On the heels of Science Online 2010, the ResearchBlogging.org community has announced the Research Blogging Awards, honoring online writing about peer reviewed research in a wide range of categories. Nominations are open until 11 February, and can be submitted by anyone; a panel of judges will select 5 to 10 finalists from nominees in each category, and winners will be selected by a vote of the RB.org membership.
#scio10 day three: In which the discussion of online civility remains (almost) entirely civil
Sunday morning, the final sessions of Science Online 2010 seemed almost planned to tie together the broad theme of the conference – how best to connect science (and working scientists) with the rest of society.
Broader impact done right: A heavily marine-themed panel – Karen James of the Beagle Project, Deep Sea blogger Kevin Zelnio, Miriam Goldstein of the Oyster’s Garter, the New England Aquarium’s Jeff Ives and NASA’s Beth Beck – discussed a wide range of science outreach options available, mostly from the perspective of working scientists.
A consensus emerged that good outreach, of which online resources are now usually a part, is essential to basic research, and will be increasingly important in obtaining funding. Funnily enough, my collaborator Chris Smith had just e-mailed me about the possibility of bringing a satellite broadband connection with us for the upcoming field season – maybe we’ll be live-blogging Joshua tree research this year.
Article-level metrics: Peter Binfield, the managing editor of PLoS ONE, discussed the ways in which PLoS is now measuring the impact of individual articles published through its online, open-access journals – not just citation counts, but also pageviews, PDF download rates, and the recent collaboration with ResearchBlogging.org to track blog coverage. It’s clear that research articles aren’t going to be judged by the impact factor of their containing journals anymore, now that you get a citation count with every Google Scholar search, and it’ll be interesting to see what scheme emerges as global standard for article-level impact.
Online civility: Science bloggers Janet “Dr. Freeride” Stemwedel, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and the pseudonomous Dr. Isis led discussion about what constitutes civil behavior in an online setting – and the conversation turned into something of an object lesson, as disagreement over the meaning of civility itself turned, well, very nearly un-civil. The panel did, I thought, an admirable job demonstrating in “real life” the skills necessary for online moderation of touchy discussions.
I wouldn’t say there was consensus, but the room did seem to come together around the ideas that communities define their own standards of civility, that those very standards can make it difficult to express minority or dissenting points of view, and that (judicious) incivility can be useful for minorities trying to be heard. Dave Munger made that last point, and I hope my paraphrase does it justice – I think it’s an important one. Certainly it’s the case that sexual minorities have been (and still are – I’m looking at you, Mennonite Church USA) told that merely acknowledging our existence and discussing our perspective is a violation of civility, inasmuch as “civil” is equivalent to “suitable for general audiences.” It was a great discussion, and I’m still processing it – it might be worth a dedicated post in the near future.
So now I’m sitting in the Raleigh-Durham airport, writing up the weekend over dodgy, overpriced WiFi – I’ve been badly spoiled by SignalShare’s fantastic service. Many, many thanks to organizers Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker, and to the sponsors, who put on a fantastic conference – and especially to NESCent, who made it possible for me to attend. It was a great time!
#scio10 day two: In which the discussion turns to duck genitalia within the second session
Science Online is not like the Evolution meetings. This was evident in the first session I entered, where the plastic click of laptop keys underlay the conversation between the panelists and the audience. Twitter was a second venue for discussion the whole conference, and you could track audience interest in a given session purely from posts with the #scio10 hashtag. Notes on the sessions I attended:
- From blog to book: Tom Levenson, Brian Switek, and Rebecca Skloot discussed the usefulness of blogging for authors and developing authors, mostly as a venue for promoting books, but also as a space for developing ideas and writing to develop a book.
- Rebooting science journalism: Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, and David Dobbs led discussion about the future of science journalism online, with emphasis on unique ways to connect the diverse and Balkanized interest groups of the web to science news, and an extensive aside on the recently discovered role of sexual selection in the morphology of ducks’ penises and vaginas – Carl wasn’t able to publish much detail via a print magazine, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) the story proved popular online. This set off a flurry of interest in the article in question, and revealed I’m not the only one who thought this phenomenon makes limerick fodder.
- Demonstrations of a new German science magazine for children, an online hub for New Zealand-centric science reporting, use of Second Life as a science education resource, and the Open Dinosaur Project. I wasn’t strongly impressed by the Second Life presentation – I don’t see the usefulness of the 3-d environment over conventional instant messaging. On the other hand, Andy Farke’s Open Dinosaur Project is doing amazing things with a bunch of volunteer “citizen scientists” assembling a morphological data from the literature. It’s a new model for digging data out of old publications, and it’s not hard to think of other projects that could benefit from a similar approach.
- An open history of science: John McKay and Eric Michael Johnson discussed the history of media employed in scientific societies. Turns out that Enlightenment-era scientists corresponding by mail, the informal science societies they formed, and the journals they compiled from each others’ letters were more like the modern blogosphere than you might think.
- Online reference managers: representatives from Citeulike, Mendeley, Zotero, and Scopus talked about their various products’ approaches to organize researchers’ electronic reference libraries, and to use personal contacts and library content to recommend new material. There’s some interesting possibilities – enough that I’ve downloaded Mendeley (the only one, so far as I could tell, that has a locally-installed client) to play around with for a bit. I’d love to ditch EndNote, if I can extract my thousands of references and linked files without too much bother.
The day concluded with a banquet at the hotel, capped by a series of brief “ignite” talks on everything from the benefits of blogging while working toward tenure to a crowd-sourced project to check the accuracy of chemistry information in online sources.
Here’s a slideshow of photos uploaded to Flickr with the #scio10 tag, mostly from Saturday if I’m not mistaken.
#scio10 day one: NESCent!
As one of the recipients of the Science Online travel awards, I spent Friday morning, and lunch, visiting National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. NESCent is an NSF-funded space where postdoctoral fellows and faculty members on sabbatical are put together with an unlimited supply of coffee to apply new analyses to (mostly) existing datasets, often in collaboration with researchers at Duke University, the University of North Carolina, or North Carolina State University, the three institutions administering the center.
In three and a half hours, I met with (in no particular order) Craig McClain, Robin Smith, Carlos Botero, Julie Meachen-Samuels, Ben Redelings, Trina Roberts, Juan Santos, and Gregor Yanega – it was extremely stimulating, and a little dizzying. (The other travel award winner, Christie Wilcox, arrived later in the morning, straight off her multi-connection flight from Hawaii, but she held up remarkably well.) The visit wrapped up with lunch at a nice cafe across the street from the NESCent offices, and then it was off to the lemurs with me. I can’t think of a better way to start the conference than a morning packed full of smart people doing interesting science.
Update, 17 Jan 2010: Christie took a couple photos, one of which I’m posting here:
#scio10 day one: Duke Lemur Center
Having a blast at Science Online 2010 – too much to write about in the time I can grab between sessions. But it turns out that Flickr has lots of good photos from the Duke Lemur Center, which I toured yesterday afternoon. It was really cool, so here they are.
Science online, fried couch potato edition
Yes, I’m presently at Science Online 2010, but there’s no rest for the Interwebs.
- Kill your TV, before it kills you: Watching more than an hour of television a day may counteract the benefits of regular exercise. (Dave Munger at SEED)
- Divorce rates are higher in states with same-sex marriage bans. Correlation, or causation? “It could be that voters who have more marital problems of their own are more inclined to deny the right of marriage to same-sex couples.” (FiveThirtyEight.com)
- Artificial selection of food plants doesn’t reduce their genetic diversity, it turns out. (Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog)
- Prairie dogs help prevent invasive plants from invading. (Conservation Magazine)
- Circumcision changes the bacterial community of the penis – and reduces the presence of species that can cause bacterial vaginosis. (Mike the Mad Biologist)
- The evolution of avian influenza depends more on local dynamics than on long-distance migration events. (Mystery Rays from Outer Space)
- Farmed salmon released in Scotland swim for Norway. (Conservation Maven)
- In Fiji, tilapia escaped from fish farms are probably preying on native fish. (Observations of a Nerd)
And, finally, via kottke, beautiful footage paired with unsettling statistics.
Why make your own food when it doesn’t pay?
We humans like to think we’re pretty complex – what with having invented the wheel, wars, New York, and so on – so we tend to forget that evolution doesn’t care about complexity. All that matters to natural selection is who makes the most babies, and sometimes complex adaptations can get in the way of that criterion. A study recently published on the always open-access PLoS ONE provides a good example of this principle in action – given the right selective pressures, photosynthetic organisms will give up on the whole photosynthesis thing.
Tiny Indianpipe (Monotropa) and giant Rafflesia, two plants that gave up photosynthesis. Photos by Bemep and Tamara van Molken.
Photosynthesis is clearly a complex adaptation, requiring specialized cellular structures and biochemical processes that can use light to power the synthesis of sugars. Complex enough for a whole additional organism, in fact, since the chloroplast, the cellular structure in which most eukaryotes conduct photosynthesis, probably originated as a symbiont that never left its host cell [$a]. (In some organisms, this process of becoming photosynthetic is still underway.) There are clear advantages to the ability to make your own food conferred by photosynthesis. Yet there are numerous examples of non-photosynthetic organisms with photosynthetic ancestors. For instance, plants as varied as the big, exotic Rafflesia or Monotropa, whose small white flowers are easy to spot in North American woods, have inactive chloroplasts and parasitize other plants. These cases are good reason to think that there may be selective conditions in which the cost of maintaining the mechanisms of photosynthesis outweighs the benefit of independent food production.
The new paper describes just such a set of selective conditions. The authors build a mathematical model of competition between microorganisms, such as flagellates, that can either be mixotrophs, able to conduct photosynthesis or capture prey to feed themselves, or heterotrophs, only able to sustain themselves by eating other critters. The model’s result hinges on two key facts of life for single-celled predators: (1) it turns out that the size of a flagellate cell determines what size of prey it is best able to capture [$a]; and (2) chloroplasts take up space in a cell, limiting the evolution of cell size.
The relative advantage of retaining photosynthesis, then, is directly related to the size range of available prey. Mixotrophs, whose cells are big enough to accommodate chloroplasts, are most efficient predators of larger prey; with no chloroplasts, heterotrophs can be small enough to take advantage of smaller prey. The question of which form wins out, then, relies on the distribution of available prey sizes and the light environment. If there’s lots of light for photosynthesis, mixotrophs can out-compete heterotrophs even if they don’t hunt very efficiently; but if there’s not much light and mostly small prey, the more efficient heterotrophs win.
The fact is, it’s rare for any given adaptation to be useful under all possible conditions. Biological structures or metabolic processes that become disused are no longer under selection for efficient performance of their original function – they are free to accumulate mutations that may make them degenerate into uselessness, or to be co-opted for entirely new functions. But if an adaptation is actually costly to maintain, then natural selection may eradicate it altogether.
References
de Castro, F., Gaedke, U., & Boenigk, J. (2009). Reverse evolution: Driving forces behind the loss of acquired photosynthetic traits. PLoS ONE, 4 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0008465
Hansen, B., P. K. Bjornsen, & P. J. Hansen (1994). The size ratio between planktonic predators and their prey.
Limnology and Oceanography, 39, 395-403
McFadden, G. (2001). Chloroplast origin and integration Plant Physiology, 125 (1), 50-3 DOI: 10.1104/pp.125.1.50
On paywalls
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
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.
And here we have Idaho
Over New Years’, Coeur d’Alene made national news when the barista at a roadside espresso stand thwarted an armed robbery by pulling out the pistol her husband had given her for Christmas. In a true Twin Peaks moment, the teenage robber was arrested by a deputy sheriff who had just picked up his morning coffee at the same place moments earlier.
That pretty much encapsulates the neck of the woods I live in – the trappings of the Pacific Northwest (viz, ubiquitous drive-through espresso joints) mingled with the last dregs of the Wild West. Twin Peaks is closer to being a documentary than anyone from other parts of the country can ever understand.