On being Underrepresented in Neuroscience

The Society for Neuroscience is accepting applications, due May 20, for the Neuroscience Scholars Program. The fellowships are to pay for attending the Annual Meeting of the SfN, membership dues and some unspecified stipend for local activities.
The part that contributes to one of our off-again, on-again conversations around these parts is the specification of Eligibility for the program.

Individuals from racial and ethnic groups that have been shown by the National Science Foundation to be underrepresented in health-related sciences on a national basis.

Okay, standard “minority” stuff here. Light the torches, my affirmative action antagonists, light the torches.

Backyard Brains tries to get Kickstarted.

Remember the $100 Spike folks? Who went on to launch a startup company called Backyard Brains to create cheap electrophysiology devices for the kid-education market?
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2067585958/backyard-brains-neuroscience-for-everyone/widget/video.html
They have launched a KickStarter drive to raise some cash for the next development cycle. They are looking to reach $5,000 and you have until Jan 9 to participate if you are so inclined. Here’s the overview:

Our goal is to develop a production version of the ‘SpikerBox’, an inexpensive, easy to use, bioamplifier for neuroscience experiments. It will be used by students in junior highs, high schools, and undergrad universities. We intend to make the teaching tools user-friendly enough that students of all ages can understand how to experiment with the nervous system of insects.

and here’s what they plan to use the KickStarter dough to accomplish:

We currently make the enclosures for our boxes by hand. While wood looks esthetically pleasing, it takes a lot of time and labor to manufacture. Our goal is to make our SpikerBoxes as cheap as possible. We are raising money to build a CNC acrylic or plastic based enclosure. Our goal in the enclosure is to make it low cost, easy to get access to the insides (we want kids to open it!) and ideally be transparent so that the electronics become a part of the experience.
Your investment will be spent to design and build several acrylic-based prototypes. This will allow us to bring these prototypes into high school classrooms and get direct feedback from the students and their teachers. The winning prototype will become our new enclosure. All because of you. Let the NeuroRevolution begin!

If you’ve never heard of KickStarter before, the FAQ will give you an idea of what it is all about. In essence you pledge a donation. If the pledges total the $5,000 threshold by the deadline, you are charged for your pledge but if it fails to reach enough pledges you are not charged (you have to use Amazon Flexible Payments Services, which permits this).
As far as I can tell there is no upside for the donor beyond being an angel. No tax deduction unless the entity to which you are eventually donating is a qualifying entity. No intellectual property or other interest in the company accrues to you, this is not an investment. So it may not appeal to everyone…
You can look through some of my prior posts, linked at the start, for why I like these guys and their effort so much. They are doing some creative stuff to try to get kids interested in neuroscience. They’ve been legging it out, doing some kids’ camps and generally putting on a traveling demo show during the year and, of course, continue to entertain at the SfN annual meeting. This past year’s bit of SfN Theme H fun was hooking their model (the cockroach leg) up to the head of a turntable and recording LP-induced spike activity. They also were trying to demo up a cheap way to wire up a toy remote control to the antenna sockets of a roach so as to be able to control the direction of movement. Fun stuff if they can get it to work and I assume all of this will eventually be put into a set of lab kits.

On being a “neuroscientist”.

If you are in a position that Journal of Neuroscience is to be sneered at for an insufficiently high IF, you are a GlamourMag scientist. Topic is irrelevant at that point.

Women’s Health irritates the scientist-reader

Scicurious picked up an issue of Women’s Health magazine while working out at the gym. She grew gradually unamused.
Go Read. and Read. and Read.

Science Enemies

Dr. Becca has a hilarious story up over at LabSpaces.

My history with Science Enemy goes back around 10 years, when I was presenting my first ever conference poster. She was very interested in my work, and, wanting to be sociable, I casually asked her whose lab she was in. My friendly query was met with an indignant “MINE,” and it’s there I believe the rivalry began. I of course tried to remedy this faux pas with “Oh, it’s just because you look so YOUNG!!” (and truly she did), but my conciliatory words fell on deaf ears; it was on.

Go read because there is one part you will have in your mind forevermore.
But it makes me think. A very long time ago I was interested in memory, from the long-term / short-term and other nomenclature debates, to interesting cases from H.M. forward to the experimental literature. And one part of that interest that was always good for entertainment was the TemporalLobeMemoryWarz. This was a war played out most hilariously every year at the Society for Neuroscience in the late eighties/early nineties or thereabouts. Zola-Morgan, Squire, Mishkin, Murray, Gaffan, Moss and assorted other players would bring their latest arguments for how they had proved how many angels could dance on the head of a pin exactly what behavioral task in monkeys or humans (or rats, a bit of spillover into rats let us not forget) revealed which amazing new fact about the temporal lobe memory system (hippocampal formation and overlying cortical regions such as PeriRhinal! ParaHippocampal! whoo-whoo!). And they would take shots at each other.
Then they would go back to their labs and publish some papers and create new experiments to prove their hated rivals wrong. Next fall, the cycle would repeat. More data, more potshots and more hot air about memory.
It was AWESOME!
Quite obviously there were big egos involved. Some of the key players are, by near universal acclaim, grade A egotists. And even if they are not, boy, they sure came across that way.
However, I got the firm impression that science, and our understanding of all the functions of the temporal lobe memory structures, was advanced by this process. I’d estimate more so than if it was some boring epiphenomenon that only one lab was interested in pursuing or if everyone stood around doing independent work and politely golf-clapping each other.
Science Enemies are not always a bad thing, even if Dr. Becca’s is a wackaloon.

Not Getting the Point on “The Third Reviewer”

Zen, Zen, Zen. Oh, Zen. On The Third Reviewer:

My position: Anonymity doesn’t improve things (see here and here).

Yeah, it does. And the proof is in the pudding proof of the pudding lies in the eating. We’ve been through the evidence before. More comments and more vigorous exchanges on sites which permit anonymous commenting. Sites which do not remain mired in low-traffic land with a limited group of participants trading puns and pictures of their cats.

Has science become that much like the mob?
Are we as a group that thin-skinned, petty and vindictive that we’re going to put out a hit someone’s grant or whack another scientist’s pub because they didn’t think we used the right statistical test?
And if the answer is yes, we should start asking ourselves why that bad behaviour is tolerated, and how we can get rid of it.

Anyone spot the error of logic here?

The Third Reviewer is….you!

cross posting from DrugMonkey at Scienceblogs:
I have occasionally mentioned that I really like the way that Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have promoted the online discussion of scientific research articles. After all, the publication of an article is merely the starting point and the authors’ interpretations of their data are only part of a larger set. Science proceeds best when we collaborate with our data, our ideas, our interpretations and our conclusions. Internet technologies can assist with this process. Indeed, these technologies already are assisting and have been doing so for some time. How many times in the last month have you used email to discuss a figure or a paper with a colleague? A ubiquitous phenomenon, is it not? Yeah, well when I started graduate school there was no email*.

I have also, I confess, waxed slightly critical of the execution of online paper discussion. Although I mostly bash NPG because they leave so much tasty chum lying in the water, I am generally critical; PLoS hasn’t really managed to do much better than the NPG titles when it comes to consistent online discussion.

Science blogs are slightly better at generating robust discussion of an article which in some cases feels a little more like journal club. This latter is a touchstone target for this behavior, IMNSHO. Science blogs suffer, however, from a lack of focus and a lack of comprehensive coverage. Researchblogging.org is a focal portal to select the journal article discussions out from the cacophony of a typical blog but again, it tends to suffer from coverage issues. The audience is presumed to be a general audience by most science bloggers and therefore they tend to select topics of general interest.

This brings me to a new internet creation: The Third Reviewer

The first thing you will notice is the list of journals which publish scientific articles in the neurosciences in the tabs at the top. The site grabs a Table of Contents feed and lists each article as a commentable link/entry. The comprehensive coverage problem is solved.

The site allows anonymous commenting. This is huge. It solves what I think is the major problem with the approach of publishing houses to this topic. Like it or not, people are less likely to openly comment on papers in a way that could come back to nail them. Yes, even if they are totally and completely polite, their criticism is on the up and up and 80% of the field agrees with it.

The snooty nosed types allege that anonymous commenting will make such an effort descend into meaningless drivel, ad hominem attacks and nastiness. Those of us who actually discuss papers in online venues that permit anonymous commenting allege that such risks are vastly overblown and that a light hand of moderation, plus social tone-setting, takes care of any problems that might arise.

The Third Reviewer will test these competing hypotheses. And you know I’m excited about that!
__
*yes, it had been developed but it was not in widespread academic use at that point.

N.b. Tragically, the owners of the movie Downfall have gone after many of the YouTube mashups, including the one from which “The Third Reviewer” derives. Has anyone seen it pop up on another host?

The Third Reviewer is….you!

I have occasionally mentioned that I really like the way that Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have promoted the online discussion of scientific research articles. After all, the publication of an article is merely the starting point and the authors’ interpretations of their data are only part of a larger set. Science proceeds best when we collaborate with our data, our ideas, our interpretations and our conclusions. Internet technologies can assist with this process. Indeed, these technologies already are assisting and have been doing so for some time. How many times in the last month have you used email to discuss a figure or a paper with a colleague? A ubiquitous phenomenon, is it not? Yeah, well when I started graduate school there was no email*.
I have also, I confess, waxed slightly critical of the execution of online paper discussion. Although I mostly bash NPG because they leave so much tasty chum lying in the water, I am generally critical; PLoS hasn’t really managed to do much better than the NPG titles when it comes to consistent online discussion.
Science blogs are slightly better at generating robust discussion of an article which in some cases feels a little more like journal club. This latter is a touchstone target for this behavior, IMNSHO. Science blogs suffer, however, from a lack of focus and a lack of comprehensive coverage. Researchblogging.org is a focal portal to select the journal article discussions out from the cacophony of a typical blog but again, it tends to suffer from coverage issues. The audience is presumed to be a general audience by most science bloggers and therefore they tend to select topics of general interest.
This brings me to a new internet creation: The Third Reviewer

doin it right

[ Please welcome our guest blogger, who identifies as robin, just your average everyday neuropharmacologist. -DM ]
One of the most important yet overlooked tasks of the average pharmacologist is dissolving drugs into solution. Those of you who work with things that don’t have to cross the blood-brain barrier probably have a generally easier time dissolving shit than those of us who prefer to study CNS-active compounds. For those of us who play with compounds that are hydrophobic enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, I can testify that those range from fairly easy to major suck to put into an aqueous solution.

On Reviewer Acknowledgement from J. Neuroscience

One hears now and again from journal editors of one’s acquaintance how hard it is to get reviewers for papers. In fact a William F. Perrin detailed the problem in his field in a recent Science letter-to-Editor:

As a past editor of Marine Mammal Science and a present associate editor of the Journal of Mammalogy, I have had great difficulty in lining up reviewers. Sometimes it takes 8 or 10 tries to find someone who will agree to review a paper. The typical excuse is “I’m too busy.”

Finding God in the Brain: That Psilocybin Study

Abel Pharmboy of Terra Sigillata has a recent post covering Sol Snyder’s NEJM commentary (currently free) on finding god in the brain, an overview of some neuroscience thinking on religiosity. Abel and Sol both touch on a 2006 study by Roland Griffiths and colleagues [available to all from the MAPS site here] which reported on a study of the “mystical-type” experiences of humans following a dose of psilocybin. I’ll try to expand a bit on this since it was a very interesting study in many ways. Even though this is a bit dated by now, I wasn’t blogging back then so I’ll give it a whack. It should be obvious where this touches on some of my own scientific interests.

Performance Doping in Academia, Take 2

A recent commentary in Nature by Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir discusses the ethical questions arising from the use of cognitive enhancing drugs to improve intellectual function in “normal” people. This follows a prior piece in Nature arguing that science-enhancing drugs may not be just acceptable but indeed laudable, which I covered previously. A couple of blogs are already on it, including Adventures in Ethics and Science (natch), Retrospectacle and Action Potential. [Update: 12/21/07: More from the Silverback , Corpus Callosum and Munger.] Commentary on the first two Borg blogs is already quite brisk. People seem to love discussing brain doping!

IFCN Clustering: A CRISP analysis.

We’ve been discussing the degree to which insular sub-groupings of scientists protect and maintain themselves and their peers through the grant review process. We’re using “bunny hopping” thanks to whimple and the NIH CSR calls this “clustering“. Note upfront that this analysis and discussion does not necessarily require overt malicious intent on anyone’s part. The presentation at the recent PRAC meeting from Don Schneider identified the IFCN (Integrative, Functional and Cognitive Neuroscience) group of study sections as top suspects in the “clustering” phenomenon. Can we derive a little more information one wonders?

Neurogeekery: The Genealogy

Just ran across the Neurotree site. They are trying to build training-relationship trees for neuroscience and depend on user input.
I’ve been sort of interested in training genealogy ever since I ran across an acquaintance’s tree which got back to Newton in rapid order.

Go contribute if you are a neuroscientist and have nothing better to do…

UPDATE: After browsing around a little bit on this thing it looks to have potential as a networking and mentor seeking tool. Although obviously it will not be comprehensive you can get an idea whether someone has launched a  lot of independent careers or not.