Victoria Braithwaite dies

I was saddened to learn about the untimely death of Victoria Brathwaite. Victoria was a pioneer in research on nociception in non-mammals (fish, specifically), culminating in her book Do Fish Feel Pain? (reviewed here).

I was fortunate to have her as one of the speakers for a symposium I co-organized for Neuroethology in 2012. She was a fine speaker, and I’m sorry I won’t get more chances to interact or learn from her.

External links

Penn State community grieves loss of biologist Victoria Braithwaite

Climbing the charts

A new preprint of a forthcoming paper I collaborated on dropped in Journal of Crustacean Biology last week.

Today, it’s in the journal’s “most read” list.

I have no idea how the journal calculates this list or how often it updates it. But this makes me happy. Not bad, eh?

The paper is open access, so anyone can read it. So please, help us bump off that Artemia eggs paper off the top position!

Reference

DeLeon H III, Garcia J Jr., Silva DC, Quintanilla O, Faulkes Z, Thomas JM III. Culturing embryonic cells from the parthenogenetic clonal marble crayfish Marmorkrebs Procambarus virginalis Lyko, 2017 (Decapoda: Astacidea: Cambaridae). Journal of Crustacean Biology: in press. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcbiol/ruz063

Science as a process and an institution

In a response to a poll that showed Canadians’ trust is science might be weakening, Timothy Caulfield tweeted:

Trust in science falling. People seem angry at institutions. But science isn’t a person, a place, an industry, or an institution. Science is a process. Science is a way of understanding the world. If not science, what?

Caulfield is technically correct (which, as the saying goes, is the best kind of correct). Science is a process. But this is an overly abstracted view of science – a view taken from 30,000 feet, as it were.

Science, as currently practiced, is done by people, in places, as an industry, by institutions.

Science is a profession (although it is not practiced as a working profession by many people). Most people don’t get to publish scientific papers or make new discoveries.

Science is predominantly carried out in cities in some way.

Science has its own infrastructures of technical supplies and publishing and it creates a product (knowledge distributed in technical papers).

Science is associated with universities and a few businesses.

Saying, “Science is a process” ignores how concentrated the community is and how the practitioners are invisible to a very large section of society. Saying, “Science is a process” ignores that, as currently practiced, science has many characteristics of an industry or institution.

Calling science a process is like calling politics “a process.” Sure, in theory anyone can participate and is participating in politics, but in practice, most politicking is done by professional politicians and civil servants in capital cities participating in government and a few other organizations.

“Politics” as practiced can be seen as isolated and corrupt and untrustworthy because of how it it organized. Same with science.

If we want trust in science, we can’t fall back on these sorts of idealized dictionary definitions of science. We have to embrace the reality of how science is practiced in reality. And the reality is that science can feel closed and confusing and haughty for many who have minimal connections with that community.

Tuesday Crustie: Philately

Australia has issued a set of crayfish stamps!

Hat tip to Dr. Crayfish.

External links

Set of Freshwater Crayfish stamps

Lessons from sport for science

Two of my interests recently intersected on ABC’s The Science Show.

As regular readers might know, I have been fascinated with the creation and ongoing development of the women’s competition of Australian Rules Football (AFL). (I am a card-carrying supporter of the Melbourne Football Club’s women’s team!) When I lived in Australia, it was clear that there were women who loved the game, but as spectators. The game was very much seen as being for blokes. I don’t think I ever heard about women playing in the time I was there.

Fast forward to a women’s league that is growing and making international waves, and that is expanding the audience for this sport significantly. The brilliant picture of the atheleticism of Tayla Harris (shown) and her subsequent poor treatment over it made news in the US. That was the first time I think I ever heard AFL on the news since moving here.

Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel talks about how this new league teaches us a lot about how creating opportunities makes a difference for people. And that science could learn from this (my emphasis).

So let’s go back and think about women’s AFL in the year 2000. (A year I lived in Australia! - ZF) If you were a schoolgirl in Victoria, you couldn’t play in an AFL competition once you hit the age of 14. Why not? Because there was no competition open to teenage girls. You had to wait until you were 18 to join the senior women’s league, and that league was a community competition, without sponsors, played on the worst sports grounds, in your spare time, at your own expense.

On the other hand, your twin brother with the same innate ability would be nurtured every step of the way. And by the time he turned 18, he could easily be on a cereal box and pulling a six-figure salary. Very few people in the AFL hierarchy seem to regard this as a problem. ...

(N)ow when a teenage girl has a talent for football in 2019, she has got role models on TV, she’s got mentors in her local clubs, she’s got teachers and friends who say it’s okay for a girl to like football. In fact it’s great for a girl to like football. She’s not weird, she's not an alien, she is a star. You can see that virtuous cycle starting to form: the standard of the competition rises, it attracts more women and girls, the standard of the competition rises. And we wonder why it took us so long to see what now seems so obvious: second class status for women in sport is not acceptable.

Second class status for women in science isn’t acceptable, either.

External links

Science should emulate sport in supporting women

This week on The TapRoot podcast...

I had the great fun of talking to Ivan Baxer and Liz Haswell for The TapRoot podcast!

We chatted about my two most recent contributions: a paper on authorship disputes, and my letter to Science about grad programs dropping the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). When I wrote those two articles, I didn’t have any connecting thread between them, but I found one for this roundtable:

(N)othing in academia makes sense except in light of assessment and how awful it is.

(And yes, I’m channeling Theodosius Dobzhansky via Randy Olsen.)

Confession time: I had never listened to Taproot until Ivan contacted me about being on the show. To prepare, I listened to a bunch of episodes. I became increasingly excited about the prospect of being one of the guests. Because The Taproot a damn good podcast. The discussion is great and the production values are excellent.

If you are a scientist, I recommend subscribing to The TapRoot – and not just because I’m on it! It’s on all the usual subscription services.

The recording process was not easy, though. Because I was mostly working at home at the time, we tried a test run of recording using my home wifi. Horrible. Awful delays, choppy audio, and just generally unusable audio.

Then I went to my university and used that wifi. You would think an institutional signal in the middle of summer with low use would be better, but nope. It seemed to be an issue with my particular laptop.

We finally solved the problem by using a LAN cable. I can’t remember the last time I had to use a physical cable to connect to the internet, but the old tech still works!

The screenshot is from audio editor JuniperKiss, who did a great job of making me sound more articulate than I am.

Please give the pod a listen or a read, since there’s a full transcript available!

P.S.—I mentioned in this interview that my department wanted to move away from using the GRE. That was no initiated by me, since I stepped down as our graduate program coordinator a while ago.

Dropping the GRE was the plan. I learned after this episode was recorded that our department’s attempt to drop the GRE as an admissions requirement was blocked by administrators up the chain. I think, but an not sure, that it was the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. As I understood it, they wanted data to show that the GRE was not predictive of success in our program.

I was surprised, because there are no shortage of peer-reviewed papers on this, some of which I cited in my #GRExit letter in Science. BUt I maybe should not have been surprised, since the Coordinating Board had required some master’s programs in my university add the GRE a few years ago.

I wonder why there is this desire to keep the GRE at the state level.

P.P.S.—I’m sorry I said “guys” as a generic for people.

External links

Taproot S4E2: The GRExit and how we choose who goes to grad school

Taproot Season 4, Episode 2 transcript

The TapRoot on Stitcher

The TapRoot on iTunes

Destination Mars

You too can send your name to Mars!

Interstellate goes international

Caitlyn Vander Wheele showcased the latest iteration of her Interstellate magazine project today! It is featured in the French magazine L’ADN, the their theme issue, “Game of Neurones.”

(Americans will not fully appreciate this pun, because Americans say the name of brain cells as “neuron,” with a short “o” – rhymes with “brawn.” Europeans have tended to favour pronouncing the name of brain cells as “neurone,” with a long “o” – rhymes with, yes, “throne.”

I couldn’t be more pleased that somehow, my contribution from Volume 1 snuck into the issue! You can see the abdominal fast flexor motor neurons of Louisiana red swamp crayfish in the upper left.

Merci, L’ADN! Je suis très heureux d’être dans votre magazine!

External links

Interstellate, Volume 1
Interstellate, Volume 2

A project will never be “perfect,” but...

A project will never be “perfect,” but it can be “done.”

“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 failure of neuroscience education

In every field of science, there are certain basic facts. These are the facts that if you get them wrong, mark you as naïve at best and foolish at worst.

In chemistry, one of those facts might be that everything is made of atoms.

In astronomy, one of these facts might be that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way round.

In geography, geology, and astronomy, one of those facts might be that the earth is round and not flat.

These basic sorts of facts are often used to assess people’s scientific literacy. We consider it important that people be educated in these.

But neuroscience has failed in conveying its most basic facts. Case in point:

The myth that “We only use ten percent of our brain.”

People believe this. I mean, they really believe it.

I’ve heard multiple people mention it at public scientific lectures. I’ve answered dozens of questions about this on Quora, where some version of it crops up every few days.

And that damn Luc Besson movie didn’t help.

From a neuroscientist’s point of view, saying “We only use ten percent of our brain” is as big an error as saying, “The earth is flat.”

A few moments of thought should show why it can’t be true. We never hear a physician say things like, “Well, the bullet went through your skull, but luckily, it went through the 90% of you brain you never use.” It has no basis in reality.

If you go to the Society for Neuroscience to see what scientists say about this, you might find their  outreach page. There, have to navigate to their “Brain Facts” page (which should be “About Brain Facts”, not the actual landing page for “Brain Facts”), dig down to their “Core concepts” and under “Your complex brain” you can read:

There are around 86 billion neurons in the human brain, all of which are in use.

So the leading professional society for neuroscience counters the 10% brain myth with a sentence fragment that is hard to find and weakly worded.

If I was leading neuroscience education, my goal would be to make, “We use 100% of our brain” the sort of bedrock scientific fact that we expect people should know.

Postscript: The 10% myth probably dates back to 1936, when American writer Lowell Thomas wrote the foreword to one of the best all-time sellers, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Thomas was summarizing an idea of psychologist William James: that people have unmet potential. Most of us could learn Russian, but don’t. We could learn to play a musical instrument, but don’t. We could learn how to repair a 1963 MGB sports car, but don’t.

Thomas added a falsely precise percentage: “Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only ten per cent of his latent mental ability.” Somewhere along the line, “mental ability” became “brain.” This isn’t surprising, since the notion that “Thoughts come from our brain” is a scientific fact that is widely known. That’s our “Sun is at the center of the solar system” fact.

External links

Do we really only use ten percent of our brain?

“Teach the controversy” image from a super cool T-shirt from Amorphia.

A sad story about the first moon landing

(This post contains material that some may find distressing; specifically, suicide.)

I’m too young to remember the moon landing.

(Continues below the fold.)

More multimedia: Crustacean pain and nociception talk

Last year, I gave a talk at Northern Vermont University about crustacean pain. It was recorded by the local public access television station, Green Mountain Access TV, and is now up on Vimeo.



Current Topics in Science Series, Zen Faulkes from Green Mountain Access TV on Vimeo.

Big thanks to Leslie Kanat for hosting me and for Green Mountain Access TV for recording it!

Audiopapers

Corina Newsome! This is your fault! You have to go and say:

Can we get scientific journal articles on audiobook? Please?

There is a long thread that follows about possible solutions. But two things emerge:

1. Software to read papers aloud automatically doesn’t do a very good job.
2. Quite a few people want these.

Following my long standing tradition of, “What the heck, I’ll have a go,” I’d like to present my first audiopaper! It’s a reading of my paper from last year on authorship disputes.

I decided to do this because I wanted to get more mileage out of a mic I’d bought for a podcast interview (forthcoming), and because I still have this discussion in the back of my head.

I often tell students, “Always plot the data”, since different patterns can give same summary stats. How could I help visually impaired students do something similar?

And the answer is that while there have been experiments in sonification of data, it seems to have stayed experimental and never moved into simple practical use. It got me thinking about how little we do for visually impaired researchers.

I picked my authorship disputes paper for a few reasons.

1. There are no bothersome figures to worry about describing.
2. The topic probably has wider appeal than my data driven papers.
3. The paper is open access, so I wouldn’t run afoul of any copyright issues.
4. The paper is reasonably short.

I wrote an little into and a little outro. I pulled out my mic, fired up Audacity, and got reading. My first problem was finding a position for the mic where I could still see the computer screen so I could read from my paper.

I broke it into sections (slightly more sections than headings the paper). I think it took between one and two hours to read the whole thing. It’s not quite a single take, but it’s close.

I’ve since figured out that I can probably do longer sessions, because I worked out how to identify sections I want to edit out because I stumbled or mispronounced words. After I screw up a sentence, I snap my fingers three times. This creates three sharp spikes in the playback visualization that is easy to see. That makes it easy to find the mistake, then edit the gaffe and the finger snaps out of the recording.

I learned that it can be surprisingly hard to say “screenplay” correctly. And I curse my past self who wrote tongue twisters like “collaborative creator credit.”

Editing the recording also took about an hour. Besides cutting out my stumbles and finger snaps, I cut out some longer pauses and occasional little background sounds. The recording was a bit quiet, so I increased the gain a few decibels.

Will I do more of these? It completely depends on the response to this experiment. I probably picked my single easiest paper to read and turn into an audio recording. It would only get harder from here. And I have other projects that I should be working on.

If people like this effort, I’ll see about doing more, maybe with better production. (I wanted to put in some music, but that was taking too long for a one off.)

External links

Resolving authorship disputes by mediation and arbitration on Soundcloud

The final chapter in the UTRGV mascot saga

When UTRGV was forming, I blogged a lot about the choice of a name for a new mascot. What we got was... something that not a lot of people were happy with at first. In the years since, I guess peopel have made peace with it, because I haven’t heard much about the name since then.

Well, we’ve waited four, almost five years for a mascot to go with the name, and today we got it.

As far as I know, he doesn’t have a name. Just “Vaquero.”

The website lists what each feature represents, although I think a lot of this stuff is so far beyond subtle that nobody would ever guess what it is supposed to mean.

Scarf: The scarf features the half-rider logo against an orange background. Traditionally, the scarves were worn to protect against the sun, wind and dirt. Today, the scarf is worn to represent working Vaqueros.

Vest: The vest features the UTRGV Athletics symbol of the “V” on the buttons, which match the symbol on the back of the vest representing school spirit and pride.

Gloves: The gray and orange gloves symbolize strength and power. They represent Vaqueros building the future of the region and Texas.

Shirt: The white shirt represents the beginning of UTRGV, which was built through hard work and determination. (Couldn’t it just represent, I don’t know, cleanliness? - ZF)

Boots: A modern style of the classic cowboy boot, these feature elements that are unique to the region and UTRGV. The blue stitching along the boot represents the flowing Rio Grande River which signifies the ever-changing growth in the region and connects the U.S. to Mexico.

The boot handles showcase three stars. The blue star represents legacy institution UT Brownsville, the green star represents legacy institution UT-Pan American and the orange star represents the union of both to create UTRGV.

I don’t know. I was never a fan of the “Vaquero” name and this does not win me over. I just feel like the guy could do with a shave. I will be interested to see if this re-ignites the debate about the name...

Update: Apparently the mascot’s slogan is “V’s up!” Which doesn’t make any sense! And demonstrates questionable apostrophe usage! 

External links

Welcome your Vaquero

Tuesday Crustie: For your crustacean GIF needs

Been meaning to make GIFs of a sand crab digging, suitable for social media sharing, for a while.

Here’s a serious one.

And here’s a fun one.

Journal shopping in reverse: unethical, impolite, or expected?

A recent article describes a practice unknown to me. Some authors submit papers for review, get positive reviews, then withdraw it if the reviews are positive and try again in another “higher impact” or “better” journal.

It is entirely normal for authors to go “journal shopping” when reviews are bad: submit the article,and if the reviewers don’t like it, resubmit it to another. But this is the first time I’d heard of this process going the other way. It would never even occur to me to do this.

Nancy Gough tweeted her agreement with this article, and said that this behaviour was unethical. And she got an earful. Frankly, online reaction to this article seemed to be summed up as, “I know you are, but what am I?”

A lot of the reaction that I saw (though I didn’t see all of it) seemed to be, “Journals exploit us, so we should exploit journals!” or “Journals should pay us for our time.” This seemed to be a directed at for profit publishers, but people seemed to be lumping journals from for profit publishers and non profit journals from scientific societies together.

The “People in glass houses should not throw stones” have a point, but I’m not sure it addresses the actual issue. Publishers didn’t create the norms of refereeing and peer review. That was us, guys. Scientists. We created the idea that there are research communities. We created the idea that reviewing papers is a service to that community.

I don’t know that I would call “withdraw after positive reviews and resubmit to a journal perceived as better” unethical, but I think it’s a dick move.

Like asking someone to a dance and then never dancing with them. Sure, there’s no rules against it, but it’s not too much to expect a little reciprocity. The “Me first, me only” attitude drags.

Since the whole behaviour is “glam humping” and impact factor chasing, this seems a good time to link out to a couple of articles that point out the many ways that impact factor is deeply flawed: here and here.

I’ve written before about grumpiness about peer review being due in part to an eroded sense of research community. I guess people don’t want to see journals as part of the research community, but they are.

Related posts

A sense of community

External links

Opinion: Stop Gaming Peer Review

Shoot the hostage, preprint edition

It takes a certain kind of academic who refuses to review papers. Not because of lack of expertise, a lack of time, or a conflict of interest, but because you don’t like how other authors have decided to disseminate their results.

I’ve been declining reviews for manuscripts that aren’t posted as preprints for the last couple of months (I get about 1-2 requests to review per week). I’ve been emailing the authors for every paper I decline to suggest posting.

This isn’t a new tactic, and I’ve made my thoughts on it known. But this takes review refusal to a new level. This individual isn’t just informing the editor he won’t review, but chases down the authors to tell them how to do their job.

I’m sure the emails are meant as helpful, and may be well crafted and polite. Still. Does advocating for preprints have to be done right then?

I see reviewing as service, as something you do to help make your research community function, and to build trust and reciprocity. I don’t think reviewing as an opportunity to chastise your colleagues for their publication decisions. But I guess some people are unconcerned whether they are seen as “generous” in their community or... something else.

And I am still struggling to work out if there are any conditions where I think it would genuinely be worth it to say refuse to review.

Additional, 9 June 2019: I ran a poll on Twitter. 18% described this as “Collegial peer pressure.” The other 82% percent described it as “Asinine interference.”


Related posts

Shoot the hostage

Graylists for academic publishing

Lots of academics are upset by bad journals, which are often labelled “predatory.” This is maybe not a great name for them, because it implies people publishing in them are unwilling victims, and we know that a lot are not.

Lots of scientists want guidance about which journals are credible and which are not. And for the last few years, there’s been a lot of interests in lists of journals. Blacklists spell out all the bad journals, whitelists give all the good ones.

The desire for lists might seem strange if you’re looking at the problem from the point of view of an author. You know what journals you read, what journals your colleagues publish in, and so on. But part of the desire for lists comes when you have to evaluate journals as part of looking at someone else’s work, like when you’re on a tenure and promotion committee.

But a new paper shows it ain’t that simple.

Strinzel and colleagues compared two blacklists and two whitelists, and found some journals appeared on both the lists.

There are some obvious problems with this analysis. “Beall” is Jeffrey Beall’s blacklist, which he no longer maintains, so it is out of date. Beall’s list was also the opinion of just one person. (It’s indicative of the demand for simple lists that one put out by a single person, with little transparency, could gain so much credibility.)

One blacklist and one whitelist are from the same commercial source (Cabell), so they are not independent samples. It would be surprising if the same sources listed a journal on both its whitelist and blacklist!

The paper includes a Venn diagram for publishers, too, which shows similar results (though there is a published on both Cabell’s lists).

This is kind of like I expected. And really, this should be yesterday’s news. Let’s remember the journal Homeopathy is put out by an established, recognized academic publisher (Elsevier), indexed in Web of Science, and indexed PubMed. It’s a bad journal on a nonexistent topic that was somehow “whitelisted” by multiple services that claimed to be vetting what they index.

Academic publishing is a complex field. We should not expect all journals to fall cleanly into two easily recognizable categories of “Good guys” and “Bad guys” – no matter how much we would like it to be that easy.

It’s always surprising to me that academics, who will nuance themselves into oblivion on their own research, so badly want “If / then” binary solutions to publishing and career advancement.

If you’re going to have blacklists and whitelists, you should have graylists, too. There are going to be journals that have some problematic practices but that are put out by people with no ill intent (unlike “predatory” journals which deliberately misrepresent themselves). 

Reference

M Strinzel, Severin A, Milzow K, Egger M. 2019. Blacklists and whitelists to tackle predatory publishing: A cross-sectional comparison and thematic analysis. mBio 10(3): e00411-00419. https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00411-19.

Related posts

From predator to mutualist, or: What if predatory journals published reviews?

Dubious journals from major scientific publishers: Homeopathy

How do you know if the science is good? Wait 50 years

A common question among non-scientists is how to tell what science you can trust. I think the best answer is, unfortunately, the least practical one.

Wait.

There’s one peculiarity that distinguishes parascience from science. In orthodox science, it’s very rare for a controversy to last more than, a generation; 50 years at the outside. Yet this is exactly what’s happened with the paranormal, which is the best possible proof that most of it is rubbish. It never takes that long to establish the facts – when there are some facts.

— Arthur C. Clarke, 10 July 1985, “Strange Powers: The Verdict,” Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers

Emphasis added. I must have heard Clarke say that on television decades ago, and it stuck with me all this time. I remembered it a little different. I thought it was, “Scientists generally get to the bottom of things in about 50 years, if there’s any bottom to be gotten to.” I finally got around to digging up the exact quote today.

Related quote:

One of the things that should always be asked about scientific evidence is, how old is it? It’s like wine. If the science about climate change were only a few years old, I’d be a skeptic, too.

— Naomi Oreskes, quoted by Justin Gillis, “Naomi Oreskes, a Lightning Rod in a Changing Climate” 15 June 2015, The New York Times