Chemistry

OUR correspondents discuss the controversy surrounding the latest diagnostic manual from the American Psychiatric Association

Imagine reading an article on private spaceflight in New York magazine and coming across this interesting tidbit (emphasis mine):Virgin Galactic’s CEO is a 39-year-old American named George Whitesides, who I met one evening after ISPCS. The son of a legendary chemist, he is himself a nonscientist who decided to devote his life to space one night in Tunisia, while studying women’s rights in the Islamic world on a Fulbright scholarship, when he found himself walking on the shore of the Mediterranean beneath an impossibly starry sky. He’s worked for Virgin for three years—recruited by Branson from NASA, where he served as the administrator’s chief of staff—but has been a customer for almost a decade: He and his wife, self-described “space geeks,” were among the first to set down a combined $400,000 for Virgin’s then-rather-speculative flights. It was meant, even at the time, to be a delayed honeymoon. George Whitesides (the senior?) is known to all as a character -- somehow not a surprise that his son would be radically different as well.[The article is worth a read -- sounds like private spaceflight will be interesting and off-beat. I am, for the most part, a techno-optimist; I think that trends have always been towards popularizing technology that was initially only accessible to the very wealthy. All of that to say that I think that more people will be able to experience spaceflight than we ever imagined.]

--> McDonald's website leaves it up to interpretation what divides these two types of toys. The Newscripts blog would like to be closer Internet buddies with our glossy print Newscripts column, so here we highlight what’s going on in the current issue of C&EN. As the cashier at the fast-food restaurant is finishing our order, she grabs a small plastic doll and tosses it in my kids' meal. “Excuse me,” my mom says testily. “You didn't give my daughter a choice of toys.” Even at age six, I can tell my mom is using tremendous restraint to give this young woman a chance to rectify her unintentional wrongs. The woman looks at my mom, then at me, and asks, “Well, do you want the girls' toy or the boys' toy?” I don't remember if I ended up picking the doll or the toy car on that particular occasion. But I do distinctly remember the feeling of trying to weigh the gaps in my own eclectic toy collection with the point my now-fuming mother was trying to teach both me and the young woman at the cash register. Toys are toys, and kids should be able to choose their own interests without feeling undue social, gender-specific pressure. Boots toy signage–with science kits in the boys' section–before customer outrage led the store to redo how they label toy sections. Credit: Twitter/@SeanEGray Twenty years later, I call my mom and tell her about this column, and she's outraged we're still having this debate. As I write in Newscripts this week, the gender-specific labeling of toys came under fire in England recently. Specifically, customers and online advocacy group Let Toys Be Toys took issue with science kits and chemistry sets being designated for boys. Since the backlash, toy giant Tesco and pharmacy chain Boots have changed their girls- and boys-specific toy labeling and issued apologetic statements. In the U.S., however, it remains fairly ubiquitous. Target has girls' toys and boys' toys, as does Walmart, Toys”R”Us, and Fisher-Price–where play kitchens are still considered girls' toys and Star Wars action figures are found in the boys' section. Some studies have suggested a hormonal basis for children's toy preferences. On the other hand, Sweden has found support for gender-neutral toy catalogs and early-childhood education. Biological influences aside, it makes one wonder what the STEM divide would look like if girls were allowed or even encouraged to pick up a model train, a kit for making a clock from a potato, or a play chemistry set. Related Posts:Making Life EasyIn Print: Droplets of Rain, Strands of HoneyAmusing News AliquotsGearing Up For Nobel WeekIYC Weekly Round-up

Good morning! Between May 16 and May 20, there were 51 new positions posted to the C&EN Jobs website. Of these, 2 (4%) were academically connected and 44 (86%) were from Kelly Scientific Resources.Athens, GA: Noramco (a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary) is looking for a B.S./M.S./Ph.D. senior analytical chemist; 6+ years experience desired.Aurora, Illinois: Aurora Specialty Textiles Group is looking for a M.S. chemist to be a senior coatings chemist. 10+ years experience desired.Classic Kelly: "Bustling Lab Technician." (Crockett, ?)

Good morning! Between May 14 and May 20, there were 4 academic positions posted on the C&EN Jobs website. The numbers:Total number of ads: 4- Postdocs: 0- Tenure-track faculty: 1- Temporary faculty: 0- Lecturer positions: 2- Staff positions: 1- US/non-US: 3/1Abu Dhabi: New York University Abu Dhabi is looking for an assistant instructor for general and organic chemistry:New York University has established a campus in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and invites applications for several Assistant Instructor positions. We encourage applicants with experience in teaching, preferably at the undergraduate level, and in planning and conducting laboratory experiments in organic, physical and analytical chemistry. An M.S., B.S. or PhD with teaching and research experience in chemistry is preferred.So what you're really saying is: we'll take anyone. (For those intrigued by this Abu Dhabi position, here's a recent write-up of the campus by New York magazine.)Jupiter, FL: Scripps Florida is looking for a Ph.D. NMR core facility manager; why do they prefer local residents?Memphis, TN: The University of Tennessee Health Science Center is looking for an assistant/associate/full professor of pharmaceutics:The successful candidate is expected to have a strong research program in the areas of pharmaceutics, physical pharmacy, drug delivery, gene therapy, nanotechnology, nanomedicine, regenerative medicine, bio-imaging, biosensors, biomedical engineering, or other related discipline with focus on drug discovery and development. Casting a broad net, I see.

On Saturday we are having an economics hackathon in London. I’d love to be there but unfortunately am going to the Eur Sem Web Conf in Montpelier. It’s run by Velichka and colleagues – here’s the sort of reason why (from OKFN blog) Velichka Dimitrova revisted the disgraced Reinhart-Rogoff paper on austerity economics, the perfect evidence of the need for open data in economics – and was picked up by the London School of Economics and the New Scientist. The point is that economists made very serious mistakes and that proper management of the data and tools could have prevented it. We have to work towards reproducible computation in sciences and economics. From Velichka’s blog (and then I set you a puzzle at the end): Another economics scandal made the news last week. Harvard Kennedy School professor Carmen Reinhart and Harvard University professor Kenneth Rogoff argued in their 2010 NBER paper that economic growth slows down when the debt/GDP ratio exceeds the threshold of 90 percent of GDP. These results were also published in one of the most prestigious economics journals – the American Economic Review (AER) – and had a powerful resonance in a period of serious economic and public policy turmoil when governments around the world slashed spending in order to decrease the public deficit and stimulate economic growth. Yet, they were proven wrong. Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin from the University of Massachusetts (UMass) tried to replicate the results of Reinhart and Rogoff and criticised them on the basis of three reasons: Coding errors: due to a spreadsheet error five countries were excluded completely from the sample resulting in significant error of the average real GDP growth and the debt/GDP ratio in several categories Selective exclusion of available data and data gaps: Reinhart and Rogoff exclude Australia (1946-1950), New Zealand (1946-1949) and Canada (1946-1950). This exclusion is alone responsible for a significant reduction of the estimated real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category Unconventional weighting of summary statistics: the authors do not discuss their decision to weight equally by country rather than by country-year, which could be arbitrary and ignores the issue of serial correlation. The implications of these results are that countries with high levels of public debt experience only “modestly diminished” average GDP growth rates and as the UMass authors show there is a wide range of GDP growth performances at every level of public debt among the twenty advanced economies in the survey of Reinhart and Rogoff. Even if the negative trend is still visible in the results of the UMass researchers, the data fits the trend very poorly: “low debt and poor growth, and high debt and strong growth, are both reasonably common outcomes.” Source: Herndon, T., Ash, M. & Pollin, R., “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff, Public Economy Research Institute at University of Massachusetts: Amherst Working Paper Series. April 2013. What makes it even more compelling news is that it is all a tale from the state of Massachusetts: distinguished Harvard professors (#1 university in the US) challenged by empiricists from the less known UMAss (#97 university in the US). Then despite the excellent AER data availability policy – which acts as a role model for other journals in economics – the AER has failed to enforce it and make the data and code of Reinhart and Rogoff available to other researchers. Coding errors happen, yet the greater research misconduct was not allowing other researchers to review and replicate the results through making the data openly available. If the data and code were made available upon publication in 2010, it may not have taken three years to prove these results wrong, which may have influenced the direction of public policy around the world towards stricter aus

The Scholarly Revolution #scholrev is forging ahead. Alexander Garcia Castro is running a fantastic hackathon n Montpelier immediately after the SePublica Polemics workshop.  Join us in Montpellier for a one-day event to hack on scholarly PDFs!Do you have tools that may help us to extract information from PDFs?send us an email so that we can include them in the hackathon.Would you like to extract citations from existing PDFs?Wouldn’t it be cool if we, scholars, did not have to pay for citationdata? What about author disambiguation?Are you interested in identifying and extracting meaningful parts from PDFs?Would you like to have XML/RDF for scholarly PDFs? What if you couldhave access to the actual content of the PDF for supporting the Web ofData?We are interested in all of these issues, send us your tools, ideas,comments and join us in Montpellier. We are also supporting remoteparticipation to the hackathon -hangout and webex.Visit us at http://scholrev.org/hackathon/casey.mclaughlin@cci.fsu.edualexgarciac@gmail.com–Alexander Garciahttp://www.alexandergarcia.name/http://www.usefilm.com/photographer/75943.htmlhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgarciac One the important aspects of a revolution is having the right tools and this hackathon will collect what we’ve got and work out how to deploy them. “Jailbreaking” PDFs is not easy. It’s complex and it’s messy. But we are getting to the stage where we have the tools to: Download PDFs from the open web. Turn them into semantic form Filter the semantics and repurpose them – everything from metadata to citations to chemistry to phylogenetic trees Build a community And since we work with open source everything we do is a step forward. Once we have solved a problem it can’t be unsolved (unlike commercial closed tools which are often withdrawn of locked). There’s a great deal we can do with collaborative action (each person can add a stone to the building. All we have to do is care enough.

A new study shows how complex biochemical transformations may have been possible under conditions that existed when life began on the early Earth.... Georgia Institute of Technology. (2013) RNA was capable of catalyzing electron transfer on early earth with iron's help, study shows. Georgia Institute of Technology. info:/

Analytical Chemistry: New sampling method for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy extends the range of materials that can be studied by the technique

Here's a man who says what he thinks about getting students into STEM careers: The United States spent more than US$3 billion last year across 209 federal programmes intended to lure young people into careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The money goes on a plethora of schemes at school, undergraduate and postgraduate levels, all aimed at promoting science and technology, and raising standards of science education. In a report published on 10 April, Congress’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) asked a few pointed questions about why so many potentially overlapping programmes coexist. The same day, the 2014 budget proposal of President Barack Obama’s administration suggested consolidating the programmes, but increasing funding. What no one asked was whether these many activities actually benefit science and engineering, or society as a whole. My answer to both questions is an emphatic ‘no’. And I think he's right about that. Whipping and driving people into science careers doesn't seem like a very good way to produce good scientists. In fact, it seems like an excellent way to produce a larger cohort of indifferent ones, which is exactly what we don't need. Or does that depend on the definition of "we"? The dynamic at work here isn’t complicated. By cajoling more children to enter science and engineering — as the United Kingdom also does by rigging university-funding rules to provide more support for STEM than other subjects — the state increases STEM student numbers, floods the market with STEM graduates, reduces competition for their services and cuts their wages. And that suits the keenest proponents of STEM education programmes — industrial employers and their legion of lobbyists — absolutely fine. And that takes us back to the subject of these two posts, on the oft-heard complaints of employers that they just can't seem to find qualified people any more. To which add, all too often, ". . .not at the salaries we'd prefer to pay them, anyway". Colin Macilwain, the author of this Nature piece I'm quoting from, seems to agree: But the main backing for government intervention in STEM education has come from the business lobby. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a businessman stand up and bemoan the alleged failure of the education system to produce the science and technology ‘skills’ that his company requires, I’d be a very rich man. I have always struggled to recognize the picture these detractors paint. I find most recent science graduates to be positively bursting with both technical knowledge and enthusiasm. If business people want to harness that enthusiasm, all they have to do is put their hands in their pockets and pay and train newly graduated scientists and engineers properly. It is much easier, of course, for the US National Association of Manufacturers and the British Confederation of British Industry to keep bleating that the state-run school- and university-education systems are ‘failing’. This position, which was not my original one on this issue, is not universally loved. (The standard take on this issue, by contrast, has the advantage of both flattering and advancing the interests of employers and educators alike, and it's thus very politically attractive). I don't even have much affection for my own position on this, even though I've come to think it's accurate. As I've said before, it does feel odd for me, as a scientist, as someone who values education greatly, and as someone who's broadly pro-immigration, to be making these points. But there they are. Update: be sure to check the comments section if this topic interests you - there are a number of good ones coming in, from several sides of this issue.