Starry Night (interactive animation) from Petros Vrellis on Vimeo.
That's the screenshot of my reply to a review request from Theoretical Population Biology. It was a little uncomfortable for me to make that reply because (a) my co-author and I sent off revisions for an invited paper that will appear in a special issue1 of TPB and (b) one of the editors was my major professor at Stanford and I shared an office with another of the editors for a year or two as a post-doc.Elsevier has settled on a business strategy of exploitation, aligning itself against the interests of the scientific community. Most of the intellectual work that goes into Elsevier's journals is provided for free, by scientists whose salaries are largely paid for by taxpayers. Then Elsevier charges exorbitant rates for its journals, with many titles running in the thousands of dollars a year. This sharply curtails the sharing of results - the fuel of scientific discovery - and makes it prohibitively expensive for the public to read what appears in its pages. Yet for Elsevier, this looks like success: In 2010 Elsevier reported revenues of about $3.2 billion, of which a whopping 36 percent were profit.]]> Trends journals. For scientists in some other fields, Elsevier is dominant, and joining the boycott is much more costly.
I pointed out the Strunk & White rap video in late December. I remember reading E.B. White's essay about his teacher when I was in high school. And I still remember how excited I was when I found a paperback copy of Strunk & White in my college bookstore."I hate the guts of English grammar," E. B White once famously proclaimed. Yet Strunk & White's The Elements of Style is among the most important and timeless books on writing. With its enduring legacy and cultish following, it has inspired countless derivatives and homages, from a magnificent edition illustrated by Maira Kalman to a rap. The book has become a legend in its own right, its story part of our modern creative mythology -- but, like a good fairy tale, it brims with more curious, unlikely, even whimsical details than a mere plot summary might suggest. Those are exactly what Mark Garvey, a 20-year publishing veteran and self-professed extreme Elements of Style enthusiast, explores in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style. (Maria Popova)
I want to challenge the key assumption - made by nearly everyone - that choosing not to publish your work in the highest impact factor journal you can convince to accept it is tantamount to career suicide. It is ubiquitously repeated by everyone from the most successful senior scientists to first year graduate students. And, judging by their publishing practices, most of them must believe it to be true. But I don't think it is.If that seems like heresy, it's because it is heretical. Michael put it more strongly than I would have but I mostly agree.
Ernest Small's research colleagues at Agriculture Canada had a mystery. Peering at the cellular innards of a clover plant, they wondered why nothing was behaving the way clover should.Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Taxing+times+taxonomy/6028252/story.html#ixzz1lFjvqWTFThey asked Small, a veteran scientist at the Central Experimental Farm, for help.
It didn't take him long to pinpoint the problem. Their clover was an alfalfa.
Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
USDA Hardiness Zone Map. Click on the image for an interactive version.
Last week the U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled a new plant hardiness map. The last one was released over two decades ago -- in 1990. Some of the changes reflect new methods for interpolating data between weather stations. ButCompared to the 1990 version, zone boundaries in this edition of the map have shifted in many areas. The new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States. This is mostly a result of using temperature data from a longer and more recent time period; the new map uses data measured at weather stations during the 30-year period 1976-2005. In contrast, the 1990 map was based on temperature data from only a 13-year period of 1974-1986. (from the USDA announcement)Plants know that the climate is changing. Minimum winter temperatures over most of the U.S. are 5 degrees warmer now than they were two decades ago. The earth is getting warmer, and this is just a little more evidence of that.
Scientific data shows that the world is getting warmer, with potentially adverse consequences for farmers worldwide. Kim Kaplan, a USDA spokeswoman, said the map's trend toward warmer temperatures compared with 1990, especially evident in the Northeast, may be attributed to better data. More research would be needed to prove the U.S. is warming, she said. (source)
I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly. I am by no means the first person to do this, but the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes, and that is my main reason for writing this post.Lest you dismiss Tim Gowers as a crank, he's a Fellow of the Royal Society and he received the Fields medal in 1998 for work in functional analysis and combinatorics. He is just one of 1671 scholars who have signed an online pledge neither to submit papers to Elsevier journals, nor to edit Elsevier journals, nor to review papers for Elsevier journals. I made the number 1672 this morning. As Tim Worstall summarized the situation on Forbes.com
Academic publishing is a very good game indeed if you can manage to get into it. As the publisher the work is created at the expense of others, for free to you. There are no advances, no royalties, to pay. The editing, the checking, the decisions about whether to publish, these are all also done for free to you. And the market, that's every college libarary in the world and they're very price insensitive indeed.I invite everyone who reads this blog to add their name to the list at The Cost of Knowledge. It's time to take a stand.]]>
Protea obtusifolia in the De Hoop Nature Reserve, Western Cape, South Africa
Photograph by Kent Holsinger
Click on the image for a high-resolution image in a new window.
Climate change is on your porch and in your backyard and living room--anywhere you bedeck with flowering plants.Head over to the NSF site if you'd like to read the whole thing.
Global warming affects favorite flowers of garden and vase. This is true of plants around the world, including the proteas and the pelargoniums native to South Africa.
Image via Wikipedia
Every year the National Science Foundation releases its Science and Engineering Indicators. While full online access won't be available until February 15th, you can download PDFs for various chapters right now. Here are a few highlights from Chapter 7 on public attitudes and understanding that caught my eye:
Much about James Franklin Crow, who died on 4 January two weeks short of his 96th birthday, challenges our sense of scale. Over seven decades, he contributed to an astonishing array of topics in genetics, and the list of his students and postdocs reads like a who's who. One of them, the pioneering geneticist Motoo Kimura, wrote that getting Crow as his adviser after a period of uncertainty was such a joy it was like "meeting Buddha in Hell". Crow also played the viola for 45 years with the Madison Symphony Orchestra. He once performed with the great violin soloist Yehudi Menuhin.That's the opening paragraph of Alexey Kondrashov's wonderful piece remembering the life and work of James F. Crow. Please visit Nature and read the whole thing. Jim was a remarkable individual.
Cold-Blooded Cannibals: Extreme Adaptations to Island Life from Day's Edge Productions on Vimeo.
Image by Suzie Katz via Flickr
The #arseniclife saga may have opened a new chapter in the way science gets done, at least in the life sciences. For those of you who haven't been following the story over the last year, here's a quick recap.1Would we refuse to publish the paper describing faster than light neutrinos just because an early version appeared in Arxiv?
