Conferences are broken and awesome at the same time

Last week, I blogged from The Crustacean Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. Given the long plane flights, and that I paid for the entire trip out of my own pocket, was it worth it?

I had a split view after the conference.

Part of me said, “Conferences are broken.”

I’m getting impatient by the low level quality of talks at scientific conferences. I don’t mean the quality of the science, but the quality of the presentation of the science.

People are still reading those damn lists of bullet points they’ve made in those canned PowerPoint templates. I am 99.9% sure I was the only person to use Prezi. I was not the only person to deliver a presentation with no bullet points, but that number was small.

Oral presentations should be the highlight of the conference. They are ostensibly the reason we are  holding the conference. Instead, talks are so weak that they are the least interesting thing about the whole affair.

Not every talk was poor - especially not yours, dear reader. But if you were there, did you feel energized before going to the coffee break, or was the coffee break sweet release?

And I ate more lunches and dinners alone than I would have liked. I suck at making conference food dates.

But part of me said, “Conferences are awesome.”

I had a lot of good, productive conversations. At the opening social. In the poster session. At the banquet. A few in the coffee breaks.

There were points in my talk that I thought people didn’t respond to, but I found out two days later that they had the desired effect.

All of those talks made me glad that I hadn’t just connected over Skype. The actual physical meeting still has advantages.

If I were organizing a smallish conference like this, I would try to:

• Schedule more featured talks from speakers at the top of their game who give kick-ass talks. Scientists who can make you laugh. Scientists who can bring a tear to your eye. Or just the ones with awesome photos. They’re out there.
• Shake up the contributed talks. I’ve said before I would love to do an Ignite! session at a conference. Another might be to put more effort into giving speakers input on effective presentation, or have a “What not to slide” workshop.
• Ask some people to try talking about their research in panels (no slides permitted) on similar themes instead of single speaker talks.
• Try to facilitate lunch and dinner outings. Maybe designate a few of the locals to act as “hubs,” to say, “Hey, I’m going to have lunch at a nearby sushi place.” Nobody should have to eat alone at a conference.
• Make sure people have a chance to view posters before the formal poster session. And more than one poster session. “All posters up for four hours, odd numbers present first two hours, even posters present last two hours” doesn’t work. People get trapped in front of posters and don’t see others. Not having all posters up at the same time allows people to see other posters.
• Have fewer tracks of programming as the conference wears on. That way, as people leave, the rooms do not appear to be distressingly empty.

I don’t think I’d be quite ready to have one of those “unconferences” I hear about. But I do think the standard conference format could be improved.

Comments for first half of June 2011

Dr. Micro O likes Comic Sans and Wikipedia. Hey, neither of those are crimes.

DrugMonkey asks what people think retraction means.

I make a cameo appearance at John Rennie’s blog. Regarding comics.

Coming off the invasive species symposium I spoke at, Christie Wilcox looks at whether every introduced species is an invasive species.

Turning light and going blind: A tale of caves and genes

Caves seem to be dead ends of the most literal sort. Not so. Caves are bubbling cauldrons of evolutionary experimentation, and pose wonderful opportunities to study convergence. Because cave systems tend to be unconnected, they can easily become little isolated pockets, and a larger non-cave-dwelling population might invade caves repeated times. Or different species might enter the same cave. In any case, the habitat is so unique and so demanding that the changes are large.

Asellus aquaticus is a widespread isopod crustacean. Some live in caves, some don’t. The ones in caves show “an increase in body length, an increase in the length of certain appendages, an increase in the length of aesthetascs (thought to be chemoreceptors), a decrease in the degree of body and eye pigmentation, a decrease in the size of the eye, and a changed setal pattern.”

But the cave and surface forms are nominally the same species. What has happened genetically to these? Are they still able to interbreed? Are all those cave-related features reversible?

Protas and colleagues tried breeding the two forms, and were able to get hybrids, all females. Why the first generation were all females isn’t clear.

When they started doing genetics, a perhaps unsurprising pattern emerged for the genes they examined: the cave dwellers were homozygous, while the hybrids and surface dwellers were heterozygous. This to me suggests the cave dwellers are showing classic recessive Mendelian genes.

The eyes of these cave crusties have a wide range of appearances. Some are truly eyeless, while others have eyes that are... messed up. Those also appeared in the second generation. The eye loss seems to be a small number of genes with large effects.

The authors found multiple genetic mutations responsible for pigment loss - there are two ways, involving three genes, to become albino. There are also different genes for small eyes and the complete lack of eyes. This is very similar to the situation in Mexican blind cave fish, where “small eyes” and “no eyes” have are the result of two different genes, not variation within a single gene.

The paper goes on to detail much more about the genes, most of which is “above my pay grade,” as they say. But it’s cool to find these genes, with such clear and large effects, that are so clearly correlated with the environment, and with such unusual parallels to an unrelated species.

Anyone know of third blind cave species that a geneticist might tackle? Or maybe someone is willing to do the experiment of releasing a population of fruit flies into a cave, and coming back in a decade or two to see what has happened.

Reference

Protas M, Trontelj P, Patel N. 2011. Genetic basis of eye and pigment loss in the cave crustacean, Asellus aquaticus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(14): 5702-5707. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1013850108

Tuesday Crustie: You remind me of gold

The Waikiki Aquarium focuses on coral reefs of the Hawaiian islands, so I was a little surprised to see this big fellow featured:

This is an American lobster (Homarus americanus) from the Atlantic. It as on display because it has a very rare colour: a golden shade instead of the more normal dusky hue. (Remember, lobsters aren’t normally red unless they’re cooked.)

There are all sorts of interesting, rare colour variations in American lobster, no doubt noticed because we are so adept at pulling them up by the tens of thousands. The finding of a blue lobster named “Fluffy” made the news last week. And there are very interesting calico colours, lobsters with different colours on left and right, and probably more.

The Crustacean Society 2011: Day 4

Audiences were rather small for the sessions of the last day of The Crustacean Society meeting. It wasn’t that people had left Hawaii (though some had), but they had upped the number of scientific sessions from two to three, so audiences were split three ways instead of two.

The closing ceremony had a few noteworthy elements.

The Crustacean Society Excellence in Research Award (TCSERA) was awarded to Gerhard Scholz, which I live-blogged over at the Marmorkrebs blog.

There were two long, excellent tributes to respected crustacean scientists who recently died. The portraits were of two biologist that had several things in common: a fierce (some might say terrifying) work ethic, and unconventional career paths that did not follow the typical pathways for academics.

Patsy (Pat) McLaughlin: The impression left here was of a woman with a strong personality, who loved her work, dogs, and husband. She hated having her picture taken, but when she warmed to a person, was unfailing generous. She was working at a time when opinionated women were not encouraged, and she had some teaching jobs, but mostly was not affiliated with universities.

L. B. Holthuis (pronounced roughly as “Holhoyce,” I learned): The man worked at his museum for over 60 years for six days a week. On Sundays, he read books. When he visited the Smithsonian Institution, he was asked why he always ate peanut butter sandwhiches for lunch. He replied that it was cheap, and that way he could save up and spend more money for books.

Program director Chris Boyko gave us firm instructions before we left for the conference banquet at the Waikiki Aquarium, “Do not touch the monk seal!” (I wondered, “But what if the monk seal touches me?”)

Buses then took the scientists to the banquet, held at the Waikiki Aquarium. The aquarium is sort of a medium-sized aquarium. not as large as some I’ve seen (Monteray Bay comes to mind). Most of the exhibit focused on coral reef habitat. I particularly like a tank where they were rearing giant clams. I hadn’t remembered their lips being so colourful!

Ironically enough, the one item served that everybody hated... the shrimp! Distinctly dodgy. But nobody was showing signs of food poisoning by the time the buses went back.

The student awards were given out, and current president Akira gave president elect Christopher Tudge the official tie of the society president.

One of the things I wish people could hear would be a recording of the bus to the banquet, and the bus coming back from the banquet. After we got back to the Ala Moana hotel, people were still hanging around in the lobby, and you could tell that people were reluctant for the conversations to end.

Those carcinologists loosen up once you get a cheap glass of wine or two into them.

My flight left early Friday evening, so I had one day to much about on my own in Waikiki. Despite my blog post about digging for sand crabs, I didn’t think I would have much luck on Waikiki, and I was kind of fascinated by Diamond Head on this trip for some reason. I walked down toward Diamond Head, and was astonished to find Kapiolani Park: completely beautiful and almost entirely empty. Phenomenal views of Diamond Head. I couldn’t quite understand why people getting a tan wouldn’t do it in the park instead of the much more crowded Waikiki.

After that, I went to the Honolulu Zoo. The line was a bit intimidating at first, and I learned it was “Family Fun Day.” I stuck it out, as I couldn’t figure out what else I’d do with my afternoon, and was glad I did. It was much bigger than I expected, and very good (exception was the elephant exhibit, which is being completely redone - it needs it). I was able to walk through at a nice pace, no hurrying, and finished just minutes before my “I must leave now to make sure I get the airport shuttle” deadline.

Mahalo to:

Nikos Lessios, Arizona State University grad student who shared a room with me. Nikos saved my ass at least twice. First, he let me use his computer to make some last-minute changes to me presentation when my netbook was not up to the task of dealing with the massive monster presentation I’d created.

Second, he found me razors during a shopping trip so I could shave and not look like a bum throughout the meeting.

I’m also pleased that Nikos was the winner of the student poster competition. And he had been reading the Better Posters blog for ideas for his poster. (See? The advice over there isn’t completely crazy!)

Leslee Morehead for Marmorkrebs discussions.

All the Australians, who brought me news from friends in Melbourne and made me more determined than ever to make a triumphant return someday.

Brian Tsukimura for inviting me to the invasive species symposium.

Chris Boyko for suggesting I participate in a completely unrelated symposium to the one I ended up in.

Christie Wilcox, whose advice on places to check out in Honolulu was unerring.

Next year’s summer meeting is in Athens, Greece. And if you do any crustacean research, you should join the society!

They aren’t the same thing

Respect expertise, but distrust authority.

The Crustacean Society 2011: Day 3

Today was a short day at The Crustacean Society meeting. Maybe it was so everyone could celebrate World Oceans Day by going to the Waikiki beach?

The morning saw a panel titled, "The Future of Scientific Publishing." Panel members included the editors of Raffles Bulletin of Zoology, Invertebrate Systematics, Journal of Crustacean Biology, Crustaceana Monographs, and a representative from Brill, the publisher of Crustaceana.

All five panelists gave about a 5 minute blurb about changes at the journal. The common features for all of them were:

• The adoption of going electronic for all stages of the production, though some journals are adopting this more rapidly than others.
• Fretting about their Impact Factors. One editor mentioned that they were even receiving pressure from libraries to have a high Impact Factor.

That took up almost half the allotted time. This was somewhat unfortunate, given there were lots of questions and comments from the floor. This panel was scheduled for an hour, but could have easily gone twice that.

A little background may help place some of the particular concerns brought up in this panel in context. Many of the people publishing in these journals do taxonomy and systematics and things that often involve naming new species. Thus, they have rules set down by the International Committee on Zoological Nomenclature they have to follow. One of those rules is that a species name must appear on printed paper to be valid. This has probably been a major factor in the slow progress of some of these journals to move to electronic publishing. Shane Ahyong, editor of Raffles Bulletin of Zoology, noted that this rule was up for debate and possible revision. But that doesn't mean the rule will change.

Ahyong said that electronic publication created three main problems. While he was speaking of these particularly in the context of species names, these are obviously concerns across all academic publishing.

• Anyone can create a journal now. There are concerns that this will mean there will be no assurance of quality control and that “chaos will reign.” (Er, how ordered are things now? Not very.)
• The long term stability of electronic formats still has to be proven. It is not clear whether PDFs will exist in, say, 2030. (The audience later got a horror story of a long gestating book that has been slowed by repeated changes in word processing formats.)
• There is a need for texts to be completely unchangeable. People doing naming want to keep want to have a single, definitive record that cannot be altered at any point.

After that, much of the discussion revolved around speed. Speed of review. Speed of the editorial decision. Speed of publication after acceptance. One editor noted that people used to wait a year from acceptance to publication, but that nobody would stand for that now.

Crustacean Society program officer Chris Boyko asked if this emphasis on speed meant that it was possible for a paper to have a decision too rapidly. I mentioned that I didn’t want my paper rejected in eight minutes. (Much laughter to this anecdote.) Chris’s implication was that a good paper and good review couldn’t be knocked out in a few days.

At this point, a graduate student expressed her dislike of PLoS ONE. She said that in her experience, about half the papers in the journal were poor. This surprised me, and I wasn't sure what she meant. I brought up papers like the arsenic life (Wolfe-Simon et al. in Science) and kin selection (Nowak et al. in Nature) which had people saying, “These are flawed and should not have been published.” I thought she might have meant PLoS ONE papers were small or trite, but she said she thought many were not well done on the experimental design end. She apparently thought that there needed to be much stronger filtering and quality control.

Fred Schram, the editor of The Journal of Crustacean Biology, had perhaps an unusual take on the matter. He said, “Don't blame the journal for a bad paper. Don't blame the editor for a bad paper. Don't blame the reviewers for a bad paper. Blame the authors for having the temerity to put up bad research for publication.” (This brought some applause from the audience.) Ultimately, he emphasized, the authors have to take full responsibility for the material. (Of course, this does raise the question of what value reviewers and editors are adding to the process.)

Open access did, of course, come up, but closer to the end of the session, and didn’t get perhaps the airing it deserved. The Brill representative said (which I predicted he would say) that open access articles are downloaded more often, but not cited more. Ahyong said he didn't have any hard data, but did note that his journal's impact factor started going up around the time the journal went to open access.

Related to open access were questions about costs. An audience member asked, “Where does all the money for journals go?” Fred Schram replied that it would take an afternoon to discuss this. (Another indication, perhaps, that the panel session was too short.) The representative from Brill claimed that the average cost to publish a single scientific article was $3,000. This included costs of servers, production staff, and the like. He also pointed out that “for profit” does not mean “no open access.”

This was not a bad panel, but I did not feel I got the glimpse into the future of scientific publishing that the session’s title advertised. It may be that journals in this field are moving particularly slow, because they is being held back somewhat by the rules on species naming. There are bolder, more innovative ideas out there.

Garbage guts

Today's post is my attempt to combine something for World Oceans Day with The Crustacean Society meeting.

Plastic is everywhere, including the oceans. While the "great garbage patch" may be an exaggeration (as Miriam Goldstein has repeatedly told us), ships are estimated to dump about 6 and a half million tons of plastics into the ocean annually.

While people have realized the negative effects of plastics on vertebrates for some time, due to some horrendous pictures of animals laden down or entangled with plastics, the effects on invertebrates aren't as clear. Could they mistake plastics for food and ingest them? And if they did... then what?

Murray and Cowie examined the stomachs of 120 lobsters, captured off the coast of Scotland. (Not a task I envy them). Fully 100 had plastic in their stomachs, usually some ball of plastic filaments.

There seems to be a size factor at work here somehow. The larger animals were less likely to have plastic in their stomach. Whether this is a function of pure digestion - the plastic is easier to pass - or behaviour (the animals are better able to discriminate or sort plastic, or avoid it for some other reason) isn't clear yet.

The authors also found that animals that had just molted were unlikely to have plastic in their stomachs. This is probably due to the fact that when the animal sheds its exoskeleton, it also sort of sheds its gut (or part of it, at least). To be honest, I am not sure how they do that.

Reference

Murray F, Cowie PR. 2011. Plastic contamination in the decapod crustacean Nephrops norvegicus (Linnaeus, 1758). Marine Pollution Bulletin: In press. 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2011.03.032

Photo by caruba on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Amphibious invasion plans

I'm in Hawaii to speak at a symposium on invasive species. Invasive species have many characteristics that might tend to make them invasive. Although I don't expect it to come up, seeing how the symposium is on crustaceans, it's worth asking a question that recurs a lot here:

What about the brains?

Normally, we think of invaders as being able to turn out lots of babies, or having defenses that natives don't, or all sorts of other factors. But could invaders be winning because they are smarter?

This has been investigated before, and for birds and mammals, the answer seems to be yes. But will this also hold true for less brainy animals? Animals like frogs, snakes, and salamanders?

Amiel and colleagues decided to test this question by trawling through the literature for cases where reptiles or amphibians had been introduced into new habitats. And they conclude the answer is again, “Yes!”

Sort of.

There’s a question of definition. Is successfully establishing a population in a new habitat necessarily an invasion? I know some of my colleagues will say, “No. An invasive species is not just established, but is outcompeting native species.” The title is wrong.

Amiel and colleagues also parsed out the relationship by geographic area, and found another little twist. Big brains were correlated with successful introductions in Palearctic, the Nearctic, the Neotropics, Indomalaysia, Oceania, and the Afrotropics.

In Australasia, the pattern was reversed. The more successful introductions were correlated with smaller brain sizes, not bigger, Amiel and colleagues speculate that Australia is, on average, more resource poor than other locations, so that energetically efficient smaller brains are favoured.

They authors also make a passing comment that it’s not clear to them if overall brain size in amphibians and reptiles improved cognitive ability. This is a severe problem. How does one compare the learning behaviour of a salamander and a skink?

Now, a real test of this hypothesis would start to come if people measuring invertebrate brains. So many more species to work with! So many more ecologies!

Reference

Amiel JJ, Tingley R, & Shine R (2011). Smart Moves: Effects of Relative Brain Size on Establishment Success of Invasive Amphibians and Reptiles PLoS ONE 6(4): e18277. 10.1371/journal.pone.0018277

Photo from Flickr.

A guest stint at Observations of a Nerd

I have a guest post over at Christie Wilcox's Observations of a Nerd today!

If you've come here through Christie's blog - welcome! I hop you'll come back from time to time!

The Crustacean Society 2011: Day 2

Busy day today.

Started off with a featured talk by James Carleton on invasive marine species, who talked a lot about the impact of centuries of human shipping, which means there are probably huge numbers of things that are called "native" that were brought in by humans before anyone noticed.

My talk on Marmorkrebs as an invasive species was the second talk of the entire conference. I think it went well, and got some positive feedback. I officially launched the Craywatch project during my talk, and have already got some good feedback from people who are organizing similar "watch" kinds of online resources for invasive species.

I also tried to argue that society members and the society needed to be much more active online and in social media. And to put my money where my mouth is, I announced that I had a gift for the society: a new easy to remember URL for the website:

http://CrustaceanSociety.org

I continued to hang out in the invasive species symposium, which featured a lot of crab invaders. There was even some good news with invasive species that were getting beaten back. Not eradicated, but at least not getting worse.

The poster session was frantic. I had three posters to present, and I was talking non-stop throughout. Although I had multiple posters, I feel like these small conferences never have enough time for poster viewing and presenting. I was the last one to leave the poster session.

No pictures today, because I somehow managed to forget to put a memory card back into my camera. The camera took some pictures on the internal memory, but I need a cable for the camera.

This was my talk warm-up music:

Craywatch is on

Craywatch.org is a new citizen science project launching today. It’s an experiment in radical openness.

Please visit the website and spread the word using all the social media tools!

Tuesday Crustie: Jonah

As I’m in Hawaii today to attend The Crustacean Society meeting, it seems only fitting to feature a species that is, while not new to science, new to Hawaii. This is Albunea bulla, a sand crab. Regular readers might recognize sand crabs as a group close to my heart, because they were the subject of my doctoral research.

But when you read the text of the paper, you could be forgiven for missing the cool story of how the sample that proved this species was found in Hawaiian waters:

Material examined. U.S.A., Hawaii: 200 fathoms (365.8 m), ex opakapaka a.k.a. crimson jobfish (Pristipomoides filamentosus (Valenciennes)) Little Brooks Bank (ca. 24°–24°15’N, 166°45’–167°W), northwestern Hawaiian Islands, coll. Capt. W. Strickland on F/V Fortuna, 11 Apr 2005: 1 male, 17.5 mm cl
(BPBM S12265).

You might suspect something was up when you hit this understated little phrase:

The condition of the present specimen is remarkably good, considering the source(.)

Finally, it sinks in:

(T)he fact that the fish species from which the Hawaiian specimen of A. bulla was removed has been found generally from 90–360 m depth (Allen 1985) suggests that perhaps the crab was eaten at shallower depths and transported intus piscis to the depth at which the fish was caught.

That’s right, they pulled the crab out of the stomach of the fish that ate it!

And, by the way, this proves that anything can sound classy in Latin. Compare:

• “intus piscis” — Ooooh, sounds elegant!
• “fish guts” — Eeeew, that’s disgusting!

I think in one of my papers, I suggested that one of the big advantages of being a digging species is being hidden from predators.

Apparently, that advantage isn’t as big as I thought.

Reference

Boyko CB. 2010. New records and taxonomic data for 14 species of sand crabs (Crustacea: Anomura: Albuneidae) from localities worldwide. Zootaxa 2555: 49-61

The Crustacean Society 2011: Day 1

Do you think this audience is ready to hear a talk about clones tomorrow?

We were all instructed to wear our conference shirts for the group photo.

Tonight was just an opening reception, which included a Hawaiian blessing and some demonstrations of traditional and modern hula. It was quite lovely and very enjoyable.

Today's view

Aloha!

This week I'm blogging from The Crustacean Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii! So expect a lots of crunchy biological goodness both here and at the Marmorkrebs blog. I'll also be tweeting a bit, I hope, using #tcs11 as the hashtag.

But now, time to find some breakfast.

In memory of Charley Lambert

I’m sad to report that Charley Lambert has died suddenly from a stroke.

I co-authored a paper with Charley, and his wife, Gretchen, after a busy weekend of data collection at South Padre Island. I was lucky enough that they were able to fit in a stop in Texas to travel plans as they were on their way to Florida, if I remember right. They got their before me, and I met Charley and Gretchen on a dock where they had just pulled up a rope loaded with tunicates and were busily photographing it.

I remember Charley saying that weekend that you should never throw away any writing. He said he had one paper where he wanted to speculate on the ascidians that might have been attached to the hull of the early explorers. One editor hated it and made him take it out. But he kept it, and got it into another paper later.

I met him once more at the Tunicate meeting in Santa Barbara in 2005 (group photo at right; I think Charley is two down from me, on a 4 o’clock diagonal), and I remember him making the entire room laugh during his presentation. I wish I could remember the joke exactly, but the gist of it was that he had reached a point of not worrying too much about what other people thought.

He might not have cared that I thought it, but I thought Charley was a lovely guy, active and full of a sense of humour.

Additional: Finally found a much better picture of Charley that I’d taken during their visit here in August 2004. A photo gallery of Charley is here.

Reference

Lambert G, Faulkes Z, Lambert CC, Scofield VL. 2005. Ascidians of South Padre Island, Texas, with a key to species. The Texas Journal of Science 57(3): 251-262.

“White and black means set to attack!”

Does this look like a warning?

I'm not talking about the pose; I'm talking about the colour. In many species, we associate conspicuous colour with warnings. “Don’t eat me, I’m poison!” Classic example is poison dart frogs.

We almost never talk about “warning colours” in mammals, though. Mammals tend not to have bright reds and yellows you see in invertebrates or reptiles or amphibians. But they certainly can have fur that is... noticeable.

New paper by Stankowich and colleagues tries to look at whether colour in mammals could act as warnings. They had a series of hypotheses that predicted mammals’s fur colour would be related to whether the animal has odor defenses (think skunk) or burrows (think badger), and so on.

The trickiest part of this sort of study is quantifying the colours. The authors classified mammal coats by how much an animal would stand out in the environment. They called this measure “salience”. They admit that these scores are subjective, but their coding scheme was based on previously published research.

They also developed codes for behaviour, body mass, and habitat. Finally, all these measures got tied into a massive set of relationships between the mammals.

Mammals with coats that “popped” (high salience) tended to be stocky burrowers living in open habitats, and also tended to be ones that were able to defend themselves using scents from anal glands, or possibly just by fighting There is a lot of variation in the data, but the authors think that this provides some evidence that colour is an honest signal of defensive ability.

But one of the animals that doesn’t fit with the patterns is... the giant panda. The authors have a reference to another paper suggesting that pandas’ colour might aid in “background matching.”

Maybe that black and white coat is for “stealth mode.”


P.S.—Fun thing I learned reading this paper: There is a real animal called a zorilla. I totally would have guessed that that was a Pokémon name. Or from some old monster movie.


“Those fools! They think they can defeat me? Release the zorilla! Bwa-hah-hah-haaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Reference

Stankowich T, Caro T, Cox M. 2011. Bold coloration and the evolution of aposematism in terrestrial carnivores. Evolution: In press. DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01334.x

Related posts

“Ogle me!”
Do bright bugs banish bothersome bats?

Carnivals for June 2011

Encephalon #87 is up at Cephalove.

Carnival of Evolution #36 is at Greg Laden’s Blog.

Blog carnivals are falling upon hard times, with several long-running ones shutting up shop. So I am unsure as to how often I will have the opportunity to do these little round-ups of the carnivals related to the main topics in this blog.

What the Coburn report has in common with arsenic life

Last week saw two big science stories hit that at first glance are unrelated. But I think they are symptomatic of the same underlying attitudes and problems.

First was Senator Coburn’s report on the National Science Foundation, which I covered here.

In response, the Los Angeles Time ran this excellent article about “Duh science.” It talks about why people often resist “what everyone knows.”

(C)onsider the case of Harvard sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler, who has spent about $3 million over the years demonstrating over and over that doctors who don’t get enough sleep make mistakes on the job. ...

Everyone had an anecdote. Czeisler had data. “It was dismissed out of hand,” he said. “They use the same argument over and over, even when we”ve tested it. It drives me up the wall.”

The researcher who built the treadmill for the shrimp, David Scholnick, explains (defends) his research in this article in The Toronto Star.

Second was the publication of a series of technical comments on the “arsenic life” paper by Wolfe-Simon and colleagues (editor’s comment here). Lots of commentary has emerged, again, but I was particularly struck by Ericka Check Hayden’s article in Nature, where several people bluntly say that they don’t want to replicate the work.

(M)ost labs are too busy with their own work to spend time replicating work that they feel is fundamentally flawed, and it’s not likely to be published in high-impact journals. So principal investigators are reluctant to spend their resources, and their students’ time, replicating the work.

“If you extended the results to show there is no detectable arsenic, where could you publish that?” said Simon Silver of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who critiqued the work in FEMS Microbiology Letters in January and on 24 May at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans. “How could the young person who was asked to do that work ever get a job?” Silver said.

I think there’s something unstated in Silver’s quote. He’s probably asking, “How could someone doing that work get a tenure-track job in a major research university?” Not everyone aspires to that goal.

Refuting another scientist's work also takes time that scientists could be spending on their own research. For instance, Helmann says he is in the process of installing a highly sensitive mass spectrometry machine capable of measuring very small amounts of elements. But, he says, “I’ve got my own science to do.”

This is bad news for science all round. This entry by PZ Myers beat me to it:

I'm suggesting that they are symptoms of something rotten in the world of science. Testing claims ought to be what we do. If the journals are going to fill up with positive claims thanks to the file-drawer effect, and if nobody ever wants to evaluate those claims, and if negative results are unpublishable, the literature is going to decline in utility for lack of rigor and evaluation.

And even if researchers are willing to do the replication, journal editors don’t seem to see this as important. An excellent recent example detailed by Ben Goldacre was the publication of findings that seemed to suggest precognition. The author, Daryl Bem, correctly realized this was an extraordinary claim, and in his paper, stressed the importance of other labs trying to repeat the finding.

The journal wouldn’t publish the papers. The journal seemed to have a blanket policy (informal or not, I don’t know) not to publish replications.

I’ll add this. Of all the papers I’ve published so far, by far the hardest one to get into print was a replication.

The common link to these two stories?

Both are about the tension between wanting breakthroughs and the reality that science usually progresses in slow, hard fought, millimeter by millimeter increments.

Politicians wants breakthroughs because they see anything else as a waste of taxpayer money. Consequently, it’s easy to look in and see a single research project as stupid because you have no context.

Scientists want breakthroughs because discoveries can make careers. It’s no accident that the arsenic tolerant bacteria’s name is an acronym for “Give Felisa A Job.”

Lots of people (including editors) overwhelmingly want the breakthrough, the identifiable “Eureka!” moments. We need tell more stories of scientific progress that unfolds over years and decades, which is a great opportunity for bloggers.

Related posts

Tales to astonish
Original and transformative
My posts on arsenic life here, here and here.

Photo by quarksteilchen on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments for second half of May 2011

Biochem Belle takes on acronyms.

Eva Amsen at the Expression Patterns blog asked if people preferred giving talks or posters. The winner, by about a three to one margin, was a talk. Since I’m the guy writing the Better Posters blog, you know I’ve got something to say.

Mo at Neurophilosophy has nice coverage about what early mammal fossils tell us about the evolution of brains in that group.

Gerty Z at Balanced Instability wonders if a new faculty members should spend time writing papers or grants. She also wonders how to hire post-docs.

Looniechemist asks how often we Ph.D. types swing around our big fancy academic titles.

Pro-Like Substance nails the importance of reminders for academics.

Dr. Micro O is plenty steamed by Senator Coburn’s report on NSF spending. Steve Silberman also comments about it. Namnezia also shows what it reveals about the political understanding of science.

Mike the Mad Biologist offers advice on posters. Something so important, it should have a blog of its own.

Neuroself looks at author Jonah Lehrer and concludes he is not a neuroscientist. Chad Orzel then tackles some of the conclusions within that post and finds them wanting. Criticism is the only antidote to error. And that’s why I like both posts.