Podcast: Working Scientist (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: A kinder research culture is not a panacea
Pub date: 2020-12-08

Postdocs and other career researchers need better trained lab leaders, not just nicer ones, Julie Gould discovers.

Calls to change the research culture have grown louder in 2020 as COVID-19 lockdowns led to extended grant application and publication deadlines.

As the world emerges from the pandemic, will researchers adopt more respectful ways of communicating, collaborating and publishing?

Anne Marie Coriat, head of the UK and Europe research landscape at the funder Wellcome, tells Julie Gould about the organisation’s 2019 survey of more than 4,000 researchers. The results were published in January this year.

She adds: “We know that not everything is completely kind, constructive, and conducive to encouraging and enabling people to be at their best. 

“We tend to count success as things that are easy to record. And so inadvertently, I think funders have contributed to hyper competition, to the status of the cult hero of an individual being, you know, the leader who gets all the accolades.”

But what else is needed, beyond a kinder culture? In June 2020 Jessica Malisch, an assistant professor of physiology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, co-authored an opinion article calling for new solutions to ensure gender equity in the wake of COVID-19. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/15378 She says “We can’t rely on kindness and good intentions to correct the systemic inequity in academia.

Katie Wheat, head of engagement and policy at the researcher development non-profit Vitae, tells Gould that researchers who feel that they’re their manager or their supervisor is supportive and available for them during the pandemic have better indicators of wellbeing than those who are not getting that support. 

“A PI might also be in a relatively precarious situation, reliant on grant income for their own salary, and for their team’s salary. 

“You can be in a scenario where the individualistic markers of success put everybody in a competitive situation against everybody else, rather than a more collaborative and collegial situation where, where one person’s success is everybody’s success.”

 

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Podcast: The Black Goat (LS 42 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Inexact Science
Pub date: 2020-04-30

Scientific knowledge is always contingent and uncertain, even when it’s the best we have. Should that factor into how we communicate science to the public, and if so, how? We discuss a recent article about the effects of communicating uncertainty on people’s trust in scientific findings and scientists. When should and shouldn’t scientists communicate uncertainty, and how should they do it? How should scientists prioritize keeping people’s trust versus being up front about what they don’t know? What are the different sources of uncertainty in scientific knowledge, and how should scientists deal with all of them? Plus, we get a followup letter from someone who asked about career support for a nonacademic partner – and they share what they learned and how things worked out.

Link:

• The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers, by Anne Marthe van der Bles et al.

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/, and on instagram at @blackgoatpod. You can email us at [email protected]. You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver.

This is episode 79. It was recorded on April 27, 2020.

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Podcast: Quanta Science Podcast (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Graduate Student Solves Decades-Old Conway Knot Problem
Pub date: 2020-11-19

It took Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway.

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Quanta Magazine, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Podcast: The Story Collider (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Stories of COVID-19: Cooperation, Part 2
Pub date: 2020-11-23

In part 2 of this episode, we’ll explore the theme of cooperation further with two more stories, from a volunteer and an organizer.

Our first story is from neuroscientist (and Story Collider senior producer!) Paula Croxson. Longing for connection, Paula decides to volunteer at a local hospital, despite her anxiety about the risks.

In our second story, organizer Kiani Conley-Wilson struggles to figure out how she can effect change during the pandemic.

Find transcripts and photos on our website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Erin Barker, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Podcast: Psychology In Action Podcast (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 4: Neuroeconomics, Addiction, and the Power of Accidental Findings with Dr. Brian Knutson
Pub date: 2018-04-27

For our fourth episode, the PIA crew interviewed Dr. Brian Knutson, a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Stanford University. We explored strategies to get an “under the hood” view of human emotions, including a discussion of neuroeconomics, insights into addiction science, and how brain reactivity can predict future decision making.

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Psychology In Action Podcast, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Podcast: Hello PhD (LS 44 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: 133. Galileo and the Science Deniers – with Dr. Mario Livio
Pub date: 2020-05-14

Four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei knelt before a group of Cardinals of the Catholic Church and was forced to recant his heretical belief that the Earth revolves around the sun.

“This must have been horrific for him,” says Dr. Mario Livio, author of a new biography titled Galileo and the Science Deniers. “To basically disavow everything he strongly believed in as a scientist.”

This week on the show, we talk with Dr. Livio about Galileo’s life and struggles, and what his experience can teach us about the science deniers living in our own time.

Finding the Center

Galileo was an Italian astronomer, physicist, and polymath who lived and studied in Italy around the turn of the seventeenth century.

He may be best known for an experiment that he probably didn’t actually do – the apocryphal tale of Galileo dropping different objects off the side of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to see how they would accelerate.

But Galileo’s astronomical observations, and the conflict they produced, take center stage in Dr. Livio’s new book. It’s a story that surprisingly few people have heard.

“Galileo is one of the most fascinating personalities in history. While everybody has heard about Galileo, I discovered that very few people actually know exactly what happened to him,” Livio recalls.

Dr. Mario Livio, author of Galileo and the Science Deniers

The book begins as a straightforward biography, describing Galileo’s early years, studying and teaching at Universities around Italy. But as the chapters progress, the reader begins to pick up on the faint but steady drumbeat of Galileo’s impending battle.

Dr. Livio sets the stage: “Aristotle and Ptolemy had a geocentric model of the solar system, in which the Earth was at the center and everything else revolved around the Earth. And the Catholic Church, over the years, adopted this particular model as its orthodoxy.”

“Copernicus changed that by suggesting that the sun is actually at the center, and the Earth and all the other planets revolve around the sun. And that’s where Galileo enters the scene.”

The book describes Galileo’s astronomical observations that built a case for the heliocentric model of Copernicus. The reader gets to follow along on this path of discovery, observing Galileo as he observes the Phases of Venus, or spots circling the sun, and draws new conclusions about the position of our planet in the solar system.

The Road to Rome

But inevitably, Galileo’s research and writings come to the attention of the Church, and his trajectory is locked on a path toward conflict with Pope Urban VIII.

Through a series of Papal threats, legal injunctions, and a three-phase trial that reads like the script of an episode of Law & Order, Galileo is found “vehemently suspect of heresy” for asserting that the Earth revolves around the sun.

He must choose between recanting these views or being labeled a heretic – a title that would lead to his torture and death.

Nearing seventy years of age,

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Podcast: The Black Goat (LS 42 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Letting Loose Your Inner Reviewer Two
Pub date: 2019-12-12

Peer review is a major part of how science works today. In this episode we talk about how we approach doing peer reviews. How do you distinguish between differences in approach or preference – “I would have done it a different way” – versus things that you should treat as objections? How much weight do you put on different considerations – the importance of the research question, the novelty, the theory, the methods, the results, and other factors? What’s your actual process – do you read front-to-back, or jump around? How much do you edit and wordsmith your reviews? When there are appendices, supplements, open code and materials, and preregistrations, which things do you read and how do you factor them in? How do you think about your potential biases and how to mitigate them? Plus: We answer a letter about deciding whether to pursue a postdoc versus other options.

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/, and on instagram at @blackgoatpod. You can email us at [email protected]. You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver.

This is episode 71. It was recorded on December 6, 2019.

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.