June 21, 2010
The Winners of the 3 Quarks Daily 2010 Prize in Science
Richard Dawkins has picked the three winners:
- Top Quark, $1000: Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria
- Strange Quark, $300: The Loom: Skullcaps and Genomes
- Charm Quark, $200: My Growing Passion: The Evolution of Chloroplasts
Congratulations to the winners (I will send the prize money later today--and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today--just send me an email). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Richard Dawkins for doing the final judging.
The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Carla Goller, Sughra Raza, and me. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!
Details about how the 3QD science prizes work, here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 06:00 AM | Permalink
Comments
Congratulations, everyone!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jun 21, 2010 12:10:15 AM
CONGRATS!! A great set of finalists, and an exemplary set of winners :).
Posted by: Christie | Jun 21, 2010 1:13:28 AM
Congratulations to three terrific science writers.
Charm: Your graphics make all the difference.
Strange: I, too, would like to know what made Neanderthals unique.
Top: I like the idea of different cuisines yielding more bacterial uniformity. It's time to sample Moroccan food.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Jun 21, 2010 2:02:50 AM
I feel utterly charmed!
Thanks so much to the good folk at 3 Quarks Daily, to those who voted for my blog post, and of course to Richard Dawkins. I’ve been a fan of his since I first read “The Selfish Gene” back in the seventies, and knowing that he came to visit my little blog and liked what he read is both boggling and thrilling.
They say that you should write about what you care about, and that’s just what I did in posting on the evolution and genetics of chloroplasts. I’ve come late in life to biology, having spent time on a couple of earlier careers. My childhood growing up on the outskirts of Sydney with weekends pottering in the bush instilled in me a love of Australian flora, and that in turn directed me to horticulture. When I studied it, however, I realised quickly that it wasn’t going to teach me the nuts and bolts of how plants work. For that I needed a science degree and so I returned to Macquarie University. After my first lecture in my first biology unit, I knew I was absolutely in the right place.
I want to express my deep gratitude to the biology staff at Macquarie, who have been unremittingly encouraging of my passion for science and general geekiness. Without their support I’d never have had the courage to try writing about biology. In particular, thanks to Dr Adam Stow (the Genetics lecturer for whom I prepared the presentation on which the blog post is based, and who is now supervising my internship in his lab), to Associate Professor Brian Atwell (my planty mentor) and to the Head of the Department of Biological Sciences, Professor Lesley Hughes, who always seems to have time for me. And finally, my fellow student and dear friend, Julian May: thanks for the nomination!
Congratulations to the other finalists and winners. The standard of their work is magnificent, and I feel very proud to be in their company.
Posted by: Margaret Morgan | Jun 21, 2010 3:15:16 AM
So, has Dawkins not written a short commentary on the winning articles as Pinker and all the other judges did last year? That, to me, feels like a bit of a let-down.
Posted by: Adrian Morgan | Jun 21, 2010 4:01:16 AM
Yes, Richard chose to let his choices speak for themselves. I, too, was a little disappointed not to hear a bit of his reactions.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Jun 21, 2010 4:08:17 AM
A full 'acceptance speech' here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/21/i-won-the-3-quarks-daily-science-prize-top-quark-heh/
But basically, mountains of thanks to Abbas and the other judges for their efforts in putting this competition together, to Richard for his decision and for writing The Selfish Gene, a book that's strongly responsible for setting me down my current path.
And as I've said in my post, writing competitions are necessarily subjective affairs and I think everyone who was shortlisted, and even nominated, should feel proud of themselves. It really is astonishing to see work of this calibre, most of which is done in people's spare time.
Posted by: Ed Yong | Jun 21, 2010 6:04:47 AM
So, congrats to the winners. (Especially Ed, who I love). But aren't Dawkins' choices a bit... parochial? All three winning entries are in biology, and two directly concern evolutionary biology. Now, granted, only 2 of the 9 finalists were on topics outside of biology, so the editors surely share some of the blame. (Then again, I thought "MSL: Mars Action Hero" would make it into the top 3 for sure).
Also: the list of finalists is no longer available on 3QD. The link
Posted by: Michael Meadon | Jun 21, 2010 7:29:17 AM
Michael, I can't speak for Richard, but the editors of 3QD do not try to balance physics vs. biology posts, or for that matter men vs. women writers or ANYTHING of that sort. We pick what we think are the best posts. That's it. If by chance one year they happened to all be by the same person even, so be it.
Thanks for pointing out the broken link. I've fixed it.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Jun 21, 2010 7:44:01 AM
Thanks for the reply, Abbas.
I'm certainly not advocating affirmative action for physicist. The point of this exercise, I presume, is to come as close as possible to finding the "real" best three posts. And what is the prior probability of the top three science posts all being in biology? Really small I'd say. (A statistics analogy: the prior probability of selecting 3 Russians at random from the world population is tiny. So if you do end up with 3 Russians - to mix statistical metaphors a bit - you have good reason to think your sample was not representative).
What this suggests, I think, is that the voting stage needs to be refined somewhat to ensure broader 'coverage', and perhaps a broader panel of judges should whittle down the finalists. And, obviously, you should instruct the final judge to be ecumenical, and not just select the three posts that happen to cover horizontal gene transfer...
Posted by: Michael Meadon | Jun 21, 2010 8:41:34 AM
Hey, on the bright side, we managed to cover three continents! :)
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Jun 21, 2010 9:33:52 AM
Many thanks for the prize.
Posted by: Carl Zimmer | Jun 21, 2010 10:43:28 AM
Abbas, I just read a little more carefully -- the design for the Charm Quark badge is YOURS! It's beautiful! And will tone in marvelously with Margaret Morgan's
color scheme... Please show your visual side more often!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jun 21, 2010 5:12:46 PM
I tried to see the last year prize winning essays. The first (Bands of iron) and the third about Hubble are still accessible. The second is not (from the post about prize winners in 3quarks daily
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/the-winners-of-the-3-quarks-daily-2009-prize-in-science.html). I wonder whether it would be possible to give a link that works. Thanks.
Posted by: gaddeswarup | Jun 21, 2010 5:44:32 PM
Wow Michael, what a terrible abuse of probabilistic reasoning. You sound like a creationist who has just learned some elementary combinatorics and is now trying to insert it into every refutation of evolution they can manage.
If you're going to do it, then do it properly. You seem to have bayesian tendencies (although I'm not sure how adding "prior" before you use "probability" helps much in the context you use it. Make it more convincing by throwing in a "posterior" every now and again), so set up two hypotheses, a biased and an unbiased one. Maybe the biased one only chooses biology posts, or maybe it just has a greater chance of choosing biology posts. Whatever. Then get a decent estimate of the frequencies of blog posts by discipline. You obviously can't assume equal frequencies there, and I'm guessing there are more biology posts than those from other disciplines.
Once you've done all that, and assigned priors to the two competing hypotheses, compute your posteriors or Bayes factors or whatever, and then start making accusations of bias. Just don't pretend that a low likelihood under the null hypothesis (I'm not even sure its that low!) implies that some alternative mechanism is at work.
I hope nobody ever lets you do science.
Posted by: Anon | Jul 1, 2010 5:24:39 AM
Wow anon. You need to get out more.
Let's do some more probabilistic reasoning. See whether you can follow along this time. What proportion of science blog posts in the last year has been on horizontal gene transfer? A tiny, tiny fraction. Assuming blog posts on horizontal gene transfer are not magically related to quality, all three winning blog posts being on a single topic - a topic we happen to know fascinates the judge - is at a minimum highly suspicious.
Please do try to think a bit more carefully before getting your statistics panties in a bunch.
Posted by: Michael Meadon | Jul 10, 2010 9:01:28 AM
Wow Michael.
Not only do you suck at statistics (which I notice you don't bother defending), but you also fail at biology. From wiki:
"Horizontal gene transfer (HGT), also Lateral gene transfer (LGT), is any process in which an organism incorporates genetic material from another organism without being the offspring of that organism."
Now please explain how the "Skull Caps and Genomes" article is about that.
Is that tumbleweed I hear?
P.S. I get out plenty. You are the one repeating poorly supported and petty accusations of bias against the organisers of some blog award. Do you have some anti-Dawkins axe to grind? Or are you just upset that your shitty blog wasn't included?
Now for both incompetence and total lack of objectivity, I hope nobody ever lets you do science.
Posted by: Anon | Jul 11, 2010 5:59:05 PM
Ah, yes. My mistake (copied unthinkingly from Zimmer). Two articles concern horizontal gene transfer and the other fairly surprising 'vertical gene transfer' between H. sapiens and H. neanderthalis. Still, not exactly chalk and cheese, eh?
So... at the risk of testing your patience, can you explain why, exactly, I'm entirely wrong? So utterly wrong that I'm stupid for even entertaining my wrong thoughts?
We know Dawkins loves biology. We can see, from reading the other finalists' posts, that Dawkins' choices were not obviously correct. We know (or can reasonably assume that) biology posts constitute a minority of science blog posts. We can postulate, again reasonably, that quality does not correlate with biology. So: we have a potential source of bias in Dawkins' beliefs and preferences. And the articles selected is consistent with the hypothesis that such bias exists. None of this proves bias played a role, but it's pretty suspicious looking. No?... No? Not even a little bit? Really?
Also: why not grow a pair and get out from under that anon?
Posted by: Michael Meadon | Jul 12, 2010 11:52:35 PM
(Note: I don't want to focus too much on Dawkins himself. Too few biology posts made it to the final imo. So, as I suggested earlier, there may be a problem with the wider process, not just the judge).
Posted by: Michael Meadon | Jul 12, 2010 11:54:55 PM
Michael.
>So... at the risk of testing your patience, can you explain why, exactly, I'm entirely wrong? So utterly wrong that I'm stupid for even entertaining my wrong thoughts?
I have no position on your "this competition is biased" conclusion. I just happen to think that you should have really solid evidence before making such accusations. So far you have two arguments so poor you haven't bothered defending them against my objections. It really starts to look like you have some agenda, unless you have a history of being deliberately contrary.
>We know (or can reasonably assume that) biology posts constitute a minority of science blog posts.
My hunch goes the other way, but its not a strong one. Know any way of checking this?
>We can postulate, again reasonably, that quality does not correlate with biology.
Again. Biology is likely easier to popularize, which could easily produce such a correlation, assuming "quality" is even well defined across different blog disciplines.
>So: we have a potential source of bias in Dawkins' beliefs and preferences.
And
>Note: I don't want to focus too much on Dawkins himself. Too few [many?] biology posts made it to the final imo.
You don't think the above juxtaposition looks a little strange? If Dawkins were selecting randomly, picking 3 biology posts would be a likely outcome, yet most of your argument revolves around his bias. So you have some prior that Dawkins is biased. Noted. But the evidence here doesn't seem to go either way, given that the outcome is expected under the null. Do you have priors for bias in the organizers? I don't. And given that our hunches about quantity and quality of biology posts disagree, we need actual numbers before we can evaluate the likelihood of a 7 in 9 outcome.
In summary, you don't have evidence to suggest bias in Dawkins or the organizers, so hold your tongue. So far I think I might have more evidence for your lack of neutrality than you do for your accusations of bias.
>Also: why not grow a pair and get out from under that anon?
As a women, I'd prefer to remain pairless...
To prevent further embarrassment, I suggest your next post contains a retraction and an apology to Dawkins and the organizers, or something useful like data on blog frequency by discipline. I guess this might be asking a bit much...
Posted by: Anon | Jul 14, 2010 8:57:54 AM
Erm... wot?? Are you even vaguely familiar with the literature on cognitive biases? If you were, you'd have known they're universal, pernicious, and ineradicable save by extraordinary efforts. In fact, the existence of such biases is the very damn reason for the existence of the scientific method in the first place. Why the hell do you think we do double blinded trials? Do peer review? Run experiments? Let's take one of these. Was the judging blinded? The voting round certainly wasn't. And, as far as I can see, neither were the semi-final and final stages. And you don't think this is a problem? For all your arrogant strutting about who should and who should not be 'allowed' to do science, if you REALLY think we should assume an 'open-label' judgement on something as subjective as writing quality is unbiased until shown otherwise, you have some serious thinking to do.
If you read my original comment in even an approximately charitable way you'll note that it was (1) rather mild - I didn't take a firm stand, nor did I accuse anyone of bias. I simply noted that the choices seemed rather too parochial. And, (2), I explicitly said there may be a problem with the wider process, not just that there may be a problem with the final stage of judging. (One issue: perhaps biology blogs have more readers so the voting stage favored them).
As for quality, that's a difficult one exactly because it's so subjective. As I've said, I think "MSL: Science Action Hero" should've made it to the final three. With some effort I suspect I could find dozens of posts that are better than some of the finalists. (Ben Goldacre? Steven Novella? PZ? Orac? John Hawks? Cosma Shalizi? Jonah Lehrer? Mo of Neurophilosophy? etc. etc. etc.)
Posted by: Mike Meadon | Jul 15, 2010 3:09:39 AM
I don't know of any really good way to determine the frequency of science blog posts by discipline, but I can think of two possibilities. (1) Counting the proportion of biology posts submitted to Open Lab. And, (2), working out the proportion from self-tagged posts at Research Blogging. Both have problems: we don't know whether either sample is representative, and we run into serious definitional issues on 'biology'. But, hey, they're a start. I quickly looked at RB, and, of the last 300 posts submitted, ~43% were tagged as biology. I strongly suspect this is an overestimate - for one thing, people seem to add as many tags as possible - but in lieu of further data, this'll have to do.
To prevent continuing to look like an insufferable bitch - and a cowardly one who hides behind anon at that - I suggest your next post... no, wait. I'm tired of this silly debate.
Posted by: Mike Meadon | Jul 15, 2010 3:10:26 AM
Hey Fatty
>Let's take one of these. Was the judging blinded? The voting round certainly wasn't.
You are complaining about bias that favored biology posts. Now you suggest blinding. You want the judging blind to... the content of the blog posts? What did I say about embarrassing yourself?
>if you REALLY think we should assume an 'open-label' judgement on something as subjective as writing quality is unbiased until shown otherwise, you have some serious thinking to do.
So you admit that your arguments attempting to show that the judging results indicated bias were just a cover for your existing prejudice/prior? Awesome. Then I'm done.
Posted by: Anon | Jul 15, 2010 5:31:55 AM
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