Month: September 2015

09/21/15

The coolest things in the world

Ok, this … is … thrilling.

Not quite two years ago, on October 6, 2013, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the National Geographic Society and the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa posted an odd, tantalizing ad on facebook:

Dear Colleagues – I need the help of the whole community and for you to reach out to as many related professional groups as possible. We need perhaps three or four individuals with excellent archaeological/palaeontological and excavation skills for a short term project that may kick off as early as November 1st 2013 and last the month if all logistics go as planned. The catch is this – the person must be skinny and preferably small. They must not be claustrophobic, they must be fit, they should have some caving experience, climbing experience would be a bonus. They must be willing to work in cramped quarters, have a good attitude and be a team player. Given the highly specialized, and perhaps rare nature of what I am looking for, I would be willing to look at an experienced Ph.D. student or a very well trained Masters student, even though the more experience the better (PH.D.’s and senior scientists most welcome). No age limit here either. I do not think we will have much money available for pay – but we will cover flights, accommodation (though much will be field accom., food and of course there will be guaranteed collaboration further up the road). Anyone interested please contact me directly on lee.berger@wits.ac.za copied to my assistant Wilma.lawrence@wits.ac.za . My deadlines on this are extremely tight so as far as anyone can spread the word, among professional groups.
Many thanks
Lee

What Lee Berger needed was a team of experienced excavator/cavers capable of retrieving newly discovered fossils from a small, remote chamber in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system, thirty meters—nearly one hundred feet—below ground level, and eighty meters—two hundred-sixty feet—from the cave entrance. The final approach to the chamber includes a twelve meter drop, forty feet down a chute of jagged rock that at its narrowest is just 18 centimeters—seven inches—wide.

He expected no more than a handful of people could meet requirements like this, but within only a few days, from around the world, he had fifty-seven well-qualified applicants who did. By the second week in October, Lee and his colleagues on the project had selected six women for the advance team of scientists to enter the chamber. By the first week in November, they were at the cave site, setting up camp.

On September 10, 2015, they finally announced to the world what they found.

Continue reading →

09/15/15

Curiosity, talent, duty, reinforcement

Naomi Oreskes on why people become scientists:

Well, the idea that scientists are in it for the money is idiotic, because scientist are all intelligent people and if they wanted to make money there’s a lot of better things they could do…

[. . .]

Why do people become scientists? I think it’s a mix; I think there are different things. I think that a lot of scientists are just naturally curious people—there’s what we could call the “natural historical” scientists, the people who like to collect rocks and bugs and things, and I was one of those, y’know, kids who have rock collections, right? So a lot of geologists had rock collections when we were kids. So, I think those are the sort of “curious about the world around them” types.

Then there are people who go into science because they’re really good in math. If you are talented in math, there’s a lot you can do in science. There are a lot of problems in the world that, if you have quantitative skills, you can address those things in ways that other people can’t. So, math is a powerful toolkit, and if you have that toolkit, science is a great place where you can use it.

Some people go into science ’cause it’s what they’re good at. Y’know, it’s what Jim Hansen says, he says, “I went into science ’cause I was good at it.” It’s where their talents lie. So they don’t necessarily collect bugs as kids, but they do well in science in school, and then they get encouraged because a lot of people can’t do science.

And to some extent that’s what happened to me, too. When I was a girl growing up, I was good in science, but I was good in a lot of other things, too. But being good at French or English didn’t seem special; being good at science did. And people— I mean, I had teachers who said to me explicitly, “Y’know, if you can do science, you have to.” And in hindsight, that seems actually a little weird, when you think about it, but remember, I’m also the Sputnik generation, right? We were raised to think that it was almost a kind of national duty, a patriotic duty, to go into science if you could. And then as a girl of a certain age—I’m just old enough that there was a kind of gender incentive to go into science, that science was just beginning to open up to women—and so there was this feeling that if you could do science and you’re a woman, you absolutely should, y’know, science needs you, the world of science needs you.

So there was a lot of positive reinforcement to go into science, and I think lots of people in science got that positive reinforcement…

This is an absolutely wonderful interview with Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt. This part is near the end of the interview, but the whole thing is highly worth seeing. She recounts how she started out as a geologist, then became a historian of science, and one day discovered she was being attacked on the floor of the Senate by James Inhofe (R-OK). As she says, the job of a historian of science is to understand science in its social context, so when she began being attacked in very bizarre ways by people with clearly political motives, her natural response was to try to understand why they were doing this.

The result of that investigation is Merchants of Doubt, which details the history of the anti-science propaganda machine first created by tobacco companies in the 1950s to undermine public confidence in the growing scientific evidence of the dangers of smoking, and was then repurposed in the 1980s and ’90s to undermine the science of how carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels is destabilizing the earth’s climate.

The video is part of Making Sense of Climate Science Denial, a free MOOC put together by John Cook and the folks at Skeptical Science, and hosted at edX. The course examines the psychology of climate science denial, the basics of climate science, the physical evidence that the earth actually is warming, and how to effectively counter the misinformation put out by the denial machine.

The course videos are all available on YouTube, as well as at edX. Very much worth watching.