How do you know‪?‬ Christie Bahlai

What happens when we can't reproduce our work- or someone else's? What does it mean about the science- and ourselves?

Today on the podcast, we're talking to Nicole C. Nelson,  an associate professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an affiliate of the Holtz Center of Sciences and Technology Studies.

Nicole's work examines scientist's assumptions about the natural world and how these assumptions shape scientific practice.  In her award-winning book, Model Behavior, she examines how animal behavior geneticists' beliefs about their systems shape the research with most models.

Her work has been applied to clinical practice in oncology, working with researchers as they applied novel genomic technologies to chemotherapy resistant cancers. She's currently studying  the scientific reproducibility crisis.

Here's a link to one of the studies on graduate students and their responses to irreproducibility that she describes in our conversation.

A complete transcript of the episode is available here.

Welcome back to season 2 of HDYK!

Today we're talking about how our positionality and the assumptions we make affect our approaches in science, but also thinking about how we turn that positionality into a strength by incorporating diverse viewpoints.  We're starting this season with a great conversation with Dr. Carrie Diaz Eaton.  Carrie is a mathematician and associate professor of digital and computational studies at Bates College.

She co-founded QUBES, which stands for Quantitative Undergraduate Biology, Education and Synthesis,  a community devoted to open educational materials, to share amongst biology educators, to help bring quantitative concepts into the curriculum. She also chairs the committee for minority participation in mathematics at the Mathematical Association of America, her work centers inclusivity and engagement in math education.

A complete transcript of the episode is available here.

What happens to public understanding when science communication goes wrong? Experts go on the media to talk about their work, and somehow, something doesn’t connect. This misinterpretation gains steam, and soon it becomes an outright conspiracy, used to manipulate, polarize and undermine one political agenda or reinforce another. The misunderstanding becomes the message- chances to communicate new findings get lost as we get pulled into conversations trying to debunk rumors and myths. Today, we’re tackling one of these zombie popular science ideas, once and for all.

Today is a special episode because we've got not one, but two experts to chat with us. 

Kaitlin Stack Whitney is an Assistant Professor in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work centers Sustainability science and environmental policy, with particular interests in how human factors affect scientist’s approaches to natural resources.

Sara  Hermann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology at Penn State University. Sara’s work centers approaches from chemical ecology, physiology and behavior to study how insects make choices about what resources they use.

A complete episode transcript is available here.
This podcast is produced with the generous support of the Mozilla Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and with input from community members from Mozilla, the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network, and our colleagues and students at Kent State University. A special shout Jen Zink for audio production. Music featured in this episode  is When, by Metre, and obtained from freemusicarchive.org under a CC-BY license. This podcast and its accompanying materials licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license- please share, like and use our stuff!


Some additional resources- here's what we're talking about- a news story featuring the 'not real ladybug' myth.

One of Sara's lab members, Dr. Jess Kansman, has an educational TikTok on ladybugs. 

Science often treats data and information as a resource that can be extracted. Like colonists coming to conquer new lands, scientists trained in the dominant paradigm often frame data-driven discovery with the same language on the frontier myth used on lands and people. But where is this data coming from- and who is impacted by its extraction? What if, instead of extraction, we thought about data sovereignty? Today on the podcast, we’re Talking to Dr. Deondre Smiles.

Deondre Smiles is a new Assistant professor in the department of Geography at the University of Victoria in BC, Canada. His work focuses on critical Indigenous geographies, human-environment interactions, political ecology, tribal cultural resource preservation, and science and technology studies. He’s written numerous fascinating papers on a variety of subjects, from the role of settler colonialism in space exploration, ethics in fieldwork, and the sovereignty of indigenous bodies in medical examination.

A complete episode transcript is available here.
This podcast is produced with the generous support of the Mozilla Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and with input from community members from Mozilla, the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network, and our colleagues and students at Kent State University. A special shout Jen Zink for audio production. Music featured in this episode  is Reflect, by Evan Schaeffer, and obtained from freemusicarchive.org under a CC-BY license. This podcast and its accompanying materials licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license- please share, like and use our stuff! 

And now, as Monty Python would say, for something completely different. Or is it? Is it data, is it science? The humanities produce knowledge. Yet, they’re not generally considered part of STEMM. So, what about humanities research on STEMM? What does this look like? Where does it fit in?  
As we continue to explore the human side of science, in this episode we consider the history of science, and also what it is like to be an early career researcher now navigating the Academy and transitioning from PhD to postdoc.
Sarah Qidwai recently completed her University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Her research interests include the history of science and religion, science and colonialism, and South Asian studies.
 Her doctoral dissertation situates Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) as a key figure in the history of science in colonial India. Sarah has investigated the development and implementation of Sayyid Ahmad’s scientific thought (including human evolution and the motion of the earth) and how he dealt with science’s role in its historical context.
 She’s published the book chapter “Darwin or Design: Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Views on Human Evolution" in The Cambridge Companion to Sayyid Ahmad Khan. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), and “Re-Examining Complexity: Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Interpretation of ‘Science” in Islam”, which was published in Rethinking History, Science, and Religion: An Exploration of Conflict and the Complexity Principle, published by University of Pittsburg Press in 2019.

A complete transcript of this interview is available here.
This podcast is produced with the generous support of the Mozilla Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and with input from community members from Mozilla, the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network, and our colleagues and students at Kent State University. A special shout out to Kristen Dowling and Emily Loccisano for managing our digital presence and branding and to Jen Zink for audio production. Music featured in this episode  is Honeyknocker Meadows, by Origami Repetika, and obtained from freemusicarchive.org under a CC-BY licence. This podcast and its accompanying materials licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license- please share, like and use our stuff!

Sometimes, when researchers ask what seems to be a simple question, they get a lot of different answers. When they look closer, they see that their simple question may be made up of many questions, and how you ask them depends on how-and who- you measure. To make things more complicated, who’s asking the question- and who’s answering- can matter a lot. This becomes a huge problem when researchers use ‘easy’ samples for their work. Today on How Do You Know, we’re talking to Dr. Leon Walls, an associate professor in the College of Education and Social Services at the University of Vermont. He sits on the board of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching and his research, focusing on equity in science, has been funded by the Gund Institute and the National Science Foundation.
 This podcast is produced with the generous support of the Mozilla Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and with input from community members from Mozilla, the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network, and our colleagues and students at Kent State University. A special shout out to Kristen Dowling and Emily Loccisano for managing our digital presence and branding. Music featured in this episode is Lifeforce 9 by Mr. ruiZ, and obtained from freemusicarchive.org under a CC-BY-NC license. This podcast and its accompanying materials licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license- please share, like and use our stuff!

Transcript is available here.