Journal articles as a revenue source

From last week, news came that the Ecological Society of America has contracted Wiley, one of the “big five” academic publishers, to publish ESA journals.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about this. A big part of the mixed feelings comes from a couple of years back, when ESA spoke out against open access. At the time, someone from the society wrote:

This is perhaps a good example of the inherent conflict between the interests of those who believe research publications should make their content freely available to all and the reality that there are significant costs associated with publishing scholarly research journals.

I appreciate that there are costs in publishing that need to be covered. Heck, I can even see a case for charging for scientific research. I can understand that a scientific society might have not want to maintain the infrastructure needed to publish journals. As the Gavin’s blog post noted:

Somewhere in Ithaca there is a single computer running DOS(!) that performs a critical part of the current journal publishing platform used by ESA

 
Still, there are a couple of things that bug me about the Wiley deal, First, this is another example of the ongoing pattern of scientific publication becoming increasingly concentrated with a few publishers. I’ve said before I think a healthy publishing ecosystem, like a biological ecosystem, has lots of diversity. Second, this sounds like ESA sees publications as a revenue stream for them.

Gavin Simpson wrote:

The payment to ESA from Wiley in the 2015–16 budget is $1,350,357. ... (I)n 2016–17 the payment from Wiley will be $2,700,714(.) ... What is, I think, indicative is that the senior ESA staff and academics were clearly anticipating significant improvements in the “profit” generated by the Society’s journals that can be directed towards activities the Society does on behalf of its members and its support for ecology.

Again, I have mixed feelings about all this. I understand that scientific societies can do good work and need revenue. But it can also be the case that societies like that can become insular and self-perpetuating, more concerned about their own continued existence than serving others. I’m not saying ESA is at that point at all... just that societies could have incentives that are not in the general interest, or the interest of their field, but only in their interest.

So I am not sure that charging for publications is the way to go about raising revenue for a professional scientific society.

Related posts

ESA still not supporting open access

External links

ESA’s publishing deal with Wiley 

References

Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P. 2015. The oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era. PLOS ONE 10: e0127502. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

Comments for first half of August 2015

Adam Calhoun has a post looking at how often neurons spike in the cortex, and what that means for encoding information in brains.

War going on (in academia)

Thank you, Telegraph, for alerting us that we should be avoiding Oxford, England. Because apparently it is a war zone.

Oxford academics at war over dangers of the internet

This sounds serious! What prompted this?

An academic wrote an editorial in a peer-reviewed journal asking another academic for evidence supporting her claims.

Um.

Here’s a sampling of the brutality you can find in the editorial:

(W)e are concerned that Greenfield’s claims are not based on a fair scientific appraisal of the evidence, often confuse correlation for causation, give undue weight to anecdote and poor quality studies, and are misleading to parents and the public at large.

Um.

The person at the end of this “stinging attack” has reacted to this incredible assault by... saying she’s too busy to respond.

Um.

If that’s war, then that is the kind of war I can get behind. I wish all wars were fought on these terms. “We will launch our devastating salvo and subdue our enemy with shock and awe... if we can get it past reviewer number two.”

Look, academia is boring, and “Let’s have you and her fight” is a time-honoured way to inject some human interest and drama into otherwise dry proceedings. But to hype the language of scientific disagreement between a few scientists to the level of armed conflict between large groups of people using guns and drones and tanks and bombs is silly.

Asking someone to support their claims is not the same as pulling a gun on them.

External links

The debate over digital technology and young people
Oxford academics at war over dangers of the internet 
Digital tech, the BMJ, and The Baroness
Jon Stewart “eviscerates” 16-plus years of hyperbolic “Daily Show” headlines and it is literally the greatest thing you will ever see in your life

A clone and two dwarfs

You can finally read my latest paper about pet crayfish!

You know you’re on to something when you get asked a question about it something like a week after you have started the project.

Back at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in 2013, I was presenting at a special session on crayfish (the one that was the precursor to the Freshwater Crayfish book that landed a few days ago). I was presenting work about the gray market in Marmorkrebs in the pet trade in the U.S. and Canada (final paper was Faulkes 2013).

Chris Chucholl, who had written an awesome paper on the trade in pet crayfish in Germany (Chucholl 2013) asked:

“Do you have any idea how Marmorkrebs compare to other crayfish?”

And I got to say something like, “I have just started a project to answer exactly that question.” That was pretty satisfying. I had just started this project days before, on New Year’s Day, 2013.

Now, this project ran for a full calendar year, which meant that I had all the data collected by New Year’s Day of 2014, so I should have been ready to write this paper and submit it to a journal. But, in what has become a recurring theme in this series of “stories behind the papers,” you may well ask, “Why did it take so long? Why is this paper only out today, 19 months after you were finished collecting the data?”

Friggin’ SICB again!

Because just when I had all of the data complete and in the can, I was prepping to run a parasite symposium with Kelly Weinersmith at SICB in Austin in a couple of days. After the symposium, I had to write up papers from the symposium. And that was the situation where what I thought was going to be one paper... turned into three papers.

And I was commissioned to write an opinion piece about social media for Neuron.

Thanks to pressure from my co-editor Tadashi, I was also trying to nail down a chapter for the Freshwater Crayfish book around the same time.

I was going slightly mental with the amount of writing that was due at the start of 2014. I still want to rub my forehead just thinking about it. Then, the middle of 2014 had a lot of tough, unbloggable stuff that stopped me from writing up this paper. Then the fall semester arrived, and before you know it, it’s New Year’s Day again.

That made me think, “Okay, it’s been a year, stop being lazy and submit this thing.” I attacked the manuscript over Christmas break and submitted it in January, just before classes started.

I picked Knowledge and Management of Aquatic Ecosystems, because they had been publishing a lot of interesting research on crayfish. Plus, there were open access, had no article processing fees, and I hadn’t published there before.

I want to say “Thank you!” to the editors of this article, who were extremely patient with me. This piece had more than its usual share of last-minute changes. Probably the biggest one was that I added an entire new figure (Figure 2).

I created Figure 2 because I was working on poster of this paper for the #SciFund poster class. When making the poster, I tried a lot of different ways to make the poster visual, and tinkered with a graph. In the end, I thought the graph didn’t work on the poster, but it was a nice addition to the manuscript. While you can get all the information presented in Figure 2 from the tables in the paper, I thought it would be helpful to the reader to show it visually. The editors indulged me and let me add it in. They also didn’t complain about other changes I asked for. Thanks, guys.

I showed a lot of restraint in not changing the title, though. I went through a lot of different titles for this paper. I toyed a lot with some version of “zero to hero” to emphasize how Marmorkrebs had gone from “unknown to science” to “almost half the pet crayfish in North America.” But I kept balking, because I didn’t want to call a potentially invasive species a “hero.” And not very many other words rhyme with “zero.”

Making the #SciFund poster, I came up with a phrase to encapsulate the paper. I didn’t want to push my luck with another change, and I worried that it was too distracting. (Funny paper titles don’t always go down well.) So I just used it here as the title for this blog post.

And, as is the tradition while supplies last, because I have a paper out today, I get to break out the Canadian chocolate:

I’m kind of glad that it’s possible for a person to publish a paper by surfing the Internet for a year.

Musical interlude:


References

Chucholl C. 2013. Invaders for sale: trade and determinants of introduction of ornamental freshwater crayfish. Biological Invasions 15(1): 125-141.http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10530-012-0273-2

Faulkes Z. 2013. How much is that crayfish in the window? Online monitoring of Marmorkrebs, Procambarus fallax f. virginalis (Hagen, 1870) in the North American pet trade. Freshwater Crayfish 19(1): 39-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.5869/fc.2013.v19.039

Faulkes Z. 2015. Marmorkrebs (Procambarus fallax f. virginalis) are the most popular crayfish in the North American pet trade. Knowledge and Management of Aquatic Ecosystems 416: 20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/kmae/2015016

Related posts

In the hands of editors now

External links

SICB 2013 special session on crayfish

A great face for (National Public) Radio

Around lunchtime today, I got a phone call, from one Carol Klinger. I sort of missed her opening introduction of who she worked for, but her call to me was prompted by the recent Wall Street Journal article on the increase in the number of authors on scientific papers. We started chatting about that.

Carol asked, “Who came up with the term, ‘kiloauthor’?” “That was me!”

Before I know it, she’s asking me if I can do an interview (sure!), if I have an iPhone (no), if there’s a studio I can get to (wait, what? Who does she work for?), and before I know it I’m on the road to an iHeartMedia studio to record an interview for All Things Considered on National Public Radio.

I almost didn’t make it, because the studio was out of town in Weslaco. As luck would have it, I had walked into work and had to walk back to reach my car, then start driving to the studio, and of course there was a wreck on the road, so I was literally stopped on the highway while the clock was ticking.

We had some technical problems, so we ended up with me listening to the interview questions from Robert Seigel on the phone while I talked into a mic. Thanks to Nathan Cantu who helped set up the recording on short notice!

I just listened to the interview streaming live on WAMU on the Internet. You should be able to listed to audio or read a transcript on the All Things Considered website tomorrow. I’ll post a link when I get it.

Update: Wow, these guys are fast. The link to my interview is here.

One of the things that I was thinking about on the drive to the studio was that this little interview was only possible because of the years I spent wasting time on the Internet blogging and developing a social media presence. It’s like climbing up an ice cliff. Chip away at the ice with a pick. Pull yourself up. Shove your spiked boots into a crevice. It’s a hard and slow ascent.

But if it hadn’t been for that, there is no way that I would have been able to talk to Nature, New Scientist, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR (all of which has happened this year). Because let’s face it, it sure isn’t because these news organizations think, “Let’s call up a researcher from a university that we haven’t heard of in south Texas and ask them what they think.” Social media can act as a leveler, and can give voice to people who might not normally have one.

Now that I’ve been on NPR, I think I have finally secured my credential as an effete, wine-sipping, out-of-touch, ivory tower, liberal academic.

Related posts

Straight outta Wall Street

External links

Research Biologist Coins Term 'Kilo-Author' For Scientific Journal Articles

The chapter of collaboration

It’s here!

It’s real! Completed and published and available in August 2015, not 2016, despite what the front matter would have you believe.

In a previous entry, I mentioned I have my name on two chapters in this book. The second one I worked on was with my regular collaborator, Paty Feria. This chapter tries to stitch all the papers we have worked on together into one cohesive piece.

Paty did much of the writing on this chapter. One thing I brought to the table was that I suggested we try to make the chapter a bit of a “how to” primer for people who had never done a species distribution model. We visualized that in a flowchart in Figure 2.1 (right).

I also suggested we compile every example in the literature of people using species distribution models for crayfish, which ended up being Table 2.1. We expanded it a little to include a freshwater prawn, since the conceptual problems of modeling the distribution is pretty for all the large freshwater crustaceans.

Following the release of the book last week, I followed my current practice for celebrating the release of a scientific publication: Canadian chocolate! Because my name was on two chapters, I got two celebrate twice.

I split the larger of the two chocolate bars with Paty. She agreed that Canadian chocolate is delicious.

Reference

Feria TP, Faulkes Z. 2016. Predicting the distribution of crayfish species: a case study using marble crayfish. In: T Kawai, Z Faulkes, G Scholtz, eds. Freshwater Crayfish: A Global Overview, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 13-30. https://www.crcpress.com/Freshwater-Crayfish-A-Global-Overview/Kawai-Faulkes-Scholtz/9781466586390


Related posts

The chapter of desperation
This calls for a celebration

External links

T Kawai, Z Faulkes, G Scholtz, eds. Freshwater Crayfish: A Global Overview, pp. 31-53. Boca Raton: CRC Press. https://www.crcpress.com/Freshwater-Crayfish-A-Global-Overview/Kawai-Faulkes-Scholtz/9781466586390

Tuesday Crustie: The bells!

These charming little guys and gays are called hunchback amphipods, belonging to the family Cyproideidae. Yet another group of crustaceans I don’t know at all well. Except that some of them are darned photogenic.

Picture from here.

Straight outta Wall Street

I was quoted in an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

I told a joke.

That’s about par for the course for me.

I actually had a long chat with the author for this piece, arising from a post I wrote back in May about that fruit fly paper with over 1,000 authors. He was able to extract key points from our meandering conversation into something short and punchy and entertaining. I’m glad I was able to help.

The piece does a fine job of laying out the issue of authorship. It also has some funny stories about “honorary” authorships to a computer, an Afghan hound, and so on.

Related post

When does authorship stop meaning anything useful?

External links

How Many Scientists Does It Take to Write a Paper? Apparently, Thousands

Dear publishers, please buy a calendar!

I’ve been beset by dates recently.

Exhibit one arrived in my department mailbox about a week ago (the old fashioned one where physical objects arrive). It was a new issue of a journal. Sort of.

“February 2012 (Published June 2015)”.

Obviously, this particular journal had a backlog that they are struggling to work through. This is admirable, but the dating is confusing. How I am supposed to cite the publication date? 2012? 2015? 2012 (2015)?

Exhibit two is the new book I blogged about last week, Freshwater Crayfish: A Global Overview. i blogged about it last week because the publisher said it was out last week:

5 August, 2015. But when you open it up, everything in it is dated 2016. I can forgive this is the book is maybe being released in December, say. But it’s the middle of summer and a long way from New Year’s.

Exhibit three is my latest journal article, which the publisher informed me by email was published on Friday, 7 August 2015. The webpage was indeed updated that day, and there is a link and a DOI... but no abstract and no text and no PDF. Compare the entry for my article compared to the one above it.

The journal emailed me the PDF the next day, so I know the paper was done production. But no text was available for anyone else to read for days. This is a very strange definition of “published”: showing the information needed to cite the paper, but not the actual paper itself.

Exhibit four is from the archives:

My “received” date was a month after I submitted, and the publication date on the cover of the issue, December 2013, was months before the issue actually hit the web. (June 2014. - ZF)

Publication dates matter to authors, because they help to establish the priority of discovery.

Why is something as simple as a publication date so hard to get right? Perhaps part of the problem is that publishers do have incentives to futz with dates. First, authors are looking for prompt publication, so there is incentive to list publication dates that are earlier than when someone can read the paper. Second, Impact Factor and citation analyses use dates, so there is incentive to set dates later than actual publication, because it gives the impression that citations have accrued faster than they actually did.

Related posts

1,017 days: when publishing the paper takes longer than the project

The chapter of desperation

Back about a year and a half ago, I was writing my little butt off. And one of those projects was a book chapter that has come out this week.

And yes, that’s my name on the cover of the book. I helped a little.

I first met lead editor Tadashi Kawai at the International Association for Astacology conference in 2010. Our paths crossed again when Tadashi organized a special session on crayfish at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in early 2013. Tadashi had wanted the session to be a symposium, but the SICB programming folks are very reluctant to hold taxon specific symposia. Papers from the symposium are published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology, and issues revolving around a specific group of animals hurts the journal’s Impact Factor. So the choice of symposium is very definitely affected by what they think will help the journal.

Tadashi is tenacious, however, and this book sort of arose, phoenix-like, from that SICB session. Originally, it was to be more focused on Marmorkrebs, but the book expanded significantly, and the final product is a big, substantive book almost 700 pages long.

Tadashi is Japanaese, and the other co-editor of this book, Gerhard, is German. Although both of these fine people have published many papers in English each, I think I was sort of brought on board as the “native English speaker” to assist with the editing! I want to give full credit to my co-editors, who I am sure did much more for this book than I did. I was pleased to help.

The chapter itself was a tough assignment. There was the timing. As I mentioned, it was coming due right around the time when I was preparing to co-host the SICB symposium on parasite manipulation, not to mention give a talk and poster there, plus write up a lot of other manuscripts. I just had to lay in a lot of text very fast.

Luckily, I had been blogging about this marbled crayfish for about seven years at that point, and thanks to blogging, I knew the literature and the issues reasonably well. I had a back catalogue to draw from. I dipped into a lot of information and ideas that I had previously treated on the Marmorkrebs blog, and sometimes from this one, too.

Worse, though, was that Tadashi had asked me to write a chapter about two quite different things: Marmorkrebs as a model organism in the lab, and Marmorkrebs as an invasive in the field. I struggled and struggled to make the chapter cohesive. And ultimately, I could only do so much, and the chapter has two very distinct sections. But... I think I found a way to join the two widely divergent streams into one river at the end of the chapter. Here’s an excerpt from near the end (my emphasis).

This series of events has been fortuitous in that it has created a framework for Marble crayfish research that unites basic, curiosity driven bench science and applied, pragmatic field science. ... This level of integration is unusual for an emerging model organism. Despite thousands of published research articles on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, mostly its genetics, the ecology and natural history remains ‘mysterious.’ There seems little impetus for improvement on that point for C. elegans, but the pressing concerns of the potential economic impact of Marble crayfish provides a clear reason for cross-pollination of research. It is, and will continue to be, important for the basic bench research and applied field research programs on Marble crayfish not to operate in largely independent tracks, but to intersect as often as possible.

That was one thing I was happy about. I was also happy that I snuck in some previously unpublished data in the chapter! I had a little data about the escape neurons in Marmorkrebs that I had presented, but hadn’t found a home for, because I didn’t have a complete narrative yet. I was able to show that yes, the marbled crayfish does have giant interneurons and a specialized motor giant (MoG) fast flexor motot neuron. Nowhere near enough to make a paper out of, because it is completely unsurprising, but it is an original observation, so I documented it in this chapter.

Because this was a book, I submitted the figure in black and white, because I didn’t even know we were allowed to have colour figures. Colour plates are typically still an expensive luxury in most books. So I’ve put the colour version here and on Figshare.

I can also give you a peek at some of the other cover designs that were considered:

As you can see, both cover designs were more similar to each other than the one that was eventually used.

One thing I liked about these unused covers because they show crayfish diversity, which fits the subtitle, “A Global Overview”. However, the final cover is a more striking, bolder piece of design. And it doesn’t have all the human hands and fingers intruding, like on these two unused covers.

My name is one one other chapter in this book, but that’s another blog post for another time.

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2016. Marble crayfish as a new model organism and a new threat to native crayfish conservation. In: T Kawai, Z Faulkes, G Scholtz, eds. Freshwater Crayfish: A Global Overview, pp. 31-53. Boca Raton: CRC Press. https://www.crcpress.com/Freshwater-Crayfish-A-Global-Overview/Kawai-Faulkes-Scholtz/9781466586390

Faulkes Z. 2015. Motor giant synapses of Procambarus clarkii and P. fallax f. virginalis. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1500912 Retrieved 15:47, Aug 04, 2015 (GMT)

Tuesday Crustie: Long lost cousin

Of course today’s animal is going to be a crayfish! I’ll tell you why in a second...

This is Astacoides betsileoensis, one of seven species from Madagascar. Madagascar is the only place in Africa that you will find any native crayfish.

One of the weird things about the Madagascar crayfish species is that their closest relatives are not the closest geographically. You might expect them to be related to crayfish in Europe. No, the closest relatives of Madagascar crayfish are those in... Australia. Madagascar and Australia are about as close to “other side of the world” as you can get.

Nobody has a good explanation for how that happened. Nobody knows how crayfish got to Madagascar.

You can learn this and much, much more in this new book, which is releasing today!

I’ll be writing more about this book in days to come. Meanwhile, I’ve started posting excerpts from the Marmorkrebs related chapters on the Marmorkrebs blog. (I normally post abstracts there, but this book doesn’t have abstracts.) There will be one a week for a couple of months.

To celebrate the release of this book, I’ll be having some with on Twitter with the hashtag #CrayfishFacts (and maybe a few #FakeCrayfishFacts thrown in for fun). And I’ll also be dipping into my stash of Canadian chocolate today. Yum.

Picture from here.

Into the vault: oxidative stress and ascidian embryogenesis

I’ve talked before about the long waits in getting projects published. But sometimes, despite waiting, projects never make it past the conference poster stage. I’ve also talked about developing a gut instinct for whether something is publishable.

It’s nice that now, there are ways to turn ephemera into an archival, potentially usable and citable, document. For a while, I’ve been meaning to start putting up some of my posters into FigShare, which I’ve been of fan of from early on. I first used it when I published a paper here on my blog. Since then, I’ve used it to archive the raw data for several of my papers as unofficial supplemental information.

The first one to go up is a poster I presented at the third International Tunicate Conference in 2005 at the University of California Santa Barbara.

This one is one of the relatively few projects that we were never able to push out into a paper. I still think it makes for a pretty good poster, though.

Archiving this poster got me thinking. I see clear value in archiving old posters that can document projects that never made it into the scientific literature. But is there value in archiving posters that were the early versions of projects that did make it into the regular scientific literature? I can see old posters have some interest as examples of design (see the Better Posters blog). They might eventually have some historical interest.

But is there any scientific interest in archiving old posters? Posters are generally works in progress, so tend to be incomplete and preliminary. Might they actually confuse matters by including dead end ideas that were abandoned by the authors?

Reference

Stwora A, Scofield VL, Faulkes Z. 2015. Effects of oxidative stress on Ascidia interrupta embryogenesis. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1499282

Happy anniversary, L5R!

You may know me as Doctor Zen, but there was a time when I was known online as the Crab Clan Scholar.

This weekend was tinged with a little sadness for me, because it celebrates the twentieth anniversary of something pretty important in my life: the card game Legend of the Five Rings – or L5R, as fans know it. There was a big twentieth birthday party at GenCon over the weekend, and I was disappointed that I couldn’t go.

I was not there when the game debuted in demo form in summer of 1995, but I started playing in December of that year. And I got in deep. That there was an entire faction of the game called the Crab Clan helped a lot. I was a die hard Crab player, and took to tagging my sig as “Crab Clan Scholar” in my posts on Usenet. (Yeah, I’m old.)

I was intensely involved in L5R for well over a decade, first as a player, then eventually as a part of the Rules Team and freelance writer. I can’t even begin to summarize how much stuff I did with L5R. I can’t begin to tell you how important it has been to my life. This game is, as co-creator Ryan Dancy put it, welded to my DNA.

I haven’t played in a while, and I miss that badly.

But in the spirit of celebration, I wanted to draw attention to a couple of projects that chronicle the game’s early days.

I make a cameo appearance in the book 40 Years of GenCon. This book has a few pages about key events in L5R history when L5R was but a wee game of two and three years old (GenCon 1997 and 1998, to be precise).

The Legend of the Five Rings Gold Edition Encyclopedia is mostly a list of cards from that particular arc of the game. but I had the supreme pleasure of writing an introduction. The book opens with an 8 page section called, “L5R: Its founding and history,” which is one of my favourite things I’ve ever written. I got to interview a lot of people who were involved in the creation of the game, and tell the story of the creative process of making something as big and complex as a trading card game.

I had so much fun writing it, I turned in something that was substantially longer than what I had been asked to write. Now, I always try to be a professional, and write to requested length. I made sure that the extra stuff could be cleanly severed if they wanted to keep the length to what was originally planned, since I’d done it purely “on spec.” But I guess they liked it, because they kept it in.

For anyone who wants to see how L5R started twenty years ago, the intro to that book is the thing to read.

It is a wonderful thing to see something you love be a success. I couldn’t be happier than Legend of the Five Rings has been in pretty much continuous production for two decades.

Come hell or high water, I’ll make it to the twenty-fifth anniversary party, damn it.

Utz! BANZAI!!!

External links

Legend of the Five Rings Gold Edition Encyclopedia
40 Years of GenCon

Picture by AEG head honcho John Zinser on his Facebook page.

Comments for second half of July 2015

Dr. Becca talks about how to get yourself noticed as a scientist, in a good way.

Richard Poynder has a piece looking at one scientific publisher’s policies on embargoes, which concludes with a sour analysis of the effect of the open access movement: pretty much none, he reckons.

Small Pond Science looks at that “Facebook for scientists” site, ResearchGate. Funny how showing that people read your papers makes you pay attention.

Connections in my scientific career

If you’ve never seen the television series Connections by James Burke, you are missing out. Whereas most histories of science emphasize a “march of progress,” Burke’s series emphasized contingencies: you couldn’t have this if there hadn’t been that, and how those this and that were related were not obvious or predictable. In episode 9, “Countdown,” for instance, Burke connects the divorce of Henry VIII to the invention of television.

I got thinking about this with the publication of my most recent paper, which was nexus point between a couple of different research projects. I’ve joked with people that I have “science ADD,” but there are relationships between my projects. They just might not be obvious to people who are not me.

As an undergraduate, I worked on a project about walking by octopuses. This got me interested in locomotion, and I looked for a related project for graduate school. This led me to do a doctoral project on sand crab digging.

Sand crabs dig with their legs, so this led me into looking at the leg motor neurons of crustaceans. I’d found a discrepancy between the description of leg motor neurons in spiny lobsters and everything else that had been looked at. I wrote a post-doctoral fellowship proposal to study that, and got it. I went to work with David Macmillan in Australia for a post-doc.

David’s students had some projects on crayfish escape responses going on while I was there. Meanwhile, spiny lobsters were hard to get and hard to work with, I moved to working with slipper lobsters. I remember standing in David’s office, chatting about trying to get as much use out of the slipper lobsters as possible (they weren’t super cheap), and saying something like, “We’ll do some sections of the abdominal nerve cord, just to look at the giant interneurons and see that they’re there.”

Except they weren’t there.

Discovering that some species were missing a major set of very well-studied neurons was a completely unplanned observation.

That led me to working on the escape response in crustaceans. Because I was seeing substantial differences between species, I thought I needed to see how those neurons developed; take an “evo devo” approach to the problem.

I got very interested in marbled crayfish as a developmental model for the escape neurons from chatting Steffen Harzsch at the Neuroethology congress. I got some marbled crayfish for my lab, fully intending to start working them up as an experimental model. I started the Marmorkrebs.org website.

While I was thing about things to post on the Marmorkrebs blog, it became obvious that there were quite a few Marmorkrebs in the pet trade in the U.S.. Those crayfish were a potential problem if they got loose. This led me to doing research on the pet trade, and about the same time started doing species distribution models. All of this led me to be co-author on a forthcoming book on crayfish (out next week!).

I was also looking for a way to get the relatives of marbled crayfish in my lab. That led me to participate in the #SciFund Challenge, which became a scientific experiment in its own right.

Meanwhile, I was still plugging away on the escape response. I’d studied slipper lobsters, spiny lobsters, and had moved on to shrimp. While I was looking at the backfills of the shrimp, I saw things moving in the nervous system. And those moving things were parasites.

Finding parasites in the nervous system of shrimp was another completely unplanned observation. And before you know it, I’m helping Kelly Weinersmith co-organize a whole symposium on the subject at an international conference.

And the sand crabs? I still liked those guys, and recognized that we knew almost zero about most species. So with the incentive of finding a field project for an undergraduate student, I started collecting very basic natural history data for the ecology of the local sand crab species.

So you see, it all makes perfect sense. (Well, most of it does: there are a few papers that don’t fit neatly into that narrative.) But you are not likely to recognize the “this happened because of that” connections by skimming the titles of the papers.

The moral of the story? One is that it’s absolutely worth doing exploratory experiments and keeping your eyes open. I’ve had two findings (interneurons missing in slipper lobsters, parasites in shrimp) that came about not because there were hypothesis driven experiments, but that I got by happenstance, and those opened up whole new lines of research and resulted in multiple papers for me.

What a strange trip it’s been.

Tuesday Crustie: Hasta be Shasta

Not this kind of Shasta...

This kind of Shasta:

Chris Lukhaup posted this on his Facebook page earlier today, describing it as the rarest crayfish in North America. It’s the Shasta crayfish, Pacifastacus fortis. This is a critically endangered species. It’s got a tiny range of only a few square kilometers. It’s been under pressure from introduced cousin, the signal crayfish (P. leniusculus) and damns (Light et al. 1995). It needs really pristine water. It’s not doing well, but I hope that with people like Chris making the effort to show how beautiful these animals are in their natural habitat, we can make things better for this beastie.

Reference

Light T, Erman DC, Myrick C, Clarke J. 1995. Decline of the Shasta crayfish (Pacifastacus fortis Faxon) of Northeastern California. Conservation Biology 9: 1567-1577. http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1523-1739.1995.09061567.x

This calls for a celebration

This is the remains of my treat to myself after a paper I co-authored was published in spring.

Back in February, when I went back to Canada for the first time in years for a training workshop, I picked up a stash of Canadian chocolate bars at the airport. Extra large sizes when possible. There are a lot of these things that are just about impossible to get in the U.S., so these are precious things to me. I didn’t want to just snarf through them. No, these are something to savour. I wanted to keep them for special occasions. I decided that I would only eat one what a new paper was published. Not just accepted – published, with the final thing out there in the world available for people to read.

This is the aftermath of the celebration of the publication of my new paper in PeerJ this week:

I think I have enough to celebrate the publication of four more papers, and I’m already trying to decide which I’ll have when my next paper comes out. But I’ll probably be saving the Crispy Crunch for last.

What do you do to celebrate success in your lab?

Shrimp FFMN FAC: social media exclusive!

Yesterday, I talked about the shrimp neurons that I think are the most beautiful thing I’ve imaged in science (right). It’s in my new paper in PeerJ.

But PeerJ didn’t get everything I did in this project. Not even for this particular stain that I like so much.

The nerve filled in this image has axons that project both forward and backwards. Most of the neurons’ cell bodies are forward from the fill. This anterior ganglion is more interesting scientifically, because it has the key motor giant neurons with their weird structure. It’s also hard to show all all the neurons’s cell bodies, because several of them are almost right on top of each other.

Consequently, I have a lot of images of the anterior ganglion in the paper; it takes up a bunch of space in Figure 2. I also created a “cheap confocal” movie that combines several images at different depths of field, and that went in as supplementary information.

The posterior ganglion... didn’t get that much love in the paper.

In crayfish, there might be two or three neurons on the left and right sides in that posterior ganglion (4-6 cells total), and these are grouped together in the FAC cluster. In white shrimp, only one cell body on the left and one cell body on the right get stained (2 total). The structure of those shrimp FAC cells is not terribly complicated, either. I didn’t think that scientifically, it was necessary to show the shrimp FAC neurons in the same level of detail in the paper as the other clusters of neurons in the anterior ganglion.

But before I reached that decision, I took a lot of pictures. And I had made another little movie to show the three dimensional structure of the FAC motor neurons within the ganglion.

And here it is!

I did make a few other “drive through the ganglia” movies, but they aren’t quite as nice as the ones I got from this one spectacular stain.

Related posts

The most beautiful thing I’ve made in science

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2015. Motor neurons in the escape response circuit of white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus). PeerJ 3: e1112. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1112

The most beautiful thing I’ve made in science

Truly, this is the social media age. I learned my latest paper had been published when the journal tweeted the article.

This paper contains probably the most beautiful thing I’ve made in my scientific career:

These are shrimp fast flexor motor neurons stained with a technique called backfilling or sometimes axonal filling. This technique can show you a lot. You can do colour coding, as shown here (cells filled from the left are yellow, those from the right are blue).

Backfilling has one problem: it’s unpredictable. To figure out what neurons are connected to the nerve you’re filling, you have to build up a composite picture from a lot of fills.

That’s why this image is so beautiful to me. It’s not just one fill, but two – left and right sides – and it is complete. Every neuron filled, so they are all there in one image. The only thing I could have wished for was to have the axons filling darker so they would be more visible. It’s no accident that this preparation appears in two figures and a movie in the supplemental information in the new paper: you can see a lot.

Here’s an animated image of the anterior ganglion, that runs from ventral (where the cell bodies are) to dorsal:

The sad thing is that I’ve waited about eight years to share this image with you. Ieee. Here’s why.

Based on work in my last post-doc, I’d published a paper on the fast flexor neurons of slipper lobsters (Faulkes 2004). Slipper lobsters didn’t have some of the giant neurons used for escape that had been so well described in crayfish. This lead me to looking for other variations in this set of neurons.

I knew from decades old research that shrimp motor neurons in the escape circuit differed from crayfish in a few ways. One neuron, the motor giant (MoG) had fused axons. Some of the escape neurons were myelinated, which is unusual for an invertebrate. (I stunned one neurobiologist when I mentioned this in a conference talk.)

Nobody had re-examined these shrimp motor neurons with newer techniques, even simple ones, so I went looking to see if there was anything different than crayfish, and to confirm that those anatomical features in the old papers were correct. This is often derided as a “fishing expedition” in grant reviews: you cast your line and see what you get. But the thing about fishing expeditions is that sometimes, you catch some fish. I caught some fish (so to speak).

Here’s a graphic summary of some of the differences between the white shrimp I studied, the old research on prawns, and the best studied species, the Louisiana red swamp crayfish:

The biggest surprise was the massive MoG cell bodies in the white shrimp, which were completely unlike those in crayfish or other shrimp that had been looked at.

That’s where I got stuck.

I looked at those huge MoG cell bodies and thought, “Those look like a bunch of little cell bodies fused together.” When I went to the International Congress of Neuroethology in summer of 2007 and the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in early 2008, most people I showed my pictures to either volunteered that idea without me suggesting that idea, or agreed that the idea of neuronal fusion was plausible.

I tried a lot of different ways to show that the MoGs were fused cells. And I kept not getting anything definitive. I knew that the paper would be so much cooler if I could show that the cell bodies were fused. I kept playing that game of, “If I was the reviewer, would I be satisfied?” And the answer was always, “I would want to see evidence of cell body fusion.”

Meanwhile, all this stuff about the escape circuit that was rattling around in my mind turned into a review article (Faulkes 2008). It included a coy mention that I had more to publish on this subject, citing my SICB conference abstract:

Additionally, the MoG cell bodies have an unusual appearance in the dendrobranchiate shrimp species Litopenaeus setiferus [Faulkes, 2007], suggesting that there is yet more diversity in the escape circuit to be described in the non-reptantian decapods.

I think at this point, I had the fast flexors, and went back and did a few more fills on the extensor side to see if I was seeing similar patterns (fewer neurons than other species).

But I still couldn’t get evidence on whether the MoG cell bodies were fused or not. I kept telling myself, “I’ll just wait and see if a student wants to pick up the project to finish off.”

Meanwhile, I picked up other projects, not the least of which was figuring out that weird things I saw in the nerve cord while looking at shrimp motor neurons were, in fact, larval tapeworms (Carreon et al. 2011, Carreon and Faulkes 2014).

Sometime earlier this year, I just realized, “Zen... it’s been a long time. No student has picked up this project. You should try to find a home for this instead of waiting for even more years to get that one last bit of evidence.”

So during spring break this year, I reached that breaking point where I decided, “I want to submit this.” A flurry of work ensued, and I pushed the “submit” button on the afternoon of last weekday of the break.

One of the benefits of waiting on a project for eight years is that entirely new publishing options open up for you: in this case, PeerJ.

PeerJ didn’t exist when I’d started this project. I’d bought a PeerJ membership very early on, because I was very interested in the journal’s ideas, but hadn’t been able to take advantage of it before now. (And that was not for lack of trying! Anyone who suggests it’s easy to publish in open access journals is wrong.) That PeerJ doesn’t review for “significance” made it a logical place to submit, because my own gut instinct said that any journal that reviewed for “significance” would want evidence showing whether or not the MoGs were fused. Just like I did.

Submitting to PeerJ was smooth, yet still challenging. The submission process for the figures and tables in particular is quite different from many other biological journals, so I messed things up in quite dumb ways. Sorry, reviewers and Fabiana (editor of the article).

Once the manuscript was accepted, I was very impressed by how fast I got page proofs to check. It’s one of, if not they, quickest turnarounds I’ve had. It’s nice that something in the creation of this paper was fast.

Of course, I still want to know if those neurons are fused. If anyone reading this has some ideas as to how to test it, I’d love to provide them with the shrimp you’d need!

References

Carreon N, Faulkes Z, Fredensborg BL. 2011. Polypocephalus sp. infects the nervous system and increases activity of commercially harvested white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus). Journal of Parasitology 97(5): 755-759. http://dx.doi.org/10.1645/GE-2749.1

Carreon N, Faulkes Z. 2014. Position of larval tapeworms, Polypocephalus sp., in the ganglia of shrimp, Litopenaeus setiferus. Integrative and Comparative Biology 54(2): 143-148. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu043

Faulkes Z. 2004. Loss of escape responses and giant neurons in the tailflipping circuits of slipper lobsters, Ibacus spp. (Decapoda, Palinura, Scyllaridae). Arthropod Structure & Development 33(2): 113-123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.asd.2003.12.003

Faulkes Z. 2007. Motor neurons involved in escape responses in white shrimp, Litopenaeus setiferus. Integrative and Comparative Biology 47(Supplement 1): e178. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icm105

Faulkes Z. 2008. Turning loss into opportunity: The key deletion of an escape circuit in decapod crustaceans. Brain, Behavior and Evolution 72(4): 251-261. http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000171488

Faulkes Z. 2015. Motor neurons in the escape response circuit of white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus). PeerJ 3: e1112. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1112

Tuesday Crustie: Classy and glassy

The transparency of shrimp can be both a blessing and a curse when doing experiments. You can see what you’re doing, but sometimes they are so lightly built that it’s difficult to work with them.

I picked this picture today not just because it’s a lovely colourful image, but because the species shown, Litopenaeus vannamei, is a close relative of a shrimp species studied in my new paper at PeerJ! I’m working on a “behind the scenes” post for tomorrow.

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

Comments for first half of July, 2015

Katie looks at the thorny issue of data ownership.

Nice post from Duffy Ma about the grand challenges in biology.

Anticipation

Not too many journals do this: list papers that are “forthcoming” without page proofs or accepted manuscripts.

It’s nice to see acknowledgment of one of my new papers coming out someplace besides my own website.

External links

Knowledge and Management of Aquatic Ecosystems

Tuesday Crustie: Before the Internet, there was the Weekly World News

From the Weekly World News, 17 September 2002. You must click to enlarge to fully appreciate the photo...

I’m surprised that nobody has taken this as evidence of immortal lobsters. I do want to use the “lobster facts” call out the next time I talk about crustacean nociception:

They have no cerebral cortex – which means they feel no pain.

Hat tip to Neil Gaiman.

Glorifying overworking: another self-inflicted crisis in Science Careers

Here we go again.

I like to work hard and be productive. But I’m stunned by this article by Eleftherios Diamandis in a careers website:

I worked 16 to 17 hours a day, not just to make progress on the technology but also to publish our results in high-impact journals. How did I manage it? My wife—also a Ph.D. scientist—worked far less than I did; she took on the bulk of the domestic responsibilities. Our children spent many Saturdays and some Sundays playing in the company lobby. We made lunch in the break room microwave.

Let’s count all the ways this one paragraph is terrible, in the order they appear.

First, sixteen hour work days are crazy. That statement should come with a warning: “Do not attempt.” Maybe some people could do this for short bursts, and maybe a rare few people could do this for extended periods, but this is not how most people are going to turn out their best work.

Second, there’s the glorification of “high impact journals” as the path to career advancement. You mean the paywalled ones where retractions correlate more strongly with their Impact Factor than their citations?

Third, and probably worst, the “woman gives up career so man can have his.” As Alice Gorman pointed out:

She ‘worked far less’ sounds a hell of a lot like ‘worked far more’ to me.

I understand that this is the decision some couples make. People have their private discussions and make hard decisions about how to live. This may have been the right choice for these particular two people. But again... to blithely drift past this as, “This is what I did to get ahead” suggests that Diamandis thinks this is easy, and normal, and acceptable. It’s hard, and exceptional, and crappy.

Fourth, kids playing in the lobby and eating out of the microwave doesn’t sound good for your general health and well-being, even if you were working normal hours, which is not the case.

When I look at Diamandis’s website, it’s clear that this work load was not a one time thing that he did to get the position he describes in the article. He co-authored thirty papers last year alone (twenty data-driven and ten reviews). I’m concerned that this guy, in a leadership position, is making a people around him do the same things that he did, whether they want to or not.

And where do we find this? On the Science Careers website! Again! I say again, because you may recall, Science Career got stung just last month for Alice Huang suggested a women faced with a man continually looking down her shirt “you put up with it, with good humor if you can.”

I am wondering if the Science Career website has the same editor as last month. Because if so, there’s a bad pattern emerging. And it needs to stop.

Last time, the “Ask Alice” column was taken down within the day. I am willing to bet that a similar fate will happen here. Article removed, another nonpology from both the Science Careers editorial board and the author, who just don’t see what all the fuss is about.

Major hat tip for Oliver Robinson, who brought this to my attention with this bottom line summary:

Errr... message from this Science piece seems to be: success = poor work-life balance + wife to do domestic duties.

Additional: Rajini Rao notes that I didn’t hit every piece of awfulness in the article, which is true. (There was so much in just that one paragraph!)

You left out the part about walking in front of dept chair to get noticed. Which is just silly.

Yeah. That’s some preening right there. And there’s no way of telling if this did him any good, or was pure superstition.

More additional: My head is reeling at reading that Diamandis lists himself as co-author on 702 papers, and that list ends at 2013.

Related to this culture of “work and nothing but,” I’d like to point to this article about post-doc salaries in the United States (my emphasis):

This is about how, as the reaction of US postdoc shows, no one in this country actually believes in labor law anymore. No one believes that they can be protected from overwork, that pay should be proportional to hours worked as well as talent. No one even believes in the benefits their employer gives them. I have yet to meet a single person at my workplace who takes our (generous) 20 day vacation allowance. And trust me, it’s not just because they love their work. I’ve spent enough time with Americans to know how they are socialized to view vacation as a professional liability.

Still more additional: Terry McGlynn nails it:

The dudes running the system, who got in charge by exploiting their spouses, can’t be allowed to impose their values on our generation.

And even if the Diamandis’s wife did not feel she was exploited, there is no doubt that there are many women who were. And it’s not okay for people to set that expectation, even incidentally by example.

Update, 15 July 2015: Diamandis has responded, briefly and in a slightly cryptic way (not clear if that’s his email or the editing at fault):

Eleftherios P. Diamandis, head of clinical biochemistry at a hospital of the University of Toronto, said via email that he had seen the criticisms. “It is a free world; all opinions respected,” he wrote.

I’m not sure if that means that we are supposed to respect his opinion, or whether he respects other people’s criticisms of him. If the latter, it would be nice if he addressed the criticisms instead of shrugging them off.

He added, “If I stayed home, would my wife be sexist?”

To which I say:

That’s not what happened.

What might have happened and how his wife might have been viewed does not change what actually happened. A woman was asked to take over all the housework again. It’s not as a though this is a rare thing. It’s common. As I wrote above, this may have been the right choice for this couple, but in a context and culture where women disproportionately give up their career options for domestic duty, this sends a bad signal of unfairness.

So, as Dave Mellert answered, if a man’s wife took up the professional overload, and the man stayed at home to do all the housework, the woman wouldn’t be sexist. She might be bigoted or prejudiced or many other unfortunate things, but she isn’t part of a larger continuing pattern.

Hat tip to Karen James - who Inside Higher Education should have referenced when they quoted her tweet. Same with Jacquelyn Gill. Talk about making someone’s contribution invisible.

Update: Scott Jaschik has indicated that the Inside Higher Education article will link the tweets from Karen and Jacquelyn.

Update, 16 July 2015: Times Higher Education covers the criticisms of this, and several other articles, that have appeared in Science or Science Careers. It includes several new comments from Science’s editor-in-chief, Marcia McNutt. Most relevant to this piece is McNutt’s argument:

Dr. McNutt went further to point out that the journal’s first person accounts are being mistaken as advice columns, and says that such future accounts will be paired with alternative commentary or perspective.

That’s a weak claim. Let’s look at the text on the Science Careers homepage (my emphasis):

Clinician-scientist Eleftherios P. Diamandis says that making sure you are noticed can give you the edge over your silent competition.

Similarly, there’s this line in the opening paragraph:

But a well-planned, long-range effort to ensure your visibility among those who have hiring responsibilities can be the deciding factor.

The repeated use of “you” turns this article into an advice column, not a biography. If this article was intended to be merely descriptive and not proscriptive, it’s been poorly written and edited.

Another update, also 16 July 2015: Retraction Watch is reporting on the Diamandis article and the letter criticizing Science for its multiple missteps. Down at the end, updated today, it notes that Jim Austin is no longer the Science Careers editor. He was the individual who, in response to a cover of trans women that didn’t show their faces, called moral indignation “boring.”

Related posts

Breaking brand: Science magazine’s latest self-inflicted crisis

External links

Getting noticed is half the battle
Laboratory of Dr. Eleftherios P. Diamandis
Diamandis’s faculty webpage

Grand challenges for biology

Meghan Duffy, writing at Dynamic Ecology, has a nice post about “grand challenges” in biology. The first time I heard this particularly phrase was at a Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting, where the National Science Foundation was soliciting ideas about what the “grand challenges” in biology are. In other words, this is grant speak.

I have some misgivings about this approach, of asking scientists what they big problems are. I think it’s too likely to be blinkered and limited: like asking city dwellers at the end of the nineteenth century what problems they needed to solve. They’d probably have been adamant about needed more and better horses for transportation.

The NSF has five grand challenges for biology, and so does Meghan. There is some overlap in these lists, but they aren’t quite identical.

• Predicting individual organisms’ characteristics from their DNA sequence (NSF) / Linking phenotype to genotype (MD)
• Understanding biodiversity (NSF and MD)
• Understanding the brain (NSF and MD)
• Interactions of the Earth, its climate and its biosphere (NSF)
• Sustainable agriculture (MD)
• Synthesizing life-like systems (NSF)
• Origins of life (MD)

To me, “grand challenge” has a few desirable features. It should be something that many people in the discipline are actively working on. That is, it’s a question many scientists are engaged and committed to answering. There are some reasonably clear ideas for what constitutes success.

For those reasons, a couple of the proposed grand challenges leave me cold.

“Understanding the brain” is, to me, is not a challenge for biology. Neuroscience is its own discipline now. The descriptions of “the brain” – singular – make it clear that people are talking about the human brain, and not the brains of the millions of other animal species.

Worse, the NSF document talks about the “emergent properties” of the brain, which is code for “consciousness.” I don’t think we have even a clue as to what an answer to that question might look like.

“Origins of life” is an unanswered question, yes, and an important one. For a grand challenge, it doesn’t feel like one that a large proportion of people in biology are actively grappling with. There’s a lot of speculation, but I don’t see this as something that people think they have a clear path to make headway on it.

“Synthesizing life-like systems” is a weird way of renaming a technology – synthetic biology – as a challenge. I’m not so much interested in life-like systems as I am in actual living systems studied with techniques to (say) make synthetic DNA.

When the J. Craig Venter Institute announced they had created a cell that ran from artificial DNA, Venter said one of the questions they wanted to answer is, “What’s the minimal genome?” What is the smallest amount of instructions that you can have that will allow a cell to be alive? That’s a fascinating question, but unless / until a lot more labs start pursuing it besides the J. Craig Venter Institute, I don’t think it qualifies as a
grand challenge.

“Understanding biodiversity” is something that I can get behind, although I’d like it even more if it was a bit more focused. Something like, “How many species are there?” We don’t know that. It would be nice to see basic taxonomy put more in the forefront, because that stuff needs more attention. And just cataloguing all the species is a grand challenge.

External links

How many species are there?

Top ten for three months running!

Just realized that the recent crustacean nociception paper I co-authored is in the top ten most read articles for the third month running in Biology Open! It was #2 for April, #6 for May, and #6 again for June.

Thank you to all who have taken an interest and read this!

Tuesday Crustie: Release the Kraken!

John Wyndham is actually a favourite author of mine. I’ve read his novel The Kraken Wakes. But I never visualized it quite like this artist behind this Italian edition...

Hat tip to Pulp Librarian and Paul Cornell.

I don’t think early retirement is for me

I heard a scientist talking about wanting to retire at 55, and it’s been bothering me ever since.

First, I’m kind of amazed that anyone in academia would have the financial savvy to have enough cash to retire early. I sure wouldn't feel financially secure retiring early.


Second, it got to me because couldn’t quite wrap my head around the lost research opportunities. As I mentioned a while ago, I’m scheduled to be promoted to full professor this fall. And that has been bringing me some anxiety. Full professor means you’re no longer early career, or mid-career – even given academia’s generous definitions of those terms, which mean you can be “early career” in your 40s. Cue jokes about graybeards and deadwood.

I’ve got a paper coming out that has been sitting on my hard drive for a while. It’s a reminder to me of how hard it can be to get stuff completed, and that I’ve got a lot of questions I want to know the answers to. And it’s not likely that other labs are going to pick up those questions. Which means if I don’t answer them before the clock goes ding on my career, I’ll never know the answers.

Related posts

Nowhere to go from here

The rules ain’t always all that: lessons from Battlebots

Over the weekend, I was watching remote controlled robots bash each other into scrap metal. As one does. And an interesting situation arose in one fight:

The team running a robot called Complete Control sent their robot out with a gift-wrapped present. The other robot, Ghost Raptor, runs into it in the first few seconds, rips open the box... and there’s a net inside. It completely messes up the spinning attack arm of Ghost Raptor, and that was pretty much it for the match. There’s a video here (embedding seems to be disabled, sorry).

Except... everyone is going, “Whaaaa...? How is that legal?”

The Complete Control team gets quizzed fast about this net. They say they checked the rules about entanglement, “It’s not in there any more.”

Now, to me, things seemed pretty clear cut at this point. Award the win to Complete Control. They followed the rules. The rest of the teams had gotten rules, because the announcers had made some comments about the weight limits for the machines (250 pounds, if I remember right).

But no! After a commercial break, the host explained:

Given the fact that Battlebots has historically always banned the use of entanglement devices, the fight has been nullified. They have agreed to a rematch.

I found this interesting, because it’s a great example of the tension between explicit rules and community standards, which is something that is a very live and real tension in science. A lot of people want standards, want explicit rules. I find this to be particularly true of early stage students: they crave structure, so they can know if they’re doing things “right.”

The Complete Control team, however, show one of the problems with this. The team was apparently known for pushing the limits of what was allowed. As Teresa Neilsen Hayden wrote:

Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

In this case, “It’s known in the community” won out. Somewhat to my surprise.

The downside to the community standards approach is that it sure seems uninviting to newcomers and outsiders. There was a great example on Twitter the other day when Rachel French complained about the format of an NSF proposal. Prof-Like Substance spoke up to say, “It doesn’t really mean that,” leading to Rachel and Karen James annoyed by “super-sekrit NSF in-crowd culture” (as Karen put it). And understandably annoyed, in my view. I wouldn’t have guessed that.

“Community standards” and “community practices” at loggerheads all the time in science. How authorship is assigned and interpreted is a big one. (“We know who did what on that 1,000 author paper.”)

There has to be a balance, but with so many issues floating around these days about how science is seen by many as unwelcoming, I would like to see our scientific communities push more towards creating explicit rules than “the people in the know, know that.”