[X] My Assistant

[jrdahlman]

I'm not sure if this topic is substantive enough to be posted under Doug's new rules, but I'll try it.

Computer and hardware pioneer Don Lancaster (still going strong), in his blog on April 2, had an interesting take on the "Gresham's Law" effect that amateur internet posting is having on traditional publishing. For scientists:

But Scholarly Journal Publishers clearly have the most serious problems. If they are to survive at all. Sloppy researcher "A" throws some crap up on the web and instantly delivers zillions of free copies worldwide. Competent researcher "B" pays an outrageous fee to have his peer-review paper published in the distant future in a journal so expensive that their institution's own library cannot afford a copy. Guess who wins?

At the very least, scholarly journal survival demands unlimited free instant access of all abstracts without so such as a registration hassle. Combined with sanely limited quantities of free access to any paper over five years old.

http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu06.asp


I am not a scientist, but clearly there are many on this board. This topic may have been mentioned before, but I'm wondering if any of you have heard anything from the journal publishers themselves? Is this really becoming a problem? Is the market changing or fees rising? Are they getting nervous about the economics of it? Are researchers equally nervous? Not leading questions--I actually don't know.

(One of the amazing things about this board for outsiders is seeing "science being made." The back-and-forth debates between geologists, alternate (plausable!) theories, etc., as opposed to the dry official reports that are finally released. I feel almost like a spy in on closed sessions!)

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

There's been a lot of debate about the quality of amateur sources of information, like wikipedia. I think it is necessary to be careful about information quality in science. One of the reasons that refereed journals are so formal is that scientists have had centuries of experience with this problem. Left to their own devices, people think in a superstitious magical fashion and make huge mistakes in logic, causal relations, and statistics. You have to apply discipline, sanity checks by other experts, and the tools of mathematics to get objective knowledge that you can be confident in. It doesn't always work, but pseudo-science and amateurism almost never works.

There is also the issue of expertise. The physicist Richard Feynman frequently talked about how carelessly the word expert gets used. To understand a scientific field at the level of a master requires years of hard work, but people often seek to skip that annoying step and just become a respected "expert" instantly. So you get the cranks and pundits who flood the internet with poor quality information. You get someone like Steven Levy pontificating about computer technology with a degree in literary criticism...all to typical in the journalism of science. The BBC's Bill THompson has a masters degree in computer science, which is amazing. I often disagree with his political slant, but he has paid his dues and understands the science.

To see how difficult it can be to get a certain answer, just look at the serious question of Global Warming. Here is a problem that needs to be understood, but the issue has been politicized and muddled by big business on the one hand and leftist political opportunists on the other. How do we find out exactly what is happening, why it is happening and how confident people really are in various theories? It's virtually impossible, because even the peer review system has broken down due to strong political passions.

For folks who are interested in science, always try to go to the source. Something like space.com does a good job of monitoring news channels, but if a mission or discovery interests you, go to the source, try to find what the real scientists said. Something else I have found, and heard many other scientists say is, read the masters. You'd be amazed at how good some of the great scientists are at communicating their ideas and undestanding. For example, the Feynman Lectures in Physics, or Einstein's original papers. And if you're really passonate about it, go to college and learn to do it!

[The Messenger]

For folks who are interested in science, always try to go to the source. Something like space.com does a good job of monitoring news channels, but if a mission or discovery interests you, go to the source, try to find what the real scientists said. Something else I have found, and heard many other scientists say is, read the masters. You'd be amazed at how good some of the great scientists are at communicating their ideas and undestanding. For example, the Feynman Lectures in Physics, or Einstein's original papers. And if you're really passonate about it, go to college and learn to do it!

Great post, Don! I agree with you almost as much as I disagree.

Several things -

1) The peer review trades are dead. Everyone trying to stay on top in astrophysics goes right to astro-archives. For many it is a daily ritual...It is not hard to tell the good research from the bad, and in any case you must weigh the data rather than the presenter. That is hard, especially since there is always a bias.

2) Peer review is an unnecessary sanity check that does more for the ego of the reviewer than the advancement of science. If you don't believe me, just post some cracker-assed comment on Wikapedia, and see how quickly it is edited out, and you are scathingly chastized for being such an idiot. (I have had this happen twice, once on purpose just to check the reliability of Wik, and once because I thought I had enough data to defend one of my alternative theories. The Wik police are brutal: New ideas can sometimes be posted, but only with very careful caviates. Since the editing process is almost immediate, I think the chances that bogus data can be found on Wik is relatively small - much less than outdated information on NASA sites, for example.

3) Einstein withdrew the only paper he submitted that was subject to peer review, and refuse to resubmit it. The irony here is that it is extremely difficult to push a paper through peer review that challenges any of Albert's accepted theories, no matter how compelling the argument.

4) By all means learn, but first learn the critical analysis process. If you are not challenging professors in your graduate studies, if you can't get the hair up on their back and force them to shrug, you are not being analytical. Every field has areas of weakness - well established theories with little substance to back them. You better come out swinging, and knowing that if there is truly order in the universe, we have a lot to learn.

5) Avoid writing papers that have to use Monte Carlo simulations to make any sense out of the data. If you have to rattle and shake the cage to get the numbers you are looking for, you don't have enough parametric control to learn jack about the system.