Working scientist: Broader Impacts
Jul. 18th, 2014 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterI posted a brief question on another social media platform about this, but it deserves its own, more extensive post here.
As background: the deadline for the annual submission of research proposals to the National Science Foundation is looming. Depending on your experience, you may or may not know much about the ins and outs of how scientists find money to do their jobs, but here's my brief synopsis of the current state of affairs: if your work is in the "basic" sciences, this means it is inherently work conducted with the goal of gaining a better understanding of how the world works. This doesn't mean it is completely abstracted and removed from practical purposes, but it does mean that any such benefits are secondary to the primary curiosity behind the exploration of a particular topic. As such, if you're seeking to address a particularly complex topic, you may require financial resources to do your work. These financial resources could allow you to hire someone to help you with the work, or could pay for expensive instrumentation or analyses. My recent example of a camera setup for filming cricket movement is actually an example of a super-cheap thing I cobbled together. But if you need money, you'll have to go hunting for it.
Who will fund basic science? In the United States, the public has generally and historically recognized that there is substantial public benefit to funding basic science. This underlies the creation of the National Science Foundation. It's most certainly NOT the ONLY potential funding stream, but it has been a big one for many scientists working at many universities. In May, one of the authors of the Dynamic Ecology blog wrote an extensive piece about the current state and future of the NSF, which is worth reading.
But I want to focus on a slightly different topic. Some time back, pressure from Congress caused the NSF to modify its grant proposal guidelines, to require proposal-writers to explicitly describe "Broader Impacts" activities that will be performed in conjunction with the research proposed in the grant. An article came out in 2012 assessing how this whole "Broader Impacts" thing has been going, and if you read just the abstract, I think you'll observe the actions have fallen pretty short of the ambitions.
So now let's come back and put the rubber to the road a bit. I've engaged my my fair share of "Broader Impacts" activities, although much of those happened during graduate school - I've done almost nothing of the sort as a postdoc. Or haven't I? What I wonder is, where do we put things like the small project I've been developing, to document the research methods I use for studying leafcutter ants and crickets? Is there a better clearinghouse? At ASU, my department worked to help faculty structure their broader impacts by providing a collection of activities and programs to choose among - things like Ask-A-Biologist, which is explicitly directed towards K-12 education and has fine-tuned its processes for getting science into the hands of the public.
But I don't know if my photo albums really belong at that sort of place. So my general questions, on that other social media site, are:
Something I've wondered about - what makes for the most meaningful "Broader Impacts" science activities? It seems to me that people are all over the board on this front, ranging from classroom visits to "citizen science"-driven research programs. Some feel the activities are a distraction from work requiring intense focus and time; others see them as vital to the scientific process. What's the best way to effectively direct these energies?
I imagine some of you may have thoughts on the subject, too.
As background: the deadline for the annual submission of research proposals to the National Science Foundation is looming. Depending on your experience, you may or may not know much about the ins and outs of how scientists find money to do their jobs, but here's my brief synopsis of the current state of affairs: if your work is in the "basic" sciences, this means it is inherently work conducted with the goal of gaining a better understanding of how the world works. This doesn't mean it is completely abstracted and removed from practical purposes, but it does mean that any such benefits are secondary to the primary curiosity behind the exploration of a particular topic. As such, if you're seeking to address a particularly complex topic, you may require financial resources to do your work. These financial resources could allow you to hire someone to help you with the work, or could pay for expensive instrumentation or analyses. My recent example of a camera setup for filming cricket movement is actually an example of a super-cheap thing I cobbled together. But if you need money, you'll have to go hunting for it.
Who will fund basic science? In the United States, the public has generally and historically recognized that there is substantial public benefit to funding basic science. This underlies the creation of the National Science Foundation. It's most certainly NOT the ONLY potential funding stream, but it has been a big one for many scientists working at many universities. In May, one of the authors of the Dynamic Ecology blog wrote an extensive piece about the current state and future of the NSF, which is worth reading.
But I want to focus on a slightly different topic. Some time back, pressure from Congress caused the NSF to modify its grant proposal guidelines, to require proposal-writers to explicitly describe "Broader Impacts" activities that will be performed in conjunction with the research proposed in the grant. An article came out in 2012 assessing how this whole "Broader Impacts" thing has been going, and if you read just the abstract, I think you'll observe the actions have fallen pretty short of the ambitions.
So now let's come back and put the rubber to the road a bit. I've engaged my my fair share of "Broader Impacts" activities, although much of those happened during graduate school - I've done almost nothing of the sort as a postdoc. Or haven't I? What I wonder is, where do we put things like the small project I've been developing, to document the research methods I use for studying leafcutter ants and crickets? Is there a better clearinghouse? At ASU, my department worked to help faculty structure their broader impacts by providing a collection of activities and programs to choose among - things like Ask-A-Biologist, which is explicitly directed towards K-12 education and has fine-tuned its processes for getting science into the hands of the public.
But I don't know if my photo albums really belong at that sort of place. So my general questions, on that other social media site, are:
Something I've wondered about - what makes for the most meaningful "Broader Impacts" science activities? It seems to me that people are all over the board on this front, ranging from classroom visits to "citizen science"-driven research programs. Some feel the activities are a distraction from work requiring intense focus and time; others see them as vital to the scientific process. What's the best way to effectively direct these energies?
I imagine some of you may have thoughts on the subject, too.
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no subject
Date: 2014-07-18 07:40 pm (UTC)There's at least a half-dozen ways to start to answer the questions you're posing, and most of the answers would go on for pages. But I'll spare you. :)
I'll give you a short answer to the easy one:
What's the best way to effectively direct these energies?
There isn't. :) Beyond the general question of what "broader impacts" professional scientists should be worrying about¹, there's no one thing to do that will effectively communicate with all people (and at all times).
Sometimes Members of The Public are looking for a simple paragraph-length explanation of some scientific topic, and they want it now. Other times, people are quite happy to curl up with a book that goes into all the complexities of trying to provide a simple paragraph-length explanation. :) ...and some would rather have a drawing or a movie than a book. Ya can't win, ya can't break even, but with some directed lobbying, we might be able to get out of this game (unless we want to play). :)
1: Who is our audience? Today's kids? Today's working non-technically-trained adults? Members of Congress and their staffs?
What are we telling them about? Information that's considered cut-and-dried in our fields? The cutting edge? Open questions? Open questions we think we could answer if the nice people in Washington would send us a check with a very large number written on the front? :)
And so on...
no subject
Date: 2014-07-18 11:09 pm (UTC)And yes, there certainly are a lot of directions one could take with this - perhaps that's why my mind often gets stuck and I ask the internets instead.
Part of all this is related to a somewhat random item -
It got me thinking about whether it would be possible to leverage something like Kickstarter for the sake of public education about the socio-political side of how science is done. This is less about walking people through hypothetico-deductive reasoning and experimental design, and more about how many scientists wind up devoting an incredible chunk of time to writing and grant-writing. A friend was joking about this aspect of scientific reeducation the other day in talking about how he has to teach undergraduates that doing science is mostly writing.
Maybe that sends the conversation in an interesting direction? :-D
no subject
Date: 2014-07-18 11:47 pm (UTC)This is less about walking people through hypothetico-deductive reasoning and experimental design, and more about how many scientists wind up devoting an incredible chunk of time to writing and grant-writing. A friend was joking about this aspect of scientific reeducation the other day in talking about how he has to teach undergraduates that doing science is mostly writing.
Well, publication is -- if not inevitable -- desirable even the absence of needing to chase money. So, some amount of writing is necessary anyway.
As to educating people about the utter horror of science as she is done these days, there are two approaches that leap to mind. The first is the matter-of-fact approach, but that requires data-gathering, even if that's limited to collecting a set of hopefully-representative anecdotes. It would be helpful to have actual data, though, on the amount of time scientists spend "doing science" and the fraction of that that's chasing money.
The second is the sort approach that's best done over dinner and drinks: how we got here, i.e. the nature of the current notional social contract between scientists and the tax-paying public and where it came from. And then opening the floor to what we think that notional contract should be. That's one of the ones I could go on for pages about. But dinner and drinks are so much more civilized. :)
Obviously, the first leads naturally into the second, but the first is -- in principle -- a matter of objective facts, where the second is -- other than specific well-documented policy decisions the US federal government made -- a matter of opinion.
Lemme leave ya with something to think about: how many scientists does the US need? It's not an easy question to answer. It's not even an easy question to frame how to answer. But it is the elephant in the living room when talking about the subject.
(FWIW, this question came from a discussion I had many years ago with the woman who ran a big hunk of French-named Company's HR department. We were talking about hiring and career paths and how we make those work together, and she asked me how many scientists the company needs. I didn't know. But French-named Company does have an answer, and it even (more or less) knows how it got that answer. The question that begs is whether that's the right answer. :) )