SGU Episode 944

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SGU Episode 944
August 12th 2023
"A hydrothermal vent displaying many red tube worms and white microbial mats." Photo: Schmidt Ocean Institute
SGU 943                      SGU 945
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
It is hard to tell which is worse: the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.
Harriet Martineau, English social theorist
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Masks and sickness, Cara's dissertation

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, August 10^th, 2023, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Hello, everyone.

S: So a few things going on here. First, as you can probably tell, I am sick. I have an upper respiratory infection. I am ill. You know, it sucks.

J: Do you feel really sick or you just sound sick?

S: I do. Yeah, it's one of those. It's like the worst day of a cold, where you have the achiness everywhere and a fever and the nose is running like a faucet.

B: I remember those days.

S: Tested negative for COVID. It doesn't really feel like COVID. It feels more like a summer enterovirus, which is I think what it is. But we just like a few weeks ago stopped wearing mandatory masks in the hospital and this is how long it took me to get sick. I haven't had a cold in three years or whatever. Two weeks after no mask policy, I get a cold.

E: I mean, does that mean you were primed to get it in a sense?

S: No. I just had patients with runny noses sitting in front of me without wearing a mask. That's what it means.

C: Yeah, it just means sick people are sick. It's like teachers.

S: People don't feel obliged to wear a mask.

C: It's like the minute teachers went back to that way.

S: So I tested negative for COVID. I did wear a mask all day. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

C: Yeah. Whenever I have just the slightest weirdness at work, I'll wear a 95 for a few days just to be safe. Because yeah, you're in really close court. Like when I'm doing therapy, it's like closed door, tiny room, one on one for an hour. We're going to catch whatever anybody has if they have something.

S: You're exchanging your microbiota.

C: Oh, yes.

E: Steve, slice a red onion and put it in a stocking and wear it to bed tonight.

S: Okay, sounds good.

E: All right.

S: Thank you, Pastor Evan. Tomorrow is Jay's birthday.

C: Happy birthday, Jay.

E: Happy birthday, Jay. Jay. You made it.

J: I made it, yep.

C: He made it.

E: Again.

S: One more circuit around the sun.

C: Yep.

E: It's good to make it.

S: And Monday, Cara, something's happening in Cara world on Monday, I think.

C: Something's happening in Cara world.

B: Sleep in that day. Take it easy.

E: Yeah. Turn your alarm off.

C: Monday, I'm defending my dissertation.

B: Whoa.

C: Whoa.

E: Oh, my gosh.

C: Can you believe?

S: No.

C: I can't.

S: Do you think everybody out there in podcast land knows what that means?

C: I think they do generically.

E: Yeah, we have a perception.

S: All right, Evan, what do you think it means?

E: You are, you basically wrote a book and you have to get up and orally defend it against a group, a panel, effectively, of people from your field.

C: Okay.

S: Not bad.

C: All right.

S: What about you, Jay?

J: It's a great question because I was going to ask you to clarify that a little bit. From what I understand, they read your dissertation and then they're going to basically shoot holes in it. And you have to sit there and explain to them like everything. And their job is to kind of make it difficult for you to, to you're not just going in saying, yeah, I wrote this, like they're going to be like, what does this mean? Explain this in detail. How do you correlate these two things together? All questions like that, that make you have to really explain your position.

C: Yeah.

S: That's close enough, Cara give us a technical definition.

C: I don't know. So different schools do it differently. My school calls it the FOR, the final oral review. And that is, in essence, their dissertation defense. Some schools call it a thesis. Some schools call it a dissertation. My hunch is that thesis is British and dissertation is American.

S: I also thought thesis was masters and dissertation was PhD.

C: I did too. But my multiple dear friends of mine went to Caltech and they had a doctoral thesis at Caltech. But I think that's Caltech being like, we're like the Brits. I really do. So I'm not sure. I think in some respects, they're interchangeable. But yes, when I did my master's degree, I defended a master's thesis. Now I am defending a doctoral dissertation. When it's published in ProQuest or whatever publishing platform they use, it is called a dissertation. But sometimes they're called theses.

S: So just a quick definition that I find is that a thesis, I think, is the more general term for defending your area of knowledge in a graduate program while dissertation is specific to a PhD.

C: That's so weird that some PhDs still use the word thesis.

S: Anyway, it's all language.

C: Yeah, it's all language.

E: Micrometer, micrometer.

C: Exactly. That's fun. So basically, I wrote this, you put it well, Evan, book. Mine's actually not that long, if I'm being 100% honest.

E: Oh, it's a novella, then.

C: Well, it's long enough that when I first opened the document, I don't know how many pages it is because Microsoft Word has to pitch up.

E: Oh, well, then it's long enough.

C: Give me a minute and I'll tell you. OK, it's speeding up now. It is 185 pages. But we have to remember that includes appendices and references and everything.

S: Which is work. It's not like that's not work.

C: Right, exactly.

S: Appendices and everything is like a huge part of the work. Your literature is huge.

C: Yeah, it's true. So basically, you write this thing, and the way that my university does it, and I think that this has become more common practice, to be honest, which is why I'm not overly stressed about this. Maybe I should be. Is that you have a committee and your committee is made up of different people. Different committees have different compositions. My school requires a committee of at least four. So I have a committee chair. I have a second reader who's on faculty. I have a third reader who's on faculty. And that individual is also a methodology expert. So with psychology research, they can be quantitative or qualitative. And so you need a different type of methodology expert for different types of dissertations. And then you have what's called an external reader, and that's pretty common. So that's somebody from another university who's unbiased, who had nothing to do with your work, who sits on your committee, and they're expected to be a subject matter expert. So I was lucky enough to get somebody who's like a really big deal in the field of gerontology and who's published on end of life stuff before. So that's really great. And then you all convene. And basically, I take, 45 minutes an hour to present my work, make a PowerPoint, go through it, show the lit review, show the research that I did, show the results, show the discussion, the limitations, all that kind of stuff. And then, yes, they ask you specific questions. Why did you choose to do this? Why didn't you do it this way? If you could do it all over again, what might you change? What were some of the things you had control over? What were some things you didn't have control over? And then they usually close the door and go rubble, rubble, rubble, rubble, rubble, and discuss amongst themselves and bring you back in. And then from what I hear, it's always, congratulations, doctor. Maybe not always, though, because some people don't pass, which to me blows my mind.

S: So my, having watched this, my wife go through this process, so I had basically front row seats, even though I wasn't doing it myself.

C: Did you go, though? Did you attend her?

S: No, no, I couldn't do it.

C: Oh, you didn't.

S: But she has a thesis advisor, right? And it doesn't show you a thesis advisor who, made sure she passed. You know what I mean? Like their job is to usher you through that process.

C: They should not get you to this point. They shouldn't be like, sure, we're ready for the defense if your paper is not publishable.

S: If you fail your dissertation, that means they failed because they were supposed to get you to the point where you were ready.

C: And this should be publishable quality, like this should be 100% contributing to the field. This should be contributing to the state of the literature. And so I've already gotten really beautiful and lovely feedback from everybody on my committee, which is really nice. My dissertation went through a few different rounds of edits, but the overwhelming feedback was just really positive and really supportive. And so I'm excited about that.

E: So is this more of an exercise or is, what's the net positive coming away from having to orally defend?

C: So there's a couple different things that can happen. For some people, it's the first time everybody is in a room together. And so because of that, things come up that didn't come up before, because each of your committee members should have read it and given you feedback individually. But now you've got a group of colleagues that are sitting down going, oh, yeah, maybe if this, maybe if that, what about that? So it is important to some extent that you're all together and having a discussion. And also, your paper doesn't have to be locked in by the time you defend it. Mine is as close as I can possibly get it. But things will come up during the defense that I can then further dial in.

S: Before you submit it for actual publication.

C: For proofreading, exactly. Yeah. So like you, they call it the final draft that at my university, at least they have to approve my final draft before we can even schedule the defense. But the final draft is not actually final. It's like VF point one. So if anything comes up during the defense that they want me to tweak or that we all agree would make the most sense to tweak, I can still do that before I submit it to proofreading.

S: It's like peer review in a way.

J: How often do people actually legit fail this process?

C: I don't think it happens often at all, but I'm sure it does happen. And I'm sure that when people do fail, like Steve, you were saying it's a failure of the committee. It also probably, I would assume, has more to do with personality problems with like people being like, well, no, I'm just going to push forward anyway, like just like not listening to the advice that they're given.

S: Again, from watching the process, my sense is that you don't fail like at your defense. The defense is kind of the formality cap at the end. But with people who fail to get their PhD, they never get to defend it because they didn't get to that point. They just never finished their project or they never got to the point where their advisor said, yes, you're ready to defend.

C: And I think for me, what I find is really interesting is among a lot of my colleagues who are significantly younger, right, because I'm doing this later in life, this part stresses them out to no end because I think a lot of people have a fear of public speaking. Or they have a fear of feeling, how do I feel confident about my work? And it's so funny to me because this part's the easy part for me. Like I did the hard work already. Like anything they ask me, I know the answer to because it's my research. You know what I mean? Like I did it. I wrote the damn thing. And so for me, and also I'm a professional science communicator, like I do this for a living.

E: Yeah, I can't undersell that.

C: A hundred percent. So even though there's like people are like, oh, it's the defense. It's so stressful. It's so stressful. I'm like, no, no, no. The stressful part was writing the damn thing. Like I'm good to go now. So I'm excited.

S: Hundreds of hours of work that got you to this point.

C: Yeah, seriously. It's so exciting to me because it's just one more checkbox. So once I finished this on Monday, I have two more weeks of seeing patients and then I have one week of paperwork and then I'm done with my internship, which is the last requirement to earn a PhD in clinical psychology.

S: And you get awarded a PhD on a specific date that you know yet or no?

C: The way that they do it is it's not about graduation day. They award it to you the last day of your internship if everything else is submitted.

S: Got it. It will be for you, right?

C: It will be for me. Yeah. I shouldn't have so many changes that it doesn't take a few days before I push it through to the publisher or the proofreader. So for me, yeah, I'm lucky. A lot of my colleagues are in a really weird boat where our internship ends on August 31^{st/sup> and they have postdocs starting September 1st. So they had to take their vacation the last two weeks. They had to save it all year. Take it the last two weeks and everything has to be backdated for early because you can't start a postdoc if you don't technically have a PhD. Like they will not let you be a postdoc if you don't have a doctorate. So they had to do some like weird manoeuvring in order to make that work. But I'm lucky I don't start until January for my postdoc. I get to take time off and chillax. Yeah.}

S: All right. Well, congratulations. We'll keep us updated this last few weeks of the process.

C: Will do.

"5 to 10 Years" (12:36)

• [url_from_show_notes _article_title_]

• Loch Ness Monster

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

Depression Does Not Cause Cancer (24:59)

• Depression and Anxiety Are Not Cancer Risk Factors

AI vs Robo Calls (35:27)

• A new weapon in the war on robocall scams

J: ... So, let me play for you--

(Cara and Evan chuckle)

C: I hate these.

E: (groans) This is for science, Cara. We have to suffer. (Cara groans)

J: All right. Here it is. [funny sound from "La La Dog" video plays] Oh, sorry. That's not it.

(Rogues laugh)

Cement Supercapacitor (51:27)

• Using Cement for Energy Storage

...We talked in the past^{[link needed]}

Hidden Undersea World (1:01:58)

• Surreal Deep Sea Discoveries Include Glitter Worms and Upside-Down Lakes 

Who's That Noisy? (1:11:36)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Optophone scans letters and converts to audible tones

[Intermittent, musical, mechanical beeps]

New Noisy (1:17:10)

[Background hissing, foreground crackling]

what that noisy is

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Follow-up #2: RFK Jr. on Tik Tok (1:27:28)

C: ... It's like the "Underwear Gnomes". It's like, "Then a miracle happens."

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Science or Fiction (1:36:13)

Theme: Oldest living things Item #1: The oldest extant branch of life is the ctenophores, which go back 700 million years. Item #2: Polypodiophyta, a type of fern, is the oldest extant plant genus at 380 million years. Item #3: The record for the slowest evolving vertebrate goes to the elephant shark (Callorhinchus milii) which has changed little in 450 million years.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Polypodiophyta fern
Fiction	Ctenophores, 700Mya
Science	Elephant shark

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Evan	Polypodiophyta fern
Bob	Elephant shark
Jay	Polypodiophyta fern
Cara	Elephant shark

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:50:05)

It is hard to tell which is worse: the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.  – Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), English social theorist, often seen as the first female sociologist.

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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Today I Learned

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