Professor Hands Out "Erase Undesirable Data Points" Coupons To PhD Students

TIJUANA- Obtaining a PhD in the life sciences now routinely takes six or seven years, whereas 30 or 40 years ago, students could graduate from a PhD program in just 3 or 4 years. The University of California, Tijuana (UCT) hired a consultancy firm to help them identify the reasons for the prolonged PhD duration. The consultants found the culprit: Data outliers.

Richard ("Dick") Tator is a Professor for Complementary and Alternative Science (CAS) at UCT and explains the findings.

“If a PhD student conducts an experiment with eight mice and five respond one way, but three mice the opposite way, most students then have to conduct additional experiments with many more mice to obtain a definitive, statistically significant result. This can prolong the duration of a PhD by months or even years.”

Professor Tator has now come up with a very innovative program to address this problem. He hands out “coupons” to his students which allow them to simply erase any data points which are interfering with the statistical significance of the results or which do not conform with the anticipated findings.

Lay Zee is a student in Professor Tator’s laboratory and is a big fan of the new system. “Dick is just a wonderful mentor. He basically allows every graduate student to earn up to three coupons a year, and each coupon is good for up to two years. So you do not have to use them all up at once and you can keep them in stock for a future data point that does not support your hypothesis.”

Lay says that Professor Tator gives out one “erase undesirable data coupon” for performing three chores, such as walking his dog, picking up Professor Tator’s laundry and baby-sitting his children. Lay feels that implementing “erase undesirable data coupons” is a win-win situation for everyone.

“I get to graduate sooner and we get to publish our results faster. Some of my friends in other programs are going to be stuck in their PhD program for another two or three years, performing mundane experiments, just to ensure that they will have statistically valid results, whereas I am already receiving job offers.”

Tator’s colleagues are also impressed with his innovative approach. Knott Eggsist is a professor of philosophy and UCT and admits that he is a bit envious.

“Professors in the humanities also have dogs that need to be walked and our students are also stuck in a PhD program for a very long time, sometimes as long as 8 or 9 years. We would love to have something similar to Dick’s coupons, but our problem is that we do not really have any actual data in the humanities.”

“How do you erase a data point that never even existed?”, Eggsist asks. After a brief pause, his eyes light up and he then nods vigorously, “Now that would be a great dissertation topic!”

Eggsist then talks about an equally innovative program that his department might implement.

“We are considering an entirely different approach in the philosophy department. We have determined that PhD in philosophy is prolonged unnecessarily because one has to deal with all the complex and long-winded thoughts of German philosophers. We will therefore start using an ‘Erase a German philosopher coupon’. With each coupon, our students will be able to write their dissertation and pretend that for example Hegel, Kant or Nietzsche or any other German philosopher of their choosing never existed and simply ignore all their writings.”

Happier Children Earn Higher Wages When They Become Adults

There is quite a bit of debate about the scientific validity of the proverb “money can’t buy happiness”, because studies on this topic have yielded discordant results. Some studies support the idea that richer people are happier on average than poor people, but there are also reports that while the median income in the US has grown in recent decades, average happiness among Americans has hardly changed.

The researchers Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Andrew Oswald decided to study the link between happiness and income from a very different angle. Instead of asking whether more money leads to more happiness, they reversed the question and asked whether more happiness leads to more money. In the paper “Estimating the influence of life satisfaction and positive affect on later income using sibling fixed effects” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, De Neve and Oswald use in-home surveys and interviews of about 15,000 adolescents and young adults in the US, assessing their “positive affect” (a technical term to indicate “happiness” or “well-being”) at ages 16, 18 and 22. The researchers then analyzed the annual earnings of these adolescents or young adults once they reached the age 29. They found that the degree of happiness at the young age had a major role in predicting their future income. For example, 16-year-olds who scored in the lowest happiness category went on to earn about $28,000 per year at age 29, while those who scored in the highest happiness category earned roughly $38,000!

Since happiness at a young age could merely reflect the family environment or family income, the researchers also corrected for this by directly comparing the happiness of siblings growing up in the same family. It turned out that the same relationship between happiness at a young age and higher future income held true. Happier siblings who grew up in the same family were far more likely to earn more money as adults than their less happy siblings. The researchers also tried to uncover possible reasons for why happier adolescents go on to earn more money as adults. Their statistical analysis found that a higher likelihood of obtaining a college degree, getting hired and promoted, having an optimistic outlook and being an extrovert were all possible mediating factors that led to the higher income of happier children. How the happiness of the younger child impacted these factors could not be determined and the study also did not provide data on whether happiness at younger ages was associated with better academic performance. 

            This was an observational study which evaluated statistical associations, but could not assess direct cause-effect relationships nor did it test whether an intervention at a young age can actually make a difference. If we found ways to help children become happier at age 16 (as a parent, I know that this can be quite challenging!), would that necessarily mean that they would earn more money when they grow up? We need more research to definitively answer this question and then identify the potential interventions that would be effective. One has to also bear in mind that this study was conducted in US adolescents and may not apply to other societies or cultures. The fact that extraversion and optimism were associated with a higher income is a reminder that introverts often face challenges at work and may lose out in terms of promotions and earnings to colleagues who exude a lot of optimism and cheerfulness. If this study had been conducted in other societies where there isn't such peer pressure to be cheerful and optimistic, the results may have been very different.   

As a society, we should try to maximize the happiness of children, purely for ethical and altruistic reasons and not because it makes them better earners. However, we live in an environment where terms such as “fiscal responsibility” are thrown around as an excuse to cut budgets for schools and for important educational and community programs. This study provides some data to show that investing in the happiness of children may indeed be “fiscally responsible” and yield returns that can be measured in actual dollars. 

Image credit: Le bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life) by Henri Matisse, 1905. The painting is in the public domain in the US.

De Neve JE, & Oswald AJ (2012). Estimating the influence of life satisfaction and positive affect on later income using sibling fixed effects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 (49), 19953-8 PMID: 23169627

Austerity Budget Includes Increased Spending for Science and Education

Expanding bubble in space
NASA

Rigid and naive approaches to reducing government budget deficits usually involve significant cuts in all areas of spending. It is therefore quite impressive that the new French austerity budget under President François Hollande has a more measured and thoughtful approach.  As reported by Barbara Casassus in Nature News, the French government is targeting a reduction in spending of roughly 3% in most areas, but not in the area of higher education and research:

French Higher Education and Research Minister Geneviève Fioraso had something to smile about as she briefed reporters the day before the government unveiled its 2013 austerity budget on 28 September. Hers was one of the few ministries to escape spending cuts as socialist President François Hollande and his team strive to honour their commitment to slash the deficit from 4.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) to 3% next year. Instead of pruning spending by 3.5% as ministers had been instructed, Fioraso managed to negotiate a 2.2% spending increase to give a 2013 budget for her ministry of just under €23 billion (US$29 billion), or €26 billion if contributions from other ministries are included. This was even more than the increase given to schools, which were one of the three priorities touted by Hollande in his election campaign earlier this year.

This is very good news, because the long-term goal of austerity measures is to improve the economy. Reduced spending for research and education would likely undermine this goal. The increased budget allotment will be used to directly create jobs and support research grants:

The upshot of the cash increase is that 1,000 new university posts will be created, a third each going to lecturer-researchers, researchers and support staff, and none of the 68,449 publicly funded research jobs will be cut. Funding for research grants will rise by 1.2% to €7.86 billion, although that is a drop in real terms as inflation is expected to average 1.75% for the year. As Hollande had pledged, the funding split between the National Research Agency (ANR), which finances most projects, and basic research institutes is rebalanced. ANR allocations will shrink from €709 million to €687 million this year, and institutes will receive an extra €60 million for operating expenses. More than €1.1 billion is slated for international programmes, up from just over €1 billion this year. The European Space Agency (ESA) will get a 3.8% rise, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will get 58% more.

In addition to directly creating new jobs, this support for research and education is an important investment in the future of France. The French government will also give tax breaks to smaller companies that are developing innovative technologies. One can only hope that this recognition of how important it is to invest in education and research will also be shared by the US government. 

Presidential Wordles: Obama and Romney on Science

Scientific American and ScienceDebate.org partnered up earlier this summer and asked President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney some key questions about their stances on issues related to science, technology and education. This is quite important because presidential debates and interviews with presidential candidates often gloss over science and science-related topics. This is not due to some sort of conspiracy among presidential candidates and debate moderators or interviewers that allows them to neglect policy stances about science and technology. Instead, there seems to be a lack of interest among the general public regarding the science policies of the presidential candidates that they might elect. To illustrate this, one only needs to review the 32 "crowd-sourced" questions that the readers of The Atlantic would like to ask the presidential candidates. In this list, we can find numerous questions related to the budget deficit, wars, terrorism, economy or taxes, but not a single question that focuses on science or technology. Being a scientist, I am probably biased in favor of emphasizing the important role that science plays in our everyday lives, but I think that even non-scientists would admit that science and technology are quite central to contemporary society. It would therefore make sense to carefully evaluate a presidential candidate’s policies in regards to science, technology and education prior to casting one’s vote.

            Instead of waiting for some elusive and sparse questions about scientific issues that the candidates may encounter prior to the upcoming presidential election in November 2012, Scientific American and ScienceDebate.org took a pro-active approach and sent them a list of questions related to science, technology and education. These carefully selected questions touch on many of the major science and technology related issues that ought to be of interest to the US voters and should factor into their decision-making. They were based in part on questions that readers of the Scientific American Blog submitted as their top science-related questions for the presidential candidates. Unlike the broad request for questions by The Atlantic, the Scientific American readers were specifically asked to submit science and technology related questions by the editor Bora Zivkovic.

I look forward to an in-depth and serious analysis of Obama’s and Romney’s  responses by the editors of Scientific American, which will be published in the upcoming November issue. However, since I am neither profound nor serious, I decided to perform my own superficial and fun analysis of some of the responses using the online app Wordle. The Wordle app generates images of texts show-casing the words, based on the frequency of the words used in the input text. The more often a word is used in a text, the larger the font of the word in the generated image. I chose four questions that I was especially interested in because they relate to general science policy and education and I plugged in the responses of the candidates into the Wordle app.

1. Innovation and the Economy. Science and technology have been responsible for over half of the growth of the U.S. economy since WWII, when the federal government first prioritized peacetime science mobilization. But several recent reports question America’s continued leadership in these vital areas. What policies will best ensure that America remains a world leader in innovation?

Obama Answer to Question 1

Romney Answer to Question 1

When we look at the Wordles of both responses, we can see that both candidates used the word “American” frequently and they use the expected buzz-words innovation, economy, workers and jobs. However, what does stand out is that in Obama’s response, science and math are specifically mentioned, whereas Mitt Romney’s response seems to use the word “tax” frequently. This does strike me as a bit odd; after all, the question is about science and technology leadership and it is not clear why taxes should be such a prominent part of the response. The other distinguishing feature of the two responses is that Obama specifically mentions science and math, whereas Romney’s response does not use the word science at all. 

3. Research and the Future. Federally funded research has helped to produce America’s major postwar economies and to ensure our national security, but today the UK, Singapore, China, and Korea are making competitive investments in research. Given that the next Congress will face spending constraints, what priority would you give to investment in research in your upcoming budgets?

Obama Answer to Question 3

Romney Answer to Question 3

The Wordles do not seem too different – research and energy appears prominently in the responses of both candidates. Romney mentions Obama multiple times, but this can be attributed to the fact that as a challenger he feels the need to highlight flaws and mistakes of the incumbent president. The Wordle does reveal that Romney uses “companies” multiple times in a response to a question about federal funding of research.

5. Education. Increasingly, the global economy is driven by science, technology, engineering and math, but a recent comparison of 15-year-olds in 65 countries found that average science scores among U.S. students ranked 23rd, while average U.S. math scores ranked 31st. In your view, why have American students fallen behind over the last three decades, and what role should the federal government play to better prepare students of all ages for the science and technology-driven global economy?

Obama Answer to Question 5

Romney Answer to Question 5

  

The Wordle of Obama’s response indicates a repeated mention of STEM – science, technology, engineering and math, whereas Romney’s response manages to completely avoid using the expression science or the all-inclusive STEM, but does have a couple of references to “technology”. Instead, there is an oddly frequent occurrence of the word “unions” in Romney’s response. I was so puzzled by “unions” in a response to a question about science and math education, that I decided to read his full response and realized that Romney believes teachers unions are to blame for the poor science and math education in the US.  

11. Science in Public Policy. We live in an era when science and technology affect every aspect of life and society, and so must be included in well-informed public policy decisions. How will you ensure that policy and regulatory decisions are fully informed by the best available scientific and technical information, and that the public is able to evaluate the basis of these policy decisions?

Obama Answer to Question 11

Romney Answer to Question 11

The one key difference in the Wordles of the responses to a question about public policy is that Obama responds using the word “public”, whereas Romney seems to be quite concerned with EPA regulations regarding mercury and pollution in general. Other than that, there does not seem to be any obvious difference in the word frequencies.

This Wordle analysis did not involve actual reading and interpretation of the responses – it therefore does not constitute an in-depth analysis of the science policies of the two candidates. Nevertheless, this simple automated enumeration of words did reveal some unexpected results, such as Romney’s repeated mention of “taxes” and “unions” in responses to questions related to science and education. It is likely that the frequent recurrence of these expressions is indicative of some key differences in the approaches of the two candidates to the policy goals for science and technology. I look forward to the in-depth analysis of the Scientific American editors and, more importantly, I hope that American voters will consider the science policies of the candidates when they cast their votes in November.

Four Year Old Boy Is Suspended From Pre-School For Plagiarism

SEPTEMBER 2, 2012 CHICAGO, IL – The Wisdom Truth Fortitude (WTF) Academy is the nation’s best elite pre-school. For an annual tuition of $57,000, three-year old child prodigies can enroll in the WTF Academy if they can pass a highly competitive entrance examination. When the WTF students graduate two years later, most of them have acquired the cognitive maturity that is normally found in middle school students. WTF Academy proudly advertises that 87% of its graduates ultimately end up going to an Ivy League college, and over half of these are accepted into these colleges before they become teenagers. This past week WTF Academy made headlines when it suspended the four-year old student Axel Foley for plagiarism.

Principal Edward Rooney made the decision after a plagiarism committee reviewed Axel’s work during the preceding year. The committee found numerous examples of misconduct, including recycling parts of an essay he had written when he was three years old and fabricating quotes of fellow students when he covered a bake sale for the pre-school newspaper. However, the most blatant case of Axel’s plagiarism was identified by his “Introduction to Postmodern Analysis” class teacher Ms. Derrida, who was grading a short story that Axel wrote. Ms. Derrida noticed that Axel used the phrase "You are made out of cardboard boxes, you must have a story to tell." Ms. Derrida knew that she had heard this phrase before, but could not remember where. “When I showed our standard anti-plagiarism video ‘Plagiarism in the Elementary Classroom’ to the incoming class of students, I finally realized what Axel had done”, Ms. Derrida explained. Apparently, Axel used the last line of that video for his short story. “Plagiarizing an anti-plagiarism video is one of the most egregious crimes that one can imagine”, Mr. Rooney stated at a press conference, “this is why we decided to immediately suspend Axel from WTF.”

Plagiarism has received a lot of press recently in light of the Jonah Lehrer controversy, the Harvard cheating ring and the fact that the German defense minister Guttenberg had to resign because large portions of his doctoral thesis were plagiarized. After Axel’s suspension and these other scandals, elite pre-schools all over the country are currently assembling plagiarism committees to review the work of the pre-schoolers. When we asked Axel for a comment, he responded with the words “If you copy from one author, it's plagiarism. If you copy from two, it's research.”