Studying for the GRE

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I’m taking the GRE on Tuesday and have been studying the last few weeks in my copious free time.  Studying for the GRE is dull, but necessary.  For example, I know how to solve all the math problems I’ve come across so far – but I don’t necessarily know a fast or efficient way to solve many of them.  I’ve been pretty good about preparing for the math section, but not the essays (see list of topics here).  I was planning on spending several hours today practicing responding to the kinds of prompts the GRE leans towards, like

“Originality does not mean thinking something that was never thought before; it means putting old ideas together in new ways.”

or

“The function of science is to reassure; the purpose of art is to upset. Therein lies the value of each.”

or

“The way students and scholars interpret the materials they work with in their academic fields is more a matter of personality than of training. Different interpretations come about when people with different personalities look at exactly the same objects, facts, data, or events and see different things.”

To be honest, I do not have 500 words to say to most of the prompts, especially the kinds of things the GRE would like me to say

A more modern example of how yielding to political authority can impede the advance ment of knowledge involves the Soviet Refusenik movement of the 1920s. During this time period the Soviet government attempted not only to control the direction and the goals of its scientists’ research but also to distort the outcome of that research. During the 1920s the Soviet government quashed certain areas of scientific inquiry, destroyed entire research facilities and libraries, and caused the sudden disappearance of many scientists who were engaged in research that the state viewed as a potential threat to its power and authority. Not surprisingly, during this time period no significant advances in scientific knowledge occurred under the auspices of the Soviet government.

I feel like a strong background in math and science leaves me far less prepared than a history degree for these essays, which is problematic since this part of the GRE is supposed to measure writing ability.

While I was supposed to be practicing writing GRE essays, I instead wrote blog posts about biodiversity and climate change that will show up here later this week.

I imagine I’ll also be posting about how much I wished I’d spent today writing essays for the GRE instead of blogging…

Music for Writing – Andrew Bird

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A few months ago I promised I’d be sharing some of the music I do my best writing to.  I’ve taken awhile to fulfill that promise, partly because I didn’t get much writing done while I was traveling in August, but I’ve gotten back into the swing of things now.  Since I got back to my lovely little town, I’ve been listening to Andrew Bird almost constantly for writing.

Figures Lie and Liars Figure – On Discussing Climate Change with Relatives

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Many of my relatives don’t believe that climate change is occurring.  As a scientist interested in what climate change means for the ecosystems humans rely on, this is a mite frustrating.

One of my aunts is actually interested in learning more.  In our last discussion, I realized that a lot of things that I think of as “climate change common knowledge” most definitely are not, so I sent her the IGBP’s climate change index and a slideshow from the EPA on climate change indicators.

Her response reminded me that communicating science is really, really challenging.   I’m going to answer my aunt here in a series of relatively short posts.  I’m doing this publicly because a lot of people share my aunt’s concerns, questions, and misconceptions and I’m hoping some of my readers will add to the discussion.

The first of her concerns I’ll cover is a common one: Money.

Senator James Inhofe doesn't get science or science funding

In more than one of our discussions, she’s echoed Senator James Inhofe’s position that climate change is all a hoax perpetuated by money-grubbing scientists.  I’m not sure I’ve been able to totally disabuse her of the notion that scientists are rolling in money from NSF grants (really, grants do not add millions to your salary, or really even add to it at all in many cases), but I think my own experiences as a scientist have at least shown her that not all scientists come from Inhofe’s imaginary world.

A somewhat separate, but related concern she has is that

our government is not willing to spend money and spend it wisely on real scientific studies that are not and cannot be influenced by corporate entities.

Ironically, my aunt uses this statement to reinforce her skepticism of climate change.  Why ironic? Because the “global warming controversy” was largely created by fossil fuel interests and political pressure has mostly been used to silence science that showed evidence for global climate change, not to silence scientists that disagree with climate change.  As for her claim that “government is not willing to spend money and spend it wisely on real scientific studies,” the US government spends about $2 billion a year on climate change science.  Considering the magnitude of the problem facing us, $2 billion a year probably isn’t enough, but it certainly isn’t an amount small enough to accuse the government of being unwilling to spend money on climate change research.  I imagine most scientists could find an example of climate change research that they believe shouldn’t have been funded, but I expect you’ll find merely a handful of loonies that agree that the vast majority of climate  change studies were unwise to perform or that they weren’t “real” scientific studies.

The government is spending money on good, peer-reviewed, as-objective-as-it-gets science, and that science supports climate change. Fossil fuel interests, on the other hand, are spending money to create a controversy and keep their own profits high.

September Scientiae

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September’s Scientiae is up now at Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist.  Karina asked us what kinds of tools we use and got a lot of fun answers.  It was also fun to see what “school supplies” many of us had in common.

Like Eugenie and Rocksinspace, I find Mendeley to be a lifesaver.  It’s free, syncs between computers and the web, and does everything from organizing my crazy collection of pdfs to inserting citations as I write.  It’s what I wanted Papers to be and what Sente tries – and fails – to be.

I am 100% with Mariawolters on using R for statistical modeling and analysis.  While it’s been the source of many, many tantrums, I couldn’t do without it.  Like Mariawolters puts it:

R is a programming language for everything statistical. It’s free, it’s open source, and it’s being maintained by statisticians for statisticians. Its origin means that it is a pain to learn. It takes a while until one has cleared a path through the data structures, including the various conventions for extracting information from objects that store the results of painstaking statistical analyses, and I am still often baffled myself.

But the payoff is magnificent. Clear (modulo coding ability), open, replicable analyses. R is the ultimate in replicable research. If you give people your data set and your source code, they can repeat every single step of your reasoning. There are no paywalls, no limits of affordability, no packages that are indispensable for the analysis, but that your department hasn’t paid for.

Mysterious Inscription on a North Carolina Tobacco Barn

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Old tobacco barn

I visited my family’s farm while in North Carolina earlier this summer.  It’s always emotionally difficult to go back – I have so many good memories of playing with my siblings and exploring, but so many bad memories involving religion and painfully insane relatives.  I’m irritable and restless the entire time I’m there.  To try to calm myself while I was there, I took a lot of long walks, taking pictures of decaying farm equipment and interesting old buildings scattered across the farm, and hanging on to the good memories.

One of the places my siblings and I loved was an old tobacco barn.  Once the door is closed, the inside seems magical (at least to an 8 year old me).  It’s cool inside, and dim.  The comforting smell of curing tobacco still lingers.  The light filters through a thousand tiny holes and cracks, illuminating the dust that’s forever suspended in the air.  A staggered series of beams stretches from about head height to the ceiling (these were used to hang the tobacco).  We’d climb and scramble through the beams playing all sorts of games.

There’s an inscription scored into the side of the barn that we’ve never been able to interpret.  We think “H.T.R.” are the initials of whoever built the barn or owned the land at that time and that “Febery” is a just phonetic spelling of how everyone in this part of N.C. says February.  But the number sequence “91.33.23” is a mystery.  I’ve always wondered if it had something to do with the tobacco allotment.  Any ideas?

mystery

Orange Jewelweed

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When most people talk about Impatiens, they’re referring to Impatiens walleriana hybrids, which are popular shade annuals.  I didn’t know of any wild Impatiens until I came across this plant a few weeks ago on a walk in Pennsylvania:

Impatiens capensis

Impatiens capensis

The flowers are quite different from any other Impatiens I’ve seen, but the leaves and watery, almost translucent stems along with the wet, shaded habitat immediately made me think of Impatiens.  My plant ecologist host confirmed that it was indeed an Impatiens and that the common name was Orange Jewelweed.  I was quite thrilled with my botanical prowess for the rest of the day.