Balancing Signal and Noise

How frequently to post is a perennial question for anyone with a footprint in social media. Too frequent and no one pays attention to all the noise. Too seldom and no one bothers to look. In either case, you also risk the possibility that Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook will deprioritize your post when serving it to your followers or friends. Of course, it all depends on how valuable a given post is. It can have value simply because you are popular in whatever sense, and the reader cares only about the fact that you are the one saying it. It can have value in some intrinsic sense because of the concept that is conveyed. Or it can have value somewhere in between. Regardless, readers are being bombarded by so many screaming pieces of content (that is, noise) that it's hard for any piece of truly valuable content (that is, signal) to be noticed.

Interestingly, this question also pertains to data. Is the signal from the device detectable and reproducible from the noise? It is also relevant to the articles that we publish in science. Is the advance incremental and hence within reach of a good guess from past work?! Or is it truly a new signal that advances our understanding? Ultimately, we scientists must find signals well above the noise, and be careful in reporting it so that it doesn't get lost in the noise. There is also the question of what is the noise and what is the signal. Consider the accompanying image with this post. Is the pretty red region the signal that is tainted by the noise of a few bright spots? Or are the bright spots the signals that shine over the noise of the red background?

If you are interested in questions of observation, you may also want to check out some of my old posts on the role of perception and implicit bias: Part I and Part II. (It's relatively timely again because Amy Herman appeared on an NPR broadcast just this week.)

Blog Post #100 - Looking Back & Looking Forward

This is my 100th post. The first 99 posts have already received over 31,000 page views. The rather eclectic mix of my posts is visible in the top 5 viewed posts:

* 924 views:   Keep your outline to yourself! (A random walk through... (Jan 27, 2014)
* 634 views:   6. The blurring of physical chemistry and chemical... (Aug 14, 2013)
* 419 views:   Chemistry is Everywhere (My first post on Apr 27, 2013!)
* 412 views:   Advancing Science Through Diversity #OXIDE #Telluride... (Jun 24, 2013
* 356 views:   Soft materials made up of tricked-up hard particles... (Jun 18, 2014)

As traditional publishers have long known, how-to books and articles do well, and my post giving tips for delivering better scientific presentations is at the top. On the other hand, a historical view of physical chemistry and chemical physics also found an audience. A post reporting on our recent theoretical and computational research work has done well. Our discussion of diversity also found an audience. There is no telling how well such page views correlate with each other. For example, are readers of the diversity-related articles interested in my science publications or in my off-beat observations about the underlying science of a rock?

All of these analytics are catnip for scientists who crave hard data to support the impact and importance of our work. The h-index (named after Jorge Hirsch), for example, attempts to quantify the impact of a scientist’s oeuvre through a cumulative but tempered accounting of the citations that their work has received. It’s of practical use because it’s very hard to compare different scientists. On the other hand, the h-index is wrought with confounding factors… The larger the field, the more citations every paper within it receives; membership in groups of prolific scientists who happily follow each other’s work gives a happy boost to all; advances in “hot” areas will necessarily receive more attention; the Matthew effect; the longer the scientist's career, the higher the h-index; and the list goes on. Such factors, though seemingly giving some scientists advantages over others, are not necessarily positively uncorrelated with their impact. And the h-index has become a metric that nearly every scientist detracts, but simultaneously follows with equal interest.

So looking at the analytics of my posts, I am simultaneously humbled and dismayed. I never expected that there would be, on average, more than 300 page views per post. This number is likely more than what my scientific articles receive. The latter have been peer-reviewed and have advanced science, but have they directly touched nearly as many lives as my posts? On the other hand, 300 page views pales in comparison with some of the more established science bloggers, and is far surpassed by anything that LeBron James or Taylor Swift tweets by a factor of, like, infinity. So I’ll keep posting, if only because thankfully you, dear reader, are still reading, and hopefully I’m providing you with some outside-the-box perspectives not available elsewhere.

The Sight and Sound of Science

How do you process music? Do you let the music flow over you? Do you translate the sound to notes? Do you look at the fingering and movement of the player? The answers perhaps depends on your level of knowledge and talent in the instruments that generate the music. The beauty of music is that you can enjoy it at any or all of these levels. I would argue that it is the same for science. Whether the details are in the equations or in the instrumental apparatus, you can still enjoy the phenomenon. 

When you look at the sky during the day or at sunset what do you see? It’s likely you’ve noticed that the sky is blue, and sunsets are red. I see that too, but I also think about the jumble of collisions between photons and the particles in the sky. The red photons are less likely to be back scattered than the blue ones… So in the end, the red ones get jumbled less, and reach my eye directly as the sun is setting. The blue photons scatter more and spread across the sky. Each of those trajectories involves equations describing the motion of the photons and one could try to follow them too. But actually, there are so many that no one can really follow them all. Instead, it is their emergent behavior that can be tracked in some collective way. You might think that that emergent dance of photons is all of the beauty in and of itself. You, like me, might find all the fun in determining the governing equations and finding their solution. Or you might remain steadfast that the beauty lies in a visually arresting sunset as if it were a painting. Regardless, the beauty comes out from science! 

Music and Chemistry in Nashville

This weekend, I had an opportunity to do something I have never done before. I introduced the band. SERMACS2014 managed to snag one of the hottest tickets in town. The SteelDrivers have been nominated for three Grammies, four IBMA awards and the Americana Music Association’s New Artist of the Year award. It was yet another sign of the prescient organization of the SERMACS2014 organizing committee that they signed them two years ago.

They were also quite clever in finding a band whose songs encoded a chemical twist. When the SteelDrivers sing one of their hits, "Wearin' a hole in a Honky Tonk floor," I imagine hole transport on graphene. The song even includes a chemical safety twist. In the lyric, "this old bar room suits me fine," I'm envisioning lab coats in front of a fume hood. That is, it's easy to see chemistry wherever you look. On the flip side, Sir Harry Kroto's keynote remarks at SERMACS2014, pointed out that his identification of the C60 structure was made possible by his early exposure to graphic arts and R. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome at the World's Fair. Which is to say that it is equally easy to find art in the science that we do. Meanwhile, the SteelDrivers also seemed amused over my opening remarks about their music. At least, they pretended to be as they introduced their song with a line about the newfound chemistry that it evidently contained. Truly bluegrass and chemistry were following the same beat... but alas, I still don't know how to two-step.

So thank you to the Nashville Section of the ACS for staging a great SERMACS, and for helping me find some cool chemistry in bluegrass!

OXIDE's Case for Inclusive Excellence in Chemistry

There's a catch-22 with any attempt to increase the participation of under-represented groups in the chemical sciences, and perhaps elsewhere too. On the one hand, students need to be trained to enter the workforce. On the other hand, they need to make the choice to be trained, presumably because jobs in the chemical sciences are more desirable than the alternatives. There exist many successful programs aimed at the former, but I believe that such programs face an uphill climb because, on top of everything else, they must convince potential candidates that a career path in the chemical sciences is desirable. Sadly, though the odds for success in professional sports are much lower, it appears to be relatively easy to convince someone to follow that dream through college. When it comes to choosing college majors, however, students tend to be more cautious about potential long-term employment opportunities. This is true for everyone, but it's often acutely so for students from under-represented groups who face the possibility of finding diversity inequities along their career path. An objective of the OXIDE effort is to help break the catch-22 by changing the culture so as to eliminate real or perceived diversity inequities. Our hypothesis is that a culture that is accommodating to everyone will lead to departments with demographics that are in congruence with those of the national population.

Our recent article, "A Top-Down Approach for Increasing Diversity and Inclusion in Chemistry Departments," was roughly based on an invited presentation (by the same title) at the Presidential Symposium held at the 246th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Indianapolis in September 2013. The symposium topic was the "Impact of Diversity and Inclusion" and included several other presentations that were also turned into peer reviewed articles in the recently published ACS Symposium book. I spoke about the work by Shannon Watt and me through our  OXIDE program. She's pictured just to my left in the image accompanying this post.  That picture, by the way, was actually taken at the 248th ACS National Meeting held in San Francisco in August 2014. I included this more recent photo with this post because, in addition to Shannon and me, it features several individuals who have been supportive of the OXIDE effort and who also spoke at the recent symposium on "Advancing the Chemical Sciences through Diversity" and thereby continued the dialogue on inclusive excellence at ACS meetings.

The article was  written with my collaborator, Shannon Watt. The reference is "A top-down approach for diversity and inclusion in chemistry departments," Careers, Entrepreneurship, and Diversity: Challenges and Opportunities in the Global Chemistry Enterprise, ACS Symposium Series 1169, edited by H. N. Cheng, S. Shah, and M. L. Wu, Chapter. 19, pp. 207-224 (American Chemical Society, Washington DC, 2014). (ISBN13: 9780841229709, eISBN: 9780841229716, doi: 10.1021/bk-2014-1169.ch019) Our OXIDE work is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health through NSF grant #CHE-1048939.
We are also grateful to recent gifts from the Dreyfus Foundation, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and a private donor.

Advice to high school students ...

Through high school, you are mostly taught the facts. As an undergraduate, you are taught to teach yourself the facts and how to construct answers to questions. In graduate or professional school, you are taught how to ask the right questions. The irony in this construction lies in the common misconception that Ph.D.s know all the answers, when in fact they mostly know the gaps in knowledge. That is, Socrates was not being so humble with his oft quoted saying, "the more I learn, the more I learn how little I know."

At the recent Herty Medal Award Dinner hosted by the Georgia Local Section of the ACS, I was pleased that nearly an entire table was filled by AP Chemistry students from Luella High School in Henry County. One of them asked our medalist, Luigi Marzilli, for advice on her way to college. I took the liberty of conveying the stages I described above. My point is that the mode of learning undergoes a paradigm shift in going from high school to college. My advice to students is thus to be aware of this change and be deliberate in changing their study habits. Indeed students often struggle as they approach the cliff on the edge of what they know coming from high school and the large body of new material that they are now expected to know in a college class. They often respond by trying to memorize every new fact and figure, but the shear magnitude of data makes such a path difficult to follow. Instead, they need to learn the material conceptually so that they can readily process the problems they face on exams and beyond. This requires practicing the problems and making the connections between the concepts steadily through the term, not in a single cramming session the night before the exam!

Traveling through Japan

Cars drive on the left side of the road, but power outlets are 110V (generally close enough to 120V for most U.S. products to work) using ungrounded (2-pin) North American plugs. Hotels generally don't have fitness rooms, and if they do, they are aimed at leisure travelers opening well after your business meeting will start. Hotel breakfasts are awesome, often including a mix of western and Japanese items (without missing any from either cuisine.) Only downside is that it makes you miss the fitness room even more. Traveling through Japan is relatively easy because most locations are labeled in latin script. Bus and rail ticket vending machines always offer an English option. Nevertheless, there are invariably surprises. The good news is that service providers really do want to help. Indeed, the level of politeness is like white noise. It feels wrong only when it's not there. Surprisingly, everyone takes it for granted, rarely acknowledging the bows and the various statements of "domo origami gozaimasu" offered multiple times any time you go near (let alone interact with) a service person. Whenever possible, just say "domo." It means please and/or thank you. Most importantly, it conveys an acknowledgment that you are ready to treat the person in front of you like a human being.

I was lucky to have local hosts to make many of the steps work without having to fumble through them. I suppose that part of traveling like a scientist is that you have scientific friends wherever you go. The other part of traveling like a scientist is that you use the scientific method in figuring out how to use some common appliance or in facing whatever obstacle you encounter. For example, when I was setting up the projector for my talk, I was faced with a remote control whose buttons were entirely in Japanese. There had to be a button that turned it on and another that would switch the mode to the VGA input. The former was easy: it was the big red button. The latter was trickier but limited to a few likely candidates based on pattern recognition with US remotes. A little trial-and-error and, voila, my presentation was ready to start. I guess I could have waited for my hosts to do this, but after all their kindness, I wanted to give them one less thing to do. We could then move sooner into the purpose of my visit: discussing our latest scientific results, and using them to enable each other's next scientific advance.

Are you a spectator or a runner(in #chemistry)? #peachtreeroadrace #ajcprr

At the end of the Peachtree Road Race, the USA 10km Road Race male champion, Matt Tegenkamp, said on air that the event was great, in part, because it included 60,000 spectators. The thing is that the Peachtree Road Race (which doubled as the USA 10 km Road Race Championship) is famous for being the largest 10 km race in the world with 60,000 registered runners. Tegenkamp's slip was that he downgraded the registered runners to spectators because evidently if you can't run like an elite (which is indeed really fast at sub five minute miles!), then you are simply a spectator of the race. While there may be some truth in that, I can tell you that all 60,000 individuals (including me) ran or walked those same 10 km. We also didn't have a chance to see any of the elites who started before us while we hung out in the corrals waiting to start our race. Indeed, if you are talented enough to be a world-class runner, it's a great privilege to get to do it in front of 60,000 people (by whatever name). But you can't forget that all of them did some kind of running.

Similarly, nearly everyone has done some chemistry in their lives. Many of them remember, not so fondly, the labs they did in high school or college. Those labs generally didn't work as expected. Truth is that's the best kind of experiment (because you can learn from it). You've also done chemistry every time you've lit a match, cleaned your contact lenses, turned on your TV, and the list goes on. In this sense, we are all chemists, but only a few of us are lucky enough to do it for a living. Nevertheless, like in running, we need everyone to support chemistry. Otherwise the elites—that is, the basic researchers who are advancing the forefront of chemistry—won't have a chance to set the stage for technological advances driving humankind. So whether you consider yourself a chemist, a spectator or someone in between, we need your support and we appreciate it!

Flying with butter or margarine?

Traveling on transatlantic flights headed to Europe, I've discovered a surefire way to confirm the direction of my flight. Ever noticed that when you travel east across the Atlantic Ocean you're served margarine, but you get butter in the western direction? The plane's food is presumably prepared by the local purveyor at the originating airport, and that determines the nature of the food. As a consequence, there usually are slight differences in the meal linked to the regional cuisine. However, butter and margarine are direct counterparts, and you seemingly always get margarine going East from the States on Delta. It's reassuring, in some ways, that the world is not yet so flat that it still maintains some degree of regionalization.

Of course, the fat content and the chemistry of butter versus margarine is equally interesting. The distinction between them is not so simple because invariably most modern margarine spreads are a mixture of butter and "pure" margarine. In turn, the fat content varies considerably, and so does the taste. Other properties, such as melting temperature, viscosity and solubility presumably also vary affecting how you cook with them. This is all to say that the underlying chemistry of these products has employed many a chemist! My apologies that I've ignored the recent Mad Men debate over how to market margarine over butter, but that isn't about the chemistry at all...

Jet Set Life of Chemists…

The WSJ recently ran a story titled "To Avoid Jet Lag This Summer, Travel Like a Scientist." When I first saw the headline, I feared that it was going to talk about how one needs to make sure to bring datapads and a laser pointer while on travel. (No more pocket protectors for us!). Or perhaps it would discuss the stamina required to endure the long days we spend when we visit a university to present a seminar on our latest research findings, starting with breakfast and ending after dinner just in time to spend a few more hours working on the datapad. The schedule is usually so full that you have to ask someone permission to take a bio break as such activities take away from the precious time that a given host has been scheduled to meet with you. Of course, invariably the schedule runs late, making everything all the more harried. Immutable entries on the schedule, such as meals and the scheduled seminar time, are the only saving grace for keeping some semblance of order during a visit.  But alas, I was wrong. The story, instead attempts to discuss recent findings on the types of actions one can take to mitigate jet lag during trips travelling across multiple time zones. Even then, the article disappoints because it tends to offer conflicting advice with much of it based on hearsay in the absence of sufficient hard data for a foolproof action that works well for everyone.

The title nevertheless caught my eye because I believe that the advice is actually correct. Namely, a traveller should first set up a control by essentially doing what is natural during the process of a given trip. Well, not quite nothing. She should take good notes of what she did and how her body behaved during the process. If all goes well, then she will have proven to herself that the null strategy is effective for herself. As she repeats the experiment in subsequent flights, presumably with positive results, she will simply be verifying it to the degree that it becomes statistically accurate. If, on the other hand, the outcome is not positive in the first case or repeatable in subsequent cases, then she has reason to try alternative strategies. Based on her knowledge of her behavior in other scenarios, she should then approach the introduction of new strategies (preferably one at a time) that are most likely to mitigate her jet lag, and then observe the outcomes. (The WSJ article does provide many such strategies for you to choose from either individually or as a cocktail.) Through successive iteration, she can optimize the protocol for herself. (WARNING: Don't share the protocol with others because it will be different for different people.) One difficulty here is that your statistics are poor because you have a sample size of one, yourself. On the other hand, different people respond differently to timezone hopping, and hence you need the strategy personalized to just yourself. So it falls on you to do the series of experiments to optimize your own strategy. Doing so means that you're truly travelling like a scientist. Now that advice you can share with others.

toasting with espresso cups...

l'chaim, Salud, zum Wohl,... These are expressions that many of us use in celebrating with wine or other alcoholic beverages. Most of us, if we think of it at all, assume that we are engaging in a diluted ritual now divorced from Dionysus or Bacchus. This may be so. For years, I have argued in favor of a different origin. I thought that I remembered a PBS Connections episode that traced the practice through ever advancing military tactics between adjoining kingdoms. Specifically, the tactic was the use of poison to eliminate a neighboring king so as to annex their land without war. Neighboring kings would presumably avert being poisoned when visiting their neighbors by pouring wine between their cups in turn. If one chose not to pour, touching glasses instead, then she or he would be exhibiting trust. (As a chemist, it was also fun to think of this as analytical chemistry in action, albeit somewhat rudimentary.) My conclusion, based on this foundation, has been that we should be at liberty to toast (and clink glasses) with any liquid as a sign of mutual trust.

Only problem with this, as Thomas Huxley said in a Presidential Address at the British Association in 1870, is that "the great tragedy of science [lies in] the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."  In this case, if you check out snopes.com on the subject "Of Drinks and Clinks," they provide evidence (or lack thereof) that the story is entirely false. Instead, it appears that it emanates from the practice of communal drinking out of a common cup or vessel in numerous early cultures. While the question of poison does not enter this cup, the remaining ritual symbolically connects us to each other without the literal sharing of liquids (or germs!) Not surprisingly, I checked back to the PBS Connections episodes, and I can't find any discussion of wine; but more on Connections in a future post... The one good piece of news here is that the common cup did not necessarily cary alcoholic fluids.

So in my house, we will continue to toast over all liquids, including our morning espresso. Salud!

Blogging Chemists; Everyone is Doing It? (#Chemistry)

You wouldn't be surprised to know that I sometimes find myself in circles of chemists. In those circles, when I mention the fact that I've started blogging, the first thing I hear is "Did you you know that Michelle Francl has a blog?" Indeed, she was the first person I asked about how to do this right! (All of the blame for my mistakes, though, go entirely to me.) Ever since I met Michelle, I've been priviledged to see how quickly she adopts new cyberenabled technologies to communicate her science. She was among the first (if not the first) of us to podcast chemistry lectures. She's maintained chemistry blogs for nearly a decade. Check her out at Culture of Chemistry and on posts at the Sceptical Chymist. (One blog isn't enough for her!)

This naturally leads to the question as to which other chemists blog? Paul Bracher maintains ChemBark that is certainly a blog (and a very good one at that!), but is also part wiki through its comments and re-editing. He'll be starting a faculty position at Saint Louis this fall. A group of chemists aggregate their posts at Chemistry Blog. One of their Staff Bloggers, Kenneth Hanson, is starting a faculty position at Florida State this Fall. In one series of posts, he's currently recounting the process of securing a chemistry faculty position. Though it's "obvious" for us insiders, it is evidently not so for would-be professors. Hanson is leveling the playing field through this series of mentoring posts. It's perhaps not surprising that this new generation is experimenting with social media as a way to advance their science! 

Beyond trailblazing senior faculty members, like Michelle, I'm also curious about the extent to which others are jumping into this pool. Among my own colleagues, Andrew Lyon maintains a blog embedded within his group's website. David Scholl does the same. Of course, most colleges and universities are now paying their press teams to maintain these dissemination channels. So perhaps blogging is the new normal for chemists?! 

The rock is hard.

This post's title was the single line answer given by my young son in a recent science test. He was surprised that it earned him an unsatisfactory mark. After all, his answer was factually correct. His teacher's hint to his failing was that he had not elaborated on the tools he had used to derive his answer. His retort was that he was given no tools to detail.

What is needed, of course, is observation to back up the hypothesis. This is not necessarily that which you see—observe with your eyes—since after all you can't see hardness. You can, however, feel hardness, that is to the extent that it is not soft. But there's not much dynamic range in using your fingers to distinguish between two hard objects such as a rock verses a table. Meanwhile, this has all been predicated on the question of a definition of hardness. When I claimed that it was the lack of softness, this gave us a qualitative scale but not one we could use to distinguish between two different "hard" objects. So how are we to distinguish between two different hard objects using the tools we have at hand in an elementary school classroom? The hint lies in providing a clear statement of the hypothesis by defining "hard" rigorously, and then determining measurements to back up a hypothesis such as the rock is harder than my head.

Chemistry is Everywhere

As I travel, as I teach, as I research, I find that science helps to explain (& predict) everything I see. As each grain of sand is but one small part of the greater beach, I hope that these entries will build to tell a story of how chemistry truly is everywhere... Corny I know, but this is what I tell my students. If only they use the tools we learn in class, then the world will make a lot more sense. When they turn on an air-conditioner will it humidify or dehumidify as it cools the air? The answer lies in thermodynamics.