substantial gap in the fraction of boys vs. girls who plan to study science in college. So it’s easy enough to ask: how much of that gap is explained by differing scores on standardized tests? Answer: none of it. Girls are much less likely than boys to plan on going into science, and Xie and Shauman find that the difference is independent of their scores on the standardized tests. In other words, even if we limit ourselves to only those students who have absolutely top-notch scores on these math/science tests, girls are much less likely than boys to be contemplating science as a career. Something is dissuading high-school girls from choosing to become scientists, and scores on standardized tests have nothing to do with it.

Now, looking at Sullivan’s post above, there’s nothing he says that is strictly incorrect. He is simply characterizing (accurately) what Summers said, not actually endorsing it. Still, he is certainly giving the wrong impression to his readers, by repeating a well-known allegation without mentioning that it is demonstrably false. It’s a small point, but it helps illustrate some of the disingenuity of the activist right. Sullivan is misleading, and he needs to correct the item. In fact, this is a good test of quasi-right-wing blog credibility. Will he correct? We’ll keep you posted.

I’m writing a review for American Scientist magazine of two recent physics books for general audiences: Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages and Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds. Lisa’s book is a great look at the details of how we come up with crazy ideas like brane worlds by working through attempts to understand particle physics — extremely rewarding for an interested reader, and I hope to say more about it later. I have mixed feelings about Kaku’s book, but one undeniable feature is the large number of interesting stories he relates.

One of the stories is about Vera Rubin, one of the discoverers of dark matter.

Rubin observed the rotation curves of spiral galaxies — the rate at which stars moved around the galactic center, considered as a function of the distance from that center. You would think that the velocity would diminish as you got farther away from the massive galaxy, but in fact it doesn’t — Rubin found that rotation curves were flat, implying a greater gravitational field than can be explained by the visible matter. From Kaku’s book, a story that originally appeared in Ken Croswell’s The Universe at Midnight:

Vera Rubin was ignored, in part because she was a woman. With a certain amount of pain, she recalls that, when she applied to Swarthmore College as a science major and casually told the admissions officer that she liked to paint, the interviewer said, “Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?” She recalled, “That became a tag line in my family: for many years, whenever anything went wrong for anyone, we said, ‘Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?’” When she told her high school physics teacher that she got accepted to Vassar, he replied, “You should do okay as long as you stay away from science.” She would later recall, “It takes an enormous amount of self-esteem to listen to things like that and not be demolished.”

Vera Rubin, with DTM image tube spectrograph attached to the Kitt Peak 84-inch telescope, 1970. Images from Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Well, we’ll talk a lot about science journalism soon. A lot. It’s one of my passions. But I’ll hold off for another time. In the meantime, you in the USA should know that your belief (because you’re often being told this again and again by Brits) that the UK might have vastly superior serious daily newspaper journalism (as well as superior tabliod journalism) ought not to extend neccesarily to science coverage. For a long time, the Science Times -which appears in the New York Times on Tuesdays-, even with all of its flaws, was a model of enlightenment compared to what is regularly produced over here in the dailies.

Well, not long ago the Guardian tried to address this (bless them) with their Thursday regular tabloid-sized science pullout section called “Life”. I hope that by now several of the other newspapers have followed suit, but I do not know since I don’t live here anymore. Someone please let me know. So for all the incredible amount of news, sport and celebrity coverage that is going on in any number of national newspapers over here, this is the pinnacle of science coverage in a country that claims to be full of educated people (too many of whom look down on the US on the matter of education).

Anyway, this week’s Life is out today. Following in the tradition of doing big science stories by focusing on a personality, instead of the science, the front cover page has a giant closeup of the face of the loveable cuddly Craig Venter. There are three huge pages on the guy (with some science in there, I’ll grant you), but this cover story turns out to just be an extract from a book on him and other biotech folk. Oh dear, the big science cover story is a book extract. This is great journalism folks! (Anyway, it might be interesting actually, so here’s the info: “The Geneticist Who Played Hoops with My DNA : . . . And Other Masterminds from the Frontiers of Biotech”, by David Ewing Duncan.)

To be fair, there are a few other pages filled with science reporting, which have to fight for space with stuff about medicine (why not, I suppose) and technology (not all about gadgets either). It’s a pretty good effort, and on some days can hold its own against the Science Times, I’m pleased to note. You cannot easily tell this from the Guardian Life website, as far as I can see, which seems to have gone to some effort to hide many of the stories and so you see at first only a couple of the stories, one of them being the extract. But I did note that a regular feature called “Bad Science” by Ben Goldacre does show up on the site too. I note his nice comment (the third paragraph) on a misunderstanding a woman he met at a party has about the role of women in science.

If you’re in the uk and care about science, you should be getting this every Thursday, whether or not you’re a sandal-wearing, salad-eating, whiny left-wing Guardian reader.

-cvj

Well, I had this link as a link in a previous post. It deserves a post of its own, because I think it points up an important point somewhere under all the jolly fun. (It’s a fun jab at string theory. There are plenty of them these days. I and my colleagues in the field should not hide from them. It is rather flattering that they consider us worth the effort, so I will not shy away from pointing out the funny ones when I see them. The field can (and should be able to) take it.)

My basic point is this: All these male physicists were paired with actor counterparts. Why oh why was there no woman physicist/string-theorist paired with an actress? They just plonked Jessica Alba in there at random. Could they not have even tried to think of any? There are several women in string theory with as much stature as others of those mentioned in the parody. Can’t we think of actress counterparts?

So I think that they missed a trick. It would have been so much funnier, as it would have opened up more possibilities. Come on….a little imagination here. Can we have some entries/ideas coming in maybe? I want physicist/actor pairings, and maybe even plot synopses.

-cvj

P.S. Lurking string theorists (male or female) who want to make harmless suggestions for female string theorist/actress pairings but feel uncomfortable doing so publicly are allowed, just this once mind you, to comment anonymously or using a pseudonym!