Blogging Transitions: academic blogging when people know who you are

Posted on January 15, 2009 by Chris Rowan

[This is another post highlighting some of my thoughts in the build-up to the ‘Transitions – changing your online persona as your real life changes’ session at ScienceOnline09 this weekend. I was planning to post this a little earlier in the week, but then I got distracted – but you still have a couple of days to post your critiques of my ramblings.]
Whilst this is primarily a science-oriented blog, I do indulge in the occasional post about the trials and tribulations of academic life. This was actually one of those unplanned consequences that I talked about last week, and I did it for some of the same reasons that other academic bloggers do; to get my own thoughts straight, and to draw upon the perspectives and experiences and support of readers and other bloggers. There is, however a difference between me and a large proportion of the people who blog about academic issues in that I write under my own name. This situation does constrain me to a certain extent, both in terms of what I can write about, and how I can write about it. Things have to be a bit less personal – if someone in the lab annoys me, or my boss is being unreasonable about something. I can’t just vent my frustration about it with a quick online rant. That’s not to say that I can’t talk about actual incidents in my day-to-day life, but ideally I should be using them as a starting point for a more general discussion, and not focussing so much on the particular episode itself. Anyone who trawls through my archives will notice several examples of me probably failing to achieve this, but that’s certainly my aspiration.
However, in my experience the most effective academic bloggers are those who are willing to take a stand, and clearly state exactly what’s pissing them off, and just how pissed off they really are. That’s valuable, because it raises awareness – in the past couple of years, my eyes have been opened to problems that I had either missed or dismissed before – and also allows us all to connect the dots; it slowly becomes apparent that the incidents that have concerned you at your institution are not just one-off abberrations, but symptoms of more widespread structural problems – and that you’re not alone in noticing and being concerned about them. But here’s the issue: anonymity gives people the freedom to say things that need to be said, and might be risky to say otherwise; particularly given that the distribution of blogging academics is almost certainly strongly skewed towards the non-tenured side. Does that mean that I’m restricted from making a real contribution to the discussion of academic issues, or to working towards changing things for the better?
A couple of things encourage me to think not. Firstly, the existence of people like Kim, whose blog is full of insightful discussions of teaching and pedagogy, shows that it is possible. Secondly, one thing that struck me about the Aetogate affair was that much of the blogging about it, which was fairly critical of the way that it was handled, was by named bloggers – as can be seen if you look down Mike Taylor’s compilation. Although there was a bit of grumbling from the SVP ethics committee, I don’t think that there was too much blowback for it; it probably helped that on the whole, the discussion focussed on criticising the process, rather than getting personal.
Perhaps this provides at least a glimmering of how I can talk about issues and problems in the academic world without getting a damaging reputation as a trouble-maker. But I do wonder if that risk is over-rated; Julia has made the interesting observation that a lot of the people of our age getting involved with the running of SVP – sitting on committees, and things – are themselves bloggers. Perhaps blogging is just another outlet for people who have latent activist inclinations; in which case, even without the internet attention-whoring, I probably would have got a reputation for causing trouble anyway.

Categories: academic life

Expanding Earth “Philosophy”: Fail

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Chris Rowan

The last thing that I was expecting in response to my post on one of the lesser-known falsifications of Earth Expansion was a defence of their position as “valid philosophy”. But that’s just what we’ve got from Nick in the comments. I’m quoting the most relevant bits of his first and second comments below, but if you haven’t already you should go and read them in full.

But the question at hand about the Expanding Earth hypothesis is a bit harder to address, and I’m not quite sure that the blog really does. I have only crossed one EEer who I felt was intelligent enough to really get into it with. He really put it in perspective for me that the basic premise isn’t about the EEer’s need to ‘negatively test’ every hypothesis that is thrown his way, but is rather to point out that a “theory” is a house of cards that falls down when you pull one out. In the EEer’s case, the card to pull is “subduction”. Now, I am a (geologist masquerading as a) geophysicist, so I accept geophysical models of subduction zones. But if I didn’t, the whole tectonic paradigm might seem a bit thin. Each one of Wegner and deToit’s hypotheses is indirect – from the facies correlations to the pmag that came later. WE accept them because we work through them and are led to inescapable conclusions. But an EEer won’t go there, pointing out (perhaps correctly!) that each piece of the puzzle has a flaw…

…The point is that these guys aren’t creationists, they are valid philosophers.

Which brings me back to my point that these guys are practicing a legitimate form of philosophy. Not science, but philosophy. Creationists in contrast are practicing religion and ideology – i.e. not even challenging our science on its own grounds, saying the whole thing is wrong because it conflicts with their faith. A good EEer doesn’t challenge on the basis of their faith in EE, but does so as a cry against “group think” etc… >

I think that this line of argument is mistaken on a number of levels. Firstly, as far as I’m concerned Expanding Earthers are exactly the same as creationists and ID advocates: in both instances, its obvious that they have started with their conclusion. You can see this in the way that they charge around, picking up on any perceived error or inaccuracy and instantly proclaiming the scientific consensus dead. Even if they are accurately representing a real problem, they will never bother to demonstrate how it undermines an entire theoretical framework – apparently its mere existence is enough, even if it can be shown quite easily that this “fatal flaw” makes very little difference (I’ve noticed a similar attitude amongst the climate change denialists in the past). Then, by default – without bothering to present any argument why this should be the case – their own pet theory is “proven”.
There’s nothing wrong with giving the underlying premises which guide our thinking the occasional intellectual poke – there are many examples of times when a scientific field has been advanced by people doing so. But the EEers’ focus on subduction is nothing to do with the relative weaknesses of plate tectonics, and everything to do with the weaknesses of their own “theory”; it’s the one part of plate tectonics that quite clearly undermines an expanding earth. The point of the last post was that, regardless of whether or not we have a good handle on subduction, we have ample geological evidence that very large ocean basins have closed in the past – which is not something that you would see if the Earth was steadily getting larger over geological time. An intellectually honest plate tectonics skeptic cannot be an Expanding Earth proponent, because they would have to acknowledge that the latter theory is even less successful – it explains less and there are areas where it clearly contradicts the facts on the ground.
Secondly, I really, really have to take issue with this characterisation of a scientific theory like plate tectonics as a “house of cards” – knock out one fact, and the whole edifice comes tumbling down. This picture fundamentally misrepresents the way that all the different strands of evidence – the fossils, the palaeomagnetism, the fracture zone trends, the earthquake focal mechanisms, the sundered mountain chains, all the rest – interact with each other. The different individual “facts” are not arranged serially on top of one another, producing a tottering tower that could be sent tumbling by the smallest nudge on any individual part, but in parallel, with numerous independent lines of evidence providing support for the conclusion. This increases our confidence that we are least broadly on the right track; even if you knock out one strand of evidence, the others are still there, not at all dependent on the one you’ve just “disproved”, and requiring an explanation as to why they are all also pointing to the “wrong” answer.
As an example, we can return to those allegedly controversial subduction zones. A skeptic might highlight uncertainties in seismic tomography, which maps areas of the mantle with higher-than average seismic velocity dipping away from subduction zones; because the colder a rock is, the faster seismic waves can travel through it, these zones are usually interpreted as evidence for cold, subducting lithosphere. However, changes in composition can also effect seismic velocity – so how do we know for certain it’s due to temperature? Well, we don’t if you’re just looking at the tomography data, but there’s the fact that earthquakes extend much deeper in these high velocity zones, as you’d expect for colder and stronger bits of the mantle. Then there’s all the earthquake focal mechanisms which indicate convergence, and the fact you have volcanoes behind trenches, with melt compositions that are what you would expect from mantle melting triggered by the addition of water, in exactly the place you’d expect water to start being driven out of cold slab being pushed into the mantle and heated… So, we could be interpreting the seismic tomography wrongly, but the other possible interpretations are not consistent with all the other completely independent evidence. When you consider everything, subduction is the only explanation that works.
So what is a theory like? Not a house of cards, that’s for sure. It’s more like a table with 20 legs, solid as a rock even if you hack a couple away. Of course even that is beyond your average expanding earther; all they do is give the table a few kicks, bruise their shins and run away claiming they’ve turned it into matchsticks, when in reality all they’ve done is annoyed the geologists round the table by spilling a few drops of their beer.

Categories: antiscience, general science, geology, tectonics

Supercontinent cycles 3, Expanding Earth 0

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Chris Rowan

Old geological theories don’t die, they’re just passed on to cranks – as the Expanding Earth Theory demonstrates. For those who have missed the recurring infestation of Expanding Earthers in the geoblogosphere (Eric, Bryan, Brian and most recently Julia have all been afflicted), and before I explain how the facts of the geological record conclusively falsify their model, I should acknowledge that it does actually incorporate a couple of valid ideas: that you can fit all the bits of continental crust on the Earth’s surface, which are nowadays separated by sizeable ocean basins, back together into one coherent landmass; and that the ocean basins represent a different kind of later-forming crust that has formed between them and pushed them apart.

Indeed, back in the early 1900s, as a way of explaining the puzzling morphological and geological connections between the opposite sides of the Atlantic, the notion that the ocean basins had formed in the gaps left as the Earth increased its radius over time was arguably a more plausible explanation for “continental drift” than Alfred Wegener’s conception of continents moving through the oceanic basins – or, at least, the physically implausible part was moved into the centre of the Earth, where it was less immediately obvious. To advocates of the Expanding Earth, then, the discovery of sea-floor spreading in the late 1950s and early 1960s probably looked like an exciting confirmation of their hypothesis- until geologists ruined the whole thing by showing that ocean trenches are subduction zones, where crust is recycled back into the mantle*. The creation of new crust at spreading ridges is therefore balanced out by its destruction at trenches, removing any need for the Earth to have got bigger – or break several fundamental laws of physics.

Suffice to say, the few remaining Expanding Earthers really, really don’t like subduction, and spend most of their time trying to “prove” that it don’t exist. In doing so, they conveniently ignore the fact that one of the basic predictions of the expanding earth model – that oceanic crust is only created, and never destroyed – is clearly contradicted by clear geological evidence for the presence, and closure, of older ocean basins.

Continue reading →

Categories: antiscience, geology, past worlds, tectonics

Web surfing on your coffee break: double climate trouble?

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Chris Rowan

When you nip away from your computer for a cup of coffee, you can potentially accumulate a fair amount of bad environmental karma. You can overfill the kettle and thus use more energy than you need to to boil the water; you can while away a minute or ten chatting with your colleagues, but not have your monitor set to switch off after a few minutes of inactivity. But it seems that even a bit of web-surfing back at your desk can also harm the environment, albeit in less immediately obvious way. The computer on your desk is not the only one that you’re relying on for your browsing; to function, the internet needs lots of powerful, power-hungry computers, working hard 24 hours a day as they shuttle the latest celebrity news and Twitter updates from continent to continent, computer to computer. Add the power output of all of those servers and routers to the electricity used by the computer on your desk, and it starts to add up. Today, The Times reports on calculations by Alex Wissner-Gross (who also has his own say here) that a typical Google search generates about 7g of CO2. Since boiling the kettle for your cup of coffee produces about 15g of CO2, it doesn’t take much for you to double your environmental impact with a bit of procrastination..
I have no way of checking these figures (indeed, the article admits that they’re not based on anything provided by Google themselves Update: Hypocentre points us to Google’s response). I have no reason to doubt them either, of course, but I’m not sure how useful these numbers really are given that as I read it, the calculation is not simply for the Googling alone, but includes your own computer, which would probably be on anyway – the real question is, what’s the additional impact of using the internet? Still, it’s another example of the total environmental impact of what we do being harder to assess than we may think. If we’re thinking green, we might consider the computer on our desk, but possibly not the whole information infrastructure behind it – an infrastructure that is already generating more CO2 per year than the oft-demonised airline industry. It’s easier to grasp the harm that a jet airliner can do, because you see it overhead, and you fly places in it; the server farm, in contrast, is hidden away and detached from what we use it for.
Similar things seem to crop up all the time: food grown locally using mechanised farm equipment and fertilisers may sometimes have a bigger carbon footprint that crops grown the old-fashioned way overseas. The other week Maria informed us that home baking bread may not be very eco-friendly either. Making informed choices about reducing one’s carbon footprint seems fraught with difficulty, with good information often difficult to find. If anyone knows of any good sources of such calculations, let me know in the comments.

Categories: environment, public science

Error 606 – go and make yourself a nice cup of coffee instead

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Chris Rowan

behind the scenes at SEED

Behind the scenes here at the ScienceBorg, a major upgrade is about to begin. As of 1pm EST, there will be no more posts, and commenting will be disabled until further notice. This won’t really matter to us Brits, since in proper time that works out as 6pm and we’ll already be down the pub. Of course, the Overlords have rather wisely not told us how long it’s going to be before everything is up and running again: the best guesstimate is Saturday evening, which is hopefully before some of my fellow Sciblings snap due to blogging withdrawal and go on a trolling rampage. Watch out, Nature Networks!
Let’s just hope this upgrade fares better than the one to the West Coast Main Line, and you will soon witness the power of this fully armed and operational blogging collective.

Categories: bloggery