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!

This reminds me of disco mirror balls. By reflecting light directed at it in many directions, it can produce complex display patterns. A disco transformation? By the way, this video was created by Douglas N. Arnold and Jonathan Rogness of the University of Minnesota and was awarded an honorable mention in the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge 2007 in the noninteractive multimedia category.  For a complete list of the visualization challenge winners, visit Science magazine’s feature story here!

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?

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 (N_p) of papers published over n years, the number of citations (N^j_c) 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 N_p papers have at least h citations each and the other (N_p ? h) papers have  h citations each.

Histogram giving number of Nobel-prize recipients in Physics in the last 20 years versus their h-index. The peak is at h-index between 35 and 39 (image and text: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/22890/1/050809.)

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.

I remember a short article in Nature early this year that touched on this subject. The article is entitled “In praise of the ‘brain drain’” and appeared in the March 15 issue of the journal (Nature 446, 15 Mar 2007 p. 231). According to this article, “countries and professions that export skilled staff do not always lose out.” There are losses as well as gains. The open question is the degree to which these benefits counteract the unquestionable initial loss. The article cited a study by Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development on the emigration of African health workers. In this study, Clemens found a clear correlation between emigration and the state of public health care system, but not the one leading to a crisis in public health. On the contrary, the study suggested that the higher the number of health professionals moving abroad, the better shape its health care system is likely to be in.

Why is this so? According to the article, “countries and professions with more openness and greater mobility of personnel are more likely to be in touch with global trends - and more likely to attract able trainees in the first place.” To be able to compete globally, it is also necessary to offer training that is at par with global standard. This will likely increase the local pool of highly skilled health profesionals in sending countries. Another factor cited is the tendency of emigrants to return home later on in their careers. The experience gained by these returning professionals while working abroad is an asset that can be utilized for the advantage of the community. There is also the renumeration and the amount of cash that migrants send back home. We all know how the country benefitted from the influx of foreign remittances from Filipinos working abroad. OFWs are contributing more than US$10B in foreign remittances every year. These are undeniable benefits the country enjoyed from those who left. How to make use of these benefits to counteract the loss brought about by the emigration of our skilled workers is an open issue.

Clemen’s study also suggested that Africa’s low staffing levels and poor health care conditions are due to factors entirely unrelated to international movement of health professionals. The same can be said of ours. There are definitely other factors contributing to the declining number of health professionals in the country. The migration of Filipino doctors is just the effect rather than the cause of the problem. So if we want to prevent a crisis in public health, it maybe high time to identify these other factors and do something about them rather than putting the blame entirely on brain drain.

This blog was created to fill in that vacuum in the blogosphere.

This is a call on all Filipino bloggers whose interests and passion are in S&T, R&D, academe or industry. Let’s blog about how we feel about the scientific and technological advancement in the Philippines. Let’s give a voice to the underrepresented minority of our country.

 And that includes YOU, my friend, the one who’s reading this blog now.