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evangelical August 30, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : language , add a comment

New to my blogroll, thanks to this TED Talk and my tangential, ongoing interest in language…
…for example, Language Log is also on the blogroll — oh, and this book I can’t recommend enough…
…is the Dictionary Evangelist. Worth a look if you like words.

???? of mein favorite English words? Macaronic.

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the bad old days August 29, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : economics , 1 comment so far

Something I’ve noted on economics-related blogs, books, podcasts, etc. is statements regarding how much better off we are now then were our predecessors.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m certainly not denying that life for the majority of people has improved vastly as time has moved on; and this trend is even more pronounced in the West in recent times (that is, in the last century or so). Things have gotten better for just about everyone and things have gotten much, much better for what is perhaps a significant portion of humanity.

What I don’t like is what I see as an implication that this is some sort of justification of our current state of affairs. I’ve encountered this plenty of times in the military — pointing out how much less things suck at time/place A compared to time/place B as an attempt to justify conditions at time/place A.

Just because thinks suck less at A doesn’t mean they don’t suck. Just because we’re all better off than were people in 18th century London, or because the impoverished in St. Louis are better off than the impoverished in, say, Kenya, doesn’t make our, or their, circumstances somehow okay. This line of argument is self-defeating: if the fact that the average human is better off living in 2007 than the average person was in 1907 is a reason to state that things are good in 2007, the same logic means that things were good in 1907 — after all, the average person in 1007 was better off than the average person in 1807, who was better off than the average in 1707, and so on. It may seem nice and refreshing, putting things into perspective, but it’s really just an argument against pushing further to improve our common lot. After all, don’t we want people in 2107 pointing out how much things sucked today?

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weekly photo #45: Sunshine August 25, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : other , 2comments

Sunshine
I’ve called this one “Sunshine”. As I’ve said before, I’m not one for photos of people. But hey — they’re my kids, and I’m allowed to make exception. Before you start complaining about the obvious setting of the photo: it was a wedding; I had no choice!

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peerless August 24, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : open access , add a comment

So, via Cognitive Daily, I found about BPR3 (developing an icon to indicate peer review), which is in and of itself an interesting concept. For me, though, a couple of posts on peer review were more interesting.

What is peer review? Should the practices at PLoS ONE be considered peer review? Can the editor be trusted? Can the reviewers be trusted?

I’m not sure if these are the right questions. Especially ‘What is peer review?’
‘What is the intent of peer review?’ sounds like a better question to me. If I’m not mistaken, the intent is for people who know what a work is supposed to be about to weigh in and decide if the work is valid within that field. It is supposed to serve as a self-check for the field, whether it be to weed out completely bogus work or simply correct oversights and errors.

If that is indeed the essence, if that’s what peer review is attempting to accomplish, then does it matter so much what the details are? Is there a minimum number of reviewers required to do this? Do they need certain qualifications? If one chases the rabbit of peer review too far down its burrow, pretty soon we’ll all be stuck with nothing be peer-reviewed as we come up with more and more loopholes and chinks in the armor that need to be protected against abuse and misuse.

The process as it currently stands seems to me to be great for a print-based world, where things move (relatively) slowly and information of the scientific-research-paper sort traveles by mail. We no longer live in that world, and I don’t see much reason to maintain its practices. Of course research needs to be carefully considered, its validity and impact weighed.

There’s no way two or three or even three dozen reviewers can do that work as well as the scholarly community as a whole can. With the ability of libraries to afford subscriptions to every journal dwindling and the ability of people to access information electronically rising, the way that information is being distributed is changing. A system where a few reviewers must decide what information to send out to everyone else is set up for the by-mail world. It was necessary, due to the costs and methods of distribution. Such distribution methods are no longer necessary, and the reason we need gatekeepers has changed. Rather then decide what information warrants dissemination, the main purpose now must be to decide what information warrants filtration, expulsion, and what should be spotlit.

Instead of trying to defend keeping control over publication of research in the hands of a limited number of people, we should be trying to find ways to expand the communities’ ability to broaden how review is conducted by authors’ peers and maximize the number of people who have a say in the validity of research.

What is peer review? It’s review of a work with an eye to validity by the authors’ peers. Editing, manuscript review, refereeing, publication, rebuttal, and citation are all forms of review. I see what PLoS is doing as furthering movement to where we need to go — because the more review we get (both pre- and post- publication), the more robust our science will be and the better our progress towards knowledge.

Is it perfect? Hardly. Is there room for error? Of course there is — but nothing is foolproof. Transparency and reproducability matter more in the review process, I think, just as they matter more in the experimentation process. I, for one, fully support PLoS’s innovations and say we need more, not less, of the same.

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it’s official August 24, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : other , add a comment

After another great post, I’m going to make it official: if you haven’t yet, you need to spend a day or so reading through just about everything over at Overcoming Bias. And pay attention to the posts by Mr Yudkowsky.

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the usual August 23, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : society , add a comment

Another worth-a-look-a-thon… well, two.

First, Overcoming Bias with an interesting post about scientific ideas, or, perhaps, lack thereof, among society.

Next, and for me even more interesting, is this post and comment thread over at A Blog Around the Clock, on peer-review at PLoS One (and peer-review in general).

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weekly photo #44: Not A Step August 17, 2007

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NotAStep
This week’s photo is one of only two that I have from Almaty, where I worked at the embassy for a month or so. It’s from a park nearby, where I walked pretty much every afternoon. If you can’t guess from the flame and wonderfully Soviet sculpture, it’s a memorial from the Great Patriotic War (known here in the West as double-ya double-ya eye eye).The Russian quote (I can’t make out or recall the source) reads:

Велика Россия, а отступать некуда позади Москва!
(Russia is great, and will not give any ground beyond Moscow!)
[translation mine]

Hence the title, “Not A Step”.

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sliced bread August 13, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : other , add a comment

If you haven’t dropped by Overcoming Bias lately, there are three posts to check out. Eliezer’s on a roll.

First up, defying data. Data is not the god that some worship it as.

Second and third, two (sequential) posts on the somewhat tired line about absence of evidence.

Definitely worth a look.

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weekly photo #43: Ali’iolani Hale August 11, 2007

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Aliʻiōlani Hale
This week’s photo, “Ali’iolani Hale”, is of a rather stand-out building in Honolulu, Ali’iolani Hale. (I really need to come up with better titles for these photos.) According to The Source of All Knowledge, Ali’iolani Hale was the seat of government before conq… err… statehood, and is now the home of Hawai’i’s Supreme Court.The statue in front of the former palace is of King Kamehameha V.

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