Science and the media: 30 August - 3 September

In this week’s review, Steven T. Corneliussen, who monitors several publications for the American Institute of Physics, looked at a letter in the Wall Street Journal comparing two recent investigations into scientific misconduct, Washington Post coverage of climate change, a news story in the New York Times about promising new chip technologies, a new TV science show for kids, a news story in Science about possible Australian involvement in LIGO, and a variety of epistolary opinions in the New York Times about peer review.

Cuccinelli’s and Harvard’s probes likened

A lengthy letter in today’s Wall Street Journal likens two recent and newsworthy investigations into the conduct of science: that of Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli into climatologist Michael Mann’s reconstruction of past global temperatures and that of Harvard University into psychologist Marc Hauser’s research methods.

Concerning the question of human-caused global overwarming, the gap between believers and disbelievers gets illustrated in a new way in the 3 September Wall Street Journal letter ‘Two Different Approaches to Academic Monkey Business .’ The letter also suggests how widely views can diverge concerning government intervention in academic matters.

The letter’s author, Charles Battig of Charlottesville, Virginia, is identified as representing ‘Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment.’ A brief internet search shows that the group is concerned about what two of its members, in an open letter to the Science Museum of Virginia, call ‘the foolish global warming mania that has swept the political world.’

The journal’s opinion editors gave Battig a good bit of space, but it seems to me that his letter presents a false analogy. He likens Harvard’s handling of science misconduct charges against Hauser to the campaign of Virginia’s attorney general against the University of Virginia and Mann, who left Charlottesville for a position at the Pennsylvania State University five years ago.

Battig first establishes that a faculty investigating commission found Hauser ''solely responsible for eight instances of scientific misconduct’ involving ‘data acquisition, data analysis, data retention and the reporting of research methodologies and results’’ and that three of Hauser’s papers ‘now need to be corrected or retracted.’ Then he writes that an ''inquiry phase,’ similar to the Harvard protocol, was initiated by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli into the possible misuse of public funds by Michael Mann in his pursuit of employment and his use of such funds in his research activities when he was at the University of Virginia.’

‘Similar to the Harvard protocol’? The work of a faculty investigating commission, empowered under the rules and traditions of academe, is equivalent to a state attorney general’s foray into academe?

Battig complains sarcastically that the ‘university and its supporters met this request with claims of impingement on sacred academic freedom and chilling the environment for academic research.’ Then he closes by pressing his analogy:

Washington Post editorial versus two instances of ‘underwhelming’ critiques of climate science

In two ways, the 31 August Washington Post engages the news about the Virginia attorney general’s campaign against the University of Virginia and climate scientist Michael Mann:

• 1. With a Rosalind Helderman news article atop the front page of the Metro section under the headline ‘Judge Rejects Cuccinelli’s Probe of U-Va. Global Warming Records.’
• 2. With an editorial under the headline ‘A Judge Puts a Damper on Mr. Cuccinelli’s U-Va. Witch Hunt.’

You’ll recall that in an April legal demand, Virginia’s brand-new attorney general—a strong disbeliever in anthropogenic global warming—invoked something called the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. He asked that the University of Virginia produce voluminous records from the period ending in 2005 when climatologist Michael Mann, now at Penn State, conducted research as a University of Virginia faculty member.

As reporter Helderman puts it, the ‘case has been embraced nationally by scientists and academics, and by others who saw it as a test of academic freedom.’ She notes as context that Cuccinelli has also filed ‘a lawsuit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of greenhouse gases and the constitutionality of the federal health-care law.’

On Monday, a Virginia judge dismissed the legal demand, writing that what the attorney general ‘suspects that Mann did that was false or fraudulent in obtaining the funds from the Commonwealth is simply not stated.’ (Both the Helderman Washington Post article and a New York Times wire-service piece quoted those words.) The ruling reportedly leaves the door open to further actions by the attorney general, who reportedly plans to press his effort.

The Post editorial begins by noting that climate-change skeptics recently ‘went on the attack, pointing to two molehills of scandal that they claimed were towering peaks of scientific malfeasance'—namely, Climategate and factual errors by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The editors note that scientists have been vindicated in these matters, and express gladness that on Monday, ‘scientists were vindicated again, twice.’ The editors call it important that the Virginia judge has ‘put a damper on a pernicious fishing expedition’ by the Virginia attorney general, who they say has been ‘twisting a state law aimed at preventing fraud in contracting.’ And the editors are glad that, despite a contrary interpretation by Fox News, an international review panel from the independent InterAcademy Council has recently affirmed the IPCC, albeit while making suggestions for improving procedures. The editors end with this:

New York Times front page, above the fold: Moore’s law revived?

Above the fold on the front page, John Markoff’s 30 August New York Times article ‘Advances Offer Path to Further Shrink Computer Chips’ suggests a possibly imminent revival of Moore’s law, which Markoff defines as the 1965 ‘observation that the industry has the ability to roughly double the number of transistors that can be printed on a wafer of silicon every 18 months.’ The piece begins:

Markoff reports that researchers at Rice say that using silicon oxide, they ‘have succeeded in building reliable small digital switches—an essential part of computer memory—that could shrink to a significantly smaller scale than is possible using conventional methods.’ And he reports that ‘H.P. is to announce on Tuesday that it will enter into a commercial partnership with a major semiconductor company to produce a related technology that also has the potential of pushing computer data storage to astronomical densities in the next decade. H.P. and the Rice scientists are making what are called memristors, or memory resistors, switches that retain information without a source of power.’

The Cat in the Hat: science for kids on PBS

Dr Seuss—real name: Theodor Geisel—originally created The Cat in the Hat a half-century ago. Now, writes Elizabeth Jensen in the Sunday, 29 August, New York Times, the ‘floppy-hatted hero is being recruited again to help promote childhood learning: this time, though, it’s keeping kids excited about science.’ On Labor Day, PBS will introduce the daily, half-hour animated show The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!

Jensen’s article—'The Cat Comes Back, in the Name of Science'—reports that Martin Short does the voice of the cat, who will lead ‘his young playmates on fanciful adventures in the natural science world, exploring how bees make honey, why birds migrate and how being slow helps a sloth.’

Jensen quotes Short comparing his character with Harpo Marx, even though Harpo was silent and the cat never is. Short says that ‘Harpo had a kind of unpredictable madness to him. He would jump in the air, sit on a lap, chase someone. The cat has that kind of childlike exuberance and childlike nature.’ And Jensen quotes a Random House official’s view of the choice of Short: ‘He’s got a ‘Fred Astaire on joy juice’ karma.’

Geisel died in 1991. Jensen describes how he himself had hoped eventually to see the Cat in the Hat help teach science, and how he even once discussed with NASA the possibility of placing an image of the cat on a Mars probe. Jensen writes that for ‘the television series the producers [have] added the adventure story line, changed the ethnicity of one child for diversity, and made the search for answers participatory.’ Unlike the books, the TV show will not be done entirely in rhyme, though rhyme will be used selectively ‘to reinforce science concepts.’

Australian boost for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)?

In the 27 August issue of Science, the Adrian Cho news article ‘US Physicists Eye Australia for New Site of Gravitational-Wave Detector’ explains possibilities for involving Australia in a major upgrade underway at the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO.

Science blurbs the article this way: ‘US physicists want to take parts from their massive twin gravitational-wave detectors and use them to build a third detector near Perth in western Australia, greatly enhancing the experiment’s ability to pinpoint sources of gravitational waves, should such waves ever be spotted.’ Cho says that according to LIGO’s chief scientist, Stanley Whitcomb of Caltech, ‘Australia has by far the most robust gravitational-wave community in the Southern Hemisphere.’

At present LIGO’s two main optical motion sensors at Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, work in concert with the European detector VIRGO, in Cascina, Italy, near Pisa. Cho writes:

Cho adds that at ‘Hanford, a second set of mirrors and equipment . . . forms a 2-kilometer interferometer that serves as a crosscheck for [Hanford’s] bigger device,’ that this additional instrument ‘does not have to sit atop the first detector’ to carry out its crosscheck mission, that it’s already slated for upgrading itself, and that in ‘a radical change of plans’ that ‘would have to happen fast,’ it could take up the newly envisioned mission in Australia.

‘The cost to Australia,’ Cho reports, ‘would be $170 million, the price tag for building and maintaining the new site. In return, Australian physicists would gain full participation in the half-billion-dollar experiment.’ The idea is being pitched this week to the National Science Board, and is under consideration in Australia as well.

Letters respond to front-page New York Times article on Web-based peer review in the humanities

On 24 August the front-page New York Times article ‘Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review ’ reported that ‘some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has’ and that they advocate instead ‘using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.’ That article’s possible relevance for the sciences shows again in six 30 August letters to the editor under the headline ‘Opening Up the Peer Review Process.’ Here are points of possible usefulness from four of those letters:

• 1. A Temple University language professor asserts that ‘many objections to the peer review system as too narrow are unfounded.’ He observes that most ‘academic journals allow rejected authors to resubmit their scholarship, provided they take into account the reviewer’s objections.’ He claims that this ‘system is invaluable for younger scholars especially.’ He says that good scholarship will always ‘find an outlet.’
• 2. A professor of English and American studies at Muhlenberg College argues that history disproves the idea ‘that evaluating originality and intellectual significance can be done only by those who are expert in a field’ and that only ‘credentialed experts are nurturers of originality.’ He offers examples:

  Half a millennium ago ‘learned’ people in Rome did everything they could to stifle the paradigm-shifting originality of Galileo and Copernicus. Eighteenth-century literary ‘experts,’ including Alexander Pope, ‘revised and corrected’ Shakespeare’s plays to purge them of impurities. Upon hearing about innovations in quantum physics in the 1920s, Einstein reportedly exclaimed that he would ‘rather be a cobbler’ than consider these ideas.

  The innovations in peer review this article describes ought to be embraced because they take into account how blind faith in expertise has let the so-called experts’ exclusionary fears of originality slow the progress of learning.

• 3. A woman in New Jersey declares that peer-reviewed journals ‘garner the awe and respect that they do because of the talent, hard work and research it takes to get published,’ and adds that to ‘open up the review process to a broad range of panelists via the Internet would tarnish the honor one receives from being in such a publication.’
• 4. A professor emerita of psychology at Richard Stockton College cautions that although sloppiness and fraud ‘are certainly occasional problems of the traditional peer review system,’ she hopes that ‘editors moving to open review have put in a little time writing for Wikipedia and are aware of the possible damaging effect of highly motivated, unsupervised reviewers with time on their hands.’ She suggests ‘early online publication with a pause for responses before ‘real’ publication’ and ‘a policy requiring that online reviewers identify themselves in some reliable way, with protections against the ‘sock puppets’ (people who create false online identities) who create such trouble for Wikipedia.’