#ArsenicLife in soft focus

I am glad to hear that Felisa Wolfe-Simon is doing well and still loves science.

But lots of other information in a new article in the New York Times about Wolfe-Simon is not as warming.

First, the timeline of events circa 2010 described in the article is very fuzzy at best. I’m not sure if it6s wrong or just cloudy.

By focusing on Wolfe-Simon, others involved in this story – notably Rosie Redfield – are reduced to namely “critics.” There are other elements of the story that are maybe over emphasized?

Critique soon became attack, and attack often became personal – focusing, for instance, on Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s appearance, including her dyed hair.

Several articles described her colourful hair positively. And Rosie Redfield dyed her hair, too. I cannot doubt some attacked her appearance, and that any of those comments can hurt bad.

 And soon, Dr. Wolfe-Simon said, she couldn’t get grants or publish papers.

A lot of researchers struggle to get grants or publish papers. There’s no way of knowing what proposals or manuscripts she was submitting or what the comments were.

Second, there is news that the journal Science is considering retracting the original paper. Current editor, Holden Thorp, expands on the possible retraction of the arsenic life paper in a thread on Bluesky. i asked what point a retraction would serve, to which Thorp replied, “Partly because of AI and even before with search engines that only look at the title, papers like this continue to get cited uncritically. ‘Retraction’ is added to the title in these cases.”

This strikes me as reasonable, but I still have some reservations. By the same argument, anyone who only looks at the title and sees “Retraction” will also view that uncritically and not read the retraction notice. This could mean someone would not cite this paper appropriately for its discovery of a new strain of arsenic-tolerant bacteria (which is not contests). 

Retraction is a blunt instrument.

Third, this article paints Wolfe-Simon as someone who was wronged, not as someone who was wrong.

Usually, professional consequences so severe are reserved for those who fabricate data or commit fraud, which no one has alleged with #arseniclife. Why, then, were the repercussions so resounding for Dr. Wolfe-Simon?

And from reading this article, it seems to me that Wolfe-Simon still thinks she found bacteria that use arsenic instead of phosphorus.

She also defended the discovery against scientific consensus. Some see that as an unwillingness to change a conclusion in the face of new information. Dr. Wolfe-Simon would say that information is wrong.

And...

To this day, Dr. Wolfe-Simon defends the work, noting that she wishes the team had saved less data for a second paper. The team published a response to critiques in Science, and Dr. Wolfe-Simon disputes failed replications of their findings. Other co-authors say they also stand by the integrity of the original work.

What I would like to know if whether the co-authors stand by the conclusions of their work. Do they think they discovered a bacterium that uses arsenic in place of phosphorus?

Wolfe-Simon throws Science magazine under the bus a bit:

She wouldn’t pursue a flashy journal that would impose a heavy hand in publication and press, she said.

We absolutely have to make space for making mistakes and being wrong in science. But researchers have to be willing to admit those mistakes.

External links

Her discovery wasn’t alien life, but science has never been the same. (Paywalled.)
 

Le Monde est à vous: Academic hoaxes in French newspaper article

The second article that arose from my posting of preprints is now available. The title is, “Why scientific hoaxes aren’t always useless.”

Translation of first paragraph by Google Translate:

Canadian biologist Zen Faulkes is not a naturalist, even if he likes to collect crayfish or sand crabs for his research. However, he has a taste for unexpected collections. For several years, he has been collecting, listing and classifying... scientific hoaxes. That is to say, parody, ironic or insane research articles that should never have been published. “Of course, if these texts disappeared, it would not be a great loss. But it is important to keep track of them and try to learn some lessons from their existence,” says the researcher, whose collection spans 432 pages, for forty-two examples.

While I have been very pleased in the last few weeks to have been quoted in a couple of fairly high profile venues, I am struck by the disconnect this week between good professional news and terrible personal news. (There have been a couple of deaths close to our family in the last week.)

External links

Pourquoi les canulars scientifiques ne sont pas toujours inutiles (Paywalled and in French)

Related blog posts

Clearing out the vault by posting preprints

“Neurosurgery on Saturn” paper shows academics’ blind spots

In the last few days, a bunch of people on Bluesky discovered a paper that has been out for a few months, “Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn.”

Looking through the social media posts about this paper, a lot of people played that favourite academic game, “How did this get published?” Many people suggested it’s a hoax. Academic hoaxes are a particular interest of mine, and I am always looking for the next entry in the Stinging the Predators collection of academic hoaxes.

I didn’t think this was a hoax? Hoaxers usually reveal the prank almost immediately, and this paper had been out for months.

My hunch seems to have been correct. The lead author has an extensive Google Scholar page and said on PubPeer: “it is clear that the document focuses on fictitious and hypothetical situations.” I am not clear about what the point of the article is, but never mind. It’s filed under “Letters to the editor,” which I think is an arena where researchers and journals can be allowed a little leeway.

But this is a good example of something that I think is decidedly lacking in many discussions about academic publishing and academic integrity. In none of the posts I read did anyone do any actual investigation.

Nobody looked to see if the authors were real.

Nobody emailed the authors. It seems to just be happenstance that the lead author saw the PubPeer comments and replied.

Nobody emailed the journal (although editors are often notoriously slow to reply to these sorts of things).

In collecting academic hoaxes, I’ve noticed a similar pattern. People create hoaxes to show that there are bad journals out there that accept anything for money. But by and large, that is where it stops. 

People know predatory journals are out there, but nobody is actively digging behind the scenes to see how they work. How do people decide to start running them? How much money do they make? Why would a scam artist only in it for the money do apparently counterintuitive things like waiving the article processing charges? (There are multiple instances of that in the Stinging the Predators collection.)

A recent paper came out that made a similar point about the lack of investigation about paper mills  (Byrne et al. 2024). 

Academics treat too many of these problems around dubious publishing as some sort of black box that cannot be opened. They only study the outputs. I think someone needs to approach these sorts of problems more like an investigative journalist or an undercover law enforcement officer might.

Go in and find the people who are doing all this dishonest stuff. Get them talking. I want hear what some of the people organizing predatory journals or paper mills or citations rings have to say. Why do they do what they do?

I don’t expect academics themselves to do this. This kind of investigative journalism is expensive and time consuming and being done less and less. But without this kind of insight, we will probably never be able to understand and curb these problems.

References

Byrne JA, Abalkina A, Akinduro-Aje O, Christopher J, Eaton SE, Joshi N, Scheffler U, Wise NH, Wright J. 2024. A call for research to address the threat of paper mills. PLoS Biology 22(11): e3002931. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002931

Mostofi K, Peyravi M. 2024. Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn. International Journal of Surgery Case Reports 122: 110139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijscr.2024.110139

External links

PubPeer commentary on “Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn”

Altmetric page for “Practice of neurosugery on Saturn”

Google Scholar page for Keyvan Mostofi

Photo by Steve Hill on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons licence. 

“Follow the rules like everyone else” is not punishment

Because I curate a collection of stings and hoaxes, I have been following the so-called “grievance studies” affair by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindasy, and assistant professor Peter Boghossian (the only academic of the trio). They sent hoax papers to journals. Many people have sent hoax papers to journal (hence my anthology), but Pluckrose and colleagues described it as an experiment and published it.

Inside Higher Education reports:

Boghossian was ordered last year to take research compliance training; he has not yet done so, the letter states. Because Boghossian has not completed Protection of Human Subjects training, he is forbidden from engaging in research involving human subjects or any other sponsored research.

In other words, “Follow the same rules as everyone else.”

Just by way of comparison, and to give you an idea of what research with humans normally entails, I did an online survey for a couple of research papers (here’s one). That’s less intrusive than what Boghossian and colleagues did. I had to:

• Go through “research with human subjects” training.
• Submit a proposal to an institutional review board and have it approved.
• Include detailed descriptions of the potential benefits and risks to anyone viewing the survey.

So “Take training before you do more research” is what anyone should do.

But some reporting makes it sound like Boghossian is being treated arbitrarily (emphasis added).

• PSU punishes prof who duped academic journal with hoax ‘dog rape’ article
• Portland State bans professor from research for getting ‘grievance studies’ hoaxes published
• Portland State bans ‘grievance studies’ prof from doing research “banned from both human-subjects and sponsored research by the public university”

My prediction is that this is going to become a talking point in the American culture wars, with some trying to paint Boghossian’s letter as a dire consequence that has a chilling effect on academic freedom, is political correctness gone mad, continue buzzwords until exhausted.

Unfortunately, the language of the letter Boghossian got was pretty severe, which will contribute to the impression that the consequences for Boghossian are bad.

And it is bad, of course. It’s embarrassing to get called out for your actions and told you didn’t do the right thing by this institution and your profession.

But I bet a lot of people wish their punishment for something was a letter saying, “Follow the rules.” I’m sure some teenagers would like that more then being grounded.

The weekly science news cycle

In politics, there is constant referencing to the “news cycle”, which is generally considered to be 24 hours. The next day is not quite a blank slate, but things older than that are not “news.”

In science, there is also a news cycle, it’s not a daily cycle. It’s a weekly one.

The scientific news cycle starts on Wednesdays, with the release of that week’s issue of Nature. It continues Thursday, with the releasee of that week’s issue of Science. Love them or hate them, the papers dropped by these two journals in mid-week drive much of the media coverage for science – whether newspapers, television, radio, or something else – for the rest of the week.

These journals are well tied into the traditional news ecosphere. Journalists often have advance notice of the big stories dropping by embargoed press releases, so the most connected media outlets are often dropping headline stories about Nature and Science papers in the middle of the week.

Social media discussions are also heavily influenced by these two glamour magazines. You often see early reaction on science Twitter the day of release, and longer reactions (blog posts, for instance) before the weekend is out.

Friday and Saturday are days for continuing, slightly longer and more in-depth coverage. Many science radio shows (also available as podcasts) air on Friday or Saturday, and they almost invariably feature interviews with authors who had a publication in Nature or Science that week. I’m thinking of NPR’s Science Friday, CBC’s Quirks and Quarks, and ABC Radio National’s The Science Show on (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the US TV network).

These are also days where websites and media companies that don’t have their own science reporters learn about stories from other reporters. A large amount of media coverage of science says, “As reportedimn The New York Times...”, not “A new paper in Nature...”.

Sunday is the day for deep dives and long reads about science. Newspapers and magazines often put out their long form feature articles or investigative pieces. It’s the day for things that “not news, but still important.”

Monday and Tuesday are reaction days from the some in the scientific community, particularly those who are low-key users of social media. They are the catch-up points for people who heard about some story that broke last week, but they maybe heard about it by listening to a radio show or reading a New York Times article. But they didn’t really tweet or comment about it because they weren’t at their desk until Monday.

Headline hogwash: Rosehip neurons

I was listening to the radio this morning, and heard some very strange coverage about something called “rosehip neurons.” The coverage was pushing this notion that these newly described neurons were somehow extra special and extra unusual and might be one of the things that make us human. I almost felt like rosehip neurons were being described the way I imagined René Descartes described the pineal gland.

I looked at some headlines, because headlines disproportionately influence what people believe about a story.

NPR, The Independent, Iran Daily, and India Today link these neurons to human “uniqueness.” News Medical and Biocompare flat out state rosehip neurons are unique to humans.

Facebook juggernaut I Fucking Love Science, Science Alert, Interesting Engineering, and News.com.au are more cautious, saying “possibly,” “looks like” or “may be” that rosehip neurons are only in humans.

Science, Science Daily, Wired (*), Forbes, and LiveScience carefully specify these neurons are found in people or humans. Yet media will almost never say when research is done in mice or some other animal.

The cumulative effect  of looking through these news headlines is that you get the impression that rosehip neurons are the first thing we have ever found that is unique to humans. Walter (2008) has a whole book of uniquely human traits.

And people are falling for this narrative already. I say “falling” because the reasoning trying to link these neurons to the uniqueness of humans is spurious.

The paper by Boldog and colleagues does not show rosehip neurons are “human specific.” The paper shows rosehip neurons are “not seen in mouse cortex”. That’s a big difference. It’s like calling whiskers “mouse specific” because you look at a mouse and a human, and you see that the mouse has whiskers and humans don’t. It sounds good until you look at a cat.

For all we know, cats might have rosehip neurons. Bats might have them. Elephants might have them. Chimps, gorillas, and whales might have them. Lions, and tigers, and bears might have them.

Different species are different. This is not a surprise. The idea that human brains are just very large mouse brains might be a great strawman to get money from medical funding agencies, but it’s not a position that anyone who understands evolution and animal diversity should take.

References

Boldog et al. Transcriptomic and morphophysiological evidence for a specialized human cortical GABAergic cell type. Nature Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0205-2 (Preprint available here.)

Walter C. Thumbs, Toes, and Tears (see also interview)

Related posts

New rule for medical research headlines

External links

What Makes A Human Brain Unique? A Newly Discovered Neuron May Be A Clue

Mysterious new brain cell found in people

Scientists identify a new kind of human brain cell

Meet the Rose Hip Cell, a New Kind of Neuron (* The Wired headline that appears in Google search results is, “Meet the Rosehip Cell, a New Kind of Human Neuron | WIRED”)

Scientists Discover A New Type Of Brain Cell In Humans

Neuroscientists identify new type of “rose hip” neurons unique to humans

Team Discovers New ‘Rosehip’ Neuronal Cells Found Only in Humans

Scientists Find a Strange New Cell in Human Brains: The 'Rosehip Neuron

International Team Discovers New Type Of Neuron That May Be Unique To Humans

New, and possibly unique, human brain cell discovered

Mysterious new type of cell could help reveal what makes human brain special

Scientists Discovered A New Type of Brain Cell That May Only Exist in Humans

Metrics do not mean academia has been “hacked”

Portia Roelofs and Max Gallien argue that the high altmetric score for a dire article defending colonialism is evidence that academia has been “hacked.”

Academic articles are now evaluated according to essentially the same metrics as Buzzfeed posts and Instagram selfies.

The problem with their thesis is that article metrics are not new. They even discuss this:

Indexing platforms like Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar record how many other articles or books cite your article. The idea is that if a paper is good, it is worth talking about. The only thing is, citation rankings count positive and negative references equally.

I’m pretty sure that it has been literally decades since I read articles about using citation data as metrics for article impact. And one of the concerns raised then was about mindless counting of citation data. “But,” people would object, “if an article got a lot of citations because people were saying how bad it was?”

This is not a hypothetical scenario. Go into Google Scholar, and look at the number of citations for the retracted paper that tried to link vaccination to autism. 2,624 citations. Or the “arsenic life” paper, which has been discredited, though not retracted. 437 citations. By comparison, my most cited papers are in the low tens of citations.

The defence for using citations as metrics was that negative citations rarely happen. (I seem to recall seeing some empirical data backing that, but it’s been a long time.) But it was certainly much harder for people to dig down and find whether citations were positive or negative before so much of scientific publishing moved online. (Yes, I remember those days when journals were only on paper. ‘Cause I be old.)

Indeed, one of the advantages of the Altnetric applet is that it is trivial to go in and see what people are saying. Click on the recorded tweets, and you can see comments like, “So hard to read it without being outraged,” “Apparently not a parody: paper making 'the case for colonialism'. How does a respected journal allow this? Shocked.”and simply, “Seriously?!” Hard to find any tweets saying something like, “This is a thoughtful piece.”

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Altmetric folks are working on code that will pick out the valence of words in tweets about the paper; “excellent” versus “outraged,” say. Some papers are analyzing “mood” in tweets already (e.g., Suguwara and colleague 2017).

So the issue that Roelofs and Gallien are discussing is not a new kind of issue, although it could be new to the degree it is happening. But Roelofs and Gallien fail to show even a single example of the thing they claim to be such a danger: someone, anyone arguing that this is a good paper, a worthy piece of scholarship, because of its altmetric score.

It is fair to point out that any metric needs to be used thoughtfully. But I am not seeing any chilling effects, or even much potential for chilling effects, that they are so worried about.

A partisan news site can play to outrage and be rewarded because of their business models. They generate revenue by ads and clickthroughs. Academic journals are not like such news sites. They are not ad supported. They are not generating revenue by clicks and eyeballs. Academic journals exist in a reputation economy. They rely on reputation for article submissions, peer reviews, and editors.

For me, a bigger problem that journals might be rewarded from criticism by high altmetric scores is that journals can be so effectively isolated from criticism by publisher bundling (a.k.a “big deals”). It’s almost impossible for a library to cancel a subscription to one journal. (And yes, I know there are arguments for cancelling all subscriptions.)

External links

Clickbait and impact: how academia has been hacked

When academic success is news

Pretty regularly, American news media runs a story with some version of this headline:

Accepted into every Ivy League school

That’s obviously a big achievement for a high school student. But I have noticed this:

The students making the headlines are almost always minorities.

News coverage focuses on the unexpected. That news coverage so consistently focuses on minority students means that their success was not expected. Success is not normalized for them. Their success is some sort of bizarre, noteworthy exception.

Even while I appreciate the importance of visibility of success for minorities, the underlying message being sent – “We didn’t expect this kind of success from you” – is kind of crappy.

The winner of the “Best euphemism for lying” award goes to...

Kellyanne Conway, who coined the term, “alternative facts.”

This was in reference to yesterday, when the White House press secretary’s lied, stating that the recent American presidential inauguration had, “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”

Coincidentally enough, 40 years before Kellyanne Conway coined the term “alternative facts,” Doctor Who broadcast “The Face of Evil,” which contained one of my all-time favourite quotes from a show loaded with great quotes:

You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

The Doctor, “The Face of Evil”, Part 4, Doctor Who Season 14 (Production code 4Q). Written by Chris Boucher, directed by Pennant Roberts, originally broadcast on the BBC on 22 January 1977

Powerful and stupid makes a particularly nasty combination.

At least, unlike back in 2011, when Senator John Kyl’s office said the Senator’s lie about Planned Parenthood was “not intended to be a factual statement,” Conway got called on it much more strongly:

Kellyanne Conway on @MeetThePress: Spicer offered “alternative facts.” @chucktodd: “Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.”

Never let yourself become a fact that needs altering.

Update, 23 January 2017: io9 also wrote a story about the Doctor Who quote. Unfortunately, it left out the important last line that served as a warning.

External links

Trump's inauguration crowd: Sean Spicer's claims versus the evidence
Doctor Who quote about 'alternative facts' sounds awfully relatable 40 years later

The open access “sting” by Science, three years on

In 2013, writer John Bohannon published a Science article where the main drawing card was an obviously bad paper that he got accepted or published in multiple junk journals. He was not the first, nor has he been the last, to set out to punk crappy journals with obviously bad papers. It’s practically a scientific genre in its own right now.

I grabbed four of the papers that made it through the production process (despite Bohannon’s efforts to keep them out of the literature) for teaching purposes. I was recently reminded of those papers, and went looking for them again.

Let’s start with Indandah et al., 7-chloronorlichexanthone inhibits the growth of murine SV40 transformed lymphoid sarcoma Cells in vitro, in Medicinal Chemistry:

The journal is still there, but there is no hint of the retraction. There’s just a gap in the page numbering.

Next, Magaya et al.,Arthogalin inhibits the growth of murine malignant prostate sarcoma cells in vitro, from Journal Of Pharmacy And Pharmacological Research.

The entire publisher website is gone. The same is true for Nonjah et al., Nephrosterinic acid inhibits the growth of murine malignant pleural sarcoma cells in vitro.

The entire Scientific Journal of Medical Science is gone, gone, gone.

With this track record, I was surprised to see one journal acting like a real journal: being transparent and taking responsibility. The Journal of Biochemical and Pharmacological Research still exists, first of all. You need to drill down to find their page for Onnoocom et al. contribution, Schizopeltic acid inhibits the growth of murine polyploid pulmonary blastoma cells in vitro. But when you do:

The journal acknowledges that the paper was there in its table of contents, but the links for the abstract and PDF both lead to a retraction notice:

JBPR has been a victim of bogus submissions; and this paper is one of those and is hereby retracted. The editor in chief takes full responsibility for accepting this bogus manuscript for publication in JBPR. We sincerely assure readers that something like this will not occur again.

The last line makes me raise my eyebrows a bit. No journal can assure readers that they won’t make this mistake again. It’s just not possible to have a 100% failsafe fraud detection system.

Yes, journals should be criticized when they publish deeply flawed papers. But how they respond to those errors matters, too. It is possible that some junk journals are actually new journals run by people with good intentions but little experience that have the potential to improve. I’m not saying a single retraction notice makes a journal reputable,

Related posts

Open access or vanity press, the Science “sting” edition
Using “journal sting” papers for teaching

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

Ahab had a great white whale.

Emily Voigt had a great red fish.

Then a great batik fish.

Then a great silver fish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

External links

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


Talks at Google:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is intriguing and important research.

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

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

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

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

But what else are we supposed to do?

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

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

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

Related posts

What the Coburn report has in common with arsenic life

External links

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

No mystery how invaders cross oceans

I hate it when news organizations act boggled when there is no reason to be.

Man-Eating Nile Crocodiles Found In Florida, And No One Knows How They Got There

Obviously, the “man-eating” thing is a bit overblown and lurid, but it’s that second half that bugs the heck out of me.

Nile crocodiles are large (hence, potential “man-eaters”) animals that live in Africa. There is one way, and only one way, that they got across the Atlantic Ocean to wind up in Florida.

People moved them.

They didn’t swim. They weren’t carried off by flying rocs and dropped off. They weren’t picked up in some freakish weather event. (Though Crocnado would be an awesome name for a bad SyFy movie, if sharks hadn’t got there first.)

Sure, maybe we want some more details about who did the moving and why. The article goes on to suggest someone thought a Nile crocodile would be a great pet. The technical paper notes:

Over the last decade several large groups of C. niloticus have been imported from South Africa and Madagascar for both zoological display (e.g., Disney’s Animal Kingdom) and the pet trade, with the latter being the most likely introduction pathway for these individuals.

Saying, “Nobody know how they got there” is a lame dodge of responsibility. It’s just another example of humans messing with wildlife. We need to recognize that, and not absolve people through “mystery.” A few years ago, I heard someone on a radio show say something like, “Our pets have become family, and wild animals have become our pets.” We need to get over this notion that almost any type of animal can be a pet.

Hat tip to Andrew Thaler. Update: Andrew rightfully points out:

The specific mode of each introduction is hugely important. Accidental release from a zoo? Illegal exotic trade? Unintentional transmission via shipping? Those details matter, and we don't know yet.

That’s a fair comment. Those details are important. They may be more important for those of us studying the pet trade or working on policy than it is in a general news story. In a general news story, more good might be done by spreading the message, “Don’t keep exotics.”

Reference

Rochford MR et al. 2016. Molecular analyses confirming the introduction of Nile crocodiles, Crocodylus niloticuslaurenti 1768 (Crocodylidae), in Southern Florida, with an assessment of potential for establishment, spread, and impacts. Herpetological Conservation and Biology 11(1): 80–89. http://www.herpconbio.org/Volume_11/Issue_1/Rochford_etal_2016.pdf

External links

Man-Eating Nile Crocodiles Found In Florida, And No One Knows How They Got There


Picture from here.

Science Blogging: The Essential Guide already making waves!

We’re still more than two weeks away from the official release of Science Blogging: The Essential Guide, but the book has already racked up its first citation, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

It’s kind of a throwaway reference at the end of a longer book review (on atheism and religion, by James Jones, but it’s exciting. Early references to the book bode well for its reception.

Harker’s book, though of interest to anyone looking for a guide to such controversies, is aimed at college students in an introductory philosophy of science course. Should he ever decide to communicate these views more broadly — which is to say, to blog about them — he might consider picking up a copy of SCIENCE BLOGGING: The Essential Guide (Yale University, paper, $24), edited by Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire and Jason G. Goldman, which offers practical advice on such matters as “blogging about controversial topics” and “persuading the unpersuadable.” For example: Always link to the relevant research, avoid “muppet flailing” (excessive fervor, I gather) and “don’t let the trolls get you down.” Words not just to blog but to live by.

“Words not just to blog but to live by.” That’s not a bad pull quote for a book blurb!

Additional, 8 March 2016: I guess I’ll use this post to compile reviews and features of the anthology. This article just in from Times Higher Education! It also has a very brief cameo at the end of this Canadian Science Press post, Science Blogging 101.

Additional, 17 March 2016: Andrew David Thaler, himself no slouch at blogging, reviews the book in Science magazine.

Related posts

Incoming: The Complete Guide to Science Blogging
Incoming: Science Blogging
Science blogging book: now with blurbs!
Science Blogging: The Essential Guide book cover reveal
The unenveloping* of Science Blogging!

External links

The twain shall meet (New York Times)
How to set up a blog about science (Time Higher Education)
Science Blogging 101
Blogging for beginners (Science, paywalled)

Sales links

Science Blogging on Yale University Press
Science Blogging page of Facebook
Science Blogging on Amazon

Ancient legacies promoting ancient legacies

In all the excitement about the discovery of the new fossils of Homo naledi, many of my friends in the science community have remarked on this discovery being published in the journal eLife, a new open access journal, rather than Science or Nature.

“Look, this shows that you don’t have to publish short articles in those closed access journals to get lots of attention!”

What I haven’t heard many people point out is that the discovery of Homo naledi had the advantage of being publicized by a well-oiled, well established, recognized print brand: National Geographic.

The style of coverage for Homo naledi was almost exactly what you would see for Science or Nature: simultaneous press releases, probably embargoes, cover of a magazine,and so on. The only difference is that National Geographic isn’t a peer reviewed journal, but I’m not sure that difference is one that a lot of the non-scientist crowd (maybe even including many in journalism) would recognize. I would wager that for many, National Geographic is viewed as having the same authority as Science or Nature.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s great that this kind scientific research is in an open access journal with an unlimited page count. See this post by team member John Hawks which shows how this publication compares to the scientific arguments over other fossils: short papers, long waits for descriptions, etc. And the scans of the fossils that people can print on 3-D printers are something pretty new to scientific publication. All of that is important for the science, but I’m asking more about the outreach.

If this same amount of attention had been garnered by the eLife articles alone – or, to head into complete fantasy, a bioRxiv or PeerJ pre-print (say) – then it will be safer to say the landscape for scientific publicity, news, and outreach has changed significantly. Right now, it’s just showing how much muscle the established media brands still have.

External links

New species of human relative discovered in South African cave
Is Homo naledi just a primitive version of Homo erectus?
Cover image from here.

There’s probably someone “smarter than Einstein” in your city

Seen on Facebook today:

“12-Year-Old Girl Beats Einstein, Stephen Hawking’s score on Mensa IQ test.”

You know the expression, “Don’t get me started!”?

That got me started.

The first thing that annoyed me was that, as far as I have been able to find, neither Albert Einstein nor Stephen Hawking, ever took IQ tests.

Stephen Hawking told the New York Times:

What is your I.Q.?
I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

I found some pages like this that have estimates of Einstein’s IQ. This page says flat out that he never took it. (Googling “Einstein IQ” today reveals about a zillion pages carrying this “Girl beats Einstein” story, so I may have missed this. But I doubt it.) But when you write that Neha Ramu (the 12 year old girl’s name) has an IQ “higher than Einstein,” you’re just guessing.

The second problem is that any time you take a measurement, there is measurement error (as Joel G. pointed out on Twitter). Measure your height or weight on two different days. You may not get exactly the same value (unless you use measure very coarsely; like measuring your height to the nearest foot, say). People have good days and bad. If this girl had taken a test on a different day, oops, maybe no worldwide story, she’s lower than the completely made-up and arbitrary Einstein IQ line. As Eric Mills noted, it’s hard to assess accuracy for a test when you’re a long way from the average.

This might also be a good time to point out that there are data on the stability of IQ scores over life. People can have pretty big swings over the course of their life.

If I remember correctly, IQ tests for young people are age-adjusted, so a score tells you about how a person compares to other people of the same age. It does not tell you that a kid can flat out outperform an adult.

Second, there is an underlying assumption that this girl’s score is crazy rare. So how rare is this girl’s IQ score? Well, there are different IQ tests. In most, the average is 100 points, and the standard deviation is about 15.

The reports seem to estimate Einstein and Hawking’s IQ scores at around 160: that would be 4 standard deviations about the mean. (This site puts it at 3.75 standard deviations.)

According to this site, someone with an IQ of 160 is rare: you would expect to find one such person out of 31,560 individuals. You’d need to look through 55,906 people to find someone with a score of 162.

You’d expect someone “smarter than Einstein” in pretty much any medium sized city. With seven billion people on the planet, there are probably 125,000 who are “smarter than Einstein” on a standard IQ test.

In fact, there were at least two young people in the news just last year with the “smarter than Einstein” label. One was Paulius Zabotkiene and another was Ramarni Wilfred. And the coverage is breathless. “How is that even possible?” asks one. The other advises you, “Just let that sink in for a minute.”

And all three of these young people are from the United Kingdom. This provides even further evidence that finding someone “smarter than Einstein” is hardly a once in a lifetime event with some sort of earth shattering implications. Instead, it’s a lazy journalistic trope.

But these people’s IQ scores, and how rare they are, are, of course, completely irrelevant.

Einstein’s IQ doesn’t matter. Hawking’s IQ doesn’t matter. Neha Ramu’s IQ doesn't matter. What matters is what you do with that.

We don’t value Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking because of their IQ scores. We value them for their achievements. Many people also value their other personal characteristics, which happened to be bottled up in the same body as their smarts.

We value Einstein as a humanitarian who worried about the atomic bomb and played the violin.

We admire Stephen Hawking for being someone who remained productive and accomplished in his field despite the most astonishing physical challenges.

Young people with high IQ scores will probably (though not always) do well in life. Good for them. But they are not “the chosen ones,” for crying out loud.

Additional: Sciliz noted that there is also the possibility of sexism in these sorts of stories. You know, “Einstein beat... by a girl!”

Indeed, I’ve noticed over time that a lot of these sorts of news stories often mention sex, race, class, ethnic background, hard upbringing, and so on. The overarching point of mentioning these characteristics seems to these seems to increase the surprise factor by feeding into people’s biases. “Look how smart this person is even though...!” Again, it seems to be lazy reporting and lazy writing.

Weirdly, this story seems to have first been reported months ago. No idea why it showed up in my Facebook feed today. Ramu’s age is variously reported as 12 or 13, so presumably she’s had a birthday since the story came out.

Related posts

Genius is overrated
The genius myth

External links

12 year old girl beats Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking’s record in MENSA IQ Is there anyone who has increased IQ substantially like 40 points?
IQ basics
IQ conversion
Giftedness in the long term, professor 

The long tail in action

I just learned that an answer I wrote months ago on Quora got picked up and featured on a fairly major UK news website, the Independent months ago.

You never know how far something you put online might travel. Or how hard it might be to know that it has traveled. I had no idea it was on the Independent website until a few minutes ago.

External links

Do crustaceans feel pain when we boil them?

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

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

New rule for medical research headlines

Dear science journalists—

I propose this simple rule for all headlines about medical research:

All headlines must include the species the research was carried out in.

I’ve suggested this a few times here and there on social media, but the latest case was the title of this Telegraph article:

Has Stanford University found a cure for Alzheimer’s disease?

My reaction might be summed up thus:

The problem is so obvious it doesn’t need a spoiler alert. The study was done in mice. Yeah. There have been a lot of studies on lab mice that suggested a cure for something or other was on the horizon. They often vanish without a trace.

Even after animal studies suggest that a treatment will be safe and effective, more than 80% of potential therapeutics fail when tested in people.

While “But if you read the rest of the article...” is a handy out for science writers, it doesn’t change that headlines are 90% of communication effort. If we’re going to improve science communication, headlines would be the place to start.

Imagine the difference in people’s response between the headline that was used and this:

Has Stanford University found a cure for Alzheimer’s disease in mice?

This provides people with a much more realistic idea of how far along the research is in that “bench to bedside” pathway.

External links

Betteridge’s Law