Impact of community masking on COVID-19

I find legislation that prevents mask mandates or requirements to be extremely irresponsible and abhorrent. These are made without regards to public safety and in contradiction to overwhelming scientific evidence that showed that wearing proper mask is one of the most effective means to reduce the risk of the spread of COVID-19.

I have presented several posts on this blog on the various scientific studies in support of this. Now comes another one that leave no doubt on the effectiveness of masking in reducing the virus transmission. This was very recently published in Science (a very prestigious and difficult journal to publish in, if you don't know this already), and is done across several villages and on a population of more than 300,000 adults in Bangladesh.

We designed our trial to encourage universal mask-wearing at the community level, rather than mask-wearing among only those with symptoms. We encouraged even healthy individuals to wear masks since a substantial share of COVID-19 transmission stems from asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic individuals, and masks may protect healthy wearers by reducing the inhalation of aerosols or droplets.

When you read this paper, keep this in mind. It is one thing to show scientifically of how masks reduces the spread of aerosols from our mouth and nose. This has been shown clearly and without any doubt base on the many publications and studies that I have highlighted so far. But it is another to show that it does have an impact STATISTICALLY when applied to large population. This latter part is more difficult because it involves a lot of variables. It is why this latest study is very important because it is one of the larger sampling of human population involved in masking (or lack thereof) to reduce the spread of the virus.

The sign of a valid idea is that the more you study it, the more convincing it becomes. Pseudosciences lack this kind of progression, where they continue to struggle getting to First base to prove that such-and-such even exists. In the case of the effectiveness of wearing proper mask to reduce COVID-19 transmission, the more we study it, the more the evidence we gather to point this to be valid, that wearing mask has been shown unequivocally to reduce the risk of the virus transmission.

Zz.

Are University Admission Biased?

This is a rather interesting Minute Physics video. It is tackling what is known as the Simpson Paradox. What is interesting is that it is applying it to an example where on first glance, there appears to be no form of statistical bias, but when viewed another way, it seems that there is.



What is interesting here is that several years ago, I mentioned of an AIP study examining universities in the US that have very small number of physics faculty and how many of those that do not have a single female faculty member. The result found that, statistically, this is what is expected based on the number of female physics PhDs, meaning that we can't simply accuse these schools (and hiring of female physicist in general) of bias against female physicists. This Minute Physics video appears to provide an illustration of what is expected statistically without imposing even any bias to the sample.

Again, I'm not saying that female physicists and faculty members do not face unfair or more challenges in their career when compared to male physicists. But illustrations such as these should also be considered so that we tackle problems that are real and meaningful and not chase something is not the source of the problem.

Zz.

Initial Employment Of US Physics Bachelors

The AIP has released the latest statistics on the initial employment of Physics Bachelors degree holders from the Class of 2013 and 2014.

Almost half of the degree holders left school to go into the workforce, with about 54% going on to graduate school. This is a significant percentage, and as educators, we need to make sure we prepare physics graduates for such a career path and not assume that they will all go on to graduate schools. This means that we design a program in which they have valuable and usable skills by the time they graduate.

Zz.

Physics Departments Without A Single Female Faculty Member

Before we start, let me emphasize that I'm a man, but I've been involved in promoting women participation in science, and especially physics, for years. Anyone who has followed this blog would have read several items on this issue, and also my activities in this area to promote women in science. I definitely think that there is an under-representation of women in physics, and one of the ways to improve that is to make the field more enticing and more familiar to them, both in terms of the subject matter, and the working condition.

Now, having said that, you know what's coming next is not going to be pretty. This is a news article that reports on a recent statistical analysis/modeling done by the American Institute of Physics. It aimed to address that fact that fully 1/3 of the physics departments here in the US do not have a single female faculty member. But one shouldn't stop there, because the statistics included schools with small number of faculty members (often less than 10), and these tend to be the schools that do not have any female faculty members.

The AIP ran a simulation that takes into account the number of available female faculty members and the available positions, and came out with the conclusion that the lack of female faculty members in these departments is consistent with the statistical distribution, and not due to any inherent bias.

A new report from the American Institute of Physics -- based on simulation analysis -- concludes that the large number of departments without a single woman is to be expected and is not the result of discrimination. Some experts on women and science, however, disagree.

The institute's report says that there are two factors that explain the distribution of women among departments: the size of departments and the total number of female faculty members available. There are many departments with only two or three physics faculty members, the report notes. So "it is unlikely that these departments will have a woman among the faculty because the overall representation of women among all physics faculty members is low," the report adds.

To put it simply, say that you have 100 balls. On the table, you have many compartments of various sizes, some able to contain 20 balls, while others are big enough to have only 2 balls. If you toss those 100 balls up in the air and let them land randomly into those compartments, the argument here says that naturally, the smaller compartments will have a higher probability to end up with having NO balls.

Whether one buys into the parameters set up for the simulation is another matter. But taken at face value, I don't see anything wrong with this. It is certainly a first attempt at trying to figure out if the lack of any female faculty members in these small departments are due to some inherent bias, or simply out of statistics. It is a scientifically valid methodology to START and investigate an issue. Now the next logical step is to re-examine if the parameters used are valid, or accurate. Maybe some of the assumptions used are debatable, etc., and thus, the simulation should be tweaked.

What annoys me is the response being given to this study. I certainly expect disagreement with the conclusion, but the counter-argument that has been given is purely speculative!

Janet Bandows Koster, executive director and CEO of the Association for Women in Science, said via e-mail that the report "a disappointment."

She urged physicists to study the concept of "implicit bias," which she said might have something to do with the pool of women in the discipline. "We know that most people are reluctant to accept that they are biased, and scientists in particular pride themselves on their impartiality. Yet scientists are humans raised in societies, and thus are subject to collective messages that suggest men are suited to science because they are independent and analytical whereas women are better suited to care-giving and cooperative enterprises."

It's too easy, she said, to focus only on the relatively small number of women in the field. "Inferring there is no hiring bias because the 'n' is so small for female faculty is essentially like granting a papal indulgence to physics departments across the country," she said.

I'm sorry, but that is stupid! You are countering a statistical analysis with nothing more than a speculative fishing expedition! That's like saying you don't agree with Special Relativity because you don't like the look of the equation!

And no one here is saying that there is no hiring bias. A statistical analysis such as this can't come to such conclusion. What it does say is that the lack of female faculty members in 1/3 of the physics depts. cannot be attributed to gender bias as the main factor, because statistical analysis alone can account for that observation! As scientists, we need to know what statistics say, and what they don't!

The PROPER way to counter something like this is to look at the validity of the parameter used, to see if the model is accurate, and to show where it might have missed something, NOT to simply insinuate that there are biases. For someone who is supposed to represent an association of women in SCIENCE, she sure used a lot of hand-waving, unsupported argument to counter a scientifically-derived conclusion.

Zz.

Recent Physics PhDs - Skills Used and Satisfaction With Employment

The AIP has released its latest statistics on recent PhDs. This one is from the graduating class of 2009 and 2010, meaning that these people graduated and entered the job market at the height of the economic meltdown. This survey asked about the skills used in their jobs, and the level of satisfaction in those jobs.

The non-surprising aspect here is the set of skills needed between postdocs and those in the private sectors:

Differences by type of position can be readily inferred from the previous figures. Postdocs were far more likely than PhDs in the private sector to regularly do basic research and utilize advanced physics principles regularly in their work. A large proportion of PhDs in the private sector were regularly involved in design and development, applied research, and quality control.

These differences reflect inherent differences in these types of employment; postdocs are temporary positions with research agendas largely motivated by scientific exploration, while jobs in the private sector typically involve producing a tangible product for a customer or providing a service to a client.

A lot of data also on the job satisfaction, and whether they had sufficient mentoring from their advisors.

Zz.

First Year Physics Graduate Students

The AIP has released the latest statistics on first year physics graduate students in the US. There are a few but not surprising data here.

Asians still make up the largest percentage of foreign students (Table 2) in terms of continent of origin, with China sending the largest number of students (39% of all foreign students). In fact, China has more first year physics students than students from Europe, Africa, Americas, Middle East, and Australia/New Zealand combined!

The other interesting observation here is that foreign students also tend to major in a more "practical" subject area, more so than American students. Table 4 shows that the percentage of foreign students intending to major in Condensed Matter, Biophysics, Material Science, and other Applied Physics tend to be higher than their American counterpart. The percentage of foreign students majoring in Astrophysics, for example, is significantly low (4%), whereas for American students, the percentage (13%) is roughly equivalent to the other two other most popular subject areas (15% and 12%).

One can spin such statistics in a number of ways. :)

Zz.

5-Sigma, You Say?

With the apparent discovery of the Higgs and the talk about "4.9 Sigma" and such, Fermilab has produced a video explaining the statistics behind such a discovery. If you are not familiar with this, you may have to view the video more than once, because some of the concepts are mentioned rather too quickly for it to sink in the first time.



Zz.

Data On Career Preference

Hum... I don't think I've ever seen this type of data/survey before. This is a report on a recent survey of graduate students in science and how their career preference change over time as they go through their graduate program.

Here's the result that has gotten the most press: Academic research careers were less popular with the late cohorts than the early ones in all disciplines, suggesting, perhaps, that graduate students are disillusioned by exposure to the lives and careers of their faculty advisers.

There's a breakdown of the study into various subject areas, and you may read that for yourself.

But the implication to such a shift is interesting, and something that I've tried to instill into students who are interested in majoring in physics.

Instead, we should all be worrying about the difficulty Ph.D. graduates often have locating jobs in, and making transitions into, some of those other work sectors that they appear to view favorably. We also need to worry about whether science careers in any sector are sufficiently rewarding, remunerative, and stable to justify the long time investment, the frustrations of training, and the forgone earnings; if they're not, we can't expect the most capable young people to choose careers in science. Instead, they'll choose other careers with better prospects, like finance or figuring out how to make people click on banner ads on Facebook.

We should also worry about whether those students are receiving the training they need to compete for jobs in sectors beyond academia. Our graduate programs already do the most important thing extremely well: The best way to convey strong analytical skills is to teach students to be outstanding researchers. But there is plenty of room for improvement when it comes to even the most basic professional skills.

Definitely! It is a FACT that there aren't that many tenure-track faculty positions in most fields, and this includes physics. Students going into such fields with the sole aim to obtain such a position need to have a reality check so that they can best prepare for other possible careers.

Zz.

Physicists Can Detect If You Are Texting While Driving

Ah, the joy of statistical analysis.

Soon, there is a way to know if you are texting while driving (and hopefully, haul your rear end off the streets). Physicists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory can now look at how your text output is being affected by your driving, and can accurately predict if you are texting while driving.

People who are texting "time-share" their attention between driving and texting, Watkins said. They look down briefly and then up again to check the road.

When Watkins compared the keystrokes from driving and nondriving texters, the differences were consistent and quantifiable, he said. Drivers text and pause and text again, without the rhythm of usual texting.

They didn't say where this research was published, but I think I found it with a bit of searching.

 "Autonomous detection of distracted driving by cell phone" M.L. Watkins et al.  14th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2011.

  

Zz.

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2012/03/21/1873247/pnnl-team-finds-formula-for-cellphone.html#storylink=cpy

Physics PhDs: Skills Used and Satisfaction With Employment

The AIP has released the latest set of statistics on the nature of skills used and job satisfaction for new Physics PhDs in the US from the class of 2007 and 2008.

There's not a whole lot of surprises here. You can see the type of "Scientific and Technical skills" and "Interpersonal skills" that most of these graduates found to be useful. So if you think that you should be left alone and not have to deal with people, then going into physics is not such a good idea.

Zz.

US Physics Graduate Degrees - Through 2008

The latest statistics from AIP is out on the graduate physics degree in the US. This latest data covers up to 2008.

The overall number of PhD being granted has increased since the local minimum in 2004, with the largest movement made by a significant increase in US citizens being awarded PhDs.

Several interesting facts can be seen from the data:

1. It still takes slightly more than 6 years to get a PhD (starting from a B.Sc degree) in the US (Fig. 6). The average is 6.2 years.

2. The largest number of PhDs still comes out of Condensed Matter Physics (Fig. 7). In fact, if one were to count "Material Science" and "Surface Physics" as part of this subject, the number is even larger.

3. The one that caught my eye was Table 6. It asks for a response to the question "“If You Had To Do It Over Again, Would You Still Get a PhD in Physics?” Most US citizens overwhelmingly said yes, either to doing it at the same institution, or at a different institution. However, non-US citizens seem to have a consistently larger percentage of either not wanting to do it all over again at the same institution, not doing a PhD in physics, or even not getting a PhD at all! It would be fascinating to dig a little bit deeper here to see what's going on.

These statistics are always intriguing to read. To me, it is still the most definitive survey of students and professionals in this field in the US.

Zz.

Physics Doctorate - One Year Later

The AIP has just released the result of a new statistics that polled Physics Ph.Ds on the state of their career one year after they received their degrees. The result comes from degree recipients from the class of 2007 and 2008, so the poll was conducted right in the height of the economic crash.

Interestingly enough, the percentage of Ph.Ds in postdoctoral position continues to decline, while those getting potentially permanent position increased. What is also interesting is that, no matter what the unemployment situation is in the US, the unemployment rate of physics Ph.D remained relatively unchanged throughout the years.

Foreign citizens continue to go into the postdoctoral position more than US citizens. Understandably, they do not have a higher percentage that are in a potentially permanent job position than US citizens 1 year after their degrees.

Would be interesting to compare this with the initial employment right after graduation.

Zz.

2008 Roster of Physics Departments

The American Institute of Physics has released the 2008 roster of physics degree-granting departments in the US. The statistics also includes total number of enrollment for both undergraduate and graduate students, number of degrees awarded for that year, and other fun statistics. It appears that the number of students getting their Bachelors degree has remained constant from the previous year, and so is the number of new graduate students.

Zz.