AAAS Annual Meeting - Day 3

Sunday, 17 February 2008
Sunday was my third and final day at the AAAS Conference. Once again, I attended a series of very interesting lectures.

Fighting the Global Obesity Epidemic: Small Steps or Big Changes?
In this panel, speakers were discussing the issue of obesity and the best ways to combat it. There were a number of interesting issues that arose. A few of the options for dealing with obesity include environmental changes, small lifestyle changes, and dramatic changes. Environmental changes have to do with changing the way society in general does things. Right now, to be healthy, people have to swim upstream - society is not organized in a way so that the norm is a healthy lifestyle. For example, people drive much more often than walking, so you have to be outside the norm to be healthier. The small lifestyle changes has to do with making sustainable changes in lifestyle - either what you eat or how often you walk or exercise. Dramatic changes seemed to be things like significantly increasing your exercising or changing your diet. These changes may not be sustainable over the long run, but there is evidence that people that lose about 5% of their body weight in a year, even though they steadily gain weight afterwards, still end up healthier five years later than a control group that didn't lose the initial weight. Another interesting fact is that because society as a whole is getting more obese, the average person does not have a healthy Body Mass Index (BMI). This results in people looking around at others and thinking, I'm not overweight, I'm just normal. Unfortunately, "normal" people are overweight in many cases. Another interesting issue - parents are very bad at identifying child obesity, and even worse, many pediatricians fail to notice the issue as well.

Global Knowledge and Information Commons for Sustainability Science and Innovation
This lecture was about organizing information and making it available for decision making and use. One lecturer talked about Joint Fact Finding, which is a method of facilitating policy discussions on science and technology issues. It was a really interesting method by which the assumptions made for research conducted can be understood by all involved. Professor Juma was on this panel also, and he spoke about the role of patent offices in developing countries. He suggested that they may play a different role than they do in the west, and could also be used as a library of existing technological solutions to be understood and used by local people. He also talked about the importance of understanding and researching current solutions before beginning on more research on the problems.
My Thoughts: I was very interested in the Joint Fact Finding method, and would like to learn more about when and where this is used. Also, I am interested in the idea Professor Juma brought up about using the patent office as a data repository. It makes me wonder why there is not a better library of development technologies already. This type of information is so spread out and difficult to find, it would surely be beneficial to create something, like an internet database of various development projects or technologies. It's a project I'd love to work on if I could figure out a plan of how to do it. Also, one of the speakers that was supposed to be there but wasn't, was from the African Technology Policy Studies Network in Kenya. I think it'd be really interesting to get in touch with this group and create some international ties between our science and technology policy program and other programs around the world.

Communication Science in a Religion America
This talk centered on how a useful dialogue can take place between religion and science. There were a number of really interesting speakers. One spoke about a difficulty caused by scientists inability to engage the public and successfully describe complex theories, such as evolution. Instead they often are aloof, and ignore arguments against evolution because they have no respect for these arguments. This panelist suggested the movie Flock of DoDo's, which I have rented from Netflix, which is about the evolution/creationism debate. There is also a new movie out with Ben Stein about the same issue, from the creationist perspective, called "Expelled". The speaker talked about the way scientists address the issue, and the way they frame their debate. He offered that scientists are making things worse by being hostile to those that disagree, because they are creating an environment of us versus them, when that isn't really the case.
The second speaker was a brother in the Catholic Church who had studied astronomy at MIT. He was the embodiment of science and religion mixed together, and does work in the Vatican observatory. He had also taken a break from his astronomy research and spent two years talking to 'techies' in Silicon Valley about how they view religion and how they choose their religion. He wrote a book on the issue called "God's Mechanics". He was a great speaker, so I've ordered his book to see how that is.
My Thoughts: I enjoyed this panel a lot. I think it is common for scientists not to be careful about how they communicate their message effectively. I also think its important to show respect for people's beliefs and to try to make arguments with this in mind. I'm looking forward to seeing Flock of Dodos and reading God's Mechanics - I'm sure I'll have comments on those once I've seen them.

Is It Possible to Predict the Future of Science
This panel was about the methods used to make science and technology policy in the United States. It was really interesting because one of the results was that we don't have good methods for predicting the benefit from funding that goes to basic research, yet the OMB does create a yearly budget and make decisions on how to invest. Currently, they use primarily expert opinion - which works well within a field, where, for example, you can ask a group of biologists what type of biology research should be funded. However, it is not a great method for deciding among fields - not many people could provide informed and unbiased information on whether funding should go to biology or to physics. The panelist gave the example of a dog show as the method they use - best in breed, best in group, best in show - to try to choose projects from diverse fields. He also said its somewhat like building the food pyramid - trying to get a healthy balance. One component of making the decision of what to fund is understanding the goal, but even this is not obvious. Should we focus on equality - making sure all fields are advancing? Should it be the areas in which we can make the most progress, regardless of the balance? Should it be based on scientific merit or on likely returns to society? How would you measure those things. All interesting questions. Many times funding goes to basic science, where the direct benefit to society is hard to understand. One panelist told a story about being at a reception for a theoretical mathematics department. One of the people proposed a toast - "To theoretical mathematics, may it never be of any use to anyone." She said that is a difficult statement to support from a budget perspective. Another panelist talked about methods of trying to model possible budget decisions and their long term outcomes. This is interesting work, but seems to be a long way off, since these are such unpredictable pathways.
My Thoughts: This is exactly the type of issue I learned about in my cornerstone class on International Science and Technology Policy. It's interesting how the process goes on, despite a lack of understanding about how and why we should invest in a particular way. I'd like to learn more about the details of the models used. I also think the attitudes among scientists and the public, and the challenges between supporting basic science and showing benefits to the public are very interesting. It is very hard to explain to people why funding should go to projects with no obvious benefit to society. On the other hand, it is believed that these are the types of things that lead to innovation. Also, scientists who work on fundamental issues and do basic research are generally considered more respected in the scientific community, compared to those who do applied research.

Association of Women in Science Reception
I intended to visit the reception put on by AWIS, but was too excited about the lectures I had been to and ended up spending an hour on the phone with Jeff talking about them. Made a brief stop at the reception, though, and met a professor from GWU that I didn't know.

Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop Per Child
The last official event that I participated in for the conference was the lecture by Nicholas Negroponte about the OLPC project. Negroponte is at MIT, and I was familiar with his work. However, I hadn't had the opportunity to hear him speak, and it was really interesting. His group has produced a laptop that costs only $180 and is designed to be used in developing countries - it has a super bright screen so it can be used outdoors, and can be powered by a crank so electricity is not needed. He decided to create a non-profit company and to sell the laptop in large quantities to governments. This allowed him to produce large enough quantities to have some sway with the manufacturing companies. The laptops have just begun rolling out this year, and increased are expected next year. I think it will be really interesting to see where this project goes.

Top of the Hub
The last thing we did was visit the Top of the Hub for drinks and a great view of Boston. Chloe, Vid, and I went with friends we had met and had great conversation ranging from topics of lectures we'd attended, to gentrification, to diversity in cities, to searching for fossils in Africa. Overall the conference was a great experience.