Have a good winter and spring, everyone. May it be less geologically tragic than 2010 has been so far.

The survey was completed online, voluntarily, and anonymously. We recruited participants through our blogs (All of My Faults are Stress Related, Highly Allochthonous, Thus Spake Zuska, and Fairer Science) by inviting readers to participate in a survey about women geoscientists who read blogs, and other bloggers and Twitterers passed on the request to their readers. We asked questions about reading and blogging habits, about blogs that the respondents read, about why participants read blogs, about what benefits the participants gained from reading blogs, and about the experience of blogging. We asked general demographic information, as well, at the end of the survey (to try to avoid problems with stereotype threats). For the GSA talk, we focused on the questions about demographic information and reading blogs.

We got 102 responses, 91 women and 11 men. Ninety-four respondents were white; no more than five people identified as African-American, American Indian, Asian American, Latino/a, or Other. We only analyzed the data from the female respondents (because we doubted that the eleven men were a representative sample of male blog-readers). We did not sort the data by race or ethnicity, but the data mostly reflects the experience of white women.

We also asked respondents about their professional status, and here are the results:

Respondents could select more than one answer to this question, so there is overlap between many of the categories. (In particular, “researchers” included post-docs, industry researchers, and government researchers, and people from a number of categories were also looking for work.) Students (28) and faculty (24) dominated the responses, though there were also a number of people working in industry (15) and government (11).

The women respondents included both bloggers (36) and non-bloggers (55). Of the women bloggers, 10 blog under their real-life name, 21 are pseudonymous, and 5 describe themselves as anonymous. The women respondents who blog write about a variety of topics:

We did not ask respondents to classify themselves as “geobloggers” or “women-in-science bloggers” or other types of bloggers, but it seems that women geoscientists who blog don’t necessarily fit into neat categories, in any case.

We asked all of the respondents what topics they read about. The women respondents read a variety of different blogs, as well:

So we know that there are women geoscientists who read blogs. But what do they get out of them? We asked a bunch of questions on a 5-point Likert scale (1 – strongly agree, 2 – agree, 3 – neutral, 4 – disagree, 5 – strongly disagree):

4. Please indicate the degree to which you agree or disagree with each of the following statements as to why you read geoscience blogs:

• Reading blogs makes my experience seem more normal.
• Reading blogs tells me what work as a geo/environmental scientist is like.
• Reading blogs tells me what it is like to be a woman scientist.
• Reading blogs makes me more interested in a career in academia.
• Reading blogs makes me more interested in a career in industry.

Here are the responses we got (from all the women respondents who answered the question – 88 women total):

In general, women tended to agree that reading blogs made their experience more normal (ave = 2.20, std dev = 1.05), that reading blogs told them what work as a geo/environmental scientist is like (ave = 2.37, std dev = 0.97), and that reading blogs tells them what it is like to be a woman scientist (ave = 2.18, std dev = 1.02), but are more neutral about the effect of reading blogs on their career interests.

We also asked about what people get out of reading blogs:

5. Please indicate the degree to which you agree or disagree with each of the following statements as to what you gain by reading geoscience blogs:

• I learn about teaching methods and pedagogy.
• I learn about topics directly related to my field of research or teaching interest.
• I learn about geoscience topics outside of my field of research or teaching interest.
• I learn about the application of technology in geoscience research and teaching.
• I feel more connected to people in my field.
• I feel more connected to other women scientists.
• I find a greater variety of role models than I find in my real life.
• I can participate in discussions of gender issues that I don’t discuss in my real life.

Here are the responses, split into two histograms to make them easier to read:

Blogs are useful for learning stuff, especially outside one’s specialty.

Blogs are especially useful for finding role models that aren’t available in real life.

So what does all that mean? Pat (who has the expertise in social science amongst the group) calculated Pearson product-moment correlations for the blog-reading questions, and found correlations (0.56 to 0.64, which Pat says are pretty high for this kind of study) between the following statements:

• “Reading blogs makes my experience seem more normal.”
• “Reading blogs tells me what it is like to be a woman scientist.”
• “I feel more connected to other women scientists.”
• “I find a greater variety of role models than I find in my real life.”

These four statements were also correlated (r = 0.44 to 0.46) with an increased interest in a career in academia, but not correlated with increased interest in a career in industry. (That is, women geoscientists who find role models by reading blogs say that reading blogs makes them more interested in academic careers; women who don’t find role models by reading blogs are less interested in academic careers.)

In order to tease out the reason for the differences between interest in academic versus industry careers, we looked at the responses to the four correlated questions from four different groups of women blog-readers: students, faculty, women in industry, and women in government:

In general, women students tended to agree with all four questions – in fact, none of the women students strongly disagreed with any of them. There was more variation in the responses from women faculty, but the responses still leaned towards agreement. Women in industry, on the other hand, had a much more mixed response to those four questions. And women in government tended to disagree more than they agreed with them.

So what’s going on? We’ve got some possible explanations.

One possibility that academia is simply better represented in blogs. Out of the women geoscientists who blog, there were 11 faculty, 6 students, 6 women in industry, and 5 women in government. Amongst the women blog-readers who responded to our survey, there were 24 faculty, 28 students, 15 women in industry, and 11 women in government. In addition, there are many academic women-in-science blogs written by women in other fields (or who don’t specify their field). Maybe women in industry or government don’t see their experience represented amongst all those academics. If that’s the case, I wonder what that means for minority women in the geoblogosphere. If 11 women in government don’t see their experiences reflected, what about the one or two or five African American or Latina or American Indian or Asian American women geoscientists who are reading blogs? Do social groups on the internet need some kind of critical mass before they can help people stay in science?

On the other hand, maybe academia has a worse climate for women than industry or government do. Many of the industries that hire geoscientists are cyclical – either they need geoscientists (and lots of them), or they don’t. The supply of students tends to lag behind the demand in industry, and right now both the petroleum and mining industries are hiring. Maybe during times of high demand for geoscientists, industry can’t discriminate without hurting itself.*

Or maybe industry and government are forced to follow anti-discrimination laws in ways that academia isn’t. It’s difficult to prove discrimination in promotion and tenure decisions, and as for trying to prove it in grant review or acceptance of papers – good luck.

Or maybe the importance of “reputation” in academia makes subtle discrimination more prevalent than in industry or government.

We don’t know the answers to those questions (and we’re curious what blog-readers think of our possible explanations). But we did leave the audience with a few take-home messages:

• Women geoscientists participate in larger blogging communities
• Blogs can be useful for sharing experiences and finding role models
• Women-in-science blogging helps academics
• But what about people whose experiences aren’t reflected? (Minorities, people with disabilities, non-trad paths?)

* I think I got that argument from reading Milton Friedman for a political class during my freshman year of college. But it’s been 24 years, and I don’t have the book any more, so maybe not.

The American Geophysical Union has its own blog. It’s staffed, not by AGU employees (for the most part), but by Science Communication grad students from the University of California at Santa Cruz and Columbia University. And the students are doing a wonderful job – interesting, engaging, scientifically accurate stories from all corners of AGU. I hope that there are jobs out there for Adam Mann, Tia Ghose, Olga Kuchment, Ale Borunda, Daniel Strain, Gwyneth Dickey, and Sandra Chung, because they’re good at what they’re doing.

And in the rest of the geoblogosphere, Dave Petley of Dave’s Landslide Blog is going to sessions on natural hazards, Julian of Harmonic Tremors is going to sessions on seismology, and the Life-Long Scholar is at petrology sessions. Oh, and #AGU09 is a hot topic of discussion on twitter. (Some discussion of science; some discussion of beer. Geologists.)

A little while ago, I was asked to be a reviewer for a journal article. That’s a more common experience for people at research universities than for someone like me, but it’s still something that’s part of my job. I turned down the request because I didn’t feel qualified to review the paper. That wouldn’t have been weird, except that I couldn’t figure out why the editors would have chosen me, out of all the structural geologists in the world, to ask to be a reviewer. I mean, I had written a blog post about a related paper, but…

Did a journal ask me to be a peer reviewer because I had written a blog post about a related piece of research?

The thought was horrifying enough before the blogosphere started discussing the CRU e-mails. But in these discussions of whether climate researchers were trying to unethically interfere with the process of peer review, it may be worth discussing how reviewers are found. (My experience is relevant because it was with a journal that publishes a broad range of geoscience research, including climate change.)

I think about my expertise (and lack thereof) a lot, in part because my job involves developing expertise in other people (my undergrads). I may have a Ph.D. in science, I may teach at the college level, I may go to scientific conferences, I may have published my own work in peer-reviewed journals. But that doesn’t mean I’m an expert in most things. In fact, as I was thinking about the comments on last week’s post about getting undergrads to critically read the literature, I started to categorize the way I think about scientific papers:

Level 1 – I have no clue what the abstract says, even in journals like Science or Nature (which supposedly publish papers that are aimed at a broad audience). I get my information about these subjects from science journalists or other popular writers, not directly from research articles. Anything dealing with a genomes or quantum mechanics falls into these categories for me.

Level 2 – I can understand the point of the abstract, and the basic reasoning of the paper makes sense. I probably don’t know much about the methods used, but I’ve seen other papers that have used them, or they’re based on concepts I learned in college, so they make sense to me. Most geoscience papers (including climate change work) fall into this category for me.

Level 3 – I understand the paper (including methods and context) well enough to explain it to a less-experienced audience (like a class of undergraduates). These are the types of papers that I feel comfortable blogging about. They include papers in structural geology, tectonics, metamorphic petrology, regional geology of places where I’ve worked, and some mineralogy, igneous petrology and earthquake studies. (I’ve taught all those topics in courses for geology majors.)

Level 4 – I’ve got enough expertise to see problems with the methods or with the conclusions. That means I’ve got experience with the topic myself – maybe I’ve done work on those rocks, and I know things that the authors neglect to mention. Maybe I’ve got experience teaching a course discussed in a pedagogy paper. Maybe I’ve used a technique enough to recognize when another scientist is misusing it, or misinterpreting the results. These are the papers that I would be qualified to review.

I hope that undergrads come out of my junior-level courses able to make sense of the basic reasoning of papers in the field (level 2), and I want senior thesis students to understand work related to their work well enough to explain it to other undergraduates (level 3). So one of the goals of my junior-level writing class is to push students towards a higher level of expertise in their chosen sub-field (which may not be mine, and yes, that makes the class especially challenging to teach).

I don’t expect my undergrads to become qualified to review research articles, however, and I don’t think journal editors would consider them qualified. And that brings me back to my concern. Why would an editor think I was qualified to review a paper when my C.V. (which is online, and which includes a list of all the papers I’ve ever published) doesn’t indicate any research expertise in the subject? Did they really judge my expertise based on my blogging?

I turned down the request. But there are plenty of bloggers who write about scientific topics who might be delighted to participate in peer review. Some of the people who don’t think humans affect climate, for instance. Would they give a positive review to a paper whose methods they didn’t understand, because they agreed with the conclusions?

If I were an editor, I would find it difficult to figure out where to draw the line on expertise. The geosciences are filled with people who have switched specialties throughout their careers – climate scientists with degrees in Applied Math, for instance, or planetary geologists who used to do field work on Hawaii or Antarctica. And even reviewers with appropriate expertise can be unfairly harsh when a paper disagrees with ideas that they like (or easy-going when a paper supports their view). And what’s an editor to do when faced with a paper that is genuinely ground-breaking – where experience with the topic might not exist? (Actually, I’ve got a mental list of Big Thinkers who would probably be fair and insightful reviewers of wild ideas. I bet editors do, as well.) So I’m somewhat sympathetic to the journals. But I’m also concerned that, given the politics and media noise around climate change, they may feel pressured to find sympathetic reviewers for mediocre-to-bad papers. (More pressured than if, say, an Expanding Earth paper* was submitted to the same journal.)

And if they’re using the blogosphere to find potential reviewers? Ack.

Is it ok to talk about these kinds of issues in the scientific community? Or is that an unreasonable interference in the process of peer review?

*Yes, there have been legitimate geoscientists who believed the Earth is expanding. The most famous, S. Warren Carey, is deceased, but he was still alive and publishing while I was in grad school (and received the GSA Structure/Tectonics division’s Career Contribution Award in 2000). He wasn’t publishing in highly respected journals any more, however. If there had been a lot of political attention given to people who think subduction has no evidence to support it, would Carey’s late-career work have been published in mainstream journals?

Looking for a geoblogger to discuss blogging at Communicating your Science workshop Sunday Dec. 13 morning #AGU09 Contact mjvinas@agu.org

(I’m not going. Have fun in San Francisco – I’ll be at home, grading.)

Our students take this course at the end of their junior year, after they’ve taken a lot of geology courses but before they start doing research for their senior thesis. When I started teaching the course, I hoped that the process of writing a proposal would help reduce the sense of panic that undergraduates can experience when they’re first told “and now, you have to do something totally new – good luck!” But it didn’t help – it just pushed the panic back a semester. Current seniors regularly tell the juniors that they need to decide on their project before they go into the writing class. So I need a different approach.

I’m considering starting the class by emphasizing reading papers – one paper per student per week for the first five weeks of class. I’m thinking about ways to make sure that students do the work, but which don’t force me to read 22 papers every week. Right now, I’m leaning towards three assignments: a short written response each week (graded done/not done), a presentation and discussion of one of the papers in class (graded using some kind of simple, in-class rubric), and a short graded paper on one of the articles (possibly modeled after some of the better blog posts about peer-reviewed research).

That’s all fine and good, but I’ve never been very good at getting ideas from reading the literature myself. So I’ve been trying to figure out what I should be getting out of articles. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Basics:

• What did the authors conclude?
• What alternate conceptual models, explanations, or hypotheses did the authors consider? Why did they prefer the explanation in their conclusion?
• What methods did they use to approach the problem? (A few possibilities in the geosciences could be various numerical modeling approaches, sampling strategies, analytical techniques, ways of plotting field data, experiments…)
• What’s the context? How does this work fit with other work that’s been done and questions being asked? Why does anyone care about this research?

Getting ideas for future work:

• Do you accept the author’s conclusions? If not, are there other approaches that could allow you to test their conclusion?
• Does this research suggest new ways to interpret a different problem? (Could something like this model explain other areas? Other periods of time? Other types of processes?)
• Are there other problems that could be studied using the same methods? (And what equipment or expertise is necessary to use these methods?)

Here’s where I need some help. What am I missing? Is it really cheesy to steal my “basics” from the structure of a scientific paper? (I mean, all I’ve done is asked students to think about the paper backwards.) What kinds of questions do you find yourself asking when you read papers – especially when you get really productive ideas from reading a paper? (“What the &*^#^@ were the editors THINKING when they accepted this stinking pile of &*#%#” is not the kind of thought that inspires new research. At least, not for me.)

HP made a huge donation to all the social media challenges, but didn’t donate money to specific projects. Instead, they gave each individual donor a Donors Choose giving card. That means you get to decide how HP’s donation gets used.

If you want help finding projects dealing with the Earth Sciences, I added a bunch of new projects to the Geobloggers Giving Kids the Earth. (Most of the projects that we had initially selected have been fully funded!) Alternately, you can look for projects on your own.

When you’ve found a project that you want to support, type the amount you want to donate into the “GIVE $ ” box. When it comes time to check out, use the giving code you received in the e-mail you got from Donors Choose.

And that’s it. Thanks again to everyone who helped out. You’re amazing.

1) We have scheduled a free geobloggers’ lunch for Wednesday, from 12:30 to 1:30 PM at the San Francisco Marriott, Pacific H Room. Right now, it’s just a socializing event — no panel discussion has been arranged.

Also, we might have a special guest speaker via videoconference, but we still have to confirm this event.

Please RSVP for this lunch to mjvinas@agu.org by Tues. Dec 1. Feel free to let other geobloggers know about this event, but make sure they also contact me by the deadline if they want to attend, since I have to keep track of the number of lunches needed.

2) We’ve set up a blog roll for the Fall Meeting (http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/newsmedia/blogroll.php)! If you are going to be blogging at the meeting, please sign up here: http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/newsmedia/blog_submission.php

I’ll make the blogroll publicly available next week, when a few of you have signed up.

3) There will be “Geoblogger” stickers waiting for you at the Press Room (Room 3010, Moscone West Level 3), so that you can attach them to your badges to help you be recognized by fellow bloggers (or to start conversations with other scientists interested in blogging).

4) Unfortunately, this year we won’t be able to offer you access to the Press Room, but we’ll be glad to discuss at the lunch how AGU might accommodate your needs at future meetings.

5) For the first time, AGU will have an official blog for the Fall Meeting! We’ll be using in-house science writers and perhaps some guest contributors, such as AGU officers. I will post the official blog on the blogroll once both are publicly available.

Have fun in San Francisco. I’ll be checking your blogs while avoiding grading my final exams.

Before designing a program to increase the diversity of the geosciences (or, for that matter, any discipline), it’s worth figuring out what factors tend to attract or drive away members of various groups. That’s what the first article in the issue discusses: “critical incidents” in the lives of people who became professional geoscientists. After analyzing the critical incidents, the authors identified several factors that play a role in drawing students into the geosciences, which include:

Positive:

• Outdoor experiences (at all levels)
• Geoscience departmental culture (more social and cooperative than other sciences)
• Field trips
• Early research experiences (including science fair participation, Research Experiences for Undergraduates)
• Place-based teaching (using geology to explain the local landscape)

Negative:

• Peer pressure (the belief that geoscience students aren’t as talented as other science majors)
• High school course choices (especially math – students leave geoscience majors because of required college math courses)
• Lack of high school geoscience courses (= minimal pre-college exposure to geosciences)
• Encounters with racism

Many of the factors affect both Anglo and minority students – to some extent, enhancing the diversity of the geosciences is a matter of making sure that minority communities have access to math and science and the outdoors at an early age. (That’s why I’m so happy that the geoscientists stepped up and helped with Donors Choose – many of the programs we funded did exactly that. That’s also why I love the work that Rue Mapp is doing with Outdoor Afro.) The one big thing that doesn’t affect both minorities and Anglos, though, is “encounters with racism.” I’m going to quote one of the incidents from the article, because I think it’s important for Anglos to understand how much the things that we say and do can affect minority students:

In our own CI study, we collected an incident of an underrepresented minority student receiving negative comments from classmates concerning an internship. One of her classmates said the student received the internship because of her minority status. The student heard similar “cheap shots” from other students as well; these comments made the student struggle even more with her own confidence about her ability in the field.

Because of the highly social nature of geoscience departments, these kinds of comments can be especially devastating. Little comments from students or professors can turn the close-knit communities in geoscience programs from something that attracts students to the science into something that drives them away. (So don’t make comments like that, ok? Just don’t.)

One way to reduce the damage done by racism is to build up a critical mass of minority students. As an example: the student body at my institution is about 20% Native American. About 20% of our geology majors are Native American, as well, despite a lack of any kind of deliberate recruitment program from the department. What we have, however, is a lot of geology majors – somewhere around 80 of them. That means that, whenever students gather, whether in class or on a field trip or in a spontaneous study session, there are usually several Native American students in the group. They don’t feel isolated. And now that we’ve got a critical mass of Native American students, the presence of the juniors and seniors shows the new freshmen that the department welcomes them, as well as Anglo students.

As for how to do that in other places? I don’t know. One possibility is to try to support and build up geoscience programs at institutions that serve large minority populations: Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and Tribal Colleges, and others that serve minority populations without fitting into one of those designations. (Industry could help fund these programs, too – if the geoscience-related industries are worried about the future workforce, their support is critical to make sure that geoscience departments continue to exist in these days of budget cuts.) Other approaches could involve bringing students together (in a summer program, or in a group of graduate students) to create a critical mass.

But regardless of the approach, the geosciences need to do something.

Reference: Levine, R., Gonzalez, R., Cole, S., Fuhrman, M., and CarlsonLe Floch, K., 2007, The geoscience pipeline: a conceptual framework: Journal of Geoscience Education, v. 55, n. 6., p. 248-468.

There have been a number of studies in the past decade or so that suggest that earthquakes can be triggered by little things, such as the passage of seismic waves. The studies are fascinating, in part because the triggers seem so small in comparison to any other force (like the weight of the rock). How could such a little thing unleash an earthquake?

The answer, I suspect, is that many faults may exist in a precarious balance – in a state of stress that’s on the brink of causing slip. It might not take much to set off an earthquake – a tiny change in the balance, and that’s it. The water might be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.

But although the water might have made the earthquake occur last year, rather than in a hundred years, I wouldn’t say that the dam caused the earthquake. The ultimate cause of the earthquake was the collision of India with Asia, and the resultant tectonic mess in the continent of Asia.

In reading Dave Petley’s blog posts about landslides, I’ve noticed something similar. Landslides are ultimately caused by gravity acting on a steep slope. But as Dave points out, again and again, there are two big triggers to the most destructive landslides: heavy rainfall, and earthquakes. Gravity makes rock and soil move downhill, but water or shaking controls when the landslide occurs.

The difference between causes and triggers is important for thinking about potential disasters, I think. Causes (like steep slopes, or tectonic plate boundaries) can help identify places that are likely to be dangerous. Triggers are shorter-term phenomena. (Maybe understanding triggers could be helpful for disaster planning, though Hurricane Katrina and the Boxing Day tsunami were sobering reminders of how difficult it is to save lives, even when scientists know what’s likely to happen.) I’m not sure the distinction between causes and triggers is obvious to most people, though. I noticed that my students listed “steep slopes” and “addition of water” as causes of landslides, and the commenters on Kerr’s piece discuss the Three Gorges Dam and carbon sequestration (anywhere) as problems that should be considered in light of the Wenchuan earthquake.

I think it’s important to think about those other situations, because humans mess with fluids in Earth’s crust all the time. (Water, oil, methane, carbon dioxide…) Yes, changes in fluids can trigger earthquakes, in places where the stresses are delicately balanced. But the big question, to me, is which places are actually in that delicate balance. Where are there faults that are close to that tipping point, not just on plate boundaries, but also in the far-worse-understood interiors of plates?

If there’s not a cause, the trigger isn’t going to matter. But if the stresses are in the right balance… watch out.