The limitations of fMRI are not related to physics or poor engineering, and are unlikely to be resolved by increasing the sophistication and power of the scanners; they are instead due to the circuitry and functional organization of the brain, as well as to inappropriate experimental protocols that ignore this organization.

That’s not to say that all is lost, of course. On the whole, Logothetis is pretty optimistic about the value of fMRI, even going so far as to suggest that “MRI is currently the best tool we have for gaining insights into brain function and formulating interesting and eventually testable hypotheses”; it’s just that it’s not perfect by a long shot.  But anyway, there’s much more to the review than I can convey coherently in my current sleepy state, so if you have access to Nature, it’s definitely worth reading.

The Science piece (“Growing Pains for fMRI”) is a much lighter news article by Greg Miller, and it focuses mostly on a controversy that played out in the pages of the New York Times last year. The thumbnail sketch is  that one group of fMRI researchers did some very shoddy “research” on the way people view the different election candidates, and another (larger) group of researchers called them on it.  The exchange then led to a period of widespread soul-searching amongst cognitive neuroscientists, until ultimately, in March 2008, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society imposed a moratorium on publication of all fMRI data until a common set of guidelines for rigorous and ethical research conduct was agreed upon.  Ok, that last part is completely made up. But the point is that the article is a good read, and you should check it out if you can.  It’s not often you hear one scientist say that another scientist’s study was “really closer to astrology than it was to real science” (for the record, I agree with that assessment in this case).

The really striking thing about the program is the sheer amount of money it throws at a select number of students—a projected 8,000 in 2014, with the number of awards gradually increasing over the next six years. It funds graduate students in natural science and engineering disciplines at a level up to $60,000 annually for three years, with applications renewable up to four times. Why the dramatic increase in funding over such a protracted period? From the article:

Critics complain that allowing graduate students to secure major funding for up to 12 years of predoctoral work will encourage complacency and clog up universities with ‘lifers’. Others see it is a necessary step if the US wishes to remain competitive with emerging Asian countries. Dr. Ron Sekubus, chair of the department of public policy at George Washington University, notes that without the funding, American universities would be forced to admit an ever-increasing number of international students in order to buffer against the loss of American students to more lucrative fields such as medicine and law. When international students complete their degrees, they are almost invariably unable to find legal work in the US, leading them to return to their home countries. The long-run outcome of this perpetual ‘brain drain’, Sekubus suggests, is that the US will fall in scientific productivity relative to rapidly-developing countries such as India and China.

When I ask him whether the government couldn’t just solve this problem overnight by allowing more trained foreign scientists to stay in the US once they’ve completed their doctorate, Sekubus’ responds aggressively. “Immigration is not the solution,” he says. “Increasing funding for American citizens via merit-based and non merit-based programs is the solution.”

The reasoning seems pretty straightforward. But as always, the story isn’t as clear cut as the above quote suggests. Here’s another relevant bit from the article:

Tovaz Shikarti, a program officer at the NIH, points out that high levels of predoctoral funding in the sciences make sense within the current cultural context:

“When we sat down to look at it, we couldn’t really understand why the top 5% American graduate students are getting paid less than the bottom 1% of American faculty. American culture is built on the promise of potential; it’s a foregone conclusion that this generation of top students is going to do some pretty remarkable things in a few years. The Pell-Mell grant program is our way of equalizing the situation by honoring the American tradition. You could think of this as an NBA draft for scientists.”

Others don’t see it that way. John Jacobson, a professor of history at The College of Wooster, complains. “I certainly don’t object to students making a livable wage. I was a graduate student once too. But when a first year physics graduate student at Wisconsin makes more than I do as an Associate Professor of Historical Arts at Wooster, I don’t think that’s right. My wife and I are giving serious thought to respecializing in materials science just so we can get a piece of the pie. It’s almost like the government’s goal is to get rid of the humanities and social sciences altogether.”

One of the caveats to the program is that the awards are highly selective–more so than existing NSF and NIH fellowships. There’s a three-stage selection process. The first two are fairly standard: First, would-be Pell-Mell grantees send in an application similar to the one required for the current NSF predoctoral fellowships. In fact, applicants to the NSF program are automatically entered into the Pell-Mell competition if they fill in several new fields on the NSF forms. Second, successful first-stage applicants are subjected to a still more rigorous screening, including close scrutiny of applicants’ transcripts, letters of recommendation, and current institution.

But it’s the final stage that sets the Pell-Mell grants apart from other programs. Successful applicants must not only demonstrate their academic prowess, but must also pass muster in the eyes of a newly-created Human Excellence Review Board (HERB). One of the novel requirements implemented by HERB is that applicants must designate a non-academic hobby as their “special skill”. The goal of this requirement is to encourage applications from well-rounded students with broad interests, instead of automatons who spend all day in the lab living and breathing one narrow discipline.

“What you list as your special skill is flexible,” says Tovaz Shikarti. “There’s no strict criterion our applicants have to live up to.” He notes that when the NIH conducted a limited test run with graduate students at Darthmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania, it received applications from people with skills like lizard hunting, karaoke, and cheese making. “There was even one trapeze swinger,” he says.

If this all sounds a little bit cock-eyed, don’t worry, the government is on top of that too.

When prompted as to whether the Pell-Mell program might not produce bad press for the NIH and NSF at a time when American scientists are complaining about flatlining funding, administrators demur. “We had a serious discussion about that at HERB,” says Aashish Patel, a board member. “Some people wanted to kill the program, to stub it out. But it’s not like we’re sitting around smoking up when we come up with these ideas. They’re serious policy proposals.”

Remember the Sokal affair? Back in 1996, physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper full of clever-sounding gibberish to Social Text, a leading postmodern journal. Shortly after the paper was accepted, Sokal revealed it was a hoax. He pointed out that even a cursory familiarity with physics should have tipped the editors off, since the paper was riddled with ludicrous (and humorous) statements that any qualified reviewer would have been able to pick out. The fact that no physicists were asked to review the paper (on the relationship between quantum gravity and hermeneutics!) was taken to show just how low standards have fallen in some humanities fields.

This week’s Nature has what at first glance appears to be a counter-point: a news article entitled “Sociologist fools physics judges.” Could it be? Have social scientists finally cracked the physical code? Should we celebrate the champions of a new quantum sociology?

Well, not quite. The sociologist in question, Harry Collins, hasn’t actually managed to get a physics article through peer review. Nor has he tried to. What he has done is provide sensible answers (in English, not math) to seven questions related to gravity waves. At least, sensible enough to render a panel of 9 physicists unable to distinguish his answers from those of a real physicists. Based on this result (and a paper to be published later this year in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science–preprint available here), Collins proposes the concept of ‘interactional expertise’: the idea that non-experts can acquire sufficient knowledge of a technical field to converse intelligently.

Personally, I think this idea is something of a stretch, at least with respect to quantitative disciplines like physics. Being able to understand the meaning of physical equations in general terms (and Collins certainly has the background: he’s been studying physicists for 30 years!) doesn’t mean you can pass for a physicist, unless you think being a physicist consists in writing prose answers to canned questions on a relatively circumscribed topic. The Nature article has a nice quote from Sokal in this regard:

Sokal says he is struck by Collins’s skills in physics, but notes that such understanding would not be enough for more ambitious sociology research that attempts to probe how cultural and scientific factors shape science. “If that’s your goal you need a knowledge of the field that is virtually, if not fully, at the level of researchers in the field,” says Sokal. “Unless you understand the science you can’t get into the theories.”

Now it’s probably a testament to Collins’ versatile intellect that he can answer questions on gravity waves at all; but as a demonstration of ‘interactional expertise’ it’s on roughly the same level as early chatbot attempts to pass the Turing Test. The fact that a very simple program like Eliza can fool some people into thinking they’re communicating with a real individual is amusing, but it hasn’t helped us create anything like an AI that can pass for a human under normal circumstances. Similarly, physicists don’t normally display their knowledge in a forum as constrained as Collins’ series of questions. They can use their acquired knowledge and formal skills to generate novel theorems and predictions in a way that a sociologist of physics presumably can’t. So unless one weakens the notion of interactional expertise to the point where it’s almost vacuous, it’s not clear how much interaction can really take place. You simply can’t do physics without being able to do math, and hanging out with physicists for 30 years probably isn’t a good substitute for calculus textbooks–though it may make for interesting dinner conversations.