Science and the media: 16 - 22 April
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0112
Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:
- Continued discussion of the developing world’s interest in open access
- Contrasting views on courts and carbon dioxide, as seen in a pair of commentaries
- A case study of alarmism in the news: a Washington Post front-page story
- Reactor cancellations raising doubts about new nuclear plants, as seen in three national newspapers
- Continued discussion of the potential role of science and science-mindedness in Egypt’s future
SciDev.net, Thomas Jefferson, and open access to new knowledge
Please indulge some long-view historical context for a report that builds on last week’s posting “Open access, citation statistics, and the spread of knowledge .”
It’s the spread-of-knowledge dimension that calls to mind how, in 1809, the scientist who presided over the physicist Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society wrote a letter that historians remember under the name “the republic of science.” The letter’s author was just completing his second term in his other office, the US presidency. In that capacity, Thomas Jefferson was writing to lament a disruptive intrusion by politics into the work of the international science enterprise—the republic of science.
Jefferson cited “the nature of the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them.” He continued:
These societies are always in peace, however their nations may be at war. Like the republic of letters, they form a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth, and their correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation. Vaccination has been a late and remarkable instance of the liberal diffusion of a blessing newly discovered. It is really painful, it is mortifying, to be obliged to note these things, which are known to every one who knows any thing, and felt with approbation by every one who has any feeling.
David Dickson serves as director of the developing world’s SciDev.net , an organization instituted, as Jefferson might have put it, for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered by scientists anywhere. In a 15 April commentary headlined “Open access: not just about citations,” Dickson has engaged the recurring debate—reported on last week—about the relationship between open access and citation statistics. He has discerned in that debate a potential for interruption to the international spread of new knowledge—calling to mind Jefferson’s letter, even if Dickson probably doesn’t find it “mortifying to be obliged to note” the problem, and even though the impediment is economics, not politics.
Dickson’s commentary’s thumbnail encapsulation says, “Focusing on the ‘citation advantage’ of open access misses its value in getting science information in the hands of those who need it.”
He begins by declaring that, thanks to the economics of scientific publishing, “support in the scientific community for the principle OA [open access] represents—that all scientific publications should be made freely available, at least in electronic form—has outstripped individual scientists’ willingness to put that principle into practice.” He calls authors’ fees “a particular obstacle for scientists in developing countries.”
This economic disincentive for OA works with the one discussed last week. As Dickson now puts it, “most scientists still prefer, where possible, to publish in established journals with high citation rates—a proxy for quality of scientific publications.” He worries that the “study published last month by Philip Davis of Cornell University ... has been widely interpreted as throwing OA into further doubt, by questioning what is generally perceived as a major benefit of OA publishing—the ‘OA citation advantage.’” He worries that “even by 2020, only about one quarter of scientific articles will be freely accessible.”
Dickson worries too about the effect of the press release for the Davis study. The headline proclaimed, “Paid access to journal articles not a significant barrier for scientists.” The thumbnail summary said, “New research paper ... shows that scientists have adequate access to paid journal content since free access to journal articles does not increase their citations.”
And there’s the problem. There’s the potential, as Dickson sees it, for harm to “the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them.” The debate that these results have triggered, writes Dickson, “sidesteps consideration of the full value of OA journals” to the spread of new knowledge. He continues:
This lies not merely in how they benefit science specialists, but also in making scientific research widely available to those who can neither afford high subscription rates for specialist journals, nor get access to scientific libraries—but whose work or personal interest depend on having access to the global pool of scientific knowledge....
Those who benefit from OA include many scientists in the developing world, where most university and research institution libraries remain heavily underfunded.
Then there are students, who are equally keen to follow new scientific developments. And finally there are all those who put scientific research to practical use—including members of the public, as well as professional groups such as healthcare workers.
As Davis has said, “there are many benefits to the free access of scientific information"—a point long argued by OA advocates, even if a citation advantage may not prove to be one of them.
To bolster his argument, Dickson cites the recent PLoS Medicine article “Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development.” It argues that “the sharing of knowledge discovery across borders and the building of a global knowledge commons is increasingly important for solving problems that we all face.” He agrees with it that “standards for assessing journal quality and relevance are generally based on ‘Northern’ values that often ignore development needs” and marginalize local science.
Dickson declares in conclusion that putting the “social value of science into measurable terms is much more difficult than the relatively simple calculations of citation rates.”
WSJ v. NYT on American Electric Power v. Connecticut
Though it’s not news that opinion in the Wall Street Journal often mismatches opinion in the New York Times, sharply diverging views might merit reporting from the two papers concerning this week’s US Supreme Court case American Electric Power v. Connecticut.
Plaintiffs including several states and New York City are suing corporations responsible for a quarter of the electric power industry’s carbon dioxide emissions. They seek abatement of what they believe are contributions to global warming.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed , two former Justice Department officials from the George H. W. Bush administration disapprove of the suit. David B. Rivkin Jr and Lee A. Casey assert that the “rank absurdity of plaintiffs’ claims should be obvious to the justices, who should rule decisively that the federal courts do not possess constitutional jurisdiction over climate change cases.”
The two call the suit political—and have filed an amicus brief. They disbelieve the plaintiffs’ fundamental motivation. Pressing often-heard claims of scientific authority, they write:
It is difficult to imagine a subject less susceptible to judicial resolution. Climate change is a well-established and natural phenomenon. The Earth’s climate has changed dramatically over time. In the 19th century, for example, the northern hemisphere began to emerge from a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. The extent to which man-made emissions like carbon dioxide may contribute to this process of periodic change, and to more recent warming trends, remains unclear.
What is clear is that the entire human population produces carbon emissions, and industrialized economies have done so on a significant scale since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution more than two centuries ago. It is impossible to determine whether emissions by any particular power plant—or US electricity production as a whole—have affected warming trends and, if so, how. Nor can we surmise what party is responsible in whole or in part for the particular plaintiffs’ alleged injuries. The law requires more than a guess.
Rivkin and Casey cite a “fundamental reason why these lawsuits must be dismissed: Federal courts can only decide cases where the complaining parties have actually been injured by the defendants’ own actions and an effective remedy can be framed in a judicial order.”
But a New York Times editorial agrees with a lower court:
As the Second Circuit writes, [the plaintiffs] “may seek their remedies under the federal common law,” including made by justices. The Supreme Court has upheld a lawsuit preventing the discharge of sewage that made the Mississippi River unfit. It has upheld limits of noxious emissions of sulfur from copper foundries in Tennessee that were destroying Georgia forests. There are other clear-cut precedents.
The appellate court’s opinion closes by paraphrasing a Supreme Court opinion from almost 40 years ago. New federal regulation may pre-empt the federal common law of nuisance, but, until then, federal courts are empowered to address the public nuisance caused by major, undisputed and destructive sources of greenhouse gases.
Rivkin and Casey also disbelieve, by the way, in the applicability of those interstate sewage and sulfur examples:
Federal common law nuisance actions have been generally limited to cases where activities in one state, such as creating air or water pollution, have a direct and identifiable harmful impact in another state. The federal courts have stepped into such cases because the states have no other mechanism to resolve disputes that may be too limited in scope to warrant congressional action.
The Times editors say that because “there is no federal regulation of this problem in force, it is fortunate that there is a line of Supreme Court precedents back to 1901 on which the plaintiffs can build their challenge.” They continue:
When this lawsuit began seven years ago, one of the defendants’ main defenses was that, because the Clean Air Act and other laws “address” carbon dioxide emissions, Congress has “legislated on the subject” and pre-empted the suit. The pre-emption claim was spurious when they made it and remains spurious now.
A Wall Street Journal news report about the case doesn’t say when to expect a decision. Neither does a New York Times article posted online just after the Supreme Court heard the case, though its headline obviously means to telegraph a surmise: “States’ Emissions ‘Nuisance’ Argument Seems to Fall on Deaf Ears in Supreme Court.”
Alarmism in the news, cont.
This report has nothing whatsoever to do with science, but everything to do with alarmism in the news—a problem and challenge having lots to do with science. (Some examples: radiation, space weather, asteroids, cell phones’ alleged health effects and—I’m not making this up—whether last month’s “super moon,” when the full moon appeared abnormally large, could cause natural disasters.)
Above the fold on the Washington Post‘s 20 April front page appeared what’s probably a bit of a case study in news-reporting alarmism: the story of Mrs. Obama’s airplane’s landing incident.
As a non-aviator, my own amateur surmise when I first heard of the incident via broadcast media was that the danger was being way overblown. So even without the prompting of James Fallows’s blog posting at the Atlantic—"Michelle Obama’s Plane Was Not in ‘Danger’ "—I’d have been skeptical of the headline appearing on at least one paper edition of the Post: “Jet with first lady escapes close call: Presidential plane had to abort landing after error by controller, officials say.” (The story’s online version may be evolving.)
But Fallows, as it happens, is a reasonably experienced aviator, not to mention a veteran critic of some of his colleagues in the national media—for example, in his book Breaking the News. He calls out this line from the Post story: “A White House plane carrying Michelle Obama came dangerously close to a 200-ton military cargo jet and had to abort its landing at Andrews Air Force Base on Monday as the result of an air traffic controller’s mistake, according to federal officials familiar with the incident.” Fallows observes that two paragraphs later, the article reports that the Federal Aviation Administration has already said that there was never any danger.
He continues:
As FAA spokesmen said, and as the NYT made clear in a much calmer-toned story (the WSJ calm too), the maneuvers required of Mrs. Obama’s plane—doing “S-turns” to slow down as it neared the airport, and then “going around” for another approach when it became clear that the first plane wouldn’t get off the runway in time—are routine and the farthest things from emergency procedures. A mistake, yes. A near-miss, no.
Last month, the Post had a similar alarmist story about National Airport’s sleeping controller forcing planes to “land on their own.” (The online version of the story has been changed from the one I talked about in that post, to a calmer lead.) It was obviously bad then to have no one on duty in the tower, and it was bad this time that the planes got closer than they should have. But there was nothing in this new situation to justify the assertion that the planes got “dangerously close.” I hope that by the time you see the online version this story will have been changed too.
Newspaper reporters and editors work fast on short deadlines. Among their duties, obviously, are two that conflict:
- To avoid deciding too much for the public, which can mean allowing stories to convey more alarm than might later seem to have been wise.
- To exercise judiciousness, which can mean preventing stories from conveying the degree of alarm that might later seem to have been wise.
No doubt it’s easier to calibrate alarm when the story—as in many science-related cases—lacks real-time immediacy. But in my view the calibration of alarm is nevertheless an important issue for everyone who cares about science and the media.
Reactor cancellations said to affect nuclear power prospects generally
Leaving aside the question’s mixed-metaphor problem, can the wheels really fall off of a renaissance?
All three of the big East Coast national newspapers reported this week that, thanks to Fukushima and changes in the economics of electricity production, NRG Energy is abandoning plans to add two new reactors to its two-reactor South Texas Project nuclear station, 90 miles southwest of Houston.
The Washington Post‘s wire-service article reported that support “for new nuclear projects in the US has eroded in the aftermath of the nuclear crisis in Japan, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll conducted earlier this month” and that of “dozens of proposals for new nuclear reactors ... submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission” only “a handful of projects remain active.”
A Wall Street Journal business article called NRG’s announcement “the most tangible evidence, to date, of fallout in the US from the nuclear accident in Japan.” (Might be another ill-fitting metaphor in that one, actually.) Besides noting that NRG was planning on reactors designed by Toshiba, the WSJ article reported that the company was also “depending on financial assistance from Tokyo Electric Power Co., owner of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.”
Matthew Wald’s New York Times article concluded with this passage, which sums up all three papers’ view of the implications of the NRG-Texas news:
The public’s appetite for nuclear power projects resembles the situation right after the Three Mile Island accident of 1979, said Charles A. Zielinski, a lawyer in Washington who is a former chairman of the New York State Public Service Commission. Companies now factor in the prospect of higher construction costs, mixed with a slack demand.
The South Texas Project “may have been on the fence already, and Fukushima pushed it over,” Mr. Zielinski said.
Tom Smith, an organizer in Austin with Public Citizen and a longtime campaigner against the project, cited higher construction costs and uncertainty after the Fukushima accident.
“The wheels are starting to fall off the nuclear renaissance,” he said.
Science, Tahrir Square, Bruce Alberts
David Ignatius’s 21 April Washington Post column asserted that America should “spend more to support the democratic revolution in Egypt and less to seek a military solution in Afghanistan.” Ignatius advocates “helping the Tahrir Square revolutionaries build a strong new country that can lead the rest of the Arab and Islamic world toward a better, saner future.”
Does science have a role?
The April Physics Today article “Freedom, fairness, and funds give hope to Egypt’s scientists” reported optimism about science in Egypt’s future. In February, the “Science and the Media” posting “Scientist president for Egypt? ” reported on a Nature Middle East commentary about the the Nobel chemist Ahmed Zewail’s prospects to become Egypt’s president.
That discussion appeared in the “House of Wisdom” blog of Mohammed Yahia, NME‘s editor, who this week posted “Bruce Alberts on the future of science. ” That new posting begins:
Celebrated American biochemist Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science and author of the Molecular Biology of the Cell, which is pretty much the standard cell biology textbook in most universities, visited the American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt, where he gave a talk to students, media and members of the public about the role of science in the future.
The over-packed room listened intently as Alberts spoke of how no democracy can function properly without what Indian prime minister Nehru once called “the scientific temper.”
“Science and technology can make a major difference for national development,” said Alberts. He stressed that scientists must have a more prominent role as the young people go out to rebuild Egypt after 30 years of authoritarian rule.
Alberts is following through with actions to back up his own past words.
“I consider science education to be critically important to both science and the world,” he wrote in a 21 March 2008 editorial at the beginning of his tenure as editor-in-chief of Science, “and I shall frequently address this topic on this page.” That editorial asked, “Might it be possible to encourage, across the world, scientific habits of mind, so as to create more rational societies everywhere?” Alberts urged that rather “than only conveying what science has discovered about the natural world, as is done now in most countries, a top priority should be to empower all students with the knowledge and practice of how to think like a scientist.” He added, “Scientists share a common way of reaching conclusions that is based not only on evidence and logic, but also requires honesty, creativity, and openness to new ideas.”
A few weeks later in another editorial , he continued his ambitious expansiveness concerning the potential of science and scientists to change the world. "[E]veryone can benefit when scientists take on practical problems,” he wrote, asserting that in fact the “future success of humanity may depend on learning to use the tools of science—including the collection of objective evidence on what works and why—at all levels of decision-making.” He advised that “scientists will need to develop much deeper connections with the rest of society.” He reported that he had “repeatedly witnessed the innovation that arises from recruiting scientists and outstanding practitioners to work together, using scientific approaches to tackle important problems.”
In late 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed what an article in Science called “three prominent scientists as special envoys to assess the potential for scientific partnerships with Muslim-majority countries,” which the article said was “the first concrete step in a broader US effort to expand the role of science in diplomacy.” The three new envoys were
- Egyptian-born Ahmed H. Zewail, the Caltech Nobel laureate chemist,
- Algerian-born Elias Zerhouni, the radiologist and former NIH director, and
- Alberts, the former National Academy of Sciences president.
The appointments were said to build upon President Obama’s earlier speech at Cairo University that had called for a new beginning in relations with the Muslim world.
So it’s plain that Bruce Alberts, anyway, believes there’s a role for science in the post-Tahrir democratic transformation that Ignatius hopes to see take place in Egypt with constructive American involvement.
Here’s the rest of that Nature Middle East “House of Wisdom” blog posting about Alberts’s visit:
[Alberts said] “Scientists can’t stay in their universities anymore. They must go out all across Egypt. Often, only local scientists will have the credibility required to rescue a nation from misguided local policies and beliefs.”
Alberts is an example of a scientist who has gone out to change the world. He has been very active in using science and technology to bring development on southeastern Asia. He is also one of the most prominent science diplomats, becoming one of the first three science envoys from Obama in his reach-out efforts to the Muslim world.
Alberts talked of the importance of an overhaul to science education as Egyptians rebuild their state. “Science education is not just about learning words of science—but about participating as scientists do, even from as early as when they are five years old.”
He also stressed the need to “support the statuses of teachers” since they are primarily responsible to produce a new successful generation. “No democracy can work when people don’t understand. They must be educated to analyze the choices being made for them by politicians.” Modern technology can be used to educate people with the increasing popularity of social networks.
During the talk, Alberts drew several parallels between the future and opportunities of Egypt and those of India, who is quickly emerging as one of the important science centres of the world.
“As in India, science and technology can be harnessed to improve the livelihoods of people, even among the rural poor.”
While talking to the young audience after the talk, Alberts stressed the important role of young people and said he went down to Tahrir Square, the epicentre of Egypt’s 25 January Revolution, and met with some of the young people who participated in the events that led to the overthrow of Egypt’s authoritarian government. “I’m a big believer in empowering young people to address their problems. The culture of science, such as honesty, tolerance and respect for logic will be critical for Egypt’s future.”
Anyone who knows me would expect to see this report tied together with some reference or other to a scientist who long ago occupied the White House, Thomas Jefferson. Here it is:
Some people, no doubt with good reason, express deep skepticism about American intrusiveness overseas, and maybe they’re right when they assert that Jefferson would have counseled isolationism. But it is also true that Jefferson found the fundamental principles underlying good government nearly congruent with those underlying science. Maybe Alberts can’t help. I don’t know. But those principles can.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the Media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
