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American Grant Writing: Race Matters
PHPNerd writes "You might expect that science, particularly American science, would be color-blind. Though fewer people from some of the country's ethnic minorities are scientists than the proportions of those minorities in the population suggest should be the case, once someone has got bench space in a laboratory, he might reasonably expect to be treated on merit and nothing else. Unfortunately, a study just published in Science suggests that is not true. The study looked at the pattern of research grants awarded by the NIH and found that race matters a lot. Moreover, Asian and Hispanic scientists do just as well as white ones. Black scientists, however, fare badly."
It's not just race, profession also hurts. Especially when applying for science grants.
True story: around 2000 some of us got together and applied for some money to map out and prove something Chiropractors already know: the subluxation-disease link. We were ready to buy a 3T MRI from Siemens, a PET scanner and hire on some lab workers (primarily students).
The fellow who submitted the proposal NEVER EVEN HEARD BACK from the organisation. He wrote several times and finally got back something to the effect of "We don't grant non-scientific experimentation" when we were ready to actually start looking at all the scientific equipment needed.
Chiropractic Saves Lives!
The word 'race' has racist connotations and as a scientific concept is obsolete, 'ethnic group' should be used instead.
Well, this discussion figures to be the most racist thing on the internet today.
TFA says that they assume the peers are assuming race from "black sounding" names or historically black universities.
Why would any of these factor in during the peer review process? I would certainly hope that scientists understand what "double-blind" means & apply it to the review process. It doesn't matter what the person's name is or what university they went to or work at now. All that SHOULD matter is the quality of the science that is presented, therefore that is all that should be on the report that is peer-reviewed.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
It could simply be Affirmative Action catching up with a population. These sorts of studies always attempt to correct for "achievement" somehow, but two PhDs from Harvard may not be equally talented if one were to receive the position through some sort of AA. Sometimes things like this simply aren't measure
as the authoritve opinion on a subject. I think it should be called a Jeffrey caus who the fuck is gonna be afraid of a Jeffrey.
The original blurb:
Black scientists, however, fair badly.
It might not be fair how blacks fare, but I'm certain, they're not getting faired
Those who "fair badly"[sic] should perhaps clean up their language? That might bring more grants.
Their results show that the chance of a black scientist receiving a grant was 17%. For Asians, Hispanics and whites the number was between 26% and 29%.
For all we know, this statistic is just due to random chance.
As much as everyone loves to play the race card, you can not deny this IS a possibility.
I'm also not denying that it's a possibility that it is indeed the truth, though. -shrug-
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Grant reviews are judged based on scientific merits, especially on NIH-funded grants. God forbid that this finding would lend support to some sort of affirmative action for grants. Otherwise, the already politically-charged scientific landscape is made even more politically charged. Then, zero scientific progress will be made in the US.
Please. At the end of the article they say that they will do a study taking out any racial indicators (names, schools, I assume). Isn't it possible that the review committees we working just on merit, and that the merit shows that the black scientists were of lesser quality? If the asian and other races weren't any different, then why just the blacks? If the peer reviewers were truly racist against blacks, then their thought process would go like this: look at the name/school. White/asian/whatever? No problem. Black-sounding? Ohhhh bad. Don't approve. How is it that these studies only give one possible explanation: racism. Aren't we proponents of truth, which explores all possibilities, regardless of political social implications?
Next thing you know they'll be showing prejudice against super-smart rats.
Can't we just face the reality that some races are actually better are certain things than others due to millions of years of evolution? Let's face it - historically, the Europeans showed up to the Americas and Africa with guns while the natives were all throwing spears. A country as small as Germany almost took over the world 60 years ago. Why is that? Couldn't it be because something in the German evolutionary history has made their brains such that they're better engineers (ON AVERAGE) ?
A fine, though debatable point: the study in Science does not suggest that grant applications are not treated on merit. In fact, racial identity is not known by the grant reviewers on study section. Further, the article mentioned that previous studies at top schools did not show this bias. One possibility (which I do not necessarily advocate) that was not discussed by the article, is that their 'controls' for institutional quality, quality of educational institutions attended, etc., are not ideal for use as a control. For many years, both undergraduate and graduate programs in the biomedical field have used different standards of admittance for blacks and whites/Asians. A less qualified black person can take the place of a more qualified white person. I'm not saying this is bad - it's simply a fact, and it shouldn't' be ignored. This can also take place in hiring decisions. Thus, a black person can have a CV which appears identical to a white person's CV, but the merit required to achieve it can be substantially less. The opposite would happen if quotas were enforced in the NBA - Doug Gottlieb might make a team, but he'd never get mentioned with Bird or Nowitzki as a great player, and the overall quality of the league might go down. It's interesting that the study found different conclusions for blacks and Latinos.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
Why are there names at all on grant applications? Shouldn't the quality of the thing be able to stand up by itself?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I wonder what the results would be if they controlled for people who benefitted from affirmative action policies that let them into schools with lower grades and test scores.
They've already noted this with law degrees: http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/morel/04/disaffirmation.html
It seems plausible to posit that regardless of ethnic or racial background, people who are held to lower standards might not fare so well in real life competition.
Doesn't focusing on differences (like this study) just perpetuate racism?
Who pays for such a "study" anyways?
Massive discrimination, in grant reviewing and in every other area, is as old as science itself.
I read about a study in which the authors took the exact same papers under the exact same completely fictional student names and submitted them in massive round-robin cycles to all the applicable journals. Sometimes, they put Harvard, UNC, or Vanderbilt down as the university source and sometimes WSU, East Carolina, or Buttfucksville University of the Holy Trinity.
I'll let you just imagine how acceptance rates came out.
All science funding and publishing is bullshit. Black scientists may get extra fucked over, but no one is treated fairly outside of the Ivy League and maybe another 20 top R1 schools.
I have black friends like Tyson here. We hang out all the time, and talk about the stars.
[uncomfortable smile]
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
You might expect that science, particularly American science, would be color-blind.
Isn't the US that country where race is generally considered a big deal, and everyone has a legal race in the census and so on? Why would I expect American anything to be color-blind?
This is unconvincing. Here's the deal:
It is well known that U.S. born black people going through college in the US get breaks not afforded to everyone else. We have even seen egregious examples of passes that should have been fails and even examples of plagiarism that has gone unaddressed and unpunished when done by black people. We know all too well how the system seeks "fairness and balance" by giving advantage to the "disadvantaged." But what happens after graduation?
Well, let's just say, I would be reluctant to go to a black doctor and would be more inclined to go to a doctor from India. Does that make me a racist? Hell no it doesn't. It's the fact that there has been a huge and competitive flow of medical students from India and only the best can get through the process due to various numeric limitations put into place by administrations in the name of "fairness, balance and diversity." Meanwhile, in order to keep the numbers of black doctors higher, they have to make allowances quite often. But how does this affect quality? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that if you have to lower standards in order to boost numbers, then quality will drop.
Does that mean "black doctors and scientists are of lesser quality" because they are black? NO! Not if you rate them on merit... individually without consideration of race. But when you start considering race, then you will see there will be "fewer black people get grants."
There is a lot more going on behind the scenes than this article addresses. It certainly doesn't offer detailed statistics covering the spread of scores presented by the various applicants.
Racism needs to go away. Every time someone tries to make a point like this, it just goes to show how racist they actually are.
On the other hand black athletes do overwhelmingly better than white ones. Is it because of discrimination in the granting of NFL contracts to black guys over the whites?
Or it could be that genes that favor physical prowess over raw intellectual aptitude are more present in individuals with dark skin than those who are paler? Maybe the corollary is also possible, that the 'bookworm genes' are about 10% more present in people with white skin.
No, that would be politically incorrect - hell, criminal - to utter, ergo, discrimination on basis of race must be the issue here.
Another example of the 'opressed/opressor ideology' and collectivism that is being the downfall of western civilization on display, nothing to see here folks.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Maybe the process is already color blind. Maybe these are just the results based on merit. As another poster suggested, affirmative action can only get you so far. On the other hand, maybe it's biased. But, to make an assumption that the process is favoring another race just because they get more papers approved is reverse discrimination and biased, too.
If I flip a coin 100 times and end up with 60 heads, does that mean the coin favors heads?
Don't assume a system is bias due to the distribution at any single point in time.
Has anyone looked at the grants to see? Maybe the ones by blacks aren't actually as good.
We know that statistically blacks have lower IQs. Given that there is more genetic difference between different groups of blacks than there is between blacks and whites, it is reasonable to assume that this is due to environmental factors. However, the grant writers grew up in the same environment, the same America as the rest. It is not unreasonable to investigate that some of the grants might not be as good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Suggestions of "black sounding names" and "black universities" are mentioned. However, with so many blacks NOT having "black-sounding names" this just seems like too big a gap between blacks and white to be purely from that. It would have to mean that those deciding would have to be the biggest racists...
... and perhaps they are- I suspect those who decide are probably older established scientists and studies have shown racism is higher in older generations.
I would prefer to believe (even though it may not be true) that this is more "cultural"- that black scientists are chosing research topics that are not as "culturally appealing" to white review board members... and no, I mean nothing racist by that... There is a cultural and even somewhat a linguistic divide between blacks and whites, and even sub-populations between and ACROSS races- and perhaps their choice of words, or what they value as important research topics disagree...
Just throwing out a "I'd like to believe" statement- I think racism is overall more likely.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I'm sorry I just don't buy the idea of subconscious racial bias in grant awarding.
The first thing is that there are almost no black PrincipaI Investigators (a fact which I find truly deplorable).
I was an intramural researcher at the NIH for 5 years, and as part of that went on courses to learn HOW to write NIH grants, and how to run a grant when it was awarded. My years intake of young investigators who were being considered for funding by my Institute all met for a workshop in my final year. Looking around the lecture hall of around 200 or so people from across the country. I was astounded to see that while whites and Asians were fairly equally represented, there was (I think) just a single black scientist there. I don't know if it's a cultural thing that underlies this or what - maybe medical research (versus medical practice) isn't seen as a route to success. But in my view this becomes self perpetuating - the fewer black PIs there are, the fewer possible black mentors and role models there are, and so the fewer black students are inspired to take this route.
As to grant reviewers having an unconscious bias based on schools attended, I call bullshit there.
The way the grant review process works is that a bunch of scientists get invited to the NIH to work on a grant panel. Each grant will be allocated to two members of the panel to read in depth and report on before the panel meets, but the whole panel will have all the grants to read briefly before the meeting. During the (usually 2 day) meeting each grant will be presented to the panel by the readers and the entire panel will then discuss it and rank it. It's an intense process and usually has a fair amount of acrimonious debate going on.
No-one looks at the PIs education when assessing a grant, they look at "is the science solid" "is it novel" "is it important" "does it have cross-over" "can it be achieved in the amount of time allotted" "will students be trained with the money". Once you've assessed all those criteria there's little room for any other bias and little time to even think about it, and if anyone was to say "hmm I don't like the school this guy went to" they'd be thrown out of the room for wasting everyone's time and not invited back. The only historical criteria that gets used is "has this guy worked on this stuff before, and if so how did he do" "has he (or she) published in this area and what was its impact" "does he actually have the skills to do what he's proposing"
You should read up on some of the more interesting "penis size" studies. I think there would be similar findings if a similar study of intelligence and other mental capacities were measured across ethnicities.
What I found most interesting that that "most men are 'average sized' regardless of race." It's just that among black men, there is a higher incident of "larger than average" sizes. Similarly, among asians, there is a higher incident of smaller than average sizes. But the fact remains, most men are average regardless of ethnicity.
I fully expect the same of black men with regards to intelligence and mental capacity/capability.
But you know? There is also something to be said about the fact that all non-black people seem to have at least a little neanderthal in them. It has been widely believed that since neanderthals had larger brains that they were actually smarter than the presumed modern humans. They disappeared, but they also mixed with the humans that migrated out of Africa. So is it worth considering that the neanderthal component has served to boost the mental capacity of non-african humans?
"The Economist" article essentially equates NIH grants to ALL of science. This is patently false of course. It is a generalization that I think most scientists would cringe at. The actually journal article in Science however, makes it clear that this is only NIH grants. I'd like to see this for all granting bodies, NSF, NASA, etc Do the rest of the bodies have the same issues?
What color are most professional athletes?
Oh, I see, genetics can have an effect on one's physical attributes but not their mental attributes.
MAYBE, we need an affirmative action program for professional sports. Sounds pretty stupid right? But in the hiring process, it isn't the best qualified it is the best qualified AFTER you have satisfied all of your racial hiring quota's.
A PhD in Eliteism.
from a sociological perspective the ingrained position of the 'inferior black' is quite well established. During african apartheid the white 'ruling class' of afrikaners imparted to their black underclass that it was necessary to have this system, as white superior intellect was all that could govern the savage african nation coherently and properly. To this day apologists still insist the removal of this white ruling class is to blame for much of the problems in african nations
in america blacks were deemed intellectually and cognitively inferior by state sponsored scientific tests as well as independent evaluation; both of which contributed to the pseudo-science of the day. Should there have been any doubt, the Tuskegee airmen were to be the ones to put it to rest...yet even after their exemplary performance at the controls of the sophisticated aircraft of the day, they all still fought the perception of inferiority.
Lewis Latimer invented the carbon lightbulb filament, woods developed a train station communication network, Carver invented four-hundred plant products and never attended a day of college until he was thirty, and Garret Morgan invented the gas mask. all these should put to rest the idea of the intellectually inferior 'black man'
in 1989, emulating the bees' honeycomb construction, the black scientist Emeagwali used 65,000 processors to invent the world's fastest computer.
i find it difficult to believe somehow we've seen a sudden dip in black ingenuity.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Explain Einstein then. A jew. Oh, jews don't count. How german of you.
How come asians do well then? Hispanics?
So race only matters to blacks... the peers don't guess the race from Mr Hernandez Lopez? But guess the race of Denzel Washington? I see.
Last time I checked many American blacks have western names, some might resent it but how then can I tell color from it?
I think there is something else going on, something that nobody dares the touch. Me? I am not going to touch it either. Lets just all dance around the elephant in the room.
Oh never mind. How come that is acceptable to claim Jews are smart or asians study hard? But if you dare to even hint that maybe some other cultures (Since jews are not a race but a religion (with many divisions into different cultures)) have negative standouts?
There is a black stand-up comedian who always bitches about race. Then a black man becomes president. His comments? This ain't going change anything and just make it harder for blacks.
With an attitude like that I bet all the black papers are marked down by black peers angry another black man is doing well.
Oh wait, the article forgot that didn't it. There are plenty of peer's who are NOT white racists like me. So are they saying ALL peer reviewers got it in for the black man?
Oh and what about women? Science is old men, how are papers with female names rated?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Lots of big words that didn't seem to say anything.
The topic of race brews up quick hostility and any debate seldom gets heard over the yelling. I'm no nazi/skinhead and I voted for Barack, if that means anything. I grew up with African Americans all around me, there were just as many African Americans as Caucasians at my high school. I had just as many African American friends growing up as Caucasian ones. I was always taught by the teachers/adults around me not to be racist or stereotype based on race. As I get older, I understand why the stereotypes exist...many of them are generally true, more so than not. Looking back at my high school classes, all of the "advanced" classes where 95% Caucasian (even though the school was 50% African American.) My university was about 90% white, but the few black people I knew either dropped out or switched to much easier majors. I would venture to guess that if we had "double blind" entry into universities, and no affirmative action, that the ratio at the university level would be even lower. I've heard the argument that it's a perceptual cycle due to the parents of Caucasian children are more educated than African American parents, so the children cannot receive as much help at home. My parents were unable to help with my homework once I got to the high school level. Math and Science in the "advanced" courses in high school now, were only taught in college in the years of my parents. I had to rely on teachers and I was on my own once I got home. This brings me to think of two possibilities: the "stupid is cool" thought is so prevalent among African Americans that it's causing this, or the genes inherited from their ancestors were more geared towards physical activity than complex thought. The first can only be fix by themselves and African American role models. I suppose the later can only be fixed with time?
There is only a 2.84% probability of having 60 heads or more.
There is only a 2.84% probability of having 40 heads or fewer.
There is a 94.31% probability of having 41-59 heads and 41-59 tails.
Statistics.
I've been working in IT for over 15 years...I have seen blacks in the companies I work at treated unfairly time and time again. The sad truth is the blacks who do well at companies are forced to act a certain way - all the successful ones I know are generally more friendly and jovial than the average white worker, and if some racist crank in some other part of the company says something offbeat about them, they just laugh it off. I see the same situation over and over. The racist crank is usually a middle-aged white guy, whose bonafides the young but educated and talented troops question, but were hired into the startup by the young top management because I guess they (or VC) wants what looks like adult supervision around, which I guess is middle-aged white guys who are perceived to be incompetent. This is probably not helped by the bizarre (often sexually-tinged) racist statements or assumptions you hear through the grapevine that they made - not just about the black and non-white employees, but other non-whites.
Another case I've seen more than once is a black co-worker in my IT group, and a young (late 20s, 30s) white junior manager over us, or perhaps the white junior manager is in a parallel group but has some sway on our group. Whatever the black teammate does, the white manager just seems to have it in for them for no reason. One of these managers I was myself friends with, he had no problems whatsoever going into vivid detail about how he hated Muslims. He also really disliked the black guy in my group, but never really gave a reason why, even when I subtly asked him why he didn't when we were alone drinking a beer at a bar. I didn't really get a real answer. Any IT worker who wants to go into management I have some suspicion of where there head is at anyhow.
I've seen other scenarios where I just didn't know, like someone passed over for promotion at a certain point. What factors went into this? I DON'T count this as definite racism as I don't know what factors went into the decisions, and they may have been completely legitimate. The point is, things work on open and hidden levels, and maybe even unconscious levels. In other words, my point with promotions is, there may be cases of race being a factor that I have not listed, as I don't know whether or not they were.
These are scenarios I saw myself where the racism was fairly obvious. But people are smart nowadays to not be too obvious. It makes me think of what Reagan and Bush aide Lee Atwater said about campaigning politically on race:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it."
This is what happens. The middle-aged incompetent white managers brought into the startups were dumb enough to say racist things out loud. The junior white managers who were on the black guys case for no reason are more subtle, even if one will privately talk about how he hates Muslims (not mentioning blacks though). Then there's people passed over for promotion, where I don't even know what factors went into them - maybe it is a legitimate reason. Things get more and more abstract.
When I was a teenager, there were local black kids interested in computers and computer networks who were as talented and some even more talented than the average white kids who did. While many of their white counterparts easily climbed up the ladder of things, through the educational institutions and then the corporate institutions, of course never having any trouble with local police institutions in the meantime, this just didn't seem to happen for them.
People come home from work, sit down exhausted and turn on sitcoms. Movie produce
Let's assume for a minute that the grant process is completely fair and the applications are actually worse. Is that automatically a racist assumption? What if there were another cause besides just black people being dumb or affirmative action? Maybe the best and the brightest among white students gravitate towards research, but black students tend to value directly helping their communities and instead spread their smartest more into clinical roles? What if the process is discriminatory specifically to poor people due to their lower quality primary education and therefore worse English compositional skills and black students just happen to get lower grant rates as a function of their early education? Yes, I realize that the articles claim that the studies were controlled for education and demographics, but I didn't see anything that indicated that they were controlling for anything but post-high school education and definitely nothing indicating they were controlling for household income during their formative years.
I guess what I'm saying is that we shouldn't be so scared of the racism card that we automatically assume there is a racial bias just because there is a measurable anomaly when we decide to measure along racial lines. People can excel or not in a particular domain for reasons other than racial discrimination or genetic inferiority.
Even if the grants process is biased by race, it doesn't have to mean the scientific community is consciously racist.
Granting research money involves making subjective judgments, like judging how competent someone seems, how likely you think they are to carry out the experiment successfully, and so on. Subjective judgments are, at best, only partially based on rational thought. The rest is based on the images which are active in your mind when you're making the judgment. For example, when reading someone's application, the name of the applicant, the name of their school, the fact that their papers are well-cited, and so on, all conjure up images which contribute to how the reader feels about the applicant. The thing is, the person making the judgment is usually not aware of which images contribute to the feeling, so it's easy for irrelevant factors to slip in. I don't think it'd be very surprising if race made a difference here.
What color are most professional athletes?
Oh, I see, genetics can have an effect on one's physical attributes but not their mental attributes.
MAYBE, we need an affirmative action program for professional sports. Sounds pretty stupid right? But in the hiring process, it isn't the best qualified it is the best qualified AFTER you have satisfied all of your racial hiring quota's.
Most professional Athletes are white.
so maybe we SHOULD have AA for sports.
What are minorities going to do that is special? Invent open heart surgery or something?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
It is well known that U.S. born black people going through college in the US get breaks not afforded to everyone else. We have even seen egregious examples of passes that should have been fails and even examples of plagiarism that has gone unaddressed and unpunished when done by black people. We know all too well how the system seeks "fairness and balance" by giving advantage to the "disadvantaged."
I missed that episode of right wing radio. Is the proof of that claim the fact that it is well known by people who are able to vaguely reference anecdotal examples of perceived bias? I guess it is surely well known that well off white kids never received this sort of special treatment so if we can find any individual cases where the black kid received a benefit, the only conclusion we could reach is that it must be a systemic favoritism of minorities over white people. Yeah, that is definitely the only possible explanation. What do we need to do to get Erroneous a grant here people?
Especially Ironic - this is in response to the idea that black scientists are treated unfairly within "objective" peer review.
Affirmative Action doesn't hand the student a degree, it just gets them in the school.
True, but if you compare the number of rejected applications and the number of students that don't finish their course, you'll see that getting into the school is usually a lot harder then getting a degree once you're there.
In my experience, most college teachers (especially in private universities) will pass even the most incompetent students, because they want to keep getting their tuition money, and students are more likely to leave college if they flunk. I'm a college teacher and I've been "subtly pressured" to do just that by the school board.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Wow, reading through all these comments makes me sad. There are so many racist comments where people don't even understand how they are being racist...
Here's a clue: If you are a middle-upper class white individual then you have no idea what racism is. If you think you have been the victim of reverse racism then you have no idea what racism is. If you think that there are inherit genetic differences in intellect and physical prowess between races then you are a racist plain and simple.
Get educated. For the love of God. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
it's possible, but don't forget to consider culture...it has a huge huge influence here...
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
The way to make racism like this go away is:
EVERYONE has to stop judging people on irrelevant factors.
This means that government and academia has to stop having lower standards for people in oppressed groups.
It also means people like you have to stop assuming that the person in front of you was a beneficiary of those lower standards just because they are a member of an oppressed group.
Your reasoning above is correct statistically, but may be doing an injustice to the individual standing in front of you - an injustice that has the same effect as the racism that started the whole mess.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
You clearly haven't, if you think Ayn Rand's theories had anything to do with ethnicity.
GP has a very good point; most people are fine with acknowledging physical differences between different races or genders but apparently not when it comes to mental differences, as if our brains are somehow uninfluenced by our genes.
In benign environments technology is a stunted, laughable thing, it can't thrive in cultures gripped by belief in natural harmony. What need of fusion reactors if food is already abundant, the climate comfortable? Why force change upon a world which poses no danger?
In short, would you say most technology or formal civilization comes from tropical, comfortable climates, or from colder and harsher ones -- Silicon Valley being an exception :-).
Because romans miscegenated with the inferior slaves they imported into the country. Duh.
Romans are now extinct. Italians are 40% roman, 30% arab, 30% african.
I am mystified by number of commenters saying that you can't draw conclusions because of the small sample size. This is not a small sample size. The results are robust in part because the data set is so large: 83000 observations.
One of the interesting points of TFA is that it pinpoints where in NIH's two-tier process of review black researchers are eliminated. They are more likely to be eliminated in the first round of peer review than in the second "scoring" round. This is not consistent with them submitting, on average, less worthy projects. If that were the case, they should have the same or a higher attrition rate at the second level of review. Black researchers are also less likely to resubmit grants, which could be a simple lack of mentoring or communication from the NIH.
From TFA:
We find it troubling that the typical measures of scientific achievement—NIH training, previous grants, publications, and citations—do not translate to the same level of application success across race and ethnic groups. Our models controlled for demographics, education and training, employer characteristics, NIH experience, and research productivity, yet they did not explain why blacks are 10 percentage points less likely to receive R01 funding compared with whites.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
"None of ya would change places with me! And I'm rich! That's how good it is to be white!"
Most agree that "bookworm genes" are due to economic status.
Most uninformed people with an opinion, maybe. Any neurologist will tell you that the best predictor of someone's IQ is their biological parents' IQ (that includes adopted children, raised in different cultures and different economic conditions). Genes account for approximately 60% of IQ variability.
Why do some people have such difficulty accepting that our brain is a part of our body, same as our bones, skin, liver, eyes, and everything else?
If two basketball players train equally hard, would you be surprised if the taller one ended up being more successful? Or maybe you think "height genes" are due to economic status...?
It looks like the Neanderthal hybrids are discriminating against the baseline humans.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Only if one was an Usian and not from the South. Everyone else would expect you to be racists. Wave hello to the world. You arrogant fucks.
Ummm and just why would we expect American science to be especially colour blind?
This would seem to imply that, e.g., Britain, Canada etc. are more racist countries than the US.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
All of this jumping to racism as a conclusion, and bunches of people trying to explain why black people are probably just worse scientists, and nobody asks a basic question:
Did this study control for the reputation of the submitting institution?
Let's face it: The institutions in this country with the best reputations are in the northeast and northern California, with some in the upper midwest. I'm not saying that other schools don't do good science, I'm saying there are concentrations of schools with histories of having very good images, particularly with the NIH. You know what they lack? Lots of black students, who tend to be more represented in HBCUs and universities in the South, which often don't have the illustrious reps of some of the other schools. (I say this as someone who has been to both well-regarded NE schools and large southern universities.)
From TFA:
There were fewer total applications from blacks (27%) at institutions receiving the most NIH funding (the top 1 to 30) compared with whites (33%, P less than .05) but a similar number at institutions ranked 31 to 100 in amount of NIH funding awarded (table S11) (13). Applications from white investigators were more likely to be associated with a previous NIH RPG or K award (78%) compared with blacks (69%), Asians (73%), and Hispanics (70%) (P less than .001).
There may be racism here, but until they really delve into the inter-institutional snobbery, I think the conclusion of specific anti-black is missing a key step.
after all how many fried chicken research studies can the NIH approve every year?
How do you know about these breaks that Black people get that you don't have access to? You are making a lot of assumptions about plagiarism and stating them as fact and then you want data to prove that the problem is not the NIH it is the applicants lack of ability. How can this be? Where is your data? The NIH did the research to prove that it is not being fair in the grant selection process. The director of the NIH practically provided his mea coupla!
Next you assert that you would avoid Black doctors because you don't trust their qualifications. In your mind you believe even the possibility of corruption invalidates an entire race. Yet you fail to mention that there have been case of White doctors faking credentials. Exibit A: (http://www.cnbc.com/id/19330471) Should I then say all White doctors are frauds? Of course not! That would be idiotic!
Last time I looked that is text book racism. You can pull any reason out "they are not smart enough", "they got a free ride", etc.
I love at the end you scoff "Racism needs to go away." I got news for you, until you go away it will be here on Slashdot.
Slashdot is a terrible forum to discuss this stuff because the deck is stacked. If you need proof grep the archives for the N word.
Just because you didn't read the article don't mean it makes the mistakes you assume it does.
I don't mean to make this seem like a joke, but every time Slashdot posts about race there is a whole slew of White people coming out of the wood-works claiming that racism is not the problem? And then form a defense out of the following...
A. Affirmative Action is the problem Black people can't be trusted.
B. Black people are not smart enough and thus can't be qualified.
C. Black people score lower on academic tests, and if they did well they did not deserve the grade. See (A)
D. How come my Asian friend is so smart and you are so dumb.
E. Let me pull out my statistics textbook: if you are Black, then you are dumb. QED.
Then sprinkle it with:
A. Oh BTW I am not racist,.. racist rant..., racism is bad
B. I voted for Obama, how could I be racist?
C. I have a Black friend somewhere! I call him by the N word and he loves it. How can I be racist?
D. Look at all of the Black Athletes this proves that genetics determine everything about a person. And since Black people don't have Neanderthal DNA...
E. Oh don't mind my friends dropping the N-word on that other post. He is just an anomaly.
Then pat yourself on the back for proving that 500 years of social engineering is meaningless and get modded up. Brillant because the next article will be about how social engineering causes somebody to hand over millions of SSN to a stealthy hacker.
I think there is a sick person who posts these flame bait articles on Slashdot. I am calling you out! You post these articles and wait for hundreds of responses and then you revel in the racist commentary. It does not make sense otherwise. If Slashdot cared about race they would have auto tagged the racists or blocked Anonymous cowards spewing racial epithets.
Let me put it into perspective for you guys. If you were Black, and you had to read that the government has be rejecting your best and brightest because of your race and then log into Slashdot and read through the most offensive racist rants. You would have quite a shitty day. Now imagine that you had to interact with a bunch of people who pretend to be your friends when talking face-to-face and then they log on to Slashdot and drop the N bomb uncontrollably. Then you will have a better understanding of what being Black is like.
Take the proposals back, scrub them of names and institutions, and have them re-evaluated.
If the black-sounding ones move up when presented neutrally, that would be pretty damning.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Even if you're a White male and you've never unleashed a police dog or fire hose on someone of color doesn't mean you haven't benefited from past racist policies in our country. Affirmative action is a pragmatic policy to "right past wrongs." That promotion your grandpa got over mine, that allowed him to buy a house in a better neighborhood, that allowed him to send your dad to a good school, that gave his children the financial security to take risks like startups; that's the institutional problem AA was designed to counteract.
Somehow, we've created a upper class generation of Marie Antoinette's who have no clue how good they've got it. One of my roommates in college was a really nice, mature (and HOT) White girl who would proudly proclaim to anyone listening that she paid her way through college. Now, she didn't pay her rent, didn't pay her bills, didn't buy her car, didn't pay for her own books, and only worked 10 hours a week at her sorority. But, she probably paid her own tuition (I imagine). In her mind, hell maybe she *was* making a sacrifice after having to listen to stories from her sisters who hooked up with hot Latin guys on their Cancun Spring Break.
One of my favorite examples of affirmative action at work. The NFL had a self-recognized inability to hire Black coaches. Just like on this site, everyone just assumed that there were no good candidates. Art Rooney, owner of the Steelers pushed the idea that every owner should have to interview at least one minority hire. While there was no guarantee of a job, it got a lot of Black candidates exposure. To top it off, Rooney hired a very young talent named Mike Tomlin to head the team. In 2 years, he took a .500 team to the Super Bowl and in 4 took them to their second.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"Asian and Hispanic scientists do just as well as white ones."
That's not terribly surprising, since Asians and Hispanics are, respectively, just slightly above and below whites in terms of socioeconomic privilege. Blacks, of course, are way down on the bottom.
What would be really interesting is to see how Jewish scientists fare. They're on top socially, and academia is one of the domains in which they're conspicuously overrepresented. Are they also getting proportionally more research money? (And would a study saying so ever make it to press?)
If it was a matter of prejudice then Asians and Hispanics would be the equal recipients of such discrimination. After all racism doesn't discriminate between a Paki or a Wop or an Afro-American. Could it possible be that people of Afro-Caribbean extraction aren't exposed to the written language as early as the rest. I do know there is some contempt for the written word among the young urban under class. Street language, slang and rapping hold more respect than the words of some dead white men.
Thanks for this . This post is a breath of fresh air among a lot of rancid cow manure. I'm black, and in the IT Field. Every time Slashdot posts something about race, I just shake my head while realizing that the very same people who smile to my face in this industry come here and post this stuff.
And it spills over into the real world.
I left a previous job because a white boss essentially forced me out. I had stellar reviews until he got promoted to be my boss, I knew he was trouble because previously in an unguarded moment he told me "I normally don't get along with black people". After he became my boss, things went to hell and it was a fucked up 2 years. And contrary to some people's fantasies, bringing a discrimination lawsuit is hard and it will essentially end your career (sad but true). I opted to leave my job, in the midst of a recession, rather than put myself through that. Thankfully I landed at a great company, and a great one after that.
So yeah, discrimination exists, I work for a great company, and there are others, but there are companies where I have interviewed and it's pretty clear all that mattered was the skin of my color. I sound British, have a good resume, but there are times I'd show up and people would look like deer in the headlights. I actually had one interviewer let me know "we do a background check on everyone, so if you have a criminal record you should let us know now". Problem is, I knew the company, they didn't do background checks on everyone as a matter of course, but this interviewer just refused to believe that a black person could actually be qualified enough for the position.
Final irony, I score really well on IQ tests (though I think IQ tests have fuck-all to do with actual intelligence) , so I joined MENSA for the heck of it. Let's just say my one and only MENSA meeting was rather 'interesting'.
Its really that simple: connections and network within scientific community will do wonders for ones career when Einstein level research results are not there. I mean giving grant to study the mating habits of tree frogs isnt more relevent than a line of research on the common cricket mating song frequencies -so who gets the grant? the one who knows Professor X who was buddies with grantees uncle in College. no? Still dont believe me? well look at other disciplines: eg. Architecture: there are more architects successful among those from rich parents than poor ones why? because a backstreet Brooklin grad can't draw? NO! because when rich kid and poor kid graduate which do you think has the family connections to start his practice by designing Uncle Thurston's penthouse? not the kid from Brooklyn. The kid from Brooklyn probably couldn't afford to go to the best Universtity (and was payin his own rent at 17) this AA always told by their hardworking (not so rich) parents they's got to be brillant and talented beyond the norm just to get by. Structural violence of racism is just that: But there's no excuse :life gives you a hand and you work with it and make the best of it.
Im basicly rambling about interrelated ideas in my paragraph but they are connected: society, privilege, talent, luck and perseverance.
Let us review a sample paper:
Yo yo yo, listen up yall
I be talkin bout speed of light
Now light, it is just so damn FAST. Fo shizzle.
Know what Im sayin?
Now I be cool wid dat, you dig?
Now as I was SAYIN, light be FAST motherfucker
As you can see from this sample paper, the gentleman of a negroid persuasion has really tried hard. Unfortunately even though he appears to be fascinated by light and has likely attended a similar school to a goodly white man, his genetics have prevented him from fully developing a grasp of the concept of language and thus he talks like a "jive turkey".
On entry the intake is universally of a low standard in comparison to the standard of graduates.
The quotas are an attempt at social engineering to try to get more of people of whatever group out there and it doesn't necessarily need to change the major educational aim of getting a group of graduates that are good enough, because the difference between the best and the worst on intake is a lot less than the best on intake and the worst graduate.
Once we took two cars to lunch. Everybody in the cars was a PhD scientist in genomics research, in Cambridge, Mass. One car was driven by a white guy, one by a black guy. Cars practically identical, moving in sync, within the speed limit, down a quiet city street. We pass a police car. The cops immediately start up and hit the lights. We both pull over. The cops let the white-driver-car go, and detain the black-driver-car. After about 10 minutes, during which neither car moves, they let him go.
If you're black, you're getting discriminated against, every day, all day, in every city. It's a fact. If I were black I'd hate white people (or at least cops).
There are two possibilities: the people in power, consciously or subconsciously, are conspiring to keep them down; they just aren't very good so tend to fall back.
We only seem to hear about the first possibility but despite all the affirmative action, the excuses, the benefit of the doubt and the hand holding things don't change.
Perhaps the average black person and the average black scientist aren't as capable as their Asian and oriental counterparts.
It's a possibility - though one's inbuilt sense of 'fair play' and the instinctive (but mistaken) expectation to see types of people represented, in every field, in proportion to their numbers might prevent one from thinking it.
I have worked in a number of companies and in each one I saw the white component of the workforce fall over themselves to accommodate their black colleagues. If the black worker made an error it was readily dismissed as an easy mistake to make whereas if their white colleagues made similar errors it was taken more seriously. I don't recall a single overtly racist remark regardless of the racial mix of those involved in the conversation. If anyone had said something racist it would have been pounced on. Black employees were always candidates for any post going, for attendance at conferences, public facing events etc.
The black workers tended to exaggerate their ability and bluff more. In mixed race groups the white people would avoid challenging them on a subject for fear of highlighting the ignorance of the black employee. I recall watching in near silence along with other colleagues as the black DBA methodically, though unintentionally, trashed a Sun cluster based database. Nobody wanted to be the person to point out that the black employee did not know what he was doing. Some made tentative suggestions, which the black DBA ignored (or maybe didn't understand) but nobody felt they could intervene for fear of showing up the DBA. If it had been a white person things would have been different. They would have been castigated. Someone else would have stepped in to take over.
Where a white person would have been ridiculed by their peers the black colleagues were often treated like children.
There are some very smart and capable black people who I look up to and respect. It is a blessed relief when I meet one because I don't then have to pretend that I think they are intelligent and capable - they actually are intelligent and capable - but there are also many who have been promoted beyond their ability because white management and well meaning but mistaken politicians have twisted reality around in their heads, to such an extent, in an effort not to be racist - and ended up being racist against their white colleagues instead.
None of this 'racism' would exist if white people were allowed the most fundamental of human rights - the right to simply GET AWAY from people they don't want to live with...
It's as simple as that. 'Racist' white people are simply white people who have been FORCED to live with, and associate with, non-whites. It's not up to the government, the media, or big business, to decide who I, or anybody else, can GET AWAY from. Non-whites are clearly forcing themselves into the company of white people, and then moan about 'racism' so they can continue to STEAL from us, i.e. take that which they haven't earned.
Any questions?
Last year, Dr. Xiaoping (Frank) Wu et al. published a paper which claimed that the present day mass trends (PDMTs) of regions such as Antarctica and Greenland had been overestimated in previous studies:
At the GRACE science team meeting earlier this month, Xiaoping Wu revised his numbers. For Greenland, "GIA estimated" now has a PDMT of -144 +- 27 Gt/yr. For Greenland, "GIA corrected" now has a PDMT of -219 +- 33 Gt/yr.
After his presentation, I asked Dr. Wu what changed in his methodology to make his new numbers more closely match those of Velicogna, Chen, Luthcke, and all the other non-GRACE measurement techniques. He said that he expanded his sensitivity kernel to 0.5 degrees off the coast of Greenland because secular trends in the ocean are very small compared to land. Thus his new inversion doesn't underweight the mass loss (as much), because it's occurring primarily on the coasts.
I took a picture of the slide in his presentation which contains these revisions, but it's illegible. When the GRACE meeting slides appear on the web (hopefully later this month), I'll share the address of these slides and the exact slide number so my report of his revisions can be verified.