Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:
- MIT's pioneering gender-equity measures, as seen in a new report and a New York Times article
- Geophysical sensor technology for natural disasters, as advocated in a scientist's Wall Street Journal op-ed
- Ernest Rutherford's founding of nuclear physics, as remembered in a New York Times editorial
- Prospects for safer nuclear power, as seen in a scientist's New York Times op-ed
- Obstacles to government scientists' service in scientific societies, as reported in Nature
New York Times reviews renewal of MIT's gender-equity efforts, whose precedent, prestige suggests national implications
"When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology acknowledged 12 years ago that it had discriminated against female professors in 'subtle but pervasive' ways," begins a 21 March New York Times article, MIT "became a national model for addressing gender inequity." The Times emphasizes that MIT's "unusual" admission of problems 12 years ago has "echoed far beyond campus."
Now MIT has revisited the question in a report, finding "that there has been remarkable progress for women faculty . . . in terms of equity, status and numbers," but that old issues remain, that "new issues have emerged," and that gender-equity efforts "need to be continued for the foreseeable future."
The Times article quotes Hazel L. Sive, associate dean of MIT's School of Science: "It's almost as though the baseline has changed, because things are so much better now"—and, precisely "because things are so much better now, we can see an entirely new set of issues."
The article captures some of the issues, whether old or new, in this passage:
As Professor Sive said, "Men are not expected to discuss how much sleep they get or what they give their kids for breakfast."
Administrators say some men use family leave to do outside work, instead of to be their children's primary care giver—creating more professional inequity.
And stereotypes remain: women must navigate a narrow "acceptable personality range," as one female professor said, that is "neither too aggressive nor too soft." Said another woman: "I am not patient and understanding. I'm busy and ambitious."
The part of the report representing MIT's School of Science notes a pervasive belief among women faculty that "MIT offers outstanding opportunities and resources, and that the Institute is a much friendlier and supportive environment than perceived from the outside." Similarly, the part representing MIT's School of Engineering declares: "There is a strong sense of excitement among the women faculty about the intellectual atmosphere at MIT."
Nevertheless, besides family, childcare, and personality-expectations issues, the report discusses problems with standards for hiring and with perceptions of those standards, with committee service burdens, with exclusion from decision making, and with lack of respect.
The MIT website offers information about a symposium that will ensue later in March: "Leaders in Science and Engineering: The Women of MIT."
Geophysicist in Wall Street Journal: High-tech disaster-warning systems
"Nobody wants another Hurricane Katrina experience," declares Caltech geophysicist Mark Simons in closing his 23 March Wall Street Journal op-ed "Budget Cuts and the Next Earthquake: Will Washington save money by nixing high-tech disaster-warning systems?"
Here's the heart of his argument:
Mitigating against future disasters depends on monitoring hazardous regions (earthquake faults, volcanoes, landslides and so on) and preparing to survive and recover once catastrophe strikes. Japan's recent experience demonstrated the success of early-warning systems, as sensors close to the earthquake's epicenter alerted locations farther away, such as Tokyo. These systems saved lives by alerting people to take cover before the shaking began, to slow down and even stop high-speed trains, and to seek higher ground because of the tsunami threat.
In the same vein, U.S. scientists at universities and government agencies are developing applications that exploit sensors in your cell phone or computer, treating them as a huge earth-monitoring system—a wonderful example of crowd sourcing. Combined with conventional seismographic and permanent GPS networks, such new technologies can provide robust early-warning, assessment and response systems for earthquakes and tsunamis.
Simons leads up to that with a litany of reminders about past disasters, and follows it with this: "But here's the reality check: Under the White House's proposed budget for fiscal year 2012, the US Geological Service would experience a 9% cut in its earthquake programs budget."
He also reports that NASA's satellites can monitor movement of Earth's surface with "exquisite fidelity" and, if properly equipped, "could identify elastic strain in tectonic plates . . . and moving magma in the Earth's crust." Such satellites could provide "highly detailed maps of post-disaster devastation spanning hundreds or even thousands of miles." Unfortunately, Simons writes, the US lacks a radar satellite with the imaging characteristics needed for such applications.
At the end, he laments in particular the defunding of the DESDynI (Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice) mission, which the National Research Council had endorsed. A Jet Propulsion Laboratory webpage lists DESDynI's purposes as follows:
- Determine the likelihood of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and landslides.
- Predict the response of ice sheets to climate change and impact on the sea level.
- Characterize the effects of changing climate and land use on species habitats and carbon budget.
- Monitor the migration of fluids associated with hydrocarbon production and groundwater resources.
Simons expresses disbelief that the state of national finances justifies the cutbacks that he criticizes.
New York Times editorial celebrates Rutherford centennial
An illustration—an oddity in the editorial column on the left-hand side of any editorial page—draws the eye to a short editorial in the 23 March New York Times: "A Nucleated Century." In celebrating this month's centennial of the physics of Ernest Rutherford, the editors supply an old-fashioned sketch of the atom seen as, in their words, "something like a cockeyed solar system."
And in summarizing Rutherford's gold foil scattering experiment, which led to the first stage of modern understanding of atomic structure, they also make sure to create pictures in the nonscientist's mind's eye. For example: "A few [alpha particles] even bounced straight back at the observer, which Rutherford said was as unexpected as firing a cannon shell at tissue paper and having it come back and hit you." And: "Compared to the whole atom, Rutherford said, the nucleus was like 'a fly in a cathedral.'"
In summing up, they explain that "finding the nucleus was the start of nuclear physics, which has transformed our picture of the atom." Nowadays, they conclude, the atom has come to look "something like a composite of quarks surrounded by clouds of uncertainty. More accurate. Much harder to draw."
Conjectural addendum: Maybe the editors thought of mentioning current events—Fukushima—especially since that would offer them the chance to mention Rutherford's intriguing and entertaining "moonshine" comment:
We might in these processes obtain very much more energy than the proton supplied, but on the average we could not expect to obtain energy in this way. It was a very poor and inefficient way of producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine.
But the editors don't mention current events, maybe out of respect for physics in the longer view.
New York Times features prominent physicist's nuclear views
Of the 24 March New York Times op-ed page's total acreage, the editors gave more than half to the nuclear physicist Frank N. von Hippel for a long essay assessing America's nuclear-energy status and prospects. The Times identifies von Hippel as a Princeton professor of public and international affairs and cochairman of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, who from 1993 to 1994 was responsible for national security issues in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The essay's closing paragraph presents a useful summary:
While new plants are unlikely to be built in the United States over the next 25 years, nuclear power provides 20 percent of our electrical power and is climate friendly. We therefore must make existing reactors safer, develop a new generation of safer designs and prevent nuclear power from facilitating nuclear proliferation. As tragic as the Fukushima disaster has been, it has provided a rare opportunity to advance those goals.
To illustrate present nuclear plants' relative safety, von Hippel uses one version of the coal comparison: Chernobyl will eventually have killed about 10 000, he observes, but "much deadlier" coal plants accomplish the same annually in the US alone.
Nevertheless, he writes, "the nuclear-power industry needs constant and aggressive regulation," but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission "has often been too timid in ensuring that America's 104 commercial reactors are operated safely." He charges that thanks to public and congressional inattention, the nuclear industry has committed "regulatory capture" and now controls its own regulators.
His examples include the failure to require the filtering vents that nuclear engineers recommended for containment buildings even before Three Mile Island, mishandling of spent fuel, and failure to distribute potassium iodide pills beyond the 10-mile emergency zones around reactors. He spurns the suggestion that established plants, with their construction costs paid off, can't afford these expenses. He declares that "perhaps the most important thing to do in light of the Fukushima disaster is to change the industry-regulator relationship."
Next von Hippel calls for development of reactors that are more inherently safe, such as the high-temperature gas-cooled graphite reactor. (Some in the accelerator community will notice that he omits the possibility of accelerator-driven subcritical reactors, or ADSRs, as advocated by the Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia and others.)
Finally he calls for making nuclear technology harder to misuse for developing nuclear weapons, and charges that an unintended effect of government R&D has been to make proliferation easier. To make this case he focuses first on the effort to commercialize plutonium breeder reactors, and then on General Electric's application to build a plant that would use lasers for uranium enrichment, which could constitute another way to produce weapons-grade material.
The American Physical Society, he reports, is leading a coalition petitioning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to study the nonproliferation implications carefully before issuing the GE license. The commission has been "predictably . . . reluctant to do so," he laments. He calls for all enrichment plants to be placed under multinational control to "make it more difficult for countries like Iran to justify building national enrichment plants that could be used to produce nuclear weapons materials."
Nature on government scientists, scientific societies, and conflicts of interest; AGU president's situation highlighted
A 24 March Nature news article reports on recent developments concerning the difficulties facing government scientists who seek to serve scientific societies.
In contrast to the UK and other countries, the article says, the US has applied strict conflict-of-interest rules, and sometimes these rules have been interpreted as preventing government employees from lobbying. Now a memorandum on scientific integrity issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) "explicitly encourages government scientists to get involved with societies" even though "previously, the government [had] tended to view such associations ambivalently or negatively."
Nevertheless, the article reports, "many government scientists affected by the policy change say that serious legal and ethical pitfalls remain." The article surveys the situations in a few specific cases, beginning with that of the new AGU president in the months just before the OSTP memorandum appeared:
When Mike McPhaden was elected president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) last year, he was delighted—but he wasn't sure he would be able to take up the position. McPhaden is an oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, which is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Lawyers at the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, were concerned that leading a scientific organization that lobbies the government on funding and policy matters would create a conflict of interest for McPhaden. "There was resistance," he says.
In the end, McPhaden convinced the agency that taking up the position would bring prestige to his government role and enhance the credibility of NOAA science. Today, a memorandum of understanding between the AGU and NOAA even allows him to spend some of his government-paid time working for the scientific society, although he has to recuse himself from both fund-raising and lobbying.
The article engages the situation of William Talman, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and a physician at a Veterans Affairs hospital, who takes unpaid leave when lobbying for funding for the National Institutes of Health or testifying in Congress for the National Science Foundation.
The article also tells about Gabriela Chavarria, science adviser to the director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who turned down an invitation earlier this month to serve on the board of the Society for Conservation Biology. Annually the Fish and Wildlife Service gives the society a few thousand dollars for scientific meetings; she worried about a possible perception of conflict of interest.
The article reports that the new policy at the Department of the Interior "follows the OSTP guidance and explicitly encourages all researchers within the DOI's jurisdiction to participate in scientific societies, although they need to fill out forms before going ahead"—and it predicts that various other agencies will follow.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
