Linkety Link July 31, 2011
Posted by mareserinitatis in feminism, links, math, science.Tags: feminism, links, math, science, women in science
add a comment
I came across this fascinating article on the history of research in global climate change. I am greatly amused by the fact that methods used for oil and gas exploration were later utilized to validate theories on climate change. Irony.
Anyway, it’s a fascinating read: The Discovery of Global Warming
I’ve also been remiss in not posting a link to this sooner. (As you can tell, blogging hasn’t been at the forefront of my brain.) GEARS wrote two great posts on diversification in STEM fields: Diversification In Stem Fields and On Diversification: with Dr. Anna Garry and Professor Ursula Keller.
Of course, there’s a lot going on at EngineerBlogs. I wrote a post recently titled Died-in-the-wool Engineer.
For fun, you should think about whether math should be taught in schools. (And yes, the video is a spoof.)
Look smart! (Bonus points for not being sexist.) February 23, 2011
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, engineerblogs.org, engineering, feminism, grad school, physics, science.Tags: education, engineering, impostor syndrome, perceptions, reddit, science, sexism
10 comments
Some of you are undoubtedly aware of the conversation that started with Fluxor’s post about women engineers and perception at our favorite engineering blog. This started a huge conversation on reddit (which can be summarized as “women are incompetent and keeping men from getting the jobs they deserve”) as well as a response discussion on reddit2xc discussing how frustrating and pervasive the attitude seems to be. Frautech weighed in with her incredibly intelligent ladybrain.
At FrauTech’s blog, Chris Gammell wrote:
Here’s all I can come up with for why in the world someone would think this way.
1. “THERE’S A GIRL IN THE ROOM!”
2. “I MUST PROVE I’M SMART. I KNOW, I’LL PUT HER DOWN.”
It’s a good theory, and while I don’t know that it’s right, I think he may actually be coming close.
When I was working on my MS, I ended up taking a class with a guy who was a superstar as an undergrad but had just started his master’s. We were taking a class in emag, and after class, we’d sit and talk. I would often go off on how some things frustrated me, what I didn’t understand, how confusing certain topics were, etc.
After about a month, I was asking him what he’d figured out on a homework set. He looked around nervously, leaned over to me and shook his head.
“I have no idea what’s going on in this class.”
*poof*
Every notion I had of him being so much more intelligent and competent than me shattered like glass. I really thought he knew this stuff…and I spent a lot of the semester helping him out on homework.
I realized at that point how much posturing goes on in engineering classrooms: guys really do feel a need to look smart, and engineering is notoriously competitive. When I was taking classes with other female engineers, we had no problems discussing our frustrations and confusion with topics in the class. Guys never did. They never let on that they didn’t know something (except for the one experience). I suspect this is part of adhering to the stereotype that men can’t let anyone know their weaknesses.
Reading the comments over at Reddit, there is a big part of me wondering if the whole “women are so much less compentent than men” issue that keeps coming up is due to the fact that women don’t feel shame in discussing their frustrations and struggles. Most men simply would never do that, and so they take women doing so as a sign that they aren’t competent. In reality, they’re just being honest about how their feeling, and due to things like impostor syndrome, a lot of women worry about failing and not keeping up with their colleagues. I really wonder how many men view these admissions as signs of weakness and failure, reinforcing a view that women aren’t as competent. In reality, the admission may be verbalizing concerns while having nothing to do with actual competence and ability. Women perceive they are not keeping up with their colleagues, they say something to this effect, and men then assume this means they really aren’t keeping up with their colleagues.
This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that women, in some engineering programs, are so few that they are often more easily remembered than male classmates who may, in fact, really be doing far worse. Considering most women I’ve run into have had a lot of difficulty finding study partners, I’m blown away that women do as well as they do. There have been a number of studies showing that women tend to fare worse than men in traditional classroom environments due to reduced interaction. One example is a study showing that women fare as well as men when the classroom is interactive (see here). There have also been studies (although not definitive) showing that women tend to fare better in online learning because the social advantage men tend to have in such classes is removed in online learning. (Unfortunately, I’ve scoured Google scholar and can’t find the reference. If you have it, let me know.) This isolation has a lot of negative consequences both academically and career-wise.
I don’t think, therefore, that the real problem is that women are less competent. I think some of the “observational data” is very perception driven and fueled by differences in communication. Men need to understand that women who are actually very capable fear failing, even when they are doing vastly better than their male classmates and colleagues.
Free Market != Sophisticated Healthcare February 2, 2011
Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, research, science, societal commentary.Tags: innovation, research, science, science funding
5 comments
The older boy knows someone who, on his blog, posted a link to information about a very sophisticated and cool medical widget. Then this person turned around and said something to the effect of, “Innovations like this are why we need to keep healthcare private.” I bet the older boy that 1) this device was developed at a university, probably state-funded and 2) the development of the device was probably done with some sort of federal funding.
I wish I’d made the bet for cash. It turns out that after asking the internet, I was right: state funded university with department of defense grantitude.
I was rather blown away that someone would make such an obvious mistake. But then, I’m a scientist and an engineer who knows people both in industry and academia. I’m probably more familiar with the process of technical innovation than the average joe. (In fact, I’m probably going to be discussing that Friday on http://engineerblogs.org.)
There are a lot of people that have misconceptions about what real scientist is or does. My guess is, that most people, when they hear the word scientist, think of the following:
(As a huge tangent, my ex-husband’s last name was Brown, and I was very reluctant to change my last name after we divorced. I wanted very badly for people to call me “Doc Brown” once I earned my PhD.)
Back to the present, we all know and love the stereotypical mad scientist: he (always a he) toils away in his basement to create some amazing gadget that will miraculously change the way human beings interact with their world. Bonus points for crazy hair.
Unfortunately, this is a very naive and pretty remote possibility. Since World War II, scientific research has been recognized as being something that our country can and should invest in order to put us “ahead of the game”. Serious science research, whether it is paradigm shifting or not, can seldom be done in the basement or garage. There is seldom “low hanging fruit” such that research doesn’t require a significant investment of time, money, personnel, and capital equipment.
Probably with the exception of electronics, which is riding a huge wave of capitalistic materialism, many of the things that have enhanced our standard of living over the past few decades has been the investment of public money into public institutions. This is especially true with health and medicine. Free market healthcare may make it easier to get access to things like MRI, but much of the initial research into medical technology comes from federal and state governments. Think about it: many of the most advanced, cutting edge medical research is done at hospitals with university medical school affiliations.
It is depressing to see that the US, especially the newly elected republican congress critters, are trying to drastically cut federal research funding while places like China doing exactly the opposite. Believe it or not, I’ve already heard about researchers going to China to do their work because they’re finding it easier to get funding and equipment time. China has seen that investment in science works, so they’re following suit. They’re being a lot smarter than we are.
I remember in the 80s (yeah, I’m that old) when everyone was so impressed that Tang was something that NASA developed. In fact, NASA is still making efforts to let people know how the organization benefits them. However, as obvious as it may seem to those of us in science, the average person may not really have a clue how important NSF, NIH, and other funding organizations are to both economic and technological leadership. It almost seems like, if they could afford it, these institutions need to be banging their own drum a bit louder, letting people know how important they are to everyday life.
But sadly, the reality is that most people don’t know or don’t care about where all our modern conveniences come from. They keep being told that the “free market” is what makes it all possible and that government spending is wasteful and useless. They believe it, and so they don’t realize how badly we as a nation are shooting ourselves in the foot if we fail to maintain or increase spending in research of all stripes.
Next time you see a gadget and think that it’s an example of what makes the United States a great nation, try to remember that there’s a good chance that gadget had some of its origins in public funding. By trying to end such funding, we are destroying our scientific and technological legacy.
Harder than it has to be August 24, 2010
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, engineering, physics, science.Tags: education, science, teaching
add a comment
While working on my MS, I took a grad-level class in physics. Despite the fact that the material was close to what I was doing in EE, I had a lot of problems understanding how to do the exercises. The prof was trying to do more interactive things with our in-class time, so homework problems were often worked on the board by unwilling class participants.
On one such occasion, I was called up to the board and asked to give the solutions to an exercise.
I wasn’t terribly concerned about this as I knew I had the problem solved correctly. However, the instructor had described a particular way to solve this problem. I honestly tried several times to solve the problem the way he had described, but the effort was rather futile. After several attempts, I solved the problem using a method I’d learned in EE. (It was something my MS advisor had managed to explain very clearly in less than 10 minutes.) When I went up to the board, I described how I had solved it.
The instructor gave me a somewhat irritated look and made some comment about, “Well, that’s how an engineer may solve the problem.” Of course, out of the 15 students in the room, 12 were from engineering. He then proceeded to go through another explanation of the method he used which still made no sense to me.
I mentioned my irritation about this comment to a classmate later, and he said, “Yeah, well, your way actually made sense. We knew what you were talking about.”
I have often wondered since then how much of getting through a degree program is made artificially difficult by the way the material is communicated. Or perhaps it is made harder by adherence to methods that may not provide much intuitive insight. I often wonder if it really does have to be that hard.
Kinetic theory of kids July 23, 2010
Posted by mareserinitatis in humor, science.Tags: children, humor, physics, science
add a comment
It’s always fun to bring my kids to play when visiting with my scientist and engineer friends. Inevitably, the most haggard of us will comment on “how much energy they have!”
My response for the past few years has been, “Oh, we have the same amount of energy as we do, they just have less mass.” This has elicited laughter, groans, and, more often than I care to admit, blank stares.
Therefore, I have decided it is time to proffer a full explanation as more than once I have wanted to say, “Go look it up on my blog.”
Energy, as you may know, has an amorphous quality about it: it makes things move, makes them hot, makes them roll downhill, but it’s hard to define. It’s just one of those things things that we assign a number to and use it to do calculations.
The most important things about energy are that 1 – it is conserved because 2 – it can change from one form to another. As an example, a ball rolling across the floor will slow down because it’s transferring the motion from its energy into heat. The energy doesn’t go away (is conserved) but simply changes to a different form.
Fortunately, for this explanation, we’ll only deal with one form of energy: kinetic, or energy due to an object’s motion. It turns out that kinetic energy is proportional to the object’s mass and the square of its velocity. Specifically,
As I said, energy is conserved. This means it can’t go away but just can be transformed into another type of energy. However, I half jokingly assert that kids have the same amount of energy as adults, so I’m corrupting the meaning. But, moving along, we’ll assume this means that we can set the energy of an adult equal to that of a child. We’ll use the subscript A for adult and C for a child. (The use of the subscript k would be for kid, but that leaves a certain amount of ambiguity as to whether the topic of the post is human children or goats.)
If we want to know how fast a child should move relative to an adult, we can rearrange the terms to get:
In words, the root of the ratio of the adult mass to child’s mass will give the factor describing how much faster the child moves than the adult. Practically speaking, this means my younger boy moves about twice as fast as me.
One may wish to assert that the above equation is obviously false because infants, as we all know, can’t move very fast. While they may initially appear to be an exception, it is useful to note that they make an awful lot of jerky, uncontrolled movements which would probably average to the correct mean velocity.
I have, on occasion, considered taking measurements to validate the theory, but I just haven’t had enough energy.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
When you think of a scientist… January 26, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in science, societal commentary, younger son.Tags: science, women in science, younger son
1 comment so far
On the way to school yesterday, the younger boy started telling me that Dr. Frankenstein wasn’t a real scientist. I asked him what he thought of when he heard the word scientist. He was very quiet, and I started feeling anxious that this was going to end up in a “dude in a lab coat with beaker”.
I interjected, “You think of your mom, right?”
“No,” he paused for a few moments more. “I think of someone who is already dead.”
Oh great. So to be a scientist, you can only be recognized post-mortem, right? I wondered if it was someone crazy like Tesla.
“Already dead?”
“Yeah, she discovered radium, I think.”
I was kind of stunned. He wasn’t thinking of guys in lab coats – he was thinking of Marie Curie. Upon conversing further, it turned out that he knew quite a bit about her. There was a Magic School Bus book on science fairs at his classroom, and he had read about her in there.
I had to admit that I was hugely relieved that not only did he suffer from a common misconception about what a scientist is but that his first thought of a scientist was actually a very accomplished female scientist.
Although I’m still a tiny bit sad he didn’t think of me.