Using textbooks you wrote in your own class

I have a little e-book that you can buy on Amazon called Presentation Tips. (If you get it through this link, you’ll support my friends at the Science... Sort Of podcast.)

I also teach a class about presentations from time to time: BIOL 4100 Biology Seminar. There’s a lot of demand for it, because it’s a required course for all our majors.

There is nothing to stop me from assigning my own book as a textbook in that seminar class, and requiring all the students buy it. I am willing to bet that this happens routinely, because faculty are given a lot of freedom in choice of learning materials.

That is a conflict of interest. I have a financial gain that I can make by selling my own book as a textbook.

That might not sound so bad. After all, students are expected to buy textbooks. You could make a good case that if a faculty member has written a book on the subject, she wrote it because she thought it would be the best book on the subject out there.

This post started because I received a report that sounded like a professor at another institution was doing something like this. As I understand it, the professor is asking students to pay for a manuscript of a book that is supposed to be published by a small publisher later. The publisher is so small, it’s nowhere to be found through a Google search. The students were instructed to use a PayPal account.

This seemed to me to be very strange and suspicious.

Textbook pricing is notoriously opaque to begin with. And as distribution moves to the digital realm, more and more sorts of shenanigans are possible.

Let’s consider my book for a second. Because it’s an e-book, I could set the price to whatever I wanted. I could gouge each student for $30 instead of $3. (When I talk about it, I say, “The version on Amazon is for people who want something that looks good on their Kindle, but the ideas in are free. You can find them on my blog or a PDF on my website.” But nothing obliges me to do that.)

While a professor might not get rich doing this, a hundreds or maybe even thousands of extra bucks in the pocket is nothing to sneeze at, either. And the amount of money raised isn’t the issue; it’s about the ethics of charging a captive audience.

If a student felt an instructor was abusing her power to choose textbooks, who would provide the checks and balances on textbook selection?

Additional, 26 August 2013: Some people seem to think I am suggesting that no professor should use her own textbook, ever, even if it’s the best or only one available. No, that is not what I am saying.

When a professor makes a decision about textbook use, if she stands to profit if she decides to use her own, that is a conflict of interest, plain and simple. But there are plenty of good ways to manage conflicts of interest. For example:

• Transparency: Does the professor explain why she adopted this book over all others? Can she demonstrate that the price is in line with the rest of the books on the market? Does the professor recognize that there is a conflict of interest, and invite colleagues to review the decision to ensure that it is fair?
• Oversight: Does anyone else review the textbook decision? Do students have any mechanism to say, “I don’t like this book, there are ones out there that are better.”

Update, 22 November 2017: This story is the first time I have seen a university take action against instructors for requiring students buy their book. The instructors wrote their own $50 ebook, and the only way students could take many of their exams was through the book.

Requiring students to buy stuff to do assessments is common, but having that book be from the instructors themselves, and not through a publisher? Looks mighty dodgy.

We haven’t seen this in a mammal! Rewrite the textbooks!

Textbooks have a lot to answer for.

Textbooks are not the compilation of all knowledge in a field. They are simplified summaries created to teach students new to a field the general lay of the land.

People forget this. Cranks get obsessed with advancing their pet theories by attacking “textbook examples,” because they think the textbook example is all the evidence we have. “If I can show there’s something wrong with the peppered moth example of natural selection, I’ll prove evolution is fake!”

Admittedly, legitimate researchers say, “One day, this will be in all the textbooks!” sometimes, too. It can look self-aggrandizing and egotistical, though.

So this press release titled

Rewrite the textbooks

Findings challenge conventional wisdom of how neurons operate

annoyed me and set off my bullshit filter. My annoyance got worse with the first sentence, and continued increasing as I read the press release.

The good news is that the paper is nowhere near as bombastic as the press release. It is a very good paper. It acknowledges the state of the art in the field and does not present itself as revolutionary. The experiments are technically proficient. And the findings are intriguing.

Let’s compare what the press release says and what the paper says.

Press release:

(T)he basic functional concept is that synapses transmit electrical signals to the dendrites and cell body (input), and axons carry signals away (output).

Paper (my emphasis):

There are exceptions to this, including neurons that lack dendrites or an axon, as well as action potentials propagating from the axon into dendrite. In invertebrates, action potentials can originate in multiple sites, including axon terminals.

What the press release is putting first as the big new finding is not new. It. Just. Is. Not. And the paper’s authors know this and say so in the paper.

In the press release, though, one of the authors, Nelson Spruston, changes his tune:

“Signals can travel from the end of the axon toward the cell body, when it typically is the other way around. We were amazed to see this.”

A neuroscientist amazed by this is either playing to the microphone, or is admitting that he started the project with an ignorance of the diversity of neurobiology. There is certainly no shame in the latter; many neuroscientists concentrate so deeply on one system, they aren’t aware of what else is out there. But playing up, “The signal! It goes backwards! Up the axon!” as something amazing, new, and borderline revolutionary after you’ve admitted in the paper that it happens in other systems is overdoing it.

If I were to rewrite textbooks on this point, it would be to add, “Invertebrates have nervous systems that often work differently than mammals.” Most neuroscience textbooks are far too fixated on humans, mammals, and vertebrates, in that order. If it weren’t for Hodgkin and Huxley’s work on action potentials in squid giant axon, you might have no idea that invertebrates existed.

Press release:

A deeper understanding of how a normal neuron works is critical to scientists who study neurological diseases, such as epilepsy, autism, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. ...

This unique neuronal function might be relevant to normal process, such as memory, but it also could be relevant to disease.

Paper:

Consolidating these results suggests the existence of a previously unknown operational mode for some mammalian neurons. ... The mechanisms responsible for all aspects of this new operational mode are unknown and elucidating them will require extensive work.

These guys care about how cells work. There’s no mention of medical applications anywhere. (They do mention epilepsy, because neurons in animals with epileptic-like conditions do odd things.)

The press release is making empty promises. “What are the practical applications of this?” is a science journalism cliché ranking up there close to “He said, she said.”

Press release:

“It”s very unusual to think that a neuron could fire continually without stimuli,” Spruston said.

My first reaction was, “Hello! Spruston! They’re called pacemaker potentials and plateau potentials! Both well described in lots of neural circuits!” A pacemaker potential occurs in a neuron that fires over and over again, spontaneously. A plateau potential occurs when a short input causes sustained firing that is much longer than the input; input less than a second could trigger firing for tens of seconds or even minutes.

Paper:

What Sheffield, Spruston and company have found is something that resembles plateau potentials, but is operating on a different timescale. Plateau potentials are triggered by very distinct, short inputs that depolarize the neuron. The neurons in this paper are getting “set off” by long trains of many events. You need hundreds of potentials (small bottom trace) over many seconds to “set off” these long sets of spikes in response in the downstream cell.

That is different and noteworthy and something I haven’t see quite seen before.

And it’s happening in the axon. Potentials starting in the axon isn’t new, and long periods of firing without stimuli isn’t new, but the combination of those two, plus the long time frame of the trigger (the most truly new and interesting thing in the paper, in my estimation) makes for intriguing combination.

Press release:

Their studies of individual neurons (from the hippocampus and neocortex of mice) led to experiments with multiple neurons, which resulted in perhaps the biggest surprise of all. The researchers found that one axon can talk to another.

“But... but... but... Axons interacting with axons isn’t new. I learned the term ‘axoaxonic synapse’ from a diagram in a textbook showing two axons connected to each other. Presynaptic inhibition is two axons talking to each other, and Dudel and Kuffler described that in the 1960s.”

Paper: All of the experiments I described above have involved single cells responding to the experimenter. When they were recording from two neurons, they found that occasionally (3 of 19 pairs), when one cell was “set off” into a bout of sustained firing, the partner cell would also go into a long set of sustained firing. This suggests this phenomenon could be a substantial part of the network in this region of the brain (hippocampus).

Finally, Sheffield and colleagues admit they don’t know how these cells are able to generate persistent firing. (This will probably keep this finding out of textbooks until they get the mechanism down. Phenomena without mechanisms are curiosities. Textbooks thrive on neat, complete stories.) Putting on chemical that block gap junctions prevents this sustained firing. But it’s still up in the air as to what gap junctions, where, between what cell, might be involved.

Press release:

Spruston credits the discovery of the persistent firing in normal individual neurons to the astute observation of Mark Sheffield, a graduate student in his lab.

I say this seriously, with no irony intended: That was a classy thing to say, Dr. Spruston, and good on you. Grad students do not get anywhere near enough credit for being the drivers of discovery that we know they are.

Recently, John Rennie asked science journalists to image what would happen if they didn’t write about papers the same week they were released. This press release was written two months after the pre-print of the paper was published online.

So a cooling off period did not appear to help in this case. The press release is breathless and hyped and oversells a paper that is very admirable and interesting. This paper is like a top notch remix of a song: there’s more old stuff than new material, but the combination is cool and worth listening to.

References

Sheffield M, Best T, Mensh B, Kath W, Spruston N (2010). Slow integration leads to persistent action potential firing in distal axons of coupled interneurons. Nature Neuroscience 14(2): 200-207. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2728

Dudel J, Kuffler SW. 1961. Presynaptic inhibition at the crayfish neuromuscular junction. Journal of Physiology 155(3): 543–562. PDF

Hat tip to GertyZ for finding me a PDF of the paper so I could compare it to the press release!

Photo by punkrockscience on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license,

“The war on science is officially back on in Texas”

Pandas? Love. Lookaddatface!

Of Pandas and People? Not so much.

The Texas Freedom Network is reporting that Foundation for Thought and Ethics, the publishers of the intelligent design textbook Of Pandas and People, plan to submit materials for possible use in Texas K-12 schools.

The press release notes that reviewers are being appointed to check all submitted materials for meeting the Texas standards, and for accuracy.

It may be a moot point, however, given that there are recurring questions about whether Texas will purchase any school textbooks in the next while due to budget shortfalls.

In a sense, this is good news. The Kitzmiller v. Dover trial showed that this company had hastily revised the draft Of Pandas and People when it was ruled in court that teaching creationism was illegal. Drafts of the book showed that the word “creation” and all variations of it were prominent in early drafts (click to enlarge graph at right). After a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against “creation science” (Edwards v. Aguillard), the word almost entirely vanished.

The court was also shown the transition point were someone had some had searched and replaced “creationist” with “intelligent design proponent,” but didn’t do it quite right, leaving “Cdesign proponentsists.”

It made it almost impossible for those attacking evolution to claim that intelligent design was anything other than creationism renamed.

In related news, Orlando Wood is looking for help. He is making a documentary about the adoption of the Texas State Board of Education and their adoption of K-12 teaching standards. He is attempting to raise $10,000 to hire an editor for the film. He’s more than halfway towards that goal.



And before you ask: Yes, I donated. I donated for the same reason I have been blogging about this story continually for the last few years: documentation is good. Indeed, one good thing about this process is that it has generally been transparent.

Panda photo by ucumari on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Textbook identity

One of my colleagues got an email from a student peeved that we had switched our introductory biology textbook. The student was annoyed by the cost, and that there were no used copies because it was a new text.

The student had apparently compared the new book and the old, claiming that there were only minor changes in content at most. Putting aside how much the student could actually determine about the content of two books weighing in at close to 1,000 pages in the first two weeks of class, what interested me was that the student thought only about the physical object.

One of the things that is most impressive about contemporary textbooks, however, is the wealth and richness of their online resources. I doubt students consider those at all. (A few years ago, before textbook publishers set up websites, texts would often come bundled with CDs. I heard that when the students sold the books back, the CDs would often still be in the little envelopes bound into the books, untouched, with many students completely unaware it had been there.)

Getting an online resource is like getting an extended service warranty: it’s not something that you can see or hold in your hand when you walk up to the counter. I wonder if there are psychological studies of how people value such purchases.

Textbook publishers are facing a lot of problems. I’ve said before that textbooks probably can’t survive in their current form, and in some ways, the online resources the publishers are offering indicate that the publishers are moving in the right direction.

But emails like the one my colleague received show that the psychological inertia is huge. If there is anything made of atoms, it seems students will focus on that one thing and think about nothing else they might be getting along with those atoms pulled from trees.

Related posts

eTextbooks
Antiquated, heavy, expensive
Why textbooks have a bad rep
The textbook conundrum

Is Texas’s textbook buying power all that and a bag of chips?

The Texas Tribune reports that the much ballyhooed Texan influence on K-12 textbooks may be exaggerated.

(S)ince the mid-1990s and the rise of the state curriculum standards and testing movement, publishers have increasingly been forced to customize their books for different states, as well as for larger school districts in the roughly 30 states without statewide adoptions. Simultaneously, advances in publishing and printing technologies allow far more customization at lower cost, much like large newspapers that issue several geographically customized editions every day.

What’s more, rapidly shifting politics and the digital revolution in instructional materials promises to dilute the power of state school boards even further — both here in Texas and nationally.

On this point, a blog in Newsweek reaches a somewhat similar conclusion, and concludes with this cynical observation:

Besides, it's not like high-schoolers pay any attention to their textbooks anyway.

Texas textbooks tapering influence?

In the blogging I’ve been doing on the Texas K-12 science standards, one point that get repeatedly emphasized is that Texas influences textbooks outside the state, for many reasons.

That influence is declining, and may be ending, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Kate Alexander reports on how several factors have combined to weaken the likelihood that textbook publishers will be as attentive to Texas standards as in the past.

First, it’s the economy, stupid (emphasis added).

Bob Cassel... said publishers have tailored textbooks to Texas in the past because the state has been an enormous customer with a reliable source of textbook funding from the $22 billion Permanent School Fund.

Last year, no money was available from the school fund for textbooks because of significant investment losses, and legislators relied on federal stimulus money to pay for the books.

Second, people are waking up to limitations of print books (emphasis added).

“Our entire purchasing philosophy right now is based on one thing, and that is the lifetime of a textbook binding,” Hochberg said.

That approach does not lend itself to providing students with the most up-to-date material, particularly in dynamic fields such as science and social studies, Hochberg said.

For example, elementary science books in Texas still say there are nine planets in the solar system even though Pluto lost full planet status in 2006.

eTextbooks

My quickie post about textbooks 50 years from now prompted this very good question from Philosopher's Mess:

Why isn't their a push in Academics to get of textbooks?

Indeed. It seems everyone else is thinking hard about ebooks and ebook readers (or “smartbooks”), as this article, and this blog post, and this radio interview (scroll down to part three) show. You thought the music industry freaked out about mp3s? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

That academics haven’t moved to ditch textbooks is a classic example of how universities are simultaneously the greatest engine for innovation in the world, and the slowest, least agile, most conservative institutions you’ll find anywhere.

Academics are like kids in dysfunctional families, in some ways: they repeat the patterns they they themselves went through. Because they had textbooks when they went through their undergrad training in the 80s (or earlier), they think it’s normal for their students to have textbooks.

Academics also obsess about standards. They like textbooks because they go through a fairly rigorous vetting process. Wikipedia? Barely a month goes by where I don’t hear a colleague ranting about Wikipedia. “It’s plagiarized.” “It’s unreliable.” “They (students) don’t understand that’s not a valid source...” So their response is to tell students, “Don’t use it at all,” rather than, “Here’s the ways to use evaluate what you find on Wikipedia critically, and use it as a way into literature.”

And in the back of people’s minds, there might be worries about obsolescence. They don’t want to be the person who bought Betamax and has a stack of 8-tracks in the closet.*

Books are one of the “most perfect objects ever invented,” so it is no surprise that people are reluctant to let go. People who love books as physical objects and mementos. Fine. Film didn’t kill theatre, television didn’t kill movies, and mp3s still haven’t managed to exterminate vinyl. But the old technologies have become occasional, premium experiences, not mass market.

Few people have such attachment to their introductory general biology textbooks, though.

I’ll try to explore this some more in a later post.

* And speaking of Wikipedia, I bet I’ve just sent a couple of people there by referencing Betamax and 8-tracks.

Misplaced confidence

The 7 January 2010 Nature podcast has an interview with Per Ahlberg, one of the authors describing some wonderful new old tracks – new to science, but dating from 397 million years ago. They’re fossil tracks of early tetrapods – which is the lineage including amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and bird.

About four and a half minutes in, Ahlberg says:

This is going to be in the textbooks fifty years from now.

And I thought, “Wow. He’s confident.

“I wouldn’t be so sure that textbooks are going to exist in fifty years.”

It will be a shame if we are still relying on “dead tree” compilations of old research to teach students fifty years from now.

A good summary of the tracks and their importance can be found here.

Texas textbooks toast?

I’ve frequently had reason to talk about Texas science standards here, thanks to the dubious actions of the Texas State Board of Education. It’s often been noted by commentators around the nation is that because Texas is such a huge textbook market, textbook publishers make their books conform to the Texas standards. So when Texas adopts bad standards, the rest of the United States tends to feel the effects.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that the state is seriously considering moving to online materials, and it could be very quickly – maybe less than a year. The Texas Tribune has a longer article detailing the same subject.

I think this is probably good news in many ways (some of my thoughts on textbooks are here). People in other states will probably have less fear of bad decisions bleeding over into their jurisdictions.

That said, I am worried that this might reduce the spotlight on the Texas State Board of Education off the hook. Their decisions might be subjected to less scrutiny and criticism nationally, creating the possibility that they might do more damage, albeit to fewer people.

No going back

Marv Wolfman, one of the most successful comics writers around, wrote today about the medium that he loves (and that I do, too):

When you look at the billion dollars plus that Dark Knight grossed, or the hundreds of millions grossed by Iron Man – a character few people outside of comics knew anything about – we see that people love what we do, but that love has not always been reflected in the sales of the comics themselves. Back in the 90s, when I was one of the two founding editors of Disney Adventures magazine – a magazine that sold over a million copies a month – I started calling regular comics a 32 page pamphlet. I meant that to be as derogatory as it sounds.

Comics were trapped in a ghetto; beloved and ignored at the same time. The days of the pamphlet are over. The tail of the dinosaur just hasn’t informed the brain. We need to look ahead to other formats, to other kinds of stories to tell and to other ways to distribute what we do. There is a generation now who gets all their entertainment over the net and that is not going to change. We are not going to go back to a 100% paper society. That is ridiculous both for distribution and for the environment. Computer book readers are going to get more popular and when they move to color, there will be no reason at all to have to print a magazine when you can download one to a perfect flat screen with no glare that looks exactly like paper anyway.

I feel much the same about textbooks in particular and other aspects of higher education in general. Why are we still doing things the same as 20, 30, 40 years ago or more? “The tail of the dinosaur just hasn’t informed the brain.”

Having said that, you know what? I still love comics on paper. I read a lot on the net, but comics are one of the things that I still like the physicality of. But I agree with Marv. The ebook experience seems to be pulling close to paper, and that’s the future.

(Pictured: Vigilante, a recent title by Marv.)

Additional: An interview with cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, who had major success with the newspaper comic strip Bloom County, includes this comment:

Newspapers have about five years left. Young readers of the newspaper comics simply don’t exist anymore in numbers that count. Those eyeballs are elsewhere and will not come back. Online comics are terrific. But they will never have 1% of the readership any major comic had 20 years ago, by the nature of the technology. They’re different beasts now. No, after having 70 million daily readers in 1985, getting 3000 a day online isn’t terribly energizing at this stage.

Antiquated, heavy, expensive

The title of the post is a quote by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the New York Times. It could be a fun guessing game to figure out what he’s talking about. Ah, so many punchlines...

He’s talking about textbooks.

This article looks at the move toward digital textbooks, but I don’t think it goes far enough.

“I want our teachers to have the best materials available, and with digital textbooks, we could see the best lessons taught by the most dynamic teachers,” said John A. Roach, superintendent of the Carlsbad, Calif., schools. “But they’re not going to replace paper texts right away.”

Why not?

There’s only one substantive reason given in the article not to switch this instant:

Not every student has access to a computer, a Kindle electronic reader device or a smartphone, and few districts are wealthy enough to provide them. So digital textbooks could widen the gap between rich and poor.

I am still trying to figure out how textbooks have held on as long as they have, and whether there are any pedagogical reasons for keeping some of them.

Making textbooks

This article explains how you make high school textbooks and why Texas has So. Much. Clout.

California has more students (more than 6 million versus just over 4 million in Texas), but Texas spends just as much money (approximately $42 billion) on its public schools. More important, Texas allocates a dedicated chunk of funds specifically for textbooks. That money can't be used for anything else, and all of it must be spent in the adoption year. Furthermore, Texas has particular power when it comes to high school textbooks, since California adopts statewide only for textbooks from kindergarten though eighth grade, while the Lone Star State's adoption process applies to textbooks from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

There is much more to learn about the textbook editorial process in this article, however.

Why textbooks have a bad rep

Seth Godin writes:

Demolish the textbook market as soon as possible(.)

Why would someone actively urge demolishing an industry devoted to improving knowledge? Surely there are other industries more worthy of immediate replacement. (Yeah, I’m looking at you, fossil fuels!)

Traditionally, people whinge about the cost of textbooks. But I don’t think that alone is the issue, considering that many of them will happily spend much more on other things. The issue isn’t the cost, it’s their value.

I think one of the problems with textbooks is that, by definition, they are compilations of established knowledge. We have a fairly long established idea that over time, established knowledge becomes public domain. This is particularly true of scientific ideas. Indeed, some may argue that this is the entire point of science. So people really wonder why they should have a compilation of stuff where the core materials are often quite literally decades old.

This problem for textbooks is going to get worse as more old information gets put online. For the kind of science found in introductory textbooks, sources like the much reviled Wikipedia are decent starting points.

Textbooks are going to have to reinvent themselves. They’re going to have to stop being mini-encyclopedias on a topic, and offer something else. I’m not sure what it’ll be. Maybe the future lies with textbooks that offer personal perspective, opinion, a plan, or a point of view.

The textbook conundrum

I don’t know what to do about textbooks.

On the one hand, textbooks are obsolete. They had a very clear and useful purpose: to summarize relevant technical research, originally published in disparate technical papers piecemeal across hundreds of journals, in one place in a reasonably authoritative manner. If a student wanted to learn about the basics of a subject by reading the original papers, it would have been a phenomenally daunting task. It would take days scouring through compilations like the Zoological Record and Psychological Abstracts to find the key papers. Even then, many papers would be may have published in journals that not even all university libraries had.

Internet resources should have killed textbooks dead about five years ago.* More and more and more research papers, even quite obscure ones, can be found online. And there are specific databases and search engines devoted to scouring only those scientific sources, like Google Scholar. And the researchers themselves are making their knowledge more available online. Now, I can usually get up to speed on a topic in a couple of days – a task that used to take me weeks.

On the other hand, I hear things like this all the time:

The #1 habit successful people share with me is this: They read books to learn. They do it often and with joy. It’s cheap (or free, at the library or online) and portable and specific.

That particular riff is from Seth Godin.

Below, Chris Anderson talks about the importance of starting to read again after the .com bubble burst in 2000. (It’s about 4:50 in, but it will have more impact if you listen to the those preceding 4 minutes.) It comes up again at about 11 minutes, where Anderson says, “Books kind of saved me in the last couple of years.”



Over and over and over again: There is something valuable and important about reading. It leads to deeper, more reflective thinking. Particularly books.

So I’m completely conflicted. Students are notoriously recalcitrant to buy textbooks. They don’t see value in them (by which I don't just mean the often extreme cost). But I think they need the sort of deep thinking skills that they get from reading.

* Maybe textbooks are dead, and they’re just twitching.

I ♥ textbook reps!

I have, almost without exception, really enjoyed working with every textbook publisher salesman that has visited our campus.

Even though the job of these reps is to make the sale, many of the companies send their reps to our department to visit regardless of whether we are currently using any of their books. They'll be visiting even if there's not a prospect of us using one of their books for several years.

Another thing I appreciate is that I've found most textbook reps are quite interested in teaching. They want to know how we instructors are teaching, what our challenges are. They often have very thoughtful things to say about the thought and design process that went into a book that are not immediately obvious.

Textbook reps have a very unique perspective on the state of teaching. They are probably among the few people who go from institution to institution and actually talk to different instructors about their teaching.

It does not hurt that when they are here, they often feed us lunch if they think there's a sale to be made. And even when there isn't, they'll often bring cookies.

Nothing like the original

It's a good month for cinema geek purists.

This month sees the DVD release of a couple of movies that I've been waiting to buy in their original versions. The Japanese release of Godzilla and the 1977 version of Star Wars. Both have been available before—the Americanized Godzilla with Raymond Burr, and the special edition version of the first three Star Wars movies, but I resisted buying earlier releases, because I wanted the original.

But it's not a great month for television geek purists. I was disappointed to read plans to redo the original Star Trek series. Hopefully, they will go the route taken by Star Wars and some of the DVDs of classic Doctor Who series and have an option where you can choose to view the original version or the new version.

I'm not opposed to tinkering with works of art in all cases. I went excitedly to the theatre when the Star Wars trilogy special edition was released, and the new effects and such were cool. But I don't want the originals to be lost.

Does this post have anything to do with science? Sort of. In Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte talks about summarizing as a potential source of corruption of evidence. The market for summaries in science is huge. You only need to think about textbooks. They repackage and summarize.

There are many notorious cases of errors being perpetuated because textbooks copy from each other. Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay about the "fox terrier clone" about how, in text after text, small prehistoric horses were compared in size to fox terriers, rather than any other dog (Gould, 1988). In one draft of a textbook I reviewed, I spotted another error that has been perpetuated by copying: a somatosensory map of the nervous system where the homonculus has a left hand attached to the right side of the body.

But even if the information is correct, quite often important context is lost. For example, some introductory biology books talk about the "Z scheme" when discussing photosynthesis to describe the energy levels of electrons. But many well known textbooks show it like below.

The "Z scheme" is shown by the yellow.

Do those yellow lines trace the letter Z?

They most emphatically do not.

At least in my world, that's an N, not a Z.

Never mind confusing the students, I have no idea why the heck the thing is called a Z scheme when faced with a diagram like that.

I strongly suspect that the diagram in the original scientific article describing electron energy in photosynthesis was rotated 90°, but I haven't been able to track it down to confirm. So I'm left with mysterious name I have to teach that is divorced from its original context, and makes no sense as a result.

I am really pleased to see is that more and more old research articles are becoming scanned and posted to the web, thanks to sites like JSTOR. More and more, I am able to read what the original authors thought and see the original evidence.

References
Gould, S.J. 1988. The case of the creeping fox terrier clone. Natural History 96(1): 16-24. (Also collected in: Gould, S.J. 1991. Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History, pp. 155-167. New York, W.W. Norton & Co.)