You've probably never noticed this, but fathers are treated differently than mothers.

Facebook post from a guy I knew in college: “[Name] is beat from picking apples and carrying children all day.” His mother posted: “Dads like you are rare!” I was tempted to write something snarky about how fathers who spend time with their children aren’t rare in my world, where most of my friends wouldn’t consider having kids with someone who wasn’t willing to be a co-parent, and that men shouldn’t be given pats on the back for doing what ought to be expected. I managed to refrain (it’s his mother, after all, and I can give her the benefit of the doubt and pretend that she just wanted to tell her son that she’s proud of him and wasn’t thinking about her word choice) but it was difficult. When I see women posting similar things they get comments like “isn’t fall fun?” or “but aren’t kids worth it!”

It’s most noticeable to me when Facebook-ers are expecting children. Women can’t post anything without people mentioning the baby. “I had an avocado for lunch” will get comments about how they should eat more, or the unsaturated fats are so good for their fetus, or they’d better be careful so they don’t gain too much weight, or to enjoy it while they still got to eat with two hands. Men’s impending parenthood is generally ignored. A friend of mine who posted about his baby for two trimesters was kind of ignored; he’d put up a status like “Finished sewing curtains for the baby’s room!” and people would comment about his art, his house, anything but fatherhood. It’s so frustrating to see people who quite clearly are not choosing a stereotypical gender-based division of labor to remain externally defined by it. What could a pregnant woman possibly be thinking about other than gestating, after all, and her husband must certainly be more interested in other things, right?

(Incidentally, the research potential of Facebook comments is pretty much untapped; if I were in grad school I’d be figuring out how to use Facebook data for my dissertation.)

I do not however miss tape drives

In fourth grade or so I did an in-depth research project on the Pony Express. My mother suggested I dig up newspaper articles as source material and escorted me to the Schenectady Library (the main branch of our library system). Paper indices of the New York Times were cross-referenced to the boxes of microfilm I needed, but staying on-task once the film was loaded into the reader was near impossible. These were real newspapers from the 1860s! The advertisements! The headlines! Sitting in front of the machine with the stories glowing in front of me, the film whirring as I skipped forward and back, heightened the sense of time-travel.

The process became somewhat less exciting as my academic career progressed; looking up 20-year-old academic articles isn’t quite so fascinating. But in graduate school I worked in the library’s microfilm department and was again enchanted. Most people were too lazy to get their articles themselves so they sent in a request and paid me to do it. I’ll admit to occasionally being glad when they wanted something from the less time-consuming microfiche collection. But the process of seeking out articles on all subjects from all eras was made more romantic by the pages of the microfilm flying by, and I became adept at stopping on the right page on the first try.

Long periods of reading microfilm is awful on your eyes; storage and retrieval is space and time inefficient. But it gives me the same pleasure as a few other time-consuming anachronisms- darkroom work and mixed-cassette-tape production come to mind. There’s the visceral pleasure in the process itself plus the technical pleasure in accomplishing something that requires some work- it gives a sense that you’ve Done Something, not just hit “print” after using a search engine or clicked an icon in Photoshop. I miss it.

(Reminded by this.)

yes, I'm conducting a literature review

Most researchers have a financial incentive to obtain positive study outcomes. I don't have direct incentives, but my research center will not continue to obtain grants if we don't make our funders happy. And our funders are, for the most part, trying to maintain their jobs, which means the programs they run need to be funded and they don't want to risk this funding with bad news.

Even if researchers are not financially tied to positive study outcomes, they often are emotionally tied to the programs under study. Many of our funders are completely convinced that the programs they oversee "work," and no research would ever convince them otherwise, even if their jobs weren't on the line. It doesn't take too long to get emotionally invested in a project.

So we come up with something nice to say in our reports even if we don't find anything positive. And even though we own the rights to all the data we collect (one thing SUNY insists on when accepting grants), we don't publish anything negative or null results (in our case, usually meaning that an intervention did not have an effect).

Null results are rarely published even in more purely academic settings simply because such studies are often less interesting to read. They're much more likely to be rejected by top-tier journals unless they're refuting something previously published and have a larger sample or better design. Both of my published papers are of null results and we didn't even bother submitting them to prestigious journals.

This is a problem because 20 people could conduct similar research and even if only one gets statistically significant results (which with a 95% confidence interval is likely to happen by chance), that one paper is likely to be added to the published literature and all the others trashed- if not by journal editors, then by the researchers themselves who won't trouble to write and submit a paper that's unlikely to get into a good journal when they could be spending their time on more effective career-building activities. Meta-analyses of published work are becoming more popular; to compensate for small sample sizes in research on a particular topic, they collect all the decent published studies on a topic and analyze them as a whole to see if they have statistically meaningful results. Problem is, meta-analysis can not compensate for publication bias.