NCI Publishes FY11 Funding Data (R01s, R21s)
05.4.12 by Michelle Kienholz
NCI has joined NIGMS in releasing some of its FY11 funding data, which break down applications and awards by percentile and PI status (established, new, ESI). They introduce the charts and table with a concise statement about “the zone”:
Beginning in FY 2011, NCI adopted a new approach to the selection of grant applications for funding that sets a zone within which nearly all applications are selected for funding. In both 2011 and 2012, that zone extended to the 7th percentile. Beyond that point, all applications are considered, resulting in a final success rate of 15% in 2011.
And they are sufficiently stouthearted to accept comments.
Storytelling and Responsibility In Science and Other Ecosystems
04.19.12 by worden
This is an old essay, but I haven't posted it on here. It has to do with what scientific models do when released into the world, family metaphors, horizontal and vertical structures, theories of Darwinian selection, subverting the hierarchy of sciences, and using modeling practices to open spaces of freedom and mutuality.
This first appeared as the intro chapter to my Ph.D. dissertation, in 2003.
Findings of Research Misconduct
04.19.12 by Michelle Kienholz
Notice is hereby given tha ORI has taken final action in the following case:
Based on the report of an investigation conducted by Oregon Health Sciences University and additional analysis conducted by ORI in its oversight review, ORI found that Peter J. Francis, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Casey Eye Institute, OHSU, engaged in research misconduct in research reported in two grant applications, R01 EY021214-01 and resubmitted as R01 EY021214-01A1.
Specifically, ORI finds that the Respondent fabricated results of a pilot experiment in which he claimed to have injected retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells obtained from Rhesus monkey embryonic stem cells (ECS) into a strain of rats (RCS) that develops retinal degeneration.
Respondent claimed that after the injection of ECS-derived RPE cells 21 days postnatal, the rats were tested at day 60 postnatal for optomotor acuity, and that the retinal histology of eyes receiving ECS-derived RPE cells, compared to mock-injected controls, showed enhanced photoreceptor preservation and no adverse effects. Respondent admitted that this experiment had not been conducted either by the time the original grant application had been submitted or by the time the later R01 EY021214-01A1 application was submitted.
Dr. Francis has entered into a Voluntary Settlement Agreement and has voluntarily agreed for a period of 2 years, beginning on March 29, 2012:
(1) To have his research supervised; Respondent agrees to ensure that prior to the submission of an application for US PHS support for a research project on which the Respondent’s participation is proposed and prior to Respondent’s participation in any capacity on PHS-supported research, the institution employing him must submit a plan for supervision of Respondent’s duties to ORI for approval; the plan for supervision must be designed to ensure the scientific integrity of Respondent’s research contribution; Respondent agrees that he shall not participate in any PHS-supported research after 60 days from the effective date of this Agreement until such a supervision plan is submitted to and approved by ORI; Respondent agrees to maintain responsibility for compliance with the agreed upon supervision plan;
(2) that this supervisory plan provided by any institution employing him shall provide assurance that each application for PHS funds, or report, manuscript, or abstract involving PHS supported research in which Respondent was involved was based on actual experiments or was otherwise legitimately derived, that the data, procedures, and methodology were accurately reported in the application, report, manuscript, or abstract, and that the text in such submissions was his own or properly cited the source of copied language and ideas; and
(3) to exclude himself from serving in any advisory capacity to PHS including, but not limited to, service on any PHS advisory committee, board, and/or peer review committee, or as a consultant.
Standardized Process for JIT Requests & Electronic Submission
04.2.12 by Michelle Kienholz
I should leave the country more often. Last Friday, the NIH released a notice indicating that to:
reduce application confusion and to minimize requests from NIH staff for JIT submissions, NIH is revising its business processes so applicants will have better information on when JIT submissions are required …
Hallelujah.
Specifically:
Beginning April 20, 2012, applications receiving an impact score of 40 or less will receive a standard notice and request for submitting JIT information … Notices will be sent via e-mail from NIH eRA Commons to the PI 2 weeks after release of the impact score …
They make it clear that this threshold is not intended to reflect the payline of any IC and that they will “review the JIT notification trigger level to determine if additional adjustments are needed to improve the process.” I assume PIs with applications scoring above 40 to be funded by exception will be asked by their PO to submit JIT via the live link available for all applications on eRA Commons, which the notice also takes care to explain does reflect likelihood of funding or any genuine need for JIT submission:
For all applications, the eRA Commons JIT link will be opened and available for submission of JIT information within 24 hours after the impact score has been released. … Since the JIT link will be available for all applications, applicants should not rely on this as an indicator of the need to submit JIT information; instead they should rely on the JIT notification described above and any specific requests from NIH staff.
My thanks to OER for this simple but very helpful adjustment to this process.
As a reminder, JIT information is needed “at least 60 days before the applicant’s proposed project period start date (or sooner if requested by the IC)” and includes:
- Current Other Support: Provide active support information for all individuals designated in an application as senior/key personnel—those devoting measurable effort to a project. Other support includes all financial resources, whether Federal, non-Federal, commercial or institutional, available in direct support of an individual’s research endeavors, including but not limited to research grants, cooperative agreements, contracts, and/or institutional awards. Training awards, prizes or gifts are excluded. Sample format pages are available (Word or PDF), however, there is no specific form provided to report on “Current Other Support.” Effort devoted to projects must be measured in person-months.
- For all senior/key personnel, provide details on how you would adjust any budgetary, scientific, or effort overlap if this application is funded.
- For Career Development Award applications, information on all active support for the candidate, sponsor(s), co-sponsor(s), and Senior/Key Personnel may be requested by the awarding component prior to award.
- IACUC Approval Date: If the proposed project involves research using live vertebrate animals, the verification date of IACUC approval along with any IACUC-imposed changes must be submitted. Pending or out-of-date approvals are not acceptable.
- IRB Approval Date: If the proposed project involves human subjects research, the certification date of IRB review and approval must be submitted. Pending or out-of-date approvals are not acceptable.
- Human Subjects Education: If the proposed project involves human subjects research, certification that any person identified as senior/key personnel involved in human subjects research has completed an education program in the protection of human subjects must be submitted.
- Human Embryonic Stem Cells (hESCs): If the proposed project involves hESCs and the applicant did not identify an hESC line from the NIH Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry in the application, the line(s) may be submitted as an “Other Upload” file.
- Other Information Requested by the Awarding IC: Additional JIT information (i.e., revised budgets, changes to the human subjects, or vertebrate animal sections of the application) may be requested by ICs on a case-by-case basis. These should be submitted as an “Other Upload” file.
Certifications:
pausing; negotiation; persuasion; silence
03.31.12 by worden
Because of health problems, I need to postpone the final stretch of this month's research for a little while. I hope to pick it up again before long, possibly in May. When I do, I'll do some more research and writeups, send out the gifts for contributors, and do a closing assessment of what happened and what's to come in the future.
Meanwhile I want to give you this citation:
S. Conry, K. Kuwabara, V. R. Lesser, R. A. Meyer, 1991, Multistage
Negotiation for Distributed Constraint Satisfaction.
This paper describes how a crowd of machines is programmed to find a collaborative solution to a complex routing problem. First they identify a number of problem-solving goals; then they unpack those into subgoals; then they propose various solutions to goals and subgoals, investigate the solutions in different combinations, find out how they conflict with each other and work out how to resolve the conflicts. If there's a way to solve the problem they are guaranteed to find it. But there's more! If there isn't a solution because there are too many constraints, they will decide together which goals to abandon, and then solve the remaining ones.
This is a rich and powerful framework that has a great advantage for my purposes, which is that the problems, goals, subgoals, and solutions are very clearly defined and ready to use in silico. I'm interested in seeing if I could develop this system into a framework for comparing different processes of deliberation.
Being a standard constraint satisfaction setup, though an especially interesting one, this system probably doesn't incorporate any of the complicating factors I've been identifying. These computer programs were created to solve the problem at hand, they know exactly what process to use to do it, and none of them will ever consider working against that top-level goal, unlike people, who have many different goals affecting the deliberation at hand. Also, they will never change their preferences (except at the one stage where they abandon excessive goals) or need to engage in debate or argument. I haven't even worked out what the key questions are about race, gender and class dynamics, but it's clear they aren't going to show up in this model as is. But it might be a good starting system to bring these complications into.
Speaking of changing preferences, I'm shocked that I've missed the main point before now. The key word is persuasion:
The model assumes that political preferences are not rigidly fixed:
that a critical mass of individuals might shift their support from
majority to minority or vice versa depending on the arguments and
appeals presented to them.
J. H. Read, Majority Rule versus Consensus: The Political Thought
of John C. Calhoun
Political scientists seem undecided about whether persuasion consists of people revealing information to one another, or introducing ways of interpreting known information, or whether there are other cases. I'm thinking there are other cases, because I'm skeptical that political decision making is entirely rational.
It would be great to know when and how persuasion happens, but I can also work with it without knowing. A bare-bones approach would be to make a range of quantitative assumptions about who persuades whom and when, taking persuasion to mean that the listener's preferences change to match the speaker's, and seeing how that affects the outcome of the process. In the constraint satisfaction framework this persuasion would mean that an agent abandons some constraints and/or takes on some of the other agent's constraints.
I've been wondering whether to add another item to my list of complications: what happens when a participant isn't at liberty to say certain things openly. This can lead to people trying to influence the process without being forthcoming about their reasons and desires. This also connects to some of the other items, though. For instance, the questions about deliberation in the presence of racial, gender, and other differences have something to do with when people feel they can speak openly. In this way, that question probably relates to Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" and Habermas's work on ideal speech situations. Academic namedropping aside, though, I still don't have much to say about that. I'm definitely hoping to do more with it.
My reading includes Peter Taylor and Jeremy Szteiter's brand new book, Taking Yourself Seriously: Processes of Research and Engagement, on how to engage with resources, scheduling and other people in the service of effective research, and Marianne Maeckelbergh's The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalization Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy. Neither of these was available from the university library, so I bought them using the funding you have so graciously provided. Your support is very important in this project, and very much appreciated.
This'll be the last pseudo-weekly update for now, until we resume, but by all means keep in touch. Your responses and encouragement have been very welcome.
the week in review: slow process, nogoods, disruption
03.20.12 by worden
[Summary: I've been meeting with people and doing my reading. Does anyone have suggestions about how people's minds change and how structural inequalities play out in deliberative settings?]
Another week of wondering about the possibilities of populist process has passed...
I've been following up the pointers I mentioned last time. Much of the time from Thursday evening to Sunday evening I was at the unconference on horizontal organizing in San Francisco, which I mentioned. It was interesting and challenging in several ways. I met fascinating people with stimulating new ideas, and I also enjoyed the unconference format, which directly encourages all the people present to take responsibility for determining what's going to happen: I found that personally challenging and useful, as it pulled me out of my habitual orientation, which can include waiting to see what's going to happen and whether it's going to include something I want or not.
I'm still thinking over the conversation that happened there on the last day, when a lot of people from Occupy SF were present and talking about the Occupy movement in general. It confirmed my perception that most of the interesting decision making tasks that Occupy faces are far too deep, divided, and long-term to be addressed by the usual consensus-process meetings with proposals, concerns, amendments, and blocks. They require some kind of slow, ongoing, inclusive deliberation. Of course, these conversations happen all the time, informally and in print, but I'm definitely concerned that there's a lack of structure to hold that and help it happen in a positive, effective way. So I'm interested in wondering what could fill that need. I also think that Occupy's assemblies and other meetings often draw a lot of people who are feeling a strong need to be heard in their suffering and acknowledged as valid people with something to contribute - and rightly so - and it would be very good to have processes that directly address those needs, helping to reduce the demands on the deliberation process, which can't generally address them.
I had hoped to move fairly quickly from reading to developing something new, but I'm going to continue reading and having conversations for now. I'm learning a lot, and I think it's probably the best approach right now.
I'll see this message out with updates on the 4 forks in the road that I identified last time.
On modeling the simple case of collective deliberation with fixed preferences as a constraint satisfaction problem: I'm intrigued by distributed constraint satisfaction algorithms - Yokoo and Hirayama 2000, "Algorithms for Distributed Constraint Satisfaction: A Review" - in which a cluster of computers work together to solve constraint problems with millions of variables. They construct "plan fragments" and pass little messages to each other called "nogoods". A "nogood" is a particular thing that's been ruled out: for instance, if we're looking for a congenial pizza, and I won't eat pineapple with garlic and you won't eat clams without garlic, at some point we may figure out that it's not worth considering clams and pineapple together. So we can pass on that news to everyone else as a "nogood". I want to delve into this in more detail and see whether there are interesting things people can do with that framework, as an alternative or supplement to the ideas of proposals, concerns, votes, etc.
On strategy and self-interest: two main sources so far.
Landa and Meirowitz, 2009, "Game Theory, Information, and Deliberative Democracy". Given a particular context and process for deliberation, when do participating agents have incentives to share information fully and truthfully, and when will they gain by dissembling or withholding. For instance, when different agents want different outcomes (some are for invading Iraq and some against, for instance), agents' incentive is to say whatever will influence people to vote the way they want, whether it's truthful or not. If everyone wants the same thing, on the other hand, for instance to stop a beloved building from collapsing into the sea or something, then all may have an interest in sharing what they know truthfully. Several more complex scenarios are also discussed.
Vannucci and Singer, 2010, Come Hell or High Water: A Handbook on Collective Process Gone Awry. Discusses lots of ways in which people subvert the process of making good decisions together, from refusing to take time to teach other people how to do certain bookkeeping tasks to conspiring to get someone banned and blacklisted from the group. Many of these behaviors can arise in multiple ways - a person might be doing it unintentionally, unable to imagine another way or out of an unacknowledged emotional need, or might be doing it on purpose to make themselves powerful at the expense of the group. The authors strongly recommend insisting on fair process based in well-defined egalitarian principles even when some people are vociferously opposed.
Vannucci and Singer's book also addresses problems of racial, gender and other equity in collective groups a bit, and recommends rising to the challenge of listening to people who are different and making room for those differences, without getting into excessive hand-wringing about particular isms. I think that this can go a long way, but something more is needed. I've had good conversations with Beth Simpson and Kennan Salinero, who gave me good reading suggestions that I'm going to follow up.
And on how people's approaches and preferences change during the encounter with others, I have a few threads to follow. Kennan suggests that change doesn't come from deliberation, but from a context shift arising from direct experience of the other person, and suggests a book by the Heath brothers, which I'll look into. Jonathan Dushoff suggests that one theoretical way in might be in the observation that people are often willing to accept a proposal if most other people want it, to support "the will of the group". This is a sort of threshold effect, which connects to things he and I have been studying in other contexts (http://leeworden.net/lw/thresholds-1, http://leeworden.net/lw/node/90).
I think I want other ways into this question. Some possibilities seem to include Quine's models of networks of core and peripheral beliefs, Lakoff's ideas about framing, and what I wrote before about Marshall Rosenberg.
I welcome suggestions about changing minds and isms (and everything else).
Week 1: forks in the road; constraints; complications.
03.15.12 by worden
[Summary: in the first week (plus) of the project I have done some conceptual work and clarified connections to existing research on constraint satisfaction problems. I've distilled several important issues to consider in parallel with the constraint satisfaction approach.]
My first-week report for March, a bit late.
I've made a series of steps that I've written up on the research wiki and/or here on the lab notebook blog. Here I'll mostly just list those, and sum up a little.
As promised, I wrote up my thinking about the difference between focusing on a proposal and focusing on a problem:
"Issue vs. proposals", http://leeworden.net/lw/node/115.
Writing it up helped me understand how these two orientations are reflected in the literature on consensus process, and raised at least one new question about a possible reframing of the deliberation strategy as one of narrowing down from generalities to specifics.
To help me take stock of the various possible ways forward that I've noticed along the way, I went over my notes to date and collected all the "things that are left out of the models" in one place:
"Forks in the road", http://leeworden.net/lw/node/118.
Given that list, I've clustered them roughly into two piles, corresponding to two lines of inquiry: philosophical/empirical questions about important aspects of deliberation that aren't acknowledged by the simple model framework I've spelled out; and making sense of the simple model framework and laying groundwork to make sense of whatever complications to it may arise. The simple model framework fits into the field of distributed constraint satisfaction problems, so I plan to look into that literature. The complications I'm looking at right now are about people changing their preferences during the deliberation process; interactions of oppressive institutions such as racism and misogyny with the deliberation process; and the general subject of strategy, in which individuals' interests come into conflict with the common project of finding a satisfactory proposal.
Now I'll be pursuing both branches in the road to some extent. I've already done some good reading about constraint satisfaction problems, particularly Boolean satisfaction, a classic problem in computer science, which I hope to write up soon. I intend to pursue the complications via both literature searching and conversations with people I know, possibly including you.
This past Sunday I had the honor of presenting this project to the Occupy Oakland Research Working Group, a very impressive and productive group of scholars who have been doing surveys, public records searches and investigative work relating to Oakland's finances, police abuses, foreclosures, real estate ownerships, public officials' involvement in the Port of Oakland, and other knowledge relevant to Occupiers. My project is somewhat different, though it clearly has a relation to the goals of the Occupy movement. The conversation was good, productive, and mutually supportive. Here are my notes:
http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/worden/index.php/Consensus_Presentat...
This Thursday I'll be giving a lightning talk at Noisebridge in San Francisco, at the opening of this weekend's horizontal organizing event, as I mentioned last week: http://5mof.net/
More to come!
Slides for tomorrow’s talk at Noisebridge
03.15.12 by worden
Tomorrow (thursday) evening I'll be giving a lightning talk at Noisebridge's monthly 5 Minutes of Fame event. This month's 5mof is connected with the weekend's Represent Yourself unconference, which is relevant to my topic, so it's a good month to go and present.
My title:
Consensus Dynamics Questions.
Here's the slides for the talk: http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/worden/index.php/Consensus_Presentat...
Slides for tomorrow’s talk at Noisebridge
03.15.12 by worden
Tomorrow (thursday) evening I'll be giving a lightning talk at Noisebridge's monthly 5 Minutes of Fame event. This month's 5mof is connected with the weekend's Represent Yourself unconference, which is relevant to my topic, so it's a good month to go and present.
My title:
Consensus Dynamics Questions.
Here's the slides for the talk: http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/worden/index.php/Consensus_Presentat...
My presentation to Occupy Oakland Research Working Group
03.12.12 by worden
Notes on my presentation to the Occupy Oakland Research Working Group, March 11, 2012:
http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/worden/index.php/Consensus_Presentat...