On gender stereotypes, rocket science and the f-bomb

Rocket scientist dies. NYT obit leads with her cooking skills, husband and kids. Oh just fuck off. nyti.ms/13GUqax HT @stevesilberman
— Ed Yong(@edyong209) March 30, 2013

The above was retweeted by someone I follow this afternoon, and I was interested enough to follow the link to see what the minor uproar was about.

Reading the obituary, I learned a great deal about the contributions to engineering of rocket systems used in satellites and space missions made by an engineer who happened to be a woman. As so often happens when I read obituaries, I was a little sad that I did not know more about Yvonne Brill's accomplishments during her lifetime, but I do feel enriched by having learned something about her life and work.

Of course, the reason that the obituary was pointed out by Ed Yong was because it leads (lede? I'm not a journalist.) off with a stereotype of a women as a cook and mother. I take Yong's outrage to be that because this was first in the article, it must be assumed that we are to think that Brill was foremost a mother and wife and secondarily, therefore lesser, a scientist or engineer.

When people I respect link to other people that I don't follow on twitter, I do want to take them seriously. On the other hand, I have hesitations about engaging with people dropping f-bombs. The chance that the issue raised is too likely to be emotionally charged that I have a hard time judging rationally the actual content of the article.  In this case, I had to reread the article three times so that I felt I could honestly evaluate the problems with this article.

Here's the introduction to the obituary:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said. 

But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

Is there a way that it could have been written to be less offensive?  Let's try this:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.   

Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits. 

That's better.  There's no need to include words like "but" and "also" when we're talking about people's career versus personal life.  The distinction should be obvious to any reader.

Can we make any other improvements?  What if the order of the first two paragraphs were switched?

Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits 

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

I personally feel the argument that starting with the cooking and family life details is implicitly misogynistic to be a little weak. I had to read the article multiple times to make sure I wasn't missing something more than the opening paragraphs. By my count, 16 of the 22 paragraphs were about Brill's work, including being a woman in a male-dominated field. Is she not also entitled to be remembered for what she was like away from the office? By simply reversing the order of the two first paragraphs, the implicit framing of Brill as woman first, scientist second is removed, no doubt.  For me, that's enough to justify a claim that the obituary could have been better written.

But, can we take the outrage down a few notches?  Reading through the conversation following Yong's tweet, it seems that there is a "you're either with us, or you're against us" mentality. No doubt, there are some who just don't get what the outrage is about. Are we trying to raise awareness about how profiles of scientists can be framed in potentially harmful ways, or are we just looking to have outrage for the sake of outrage?

For me, I learned about the life work of a person I had never heard of, and I am grateful I now know a bit about her. But, it was also a reminder why I'm skeptical of emotionally charged tweets. In this case, I clicked through, and was please to learn about Brill. I might have just as easily decided to skip the article because of the language in Yong's tweet.  Frustrated or not with gender stereotypes, I don't believe that the science community is necessarily always better off with outrage as the default reaction.

Why I don't like the "Doppler Rocket"

It's time for me to rethink how we look at the Doppler effect in class.

When I'm working with a class on the physics of sound, whether it is a general physics class or a physics of music class, the Doppler effect is always one of the topics in whatever textbook we are using. Time permitting, we will look at the Doppler effect.  I think it's an interesting topic, and it certainly has important and useful applications in other fields of science: astronomy, medicine, weather, etc.

What I can't stand, though, is the terrible quality of the standard acoustic Doppler effect demos. I'm talking about the demonstrations where you take a sound source and tie a string to it, then whirl the string around your head with the sound source making a circle around you. The class is supposed to hear the change in pitch alternating between getting higher (while the source is moving toward them) and going lower (while moving away from them).

Unfortunately, the demo often has two major flaws with it:

1.) The change is pitch is often within the just noticeable difference (jnd) for non-ear trained musicians.

and,

b.) The change in pitches is almost always overwhelmed by the observation of the relative change in AMPLITUDE.  As the source moves away from the class, it seems to be less loud, and louder as it is approaching the class.

The situation is not much better when the demo is using a "Doppler Rocket" or "Doppler Ball" where a sound source is embedded in a soft ball then thrown or slid along a guide string across the room.  While it is usually the case that the frequency change can be more noticeable with these demos, since the speed of the ball can be high enough to make the frequency be outside the average jnd, my experience has been that the change in amplitude is even more dramatic with the Doppler Rockets.

What to do?  For me, it's interesting. I mean, one of the main ideas in science is that we only want to test one thing at a time. But in this experiment, we seemingly have two inextricably linked quantities that are changing.

I don't have a real good answer for what I want to do to get around these conceptual challenges. I've tried an Interactive Lecture Demo style presentation on the Doppler effect without the success I was hoping for.  I may try that approach again, but I'm sort of leaning towards making the Doppler effect a lab activity where students have to confront the two aspects of the experiment (frequency and amplitude) and tease them out separately.  I'm not sure if that will work at the introductory level, but I'm willing to try.

Weekend book review: The Radioactive Boy Scout

One of the first magazine articles I ever remember reading on the internet was the story of a teenager who wanted to build a nuclear reactor at his home. This was probably in 1998, during the thick of my time in college majoring in physics.  That time, as I recall, was before it was common to have magazine articles online. But Harpers Magazine was forward thinking, and the article was linked to from several nerdy websites that I read daily back then.

I learned about the concept of a breeder reactor, I learned that smoke detectors often used radioactive sources for their operation, and I learned that I wanted to know more about this story.  I was happy to hear that the author of the book had written a full-length book on the topic.

It took me awhile, but I finally got around to reading the book "The Radioactive Boy Scout" a few years ago.  I was not disappointed in the fleshing out of the story, although I was also not surprised that in parts of the book it felt like it was being padded to fill space.

The book was definitely a quick read, and it was worth going back to after years of first hearing the story. 


The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor by Ken Silverstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

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Is Marcus right? (Physics of the Funnies)

 

Here's another comic that I think could be used to spark discussion in a physics class. Some questions that I would want to elicit from my class:

How long is Marcus watching Jason fall?

What forces are on Jason?

How would we characterize Jason's motion? (constant velocity vs. accelerating)

Then, to go Mythbuster's style on the discussion: is the scenario plausible? Of course, it is a comic strip; it does not have to be plausible.  But, if it is not plausible, what conditions would have to be met to get the motion depicted in the comic?

Finally (for this post, at least): is Marcus right in what he says at the end?  Would using less helium make a difference?