Category Archives: media

On paywalls

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Via the Daily Dish: the Economist thinks 2010 will be the year that online newspapers and magazines start erecting paywalls between their content and the rest of the web. Sullivan doesn’t buy it (no pun intended):

Paywalls kill off critical interaction with the wider blogosphere and reduce readership drastically. I can see why media moguls might want the paywalls as some kind of replacement for all the power and money they have lost over the last decade. But I fear that the moment has passed.

But it occurs to me that, as someone who routinely blogs about science, I’m actually already working the way that more general news sites like the Dish might in a paywall-heavy environment – I frequently link to pages that contain only an abstract of the source article and a link via which you can pay some ridiculous figure for one-time access. The scientific journals to which I link are far more expensive than the New York Times will ever be. Yet I, and a lot of much more successful science-focused bloggers, are doing OK, and people are learning about new scientific results through our (mostly their) writing, probably mostly without ever clicking through for the original articles. That wouldn’t work for the New York Times.

So why does it (kinda, sorta) work for scientific journals? (1) Maybe most of my readers are academics, with institutional subscriptions to carry them past those links with the [$a] tags. (2) Maybe those of my readers who don’t have institutional subscriptions don’t count as lost revenue for the journals, because they’re people who would never buy a copy of Systematic Biology on a newsstand if they could. (3) There’s PLoS, and open-access has lots of promise as a model – maybe they’ll start to win out as blog coverage becomes more important as an impact metric?

#scio10: Skepticism != cynicism

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In preparatory remarks for a Science Online session about trust and critical thinking, Stephanie Zvan makes a point that isn’t made often enough:

You’ve met them. “Oh, those scientists. They get their funding from the government/industry/political think tanks. They’re just producing the results needed to keep their money flowing. They’ll say anything it takes. Besides, it’s not like they don’t make mistakes. Even Newton and Einstein had it wrong.”

You’ve met the others, too. “My friend told me about an Oprah show where she talked to a writer who explained how the universe really works. I always knew it was a special place made just for me.”

There’s no polite way to say it, but it can be said simply. They’re both doing it wrong.

The point being that the opposite of complete credulousness – cynicism – is not the same thing as skepticism. I see the term “skeptic” used as a synonym for “cynic” all over the place. But they’re not the same thing at all – the cynic is the guy in Zvan’s first example, who trusts nothing at all. A skeptic, on the other hand, does trust, given justification. Skepticism is positive; it believes that there are knowable answers to factual questions, and that human brainpower can deduce them. A skeptic may rarely decide that a given answer is the final word on a question, but that’s not at all the same thing as rejecting the possibility of a useful answer.

On my iPod: Too Beautiful to Live

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I’m moving back into a labwork-intensive schedule at the moment, which means that I’m burning through podcasts like nobody’s business. Fortunately, I’ve recently been sucked into the orbit of Too Beautiful to Live, the online incarnation of Luke Burbank’s daily talk/music/newsish show. I only found TBTL after it lived up to its its name by getting dropped from the air by Seattle-area radio station KIRO.


Photo by bonacheladas.

Luke and his co-conspirators Jen “Flash” Andrews and Sean DeTorre put together an amalgam of music, pop-culture sound cues, news commentary, and whatever else happens to drift through Luke’s head at the moment of recording. Topics range from the current status of the Large Hadron Collider to Alec Baldwin’s self-esteem issues; one recent episode revolved around plumbing issues in the Burbank residence.* It’s weird and silly and oddly compelling, and it works great in the background while I’m racking pipette tips.**

Which sounds like damning with faint praise, now that I re-read it, but really isn’t. I mean, Studio 360 doesn’t usually make that particular cut. Anyway, you should totally subscribe.

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* The appropriateness of which subject matter was discussed in today’s episode, which was basically a recorded conversation between Luke and his girlfriend on a drive to down to Portland, and which achieved an almost “30 Rock”-grade degree of meta.

** Except for that one occasion when I had to dive across the lab to hit the volume control and kill Jen’s Swedish Chef impression just as my (Swedish) dissertation advisor walked in the door.

Hey, PNAS?

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Hey, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? (Can I call you PNAS? Thanks.) You know what really drives me crazy, as a scientist and a blogger, PNAS? Internationally-recognized journals that release scientific studies to the press before they make them available online.

Why does this make me crazy? I’m glad you asked, PNAS. It makes me crazy because sometimes I read something as batshit absurd as this gem from Wired Science:

No exact rule exists for deciding when a group of animals constitutes a separate species. That question “is rarely if ever asked,” as speciation isn’t something that scientists have been fortunate enough to watch at the precise moment of divergence … [emphasis mine]

(Which statement is like claiming that physicists rarely ask about gravity.) And when I read something like this I’d really like to be able to go and see whether that’s actually in the peer-reviewed article in question, or if it just materialized in the course of the sausage-making that is popular science journalism.

But, apparently, PNAS, you’re more interested in having your results butchered by people who think biologists don’t ask questions about speciation than you are in having them read by, you know, biologists. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I take that a little bit personally.

A radical idea

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Responding to Nature‘s review [$-a] of his new book about evolution, The Tangled Bank, Carl Zimmer objects to the reviewer’s justaposition of his work with the more, shall we say, combative book Richard Dawkins has just released. Zimmer has the audacity to assume that his readers aren’t hostile:

I envisioned my potential readers as curious people who didn’t know much about evolution–what the idea actually is and how scientists study it. I envisioned people who might be interested in learning the nuts and bolts of processes like selection and drift, and who might be intrigued by sexually deceptive wasps, whales with legs, the viruses that dominate our genome, and other features of life that evolution allows us to understand.

With all due respect for those who want to take the fight to the wingnuts in the war on science — I enjoy Pharyngula as much as the next grad student — this seems so much more, well, hopeful. Ultimately, it might even be more productive.

Growing up in a science-friendly household surrounded by creationists, I didn’t come to the conclusion that evolution was true because I read a diatribe about the idiocy of biblical literalism. I came to that conclusion because I thought dinosaurs were pretty cool, and it turned out that you could learn a lot more about dinosaurs in the context of their evolutionary history than if you just assumed they all died in Noah’s flood. I think that people in a similar state — “curious people who didn’t know much about evolution” are much more likely converts to the cause of science than the wingnuts. Certainly there must be a lot of them out there; otherwise who’s keeping the Discovery Channel afloat?

More on Safire

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Over at the Slog, Sean Nelson takes the time for more nuance than I did, but comes down in about the same place:

Though you could feel an aging man’s dismay (and sometimes disdain) coming through the pieces he wrote about tech talk and the newspeaky constructs of text and IM-based communication, his diligence in reporting and contextualizing them never faltered. He had a corny sense of humor and his puns were usually groaners. Still, it’s hard not to love the opening line of the intro to his 2004 On Language collection, The Right Word In the Right Place at the Right Time: “We will come to sodomy in a moment.”

Nelson also pulls this Safire quote:

“Knowing how things work,” he wrote, “is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.”

If that isn’t the essence of being a geek, I don’t know what is.

It also occurs to me that an excellent successor to Safire is found in Roy Blount, Jr., whose Alphabet Juice is less prescriptive but even more enthusiastic, and marinated in southern charm to boot.

William Safire

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Nixon speechwriter turned political analyst William Safire has died. What I read of his political writing encapsulated everything I can’t stand about American political conservatism, although it was well-reasoned and insightful by the Glen Beckian standards of the present era. On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed “On Language,” his magazine column about words and their usage. On that subject, Safire was geekily, infectiously enthusiastic, and that’s an attitude that transcends a lot of political backbiting.*

*Incidentally, Oxford English Dictionary defines “backbiting” as “the action of detracting, slandering, or speaking ill of one behind his back,” and dates its first usage in this sense to approximately 1175 CE, not long before the origin of parliamentary democracy.

Crowdsourced dinosaurs

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The Open Dinosaur Project opened yesterday, inviting scientists and interested laypersons alike to help assemble a database of published dinosaur skeletal measurements, to serve as the basis for a massive study of evolutionary transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality. Project head (and Open Source Paleontologist) Andy Farke lays it out in an introductory post:

Every step of the way will be blogged. And . . . all contributors are invited to join us as co-authors. The project: look at the evolution of the limbs in ornithischian dinosaurs. [Ellipsis Andy’s.]

Kindle curmudgeonry

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Via the Slog: Nicholson Baker reviews Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader for the New Yorker. He is, to say the least, skeptical.

Yes, you can definitely read things on the Kindle.

Damning with faint praise? Actually, the tone of the review is more just damning. Especially when you get to the list of books not yet available.

About the only thing I might want to do with an e-book reader is read PDF documents, which are my format of choice for journal articles. For that, I need note-taking support and the ability to rapidly zoom around on the page — and the confidence that figures will be as clear as they would be in color. I’ll stick with my MacBook for the time being.