natural problems 29 September 2008
Posted by DSM in astronomy.comments closed
So on Friday we had Leslie Sage visit, who works for Nature (the massive science publishing giant) and is the point man for astronomy. I learned a fair bit about the way their process works, much of which surprised me, and left me thinking less of the journal than I’d thought beforehand, which wasn’t much. This is a bit of a problem, as Nature gets a fair amount of the most interesting science, and the boss and I were toying with aiming one of our ongoing projects in its direction.
Basically:
(1) Sage explained that Nature only publishes 7% of submitted papers, and roughly 12% of the astronomy-related submitted papers, because they’re looking for only the best papers. This isn’t true, though: they don’t publish the best papers. Not even close. The articles in astronomy in Nature are usually pretty terrible as papers. For example, in theory, it’s almost impossible to figure out what the authors have actually done from their description in Nature. The articles are so compressed that there’s little room for the details which are necessary to reproduce a simulation. It’s not the authors’ fault at all, or at least not most of the time; page budgets are very tightly controlled, often to the point of absurdity.
There are papers, and there are “Nature papers”. It’s not uncommon to be searching the literature, find out that a result you need to understand was published in Nature, and then find yourself desperately hoping they published something real on it somewhere useful.
Sage argued in Nature’s defence that they allow online “supplemental information”, but that’s more suited for data tables. To suggest putting necessary information in a supplement is merely another way of admitting that they don’t publish science papers but press releases/extended abstracts with graphs.
Nature isn’t trying to get the best papers, but the sexiest results. And this they often succeed at, but I don’t see why it’s in the community’s interest to have our most important results written up in a deliberately inferior format — “defective by design”, as they say.
(2) I’d always assumed that there was some team of notable astrophysicists who reviewed the submissions and decided if they were Nature-worthy results, independent of the refereeing process. It turns out that said team consists of Leslie Sage. (Plus cameo appearances by people he sometimes consults.) I’m sure he’s a decent enough guy, but I don’t like single-point-of-failure arrangements, and with all due respect to Dr Sage, “capturing Leslie Sage’s interest” doesn’t strike me as all that prestigious. Moreover, what if you manage to incur Dr Sage’s wrath? Then what?
In the end I suspect that we would all be better served simply by not sending our results to Nature, breaking the cycle of dependency. For various reasons people are taking a long, hard look at the way we do science publication at the moment, and it’s not at all clear how the landscape is going to look in ten years, but we can start by imagining one in which Nature doesn’t play a role.
of hatred and love 25 September 2008
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
The inimitable Jay Nordlinger writes at the Corner of a friend of his:
[..] she said to me, out of the blue, “What do you think of Sarah Palin?” And while I was drawing breath to answer, she said, “I hate her.”
That kind of took my breath away — because this friend of mine is no hater. But she said it with firm, horrible conviction. She said it with true emotion in her eyes.
I have similar stories. I’m reminded of my very first CASCA meeting at Vancouver (the main Canadian astronomy association), at which a very famous astronomer — a genuinely friendly guy — went into a long spit-filled rant about how much he hated Christians. It was so over-the-top that I actually found myself somewhat amused, both at the impressive degree of malice and the fact his prejudices completely blinded him to the possibility that the person he was talking to was one of the Dreaded.
We wound up having lunch together the following day, and as is my wont I crossed myself before eating. He noticed, and spoke about it quite civilly, apparently having completely forgotten who he’d been speaking to the night before when he was revealing his true feelings. It was all I could do not to break out laughing: in vino veritas.
Contempt such as he had poisons everything you do. You can get away with it to some degree in science, but it’s much harder in the arts. Orson Scott Card says it well in a recent review of a movie that left him unimpressed with the scriptwriters, to put it mildly:
We blame the writers and only the writers [for the movie not being funny].
Here’s why: They hated every major character in the movie. All the comedy depended on our seeing these characters with the amused contempt that the writers had for them.
The trouble is, the actors were too good. They kept inviting us to see these people, not as cardboard cutouts the way the writers did, but as living breathing people.
The directing style was hyper-realistic, in a sort of art-house movie way. The acting was low-key and frightfully earnest. [...] So we had these earnest people trying to be likeable, and everything they had to say and do made them stupid and vile. The kind of people who, if they were sitting at the next table, you’d leave the restaurant without finishing your meal.
[...]
When I said the writer hated all the characters, that was not strictly speaking true. There is a blip of a character — the reviewer for the high school paper. This reviewer wrote an intellectually pretentious, sneering, savage review of the main character’s production of a play version of Erin Brockovich.
It was obvious that this was the one character the writers had respect for. The superior, condescending tone of his review was identical with the superior, condescending tone the writers have toward everyone in the movie.
Mr. Nordlinger is wrong on one point, though; his friend *is* a hater, as proved by the fact she hates. Sweet tea doesn’t become bitter if its cup is knocked over, much less merely because someone else is drinking coffee. Unfortunately, that doesn’t distinguish her from any of us.
There but for the grace of God go we. I think if you genuinely find yourself hating complete strangers on account of, well, practically nothing, it’s time to spend less time following politics and more time at prayer.
truth without hope 22 September 2008
Posted by DSM in QOTD.comments closed
In the genre of true crime, the facts always seem to have a strange, half-religious light cast on them, as though, in the end, original sin alone provides much explanation of crime. If fiction is the great humanistic endeavor, seeking human reasons for human behavior, then true crime is not an art form but a sort of low-rent theology. In its American form, at least, it offers little more than a Christian worldview—or what the Christian worldview would be without the possibility of Christ: sin without redemption; the Fall without the Resurrection; justice, sometimes, but never mercy.
Ain’t nothing, really, but a meanness in this world.
RJN
no thanks, I already have plans 17 September 2008
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
The school term is starting again here at Queen Mary, which means it’s time for the usual “Grants Not Fees” booths advocating the idea that students should not have to pay to spend time reading books in these buildings, but other people who don’t get to read what they want to should pay for it instead. I certainly understand why that appeals to them; I’ve never quite understood why they think others should work and they should eat (as it were), or why this should appeal to the workers, or why it’s in the workers’ interest. By “workers” here I mean the people who are actually working, not those students who seem to think they shouldn’t have to on account of their intellectual prowess but call themselves the working class anyway.
I did get a kick out of the poster sales, though: on the same billboard, there were two communism-related posters, one above the other. I guess the poster company had put them together because they were both “progressive” or something.
The one on top read “Welcome to the Party” and had various famous socialist thinkers. Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Marx, and of course Mao Zedong. (One can only imagine Hitler’s annoyance; how many millions of people do you have to kill in the name of socialism to get some respect? That Marx guy was all talk!)
And underneath it? A poster saying “Free Tibet“.
Ah, the Left.
second act 10 September 2008
Posted by DSM in astronomy, travel.comments closed
Hooray!
Yep, back. The last few months have been incredibly hectic but great fun. During that time I visited Vienna, which was my first trip ever to the continent, for the annual meeting of the European Geophysical Union (of which I’m a member); beautiful, beautiful city. After I got over the unnerving feelings induced by being given commands over loudspeaker in German (too many WWII movies as a kid, I guess), I settled in nicely and got some sightseeing done.
Almost immediately after that I went to Japan for several weeks by the kind invitation of Nagasawa Makiko and fell completely in love with the place. I felt more comfortable in Tokyo than I had in Vienna, even though very few people there spoke English but most everyone I came across in Vienna did. I considered blogging the trip, but frankly I was having way too much fun to stop to type, and too much to describe in any case. I have to get back as soon as I can.
There’s some discussion here of bringing Nagasawa-sama over here, which would be really cool. I’m too junior to have the budget to do it myself but some of our mutual friends do! I think I embarrassed her slightly by insisting on the -sama honourific: she complained that the grad students asked her if she’d told me to call her that. (-sama’s a little above what one would ordinarily use in that context.) But she was my host, and genuine gratitude + major teasing = WIN!
For anyone who was wondering, the introduction to my talk (which I gave in Japanese– the introduction, not the talk) went very well. Everyone laughed at the right spots, and not just because of my accent, I think. So that was good.
After Japan it was off to Victoria for CASCA, which was enjoyable though I have to admit not as much fun as usual. Not sure why, although I suspect it was because not all of the usual suspects were there, including some of my favourites. Then a few weeks in Red Deer visiting the family, and then back to London!
Never done so much travelling in my life.
One mildly irritating thing happened while I was in Japan, though: I got the referee’s report back on my last paper, a report which was quite snarky. It was anonymous, as these things usually are, but from the use of idiosyncratic terminology used only bay a certain author and the fact that a considerable fraction of the report was devoted to asking why I didn’t refer to/do things the same way as said author, it’s obvious who it was. Certainly he knows a considerable amount about the subject matter, and once you correct for the steel-wool tone the report is thorough and detailed.
But surely a professor at [very famous American university --redacted] has better things to do with his time than COMPLAIN ABOUT THE NAME OF MY CODE?! Good grief.
(“Naoko”, for the record. “New Adaptive Orthochronous Kepler Orbiter”. Any relation to Yamada Naoko, the character who helps out physicist Ueda Jiro in the brilliant “Trick” series, is too much fun for the referee and so should probably be kept hush-hush.)
In any case, last Friday I fired off the revised version on which I’ve been working since my return to England, and so my promise to myself to stay away from the blog until it was done has been kept. Harsh mistress, astronomy.
