Friday links: NIH vs. NSF, the lunch problem faced by female faculty, tracking people at conferences, etc.

From Brian:
A nice blog entry on using R (and Bolker’s bbmle package) can be found at http://www.r-bloggers.com/dave-harris-on-maximum-likelihood-estimation/ . This is a good pedagogical piece for those interested in following up on my Wednesday post where I suggested that complex likelihood models can often be solved without MCMC.

On the rise and fall of PLOS One’s impact factor and why it was inevitable.

From Jeremy:
The lunch problem faced by female academics.

Just found When I grow up I want to be a Scientist, the new blog of Alienor Chauvenet, a quantitative ecologist in the UK. It’s brave stuff–not everyone who wants to go on in academia would admit in public to struggling to figure out what their long-term research goals are. Early posts also talk about things like her efforts to hold on to academia as a career goal while working in a non-academic position. Worth checking out.

From Meg:
NIH is not spelled “NSF”: I enjoyed this post from Irene Newton comparing NSF panels and NIH study sections. NIH still seems somewhat impenetrable to me, so I really enjoyed reading a comparison of review panels at the two agencies.

Speaking of NSF: Interested in talking with an NSF program officer at a meeting this summer? Over on the DEBrief blog, they’ve posted a list of which DEB program officers are heading to which meetings this summer.

And, to continue my theme from previous weeks, Mary Ann Mason had a piece in Slate this week on how female academics pay a heavy baby penalty (ht: at least half of the women academics on twitter, and many of the men, too.) It includes this depressing quote:

It is well established that women are less likely to be awarded tenure than men. There is a baby penalty, especially strong in the sciences—but women without children also receive tenure at a lower rate than men. There are other factors than children that cause women to fail at this critical juncture. The women who do make it often do so alone. Women professors have higher divorce rates, lower marriage rates, and fewer children than male professors. Among tenured faculty, 70 percent of men are married with children compared with 44 percent of women.

She ends by saying:

It is time for women to “lean in” and demand family policies that will at least give them a fighting chance to have both a successful career and babies.

As Jonathan Eisen pointed out, men should “lean in” and demand the same, too.

Related to the above, NSF recently announced Career-Life Balance (CLB) supplement funding to graduate students holding Graduate Research Fellowships. This is great news! (ht: 5 Brainy Birds).

Thanks to 5 Brainy Birds for also linking to Soapbox Science. From their website:

Over the next few weeks www.soapboxscience.org will be showcasing the lives, strategies, insights and thoughts of some of the UK’s top women in science. Each blog is a Q&A interview that tells a unique story about how and why these inspirational women got to where they are now. You won’t find many ‘text-book’ cases: many of these women have taken a rather untraditional route to be where they are today.  Interestingly, these women were chosen not because of their unique stories, but for their passion for science and their eagerness to break the taboo and speak up about women in science and the urgent need for society, industry and government to tackle the lamentable inequality among scientists today. Each interview serves as empirical evidence of how the challenges facing women in science can be surmounted. These include the mentor (Hilary Lappin Scott), the ‘two-body’ problem (Jane Hill), the late-comer (Julie Dunn), the supportive partner (Laura Piddock), the international jet-setter (Zoe Schnapp), the long distance relationship (Sabrina Maniscalco), and the amazing story of the one who broke the rules: the returner to science (Ravinder Kanda).

On July 5th, these women will

stand on soapboxes on the streets of London and speak to an audience who would not normally come across a scientist in their everyday lives. Together, these scientists will showcase some of the groundbreaking science that is being masterminded by women of the UK today. They make a stand not only for UK science, but also for women in science in general by serving as the accessible, visible, taboo-breaking role models that are required to achieve a fairer, more gender-balanced science culture at home and abroad.

I’m looking forward to hearing more about it.

And, finally, while I don’t speak German, the ESA Facebook page says that this animation shows people moving around at a conference, tracked by their personal devices.

NOTE: Jeremy and Meg are both traveling today, so comment moderation will be slower than usual.