Publication Star

I have been blogging about conference posters for fourteen years. Many people have told me that my blog helped them win a poster award.

Today, I finally shared a poster award!

This certificate is for an encore presentation of our poster, “Are conference presentations accessible? Insights from an online survey to improve equity.” This is a project I was invited to work on last year. It’s been shown at a couple of meetings of the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals.

The “Publication Star” award is for the poster that the judges most want to see written up in  a manuscript and published in a journal. That award category is the most academic thing ever. “You win an award! Your prize is... to get back to writing, you layabout!” 😶

You can read the poster at the conference website. This version has a seven and a half minute video by lead author Emily Messina explaining the works.

The poster is also part of our FigShare collection of material related to this project. You can compare and contrast versions 1 and 2 of the poster, presented at European meeting in January and the American meeting this month.

External links

International Society of Medical Publication Professionals

Poster awards for 19th ISMPP meeting

Texas in lead to be first state to eliminate tenure

The Texas senate passed Senate Bill 18 a couple of days ago. If approved, the law would eliminate tenure in Texas public universities starting fall of 2024.

This is deeply disappointing. Both the bill itself and the weirdly limited reaction from higher ed. Higher ed leaders should be on every news channel, every talk show, writing op eds about why tenure is valuable. The response is nowhere near what it needs to be.

Is the loss of tenure on par with states that are allowing kids to work in factories again? No. But it’s part of the same small minded and regressive mentality.

Anyway, you can check the progress of the Texas bill on the Texas Legislature website.

Related posts

Tenure in US higher education is under threat, and I’m not sure it can be saved

Tenure in US higher education is under threat, and I’m not sure it can be saved

Texas, where I used to work, is considering legislation that would end tenure in its universities.

Needless to say, I think this is a horrible idea. Texas already had post-tenure review (every five years). I know, I went through it.

As much as I am concerned about the legislation, I am even more concerned about the apparent lack of reaction to it. This should be the five alarm fire for American higher education, all hands on deck emergency type of reaction. And I’m not seeing that.

How did we get here? I’ve long has a suspicion that tenure was becoming increasingly vulnerable to attack because the job market for academics has been so tight for so long. When I’ve seen moves to curtail tenure, universities usual response is, “We won’t be able to attract talent, people won’t come to a place without tenure.”

Well, when the educational system has been churning out far more qualified candidates than jobs for decades, that threat rings hollow. A lot of people will take their chances at a job without tenure, because people have to eat and people want to work in the fields they trained to work in.

I hope these bills will die in committee, as many do. But I’m not feeling optimistic.

External links

A Texas trilogy of anti-DEI, tenure bills

New Texas bill would end tenure for college faculty

How Republicans’ threats to tenure and diversity might undercut their own efforts to advance Texas’ universities

Tenure was already in decline. Now some Republicans want it gone from colleges for good.

I think that “intelligent design” bill died

I’d been occasionally checking the West Virginia bill tracker for the progress of the “intelligent design” bill (Senate Bill 619) that made it out of the Senate’s education committee. Every time, I saw the bill still in the House Education Committee, so I thought it was still possible that it might move forward.

But the legislative session ended last month. The bill tracker makes no note the end of the session, which is why I missed it. The bill never make it out of committee for a vote.

I think that means the bill in its present form is done?

Related posts

That “intelligent design” bill hasn’t died yet

Register for “Publication bans & DORA” roundtable

The anniversary week for DORA is still some weeks away, but I just realized that people who learn about it now might want to get updates as the event gets organized.

I have created a registration form for the “Publisher bans & DORA” roundtable event. Just enter your email and you will get an update when I have panelists and links to the online discussion ready to go. 

External links

Dora Tenth Anniversary events

A star chamber for predatory journals

Look, I am not one for conspiracy theories. 

But if I was a major academic publisher, and I saw a lot of business going to new, upstart publishers that had even slightly questionable editorial practices, I’m not sure I would back a way from a little aggressive corporate public relations. I might set up a website that claimed to be providing a service by listing dodgy journals and publishers, and then – Bam! 💥 – I label a bunch of stuff coming from the competition as “predatory.”

Meanwhile, today I learned about a website called Predatory Reports in Scientific Publishing. I noticed today because they recently stuck a bunch of MDPI journals on their blacklist.

Their Twitter account has been around for a little over a year. It’s interesting that I never heard of them before they target MDPI, which fits the narrative of people who are already grumpy (legitimately so) with MDPI.

Looking around their website, I clicked the “About” page, I thought this was an overly honest image:

An empty conference room.

The written description is no more informative. This group is “association of scientists and researchers.” No names, emails, how many people are involved, nothing.

Now, there may be a reason for this. The debates about anonymity in science are long, but usually come down to, “There are some cases where it’s appropriate.”

For instance, the creator of the original blacklist of predatory journals, Jeffrey Beall, tended to have people threaten to sue him with alarming regularity. You may recall he took down his list and never explained why.

But a far more important question is how this “association” decides what journals to include on their list. There is zero description of criteria or process here.

Compare this to another organization that tries to identify predatory publishers, Cabell’s. Their list is a commercial product, but their “About predatory reports” page at least promises that the full report includes, “A complete record of when, what and why a journal is put in Predatory Reports.”

I looked at one of their blog posts about SCRIP to try to glean how they are assessing publishers. They quote Beall’s work, they quote Cabell’s report, and have a list of references at the end. It looks like just a haphazard compilation of other people’s writings.

This is a step up from how I thought the list might be generated (just by using vibes), but there doesn’t seem to be anything new here. I don’t see a lot of value.

For an association that wants to “build trust in scientific research and publications,” they don’t seem to have given much thought to how a blacklist made by a completely opaque process by a group of utterly unknown people looks more like a star chamber than a trustworthy organization.

External links

Predatory journals in scientific publishing

About Predatory reports (Cabell’s)

Are grad students employees or students?

Many people have noted that grad students are in a weird dual state. Sometimes that are treated as employees. Sometimes they are treated as students. Which they get treated as often seems to depend on which is advantageous to the university at that particular moment.

Over the last couple of years, a combination of events has meant that many professors – particularly in the US – are finding it harder to get graduate students and post docs. So the number of people broadcasting on Twitter that they are recruiting students has gone up.

And what has struck more more and more is that those tweets look like job ads.

They’re not, “Come join our master’s program in my department,” they’re “I have a master’s position to study desert fishes using ecological modelling and environmental DNA” or what have you. 

Opportunities for graduate students are consistently described as “positions,” not programs.

I would have expected this for postdoc positions. I think postdocs have always been more or less this way, because there6s no degree associated with being a postdoc. But I wouldn’t have expected this as much for a doctoral programs, and lately I’m seeing a lot of tweets that are advertising for master’s students like this.

This is probably an inevitable outcome of graduate students being supported by professors’ research grants.

So I think we have to really stop thinking of graduate degrees as degree programs, because we aren’t treating them that was. They are entry level contract positions for scientists, in which you are partly compensated with a credential rather than money.

I miss the fail whale

At least when Twitter tanked when it was a new service, you got an amusing, cute marine mammal to look at.

Now you just get a cryptic error message.

Several sites are reporting that every link on Twitter is doing this.

External links

Every link on Twitter is broken right now

Twitter Displaying Error Messages for Web Links Posted in Tweets 

Twitter’s busted again

My social media style

 Okay,I blame Doc Becca for linking to abbrevia.me. It generates descriptions of how people use Twitter.

Doctorzen’s tweets cover a wide range of topics, including science, education, politics, and social issues. They often share articles and express their opinions on current events. They also engage with other users and respond to their comments and questions. Doctorzen’s writing style is straightforward and concise, with occasional humor and sarcasm. They use hashtags and retweets to amplify important messages and promote causes they support. Overall, Doctorzen appears to be an active and engaged Twitter user who uses the platform to share information and connect with others.

Ooh, concise! I worked hard for that one!

External links

abbrevia.me

That “intelligent design” bill hasn’t died yet

Well, hell.

The pro “intelligent design” bill in West Virginia passed the Senate Education Committee.

The bill has now gone to the House Education Committee. The bill’s progress can be tracked on the West Virginia bill tracker. 

This Metro News article has more background on the bill, including the slightly strange fact that the bill was prompted by an idea from a high school student.

Committee chair Amy Grady, R-Mason, is leader sponsor and told the committee that the idea was brought to her by Hayden Hodge from Hurricane High.

Hodge appeared before the committee and said a teacher gave him the idea. The teacher wanted the option to teach ID alongside evolution.

“I am not in favor of getting rid of evolution,” Hodge said. And ID is not ultimately religious. (I hope this is Hodge’s opinion, not the reporter trying to state a fact. - ZF)

“I’m not asking for religion to be taught in classrooms, period,” Hodge said.

This is, of course, untrue. “Intelligent design” is a religious argument. This has been documented many times. We have the receipts. 

Reading the comments from the committee members is depressing. A retired science teacher was arguing in favour of this bill. In favour.

I’m glad the American Civil Liberties Union spoke out against the bill.

The bill made it out of committee with only one vote against it. The report doesn’t say who it was, but my hat is off to you, anonymous West Virginia senator.

External links

Senate education committee approves 4 bills including ‘intelligent design’ measure

‘Intelligent Design’ bill threatens science education in West Virginia

A zombie idea rises again: New attempt to get “intelligent design” into classes

Policy analyst Bryan Kelley is reporting on a bill in West Virginia – Senate Bill 619 – that would legalize the teaching of intelligent design.

There is zero ambiguity in the text of this short bill.

(A)llowing teachers in public schools that include any one or more of grades kindergarten through 12 to teach intelligent design as a theory of how the universe and/or humanity came to exist.

Last year, I predicted that we would see a renewed push to get religious ideas into public schools in the United States. The legal landscape has completely changed for teaching religious ideas in public schools after the US Supreme Court said, “We don’t use the Lemon test any more.”

Honestly, I’m only surprised it took this long.

At this point, the bill has been referred to committee. And many state bills die in committee, never get voted on, never become law. But here’s the thing. There is a pattern of political parties acting in many states more or less simultaneously to push bills towards legislation. I would not be surprised to see a whole bunch of similar bills in state governments before the end of the year.

Hat tip to Tara Smith.

P.S.—Hey, support the National Center for Science Education!

Related posts

Prediction: American creationists will try again to get evolution out of schools 

Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) decision clears way for new science education battles

External links

Senate Bill 619, West Virginia

Context matters as much as data

In the novel Passion Play, author Sean Stewart has a rant about Sherlock Holmes. 

It’s one of Doyle’s famous scenes where Holmes says, without prompting, what Watson was thinking about the war he was in. I think it might have been this, the opening to “The Dancing Men”:

 “So, Watson,” said he, suddenly, “you do not propose to invest in South African securities?”
I gave a start of astonishment. Accustomed as I was to Holmes’s curious faculties, this sudden intrusion into my most intimate thoughts was utterly inexplicable.
“How on earth do you know that?” I asked.

 Holmes goes on to explain how he arrived at the conclusion. But while Holmes is famous for his “deduction,” what Holmes did was not deduction.

“Very likely not; but I can quickly show you a close connection. Here are the missing links of the very simple chain: 1. You had chalk between your left finger and thumb when you returned from the club last night. 2. You put chalk there when you play billiards, to steady the cue. 3. You never play billiards except with Thurston. 4. You told me, four weeks ago, that Thurston had an option on some South African property which would expire in a month, and which he desired you to share with him. 5. Your check book is locked in my drawer, and you have not asked for the key. 6. You do not propose to invest your money in this manner.”
“How absurdly simple!” I cried.

You couldn’t have come to the same conclusion as Holmes if you didn’t have the same detailed knowledge that Holmes had about Watson. You had to know practically everything about Watson. You had to know the context for all of these little details that Holmes observed.

It’s been reported that human brain size is shrinking. I think I’ve even said this in a Quora answer or two.

The Guardian mentions this claim (as well as the “sea squirt eats its own brain” myth) in a new article about language using artificial intelligence like ChatGPT.

Alain Gorely tracked the origin of this claim back to one particular paper. He found reasons to be skeptical of the “brains have shrunk in the last few thousand years.

Suzanna Herculano-Houzel looked at this sleuthing and wrote:

ALWAYS look at the data. Always. The data are one thing; the interpretation of the data quite another. Robust findings are the ones that already appear with basic statistics, not that require the complex analyses.

The funny thing is... the data are not at issue here. That is, the values that are used in the analysis are not in any way wrong or under dispute. It’s not, “Someone moved a decimal place, and that screws up the average.” 

What Gorely does is put the data in context. In particular, he asks, “How were the data collected? How consistent was the collection methods? Are the numbers in line with other numbers?”

“Show me the data” isn’t a definitive mic drop. And when people “look at the data,” they are usually doing something much more complicated.

Killing Twitter

Today may be the day that signals the end of Twitter for me.

I initially had a good day on Twitter. I live-tweeted a great presentation. I was pretty pleased with that.

But late afternoon, I tried to follow-up and got a message saying:

You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.

Then Tweetdeck wouldn’t let me log in. I’d been worried about Tweetdeck for a while, given that Twitter was killing its open API so there couldn’t be third-party Twitter apps. But Twitter owns Tweedeck, so I thought it might be safe. But apparently not.

This seems to be another restriction to force more people to subscribe to Twitter Blue. I just can’t see myself doing it. Yes, Twitter has provided great value to me, but. I just can’t stomach the thought of sending money to a billionaire who is poisoning the town well so he can sell more bottled water. 

Update: News services are saying that a change to number of tweets was not announced, so could be a bug. But it sure doesn’t feel like one. It feels like a preview.

DORA at ten: Publisher ban roundtable

On a bit of a whim, I proposed an event for the 10th anniversary events around the Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA).

And they said yes?

And now I have to do this. Mark your calendars and if you’re interested in being part of the roundtable, email me!

Publisher bans and DORA

Publishers like MDPI, Frontiers, and Hindawi have experienced enormous growth in the number of submissions from researchers, which would suggest they they are meeting needs of the research community and providing good value to researchers. But multiple institutions have told scientists that research in journals from these publishers will no longer “count” for assessment. Such policies suggest that these are “predatory” publishers that do not perform the basic functions of academic journals. The publishers dispute this, as do many authors whose work appears in their journals. Many authors believe that choosing where to publishing their findings is part of their academic freedom. Blacklisting publishers with hundreds of journals may be too blunt an instrument for research assessment and inconsistent with DORA. Are there cases where such bans are valid and useful to the community?

This event will be held as an online round-table discussion followed by a moderated Q & A session.

Update, 12 March 2023: I have created a registration form for the publisher bans and blacklists event so that you can be notified of updates.

I’ve been ripped off! OMICS journal messes up my work

Matt Hodgkinson drew my attention of that fact that one of my articles on authorship has been ripped off and turned into mush by someone in OMICS. (Lightly edited)

Allied Business Academies, a.k.a. Allied Academies, are another publisher to avoid. Quelle surprise, as they’re a brand of the notorious publisher OMICS.

Compare: Zen Faulkes’s 2018 article, “Resolving authorship disputes by mediation and arbitration” with Laura Sandra’s 2021 article, “Alternative Dispute Resolution in Academic Publishing”, in Journal of Organizational Culture Communications and Conflict.

Ms. Sandra, of course, does not exist.

I am always glad when someone finds my work worthy enough to re-use, but I have to say: This is not what I had in mind.

It is weird to see my work in this garbled form. I can recognize some of the elements of my paper, but it’s like they’ve been put through a blender, no doubt to avoid setting off plagiarism detectors. My original paper was 7 typeset pages with 95 references. “Sandra’s” version is a page and a half with three references. 

I have not included a link to the OMICS article because they don’t need the clicks. Go read my paper instead. I think it has something useful to say.

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2018. Resolving authorship disputes by mediation and arbitration. Research Integrity and Peer Review 3(1): 12. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-018-0057-z

External links

Matt Hodgkinson on LinkedIn

Why my new paper on award-winning conference posters is short

You know, sometimes you have plans for a project. Big plans. And sometimes those pan out. And sometimes, you are pleased that at least something came out.

I have a new little paper about conference posters out today.

It started when Paige Jarreau wrote somewhere (can’t remember if I saw it first on her Twitter or a Slack channel) that she was going to be organizing a special collection on visual narratives in science communication. And I thought, “Hey, I could use this to make the point that even though posters are a form of visual communication, they are usually very heavy on text.”

I submitted an abstract for a proposal to see if it fit the project. I had an idea for checking out a few posters every week over the summer to build up a little database. 

I didn’t want just a hodge-podge of random posters. I wanted distinct sets that were publicly archived. I had already bookmarked a few conferences that archived their posters.

Then reality set in. Some of my bookmarks had already succumbed to link rot, and the posters were no longer available. The semester started, and it was a hard semester in terms of preparation. So instead of posters from multiple conferences, I ended up with just one conference. But I think it was an interesting set of posters, because they were award winners from one of the biggest conferences in the world. Surely these would be awesome!

I hadn’t gotten as far or as detailed as I originally planned. But this project had a deadline, and 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing. I wrote the paper and submitted it. 

Things got worse, time wise, when reviews came back. It wasn’t rejected! But then, not only was class preparation had gotten more time-consuming, not less. I just couldn’t get to the revisions. Then there was a family emergency, so I got an extension.

Unfortunately, I was already so far behind that I missed one opportunity to make the paper better. 

One reviewer suggested a work I hadn’t heard about. But it wasn’t online or in the library. And it wasn’t a short article. It would take time to read. I decided not to wait until I could get the interlibrary loan. I submitted the revision without it. I have since gotten the work and... argh, it was so on point. It would have been a completely logical thing to include and discuss in my paper.

It’s going to be one of those losses that will haunt me until I put it right somehow.

I hope the paper has something to offer. It gave me more ideas for how I could push forward with bigger, better analyses in the future.

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2023. The “wall of text” visual structure of academic conference posters. Frontiers in Communication 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1063345

Publisher bans: A repeating pattern of attack on academic freedom

Last week, a couple of websites reported that a couple of departments at Zhejiang Gongshang University were not going to count publications appearing in three large open access publishers: MDPI, Frontiers, and Hindawi.

The policy appears to be leaked from internal memos. I searched the university site for the memo, and Google reports a result, but it is hidden behind an institutional login, so I can’t see the rationale behind this move.

This is the third attempt I know of to stop researchers from using certain publishers. I say again, publishers. And this doesn’t include the Chinese Academy of Sciences flagging dozens of journals as “risky.” 

You know, back when European funding agencies were announcing so-called “Plan S” to promote open access publication, some folks got all huffy 😤 about how vital it was to academic freedom that researchers be able to exercise choice in where they chose to publish their results. How dare a funding agency tell a researcher that they can’t publish in journals like Nature or Science, just because they are not open access! 

If that principle of researchers being able to choose their journal is important, then we are seeing a lot of attacks on academic freedom. But not many people seem to care. Far from being concerned, a lot of researchers seem to think banning researchers from using particular publishers is a great idea. That’s kind of blowing my mind. 🤯

Have these people not heard of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)? It says, we “need to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published.” The same principle should extend to publishers. If we shouldn’t judge research based on the journal it is in, we shouldn’t judge research based on the publisher of the journal, either.

For what it’s worth, I’ve tracked a lot of the criticism of MDPI in particular here on the blog. There are valid reasons to be concerned about editorial practices. But on the other hand, I’ve read a lot of useful papers in journals from all three of the publishers that Zhejiang Gongshang University are trying to blacklist.

Hat tip to Mario Barbatti and Richard Sever.

P.S.—Weirdly, when I searched the university for references to this new policy, one of the hits was to an open access library that said, “Most of these papers come from internationally renowned publishing institutions, including Hindawi, PlosOne, MDPI, Scientific Research Publishing and some high-quality articles from Biomed.” (Emphasis added.) So the library knows not what administrators are doing?

Update, 18 January 2023: I ran a couple of polls asking if people considered being able to choose their publication venue to be important to their academic freedom.

People on Twitter voted “Yes” more than twice as much as “No.” The vote on Mastadon was smaller but even more lopsided.

External links

A university has blacklisted all the journals of the three major OA publishers, Frontiers, MDPI, and Hindawi! (Google translated from Chinese)

Related posts

University tells scholars what journals to publish in

The mind of a worm, the mind of a human, and mind uploading

In 1986, a key paper on the nervous system of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans appeared. It was a fairly complete description of the entire nervous system of the animal: it counted all the neurons (302 then) and a good first pass at counting neural connections (5000 chemical synapses, 600 electrical synapses, and 2000 synapses to muscles).

The paper was subtitled, “The mind of a worm.” 

This subtitle was despite there being nothing about the behaviour or internal states of the species. It was all anatomy.

I think it was called that for a couple of reasons. 

First, co-author Sydney Brenner was a playful writer. He wrote a great column for Current Biology for many years that often showed his wit.

Second, it represented a hope in invertebrate neuroethology that understanding the neural connections of an organism would allow you an almost complete ability to predict the behaviour of that organism. A few papers since have used the phrase “mind of a worm” in homage to the 1986 paper.

So the subtitle was probably a joke, but one the represented a real goal of invertebrate neuroethology: to crack the neural circuitry of animals. Then we’d understand behaviour.

Fast forward to 2022. Our understanding of nervous systems is better. Technology has gotten batter. But a preprint about C. elegans released this year says, “We find that functional connectivity differs from predictions based on anatomy.” 

Wait, what? Wasn’t the promise that that once we had the neural connections, we would have near omniscience about the behaviour of thise worm?

In the world of invertebrate neuroethology. this is kind of yesterday’s news. It’s been decades since neuroethologists gave up on the idea that neural circuitry alone would give you a relatively complete understanding of behaviour. I suspect that idea was already wobbly in 1986 but was pretty clearly abandoned by the 1990s. It was killed by things like the study of neuromodulation in the stomatogastric nervous systems of decapod crustaceans.

But it seems that the news has yet to reach other fields in neuroscience.

After my last post on mind uploading, Ken Hayworth helpfully sent me a link to an article he wrote about mind uploading. I appreciated the writing, particularly this concise summary.

The core of the scientific argument: I am my connectome and (aldehyde stabilized cryopreservation) preserves the connectome

Most of what I said in my review of a book length treatment of the connectome argument is relevant here. In brief:

Invertebrate neuroethology has already tested the connectome hypothesis. The connectome hypothesis didn’t exactly fail, but it certainly under performed. Knowing the connectome of a worm has not revealed the mind of a worm.

The only reason to think, “Sure, the connectome didn’t give us everything we wanted to know in small neural circuits in invertebrates, but it will totally work in humans” is special pleading.

External links

Vitrifying the Connectomic Self: A case for developing Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation into a medical procedure (PDF)

References

Randi F, Sharma AK, Dvali S, Leifer AM. 2022. A functional connectivity atlas of C. elegans measured by neural activation. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208.04790

Related posts

Brainbrawl! The Connectome review

If you know how to do mind uploading, please do tell us

 

If you know how to do mind uploading, please do tell us

Here we go again.

Ken Hayworth is mad that more neuroscientists aren’t working on the problem of immortality.

(I)t is still really bugging me that we could ALL likely get to the future together (via quality brain preservation and far future mind uploading) if only the neuroscience community would start taking its own findings seriously and consider the implications.

He seems to think that neuroscientists are avoiding this topic because we are all secretly dualists?

Neuroscientists should not succumb to magical thinking about the mind/brain.

I don’t know any other working neuroscientists who think the brain in magic. Citation needed.

Neuroscientists should know that we already have the tools to preserve brains fantastically well at the ultrastructural and molecular levels using aldehyde fixation.

But Hayworth does not say how he can demonstrate that the current level of detail of preservation is “enough” detail. Sure, synaptic connections will be important. What about resting membrane potential? Gasotransmitter levels? Blood flow? Can any of those be captured in a static preserved brain?

Of course mind uploading will be possible in the future… just read the damn literature on models of brain function… they are all computational.

But Hayworth does not say how he can demonstrate how structural information can be converted into a computational model.

Why refuse to openly discuss/debate what should be considered the most important long-term application of your research?

Here I am, discussing it. I’ve answered a lot of questions about mind uploading on Quora. Let’s see... (Searches Quora) In no particular order:

Is mind uploading digital immortality a real possibility for the future?  

How is it possible to copy our brains into computers?

How realistic is mind uploading and what should I learn in order to research it?

Why is there no focus on uploading our brains to travel in efficient small spaceships? Should we fund mind uploading research for this end purpose?

Are we working on a way to upload brilliant minds in various scientific disciplines into a digital repository to hasten scientific advancement?

Does quantum computing make it possible to upload a neural net of your brain into a simulation so that when your body dies a copy of your brain itself could live forever in a computer network with other people?

Could thoughts and memories be digitalized at some point?

What is the current state of progress on mind uploading? What are the specific major obstacles and progress on each? 

How long will it be until I can upload my consciousness?

Why are people so against the idea of mind uploading and even question its possibility? 

Do any laws of physics prevent mind uploading?

What percent chance is there that whole brain emulation or mind uploading to a neural prosthetic will be feasible by 2048?

Will human consciousness ever be transferable to a new body or a machine e.g. a robot cyborg computer or avatar? Can-you transfer your own consciousness and memory and leave your biological body without creating two selves? 

Can the-mind be uploaded to a computer?

What do we need to know in order to be able to upload a human mind? 

It is like physicists refusing to discuss the possibility of fusion power plants. It is like NASA refusing to contemplate human settlements on Mars.

Hayworth thinks mind uploading is a mere engineering problem – like space travel in the 1920s. It was pretty clear that you could get into space with a big old rocket. (A movie about going to the moon, Frau im Mond, was made in 1929.) Conceptually, we knew how to solve the problem. Creating the rockets was a mere engineering problem. 

But I argue that mind uploading in the 2020s is not like space travel in the 1920s. “Mind uploading” is an unsolved conceptual problem, as far as I can see. That is, it’s more like NASA admitting they don’t know how to create artificial gravity or faster-than light travel than refusing to think about sending humans to Mars.

Liquid fueled rockets were flying in the 1920s. What’s the “mind uploading” equivalent of Goddard’s rocket? Can Hayworth point to a single working model of taking a preserved nervous system and successfully reconstituting it as a complete digital model that can faithfully reproduce behaviour?

For me, science is the art of the solvable. If there is anything I have learned in science, it’s that the only way to tackle big questions is by tackling small questions.

And I am selfish. I want to contribute to problems I can solve in my lifetime. Or, at least, see some significant progress towards solving. I don’t want to chase pipe dreams of the “far future.”

Many a career has been wrecked on the rock of “big ideas.” Immortality is a exactly such a rock. 

 Do you have scientific objections that will stand open scrutiny?

Wait. Burden of proof is on the claimant. If Hayworth thinks mind uploading is possible, it is up to him to specify why it is possible. In considerably more detail than a six tweet thread.

Human life not worth saving?

Hayworth may consider a biologically based computer model to be a life. But many will not. Nowhere in his description is how this “uploaded mind” will interact with the world. Hayworth probably considers Alex Murphy’s existence in RoboCop not just acceptable, but positively luxurious:

I don’t think a disembodied simulation of a dead brain warrants the name “life.”

Related posts

Overselling the connectome

Brainbrawl! The Connectome review

Brainbrawl round-up

“Mind uploading” company will kill you for a US$10,000 deposit, and it’s as crazy as it sounds

Belated Dalek Day

 Ooh, it’s been a while since I’ve used the “personality quizzes” label on here...

Yes, I am a day behind on Dalek Day, the 59th anniversary of the best television monsters. I should have posted my results for the “Which Dalek are you?” quiz yesterday, but better late than never.

Grad schools should not require students to publish to graduate

Times Higher Education and other news venues is reporting on changes to doctoral programs in India, one of which is not requiring doctoral students to publish work as a requirement to graduate. This change was recommended back in 2019, but only just took effect.

While this is described as maybe the most controversial of several reforms to India’s doctoral programs, only one person is quoted speaking against it.

Dr Mukherjee said that this was the wrong approach. “If we want good quality research, and are worried about the rise of predatory journals that cash in on the students’ need to publish, the concern is the predatory journals,” she said.

Most of the article is about what students have to do to enter doctoral programs, not about what you need to do to complete it.

The news story is a good kick in the pants to me to finish this post, which I have been thinking about and drafting for months. Because India is far from the only place that has been requiring its doctoral students to publish papers to get their degrees.

A while ago, I asked about what graduate programs required their students to publish before they were eligible to graduate. I was surprised that the practice was quite widespread, and by the number of publications some institutions require their students to put out to graduate.

The highest requirement reported was three first-author published papers with two more submitted (five total). Another reported authorship on four papers, of which two have to be first author. But even requiring a paper or two was much more widespread than I expected.

This replies to my Twitter thread were abundant and helpful, so you might want to look through them.

A little later, DrugMonkey ran a poll that indicated a little more than half of programs required a publication to graduate.

To be blunt, I think requiring publications before a degree is awarded is bad, and I think India made the right move.

Publication requirements are extremely unfriendly to students. Neither a student nor supervisor nor university has any control over the peer review and editorial process. So it is entirely possible for a student’s graduation to be delayed through no fault of the student. And there is a real financial cost in many cases for students have to pay tuition and expenses for extra semesters, when all the work is done.

Worse, there is a completely predictable outcome of publication requirements. A publication requirement creates an incentive for fast publication and high acceptance, both of which are most easily achieved by shoddy work and editorial shortcuts.

Researchers found 88% of “approved” journals were problematic. India Express reported  did other investigations that suggested India was a major source of articles for dubious publishers. More than one person has suggested that such requirements are partly responsible for the enormous growth of MDPI and similar publishers.

I am annoyed hearing researchers loudly tell others not to publish in MDPI or Frontiers or what have you, and then get upset that these publishers are growing all the time. But they don’t seem to look at things like graduate publication requirements that create a vast, worldwide market for the services of journal articles where decisions are fast and acceptance is likely.

I completely understand the counter arguments. Training a student to produce professional level academic work is the point of a doctorate. The best way to prove that work is publishable is to publish it. It is harder to argue, “That shouldn’t have been published” than “That won’t be published.” 

I also get that public institutions are always being asked to justify their expenses to prove they are not wasting taxpayer money. Journal articles are a “product” that is easily tracked and counted.

I am all in favour of getting graduate students to publish. This should absolutely be the goal and students should be encouraged – or even pushed (with kindness) – to write up work and get it in the hands of editors. 

But Goodhart’s law comes in action once again. When something becomes used as a measure, it stops being a good measure.

Reference

Patwardhan B, Nagarkar S, Gadre SR, Lakhotia SC, Katoch VM, Moher D. 2018. A critical analysis of the ‘UGC-approved list of journals’. Current Science 114(6): 1299-1303. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26797335

External links

India axes publication goal for PhDs to tackle predatory journals (Registration required)

Not mandatory to publish in journals before final PhD thesis: UGC

No paper, no PhD? India rethinks graduate student policy

New podcast interview on aquarium crayfish

Back in October, I recorded a podcast interview with three University of Ottawa students about my papers about crayfish in the aquarium trade. It was tons of fun to do, and I hope that comes across in the recording!

BEaTS Research Radio's Podcast: Come to their aid! - The crayfish pet trade - Special Episode

https://beatsresearchradio.buzzsprout.com/591520/11837184

Thanks to Julie Pan, Malithi Thanthridge, and Ishika Tripathi for their great questions, and editing our conversation down to a tight 15 minutes.

 

Does anyone read German?

A paper I helped with on the Czech aquarium trade (Novák et al. 2022) has gotten a little write-up in the German aquarium magazine, Aquaristik.

At least. I think it’s this article? I don’t read German, and my cut and paste from the PDF into Google Translate wasn’t copying text correctly.

Update: Aha! A screenshot of the article and a little optical character recognition solved my problem. Loosely translated with Google, the article reads:

Researchers investigate the "Czech Aquatics Phenomenon"

An international research group led by the Czech scientist Jindřich Novák introduces the term “Czech aquarium phenomenon” to describe the considerable economic and scientific importance of the Czech Republic in ornamental fish aquaculture. A large part of ornamental fish farming is carried out by private individuals and companies in tropical countries because many species come from the tropics, however, the Czech Republic is an exception and suppliers there have dominated the global market for decades influenced. The study goes into the history of aquaristics in the Czech Republic and discusses the associated risks. It lists the most traded and exported species, including species that rarely reproduce in captivity. Given the tremendous diversity and scale of species traded, “we propose to take this phenomenon into account when designing aquaculture policies, including management of invasive alien species and ex situ conservation programs for threatened species.”

This is a cool thing about research. You never know who takes notice and where it will pop next.

References

Novák J, Magalhães ALB, Faulkes Z, Yonvitner, Maceda-Veiga A, Dahanukar N, Kawai T, Kalous L, Patoka J. 2022. Ornamental aquaculture significantly affected by the “Czech aquarium phenomenon”. Aquaculture 555: 738259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aquaculture.2022.738259

External links

Aquaristik Volume 2022, Issue 4

eLife chooses not to decide (but still has made a choice)

Last week, science Twitter was abuzz with an announcement from the journal eLife that they don’t “accept” papers any more.

Lots of people had opinions, and of course I do too.

I think this tweet from editor Michael Eisen is informative (emphasis added):

The future of science publishing is author directed publishing (preprints) combined with multifaceted, ongoing, public post-publication peer review. There is no other way. And I'm glad we're finally getting into the nitty gritty of how to do it right.

This statement has the zeal of a missionary, which I appreciate. But saying that “This is the future of scholarly communication” and “There is no other way” does not make it so. It’s an assertion, not a fact. Karl Marx was convinced that bloody revolutions would lead to more perfect collective societies. But that didn’t work out the way he envisioned.

A bit of background. Eisen was involved in the Public Library of Science, and particularly PLOS ONE. PLOS ONE was revolutionary because it said, “We are not reviewing for importance.” eLife’s new policy is another attempt to get people to not assess whether something is “important” because it appears in a particular journal.

Why does that matter? As far as I can see, this is mostly about career progression. 

Over the last couple of decades, more and more decisions about hiring, tenure, promotion, merit raises, and grant funding have become highly influenced by what journal the work appears in. A lot of people believe that careers are won or lost on the basis of whether you can get a paper in Nature or Science. (Data don’t bear that out – you can have a career without those papers in glamour magazines – but their influence looms large.)

Indeed, these concerns about assessment were the entire impetus for the creation of eLife.

eLife’s new policies feel like an attempt to “fix” committees doing that decision making, in a highly circuitous, roundabout way. This is not an attempt to fix publishing, it’s an attempt to change assessment culture.

Those assessing committees are under no obligation to pay attention to what eLife does. Committees could simply decide that eLife manuscripts don’t “count” for assessment purposes. More likely is that committees will try to force reviews into a binary: to use topline review summaries in the same way that they use “accepted for publication” now.

The “Everyone should just read the paper and assess the science themselves” is understandable. We all want out work to be assessed on its own merits, and with deep reading with attention paid to the nuances. But it runs counter to a world of bestseller lists, boxoffice lists, and online ratings. Lots of people are looking for quick ways of deciding, “Is this any good or not?” I don’t see how science can be immune from that.

I can’t help but think that everyone is all crazy about publication and how it affects careers and assessments because we are so busy fighting for crumbs. The number of people with the desire, training, and skill who want to have scientific careers exceeds the number of career opportunities out there. If we could address that, maybe things like eLife’s new direction in becoming “not a journal” would just be seen as an interesting experiment by a single player in the publishing landscape, rather than a harbinger of doom or salvation.

Update, 26 October 2022: I will be watching the results of this Twitter poll with interest.

Do you think it is sound career advice to encourage a postdoc looking for a TT job or assistant professor hoping for tenure to submit their work to eLife 2.0?

Currently very close.

External links

eLife’s new model: Changing the way you share your research

Schlimmbesserung: A German word that academics need to add to their vocabulary

I have a new entry in my list of German words I like:

“Schlimmbesserung.”

According to Holly Tuten,  it means, “Something that was meant to be an improvement, but actually makes things worse.”

How useful is that? Especially to academics, who often believe that every suggestion reviewers make for a manuscript is a Schlimmbesserung.

It could also be a useful word in biocontrol efforts. What was the introduction of can toads into Australia if not Schlimmbesserung? In fact, I had found people talking about “cane toading” years ago to describe this phenomenon. But it’s nice to have

It is not my favourite German word, though. My favourite German word is “Backpfeifengesicht.” Roughly, a face in need of a punch.  

Related posts

Definition of the moment

Picture from here. 

Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) decision clears way for new science education battles

I did not want this to be a blog post. 

Below is an article I first wrote back at the end of June. I thought this was important, and I submitted it over and over again (six times, I think?), trying to find a bigger venue than my blog to publish it in. No takers.

None of the editors disliked what I had written. Some even agreed it was timely. In a couple of cases, the sticking point seemed to be that I was not a lawyer. (How dare a mere biologist comment on a matter of law?!) But nobody said the analysis below is wrong.

I was reminded of this because Nature published an article on the Supreme Court’s “war on science.” (I did not submit this piece to Nature, thinking a UK based journal might not be the best home for a comment / analysis piece on US law. Oh well. Maybe I gave up too soon.) I admit I am surprised the Nature article does not mention the Kennedy ruling or the Lemon test, which has been key to court cases about the teaching of evolution. (Pictured: Alton Lemon, whose 1971 Supreme Court case gave us the “Lemon test.”)

My impression from trying to get this piece published? I feel like both the biological research communities and the science teaching communities are sleepwalking into disaster. The court did a rug pull on teaching evolution. Scientific communities are like cartoon characters after the rug has been pulled out from under them: suspended in mid-air, not realizing that in a moment they are going to come crashing down very hard, very fast.

Anyway, here’s the last version of the article I submitted before accepting its fate was just to be a blog post.

Unless there’s an editor reading this who is interested? (Hope springs eternal, I guess.)

 • • • • •

Abstract

For decades, teaching creationism in the United States was ruled unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment of the US constitution. A recent US Supreme Court decision rejects the legal test that prevented teaching creationism in public classrooms. Educators should expect renewed efforts to insert creationism into public schools.

Keywords: evolution • creationism • Supreme Court of the United States • constitutional law • lawsuits

There is a long history of legal battles over teaching evolution in America. While many might have thought this settled after the Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925 (stirringly – if not always accurately – shown in the play Inherit the Wind and movie adaptations), there have been many legal challenges seeking either to limit instruction of science or to introduce religious concepts into science classrooms. Court rulings have consistently rejected arguments against teaching religion.

But a recent Supreme Court decision opens the path for new legal challenges that might allow the teaching of creationism, intelligent design, young Earth geology, or any number of other religious claims about the natural world.

The Supreme Court case Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022) did not concern science education. The issue was a football coach who prayed before his players. The court ruled in favor of the coach. But more important than whether the ruling favors religion is the justification the ruling. In its ruling for the praying coach, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected the so-called “Lemon test,” which had provided the legal footing for rejecting religious instruction in science classes.

The “Lemon test” refers to Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), a First Amendment case before the Supreme Court. The ruling established a three-part test for whether the state had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that forbids government from establishing a religion. Actions concerning religion were legal if (1) the rule had a secular purpose, (2) the main effect did not advance any particular religion, and (3) the actions did not excessively entangle the government with religion. All three of these considerations needed to be met for the action to be constitutional.

The Lemon test had been an important consideration three court cases concerning teaching of evolution. Arkansas tried to pass legislation that required evolution and “creation science” get equal time in schools. Maclean v. Arkansas Board of Education (1982) ruled that the law failed the Lemon test and was unconstitutional. That same decade, Louisiana tried to prohibit the teaching of evolution unless it was accompanied by “creation science.” Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) also ruled this as unconstitutional. Most recently, the Lemon test was used again in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), the only major court case on “intelligent design” (creationism with references to God stripped away in hopes that it could pass a court case). Intelligent design advocates lost this case resoundingly. The presiding judge described the board’s actions as “breathtaking inanity.” The ruling was so decisively opposed to the Dover School Board’s efforts to introduce intelligent design that it effectively killed all further efforts to introduce intelligent design into schools – until now.

In the Kennedy decision (2022), Judge Neil Gorsuch surprised court observers by claiming that the Supreme Court had “long ago abandoned” the Lemon test. Gorsuch called the Lemon test “abstract, and ahistorical.” Instead, his opinion argues that the Supreme Court should interpret the Establishment clause by “reference to historical practices and understandings.”

The move away from the Lemon test and towards history in the Kennedy decision is consistent with other recent decisions. The Kennedy decision came days after Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), in which the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which assured a right to an abortion. Both Kennedy and Dobbs concerned with religious issues, and both were justified by arguments about history and tradition. Critics pointed out that the court’s description of both history and current facts were selective.

The loss of the Lemon test is a precarious moment for science education. Despite a Supreme Court ruling that teaching creationism was unconstitutional, many parents and teachers have tried to insert some creationism into classrooms. People often make no pretense about their efforts: they want their religion taught in public schools. While such efforts were usually not fought in court, science educators were usually confident if they did, they were likely to win. Decades of precedent supported the idea that schools should teach science in science classes.

Science educators should be prepared for a legal system that no longer has their back.

These recent decisions by the Supreme Court confirm that the court is far further to the political right than it has been in decades and seeks to undo civil rights victories of the left. Judge Clarence Thomas wrote a supporting opinion for Dobbs that said that the Supreme Court should revisit cases like availability of contraception and marriage equality.

Conclusion

While the Kennedy decision was not specifically about science education, the loss of the Lemon test should be the writing on the wall for professional scientific and educational societies. Conservative parents, local school boards, and state boards of education have showed time and time again that they are determined and persistent in their efforts to have their religious beliefs taught in public schools alongside, or in place of, established science. Supporters for science education must be prepared for renewed legal battles to push creationism and other religious ideas into classrooms.

References

Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. 2022. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21-418_i425.pdf

Lemon v. Kutzman. 1971. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep403/usrep403602/usrep403602.pdf

Maclean v. Arkansas Board of Education. 1982. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/529/1255/2354824/

Edwards v. Aguillard. 1987. https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep482578/

Kitzmiller v. Dover. 2005. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2426499-kitzmiller-v-dover-decision

Dobbs v. Jackson. 2022. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

A second look back in the crystal ball

I wrote the bulk of this post this post five years ago, back in 2017. Ten years ago, a paper came out in Nature that claimed to predict... the future! At least, it claimed to predict one part of my academic future, namely, my h-index:

At the time the paper came out, there was an online calculator. It hasn’t succumbed to link rot: it’s still there! (Remember, the preceding sentence was written in 2017.) I entered in the following values then:

• Current h-index: It was 8 in 2012 (according to Google Scholar).
• Number of articles: 24 (I only counted my original technical articles).
• Years since first article: 20 (then; my first paper was in 1992).
• Number of distinct journals: 20.
• Number in “top” journals (a.k.a. the glamour mags): 0.

The program predicted my h-index now, five years later, would be 13. It got it exactly right, which I mentioned in a 2017 post.

Next, to schedule a post with this graph for 2022. We’ll see how close it is.

[Wakes up in 2022, sees post, checks Google Scholar]

PI predictor said in 2012 that my H-index this year would be 21. Google Scholar says it’s...

22!

I exceed expectations, woohoo! And it’s even better than the 2017 prediction, which said I would only have an h-index of 18.

It’s a good thing I checked back in 2017, because the online PI Predictor page seems to have finally succumbed to link rot.

Related posts

Gazing into the crystal ball of h-index

A look back in the crystal ball

References

Acuna D, Allesina S, Kording K. 2012. Predicting scientific success. Nature 489: 201-202. https://doi.org/10.1038/489201a

Students: Write shorter emails

The fall semester is underway at almost all universities now, so this is as good a time as any to give some advice to students. 

Write shorter emails.I gave that away in the post title, so why am I still writing? Because I want to try to explain why I give this advice.

Friends, your profs get a emails. A lot of emails. A great heaping buttload of emails. We get them from chairs, we get them from deans, we get emails from chair who are forwarding the dean’s emails, we get them from funding agencies that we have never applied to a grant from, we get them from almost every administrative office on campus, we get them from journals, and we get them from students.

I don’t think it’s easy to understand how much of a professor’s life revolves around emails. It is the default mode of communication for universities.

I think for many students, their typical mode of communication is through their phone, either by text or social media. Email? That’s for old people. 

But a lot of professors are old people. And even for new professors who might prefer to communicate with their phones, they are more or less forced to work with emails.

To make things worse, we profs are usually forced into using byzantine forms of email because of “security.” There’s a huge difference between using my personal Gmail account (say) and my university *.edu email account. 

I can open up my Gmail app on my phone and just... read my emails. 

My institutional account, my email might take over my phone login and force me to use a “more secure” method (using a PIN instead of an unlock pattern, say), force me to use two factor authentication every time I want to read an email, or force me to install an “Authenticator” app that requires entering my PIN, approving a request, entering my PIN again before I can read my emails.

So, students, trust me when I say this.

Writing shorter emails is one of the simplest things you can do to make your professor’s life easier. 

Look, I get that you, as a student, don’t want to seem rude. You might think that anything less than three carefully composed paragraphs is some sort of slight or that you won’t be taken seriously. 

Just tell us what you want. Need an extension? Just say, “Can I have an extension for this assignment.” You don’t need to detail that you need an extension because you were out with a friend and ordered coffee but it was way hotter than you expected and you burnt your tongue and went to an emergency room to see if there was anything they could do. If we need more information, we’ll ask for it.

Also? This is why, when you write one of those three paragraph emails to a professor, you might only get a “Sure. - ZF” or a sentence back.

Nociceptors are not pain receptors

From time to time, I see people say that some group of animals have nociceptirs or "pain receptors" amd then use to to say this prooves those animals feel pain.

There is a lot of subtle misuse of definitions going on there.

Nociceptors are neurons tuned to tissue damage. Pain is not tissue damage. The two are related but they are not the same.

Calling nociceptors “pain receptors” is like calling auditory sensory neurons “music receptors.” And then use that animals can hear to claim that animals appreciate music. Well, no. There is a difference between sensory neurons and a higher order perception or psychological state arising from those sensory signals.