Linklist: October 17, 2021
"Crocodiles look like they belong to another time, an era when reptiles ruled. But appearances can be deceiving. Today’s crocodiles are not holdovers that have gone unchanged since the Jurassic, but are one expression of a great, varied family that’s been around for over 235 million years. More than that, crocodiles are still evolving—and faster than they have at other times in their family’s scaly history.
The seemingly contradictory conclusion about crocodylian evolution comes from a recent study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by University College London anatomist Ryan Felice and colleagues. By comparing three-dimensional models to track anatomical landmarks on crocodylian skulls over time, the researchers found that modern crocodile species in Australia, southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific are evolving quickly despite looking like semi-aquatic antiques. Modern croc species look so similar not because of conserving ancient traits, but because crocodiles are evolving the same skull shapes over and over again through time."
"Noah Hutton’s independent documentary In Silico is a captivating, decade-long account of the rise and fall of Henry Markram’s controversial Human Brain Project (HBP).1 The HBP began in 2013 as an ambitious, ten-year-long, billion-euro program that aimed to build an exact digital simulation of the human brain. It promised to help elucidate the mechanisms that underlie information processing, from molecular processes to large-scale neural networks. As the years go by, the chasm between the HBP’s promised and delivered product is revealed to be so astounding that, despite its respectful and factual reporting, the film can’t help but elicit a cynical laugh or two at the project’s expense. At its most extreme, the project is evocative of Fyre festival in scale, hype, and misguided ambition—and of course, in the raw schadenfreude its failures evoke in critics.2
On the face of it, the documentary is simply a cautionary tale about the dangers of salesmanship and hype in science, a rebuke of “Big Science” and an implicit endorsement of the humbler “status quo” science championed by Markram’s many critics. A review in Nature pins it as “a fascinating window into the trouble grandiose research projects and grandiose personalities can generate.”3 But those who stop at the “big science, big personalities” story risk missing the forest for the trees. For all the HBP’s talk of revolutionizing neuroscience, In Silico’s documentation of the HBP serves as a remarkable picture of business-as-usual in laboratories of all subjects and sizes. Seen as a social phenomenon, the HBP marks no fundamental departure from the logic of the corporatized research model that pervades academic STEM, including the labs of even its most vocal critics. Instead, the project’s spectacular size and public profile serve as a magnifying lens held to the system at large, allowing us to examine the rot of corporate bureaucracy taking hold of scientific research institutes everywhere.
As the film follows Markram’s transformation from scientist to salesman, we’re reminded of the parallel transformation occuring on an institutional scale all around us. Viewed this way, the film is a stunning reminder that a kind of neoliberal logic has worked for decades to make the culture, language, organization, and aims of academic research institutions virtually indistinguishable from those of capitalist firms4 —and the increasingly corporatized government bureaucracies that enable them—much to the detriment of everyday people and the practice of science itself."
"This post is about MDPI, the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, an Open-Access only scientific publisher.
The post aims to answer the question in the title: “Is MDPI a predatory publisher?” with some data I scraped from the MDPI website, and some personal opinions.
Tl;dr: main message
So, is MDPI predatory or not? I think it has elements of both. I would name their methods aggressive rent extracting, rather than predatory. And I also think that their current methods & growth rate are likely to make them shift towards more predatory over time.
MDPI publishes good papers in good journals, but it also employs some strategies that are proper to predatory publishers. I think that the success of MDPI in recent years is due to the creative combination of these two apparently contradicting strategy. One — the good journals with high quality — creates a rent that the other — spamming hundreds of colleagues to solicit papers, an astonishing increase in Special Issues, publishing papers as fast as possible — exploits.This strategy makes a lot of sense for MDPI, who shows strong growth rates and is en route to become the largest open access publisher in the world. But I don’t think it is a sustainable strategy. It suffers from basic collective action problems, that might deal a lot of damage to MDPI first, and, most importantly, to scientific publishing in general. "
"Like a surprising number of scientists, I often feel like I’m an impostor.
I’m not alone in this. Even Charles Darwin, one of the most well-known and accomplished scientists, had days where he felt he didn’t fit in. “I am very poorly today,” he scribbled in his diary, “and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.” This could be straight from my own journal.
This feeling, “impostor syndrome,” is a very real threat to the success and recognition of the scientists who live with it. It can stem from different sources: people (especially women and underrepresented minorities) can be made to feel this way through systemic racism and lack of workplace diversity or support. Alternatively, our internal feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem can be more at play despite supportive environments.
I hope to share what my internal struggle with impostor syndrome (in the sense of the latter definition), in both the queer and scientific communities, has taught me about belonging."
"Just as it is often less expensive to repair than to buy new, extending the service life of a nuclear power plant is way cheaper than constructing a new one. Indeed, in advocating for the long-term extension of existing plants, the IAEA asserts that, on a technical level, “most existing reactors could be safely operated until they are 60 years or older.” In the absence of extensions, it predicts sharp declines in existing nuclear capacity by 2030 in North America and Europe and the retirement of all existing plants by 2060.
But the nuclear plants in the global fleet are old. Two-thirds commenced operation in the 1970s and 1980s, with a then-expected service life of 30 to 40 years. Their builders did not consider worsening climate extremes in their design, construction, maintenance and operation. As a result, keeping plants operating past their prime carries risks to both energy generation and the plants themselves. When new extremes hit existing plants, they could result in a loss of the critical cooling systems required to prevent nuclear fuel from overheating, which can lead to a meltdown.
France came frightfully close to a nuclear disaster in 1999. Storm surge and strong winds during a high tide had pushed waves from an adjacent estuary over the dikes protecting the Blayais Nuclear Power Plant. The flooding forced three of the facility’s reactors into an emergency shutdown. Fortunately, a central cooling pump remained functional, preventing a nuclear meltdown. The specter of utter catastrophe prompted French authorities to spend 110 million euros ($122 million) on flood prevention measures like raising seawalls and strengthening dikes as well as creating a program to monitor future climate impacts on power plants."
"This insane freak purrs like a cat and rips the ground. Major success.We have now demonstrated a workable design with LifeTrac 5. We took the articulated joint that was present in LifeTrac I - to allow long-life on the shafts - which experience much less wear compared to skid steering.
The frame is bolted together from 1/4″x4″x4″ mild steel square tubing. 4 modular wheel units snap right on the frame. Quick-connect hoses are used throughout for plug-and-play interchangeability of parts. 1 ro 4 PowerCubes can be used.
The flexibility of the design is extraordinary – wheel motors are detachable and have quick couplers. The valves are detachable and has quick couplers. The hoses have quick couplers. This means that all these hydraulic components may be used elsewhere, as part of a flexible Lego set for real technology. Moreover, the quick disconnects allow this tractor to operate in 2 wheel drive and 4 wheel drive.
We know of no other machine in this world which features this level of part interchangeability or modularity. This is a feature that allows one to control equipment costs to the lowest possible – not only by repurposing components, but being able to service or repair the machine readily."
"The film’s opening act is set during The Dawn Of Man. The dawn of man is definitely not set in the future, as indicated by its use of Albertus for the act’s title card.
After introducing us to Albertus, the Dawn Of Man turns out to be typographically unremarkable. So, let’s skip forward a little, and join Dr. Heywood R. Floyd on his Pan Am flight to Space Station 5.
In the first of several subtle inclusions of real-world American companies, we discover that the Pan Am logo hasn’t changed much between 1968 and 2001. (We’ll gloss over the fact that Pan Am went bust in 1991.) The cabin crew have, however, adopted Velcro Grip Shoes to counter the weightlessness of space.
The Pan Am spacecraft’s flight deck gives us our first sighting of Eurostile Bold Extended, in an ominous foreshadowing of the HAL 9000 interface screens we’ll see later on. Presumably the Pan Am craft are also controlled by HAL-series computers. And why not? After all, the 9000 series has a perfect operational record.
In a subsequent close-up, we see that the craft also features the IBM logo in its pre-1972 version, set in City Medium, as designed by Paul Rand."
"To date, the research has been equivocal and our recent systematic review summarized these findings (Dobersek et al., 2020). Briefly, we found that the majority of studies showed that meat abstainers (vegetarians and vegans) had substantially higher rates or risk of depression, anxiety, and/or self-harm (e.g., suicide) (Baines, Powers, and Brown 2007; Hibbeln et al. 2018; Matta et al. 2018; Michalak, Zhang, and Jacobi 2012). Additionally, these groups were more likely to be prescribed medication for mental-health issues (Baines, Powers, and Brown 2007). However, some studies suggested the opposite conclusion (Beezhold et al. 2015; Beezhold, Johnston, and Daigle 2010), and the findings regarding other less clearly defined concepts (e.g., mood states, affective well-being, stress perception, quality of life) were less obvious (Beezhold et al. 2015; Beezhold and Johnston 2012; Beezhold, Johnston, and Daigle 2010; Boldt et al. 2018; Pfeiler and Egloff 2018; Wirnitzer et al., 2018).
Our analysis showed that these contradictory findings were engendered by numerous factors (Dobersek et al., 2020). These included the inconsistent categorization of vegans and vegetarians, poor operationalization of psychological outcomes, biased recruitment and sampling strategies (Beezhold and Johnston 2012; Beezhold, Johnston, and Daigle 2010; Lindeman 2002; Perry et al. 2001; Timko, Hormes, and Chubski 2012), invalid dietary assessment protocols (e.g., food frequency questionnaires, FFQs) (Archer, Pavela, and Lavie 2015; Archer, Hand, and Blair 2013; Archer, Lavie, and Hill 2018a; Archer, Marlow, and Lavie 2018b, 2018c), and statistical and communication errors (e.g., failure to correct for multiple comparisons, inappropriate use of causal language). In summary, study rigor and quality appeared to be the greatest generator of inconsistent findings (Dobersek et al., 2020).
While our systematic review (Dobersek et al. 2020) provided rigorous evidence suggesting that meat consumers had lower rates or prevalence of mental health issues, we did not examine the strength of this relation. Therefore, the purpose of this meta-analytic review was twofold. First, to provide a comprehensive assessment of the quantitative relation between meat consumption or avoidance and mental health, and second, to examine the effect of study quality on this relationship. To avoid inconsistent definitions of meat abstention, we captured only studies that offered a clear dichotomy between individuals who reported consuming meat (i.e., omnivores) and those who reported to be meat abstainers (i.e., vegans, vegetarians). Our focus was limited to the two most prevalent mental-health outcomes worldwide: depression and anxiety."
"Under low and medium mitigation scenarios – which do not meet the Paris Agreement goal to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius – vegetation and the best crop-growing areas may move towards the poles. The area suitable for some crops would also be reduced. Places with long histories of cultural and ecosystem richness, like the Amazon Basin, may become barren.
They also found that heat stress may reach fatal levels for humans in tropical regions that are highly populated. Even under high-mitigation scenarios, the team found that the sea level keeps rising due to expanding and mixing water in warming oceans.
“These projections point to the potential magnitude of climate upheaval on longer time scales and fall within the range of assessments made by others,” says Lyon.
Although many reports based on scientific research talk about the long-term impacts of climate change – such as rising levels of greenhouse gases, temperatures, and sea levels – most of them don’t look beyond the 2100 horizon. To fully grasp and plan for climate impacts under any scenario, researchers and policymakers must look well beyond the 2100 benchmark, says the team."
"On the whole, consolidation in tech seems actually to help consumers. Or does it?
Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, a history of antitrust in the United States, makes a compelling case that it doesn’t. More generally, he argues that we are, in fact, in an all-out return of the Gilded Age — and perhaps only the clothing has changed. A professor at Columbia Law School known for coining the term “net neutrality,” Wu argues that the very bigness of present-day companies — especially those in the tech sector — does not just harm consumers, but that it also threatens innovation and undermines the power of government.
In a nutshell: His prescription to end the new Gilded Age is the same bitter pill that ended the old one — trust-busting.
It’s worth revisiting the history of trust-busting, which he does in some detail in his book. During the first Gilded Age, powerful trusts were celebrated as an embodiment of social Darwinism — in other words, as survival of the fittest. As Rockefeller himself said, “The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it.” Between 1895 and 1904, the number of manufacturing companies operating in the United States declined from 2,274 to a mere 157. Those who survived, including General Electric, US Steel, Standard Oil, and AT&T, used predatory-pricing exclusionary cartels and virulent lobbyists to keep rivals at bay.
Few businesses were safe from the trusts, especially from the United States’s most aggressive bud clipper, Rockefeller himself. In 1904, investigative journalist Ida Tarbell said that, for him, “nothing was too small: the corner grocery store in Browntown, the humble refining still on Oil Creek, the shortest private pipe line. Nothing, for little things grow.” Tarbell’s 19-part exposé on Rockefeller’s Standard Oil would mark a turning point in setting public sentiment against the trusts. And it set the stage for one of the earliest antitrust cases, led by President Theodore Roosevelt."
"Canon USA is being sued for not allowing owners of certain printers to use the scanner or faxing functions if they run out of ink.
David Leacraft, a customer of Canon, filed the class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging deceptive marketing and unjust enrichment by the printer manufacturer.
While using his Pixma MG6320 printer from Canon, the plaintiff was surprised to discover that the "all-in-one" machine would refuse to scan or fax documents if the printer ran out of ink.
As ink is not necessary to perform scans or faxes, the argument is that the printer features should continue to work even if there is no ink in the device."
"Without any doubt whatsoever, one of the most important and significant online contributions to the history of science, in all the time that I’ve been monitoring it, has been Lady Science. Originally set up seven years ago by Anna Reser and Leila McNeill, as a blog dedicated to emphasising the role of women in the history of science it became so much more. A magazine with features, essays, commentaries, ideas, reviews, and podcasts, which describes itself as A magazine for the history and popular culture of science. We publish a variety of voices & work on women and gender across the sciences, written by an ever-expanding group of authors, who maintain an impressively high standard of expression.
Sadly, last week Anna and Leila announced that they were closing down Lady Science at the end of 2021 and you can read their explanation why here. They are moving on to new projects and I wish them all the best, whilst shedding a silent tear for the loss of Lady Science.
However, for all fans and supporters of their work, Reser and McNeill published an encyclopaedical collection of their work this year under the title, Forces of Nature: The Women Who Changed Science."
"(This week’s editorial is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of my personal heroes. Bonhoeffer was hanged by Adolf Hitler in 1945.)
Taken from a circular letter, addressing many topics, written to three friends and co-workers in the conspiracy against Hitler, on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship of Germany…
‘Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
‘If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances."