Tomorrow I fly out to Minneapolis for Evolution 2008, the joint annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society of Systematic Biologists. I’m going to be presenting an ancestral trait reconstruction that traces the origins of the yucca-yucca moth interaction. Should be a blast!
Tag Archives: me
Science 2.0 revisited
Back in March, Science ran a Perspectives piece in which computer scientist Ben Shneiderman suggested that the wealth of new data on human interactions provided by the Internet (Facebook, Amazon.com customer records, &c.) would require a new approach to science, which he called “Science 2.0” [subscription]:
… the Science 2.0 challenges cannot be studied adequately in laboratory conditions because controlled experiments do not capture the rich context of Web 2.0 collaboration, where the interaction among variables undermines the validity of reductionist methods (7). Moreover, in Science 2.0 the mix of people and technology means that data must be collected in real settings … Amazon and Netflix became commercial successes in part because of their frequent evaluations of incremental changes to their Web site design as they monitored user activity and purchases.
Science 2.0 sounded, to me, a lot like what ecologists and evolutionary biologists often do – hypothesis testing based on observations, manipulations of whole natural systems in the field, and the clever use of “natural experiments” sensu Diamond [subscription]. I said as much in a post shortly after Shneiderman’s article ran, and also wrote a brief letter to Science.
And now it turns out they’ve published it! My letter, along with a response from Shneiderman, is in the 6 June issue [subscription]. You can read it in PDF format here. In very short form, I say:
… what Shneiderman calls Science 1.0 has always included methods beyond simple controlled experiments, such as inference from observation of integrated natural systems and the careful use of “natural experiments” (1) to test and eliminate competing hypotheses.
Shneiderman’s response concedes the point on natural experiments, but says he was actually talking about manipulative experiments conducted on large online social networks:
Amazon and NetFlix designers conduct many studies to improve their user interfaces by making changes in a fraction of accounts to measure how user behaviors change. Their goal is to improve business practices, but similar interventional studies on a massive scale could develop better understanding of human collaboration in the designed (as opposed to natural) world …
That still sounds to me like ecological experimentation, but with people’s Facebook accounts instead of (to pick an organism at random) yucca moths. Maybe I’m just not getting it, but I don’t see anything in Shneiderman’s description that qualifies as a new kind of science.
References
Shneiderman B. 2008. Science 2.0. Science 319:1349-50.
Diamond J. 2001. Dammed experiments! Science 294:1847-8.
Yoder, JB, and B Shneiderman. 2008. Science 2.0: Not So New? Science 320:1290-1.
Beady little eye contact
The first half of the walk between my apartment and campus goes downhill through a slightly shabby, crowded college-town residential neighborhood that is much improved by the presence of large, shady trees lining the sidewalk. Almost at the bottom of the hill, my walk takes me past a tree whose owner has decided to feed squirrels. The tree is close to the sidewalk on the left as I walk toward campus, and it has two trunks that diverge almost at the ground; nailed to each of these at about the height of my chin is a wooden box about ten inches by ten inches, with an open face looking across the sidewalk to the house of the probable squirrel-feeder and the bottom surface forming a tray, which usually contains seeds or nuts or such. Many times I’ve forgotten that I’m nearing this tree as I walk to campus in the morning, and many times I’ve been jolted by the explosive scutter of squirrels evacuating the feeder as I approached.
Yesterday this didn’t happen. Yesterday, I didn’t think about the approaching feeder until I was right on beside it. Remembering it, I turned left for a glancing look as I passed. And I came eye to eye with a squirrel.
It was sitting atop the farther of the two boxes, right about at my eye level, frozen in that twitchy way that largish rodents sometimes freeze when they’re threatened, as though you might go away if they don’t do anything cute. It was a fox squirrel, I think, rusty gray above and just rusty below, fixing me with a pair of black, shining eyes.
I stood still and looked at it. It twitched its tail.
Then, incredibly, it jumped to the other box, just a foot or so from my face. I could see its handlike little paws gripping the edge of the box, paws that called to mind words like “cunning” and “clever”. The black little eyes stared at me, blank and shiny as freshly-washed chalkboards. The squirrel made a twitchy advance, then backed off, then advanced again. I tried not to move; but this was unnerving.
It advanced again, and I must have stepped back a fraction – the squirrel made an instant U-turn and scuttered up the tree trunk. I was left blinking at the feeder box, listening to the sounds of traffic on the street at the end of the block.
Why?
Blogging is a terribly, terribly egotistical activity. It assumes that the world in general cares what I, personally, have to say about whatever topics catch my fleeting, Internet-era attention. It’s so egotistical, in fact, that some people (bloggers all) have carelessly described blogging as journalism, by which standard anyone who turns to anyone else and says, “so I read/heard/saw X in/on The New York Times/NPR/CNN and I think …” is a journalist. Even with the tiny taste of journalistic experience I have (three years on my university’s campus newspaper), I know that journalism takes far more than an opinion.
So if all I have to offer is an opinion, why should anyone care? My dad used to say that opinions are like assholes – everyone has one, but you don’t show them off in polite company. But I spend a lot of time online these days – both for work and to read the news – and it’s hard not to see that todays politics is increasingly driven by what’s said online, whether or not what’s said is worthwhile.
To the extent that I have something valuable to say, it’s because I think I can offer a perspective that isn’t represented anywhere else out there. My background crosses some of the major cultural divides of present-day politics: I’m a baptized member of the Mennonite Church who grew up in rural, conservative Lancaster County, PA, and I presently live in Idaho, in one of the few congressional districts in the nation to remain solidly Republican in the 2006 election. However, my parents raised me to view the Bible as an important, not infallible story; I voted for the Greens in 2000 (for every post except President); and I’m living in Idaho because I’m earning a doctorate in evolutionary biology in the excellent biology department at the University of Idaho. Does that make my perspective unique enough to rate a personal soapbox? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.