The global warming debate stirs up passions from both supporters and deniers.

One thing that is clearly lost in most of the “popular” debate is the underlying science.

There was an article that studied this: “Balance as bias: global warming and the US Presige Press“.

They make an interesting case about why the popular press coverage of the issue, under the guise of “balanced reporting,” actually skews away from the science.

Here’s a simple thought experiment to illustrate how “balanced” reporting is biased

Say we have the “Purples” and the “Yellows” – two groups of people who have a strongly held belief in their favorite color.

There are 95 Purples and 5 Yellows.

We also have two other groups:  ”Reporters” and “Undecideds”.

Undecideds listen to Reporters.  Reporters have the job of “balanced” reporting of the Purple vs Yellow debate.

So, every time the debate crops up, they report “Purple said XXX” and then balance it with “Yellow responds YYYY.”

Let’s do the math, and compare that to what “Undecideds” will end up reading.

They will read 50% of the reporting on Purple’s side, and 50% on Yellow’s side (if it is truly “balanced”).

So, if there are 100 news reports, there will be a total of 200 statements.

100 for Purple, and 100 for Yellow.

Already it sounds to Neutrals like Yellow is “just as valid” as purple, because we’ve got “fair and balanced” reporting (despite that Purples are actually in the vast majority).

But it gets worse. Because the Yellow population is so small, the press ends up asking the same people over and over again (resampling from a limited pool).  Those five Yellow folks get a lot of practice, and refine their message over time.  Plus, they have extra incentive to promote Yellow, because they get $$$ from donors for it.  So they get really, really good at promoting Yellowness.

However, the Purple folks only get asked once in a while for quotes.  They don’t get much practice. And they don’t get any $$$ for being purple, so they have no real need to refine their message.  Plus they’re the kind of folk who don’t really like “marketing” themselves anyway.  They think “marketing” is a strategy only for, well, marketers.

So, then, you have the “balanced” reporting that gives the undecideds the impression of a 50/50 split, on top of a more refined message from the yellows.

Who’s going to win that debate?

I don’t care what topic you pick (global warming or colors of the rainbow), the minority group with the refined message wins the round.

That’s why Science Marketing is so absolutely vital!

A while ago I wrote about one of my own major “science marketing blunders” (and I have more stories to come).

But this global warming thing is a similar blunder writ large.

On that point, I just saw a tweet from Michael O’Loughlin that is relevant: “So tired of science not being vetted through academia, rather it is being spun by media all the time.”

There are two fallacies in this thinking:

1. That academia is particularly good at “vetting” (I say this having just received yet another crackpot paper review last night from a reviewer who must have been asleep – they missed the point by a mile – while the other reviewer clearly “got it”)

2. That this is the fault of “the media”.

NO.

It is our own fault as scientists, because we, collectively, are horrible at marketing our work to the general public.

I’m not trying to start a war here about whether global warming is real or not – or whether we should do something about it or not.

I’m simply saying that, if the majority of the scientific evidence on the topic says one thing, yet the majority of the populace believes the opposite thing, then we, as scientists, have done a horrible job of getting our message out.  We have failed at marketing.

Why do we do such a horrible job at getting the message out?

There are multiple reasons:

• Because we’re boring. Seriously boring.  I see talk and paper titles all the time that are fluffed up with haughty buzzwords.  It may make the speaker/author look smart, but what it doesn’t do is get a broad audience interested.
• And since we’re boring, our message gets drowned out by the sea of noise out there in the world – Pop stars, Olympics, Car Ads, Beer Ads, Internet Marketers, iPods, iPads, American Idol, Lost… you name it.  It all competes for attention, every day and all the time.  Boring is going to loose that competition, every time.
• Worse still, scientists haven’t caught up with modern internet communications.  Visit a typical scientist’s lab website.  My own is a case in point. (I’ll refer to my own site so as not to offend anyone else.  I’m sure this only applies to my site, and that yours is exciting and interesting).  It is full of tedious facts going on and on about how great we are.  It doesn’t get updated often.  It is not particularly interactive.  We don’t promote ourselves on Twitter or Facebook.  The list goes on. I might want to change it, excepting the following point:
• There is no direct “reward” for marketing or promoting our science to the outside world. This is a humdinger. As a practicing scientist, the best way I can be rewarded (if I care about that kind of thing) is to keep my head down, work hard, publish papers, and apply for grants (then apply for more grants).  Maybe I should mentor a few students and teach a few classes here and there.  That’s it.  If I decide to take it upon myself to do something outside of that – this blog for instance – there is no reward, and quite often, a negative reward.  It takes time away from the grant writing I should be doing.
• We don’t understand that different media require different messages.  Scientific papers may require more rigorous terminology – but communication with the general public requires inspiring, interesting, and exciting words.  They are two different beasts, and almost no scientists I know are trained in the art of communicating with the public (though some figure it out).
• How many times have I heard some scientist on NPR saying “the evidence is inconclusive” or somesuch.  Well, I’ve got news: the evidence for everything, always, is inconclusive! But ordinary people who aren’t scientists don’t understand that kind of waffling.  They get up, go to work, and get a paycheck.  If they don’t go to work, they get fired, and there’s no paycheck.  None of that stuff is “waffling” – it is reality.  There’s no “63.2%” probability there.  So it is hard for someone living in that kind of reality to understand people who sit there and waffle about “we don’t really know how much the temperature will rise”.  Come on, folks!  Some of you are pretending as if human belief has nothing to do with it, and that science is all just about “facts.”  By pretending this, you damage your scientific cause – whatever that may be.

Science is not just about “facts”.  If it were, then explain this phenomenon to me: science goes in fads and fashions.  Once it was a “fact” that stomach acid caused ulcers – until a new “fact” came along that H. pylori causes ulcers.  Those two “facts” contradict one another.

That’s because they are not facts, they are beliefs, supported by some body of evidence.  And those beliefs often change as scientific fads come and go, and as new evidence accumulates.

I’m not saying that global warming is a fad.

What I am saying is that I know many people on the “yes global warming is happening” side of the debate, who act as if the debate is about “facts”.  When you get into a debate and pretend it is about facts when it is actually about belief, you’re going to loose, every time.

That’s because you’re debating from a weak platform.  You’re not admitting to yourself that you actually believe something, and so you’re not allowing yourself to argue the point effectively.

Hence, you go up against someone who does unabashedly believe in their side of the argument, and they’re going to quite frequently come out on top – regardless of “facts”.

If scientists would learn “marketing” this wouldn’t be such a ridiculous debate

Here’s an interesting tidbit: good marketers are just as scientific as any scientist, perhaps more.

They test everything.  Every headline, every word, every ad gets tested – because it is the difference between money and no money in the pocket.

Hence, I find it rather ironic that no scientist I know of is out there testing the efficacy of their own scientific communications.  There is no “split testing” for the efficacy journal article headlines or lab websites.  Hence, most of them are not effective.

Simply put, marketing is a science: the science of swaying belief.

Hence, it is a second irony that the marketers of the anti-global-warming debate are using the science of belief so much more effectively than the scientists with the pro-global-warming point of view.

And that, dear reader, is why I need to get back to writing my book about “Marketing Your Science”. (3 chapters done, a few more partly done – it won’t be that long, if I can just find the time to work on it).

Previously, I wrote about an upcoming meeting with the chancellor of UNC.

It was audacious of me to just call up and make an appointment with the head of a large, prestigious institution like mine.

But I like to live life on the edge.

My goal was to discuss entrepreneurialism within the university – and how the university bureaucracy squashes entrepreneurial spirt.

The layers of bureaucracy are thick here, layered like a truffle embedded inside a wedding cake….

The chancellor was surprisingly receptive to my visit.  He’s obviously a smart guy, and a scientist.  He wants to do right by the University and its faculty.

He clearly understood the problems of bureaucracy at UNC.  He said it is his number one mission to reduce it.

But every time he tamps down the bureaucracy in one division, it lasts for a little while until he turns his attention to something else.  Then it grows right back, like weeds in a place with plenty of water and sunlight.

Perhaps that is an apt analogy.  Cutting back the weeds never solves the problem.  They just grow back.

The only ways to kill weeds are to cut off their water or sunlight – or to poison them.  Since “poisoning” is not going to be an acceptable solution when it comes to bureaucracy, we have to implement one of the other solutions.

The sunlight and water of bureaucracy are money and rules.

Rules serve a purpose – at least in someone’s mind, at the time they are conceived.

Once they have served for a while, they grow stale, old, and smelly.  Bureaucracy thrives on them – while everyone else chokes.

And money helps support the beast.  One might try to choke off the money, but I guess that the people at the end of the food chain – the scientists – would starve before the bureaucracy does.

Every grant that a researcher brings in comes with “facilities and administration” (F&A) money.  That money is supposed to pay for things that support the research environment.

But it is all sucked up into the voracious beast before it gets to the place where it benefits the researcher.  Various people have pointed out to me various “worthwhile” things that it is used for.

Is 5 levels of bureaucracy to approve a hire, “worthwhile?”

It doesn’t matter whether it is “worthwhile,” even in the rare instance that it is.  It is not benefiting the research.  It is not benefiting the science that the grants are supposed to be supporting.

I work in a 30 year old building that is crawling with cockroaches.  I’m not sure who that benefits, except for the cockroaches.

The way to starve the beast is to bypass it.  The F&A money should go directly to the researcher’s most immediate unit (e.g. department).

The department then could apply it to do things like get the space that we need.

I can hear many people in humanities say, “but wait, that would starve our side of campus.”

I am very much in favor of supporting the humanities and many other non-science departments.  I have a personal fondness for philosophy.

But I am not in favor of supporting those departments with F&A money from grants that are given to me to do specific research.  That is misdirection at best.  The state and tuition should be supporting the teaching mission of the University.

—-

I was thinking about all the hiring problems we seem to have.  It can take (many) months to get a hire completed, because it has to go through so many levels.

Why is that?

My department seems to have an HR person (a “facilitator”) just to navigate the bureaucracy at higher levels of the system.

Instead, why not train her in the rules, and just let her do the work directly?  Then we wouldn’t need 5 levels above her (or however many it is).  It would be faster, cheaper, and would starve the beast.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think that many of the people that work within the beast are very well meaning and trying to do their jobs.  But when one is trying to do their job in a dysfunctional organization, the job is, unfortunately, promoting more dysfunction.

Out of date rules need to be removed.  But there would be massive resistance to that.

Money needs to flow around the bureaucracy, not into it.  There would be massive resistance to that too, but perhaps not quite as much.

Ideally, both would happen.  That would really take care of the problem, once and for all.

I hope the Chancellor is listening

——

Note: I do plan to get back to topics of science careers and grant writing in the next installment.

You can also join my newsletter list if you want to hear more about the career stuff right away.

A while ago I had a meeting with a well-known scientist visiting our campus, and after talking science, I expressed some frustration about the impediments presented by university bureaucracy to doing my science.

He responded saying that he had just had dinner the night before with our Chancellor, Holden Thorp, and that Dr. Thorp had expressed an opinion that faculty should find ways around the bureaucracy.

I let that sit for a while… and it didn’t sit well.

Often times there are no viable ways around the bureaucracy.  For example, let’s say I need to give a key person in my lab a raise, and say for example that the bureaucracy says “no raises”.  I say for example “but the person took on much more work that she wasn’t doing before, so needs a raise”.  And the bureaucracy says “budget crunch.” And I say “but I pay for the person with grant money”.  And the bureaucracy comes up with some other reason.  Round and round it goes.  There is no way to get around such a situation, except for paying the raise out of my own pocket.  (The example situation above is very close to a real situation, where it took over 14 months to get a raise for someone who was strongly deserving of it).

So I called up the Chancellor’s office to ask for an appointment.  That appointment is today.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that this university (like many) want us and tells us to be entrepreneurial, yet in terms of actually supporting us in doing so, it falls very short.  This is going to be my main point for the Chancellor.

For example – this Fall my collaborator and I received an ARRA “Grand Opportunities” award from the NIH to accelerate our work on human genome annotation.  This came directly from an extraordinary grant writing marathon that I had undertaken last May, writing 3 proposals and parts of 2 others within a 5 week span.

Now, if this were a real entrepreneurial system (i.e. a business), if I had just made such an effort, and as a result brought in over $2M in revenue, I believe that they would have found some way to make that a rewarding experience, so that I would do the same thing more times in the future.

However, I had the opposite experience.  Getting that award was one of the single most challenging happenings of my entire career, because the university bureaucracy has been in the way at every step.  There have been problems with space, hiring, administrative support, and many others.  At one point, I found myself yelling at my chairman over space issues (which really weren’t his fault).  After apologizing for that, I had to do some serious reflection about what the problem was that would lead me to such a situation.

Who else thinks that bringing in $2.1M in funding (on top of the R01 I received earlier in the year) should be a cause for celebration, rather than a cause for major career angst?

The bottom line is that there’s a strong disincentive here for me to go out and ever try to do that (getting big grants) again!  (Instead, I’ve decided to use my grant-getting skills and energy to help other faculty be more successful at it).

That kind of negative feedback loop for doing something great is strongly discouraging of entrepreneurialism.

If I were in a business, and we’d just received a big contract or grant, we’d go out and lease more space (and have a big party as well!).  Problem solved.  Here it was a somber occasion.

I think this problem is not just localized to UNC.

Many universities now expect their faculty to go out and get (lots of) grants.  Yet many of those same universities aren’t prepared to support and encourage that grant-getting work (hey, if you’ve had a positive experience, please write about it in the comments, it would be great to see some uplifting stories once in a while!).

It is very different being an entrepreneur in the business world.  If you’re successful – you get paid a lot more money, and get access to a lot more resources.

I know, I know – science isn’t about the money (or, at least in theory, it shouldn’t be).  But the fact is that most universities have monetized the scientific endeavor.  So like it or not, as faculty, we can simply come to be seen as profit centers, rather than as scientists.

I think I have an idea here for another book… something like “Science is broken…and how to fix it”.  First I have to finish the other two books on my slate.

I’ll post about how the meeting with the Chancellor goes.

Federal granting agencies give extra money with each grant funded for so-called “facilities and administration” – is that money ever used for the intended purpose?

Today I got an email from the faculty member who leads the charge for equipment issues on my floor of a 30 year old antiquated building.

The email said that the department had decided to stop paying for shared printers, because they can no longer charge them directly to our NIH grants.

Yeah. Ok. Um….

So now I’m scratching my head, along with several other faculty, wondering, “exactly how am I supposed to pay for printing in an NIH-compliant fashion?”

I can’t technically pay for it directly from grants – not if I need to print something not directly related to that research program.  I suppose I could buy 3 different printers – one for each grant.  But then when it comes to print out a class syllabus???  Sorry, out of luck.  (The astute reader might point out that I could just do it anyway, and that astute person would be right, I could do it, if I wanted to accept being forced to violate NIH rules).

What, exactly, is the “Facilities and administration” fee that my university charges going for?  It charges 48% from any grant.  This is supposed to cover space (I have about half the space that my peers with similar sized labs do), equipment (but apparently not printers, centrifuges, or anything of the like), administration (my lab is so big that we regularly overwhelm the capabilities of my department’s staff – but the department won’t pay for extra help for me), and etc.  I guess it all goes into “etc.” (whatever that is).

This year my grants will bring in several hundreds of thousands of that “F&A” money.  I once calculated that I’m receiving about $30k worth of space (calculated at the regional rate of $25/sq ft), $40k worth of administration (being generous to account for portions of several salaries in our main office), and maybe some miscellany worth $20k (like hosting our cluster and paying for electricity).

At best – given this very generous calculation – I’m getting about 30% of the F&A in terms of actual F&A.  The rest is for ???  Come on UNC, you could pay a measly few hundred (or even few thousand) for printer maintenance out of this bonanza of grants!

I don’t understand why the NIH doesn’t crack down on this kind of “redirection” (to put it kindly) of F&A money.  I don’t understand why more faculty don’t question this, when they get emails like the one I just got telling them they will have to pay for this out of their own pockets.

If anyone wonders why I’ve gone off and started a for-pay class to teach scientists to be world class grant writers, it’s because I’m going to need the money to support my family when I just can’t stand the hypocrisy anymore within my institution, and decide to resign.

Addendum: I was contacted early this morning by someone in my department with a clarification that, in fact, I do have free access to a shared color printer in my department that can be used for things like class syllabi, and therefore, I am not actually going to have to violate NIH rules.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that printing on that  printer is expensive for things that don’t need color printing.  And the central point of this post remains: what is happening to all those F&A receipts?

I just met up with a friend of mine who teaches at a small(ish) western university. It was interesting how much our stories intersected about some of the job challenges we both face – even though our respective University environments are quite different.

Both seem to stem from a fundamental lack of respect for what scientists and faculty do. We get squeezed from both sides. At the small college, they try to squeeze more teaching out with ever less resources.
At the large University like my own, they try to squeeze more research out of us with less and less resources.
A while back, I calculated an interesting thing. I am bringing in over $300k in “Facilities and administration” money this year to my university.
That is “extra” money that is tacked onto research grants to cover things like:
- Administrative personnel
- Space
- Office equipment
- etc.

I’ll just tell one story here that shows how much of that money comes to support my work.
About a year ago spring, I was hiring more people and had no place to put them.
So I needed to buy some new desks to cram them in.
We attempted to be frugal by going to University Surplus – but there weren’t any desks that would fit.
So we went to Ikea and found a desk set for $500 that would fit perfectly – and allow me to put two new people into my limited space.
What happened when I asked about this?
My department said, “Sorry, you can’t spend that much – the limit is $200″.
Do you notice any mismatch between the numbers here?
I bring in $300k of “Facilities and Administration” money.
The University refuses to pay for $500 desk – limit $200. (It is not like I was asking for a bunch of other stuff!)
My goal isn’t to complain – I realized a long time back that complaining does no good.
But my goal is to highlight something: that certain University administrations seem to have entered a sort of collective insanity. At my own University, it is an insanity of expecting us to bring all this grant money in – but giving nothing in return.
At my friend’s small University, it is an insanity of expecting people to teach so much that they can’t do any research – and hence, there are no opportunities for graduate students to get hands-on training.
These aren’t like the days when my father was in academia. Back then, people looked up to what scientists did, and wanted to support them.
Now they care more about pop stars and fast cars.

Here is a followup note to my series of posts on “rejection,” that had to do with the paper that an editor bounced from PLOS Comp. Bio.

I’ve gotten pretty good at reading between the lines.  My “intuition” for why they bounced it in the first place was that they simply disliked our new modeling approach because it was too new and different.

After posting here, the managing editor contacted me and said that she would look into it.  For that I am grateful.

After about a week, I got a review back from the associate editor who had made the rejection, apologizing for not giving more information in the initial rejection.  That was good.  At least I now knew why our paper had been bounced without sending it out for review.

The reasons for rejection were as I had suspected.  In his explanation, the editor told us that we had taken an inferior modeling approach to existing methods.  I found that offensive.

How can one judge that an approach is “inferior” when it hasn’t been tried to any great extent?  Only a small handful of people have attempted to use this method, because it is so new.  To compare something that is brand new (i.e. “beta”) to something that people have been working on for 20+ years, and say it is “inferior” because it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles yet seems silly.

That would be like comparing the sophisticated horse & buggy’s of the late 1890’s to the automobiles of the day.  People said that those automobiles were clunky, slow, and would never amount to much.  Where are those horse & buggies now?

On this subject,  I wrote to him:

I got no response to that email – none.  Not even a short message that says “we agree to disagree”.

It is too bad that people feel such strong need to defend their turf, and their ideas, at the exclusion of other ideas.

The ostensible purpose of scientific publishing is to get the work out there for the audience to read, discuss, and debate about. Only time will tell whether this modeling approach is better or worse than existing approaches.  No single person can judge that – there is not enough information.  But if censorship occurs, then there is no discussion and no debate.  There is no way of resolving the question about which method is better, if there is no discussion.

Another senior scientist I know told me he’s seen a lot more of this type of censorship as grant funding has gotten tighter.  I don’t know whether that’s true, but if it is, it makes a sad statement.

However, the internet is too powerful a tool to let scientific censorship sit undisputed.  I don’t think that many scientists have yet exploited it to the full extent that they could.  As an experiment, I’m going to start applying some of the very same principles that I talk about in the book that I’m writing (Marketing Your Science) to make an end run around the censorship.

I’ll talk a bit more about some of the things that I’ll do in future posts.

Science should not be about censorship or rigorous adherence to a given ideology.  Instead, science is at its best when it consists of open exploration and testing of new ideas.