Archive for the ‘Science’ Category.
16th October 2007, 09:25 pm
Years ago, I read in a science magazine somewhere that in order for someone to increase one’s probability of winning the Nobel Prize, one has to be 1) white, 2) male, and 3) belonging to the upper class. That was based on the demographic analysis of Nobel laureates in science and medicine awarded so far.
There have been only two women awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics: Marie Curie (1903) and Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963). (And by the way, Marie Curie also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. What an exceptionally gifted woman!) Somehow, the dearth of women given this prestigious award makes one wonder if women must really prove themselves able to outperform men in order to receive any recognition at all.
On the other hand, a relatively higher number of women have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. One of them was Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, who was given the award in 1995.
Now here is a rather interesting clip taken from her interview. Here, the 1995 Nobel Laureate in Medicine describes why she might not recommend a career in science to women, in an excerpt from the full interview at nusslein-volhard-interview.html
However, I do not necessarily agree with her opinion that it is a tricky business to encourage women to pursue careers in science because they will eventually be disliked by society or their contemporaries. I’d say, instead, that if someone really has a passion and talent for science, then the real crime would be to discourage her just because she is likely to face obstacles along the way. There should absolutely be no questions about encouraging her to pursue her scientific ambitions. Surely any obstacle would pale in comparison to the higher and more noble goal of scientific discovery?
Nobody said that doing science would be easy. Challenges exist for both men and women. For women, perhaps the task may even be more daunting, and the expectations may be higher. The number of women Nobel laureates may be small for now, but the fact remains that they were still able to do so - it simply means that it is not impossible! They will serve as an inspiration to all: no matter the odds, yes, women CAN!
8th September 2007, 09:14 am
Presentations in conferences are typically classified into oral or poster presentations. Obviously, oral presentations are reserved for those topics which are considered “hot” and of higher appeal to the intended audience. If you want to increase your signal-to-noise ratio (here, signal pertains your scientific work, in contrast to noise, which is what everyone else is talking about), oral presentation is the way to go. This is the best way to get maximum exposure or visibility to other researchers. Indeed, this can be conveniently thought of as “parallel visibility.”
Posters, on the other hand, allows you to discuss your work to one person at a time. In contrast to oral presentations, this only allows “series visibility” of your work (and thus, lower signal-to-noise ratio). Nevertheless, this allows more in-depth discussion of your results, and even offers the possibility of networking with other people interested in your work. Some valuable ideas could come up as a result of these in-depth discussions - something that doesn’t usually come by way of an oral presentation, which is of course constrained due to time limitations.
In the biannual meetings of the Japan Society of Applied Physics (Nihon Oyobutsuri Gakkai), there are even sessions where both poster and oral presentations are combined. These are called short oral presentations with poster. Oral presentations are given for 5 minutes (usually in the morning), followed up by a 2-hour poster session (usually in the afternoon). Oral presentations usually just give a highlight of the main results, which allows the audience to choose which more interesting results to go to during the poster session.
If I were to choose, however, I would prefer an oral presentation. I find poster presentations particularly tiring, especially because most poster sessions I attend are usually two hours long. If there are is a considerable number of people who are interested in my work, that usually means that I have to stand and talk for the entire two-hour duration! Also, most of the interesting results related to my work tend to be presented in the same session, so this also means that I miss out on discussing those results with the concerned poster presentors because I have to attend to my own poster. Of course, this can also be conveniently circumvented by sneaking out of one’s poster presentation and doing the rounds of other posters. For a two-hour poster session, I think the best compromise would be to stay at one’s poster for about 1 hour, then use the remaining hour to check out other people’s posters.
What about you, what is your preference? Oral or poster? 
25th August 2007, 11:02 am
The Hirsch number (otherwise known as the h-index) tries to quantify the (scientific) productivity of a scientist. The Hirsch number was first described by the physicist J.E. Hirsch in a 2005 PNAS paper: An index to quantify an individual?s scientific research output. Hirsch says:
I propose the index h, defined as the number of papers with citation number 
h, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher.The publication record of an individual and the citation record clearly are data that contain useful information. That information includes the number (Np) of papers published over n years, the number of citations (Njc) for each paper (j), the journals where the papers were published, their impact parameter, etc. This large amount of information will be evaluated with different criteria by different people. Here, I would like to propose a single number, the “h index,” as a particularly simple and useful way to characterize the scientific output of a researcher.A scientist has index h if h of his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other (Np ? h) papers have 
h citations each.
For example, if I have a Hirsch number of 10, that simply means that I have written 10 papers with at least 10 citations each.
Most of us are familiar with the impact factor, which is the commonly accepted method for measuring the scientific “weight” of a paper. The impact factor for a journal is “calculated based on a three-year period, and can be considered to be the average number of times published papers are cited up to two calendar years after publication (including the calendar year in which it was published)” (Source: Wikipedia). Currently the top scientific journal with the highest impact factor is Science (30.028) followed closely by Nature (26.681).
J.E. Hirsch further argues in a recent paper that the h-index appears to be a good predictor of one’s scientific productivity in the future.
For those of us who hate quantifying our work, and having ourselves “measured” in terms of simple numbers, it may very well be that the h-index is just another mathematical exercise that we can do without. The thought of having our CVs - our life’s work - reduced to a single number could be unnerving especially to those who are only about to embark on their scientific careers. On the other hand, knowing in advance that such a parameter exists - which could very well be the basis for evaluation in future employment applications - may also help one in mapping out the best strategies for scientific productivity and career advancement.
