And it is a kind of good deed to say well; And yet, words are no deeds.

After this year's Nobel prize winner and editor of glam mag eLife Randy Schekman announces a boycott to (other) glam magazines, several interesting comments appeared through twitter. This pursuit for glam hits close to home since I've seen first-hand the transition of arguments from "it's a sad necessity" to "that's how it should be done, space is limited" -- even without realizing that this scarcity is artificial.

What is wrong with scientific publishing and how to fix it. : gg

Ok, so let’s assume tomorrow morning CNS cease to exist. They close down. How does this solve the issue? It doesn’t. CNS are not damaging Science. They are simply sitting on the very top of the ladder of scientific publishing and they receive more attention than any other journal. Remove them from the top and we have just moved the problem a bit down the ladder, next to whatever journal is following.

I think you might be a hypocrite | opiniomics

I wrote a blog post recently called “We didn’t ask for it”, and in case you missed the subtle nuance (!) of the post, what I was trying to say is that if you’re an established scientist, a tenured professor with hundreds of peer-reviewed papers behind you, and especially if you’re a man, you don’t get to tell people like me that the system is broken, because you’re the one who broke it!!!

I disgree with many points of the text above, but the idea is sound. It's not about pointing fingers (why can't men complain about gender issues? By being born a man you're at fault?), it's about talking the talk and not walking the walk. Which applies equally to politicians alike.
An Alternative to Schekman’s Boycott of Luxury Journals | Telliamed Revisited

Now let’s make a few small changes. I don’t think the words I’ve substituted are any less true than those that Prof. Schekman wrote.  I’ve changed only those words in italics:

“These luxury universities are supposed to be the epitome of quality, training only the best students. Because funding and appointment panels often use place of degree as a proxy for quality of science, obtaining degrees from these institutions often leads to fellowships and professorships. But the big universities’ reputations are only partly warranted. While they produce many outstanding scientists, they do not produce only outstanding scientists. Neither are they the only producers of outstanding scientists.”

So, will Prof. Schekman and his group also avoid luxury universities, and will he encourage others to do the same?

The problem is not the existence of glam journals, it's a system that gives disproportionate weight to them, and our even more unreasonable preference for such venues. So we cannot blame the overhyped magazines for making all kinds of arbitrary demands and creating schizophrenic standards. We crave for them, and we are willing to inflate our claims and to distort the narrative of our manuscripts, to divide our work's ouput into as many papers as we can, to avoid risky research and to follow bandwagon subjects, and to reject other people's manuscript for the quaintest disagreement (as e.g. their failure to inflate the claims and to distort etc.)

BTW, this discussion reminded me that it should be a concern that more and more scientists are not ashamed of parading their economic ignorance (instead of, let's say, recognizing our limitations as we should in all academic areas we have no first-hand expertise). It will certainly hurt us in the long term, first because we start to resemble creationists: refuse to study for fear of perceived consequences, reading instead excuses created by equally ignorant others; rejection of recognizing the field as a science, laying ground for an alternative but "inconvinent" version of the field; claim that knowledge of this 'deeper' version excuses the lack of familiarity with the field; lack of capacity to pass a first-year course on the discipline. Second, because people versed in the discipline may have less incentives to take us seriously (in the same way as we ignore claims made by quacks), and they will just stop listening.
To finish on a lighter tone, two nice tweets commenting on the boycott:

I don't see wher the big fuzz is, i've been doing this boycot ever since i've been doing science... http://t.co/uQMb9o0J3F
— Yves Clement (@TwelveSharp) December 10, 2013

Nobel winner declares boycott of top science journals http://t.co/94otcwRYkp via @guardianscience In other news, lotto winner quits job. — Jim Woodgett (@jwoodgett) December 9, 2013

Some links about fisheries and the tragedy of the commons

(Just to complement our lunchtime discussion, I wanted to take a look at a few articles)

One solution to global overfishing found

One of the unexpected results of the study revealed that co-management benefits the wealthier people in the local community, although it is not detrimental to the poor. "In other words, the main benefits tend to trickle up to the wealthy, rather than trickle down to the poor," Dr Cinner added. "Nevertheless, most people felt that they benefitted." The team found that the institutional design of the fishery management arrangement was vital in determining whether or not people felt they benefited from co-management and were willing to work together to protect fish stocks by complying with the rules.

Ending the oceans' 'tragedy of the commons'

Fishers and scientists had been working together on the problem for some years, sharing knowledge and building trust. This led to the trialling of new co-operative models for fishery management, based on the latest that science can reveal about the state of the fish stock and the surrounding marine ecosystem. The result is a revolutionary national system of marine tenure that allocates user rights and responsibilities to collectives of fishers.

The tragedy of the commons in international fisheries: An empirical examination (Journal of Environmental Economics and Management Volume 57, Issue 3, May 2009, Pages 321–333)

The results of my ordered category estimation indicate that the probability of a fish stock being over- (under-)utilised rises (falls) with the number of countries sharing the stock. This negative effect of sharing is apparent when stocks are harvested from either large or small portions of nations’ waters, suggesting that access is all that is required to have an effect on stock status. In addition to the detrimental impact of international sharing, some economic and biological characteristics affect stock status, for example, higher valued and slower-growing stocks face further exploitation pressure.

The future of the sea: Fish food | The Economist

Trying to farm a fish just because there is an established market for it is a waste of time and money, argues Mr Greenberg. Farm animals were domesticated because they were suitable to begin with, and only got more so over time. Aquaculture will only work, environmentally and economically, with the right sort of fish. So far the search has turned up two good freshwater options—tilapia and the Vietnamese Pangasius or river cobbler. A marine version may still be out there. The prize is a form of protein that is far cheaper and more efficient to produce than meat.

Fisheries are Classic Example of the "Tragedy of the Commons" | PERC – The Property and Environment Research Center

Fisheries provide the classic example of the tragedy of the commons, which occurs when property rights are incomplete and access to a resource is open. The migratory nature of most fish species makes it difficult to establish and protect rights to fish in the sea, so the rule of capture prevails. The result is often overexploitation of the resource. Economists long have argued that the waste associated with this problem could be reduced if we "privatized the commons," that is, created individual private property rights for common-pool resources.

The tragedy of the commons in a fishery when relative performance matters (Ecological Economics Volume 81, September 2012, Pages 140–154)

This paper presents a simple model of a common access fishery where fishermen care about relative performance as well as absolute profits. Our model captures the idea that status (which depends on relative performance) in a community influences a person's well-being. In our main specification, relative performance depends on the absolute difference in after-tax profits. We show that overharvesting resulting from the tragedy of the commons problem is exacerbated by the desire for higher relative performance, leading to a smaller steady-state fish stock and smaller steady-state profit for all the fishermen. We also consider alternative specifications where status depends on the absolute difference in harvests or relative difference in profits, or where there is heterogeneity in the degree to which status matters, or allowing for the possibility of extinction. In all these specifications, status further reduces the steady-state fish stock. We examine taxes and an individual quota as policy alternatives and find support for using the direct quantity method to implement the socially efficient stock level.

When companies do it, shame on them. When politicians do it, that's the future.

The Next Frontier of Consumer Exploitation By Corporations

"So what if Google knows where I'm planning my next vacation and suggests hotels for me? Sure, it's creepy, but is there really any harm in companies tracking my info to target ads to me? Professor Ryan Calo (UW law) is out with a new paper that demonstrates the real harm behind these practices, making consumers vulnerable to making decisions that go against their self-interest (ie: predatory lending, price inflation, etc). The Atlantic has an article today that outlines the new research."

Obama, Romney Data Scientists Strike Out On Their Own

"The self-described nerds of President Obama's presidential campaign last year are back using big data analytics, this time to help Newark Mayor Cory Booker achieve a landside primary win Tuesday in the New Jersey Democratic primary for a vacant U.S. Senate seat. The data scientists from Obama and Romney campaigns recently formed their own consulting businesses within months of each other. The chief data scientist for Romney's campaign, Alex Lundry, co-founded Deep Root Analytics. He gives credit to the Obama campaign's data effort in 2012. But since last year's election, "what you are seeing is a flurry of activity on the right to make sure that we not only catch them, but surpass them," Lundry said. Meanwhile, the co-founder of BlueLabs, Chris Wegrzyn, a senior member of Obama's 2012 campaign analytics department, says last year was turning point for big data analytics in elections. "Usually the nerds in the back room don't warrant a great deal of attention, especially in politics," said Wegrzyn, "but the world is changing.""

Update 2014.03.01: I just realized that the same point (about neopopulism) has been made by Henry Kissinger at his talk at Google.

Well-meaning lobbying is eventually supplanted by plain old lobbying

I was just gonna include a link to a commentary on Nature News, but something at the end of the article called my attention. From "Bees, lies and evidence-based policy"(Lynn Dicks at Nature News & Comment):

Yet I also see that lies and exaggeration on both sides are a necessary part of the democratic process to trigger rapid policy change. It is simply impossible to interest millions of members of the public, or the farming press, with carefully reasoned explanations. And politicians respond to public opinion much more readily than they respond to science.

Which is an important point. In fact, one of the most convincing commentaries for me was based on the very understanding that scientists and all their uncertainties are always in disadvantage when compared to the unshakable belief of other policy actors. But I'm at loss about the need to dumb down the arguments in order to convince politicians. And I must disagree strongly with her conclusion, from the same Comment:

It is important to get as near to the decision-makers as possible, providing clear and well-referenced information with an independent voice. (...)
When I saw the exaggerated pollinator-decline claim attributed to me in The Guardian I did not seek to correct it, because the correct information, with references, will go into a forthcoming parliamentary-committee report.

It is shortsighted or worst to think that we can inform policy-makers without trying to correct the public understanding. Our dismaying state of political affairs is in large part consequence of this disconnect between the State as envisioned and as implemented -- governments don't see themselves as having to respond to those they represent, except in a shallow, populistic way. Her attitude might earn her a small immediate victory, but at a high cost in the long term. As scientists, the adoption of our favored solutions by politicians should not serve as a consolation for the maintenance of ignorance and misinformation. A likely outcome is to have an unpopular policy implemented, just waiting to be reverted back or replaced by another opaque and unaccountable one.

Bottom-up advocacy by informed citizens is always a better option than lobbying. If her proposed solution of cozy relations with policy-makers while neglecting the public is successful, we can expect the appearance of a lot of nonsense "correct information reports". It's "cheaper" to fake authority than to educate and convince the general public. In other words, politicians cannot distinguish between good and bad lobbyists. And this, in the end, will lead to a dillution of scientific education and to a politicization of scientists.

Accepting that scientists must work twice as hard to have half the impact is still better than the alternatives. Education is the only way to go (and by the way, science reporting falls short of that, too).

Fannie and Freddie, who could have predicted?

Watching this video and thinking about the dangers of government picking winners and protegees. Some links below (Interesting how we can use the term "deregulation" on government-sponsored, crony capitalist entities)

link para o vídeo no Youtube

The Velvet Fist of Fannie Mae - New York Times -- April 20, 1997

Fannie Mae's fearsome reputation has created the impression in Washington that Mr. Johnson can squelch any meaningful debate over the company's relationship with its Government benefactor. That debate encompasses a regulatory review of whether Fannie Mae should put aside more capital to protect taxpayers against the risk that a ruinous economic spell or mismanagement could lead to a Federal bailout.

Homeowners Record Is Set in Third Quarter - New York Times -- November 01, 1997

In 1995, seeking to save his department from elimination by the newly elected Republican-led Congress, Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros adopted a ''national homeownership strategy'' that eased requirements to qualify for Federal Housing Administration-insured loans and reduced closing costs by as much as $1,200 on those loans for first-time buyers.

A Homecoming At Fannie Mae; Franklin Raines Takes Charge Of a Most Political Company - New York Times -- May 17, 1998

Because much of its success can be tied to financial advantages stemming from its roots as a Government agency, Fannie Mae has a huge interest in holding off political attacks on its franchise. Indeed, the company plays hardball politics with tremendous sophistication to defend its interests.

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending - New York Times -- September 30, 1999

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits. In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. (...) By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.

Big-City Paydays At 'Farmer Mac' - New York Times -- April 28, 2002

Farmer Mac is the country cousin of two much better-known government-sponsored entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Always far bigger, and growing by the day, they have spawned a cottage industry of critics who deride them as costly examples of government do-goodism that could backfire on taxpayers if their implied government guarantees were ever tested. (...)

Wall Street analysts pitch the stock as a ''toddler'' Fannie or Freddie, invoking two names that have made fortunes for investors. Farmer Mac does enjoy many of the same perks. It is exempt from most state and local taxes. Most of all, it pays just over half a percentage point more than the United States Treasury when it borrows. (...)

In 2000, after Mr. Baker proposed overhauling government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac swamped Congress with donations. He soon lost every one of his co-sponsors, according to an aide, and could not get legislation out of his subcommittee. Farmer Mac's spending on political gifts and lobbyists pales next to that of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

2 Big Mortgage Agencies Pressed To Buy More Low-Income Loans - New York Times -- May 12, 2004

The companies have not publicly opposed the changes, which will take effect on July 2 unless the administration rescinds them. But they are quietly worried that they will be unable to meet the new goals unless they refuse to buy some loans from people making more than the median income, in effect slowing their growth. (...)

While the companies are privately owned, they have a special relationship with the government, including a line of credit with the Treasury Department. As a result, investors believe that the government would never allow the companies to fail, and so Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can borrow at lower interest rates than other financial institutions.

The New York Times > Business > Fannie Mae Crisis Raises Concerns on Leadership -- September 29, 2004

Before the the problems surfaced at Fannie Mae, both men were considered to be high on the short lists for top administration jobs should Senator John Kerry prevail in the November presidential election.

A Coming Nightmare of Homeownership? - NYTimes.com -- October 3, 2004

Since regulators disclosed evidence of widespread accounting improprieties at the company, which carries almost $1 trillion in mortgages on its books, the response from the financial markets has been surprisingly muted. (...)

So far, Fannie Mae's rarefied status as a government-sponsored enterprise has certainly helped holders of its debt stay calm. (...) Thanks in large part to Fannie Mae's torrid growth, the market for mortgage securities now surpasses that for Treasury securities.

Chief Is Ousted At Fannie Mae Under Pressure - NYTimes.com -- December 22, 2004

In recent years, some industry and government critics, including Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, have sought to have Fannie Mae's privileges removed. They say the company could pose a significant risk to taxpayers if it became troubled. And the White House, concerned about any political fallout if Fannie were to stumble, has declined to make 5 appointments to the 18-member board.(...)

In the process, it has built a steadily profitable business for shareholders and enriched its top executives. Together with a smaller brother company, Freddie Mac, it holds or guarantees more than $7 trillion in mortgages.

Report on Fannie Mae Cites Manipulation to Secure Bonuses - New York Times -- February 23, 2006

Investigators have uncovered new evidence that senior executives of Fannie Mae, the nation's largest buyer of home mortgages, manipulated its accounting in the 1990's to meet earnings projections so that top executives could receive more than $25 million in bonuses.

reading suggestions from twitter

Marx was no empiricist (and the evidence is against him) lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/john-l… @LRB

— John S. Wilkins (@john_s_wilkins) March 29, 2012

Great diversity in judges. #AllWhiteGuyswHipsterGlasses RT @mbeisen: the NYT wants to know why it's ethical to eat meat nytimes.com/2012/03/25/mag…

— David Dobbs (@David_Dobbs) March 29, 2012

(I'm also experimenting with embedding a tweet)

Let's blame someone for the scientific illiteracy

I just read the article "Why do people reject science? Here's why ..." by Stephan Lewandowsky, and despite I agree with many of his points, the narrative worries me a little bit. Some comments of mine follow below the quotes:

The historical evidence is overwhelming that some of that opposition has been organised by vested interests, often successfully delaying political and regulatory action that posed a perceived threat to corporate profits. The peer-reviewed literature has clearly identified the subterfuge, distortion and manufacture of doubt with which vested interests delayed the control of tobacco, CFCs and sulphur emissions.

"Vested interests" are not restricted to big corps, they also apply to small corps -- even at the individual level. To fingerpoint at money is not enough (to be fair, the author aknowledges it later), and everybody have expectations of profit, not only "corporations". To have some commercial relation does not transform you in "evil", and to be free from it does not mean you are uninterested. Publicly funded researchers may struggle to keep being publicly funded in similar ways as privately funded ones (Lysenkoism was not a "corporate scam", for instance).

The notion of threat is key to understanding the rejection of evidence; whether it’s by vested interests, by mediocre scientists fearful of becoming outdated, or by the public at large when confronted by inconvenient science. (...) Perhaps most relevant to present public debate are threats to people’s “worldviews” – the very fundamental beliefs people hold about how the world should be organised.

But even outstanding, "altruistic" and handsomely rich sicentists (even as a collective body) can be resistant to evidence and "inconvenient science" -- it is part of the regular, skeptical peer review process. When new science comes up most scientists won't laugh in epiphany, and not because they are particularly evil or stupid. Maybe they need to reproduce the results themselves, or they lack the theoretical background for this specific result (scientist do not have priviledged access to The Truth, they also need to RTFM from time to time), or they genuinely demand that the new research programme must improve over existing methods in explaining all existing evidence. An analogous process of healthy suspicion might take place with the public at large, not because they are averse to progress but because we are averse to risk. Since the public may have simplified/incomplete views of the scientific process the outreach becomes more relevant, and be not only politically agnostic but perceived as so -- if you care to educate the public, that is.

Worldviews come in many shades and forms, but one prominent distinction — popularised by Professor Dan Kahan at Yale University — is between people whose worldview is “hierarchical-individualistic” and those whose worldview is “egalitarian-communitarian”.
Hierarchical-individualistic people (HI from here on) believe rights, duties, goods, and offices should be distributed differentially and on the basis of people’s own decisions without collective interference or assistance. Egalitarian-communitarian (EC) people, by contrast, believe rights and goods should be distributed more equally and society should bear partial responsibility for securing the conditions of individual flourishing.
Like all binary classifications, the distinction between HI and EC worldviews lacks nuance and oversimplifies the complexity of human worldviews.

It simplifies to the point of becoming useless -- it is a straw man version of individualism and a very charitable version of collectivism. Let me guess in what camp the distinguished professor wants to sit in...
This is the problem not only with this analysis, but with several other recent commentaries: if we could classify people between good and bad, it would be very easy to blame bad people for whatever problem we have at hand. First, I don't believe anybody would belong to the HI camp thus described (I don't know prof. Kahan's research so I am based solely on this article's description), since even the usual suspects believe in collective interference, and extreme individualism excludes hierarchy. And by usual suspects I mean those nasty ideological opponents that progressives retort to as "the other".
Second, and more importantly, this fixation in highlighting the differences between "us and them" is for me the definition of evil. Of course, recognizing the differences is natural and desirable (e.g. being capable of telling progressive from conservative ideas). But when this is used in a narrative to blame "them",make "them" responsible for something, or simply believing that detecting "them" is enough to solve the problem, we are paving the way for the destruction of empathy. And as everything else in politics, it usually goes well in the short term, but leads to catastrophic consequences...
We may be binary, but we don't fit into one byte.

In light of these data it’s not surprising there can be yawning gaps between scientific knowledge and public acceptance of that knowledge.

We must remember that the scientific community is also part of the public, and thus ignorant on many subjects. The problem then is when they neglect their own ignorance and treat it as part of their knowledge body. For example the scientist with a pretense of economical knowledge when in fact he is ignorant about it, and propose economically inane solutions as if they were part of the scientific knowledge. That is, they cannot see the distinction between descriptive and normative assertions. (To be clear, they are entitled to join the normative discussion, even as "experts", but not to confuse it with facts).
Scientists are great in determining the boundaries of their ignorance within their fields -- that is, they know quite well what they don't know and what can't be known -- but less so about other fields. The recipe to minimize this is to rely on the respective authorities in the field ("Don't know evolution? Then listen to evolutionary biologists. Not sure about climate change? Then read what experts have been discovering"), but for some reason Economics does not get the same love ("Economists? They are all stoopid"). And it becomes a problem when they step on each other's foot, proudly ignorant and certain of having found the problem on "them".

When you start believing "us and them" helps explaining things...

ScienceMag New Focus - Science in Brazil

There are three articles in this week's Science magazine penned by Antonio Regalado, talking about current challenges for Brazilian research. This is the same issue where the famous arsenic bacteria were announced. The abstracts follow below.

Brazilian Science: Riding a Gusher (Vol. 330 no. 6009 pp. 1306-1312 DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6009.1306):

Over the past 8 years, Latin America's largest nation has begun to boom. Its economy is growing fast, and it has become a player in world affairs, reveling in an unprecedented bout of self-confidence. It will host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics 2 years later. The good times are lifting science, too. Between 1997 and 2007 the number of Brazilian papers in indexed, peer-reviewed journals more than doubled to 19,000 a year. Brazil now ranks 13th in publications, according to Thomson Reuters, having surpassed the Netherlands, Israel, and Switzerland. Brazil's universities awarded twice as many Ph.D.s this year as they did in 2001, and thousands of new academic jobs have opened up on 134 new federal campuses. It's a reversal of fortune for a nation that during the 1990s was beset by dire economic problems. But Brazil is not formidable yet; its scientific output trails its ambitions. The country produces few high-impact papers and only a trickle of patents. Its primary and secondary public education system is in shambles, leaving the nation of 195 million chronically short of technical workers.

Talented But Underfunded: Brazil's Future Scientists (Vol. 330 no. 6009 p. 1311 DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6009.1311):

Twenty-five-year-old Reinaldo Sousa dos Santos is a Ph.D. candidate in biochemistry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a resident of Parque União, a crowded favela where residents live under the thumb of a drug gang. Dos Santos owes his journey from shantytown to lab bench to his mentor, Leopoldo de Meis, a 72-year-old professor of biochemistry at UFRJ. In 1985, de Meis began offering a hands-on science course for low-income adolescents called Young Talents. Dos Santos enrolled when he was 14, a year after his father died, leaving him orphaned. Brazil must write thousands more stories like Dos Santos's if it is to overcome deep social divisions and achieve its dream of becoming a major player in scientific research. Many say the task must begin with improving public schools, where poorly paid teachers offer rote lessons.

Tapping a Deep, 'Pre-Salt' Bounty (Vol. 330 no. 6009 pp. 1308-1309 DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6009.1308):

Three years ago, a drill bit struck immense oil deposits deep off the coast of Brazil. Petrobras, the national oil company, tapped undersea fields now estimated to hold about 80 billion barrels of oil and natural gas—about three times the size of the reservoir under Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. It brought the promise of new wealth and expectations that Brazil will climb to the world's top rung of achievement in science and technology. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva once termed the oil strike "a second independence for Brazil" and promised to use the oil revenue for education and public health. But Brazil's R&D sector has been first to benefit.

Two quick notes about science funding in Spain and EU

Austerity measures sap Spanish science - Nature News, 7 October:

On Tuesday, science minister Cristina Garmendia defended her ministry's budget in a press conference, suggesting that it was similar to last year. But overall government expenditure in research and development (R&D) is set to drop by 8.37% next year compared with the 2010 budget, according to an analysis released on Monday by the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies (COSCE).

Europe Aims to Boost Economy in New Innovation Plan - ScienceInsider, 7 October:

Europe has a new plan aiming to ensure that science will get the continent's economy humming again. The Innovation Union, adopted yesterday by the European Commission, is a new attack on one of Europe's intractable problems: research is plentiful and of relatively high quality, but it doesn't as often as desired result in products and services that create jobs and wealth for the 27 member states of the European Union.

The Innovation Union document is billed as the "flagship" of the Europe 2020 plan for economic growth. High in aspirations, the plan proposes a wide range of measures—from bolstering funding for science and radically simplifying the European Unions's own funding procedures to removing barriers to international collaboration.

If that sounds familiar, that's because many of the proposals have been official policy for years; they have just been hard to implement. The so-called European Research Area (ERA), for instance, aims to create a borderless market for researchers. But most grants still aren't portable, and moving to a university 30 kilometers away that happens to be in another country can put a major dent in a scientist's retirement plan as pensions often can't be transferred. (The new strategy says ERA should be completed by 2014.)

The wrong tool for solving political disputes

Excerpts of Daniel Sarewitz's column at Nature News:

Of course, during the regime of Republican president George W. Bush, opposition Democrats got surprisingly good political mileage from accusations that science and scientists were routinely suppressed, flouted or abused on issues ranging from stem cells to air pollution. But the political resonance of this subject has mostly died down during the Obama administration. Could this be because less than 10% of US scientists are Republicans? In any case, the fact is that Obama, like Bush before him, is not sacrificing his political agenda on the altar of science. (...)

The decade-long brouhaha over the politicization of science in the United States reflects an incorrigible cultural delusion: that if science were left alone to speak truth to power, it would exercise a purifying magic on the miasma of politics. The delusion serves politicians, who are free to hand over difficult choices to scientists, as they did with Yucca Mountain — and later with climate change. It also serves scientists, who get to maintain their position of high cultural authority and do a lot of research in the process.

Intellectual Property around the tubes

Helpless Mainstreamers Grappling with Intellectual Property (Stephan Kinsella):

A recent CNET video on “Intellectual property rights vs. journalism” shows a Stanford University’s Innovation Journalism conference on June 7, with a panel discussion by various mainstreamers discussing the quesion “Is intellectual property protection a threat to journalism?” The lack of libertarian principle and sound economics has these commentators floundering as they discuss various cases where IP infringes free speech and freedom of the press. Lacking any principled approach they retreat to legal positivism, talking about how the Constitution protects both freedom of the press and speech as well as IP rights, so some “balance” must be made. Without Austrian economics and libertarian principle, even well-intentioned people, who sense that something is wrong, are helpless before the state’s propaganda and onslaught of legal positivism.

Copyright as a Moral Hazard (Jeffrey Tucker):

You can tell that intellectual property rights are not real property rights just from this very interesting item on BoingBoing, a report on round one of the Google vs. Viacom case. With real property rights, people do not usually go around actively violating their own rights in order to collect from innocent defendants. I’m not even sure I understand how that would work in a case of real property rights. But in this Viacom case:

Filings in the case reveal that Viacom paid dozens of marketing companies to clandestinely upload its videos to YouTube (sometimes “roughing them up” to make them look like pirate-chic leaks). Viacom uploaded so much of its content to YouTube that it actually lost track of which videos were “really” pirated, and which ones it had put there, and sent legal threats to Google over videos it had placed itself.

Why would Viacom have done that if the company really believed that these postings were hurting its business? Perhaps they believed they would help the business: promoting its product and creating an opportunity for legal blackmail.

Was Napster Right?: Is this what they mean by analog hole? (David K. Levine):

Having trouble with DRM on your ebooks? Try this site. The problem with DRM is it encourages piracy. It can always be removed - but it can be a hassle. So: if you are going to distribute it widely it is worth the effort - and if you take the trouble to do it yourself you are so pissed off that you feel a strong temptation to share it. Irritating your customers hasn't proven a winning business model in the past.

Ideas vs. Execution Shows Why Competition Is A Good Thing (Mike Masnick):

Similarly, just because there are so many companies in a market, it doesn't mean any of them are really executing well (...) In fact, this succinctly reiterates a whole bunch of the points that we've discussed repeatedly over time. First, there's a big difference between ideas and execution. Just because others are in the market (and even well established), it doesn't mean you can't do a better job. It also highlights the difference between invention and innovation, where invention is just coming up with something new, but innovation is really bringing it to market successfully. Facebook and Google are both great examples of innovative companies who didn't really "invent" their initial markets.

This week's readings

Lift the veil of secrecy over peer review - New Scientist:

But the authors of the protest letter suggest a compromise, which should make abuses easier to spot while preserving the main strength of peer review: keep anonymity, so scientists aren't discouraged from being critical, but publish the reviews and editorial correspondence. Indeed, The EMBO Journal already does this.

For justice to be seen to be done more widely, other journals should follow this lead. Like democracy, peer review may be flawed but it's the least-worst system we've got. It should be nurtured, through exposure to a little more sunlight.

To be a science ignoramus is simply not on - Times Online:

To ordinary people our top universities often seem somewhat elite and mysterious where arcane subjects are explored. Universities should foster a culture of open access and strengthen educational activities in the community and in schools.

In the past, the mark of a civilised person was an appreciation of Shakespeare, Thucydides, Rembrandt and Beethoven. Today the pursuit of science is so demanding that scientists are more likely to neglect their cultural inheritance. Perhaps, by broadening our own interests, we scientists may also help non-scientists see science more as part of our culture.

Are We Training Too Many Scientists? - The Scientist:

Career disappointment for postdocs is not just about finding a job, it's finding a job that is rewarding: one that pays reasonably well and offers a career path. The recent prospects for PhDs - rising numbers of postdocs, few tenure track positions, and poor funding - do not live up to that expectation. (...) The unintended consequence of the shortage of faculty positions was longer postdoctoral fellowships as young scientists received low wages, endured little job security or respect, and delayed starting families while waiting for a job.

Shrinking budgets + skyrocketing subscription fees = UC boycott of NPG  - Adventures in Ethics and Science:

Scientific publication, after all, isn't just about keeping score. It's also about communicating findings, ideas, techniques, and conclusions. And NPG surely has no monopoly on the technologies by which that communication can -- and will -- take place.

I also made a comment on the NatureNews report about the last Brazilian scientific meeting - which had very nice talks as well (link in pt_BR).

PS: HT to @BioMedCentral for some of the links.

Just out of reach

first page of pdf report

There is a special report at Financial Times about Brazilian Infrastructure, and the future looks dimmer than we would like to think of. (HT @brasilciencia, AKA Daniel Ferrante)

It is hard to evaluate innovations when you have something to loose with them

There is a post at the Scholarly Kitchen that is receiving a lot of attention. Since I strongly disagree with its content, I will quote instead an interesting critique on its commentary area:

Efficiency is exactly the debate scientists, authors, and publishers need to be having. I don’t know what efficiency looks like, but putting pressure on authors to submit to high-ranking generalist journals when their stuff would be better suited to a niche outlet isn’t efficient for scientists or publishers. Forcing libraries to subscribe to Big Deals for a bunch of stuff they don’t want isn’t efficient nor is it good reader service. In fact, patting yourself on the back for your selectivity is hypocritical when you also force the library to carry the other journals that the rejected manuscripts end up in.

We can find other adequate responses here, here and here, for instance. Another point is that we cannot use journal ranks to evaluate a scientist or a research.

I won't blame it on racism when ignorance suffices

Japan, Inc.’s Communication Gap - Project Syndicate:

Indeed, although Toyota claims to be “global,” its board of directors is exclusively Japanese. Toyota Europe’s executives felt that making English the working language would contribute to improving trust, communications, and efficiency, and also to retaining high-quality staff. But this was not adopted.

If Toyota and other Japanese companies want to become truly global, their managers must learn to communicate effectively with all their foreign stakeholders. In this global age, the language of business is English. In a recent international test of English proficiency, Japan ranked 136th, well behind South Korea, at 89th, and even North Korea, at 111th. While journalists in South Korea used this survey to demand reforms to improve English instruction in their country’s schools, the same survey hardly received any coverage in Japan.

Maybe because this was hardly a surprise, and maybe because the author could hardly tell a big from a small coverage in Japan. The reforms are already in course in Japan. The Japanese society is investing a lot of effort in improving its general english knowledge. And the government (at least the previous ones) invested a lot of money on it, from international english-only research institutes - I think it appeared on Nature or Science in 2008, it was something like 8 billion US dollars per year just for these centers - to a special JSPS program of postdoctoral grants for native speakers of english only - in which they must make a commitment of teaching at japanese high schools.

Soon it will take a Ph.D. to rap

Here is the latest addition to the list of academic contributions to rap. In a sense.

A few other ones after the break:

When Science meets politics and likes it - update on Climategate

This week's round-up of interesting commentaries:

• Professor Judith Curry's lucid commentaries on the dotearth and ClimateAudit blogs
• Janet D. Stemwedel nails down the relevant ethical implications of the case - she elegantly avoids politically contentious issues
  
• The Curmudgeon is not happy about the vindication of the creationists (great read)
• Phil at Andrew Gelman's blog is surprised at how scientists buy the skeptic arguments (his analogy was not appropriate, but this was fixed in the comments)
  
• Daniel Henninger talks about the danger of allowing for a postmodernist politicization of Science
• Andrew Revkin shows that the "contrarians-deniers-skeptics" are not alone in having too many strings attached (here, here, and here you can see examples supporting this view)
• Chris Mooney and Matthew C. Nisbet seem to be outraged that the "contrarians-deniers-skeptics" dared to frame Climategate. And they thought that they had a monopoly on this rhetoric trick... to make things worse, they try to fix it by reframing it as a dispute between left and right wings. This name-calling always work against reason (in this case, science).
• Gavin Baker points that the solution to many of these issues relies on Open Access.

update 2009.12.14: I just realized that Andrew Gelman is not the only one to write on his blog, some posts are written by a mysterious "Phil". I corrected the entry.

The climate is getting hot on the blogosphere

I have been following this climategate imbroglio since the beginning, and was really appalled by some of the e-mails. This week both Nature and Science magazines stepped into the discussion, with a balanced account from Science. Nature, OTOH, preferred a smoke and mirrors approach focused on the media, writing a sloppy and loaded editorial: they call for "better support in face of public scrutiny", against "paranoids", "obstructionist politicians" and "denialists' conspiracy theories", even while they acknowledge that some of these denialists are practicing researchers:

...when the [IPCC] assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers [one from McIntyre and McKitrick and the other from Soon and Baliunas].
If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts.

Did Nature's editor realize that the very same researchers who had peer-reviewed material incorporated  into the IPCC report were "demanding" data through FOIA requests? Tell me about straw man and ad hominem... they are in desperate need of reading David Goldston's last column on their own magazine (the one in which he says that "credibility is scientist's to lose").
But anyway, my purpose was to write down here a list of articles worth reading on the subject, together with a few links. They speak louder than I could explain:

• Curtis Brainard's article on Columbia Journalism Review about the uncritical coverage of the case (HT Matthew C. Nisbet)
  
• Excellent analysis of Peter Kelemen on Popular Mechanics discussing the scientific and ethical implications of the leakage (HT Carl Zimmer)
• A few observations from Maggie Koerth-Baker on BoingBoing with several relevant links (HT Massimo Pigliucci)
  
• John Tierney's commentary on the New York Times pointing to some contradictory statements of the researchers involved
• One of John Graham-Cumming's posts explaining some of the source code (spoiler: these climatologists are dreadful programmers, but not charlatans)
• Chad Orzel correctly reproofs and reminds us that sometimes Science must move despite the scientists
• Phil at Andrew Gelman's blog tells us a side story about scientific misconduct
• Bill Sakovich (the most relevant blog about Japan IMHO) describes the lack of coverage about the climategate in Japan
• Bret Stephens comments on the Wall Street Journal how charging the contrarians of having a political agenda can backfire (he is off the mark on the scale of misconduct, though) (HT @nuin)
  
• A short introduction to the history of Climate Science, by Stephan Ramstorf at the Project Sindicate
• The full-fledged IPCC report with the scientific basis for Climate Change (2007 edition)
  
• list of publicly available climate databases
• Leaked e-mails from CRU at East Anglia,  browsable and  searchable
  

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the news about the leaked data was the (heavily criticized) article from Lawrence Lessig "Against Transparency". On it, Lessig maintains that a "naked transparency" (whose only concern would be a complete open government, without oversight) is potentially harmful because of the low attention span of the general public eye. People will consistenly find the same correlations, despite spurious. 

But if you like to compare AGW critics to creationists, be careful: that's exactly what cdesign proponentists are longing for.


update 2009.12.14: I just realized that Andrew Gelman is not the only one to write on his blog, some posts are written by a mysterious "Phil". I corrected the entry. 

random picks

In order to unclutter my twitter (and maybe reduce the number of shared items in google reader), I'll try to aggregate interesting articles into blog posts. Here is my first attempt!

Surprising AIDS Vaccine Success Praised and Pondered (Jon Cohen @ Science 326 (5949): 26; 2 Oct) [behind a paywall]:

Even skeptics are careful not to rain on the parade. "Looking at the numbers, it's underwhelming to me," says Ronald Desrosiers, head of the New England Primate Research Center in Southborough, Massachusetts. "But I want to sit tight and get a bunch of people to do analyses and see whether the protective effect holds up."

Data Call Into Question HIV Study Results (Gautam Naik and Mark Schoofs @ WSJ.com; 12 Oct):

Researchers from the U.S. Army and Thailand announced last month they had found the first vaccine that provided some protection against HIV. But a second analysis of the $105 million study, not disclosed publicly, suggests the results may have been a fluke, according to AIDS scientists who have seen it.

The second analysis, which is considered a vital component of any vaccine study, shows the results weren't statistically significant, these scientists said. In other words, it indicates that the results could have been due to chance and that the vaccine may not be effective.

Cern physicist admits links with al-Qaida (AP in Paris @ The Guardian; 11 Oct):

A French physicist arrested last week while working at the world's largest atom smasher has told investigators he corresponded over the internet with a contact in north Africa's al-Qaida branch, a judicial official said today. The exchange vaguely discussed plans for terror attacks, but nothing concrete was planned.
...
At work, the physicist had no contact with anything that could be used for terrorism, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research has said.

U.N. Envoy Calls Afghan Fraud Widespread (Anand Gopal @ WSJ.com; 12 Oct):

The head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, who has faced sharp criticism from his former deputy for not moving aggressively to expose vote-rigging in the August presidential elections, said Sunday that there was "widespread fraud" during the poll.

Mr. Galbraith subsequently charged that Mr. Eide had avoided releasing what the U.N. knew about the fraud because he feared further destabilizing Afghanistan's weak government, a charge Mr. Eide denies. The American diplomat also accused Mr. Eide of being biased in favor of President Hamid Karzai, whom observers and diplomats have said benefited the most from the vote rigging. Mr. Eide declined to address this allegation.

When Moore means less (The Economist; 6 Oct) About Michael Moore's newest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story:

It is hard to believe that Mr [Michael] Moore wants to be taken seriously, given that the only economics he offers in support of his analysis is supplied by his friend, Wallace Shawn, a character actor who appeared in “The Princess Bride” and who took a few classes in the dismal science. The capitalism he describes as “evil” and in need of being eliminated is clearly a straw man. To top it all off, he ends the movie with a rousing version of the socialist anthem, “The Internationale”.

The leading capitalists of the past 30 years, and especially in the run-up to the recent crisis, should probably be grateful for Mr Moore’s lack of seriousness, because the movie contains plenty of moments that could have been used to make a genuinely insightful documentary.

The Weekend Interview with John Mackey: The Conscience of a Capitalist (Stephen Moore @ WSJ.com; 3 Oct):

For the 12th straight year, Mr. Mackey's company has been praised as one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" by Fortune Magazine. Whole Foods sells healthy food, practices "socially responsible trade," and prides itself on promoting foods that are grown to support "biodiversity and healthy soils." Mr. Mackey donates 5% of company profits to charity and has been one of America's loudest critics of runaway compensation on Wall Street.
...
Yet his now famous op-ed incited a boycott of Whole Foods by some of his left-wing customers. (...) Free-market groups retaliated with a "buy-cott," encouraging people to purchase more groceries at Whole Foods.
...
"President Obama called for constructive suggestions for health-care reform," he explains. "I took him at his word." (...) What Mr. Mackey is proposing is more or less what he has already implemented at his company—a plan that would allow more health savings accounts (HSAs), more low-premium, high-deductible plans, more incentives for wellness, and medical malpractice reform.

Democratic Donor Gets 24-Year Term (Chris Herring @ WSJ.com; 30 Sept):

A federal judge Tuesday sentenced Democratic fund-raiser Norman Hsu to more than 24 years in prison for illegally funneling money to U.S. political candidates and for defrauding investors in a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
...
Mr. Hsu rose from being a relatively unknown businessman in California to a prominent fund-raiser who pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hillary Clinton and some other Democratic politicians.

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