Saturday, June 29, 2019
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
On work (AAG-BSG Chair's Column)
This is a column I wrote for the AAG Biogeography Specialty Group newsletter while serving as chair 2017-2019.
On work
Like many of you, I find that competing in the marketplace of ideas can be unpredictable. Themes and methodologies surge, rise and fall in popularity. The process of peer review always has an element of unpredictability despite its worth. The quality of our work has its own inherent element of unpredictability too, as it is often difficult for us to judge its value. More than just a few geographers have seized upon an idea or method and worked toward what we thought would surely be an immediately recognizable breakthrough others would recognize. Unfortunately, these impassioned works of ours are most likely coherent and revolutionary only to ourselves. But that is not to say there is no value in such idiosyncratic work. Indeed, it may not be productive from the standpoint of publication counts and lines on a vita. But the incomprehensibility and failure common to free form intellectualizing is part of the collective process of moving knowledge forward.
Perhaps there should be more institutional room for what we might call hunch-based science or science with fewer rules. There would be more failures, but the net we cast out would be wider. The science of today will be invigorated and often replaced by the science of tomorrow and few of us can see those ideas until they are here. That’s what we need to keep in mind when the certainty required of being a professional academic overshadows any humble appreciation of how much we don’t know. Here are a few recent articles that illustrate how the small and conjectural can be valued amid the seemingly permanent towers of academic practice and always perfect accomplishment.
(1) Vazire, S. 2017. Our obsession with eminence warps research. Nature 547(7661).
(2) Fortin, J. and D.J. Currie. 2013. Big science vs. little science: how scientific impact scales with funding. PloS One 8(6): e65263
Hunch-based research has to get lucky. It doesn't get the same position at the starting line. Most of our research proposals undergo single-blind review, in which reviewers are aware of the author's identity. In a double-blind review, the reviewer does not have this information. Single-blind reviewers are significantly more likely than their double-blind counterparts to recommend for acceptance works from famous authors and top universities. Double-blind reviewing, on the other hand, gets around this problem of prestige. Eminence, the very thing that we are required to cultivate as academics, shapes the processes of inquiry by favoring the well-established rather than the novel and lesser known. The tendency to reward eminence or track record by giving them more weight to funding applications is, as Vazire points out, “… like giving Usain Bolt a 10 meter head start in his next race”. How can the inherent unpredictability of ideas and insights be given more weight?
(3) Fang, F. and A. Casadevall. 2016. Research funding: the case for a modified lottery. MBio 7(2): e00422-16.
(4) Gravem, S. A., S.M. Bachhuber et al. 2017. Transformative research is not easily predicted. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 32(11) 825-834.
Transformative research, despite our certainty that our research is just that, is difficult to predict or anticipate. Transformativity often arises as an after effect of more incremental research and cannot be easily predicted ahead of time. Larger grants do not necessarily lead to larger discoveries, as scientific impact measured in publications is only weakly limited by funding. Lotteries could make research funding awards more equitable given that ranking large numbers of meritorious proposals induces selection bias.
(5) Mountz, A., et al. 2015. For slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14(4) 1235-1259.
(6) Scheffer, Marten. 2014. The forgotten half of scientific thinking. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(17): 6119-6119.
The degree to which our public academic personas emphasize certainty and closure over working the more productive gray areas is a consequence of the professionalization of the academic class. Rather than researchers ensconced in the thick and tangled woods of ideas, we are expected to signal and advertise certainty and clarity by producing large numbers of publications. We are also expected to embrace the cultivation of a university administrative utopia that reinforces this ideal. Good scholarship, on the other hand, requires more open-ended use of our time. Time to think, reflect, and even fail may not be always be possible, but we need to hold on to that ideal and cultivate it how we can.
On work
Like many of you, I find that competing in the marketplace of ideas can be unpredictable. Themes and methodologies surge, rise and fall in popularity. The process of peer review always has an element of unpredictability despite its worth. The quality of our work has its own inherent element of unpredictability too, as it is often difficult for us to judge its value. More than just a few geographers have seized upon an idea or method and worked toward what we thought would surely be an immediately recognizable breakthrough others would recognize. Unfortunately, these impassioned works of ours are most likely coherent and revolutionary only to ourselves. But that is not to say there is no value in such idiosyncratic work. Indeed, it may not be productive from the standpoint of publication counts and lines on a vita. But the incomprehensibility and failure common to free form intellectualizing is part of the collective process of moving knowledge forward.
Perhaps there should be more institutional room for what we might call hunch-based science or science with fewer rules. There would be more failures, but the net we cast out would be wider. The science of today will be invigorated and often replaced by the science of tomorrow and few of us can see those ideas until they are here. That’s what we need to keep in mind when the certainty required of being a professional academic overshadows any humble appreciation of how much we don’t know. Here are a few recent articles that illustrate how the small and conjectural can be valued amid the seemingly permanent towers of academic practice and always perfect accomplishment.
(1) Vazire, S. 2017. Our obsession with eminence warps research. Nature 547(7661).
(2) Fortin, J. and D.J. Currie. 2013. Big science vs. little science: how scientific impact scales with funding. PloS One 8(6): e65263
Hunch-based research has to get lucky. It doesn't get the same position at the starting line. Most of our research proposals undergo single-blind review, in which reviewers are aware of the author's identity. In a double-blind review, the reviewer does not have this information. Single-blind reviewers are significantly more likely than their double-blind counterparts to recommend for acceptance works from famous authors and top universities. Double-blind reviewing, on the other hand, gets around this problem of prestige. Eminence, the very thing that we are required to cultivate as academics, shapes the processes of inquiry by favoring the well-established rather than the novel and lesser known. The tendency to reward eminence or track record by giving them more weight to funding applications is, as Vazire points out, “… like giving Usain Bolt a 10 meter head start in his next race”. How can the inherent unpredictability of ideas and insights be given more weight?
(3) Fang, F. and A. Casadevall. 2016. Research funding: the case for a modified lottery. MBio 7(2): e00422-16.
(4) Gravem, S. A., S.M. Bachhuber et al. 2017. Transformative research is not easily predicted. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 32(11) 825-834.
Transformative research, despite our certainty that our research is just that, is difficult to predict or anticipate. Transformativity often arises as an after effect of more incremental research and cannot be easily predicted ahead of time. Larger grants do not necessarily lead to larger discoveries, as scientific impact measured in publications is only weakly limited by funding. Lotteries could make research funding awards more equitable given that ranking large numbers of meritorious proposals induces selection bias.
(5) Mountz, A., et al. 2015. For slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14(4) 1235-1259.
(6) Scheffer, Marten. 2014. The forgotten half of scientific thinking. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(17): 6119-6119.
The degree to which our public academic personas emphasize certainty and closure over working the more productive gray areas is a consequence of the professionalization of the academic class. Rather than researchers ensconced in the thick and tangled woods of ideas, we are expected to signal and advertise certainty and clarity by producing large numbers of publications. We are also expected to embrace the cultivation of a university administrative utopia that reinforces this ideal. Good scholarship, on the other hand, requires more open-ended use of our time. Time to think, reflect, and even fail may not be always be possible, but we need to hold on to that ideal and cultivate it how we can.
Tales from the Underside (AAG-BSG Chair's Column)
This is a column I wrote for the AAG Biogeography Specialty Group newsletter while serving as chair 2017-2019.
Tales from the Underside
I want to talk about some of the forces that shape us as a scholarly community internally, and within Geography. Although such introspection can be taken to a paralyzing extreme, I’ll argue that periodic formalization and discussion of these kinds of issues is not entirely useless. Some recent events, and no doubt my own personal experiences along these lines, have prompted me to propose a few tentative questions.
Are research funding opportunities equitably distributed across geography and among physical geographers? Calls have been made for federal funding agencies like the NSF and NIH to fund a proportion of research proposals based on random selection, a lottery, once they surpass a given level of fundability. This allows more varied kinds of research to be funded and circumvents the problem of prestige. Criticisms have been leveled that success and the prestige that comes with it makes the strike zone for future success a little larger, even though the relationships among funding levels, novelty of research, and publication record are not necessarily as strong as we assume.
Must all physical geography research be critical and relevant to policy? Many of us have become aware of critical physical geography. It emphasizes how the production of knowledge relates to issues of power and justice. Should this version of being critical take prioritization over others in physical geography and biogeography? How does critical physical geography’s implied urgency impact the standing of biogeographers and physical geographers at large within the NSF and within the AAG? Open-ended research without overt relevance to policy and critical theory seems to be a hard sell today. But is that what a more pragmatic process of scientific inquiry requires?
To what extent should publishing (and broadly, academics) become a zero-sum game, in which if you don't win, you lose? I’d like to think that every bit of my research had clearly defined goals from the outset and career-forwarding outcomes. Hardly. My first, and unschooled attempt at dendrochronology was a disaster. My tinkering with kite photos and structure-from-motion photography had a large effort to return ratio. Yet they were successful, just not in the manner that we are increasingly conditioned to think of success: as winning, as publishing, as fame and fortune. Has practice in biogeography become too wedded to outcomes? How do we value our work more broadly? With the small acts of learning and service, the moments that are not quantifiable in Web of Science or in the kudos that go out on the faculty listserv? Where would we be without more stumbles, false starts, and plain old being wrong? How has the emphasis on visibility and quantifying our productivity, often through increasing specialization, impacted physical geography?
Tales from the Underside
I want to talk about some of the forces that shape us as a scholarly community internally, and within Geography. Although such introspection can be taken to a paralyzing extreme, I’ll argue that periodic formalization and discussion of these kinds of issues is not entirely useless. Some recent events, and no doubt my own personal experiences along these lines, have prompted me to propose a few tentative questions.
Are research funding opportunities equitably distributed across geography and among physical geographers? Calls have been made for federal funding agencies like the NSF and NIH to fund a proportion of research proposals based on random selection, a lottery, once they surpass a given level of fundability. This allows more varied kinds of research to be funded and circumvents the problem of prestige. Criticisms have been leveled that success and the prestige that comes with it makes the strike zone for future success a little larger, even though the relationships among funding levels, novelty of research, and publication record are not necessarily as strong as we assume.
Must all physical geography research be critical and relevant to policy? Many of us have become aware of critical physical geography. It emphasizes how the production of knowledge relates to issues of power and justice. Should this version of being critical take prioritization over others in physical geography and biogeography? How does critical physical geography’s implied urgency impact the standing of biogeographers and physical geographers at large within the NSF and within the AAG? Open-ended research without overt relevance to policy and critical theory seems to be a hard sell today. But is that what a more pragmatic process of scientific inquiry requires?
To what extent should publishing (and broadly, academics) become a zero-sum game, in which if you don't win, you lose? I’d like to think that every bit of my research had clearly defined goals from the outset and career-forwarding outcomes. Hardly. My first, and unschooled attempt at dendrochronology was a disaster. My tinkering with kite photos and structure-from-motion photography had a large effort to return ratio. Yet they were successful, just not in the manner that we are increasingly conditioned to think of success: as winning, as publishing, as fame and fortune. Has practice in biogeography become too wedded to outcomes? How do we value our work more broadly? With the small acts of learning and service, the moments that are not quantifiable in Web of Science or in the kudos that go out on the faculty listserv? Where would we be without more stumbles, false starts, and plain old being wrong? How has the emphasis on visibility and quantifying our productivity, often through increasing specialization, impacted physical geography?
Day and night science (AAG-BSG Chair's Column)
This is a column I wrote for the AAG Biogeography Specialty
Group newsletter while serving as chair 2017-2019.
Day and Night Science
1. There is no such thing as the Scientific Method.
2. New knowledge is not science until it is made social.
3. Scientists do not find order in nature, they put it
there.
4. Science does not deserve the reputation it has so widely
gained of being wholly objective.
5. What pass as acceptable scientific explanations have both
social determinants and social functions.
Despite your initial reactions, these are quotes from
scientists. The authors are listed at the end of this column. They are presented in the book Never
Pure, by the philosopher of science Steven Shapin. The broad thread through
this book is that there is no one kind of science. Feyerabend (2015) similarly
criticizes the perception of a productive science as one that is singular in
its form of practice. Scholars in the field of science studies have articulated
analogous descriptions of how science works. They have done so in ways that
also negate extreme social constructivist accounts of science in which the
disunity of scientific method becomes an argument to support the acceptance of
creationism and the denial of anthropogenic climate change. This may be no
surprise, as many of us now recognize that science is not value free.
Biogeographer Tom Vale (1988) acknowledged this critical perspective in his
call for wisdom in light of how scalar extent and grain can be used to justify
or refute our interpretations of forest change. Still, do geographical
biogeographers recognize and encourage the diversity of modes of scientific
inquiry? Geographical biogeography doesn’t idolize controlled experimental
science like biology and ecology, for the most part. We test and falsify hypotheses,
but we also are descriptive and rely on context to orient any generalizing
qualities of our research findings. But do we have good philosophical health?
Two recent essays, one from biology and the other from ecology, highlight ways
of thinking that we might reflect upon as biogeographers. Biologists Desai and
Jun (2018) refer to day science, the science that is mechanical, logical, and
seeks to appeal to a universal template of best practice. Night science, by
contrast, wanders, guesses, and considers hunches and patterns. Instinct and
intuition are part of problem solving. Similarly, Schroeter et al (2018)
discuss the difference between divergent and convergent thinking in ecology.
Divergent thinking is the ‘ability to generate multiple unique solutions to a
problem and to connect disparate concepts in unique ways’. It is considered the
foundation of creative ability and complex problem solving. Convergent thinking
differs from divergent thinking in that it results in a correct or best answer,
idea, or solution from a selective number of concepts. When we do research, we
likely use day and night science. Our research will inevitably involve
convergent as well as divergent thinking. But do we tend to value day over
night science? Is convergent thinking worth more than divergent thinking? What
are the implications of our preferences? If we are to encourage and train
creative thinkers and preserve some of the excitement that brought us into
science and geography, we may need to put more value on night science and
divergent thinking. This will ask us to appreciate scholarly work less for the
way in which it adheres to our norms and offers up the slow, safe, conservative
accumulation of knowledge, and more for how it departs from this model and
takes risks.
References
Collins, H. 2009. We cannot live by scepticism alone.
Nature 458(7234)
Desai, A., & Jun, S. 2018. Promoting an “Auteur Theory” for Young Scientists: Preserving Excitement and Creativity. BioEssays,
1800147.
Schroeter, I. M., et al. 2019. Diverging from the Dogma: A Call toTrain Creative Thinkers in Science. Bull Ecol Soc Am 100(1):e01463
Shapin, S. (2010). Never pure: Historical studies of science
as if it was produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture,
and society, and struggling for credibility and authority. Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Feyerabend, Paul, and Eric Oberheim. 2015. Tyranny of
science. Polity Press.
Vale, T. R. (1988). Clearcut Logging, Vegetation Dynamics,
and Human Wisdom. Geographical Review, 375-386. https://doi.org/10.2307/215089
Sources of the quotes. See Chapter 3, pages 32-46 in
Shapin’s book Never Pure for full details.
1. Peter B.
Medawar, Richard Lewontin (biologists)
2. Edward O.
Wilson (biogeographer)
3. Jacob
Bronowski (mathematician)
4. Warren Weaver
(mathematician)
5. Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose (biologists)
5. Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose (biologists)
Convergent and divergent thinking
Where do ideas come from? Abductive, divergent, exploratory thinking and research.
From: Schroeter, I. M., et al. (2019). Diverging from the Dogma: A Call to Train Creative Thinkers in Science. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 100(1), 1-7.
Berries from my garden, Summer 2019
I planted blackberry bushes two years ago, and gooseberry bushes last winter. They are just beginning to produce. So far, the birds haven't discovered them.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Comparing resilience properties through the data modeling of state space
This is a poster I presented at the recent Association of American Geographers conference in Washington, D.C. Click on the image to download the pdf.
Sunday, January 27, 2019
Non-work related books I read in 2018
 |
| I had a bit of obsession with Vietnam this year with two novels: The Sympathizer and Tree of Smoke. For non-fiction, Other Minds: Essays on the Origins of Consciousness Informed by Study of the Evolutionary History of Cephalopods. The Lives of Others: a multi-generational novel about Marxist foment in India. Not shown but read: American Prison (obtained from the library, a public institution) and The Girls (borrowed by my daughter) |
Friday, January 18, 2019
My family, late summer early fall 2018
 |
| This is my older daughter Sophie. She is helping one my PhD students, Karen Kinslow, do some topographic surveying. Sophie is a junior in high school this year. |
 |
| These are my twins, Sara (left) and Kate (right). They are in the fourth grade and this is the first day of the school year. |
My garden in 2018: tromboncino
Tromboncino, or zucchetta, can be eaten as a summer squash or allowed to cure and eaten as a winter squash. The top photos is the summer tromboncino. At the bottom are the ones that made it through to the curing stage. I have them now, in my basement root cellar and will be eating them through the spring of 2019. They taste a lot like acorn squash but are much easier to peel. I use a puree of boiled or roasted winter tromboncino as a base for a tomato pasta sauce and for when I make pinto or black beans. I've baked it into breads and added boiled slices of it to miso soup.
2018 music favorites
In no order of importance, and only a few are band/songs I heard for the first time in 2018 although they may be from the deeper past. Thanks again to WFMU and the podcasts by Todd-o-Phonic Todd and Suzy Hotrod's Rock and Roller Derby show.
Music City – Pretty Feelings
The Nude Party – Records
The Number Ones – Lie to Me, Long Way to Go
Dancer – I'm Not Giving Up
No Bunny – Church Mouse, I Am a Girlfriend
Tyler Keith and the Apostles – Do It for Johnny
Corner Boys – Love Tourist
Wyldlife – Teenage Heart
The Mighty Jabronis – Heart Punch My Heart
The Straight Arrows – 21st Century
The Scientists – Frantic Romantic and Last Night
Sam Pocker and the Pretty Colors – Weekend with You
Wau and Los Arrrghs!! – Es Un Buen Dia
The Rentals – Irrational Things
Nick Lowe – Crying Inside
Music City – Pretty Feelings
The Nude Party – Records
The Number Ones – Lie to Me, Long Way to Go
Dancer – I'm Not Giving Up
No Bunny – Church Mouse, I Am a Girlfriend
Tyler Keith and the Apostles – Do It for Johnny
Corner Boys – Love Tourist
Wyldlife – Teenage Heart
The Mighty Jabronis – Heart Punch My Heart
The Straight Arrows – 21st Century
The Scientists – Frantic Romantic and Last Night
Sam Pocker and the Pretty Colors – Weekend with You
Wau and Los Arrrghs!! – Es Un Buen Dia
The Rentals – Irrational Things
Nick Lowe – Crying Inside
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