Science and the media: 30 October - 6 November
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.1085
This week Steve Corneliussen covers a Nature commentary about a European journal’s effort to improve peer review, an Investor’s Business Daily op-ed’s treatment of human-caused climate disruption, articles on the impending demise of the Royal Society’s book prize, a New York Times feature story about the Large Hadron Collider, and a Washington Post piece about a teachable moment seized by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu at Halloween.
Increase transparency to improve peer review?
“Peer review,” declares Bernd Pulverer in the final sentence of his 4 November Nature commentary , “is the most remarkable manifestation of a collaborative spirit of science and needs to be nurtured and fortified where necessary.” He heads scientific publications at the European Molecular Biology Organization and serves as chief editor of the EMBO Journal. His long, detailed essay, “Transparency showcases strength of peer review,” tells how that journal has been seeking to do some nurturing and fortifying.
Two years ago the journal began to publish “peer-review process files” alongside the papers of willing authors. Most authors have agreed. With these files, more than 400 primary papers now “showcase . . . referee comments from every round of revision, editorial decision letters, the authors’ response, as well as a detailed timeline of submission, decisions, revisions and publication.” An example process file is available online.
Pulverer reports that the program began with statistics seeming to validate his organization’s “sense that [its] editorial decisions are generally informed and fair.” For example, he writes, “only 1% of manuscripts rejected in 2008 ended up in journals with an impact factor two points or more above” his own journal’s, and “only 9% have a citation rate higher than the average paper in the journal.” This sense that their system works well caused them to ask themselves why the “huge amount of effort” that goes into peer review, including “incisive, constructive comments,” remained “largely invisible.”
Pulverer says that despite initial worries, the journal’s experience in reducing that invisibility has been “overwhelmingly positive,” with submissions “steady” and only 5.3% of authors opting out. Reviewers’ willingness to participate has not dropped off, and the journal staff has perceived no significant change in the quality of referees’ reports or authors’ responses. The process files do attract attention, with a given file’s access rate about one-tenth that of the paper itself.
Pulverer notes what he calls a “crucial limitation of the policy,” namely, that the journal does “not release reports on manuscripts that end up being rejected.” Because these “are often the more interesting cases to consider,” he calls this a “shortcoming,” and laments that a workable way to redress it has eluded the staff.
Pulverer believes that his journal’s “augmented papers are testament to the fact that carefully administered peer review” works well. His organization is extending the policy to its three other publications, and, after initially somewhat downplaying the process files, is making them much more visible online.
Physics according to Investor’s Business Daily
It’s not news that the Wall Street Journal editorial page expresses hostility toward the scientific consensus on human-caused climate disruption. But a recent op-ed from a comparable national publication, Investor’s Business Daily, might merit attention.
First, though, a datum on the IBD editors’ knowledge of the world of physics. Their 31 July 2009 editorial on health care asserted that Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.” IBD’s editors, in other words, didn’t know that Hawking isn’t American.
(To report about Hawking’s response, by the way, doesn’t constitute taking sides concerning health care. He said in part, “I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. . . . I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”)
The IBD‘s editors recently assigned some opinion-page space to an op-ed by three authors: Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Robert M. “Bob” Carter, a geologist in Australia who is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand; and David Russell Legates, the Delaware state climatologist and former director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware.
Maybe one or some of these three scientists have published peer-reviewed climate science contradicting all or parts of the climate consensus—but if so, IBD doesn’t mention it.
The three attack what they call the “demonizing” of CO2, which they call “the gas of life.” They assert that as “independent scientists, with broad training in mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology and geography,” they “know CO2 is not a pollutant, and the notion of ‘carbon-free’ or ‘zero-carbon’ energy is inherently harmful and anti-scientific.""Far from having detrimental effects,” they continue, “carbon dioxide has decidedly beneficial impacts on plants, aquatic and terrestrial alike, and a new study connects enhanced plant productivity to greater bird species diversity in China.”
The three scientists ask, “How, therefore, can anyone conclude that human carbon dioxide is a pollutant that must be eradicated?” To do so, they charge, amounts to “promoting continued suboptimal growth of food plant species in the face of impending global food shortages—and poorer functioning and less diversity in the global ecosystem."Then they arrive at this:
Zero-carbon activists respond to these facts by asserting that human CO2 emissions cause “dangerous global warming.” They are wrong about this, too.
If rising atmospheric CO2 levels drive global temperatures upward, as they insist, why is Earth not suffering from the dangerous “fever” that Al Gore predicted? Instead, after mild warming at the end of the twentieth century, global temperatures have leveled off for the past decade, amid steadily rising carbon dioxide levels.
No mention by IBD of how, say, the climatologist Gavin Schmidt or his colleague James Hansen would likely respond to that.
No more Royal Society Science Book Prize
Maybe the idea of honoring excellence in science communication remains healthy. After all, the American Institute of Physics annually bestows its Science Writing Award . And just last month, the National Academies honored the winners of their 2010 Communication Awards at a ceremony in Washington, DC: Richard Holmes for The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Charles Duhigg of the New York Times for his series Toxic Waters, Carole and Richard Rifkind (coproducers and codirectors) for Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist, and Ed Yong for his blog Not Exactly Rocket Science.
But none of that is likely to make Philip Ball feel much better.
Ball is a physicist and science popularizer who served for many years as an editor at Nature. His recent Prospect magazine article “The Sad and Shameful Decline of the Science Book Prize” begins: “No science writer is going to be happy with the prospect that this year’s Royal Society Science Book Prize will be the last. But there’s valid cause for concern beyond sheer self-interest.” The “message this sends out to the profession—that what they do is not valued—is dispiriting,” he writes. Moreover, without the book prize, “there is one less reason for the media to talk about science and how it is covered.”
The Royal Society had been an interim sponsor. Ball says that the prize “looks doomed” because a permanent sponsor hasn’t been found.
A similar report at Physics World online says, “It’s a sad state of affairs and could serve to reduce public interest in science in the UK at a time when science budgets are being squeezed.”
New York Times: excitement for high-energy physics
Dennis Overbye’s upbeat, lengthy feature article “Trillions of Reasons to Be Excited” dominates the 2 November Science Times section front page in the New York Times. Overbye surveys the status and outlook of the Large Hadron Collider.
The article extensively reviews LHC basics, the collider’s early operational problems, its relation to—and competition with—Fermilab, and what its budget-hampered schedule looks like for the next few years. Overbye also provides, of course, the apparently mandatory mention of that worry that LHC operation might lead to black-hole-induced planetary doom.
But mainly the article seeks to convey the excitement that Overbye is hearing from LHC scientists. By the end, in fact, he quotes one of them enthusing that “only good and beautiful things are coming.” Overbye writes:
CERN physicists say that data has already been accumulating faster than they can analyze it, and that the collider has already begun to surpass its rival, Fermilab’s Tevatron. “It’s a really beautiful machine. It’s performing far better than I expected,” Lyn Evans, who oversaw the building of the collider, said recently.
Overbye also reports that “high-energy physics is a game of statistics,” with trillions more collisions needed before physicists can know if the events they have begun to see “are the harbingers of an intellectual revolution in what the universe is made of"—or “if there is any new physics to be discovered in the collider at all.”
He mentions “an idea to swap out all [of LHC’s] magnets in 2030 to increase the total proton energies to 33 trillion electron volts,” which would be almost as much as the ill-fated Superconducting Super Collider would have had. He notes that this “suggestion raised eyebrows among physicists in and out of CERN, who wondered, among other things, what it would mean for the International Linear Collider, which has long been presumed to be the next big physics machine.”
Zombies, vampires, Nobel laureate Energy secretaries
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has taken a novel approach to helping Energy Star, a joint program of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. On his Facebook page just before Halloween, he posted a photo of himself as a zombie.
“As a lifelong geek,” Chu writes, “I’ve never had such a cool Halloween costume.”
He’s cheerleading in the spirit of the season for the Energy Star webpage Standby Power and Energy Vampires , which campaigns against devices that “suck energy from your home while not providing any useful function.”
To head off literal-minded protests from the whimsy-impaired concerning the zombie photo, he quickly stipulates that there’s “no scientific evidence” for zombies. Then he asks, “But what about vampires?” And he answers his own question:
Actually, when it comes to energy, they are all too real. “Vampire appliances"—from DVD players to stereos to desktop computers—suck up energy even when they are turned off. In fact, these vampires are responsible for adding 10 percent or more to your monthly electricity bill.
Garlic doesn’t work against these vampires. But by taking some simple steps—like using power strips or setting your computer to go into sleep mode—you can protect yourself, and your wallet.
In a brief back-pages article the 1 November Washington Post reports that a Chu staffer found the Chu-as-zombie photo on a technology blog and that, for Chu’s more than 14 500 Faceboook followers, recent postings include his thoughts on the film The Social Network and a video tribute to his high-school physics teacher.
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.
