Time for a rare music post, and opportunity to promote a fantastic jazz group, the Jeni Fleming Acoustic Trio. I've been lucky enough to hear them play three times in the last few years, despite not getting out much, because they are based close by, in Bozeman, Montana. Jeni Fleming is the vocalist of the group, with her husband Jake Fleming on saxophone and guitar, and with Chad Langford on acoustic bass.

The trio has two main reasons why it is great: the perfect unity of Langford and Jake, and Jeni's voice. The bass and guitar are as tight a unit as they can be, playing classic and more novel jazz rhythms. Jeni uses the solid backing to free her voice to do what it does best. Her voice is everything a jazz singer's should be - mellow, controlled, fluid, and with an expansive range, both dynamically and vertically. They win converts from the ranks of people who don't like jazz. One person I know said, "I don't like jazz, but this is great." Another was less willing to budge from his anti-jazz preferences, but admitted that he could listen to Jeni talk all day.

They mix original jazz tunes (primarily Jake's), classic jazz such as "'Round Midnight" and "Garota de Ipanema" (yes, the Portuguese version), a wide range of pop tunes including "Still Crazy After All These Years" and "Time After Time", and both old and recent show tunes, such as "Somewhere" (from West Side Story) and "Stars and the Moon" (from Songs for a New World). At a recent concert, I heard a fantastic jazz rendition of "She's Leaving Home," the Beatles' classic from Sgt. Pepper's. This is the third major strength of the band - its willingness not to be limited by the original genres the tunes came from. As Jeni Fleming says herself at performances, a good song is a good song, no matter where it came from.

They are comfortable and interactive with listeners both in the more intimate setting of a bar, and onstage in a large auditorium. The only real criticism I have of their live performances, which isn't much, is that they spend a little too much time explaining the genesis of their original numbers. Because Jake and Jeni are husband and wife, some of the personal anecdotes definitely border on TMI. I'm there to see great musicians perform, not to hear their life stories. But this is a case where too much is probably better than too little, because they are humorous and establish a good rapport with the audience, making us feel as though they've let us in on some creative secrets.

Check out their music page or iTunes to listen to clips. Although recordings never do a good live band justice, Jeni Fleming's vocal ability will come through loud and clear. (Four tunes, including one of their signature originals which is highly representative of their sound, "Once Around the Sun", can be heard in its entirety on the band's MySpace page.)

One additional sideline of note: Jeni and Jake Fleming have collaborated with the family of Greg Mortenson to produce the song "Three Cups of Tea," available as an accompaniment to the book (below) about Mortenson's Central Asia Institute (also based in Bozeman, Montana). Mortenson's young daughter Amira is an aspiring professional singer and sings with Fleming on the song. Some of the proceeds support the CAI, which funds school building in remote regions of middle eastern Islamic countries. The CAI is particularly devoted to providing education for both boys and girls in countries where they have previously grown up in ignorance. Although the book is padded with quite a lot of gratuitous material about Mortenson's personal life, especially early on, it is worth a read by Americans who support bombing and destruction as a means to combat terrorism.

Labels: education, jazz, music

A recent paper in Nature Neuroscience (Amodio, D.M., J.T. Jost, S.L. Master & C.M. Yee, 2007. Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience 10:1246-1247) has been presented as far more controversial than it is - although surely the authors knew they would ruffle a few feathers with their study.

Here is the abstract:

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

The authors give citations to support the claim that "Across dozens of behavioral studies, conservatives have been found to be more structured and persistent in their judgments". I have not read those papers but for the purpose of this commentary will assume that there is indeed scientific support for this conclusion. Though their experimental procedure is clearly one accepted by neuroscientists, the rest of us are expected to take at their word that "responsiveness to complex and potentially conflicting information relates to the sensitivity of this general mechanism for monitoring response conflict." Here is the test:

Go/No-Go task. On each trial of the Go/No-Go task, either the letter "M" or "W" was presented in the center of a computer monitor screen... Half of the participants were instructed to make a "Go" response when they saw "M" but to make no response when they saw "W"; the remaining participants completed a version in which "W" was the Go stimulus and "M" was the No-Go stimulus; assignment to either version of the task was random. Responses were registered on a computer keyboard placed in the participants' laps. Each trial began with a fixation point, presented for 500 ms. The target then appeared for 100 ms, followed by a blank screen. Participants were instructed to respond within 500 ms of target onset. A "Too slow!" warning message appeared after responses that exceeded this deadline, and "Incorrect" feedback was given after erroneous responses.

There is no way here to confirm the authors' interpretation that results obtained on this test are explained by liberals' higher sensitivity to "cognitive conflict" at the level of political decisions, but it is an interesting idea, because it appears both from cited research and probably anyone's observations that conservatives tend to have more of a black-and-white view of the world, while liberals tend see more shades of gray. ("Liberal" here is used in its traditional sense, not the currently distorted media code word for "left wing." Indeed, hard left-wingers are arguably no more liberal than hard right-wingers.)

The paper wisely does not attempt to determine whether this brain-function correlate or political leaning comes first (and they certainly do not at all imply that the response of liberals to this test is "smarter," despite William Saletan's defensive interpretation). It should not be assumed that just because the brain shows a certain physiological response to a stimulus, this response is genetic. Just as the accumulation of memories alters pathways in our neurons, a response such as this may be "learned" by the brain as well, based on experience.

Of course, some people become more conservative with life experience. Here are three competently untested hypotheses for why this can happen (given the conclusion that liberals see more complexity in the world than do conservatives).

1) Often, people become more fiscally conservative as they grow older. Fiscal conservatism is, however, a separate issue from that of "cognitive conflict." Those emphasizing the long term will be more fiscally conservative than those who prefer to live in the moment, which is more correlated with age group than with social or political views. Certainly over the last three decades political conservatives have shown no sign of being fiscal conservatives.

2) Someone who has suffered a traumatic, life-affecting event, such as a death or lost job, or whose loved ones have, might find it simpler to have an easily defined target to blame. Bad economic times had a lot to do with the growth of the Ku Klux Klan.

3) There is really no way to form economic or social policy that takes into account all the complexities that a diverse group of people will experience. Because it is simpler to craft legislation that does not take so many complexities into account, policy makers - and the pundits living in the same beltway world, away from the real one, and those listening to the pundits - come to believe we live in a simple world with easily definable boundaries. Such was one of the major reasons the SCHIP legislation failed. The idea that there is a particular income cutoff, above which every American family can afford health insurance without regard to any other parameters, was heavily promoted by the conservative opposition to the bill.

A corollary of the last point is that people who are well-off financially are usually conservative not because they are fiscally conservative (many of them are not), but because it is emotionally least complicated to believe there is a simple reason why they are wealthy while so many others are poor, e.g. they work hard and poor people don't.

There also could be positive physiological feedback loops in the brain which strengthen a tendency to fall one way or the other in one's view of the world. While some people do change their political views, most people actually seem to become more strongly liberal or conservative over time. It is an unfortunate by-product of our social tendency to form opposing groups that once we have formed an opinion about a person or topic, our views become more confirmed because we accept observations that support them, and ignore or rationalize observations that do not support them.

To be truly objective in his or her views, a person would need to be constantly reassessing prior beliefs based on every bit of new information received. Why are humans, many of whom pride themselves on their over-awing logical arguments, not that way at all? Perhaps it is because as social animals, we are always creating rules to live by, and the simpler those rules are, the easier our lives are, in many ways. Even with our large brains, it would get too difficult to navigate socially, as we need to, if the rules were too complex.

Labels: brain, empathy, humans, politics, sociality

Check it out at The Radula.

Labels: biodiversity, carnivals, ecology, environment, humans

Once again, the mass media can't tell real science from a junior high fair project. Genetics is the new path to a guilt-free style of life and child-rearing; it has been mass-marketed to people who want to evade all responsibility for persistent unpleasant conditions ranging from obesity to bad behavior, not to mention sexism. This is especially true in the field of child-rearing, where there has been a backlash against the offensive "blame the mother" explanations for problem children espoused decades ago. As usual, though, the backlash has swung too far in the other direction, making parents completely blameless. Bad papers supporting this faddish view continue to be published simply because they generate positive press.

The latest condition to be given a free pass is picky eating by children, in a study (Cooke, L.J., C.M.A. Haworth, and J. Wardle, 2007. Genetic and environmental influences on children's food neophobia. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 86:428-433) using the differences between the eating behavior in identical twin pairs and in fraternal twin pairs. The idea is that twins in each pair are both presumably reared in the same environment, and so if there is a bigger difference in fear of new foods (="neophobia") between fraternal twins than there is between identical twins, this behavior must be genetic, thus, it's not the parent's fault that a child is picky.

The press release demonstrates the first problem with this paper:

"People have really dismissed this as an idea because they have been looking at the social associations between parents and their children," Dr. Cooke said. "I came from a position of not wanting to blame parents."

This of course explains the absurd conclusions of this paper - apparently, the first author had decided what the results should be before the study was conducted.

As usual with human health papers, the authors commit the fallacy of believing that a bigger sample size is better. They admit up front that a previous paper failed to find that genetics played a role in picky eating, but discount it by asserting that its sample size of 91 was too small. This of course is a circular argument; the authors are defining 91 as too small a sample size because no effect was found.

The data from the study are from parents completing questionnaires on the pickiness of each of their twin children, answering four questions on a scale of 1 to 4. They determined that fraternal twins were more different in their food choice than identical twins, based on a difference in survey score of 0.03 on that scale. Such a minute difference could of course only be detected by an enormous sample size, which they had - 5390 twin pairs. When a huge sample size is needed to detect a difference, it is unlikely that difference is biologically meaningful. This result is thus consistent with that of the previous paper which was unable to detect a difference with its sample of 91 twin pairs. It is especially egregious that the authors try to pass off their result as meaningful, when two other analyses associated with the paper that did not contribute to the support of their theory, but were statistically significant, were dismissed because these results were "statistically significant only because of the large sample size."

The other fundamental problem with the study is the fact of its reliance on evaluations of pickiness by parents. Think about it for a moment: parents with identical twins often dress them the same, give them the same toys, and refer to them as a unit, while parents with fraternal twins are much less likely to do so. The tiny difference that was found could be merely due to a bias by parents of identical twins, in their unconscious assumption that the children are naturally similar. This is separate from the possibility that there would probably be a greater correlation between identical twins than fraternal twins in personality traits that manifest themselves as food pickiness, apart from any genetic determination of pickiness per se. And, while the questions addressed the children's behavior toward new food, there was no data on how often the children actually encountered new food.

Obviously there are clear genetic differences in how individuals taste food. This is known from research on taste receptors. Given this, it is actually surprising that a study that set out to show genetic differences in food exploration found such a slight effect. Nevertheless, the publicity surrounding this non-result will lead people to believe that they cannot control their children's stated food preferences, and thus must give in to them. This is an unfortunate implication, because it could lead to an even larger number of adults in the next generation subsisting on McNuggets from the drive-thru as they drain the health system with their obesity-related conditions.

You do have a choice about whether or not your children will eat anything besides tater tots. Give them the food you have cooked for the family, and if they don't want to eat it, fine. They really will not starve to death between dinner and breakfast. (For a lot more advice in this vein, read Ellyn Satter.)

Labels: health, humans, statistics

Our local wilderness controversy has made national news. The article is suggestive of the growing recognition that land use is a complex problem because of the large diversity of stakeholders, but only scratches the surface of the problem.

The current backlash in Beaverhead County, Montana, is against a consortium of environmental groups (including the National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and Montana Wilderness Association) and logging companies (including RY Timber and Sun Mountain Lumber) who recognize the need for some sort of compromise among those with widely divergent interests in public land. The group is presenting to the Forest Service a plan that exchanges more guaranteed logging in certain forest areas in southwest Montana for more acreage in the forest being designated as wilderness. The plan has the advantages of providing for stable timber harvests that are minimally invasive but will allow logging companies to keep operating, while it recognizes the value of preserving land in wilderness areas to maintain the watershed and prevent overexploitation of resources.

Unfortunately, in this county, "wilderness" and "environment" are the dirtiest words you can say. To put it in perspective, voters in Beaverhead County overwhelmingly supported a 2004 initiative (put on the ballot by an out-of-state mining company) to repeal a ban on cyanide leach mining, which has damaged many an ecosystem and watershed in several states. While the rest of the state was smart enough to understand that no number of local mining jobs is enough to offset the cost of a destroyed fishery, Beaverhead County, whose nearly entire economy is dependent on tourism on its blue-ribbon trout streams and ranching (which also requires clean river water), supported the initiative, apparently seeing the issue only as a vote against the evil environmentalists.

A deluge of letters to the editor is now condemning the proposed logging-environmental draft forest plan simply because it creates a few more thousand acres of wilderness, a small percentage within a sea of exploited forest. The letter writers take the common view that the creation of wilderness somehow takes land away from their use, because they prefer to use ATVs rather than their own two feet (or horses) for their recreation on public land. What has been lacking in every letter by an ATV user so far has been any acknowledgement that some ATVers themselves fuel anti-vehicle backlash when they ride off road illegally, trashing out areas that are no longer available for the enjoyment of others. They also do not acknowledge that hiking and skiing, being quite, no-emissions activities, do not impinge on anyone else's enjoyment of the forest, while the use of ATVs and snowmobiles very much degrades the forest experience of non-users. It is ironic that they claim that the use of the forest is being stolen from them by the addition of a few more acres where they are not allowed, when they have already stolen peace and fresh air from the rest of us in the great majority of the national forest.

They call for "management" of the forest because it is a "waste" to let nature take its course in the form of fires and insect outbreaks - and apparently they are ignorant that the potential new law as drafted allows for management of fire and insects in wilderness areas when deemed necessary, and the grandfathering of grazing rights. In the mythical world of the wilderness opponent, nature can be completely controlled and managed, and any failure to do so by the forest service is blamed on "environmentalists" (who apparently have god-like powers possessed by no one else).

The logging-environmental consortium came together to reach a compromise because all the organizations realize that current management policies are unsustainable. They have drafted a perfectly reasonable proposal that keeps logging alive in Montana, but supports both economic and ecological sustainability, unaddressed in past policies which subsidized logging companies to clear cut huge swaths of land, without remediation. The Forest Service is under no obligation to support the new plan, but would be well advised to do so. Those of us lucky to live in a county that consists mainly of public land would do well to remember that the land is not a personal playground to exploit here and now, but belongs to every single U.S. taxpayer, living and unborn, from sea to shining sea.

Labels: ecology, environment, forests

Certain institutions exist in order to have a place to put those people who one way, or another, are on the fringes of society. For example, the NBA and WNBA provides a community where otherwise freakishly tall people fit right in. Academia provides a community where people missing some normally important life skills can find a comfortable home. There is one important difference between these examples, though; when a basketball player retires, he (or she) can do so with a decent amount of money and the continuing worship of adoring fans. When a professor retires, he (or she) actually doesn't, really, because he doesn't have any money. That's usually OK, though, because he gets to continue his life's passion, research on a field so narrow, he is the world's only expert.

The problems start when retired professors attempt new life pursuits after retirement. Evert Schlinger, a retired professor of entomology, made the mistake of trying a second career managing a foundation, with disastrous results.

Although it may seem hard to believe to those living in the real world, it is probable that Dr. Schlinger was foolish and naive rather than deliberately engaging in fraud that ended up losing nearly all of his foundation's money. Although he is implicated in a pyramid scheme, it is quite possible that he had no idea what a pyramid scheme was at the time. It sounds like he was an easy mark for crooks who wanted to make off with the foundation's money, and leave him holding the bag (one of his financial "advisors" is filed under "whereabouts currently unknown").

There is a reason that certain people become entomologists and others become kingpins of the financial world. Entomologists are at their best tramping through jungles looking for tiny creatures. Insects are elegant beasts, thrilling to watch and holding keys to many of the mysteries of life. They are not out to get us (despite what the layperson might believe). In contrast, the world of finance is not only complex but bewildering at times, and if you are lucky enough to have the millions to start a foundation, there will be people waiting in line to try and take your money away. The world of insects has nothing to do with money (apart from the funding needed to seek them out). It is a world of interlacing webs of ecological interactions that no matter how much we discover, will always hold more mysteries for the human mind to delve into. Entomologists will never be burned by entering the world of the insect, only fascinated and delighted over and over again.

So do not condemn Dr. Schlinger as a shyster or a fool. In his world, he is king. We need to remember that some of us need protection from some of the harder realities of human interaction, because we are focused instead on the interactions among a multitude of species that are simply far more interesting. If Dr. Schlinger was able to transmit his enthusiasm for his world to some students who will also see beyond the minutiae of day-to-day maneuvering, then he has done more than his job.

Labels: insects

Finally, a paper that is fun to read: Sand-Jensen, K. 2007. How to write consistently boring scientific literature. Oikos 116: 723-727.

Dr. Sand-Jensen has hit the nail on the head with this one. The ten rules below are his for making a scientific paper as inaccessible as possible - a problem frequently encountered by those of us trying to make the scientific literature more accessible to a general public which is not science literate.

1. Avoid focus
2. Avoid originality and personality
3. Write l o n g contributions
4. Remove implications and speculations
5. Leave out illustrations
6. Omit necessary steps of reasoning
7. Use many abbreviations and terms
8. Suppress humor and flowery language
9. Degrade biology to statistics
10. Quote numerous papers for trivial statements

Sand-Jensen needs to make it clear he is being tongue-in-cheek, however; honestly, it would not be surprising for some of the scientists out there to take his advice seriously. So he summarizes his views:

Because science ought to be fun and attractive, particularly when many months of hard work with grant applications, data collections and calculations are over and everything is ready for publishing the wonderful results, it is most unfortunate that the final reading and writing phases are so tiresome.

Most of these problems could be alleviated by the authors themselves. Why are they not? Because papers that have these characteristics continue to get published. In fact, if one were to attempt to remedy "rule" no. 8, it is likely that most reviewers for most journals would send the paper back in order to have all entertaining language removed.

But this is the proximate cause of the problem. What is the ultimate cause? Most people are never taught to write, including Ph.D.'s. They adopt the absurd jargonist language of their field because they were taught to write when training for that field. The crisis in our educational system does not end at the university level. Students are not trained to write in high school; a literate 10-page paper turned in for a typical college course is currently so rare it can be considered an endangered species. College professors then are left with two options: either to try and make up for basic skills that students should have learned in high school, or to join the ranks of the bitter cynics and hand out passing grades and thus degrees as rewards for students showing up to class. And guess which professors get the better evaluations, and therefore, less hassle from administrators.

Thus, many students who are bright enough in a certain field and interested in going to grad school still lack basic communication skills, and the cycle is perpetuated when they become professors themselves and teach their students to write specifically in the jargon of their field.

So getting back to why all these terrible papers get published in the first place, is it simply because standards are so low for good writing? Or even that people so rarely see good writing that they don't recognize the bad? This is part of it, but while the existence of the bad writing in the first place was a catalyst, the whole equation also includes the ego factor - there is the distinct subtext in many unnecessarily complicated papers of, "if you don't understand my paper, it's because you are not as brilliant as me." There is no other possible explanation for the slew of poorly written and mistake-ridden modeling papers in ecology. Reviewers must be afraid to tell editors that a paper does not make any sense, not realizing that if this is the case, it is the writer's fault, not the reader's fault, when the reader is an educated and well trained professional in the field.

From this insecurity-soaked process then emerges a kind of code language for professionals within a narrow field (and the narrowness of some of these fields is suggested by some of the journal titles out there, such as "Journal of asynchronous learning networks" and "Journal of aquatic ecosystem stress and recovery" just to pull out a couple from the thousands of journals available from a typical university library). This spirals inward sometimes to the point where there are only four people out there who can read a particular paper, and it gets published because those people are the reviewers - because no one else can understand the paper.

This is a particularly important issue with human health because from papers that are often horribly written, leave out important methodological information, use bad statistics, etc., the public is spoon fed a misleading press release that makes bold new health claims that are not at all substantiated by the paper, but that give publicity to the journal and sell newspapers.

So the problem identified by Sand-Jensen - but always known to the few scientists who care about proper scientific communication - reaches much further than the frustration of a scholar having to wade through a morass of bad writing. It affects the public's attitude and education about science, which in the U.S. couldn't be much lower for an industrial country. And it makes even those of us who did go into science as a career feel sometimes like closing the journal, turning on the TV, and watching Law and Order reruns for the rest of the day. Dr. Sand-Jensen speaks for me when he says, "It has been a great relief from time to time to read and write essays and books instead." That is the raison d'etre for this blog.

Labels: education, humans, statistics

Acacia ants, in the genus Pseudomyrmex, and their acacia tree hosts, are a terrific example of coevolution between plants and insects. While yellow flowers and many species demonstrate a loose form of the coevolution between generalized pollinators and a large range of plants, the coevolution in this case is very specific, although there are other examples of Acacias with ants that have a looser association.

The species depicted here are likely Acacia cornigera and Pseudomyrmex ferruginea, native to Mexico and Central America. These photos were taken at Palo Verde National Park in Costa Rica.

While some instances of coevolution may be hard to demonstrate for certain, this case is definitive. First, a common name of this acacia species, bullhorn acacia, refers to the extremely large, swollen thorns shown here. The horns also happen to be hollow, and provide perfect chambers for nesting ants. (An ant on the left thorn can be seen entering a hole in it.)

Next, the tree provides food for the ants in two forms. The first is nectar, but this is not the generalized nectar production of flowers attracting pollinators. The acacia nectar is provided from extrafloral nectaries, found actually on the leaf petioles, as shown here (slightly out of focus). Because of the location and size of these nectaries, it is clear that the trees are obtaining a benefit apart from pollination.

Second, the tree also produces a unique protein source for the ants called Beltian bodies (after the naturalist Thomas Belt). These extraordinary structures are produced as part of new developing leaves. When the new leaves unfold and expand, there is a Beltian body on the tip of each leaflet. These are harvested by the acacia ants and provide most of their protein. Between the nectar and the Beltian bodies, and the housing provided by the thorns, the tree provides all an ant colony's needs.

What does the tree get in return? It gets extremely aggressive defense from herbivores, both large and small. Pseudomyrmex have one of the nastier stings in the world of Hymenoptera (the order comprising ants, bees and wasps). Any insect that alights on the tree is instantly driven away or killed, and the ants are quite effective against potential vertebrate herbivores as well -- to which I can attest first hand when I made the mistake of brushing against a branch while taking these pictures.

The ants are so aggressive that they also take care of potential plant competitors, by cutting down any seedlings that sprout in the vicinity of the tree. In this photo it should be clear that the acacia in the center is sitting in a circle of bare dirt, courtesy of its ant colony.

The relationship between the acacia tree and Pseudomyrmex ants is thus a true mutualism, in which both species have a large benefit from the association.

Labels: cool bugs, ecology, evolution, insects