I was interviewed last month for the CBC radio broadcast, "Quirks and Quarks". They have done a segment on the Denisova genome, with contributions from David Reich, Peter Parham, Chris Stringer and me, and it's part of this week's episode of the show.
Popular Science writer Tom Clynes gives us a long profile of Felisa Wolfe-Simon, who became a lightning rod for criticism after she authored an article claiming some bacteria were using arsenic in the place of phosphorus in their DNA ("Scientist in a Strange Land"). I've been following the story as it has become a case where traditional methods of peer review have conflicted with more open approaches to science.
This article tells a story that hasn't come out fully before, while emphasizing repeatedly the reasons why many have criticized the approach to the media by Wolfe-Simon and NASA's role in hyping the findings.
Wolfe-Simon says that “otherworldly” is the word that came to mind when she first visited the lake in 2009 on a grant from NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. She was there with several other researchers, including Ronald Oremland, a senior scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park who has studied the biogeochemistry of Mono Lake for 30 years. The two had met at a conference in 2006. “She was always persistent,” Oremland says. “She kept on talking about arsenic substituting for phosphorus. Every two years, her argument became a little more complicated and a little more compelling. Finally, I said, ‘Look, I don’t think this is going to work, but it might. Come on out to the lake—what have we got to lose?’ ”
Now, for the first time since last summer, Wolfe-Simon has returned, not to do fieldwork but to pretend to do it for the benefit of a two-part Nova television documentary that will air this fall when NASA launches its Mars Science Laboratory, a mission to determine the habitability of the Red Planet and to search for chemical signatures of life. The video crew has flown in from London for what will turn out to be a one-day shoot.
I just don't get why NASA and NOVA are continuing to present this to the public instead of getting to the bottom of it as quickly as possible. I would be in my lab constantly until I knew the answer, or I wouldn't feel like I could tell the story honestly to anyone. It is difficult for a young scientist to turn down the kinds of invitations Wolfe-Simon has received, but I think the whole situation is poisonous. In the article, she worries that her career in science may be over (she's been dismissed from Oremland's lab), and in my opinion her mentors and funders bear a lot of responsibility for the series of public relations mistakes.
I really like e-books quite a lot. It's easy to take a device like the Kindle, load up books, and read them. It holds your place for you, and multiple devices can be synchronized so that you can pick up a different one and read from the same page you left. One of the things I like most is that the electronic files themselves are a very simple format. When devices change, these files are still going to work. They aren't very different from the basic HTML that your browser can read, and in fact converting from web authoring to e-book authoring is very natural.
But there's a limit to what you can do with a very simple format. You can't present multimedia or interactive content without adding some complexity. Many people have started to incorporate book-like material with interactive content by packaging them as apps instead of e-books. The best-known example of this is an app called The Elements, half coffee-table book about the periodic table, half whiz-bang visualization of 3d objects.
John Dupuis is a librarian who has been thinking a lot about the impermanence of apps: "On the evilness of the emerging ebook app ecosystem".
In the longer term, it's not clear how apps such as The Elements could follow their owners to new platforms or new devices. Certainly the content for something like The Elements could have a very long lifetime, say even fifteen or twenty years. If you bought it today what do you think the likelihood is you'll be able to access it in that time frame. It's like if book publishers could make you use their proprietary glasses to read their books.
I'm not sure how I feel about the issue but it's worth thinking about. Apps can be done for free, but if they need to be constantly updated they will introduce costs that tend to make them costly relative to e-books. Some app-like content can be done in a cross-platform way, for example with Flash or HTML5. I've worked to some extent with Wolfram's system for sharing interactive content, which they're trying to make more widespread. Hopefully a more open, e-book-like system for sharing interactive and media content on readers will emerge.
Seems to be a theme going in the press today: The Internet is making us stupid by connecting us with the things we like.
Yes, when I write it that way, it sounds kind of silly, doesn't it?
But that's the thesis of an essay by Natasha Singer in the NY Times: "The Trouble With the Echo Chamber Online", and a separate essay by Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal: "When We're Cowed by the Crowd".
Singer posits that the problem is Google giving us search results that we want, not irrelevant ones.
If you type “bank” into Google, the search engine recognizes your general location, sending results like “Bank of America” to users in the United States or “Bank of Canada” to those north of the border. If you choose to share more data, by logging into Gmail and enabling a function called Web history, Google records the sites you visit and the links you click. Now if you search for “apple,” it learns and remembers whether you are looking for an iPad or a Cox’s Orange Pippin.
OK, seems like a pretty awesome thing to me. I'm here in Rome, and when I search for a location on my phone, it gives me the location in Rome! Not only does that give me the information faster, it saves me (expensive) bandwidth. Win!
But Singer worries that this will harm our democracy. No, stop laughing. Really.
But, in a effort to single out users for tailored recommendations or advertisements, personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy, says Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and the author of “You Are Not a Gadget.”
This argument is bunk. At no time in history have people been exposed to a wider range of opposing viewpoints. And you know what? Most of them are bunk.
We have always had algorithms to select content. In the past, those algorithms were inside the heads of a small number of newspaper editors and media programming executives. Most of these people knew each other socially, and all of them were locked in competition for eyeballs with the same small group of people, thinking in minor variations on the same theme. That's why you see things like different newspapers, owned by different companies, publishing opinion pieces on the same out-of-the-blue internet theme on the same day! It's like a throwback to the past.
I like Google better. Who is more likely to get the truth about bunk theories -- somebody who Googles, or somebody who flips his television to the History Channel?
Lehrer picks up a related theme: the "wisdom of the crowd". The idea is like the "ask the audience" lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Ask enough people who don't know the answer, and the result of the poll is more likely to be correct than if you asked any one of them. Lehrer notes a recent study that showed that a crowd where people can exchange guesses with each other is actually worse at this kind of thing than if they all remain mutually mute.
So if you find yourself in Slumdog Millionaire, you'd better gag the audience.
We can all see that this "wisdom of the crowd" thing has pretty limited utility. Guessing number of ping pong balls in wading pool, yes. Unified field theory, no. That's why we don't make decisions by polling random ignorant people.
Oh, I know, you're going to say that's exactly what we do in a democracy! But really it isn't at all. Shaping the information environment before an election is a multibillion dollar effort by political parties, candidates, independent organizations, and the media. The public in modern democracy is highly informed. It's just that each person is highly informed about a small window of things. The internet helps us to connect with other people who know about the same things, allowing coordination of action among dispersed people on a scale rarely seen before.
Lehrer thinks all this communication is making us stupid. No, stop laughing. Really!
And yet, while the Web has enabled new forms of collective action, it has also enabled new kinds of collective stupidity. Groupthink is now more widespread, as we cope with the excess of available information by outsourcing our beliefs to celebrities, pundits and Facebook friends. Instead of thinking for ourselves, we simply cite what's already been cited.
Yep, it's that groupthink thing. The echo chamber.
Someone who uses the word, groupthink, invariably means, "I can't stand that everyone doesn't think like me!" Oh, if you weren't deluded by your cult of celebrity, surely you would listen to reason!
Bunk. If you have an argument that can't make traction against somebody's Facebook friends, it's not a very good argument. If you don't like it, make it better.
Yes there is a social influence effect on decision-making. That's the way humans think. We're social creatures, and our friends and relatives are important. It's important that we get to choose our friends. It's important that we get to choose what we want to know. A society where we can't choose those things would be a tyranny.
So if you want to influence people's ideas in our social world, you need to engage with their social networks. Seems like the sort of think that could use a better algorithm.
Last month, Virginia Gewin put an article in Nature about social media and science, which is now available online for free: "Social media: Self-reflection, online".
The Internet is markedly changing how science — and scientists — are perceived. Publications are lauded or rebuked in the Twittersphere (see Nature 469, 286–287; 2011), and leaked e-mails can escalate into political controversy, as in the case of 'climategate' (see Nature 468, 345; 2010). Scientists can also now engage with the public in new and innovative ways, as demonstrated by a researcher who was contacted about his ancestry after publishing his genome on the Internet (see Nature 468, 880–881; 2010). “Even if you never pay attention to the online world and don't want anything to do with it, it's bleeding into your real life,” says Liz Neeley, the Seattle-based assistant director of science outreach at the Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea, an organization that helps scientists to engage with the public.
Gewin spoke to several blogging and tweeting scientists, and I get to play a small part as the voice of moderation. A range of people at different career stages get a few words to describe how blogging and social media fit into their strategy.
Along similar lines is an article from The Scientist late last year: "You aren't blogging yet?" It's sort of a howto featuring Bora Zivkovic and Jonathan Eisen, among others.
Science is a realm in which many highly motivated and smart people are competing for a limited number of jobs. There are many ways to put your work forward, and blogging can be one of them. I never discount that the biggest factor is luck. But 90 percent of luck is standing in the right place at the right time. The beauty of a blog is that it's standing there waiting all the time for the right person to look.
Slate has an editorial by Farhad Manjoo, featuring the idiocy of people who write crank letters to NPR ("We Listen to NPR Precisely To Avoid This Sort of Stupidity"). Yes, I know some of my readers probably sympathize with the letter writers, plaintive plaints to keep their highbrow high.
But lo, there at the end of the dyspeptic quote-mine, we find this:
"You can't mention sports without someone saying, 'Why are you covering sports—it's just a bunch of Neanderthals, it's just a bunch of fascists!' " says NPR sports correspondent (and Slate sports podcast "Hang Up and Listen" panelist) Mike Pesca.
Imagine! I ask you: What kind of quisling would stack Neandertals and fascists in the same breath?
It's Milford Wolpoff and Razib Khan on bloggingheads.tv!
What a great choice for Science Saturday.
I can't bear to watch it again, and I don't see why I should tolerate anyone else having to watch it. But I can't sit quietly while physicist Michio Kaku tells us how human evolution has stopped.
I'm telling you, don't go watch it. DON'T DO IT!
Oh, heck, how did that get there?
Don't press play, whatever you do. I'm warning you.
Kaku wants to tell you all about how life in the forest used to make us run fast, but now we don't have to do that anymore. He says that life on isolated island continents, like Australia, would rapidly accelerate our evolution. But today jet planes will spread your genes across the world, so our evolution has stopped.
Or, no, it's not all our evolution that's stopped -- Kaku says that's still going on because our molecules can change. No, it's gross evolution that has stopped. You know, like making our brains twice as big -- that would be gross.
What about genetic engineering, you ask? Well, Kaku says that changing genes is very painful. And we can't make pigs with wings, so why would we bother? No, many decades from now, humans will look pretty much the way they do now.
Well, you can't say I didn't warn you. That's today's "Big Think" for you -- timely news you can use. But no flying pigs.
DERP!
(via Pharyngula)
It's Kate Clancy and me on bloggingheads Science Saturday!
Topics include, Kate's research on fertility in Poland, the variation in normal menstrual cycles, the challenges facing women in science, the role (or non-role) of science in the American Anthropological Association, and why we think blogs are awesome sauce.
Martin Robbins last week posted a column with a great title: "Return to the Silence: Is theatre exposing the gutlessness of TV science?" In it, he discusses some innovative storytelling approaches, not only in the theatre but also beat poetry and science comedy. Sounds to me like London is a great place to be a science fan.
His complaint about television is that science shows are too formulaic. Seems to me he's got the formula down:
Pick a topic that people love, like space, dinosaurs, cavemen, sex, or preferably cavemen on dinosaur-back having sex in space.
Find an athletic, easy-on-the-eye presenter in their 30s or 40s (or one with an amusingly-distinctive facial feature like Robert Winston's moustache).
Send them to to a series of increasingly improbable locations based on the slimmest premise you can imagine. For example, if the presenter is talking about the element lanthanum, send them to Los Angeles, because the symbol for Lanthanum is 'La.'
Once there, get them to resort to increasingly desperate uses of nearby objects to explain concepts. Force Brian Cox to steal fruit from Indian market stall owners to explain an eclipse. Make Robert Winston shave off his moustache as a metaphor for the effects of cliff face erosion.
Film lots of sweeping landscape shots in HD. If you film too many, don't worry, just stick them in the next documentary you make - no one will notice.
Overlay the whole thing with audio from the latest
MobySigur Rós album.
In other words, siphon the genius out of the tank of British Top Gear, resulting in something like the lifeless corpse of American Top Gear.
Well, I give the BBC Horizon and other science programs a lot of credit, since here in the States the number 2 science program on television is ...
Ancient Aliens.
OK, yes, it's highly misleading to call that a science program, since it denies science in every episode. It's a pseudoscience program. Likewise for Ghost Hunters and MonsterQuest. But these shows have been averaging well over a million viewers per episode. Since the new season started, Ancient Aliens has had more than 2 million viewers every week. Those are big numbers for cable, which means the History Channel will probably bring us Ancient Aliens for longer than they gave us Hitler's secrets.
Pseudoscience drafts off science's fumes. It doesn't work if it isn't trying to look like science, so it follows the forms. Ancient Aliens has a disembodied narrator, parade of experts, HD landscape shots of the Nasca lines, pyramids, and whatnot. The "experts" are retreads like Erich von Däniken, Michael Cremo and Graham Hancock -- the show presents them "asking the tough questions", implying that real archaeologists don't have the answers.
It's a joke. Put one real scientist on the show and it'd fall apart like a house of cards. The entire premise is that ancient people were too stupid to invent stuff.
You know what I'd really love to see? I'd like to see somebody give Ghost Hunters the VH-1 treatment -- you know, coming up with totally comical riffs on the "EVP" recordings that supposedly have ghost voices on them. Oooh-oooh! A spectral voice said "Bring me the head of Mo Rocca."
Mythbusters is the only science show right now that smokes these pseudoscience programs. What makes it work? Well, it doesn't take itself too seriously, it shows experiments with a real chance of failure, it calls on many different specialties and relates to ordinary experience. It definitely isn't "gutless" -- although it does have its conventions, including the frequent explosive endings.
Anyway, I think Robbins is onto something. During the past few years there have been some excellent programs featuring archaeology on American TV. Some of them followed the high-Q presenter formula, others the disembodied narrator approach. Some of them I've really enjoyed. But I'm afraid people are lulled into complacency by the format. Viewers who are already knowledgeable about science can follow them and get a lot out of them, taking on faith that the people doing the science know what they are doing. What's the difference between that presentation and the pseudoscience shows, though?
Robbins writes that the solutions to these problems are most likely to come from the innovative approaches found in new and alternative media:
[A]mateur science communicators are beginning to reach audiences that rival science magazines and the backwaters of digital TV. Some of the most creative new work is springing up at blogs, Youtube, local theatres, and even pubs. It's messy, but it's quietly brilliant, and reaching a bigger and bigger audience, and no doubt if TV had come along and picked it all up I'd just be sitting here ranting about how they ruined it all with their bloody rules.
These laboratories are great for developing new concepts, but they're a niche. Science should have a better presence on TV.
