A memo of understanding is not neutrality

Seen on Twitter this morning, from Moosesplaining Max:

A neutral stance on a contentious person is an implicit endorsement, stop kidding yourself.

The moose is right. It reminded me of this quote:

“We understand that there were two sides to this,” he said. “The students that [are part] of that certain student group is opposed to LNG and I hope you understand that there are those who are for it as well. We can’t get involved in either of those sides. We’re simply focused on providing the best educational opportunities for our students.”

And that would be Guy Bailey, our university president, arguing with a straight face that signing a memo of understanding with an energy company, NextDecade, is “not taking sides.” What rot. That’s not even an “implict” endorsement, that’s an explicit endorsement.


I also don’t buy the “We’re just focused on education” argument, either. Why do we have a South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Center? It’s not just to educate people about that; it’s an active effort to improve health in the region. This university does all kinds of things that are not related to education.


The president’s office got over 200 calls about the university’s memo of understanding with NextDecade, and almost all were against it.

I hate the crummy arguments. I wish that administrators would keep it a hundred: say there is a real controversy. Talk about the pros and cons of partnering with corporations. But I so wish they would stop kidding themselves.

Related posts

Is there any money you won’t take?
External links

LNG agreement concerns continue

Tuesday Crustie: Guess this crab's job

“This crustacean appears to be on a tenure track.” - Rutger Vos

“2017 goals” - Ryan Broderick

Is there any money you won’t take?

Here’s a picture of UTRGV president Guy Bailey from a little over a week ago, doing what he’s doing in a lot of pictures: agreeing to take money. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration. There wasn’t a cheque from NextDecade, the other party in this agreement. Instead, the press release says this is a:

(S)trategic partnership to foster STEM-based (science, technology, engineering and math) education programs,facilitate research and job training opportunities for UTRGV students, and promote collaboration between academia and industry(.)

This is not just yesterday’s news, it’s last week’s news. Why am I blogging about this now? Because I missed it. It wasn’t on the university’s home page. It wasn’t in the daily news email we all get. No administrator – not my chair, not my dean, nobody – mentioned it, even though, as a STEM faculty, I should be one of the people potentially affected, nay, benefiting from this partnership, because it’s for STEM education, right? It snuck past my radar, almost as though the university isn’t proud of this partnership. Hm...

The partnership is with NextDecade, a company proposing to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in the region. Here’s how the Sierra Club describes it:

If built, the Rio Grande LNG export terminal would be the largest single source of air pollution in Cameron County, according to its expected emissions. Its construction would require filling in hundreds of acres of wetlands in an area that is critical habitat for the endangered ocelot and Aplomado falcon. There are also concerns that the view of the industrial landscape and associated pollution could threaten the Valley’s beach and nature tourism industries.

The Brownsville Herald reports (my emphasis)

UTRGV declined to address the controversial aspect of local LNG projects. In an emailed response to The Brownsville Herald’s request for comment on that aspect, university spokesman Patrick Gonzales wrote only that “UTRGV is excited about the education opportunities this NextDecade LLC partnership provides, especially in the STEM fields, for our students.”

UTRGV is going to deal with community controversy by pretending it doesn’t exist. That is not the way to build trust with your community.

Calling this partnership a boon for “STEM education” is too generous. This will be a partnership for TE education. I doubt there will be anything for science or math students or faculty. This might be for engineers.

It’s also coming at a time when many other universities are divesting from fossil fuels.

Is there any money our president won’t take?

Bailey has more or less said that he sees money as the solution to all the university’s problems. When he started, he accepted money from the food industry for diabetes and obesity research. That’s a conflict of interest. This NextDecade partnership is also rife with potential conflicts of interest. I wonder what would happen if biology faculty started doing research on those endangered species whose habitats could be affected by the LNG export terminal?
 A lot of old UTPA signs were swapped out for UTRGV ones last week when the semester started. Maybe they should have looked like this:

Related posts

Show me what you value
H.E.B.’s donation to UTRGV: the gift that keeps on conflicting

External links

NextDecade partnership with UTRGV aims to stimulate STEM-based learning and boost local economy
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Makes Agreement with Rio Grande LNG. Students, Community Leaders Wont Have It
Students, environmentalists, criticize UTRGV education agreement with LNG firm
UTRGV and NextDecade sign MOU

Administrator calls our students “products”

In a recent document, one of our adminstrators was talking about student learning outcomes (SLOs), and wrote (my emphasis):

Identifying which SLO a course addresses is not a huge task. It only ensures that students learn what they are required to learn so that we send a product out that we are proud of.

Wait. Did this administrator just call our students, “products”? Pretty sure the answer is yes.

When I first ran across this, I was surprised and disappointed. The more I’ve thought on it, the madder I’ve gotten. Our students are not “products.” They are people.

This is just horribly dehumanizing. I only hope the administrator who wrote this will feel a little shame for writing that when this is pointed out.

It’s such a revealing glimpse into the model of education that administrators long to have, which is an industrial model.

As few professors, oops, lecturers, oops, adjuncts, oops, workers, oops, online tutorial programs as needed to churn through as many products with as little variation as possible.

Many others have pointed out this is a trend in North American higher education. But I’ve worked under a lot of administrative teams here. These are attitudes that are specific to this administrative team now, that I have not seen under previous administrations.

Related post

Show me what you value

In praise of lurkers

There’s practically a new emerging literary genre of academics writing pearl clutching thinkpieces decrying the sad effect of social media on academia and science.

Last week there was an opinion piece in PNAS. It was illustrated with this picture:

Then, there was this piece in Times Higher Education.

In return for feeding our desire for evidence of how we are doing in our social interactions – our narcissistic craving for others' approval – first Facebook and then a group of other social media corporations persuaded half of humankind to give up their most intimate personal details. 

Both of these pieces got soundly criticized, as they should, because they make some silly statements. For instance, the Egan piece says:

Students need to be helped to sever some of the ties that bind them to the people they already know and to discover new forms of connectedness in the shared writings of the wider world.

Jordan Gaines wrote:

This is...literally exactly why I started using social media more when I started as a grad student.

That’s my experience, too. Social media has given me a window into what other people are thinking in a way that I just haven’t had before.

A very common charge levied against social media is that is is mere “narcissism.” What these anti-social media types seem to forget is that there is another, largely invisible category of social media users: the lurkers. For every person who is active on social media (the “narcissists” posting material), there is an unknown number of people quietly reading, listening, learning.

If you condemn the posting of scientific or academia material on social media, you’re penalizing not just the producers of that material, but you’re saying that all the people who might learn from that don’t matter, and that their learning is somehow invalid and unworthy. Presumably because it’s not in a brick and mortar building.

This “cane shaking at social media” genre needs a catchy name. Like how people writing editorials about why they got out of academia became known as “Quit lit.”

External links

Science in the age of selfies 
Why academics should NOT make time for social media

Picture from here.

The IOT test

This is an excerpt of a data set from a manuscript I’ve been working on.

The box shows where half the data live, with a line dividing the boxes marking the median. The small black square in the mean, and the little crosses show highest and lowest data points.

When I submitted the manuscript, I didn’t do any statistical analysis of the data. One reviewer asked me to to a statistical analysis. It was a perfectly reasonable request that I should have anticipated. The reviewer didn’t see the same plot that I have above and didn’t know the data as well as I do.

But it got me thinking. John Vokey, one of my undergraduate professors at the University of Lethbridge,used to refer to some differences as “significant by the IOT test.” IOT was an acronym for “Inter Ocular Test.” In other words, the difference was so bloody obvious that it hit you right between the eyes.

“If the mean for one group is up here with only a little variation, and the mean for the other group is down here with this much variation, what do you need a test for? Why not just say they’re different?”

I didn’t do an analysis because I thought there was no point. In the data above, there is no overlap between the two sets at all. Do you need a statistical test to tell you that those two data sets are different?

It is easy enough to do a simple t-test on the data above.

But does adding the test and p value tell you anything more, or different, than the plot alone? Or is including the p value a statistical “fig leaf”?

Do your thoughts about analysis change when I plot the raw data next to the box plot?

Now you can see more clearly that the sample size is small. But even then, when there is no overlap in the data sets, is there any test or condition that will say those two are not statistically different?

Show me what you value

My dad used to have an expression: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” - Joe Biden

Press releases, liked budgets, are often uncomfortably honest revelations into what institutions value. With that in mind, consider this tweet from UT System about UTRGV’s first year:

Philanthropy: Up 530%
Research expenditures: Up 56%
Student applications: Up 21%

Based on this, the UT System values money above all.

This is consistent with comments UTRGV president Guy Bailey made to faculty last year. He said he was often asked about what problems the new university was facing. He said, roughly (not a direct quote) that he told people, “I don’t have any problems that money can’t solve.” And indeed, the rest of his presentation talked about how UTRGV could get more money from the state by optimizing patterns of student enrollment. The main times I have seen our president in the news have been when he’s accepting money from donors.

The longer press release is a bit better. The first bullet in the list is student retention rate. That is indeed something to be proud of, considering that retention was something the legacy institutions struggled with. But the next two items on the list are about money.

Realted posts

What does an institution brag about?

External links

UTRGV off to a stellar start in historic first year
UTRGV receives largest donation in RGV higher education history, names business college in honor of Robert C. Vackar

Broader impacts

I find it interesting that I can know I’ve crossed half a million views on a Q&A site, but still have no idea what having a journal’s “Top 10 paper” for a month means in terms of page views, downloads, and so on.

Memory whiplash: “Baby eat that chicken slow...”

I’m far from the first to note how music locks us into times. You can’t control what songs are playing and popular in any year, and they become indelibly associated with that time in your life.

For me, I can’t think of The Tragically Hip without thinking of grad school. 100.3 The Q, the local Victoria rock radio station, declared The Hip to be their “house band,” so they were kind of ubiquitous on the airwaves when I was doing my doctorate.

When I moved out of the country, I didn’t hear their music any more. I’d heard about Gord Downie’s diagnosis of terminal cancer. But I happened to be in Canada this last weekend, and caught a bit of the Hip’s final show on CBC. I saw people’s reaction on Twitter. Even with my tiny little familiarity with the band and the music, I was awestruck by how they touched people last Saturday night.

I was never actually a big fan of the Tragically Hip’s music. But I always liked this one a lot.


Thank you, Gord.

Master’s theses should be published

Mark Humphires has a nice post about the difference in research conducted at private organizations versus universities. His argument is that universities have screwed up scientific research because of those pesky wrong-headed incentives. (You know, the ones that scientists create for themselves.)

In the middle of a good article, I find this aside:

(Last semester, we even got a Faculty-wide email encouraging us to write up our Master’s students’ project work for publication. Because what science needs right now is more unfinished crap.)

Objection!

It’s terrible to characterize master’s theses as “unfinished crap.” It shows how little regard you hold for master’s students and their work. What have master’s students done to warrant their research being treated with such contempt?

I wish I could say this was surprising, but I have seen over and over again this disinterest in master’s students, their work, and their degrees. Research universities view master’s degrees as the exit route for bad doctoral students. Funding agencies don’t want to support them, because they buy into the “failed doctoral student” narrative, and because master’s are not terminal degrees.

This is another one of those biases that works against the stated aim of many institutions to increase diversity in science. As Terry McGlynn has often noted, under-represented students come from under-represented institutions. Many of the under-represented students we say we want to recruit may not have immediate access to an institution with a doctoral program. They may want to gain research experience in a master’s that may not have be available to them as undergrads (but that undergrad students at the more swanky universities may have already had).

In my role as grad program coordinator, I have been the person sending those emails asking, “Why we are graduating so many master’s students with thesis, but we are not seeing papers being published based on that thesis research?” I send them because we have always had in our program’s guidelines that a master’s thesis should represent a publishable peer-reviewed journal. My rough and ready guide is that a master’s thesis represents one paper, and a doctoral dissertation represents about three papers.

If you think your students’ work is “unfinished crap,” let me suggest to you that it is not always the students’ fault. Maybe it’s the fault of professors who didn’t mentor the student, didn’t support the work, and can’t be bothered to do their job right.

Related posts

The cages we scientists make for ourselves

External links

How a happy moment for neuroscience is a sad moment for science
Disadvantaged students come from disadvantaged universities

Emily through the aquarium glass: The Dragon Behind The Glass reviewed

Ahab had a great white whale.

Emily Voigt had a great red fish.

Then a great batik fish.

Then a great silver fish.

In every case, Voigt is pursuing the arowana. She first hears the name from a law enforcement who is talking to her about the exotic pet trade in New York. She learns that the arowana is a large fish prized by a certain kind of aquarium owner: usually Asian, male, and rich. The latter is the most necessary feature for many arowana owners, because single individual arowanas are fetching hundreds of thousands of American dollars.

That’s not a typo. It’s no surprise that you find arowana gracing the landing page of Aquarama, a trade show for the aquarium industry that Voigt visits early in the book.

Even by the time Voigt visits Aquarama, it’s clear that the arowana is the center of an unusual market, often shrouded in secrecy, and both threats and acts of violence. Again and again throughout the book, arowana are stolen, smuggled, and fought over, both in the professional and literal sense of the word.

The strangeness of it all is compelling for the reader and Voigt, who ends up pursuing this fish through multiple countries and jungles. She’s accompanied by a memorable set of other people, who I found myself constantly googling to see by the time I reached the second half of the book.

The Dragon Behind the Glass is not an academic work, but it almost could have been. Voigt’s research on the pet trade and the science is flawless. There is lots of solid biology and scientific history. For instance, we learn one species of arowana was collected and drawn by no less than the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, on an expedition to the Amazon that was ultimately doomed. (Sean Carroll’s Into the Jungle describes why in more detail than here. It’s about the only example in the book where I felt Voigt missed a good story.)

I came to this book because of my own research on the aquarium industry. But I was an armchair investigator. I was frustrated by my inability to get a handle on much of the supply chain for aquarium animals (crayfish in my case). Voigt provides that inside view of the production and wholesale end of the aquarium trade, and has many thoughtful asides about the pet trade. She considers the pros and cons of collecting from wild populations, CITES listings, and the paradox of the arowana being “a mass produced endangered species” (a term that applies perfectly to some crayfish in the pet trade, too).

While I was originally interested in this book because of its relevance to my own research, I kept reading because it was intertwined with the personal stuff, and her own jungle adventures, in such an entertaining way. Voigt is self aware enough to realize that her interest in this fish is... not normal. There’s a recurring theme of, “Why am I doing this and is it worth it?” that I think anyone deeply invested in a project will recognize.

The Dragon Behind the Glass is part exposé, part travelogue, part scholarship, and part descent into madness. It’s a combination as addictive as a skillfully made desert.

External links

Emily Voigt
The Dragon Behind the Glass (publisher page)
The Dragon Behind the Glass (Amazon page)
The deadly trade around exotic fish
Aquarama trade show
Early evolution pioneers’ artwork now online


Talks at Google:

Tuesday Crustie: Enunciate

It’s trivia night at the pub! Because I am a non-imbiber, the most fun alcohol ever gets for me is enjoying the names and the bottle designs. I was tickled by this name when I saw it on the menu: “Evil crawfish.”

This was the art before all the brewer’s insignia got added.

Another version of the tells the story behind the name. The same company makes “Eagle Claw Fist.”

Once upon a time a man walked into a bar where a friend of our’s was tending the taps. He tried to order an Eagle Claw Fist, but got it wrong and asked for an Evil Crawfish. When we heard the story, after much laughter, we knew one day we’d make the beer. Finally, here it is, built off of ECF, but cleaner, meaner, less bitter, and dry hopped with Citra, El Dorado, and Mosaic.

Related posts

Building a winning trivia team

External links

Clow Shoes Beer: Meet the label artist

Research is more than bench work and field work

I sometimes get emails from undergraduate student here asking if there are research opportunities with me. Partly because I have some bottlenecks in my lab (microscopes are a limiting factor), I can’t have a lot of students in my lab.

I’ve started offering them research opportunities to do data extraction or analysis, rather than data collection. I ask them to extracting data from websites or journal articles, and get them into an analyzable form. For example, getting latitude and longitude coordinates for species locations in the literature. Or compiling weather data.

I never heard from those students again.

I can only speculate as to why they never follow up. But, at a guess, I think they don’t consider working with spreadsheets “real” research. For them, “real” research means having a lab coat on and a pipette in hand, or getting a sunburn out in the field with a notebook in hand.

Students are shortchanging themselves.

First, I suspect that by the time you’re asking someone to compile and analyze data from some other source, it may be more likely to result in the student getting their name on a publication than bench or field work.

Second, extracting existing data and putting into a form that can be analyzed is far, far more likely to be a skill that these students will use throughout their professional career. Lots of professional level jobs require working with spreadsheets; very few require running gels.

Campus carry day

August is rarely a happy month for academics. Summer is more than halfway gone, we haven’t done as much research or as much writing as we wanted, and classes are going to start gearing up again very soon.

At my university, and public universities across Texas, today marks the start of an even less happy month. Today, 1 August 2016, is the day Texas’s campus carry law goes into effect.

The sign above, on the door leading to the research labs, including mine, went up Friday. The law permits university administrators to set “reasonable rules” for “campus safety.” (Yes, the wording is vague, which caused no end of difficulties in drafting policy, I’m sure.) Consequently, there is a long list of exclusionary zones on UTRGV campus, including labs.

University administators, and many others, lobbied harder against this law than any other I have seen in my time here, but to no avail. It’s telling that private universities were given the option to opt out of the law, and 36 out of 37 did.

Not surprisingly, the #CampusCarry hashtag on Twitter shows the usual split of rote political talking points, just adding more fuel to me desire for blogging to be my main social media outlet for a while.

And because fiftieth anniversaries matter more than usual to me this year, I can’t go without mentioning that this law is going into effect 50 years to the day after the first major mass shooting in an American university at the University of Texas in Austin. <sarcasm> That was extra classy, Texas legislature. </sarcasm>

I don’t feel safer today. Quite the opposite.

External links

Campus carry goes into effect at UTRGV

It doesn’t matter if the Ice Bucket Challenge gave us a “breakthrough” or not

We are in the middle of a science news hype cycle.

First, the inflated expectations. Lots of news sources reporting that funds from the Ice Bucket Challenge were used to make a “breakthrough” in ALS. Note that the original press release didn’t say “breakthrough” anywhere in the headline or the main text. It said a “significant... discovery” was made.

We’re now in the trough of disappointment. Serious science journalists are poo-poohing the claim that the results reported can be described as a “breakthrough.” Some are warning that just proves this whole crowdfunding thing is a dangerous idea. Boing Boing, for instance:

As useful as the funds raised by the Ice Bucket Challenge are, they can’t replace the big, institutional, steady spending that has been under assault since the Reagan era.

I’m right with people saying that neither pretentious press releases nor hyperexcited news coverage do us much good.

But I worry that downplaying good new research (which as far as I can see, everyone admits this was) because it’s not a “breakthrough” accidentally reinforces the notion that only the “breakthroughs” matter. It also implies that because the results are not a “breakthrough,” that they are trivial findings. Of course, the “not a breakthrough” article admits:

This is intriguing and important research.

Guys, if you’re going to criticize press coverage for bombastic headlines and burying the qualifiers and nuance near the end of the story, I think it’s fair to ask for the same in return.

Focusing on the resulting science also buries some of the less tangible benefits of the crowdfunding campaign. People had fun with the Ice Bucket Challenge. People might have learned what ALS was for the first time. Scientists got to do their research were less likely to shut their labs down. Those are positive benefits regardless of whether the money raised led to any particular scientific outcome.

I’ve seen the argument that crowdfunding somehow poses a threat to federal funding since I got involved with #SciFund. What’s been missing every time I see this claim is any actual evidence. I have yet to hear one politician say something like, “We’re thinking of cutting funding to ALS research because we saw the Ice Bucket Challenge was a big success.”

All I see is fear. And I get that fear. Many people’s labs and careers have depended on federal funds for so long that anything that gives the hint of deviating from the cry of “MOAR funding!” is open for criticism.

But what else are we supposed to do?

Yes, we’re supposed to advocate for our science to politicians. We’re supposed to communicate our discoveries to the broader public. We do that. And, in the United States, all that advocacy over more than a decade has yielded us... 

A set of flat research budgets in real dollars (check the “nondefense” line). Labs shutting down, and an endless stream of complaints about the amount of time spent trying to get money for research instead of doing research.

It’s frustrating to be told that scientists should not even try any other plan because it might threaten the plan that is not making any progress, even after more than ten years.

Related posts

What the Coburn report has in common with arsenic life

External links

Here's the Exact Way That the Ice Bucket Challenge Helped ALS Research (from September 2015)
Remember the ice bucket challenge? It just funded an ALS breakthrough
Ice Bucket Challenge “breakthrough”? Experts pour cold water on superficial reporting
The Ice Bucket Challenge did not fund a breakthrough in ALS treatment
Federal Budget Authority for R&D in FYs 2014 and 2015 Turns Modestly Upward, but Extent of Increase in FY 2016 Uncertain

Reasons to go back to blogging

Because my blog is a place I don’t have to put up with the proliferation of political memes.

Tuesday Crustie: Today the bucket, tomorrow the world!

Caption:

Lobster (sic) in a bucket looks like a gigantic monster on a metallic planet, and the waterdrops look like stars.

From here.

Pokémon in real life: biologists catch them all!

Pokémon are back in the news. The property that was a mega-popular trading card game in the late 1990s is back with a new smartphone game, Pokémon Go, that launched last week and is suddenly thing the thing on everyone’s lips.

You are going to read about a zillion hot takes and think pieces about this game, but remember: the Southern Fried Scientist, Andrew Thaler, got there first.

In our afternoon of wandering, it was clear there was no ‘typical’ Pokémon Go player. We saw parents with their kids, young adults, older couples, grandparents, and one gnarly Harley rider who excitedly called to his buddies in the Yorktown Pub “Hold up, I found a Pidgey!” The Colonial Triangle (Yorktown, Jamestown, and Williamsburg) in general is so snow-blindingly white that no one even thinks twice about calling it the Colonial Triangle. Yet, this afternoon was the most diverse gathering of people I’ve ever seen in Yorktown.

Asia Murphy has came up with the idea of creating a pokédex for real organisms. Thus, the #PokemonIRL hashtag was born.

I made mine up at the top, and you can, too! A template is here. You will need a graphics editor and a bit of experience, but you can make one pretty quickly. It’s a cool idea to spread the joy of finding critters, which are just as wild and exotic as any that the Pokémon Company creates.

Additional: The person who created Pokémon was a frustrated insect collector, Satoshi Tajiri (Thanks to Jon Mooallem).

Alex Lee points out that Pokémon is doing a much better job of inspiring kids than nature is. This is perhaps to be expected. To paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock, “A game is life with the dull bits cut out.”

External links

The power of Pokémon Go
#PokémonIRL (blog post) 
Pokémon in real life blank templates
Is ‘Pokémon Go’ Good for science?
If you must play Pokémon Go, ‘catch’ some real animals while you’re at it

“Proper” technical writing?

I’ve been struggling with a frustrating manuscript revision this week.

First, the manuscript was turned back to me because of formatting. I think this was the first time that a journal didn’t send the article out for review just because I hadn’t followed their style guide. In fairness, I had not followed their style guide closely enough, but it wasn’t fixing the reference format that frustrated me.

What frustrated me was that I had submitted the paper months ago, and had been waiting for something to happen. The journal had sent it back for reformatting a couple of days after I submitted it.... but never sent me an email notification about it. I only found out because I logged into the manuscript handling system just before I was about to email the editor saying, “Hey, what’s going on?” I had wasted months waiting for a decision because of that lack of notification.

After I found this out, I talked to one of my colleagues who’d had a similar experience. A paper she’s submitted sat in the editorial system, with no notifying email, because the recommendation was not “Accept,” or “Reject,” but, “We think this paper would be more appropriate to our sister journal.”

The moral of that part of the story is to log in to the manuscript submission system after a week or so to check on your paper.

I made the changes and resubmitted it. It came back again fairly quickly – and I did get an email telling me about it this time – with another style request.

Please eliminate pronouns like ‘we’, ‘I’, ‘our study’, and ‘my study’ throughout your text. Proper technical writing should not use such phrases.

I had a Return of the Jedi flashback:

Han Solo: “Well, why don’t you use your divine influence and get us out of here?”
C-3P0: “I’m sorry, that just wouldn’t be proper.”
Han: “Proper?!”

First, that little detail about not using the first person is nowhere in the journal’s rather extensive style guide. I would have avoided it if you’d told me not to do that.

Second, the comment that using first person is not “proper technical writing” is annoying. Look, I’ll try to follow your journal’s style. But don’t tell me that using first person in a scientific paper isn’t “proper.” There’s no Académie française for scientific writing that determines what is and is not acceptable. There are just common community practices. There’s been articles (in higher ranked journals than yours, by the way) arguing that we should write like we speak. For instance, Gregory (1992) wrote:

With no guidance, scientists copy what they see, and we see thing like this: “The author is of the opinion that it is appropriate to write papers in the third person.” This is ridiculous. I am the author, not a third person.

The insistence that “data” must always be always a plural noun is another example of a stylistic preference that is confused with some sort of “proper” use. I used to believe this, but argument, analysis, and common use has softened my position. The example that convinced me was that we say, “Eight hours is too long to wait.” There’s a plural noun followed by a singular verb, and nobody bats an eyelash.

There is no ultimate authority of what “proper” technical writing is that someone can appeal to. I realize that people disagree about writing style. That’s fine. But asserting that something is wrong or improper is annoying when you can find examples of that style in many journals, and there is no ultimate authority to appeal to.

Update, 13 July 2016: People on Twitter (mostly) agree: first person is technical writing is not a horrible thing to be avoided at all costs.

Reference

Gregory MW. 1992. The infectiousness of pompous prose. Nature 360: 11-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/360011a0

External links

The data is in, Pt. 2

Tuesday Crustie: Under the microscope

Arthropods are wonderfully charismatic and photogenic under a scanning electron microscope. Here are a few pictures of Emerita benedicti that my student Claudette and technician Tom took for no reason than they look cool.

The animals were under the microscope for a research project that we have going on. We got some other nice pictures that may make their way into a manuscript. These were just a bonus.