Bad Faith Awards

 
From the New Humanist

After a nomination period that saw you put forward those you feel have made the most egregious contributions to irrationalism and superstition during the course of this year, we've whittled them down to a shortlist of eight. Now all that's left for you to do is vote for the person you think should take the Bad Faith crown from last year's winner, Pope Benedict XVI.

Here's the list. I'm not going to tell you who I voted for.

Lauren Booth
Prince Charles
Baroness Warsi
Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed
Ann Widdecombe
Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi
Cardinal Walter Kasper
Pastor Terry Jones

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Happy Blogiversary Sandwalk!

 
Today is the 4th anniversary of Sandwalk. My first posting. Welcome to my Sandwalk, went up at 9:07 pm on Nov. 4, 2006. I didn't think I was going public when I created that posting but it contained a link to Pharyngula and PZ noticed. He mentioned it on his blog and that was the end of my attempt to experiment in private. Things have never been the same since then.

That first posting was followed by 3506 others and 28,465 comments from readers—most of whom disagreed with me!

Sandwalk pages have been viewed 3,255,306 times. There are about 3,500 visits per day from Monday to Friday and 2,500 on Saturdays and Sundays.

None of my top five most popular postings are science postings. That's kinda sad.

1. Dear Royal Ontario Museum ...


2. A Challenge to Theists and their Accommodationist Supporters


3. Who's the Grownup in the Science vs Religion Debate?


4. Arguing Against God


5. Sophisticated Religion

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Science Blogs vs Scientific Literature

 
Royce Murray is a highly respected scientist. He doesn't like science blogs, a point he makes in an editorial published in Analytical Chemsitry [Science Blogs and Caveat Emptor].

David Kroll discusses Murray's ignorance of scienc blogs in an article on Terra Sigellata [“The current phenomenon of ‘bloggers’ should be of serious concern to scientists”]. I urge you to read Kroll's article to see why Royce Murray is so wrong about blogs.

I'd like to make another point. Murray begins his editorial with ...

If you are a science scholar, you hope that all scientific articles that you read are grounded in fact. There is a lot of background information to guide you, including statistical data on what professional journals are read widely, with papers therein that produce citations by other subsequent papers and in general, influence the direction of forthcoming new science. As scholars publishing in professional journals, we are schooled in the importance of factual reliability and impact of articles we read in science journals. In terms of impact, we know of various collective valuations of journals through metrics like the so-called “Impact Factor”. By extension, editors and reviewers reinforce the meaningfulness of Impact Factors by explicit attention to the reliability of submitted articles; if the Scientific Method has not been adequately followed, then there should be a downwardly adjusted evaluation of impact. The picture of scientifically grounded innovations feeding progress in science is well established. I firmly believe that this system has served science well and that the scientific literature has provided generally reliable information and vast benefits to society over the centuries to the present and will continue doing so into the future.

I don't disagree with the final conclusion; namely that publication in scientific journals has served science well over the past 150 years. However, I do disagree with the general tone of this paragraph because it fails to recognize the poor quality of many papers that are published in the scientific literature. The focus on "impact factor" is especially disappointing since it caters to "me-too" science and not true innovation and risk-taking.

Royce Murray's criticism of science blogs would be a lot more credible if he were more honest about the limitations of the scientific literature. The lack of credibility in the scientific literature is often responsible for bad journalism and leads to an incorrect view of science among the general public. How many times have you seen an article in the popular press that's based on a bad scientific paper? How many times do we have to read about new cures for cancer before we admit that the scientific literature isn't all it's cracked up to be? And let's not even talk about fields like evolutionary psychology.

Fact is, the peer-reviewed scientific literature hasn't been very successful at weeding out bad science. It's about time we recognized this and tried to find a way to fix it. One of the advantages of blogs is that they frequently highlight the bad papers that make it into the scientific literature—they also point to the good papers.

Before blogs, there was no good way for the scientific community to critique the scientific literature. Some scientists think that papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature should be immune from such criticism from the outside. They think that the only criticism should come from within the scientific literature. In other words, if you don't like a paper you have to publish another paper refuting the science.

One of the strange things about this attitude is that those very same scientists are very happy about issuing press releases and very happy to have their work praised in the popular press.

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Right On!

 

sandwalk.blogspot.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and happy most of the time.

Except that I'm only 64. See UrlAi.com.


I was so impressed by the accuracy of this analysis that I decided to check out some other blogs. Here's the result for Post-Darwinist.

post-darwinist.blogspot.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 26-35 years old. The writing style is academic and upset most of the time.

I don't think Denyse O'Leary is going to be happy about this! Three of the four conclusions are wrong. The only one they got right is that she is upset most of the time.

On the other hand, John Wilkins will probably be pleased with,

evolvingthoughts.net is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and upset most of the time.

It's always flattering to come across as being older and wiser than you really are!

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Hat Tip: Friendly Atheist: This is Why You Can’t Trust Blog-Analyzing Websites

Tell Me Something I Don't Know

 
Chad Orzel is bored so he asked his readers to Tell him something he doesn't know. It's lot's of fun reading the comments on his blog so I though I'd ask for more.

Can you tell me something I don't know? I can assure you that there's plenty of opportunities.

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You Can Skip This One

 
Some people are enamored with the idea of collecting blogs together into some kind of consortium. Several of these people, Anton Zuiker, Bora Zivkovic and Dave Munger, were so traumatized by the defections from ScienceBlogs they decided to create a new site bringing together all the science blog groups [scienceblogging].

Summer of 2010 saw a rapid reorganization of the science blogging community. Where once ScienceBlogs reigned as the most important network of science bloggers, in the wake of many noted bloggers’ departure from ScienceBlogs, a new ecosystem arose in which many different networks were founded, or grew, and became much more visible and prominent.

While the change from a system in which a single network dominates to a system in which many networks, aggregators, and services are somewhat equally represented is a positive one, leading to a healthier overall ecosystem, this development posed a new difficulty for readers: how to keep track of all of these networks and blogs?

There is now no one-stop-shopping place for a daily fill of science and culture – instead, there are dozens of such places. Thus a need arose to aggregate all these networks in a single web page as a starting point leading to all of the diverse places where science is discussed online.

Is your blog part of a "network"? Mine isn't. If you don't belong to a group of science bloggers then you don't count as far as scienceblogging is concerned. Isn't that strange?

Don't bother with scienceblogging unless you share their opinion that independent science blogs aren't worth reading.

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Visitors

 

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Blogging Ethics

 

As Canadian Cynic notes, this applies to bloggers as well. It would be unethical for me to mention on my blog that I'd like Apple to send me a free iPhone 3Gs and a free iPad.

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What Is This?

 
Some of you might not be regular readers of Panda's Thumb. If you're one of them, shame on you. Check it out to see what kind of an organism is shown in the photo. Is it animal, plant, fungus, protist, or bacterium?

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Who Does This Remind You Of?

 

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[Photo by Ms. Sandwalk]

Boycott Science.org

 
We all get spam in our mail box and usually there's nothing you can do about it. This time there is. I got this message today.

Subject: Award Acknowledgment for sharing great PHYSICS information to the public

Dear Blog Owner,

Our website Science.org is a informational databases and online news publication for anything and everything related to science and technology. We recently ran a poll asking our website users regarding what online informational resources they use to keep up to date or even to simply find great information. It seems many of our users have labeled your blog as an excellent source of Space information. We have reviewed your blog and must say, we absolutely love the information you have made available to the public and would love to make your blog a part of our top science blogs. After browsing your blog, our research team has decided to award you a Top science Blogs award banner.

It is a distinction we offer to the blogs that our team feels is ahead of the curve in terms of content.

Thanks again for the great information and we look forward to the great responses your blog will receive from our site. Your blog presence will be very effective for our users (top science blogs).

We have put great efforts in making this decision to give deserving with award acknowledgment. For listing please reply to request banner.

Sincerely,
--
William Lee
Research team
Science.org
1 international blvd
Mahwah NJ USA - 07430
201 247 8553
editor.science@gmx.com

It turns out that Science.org is an actual website. Mr. Lee apparently believes that by lying to Blog Owners he can enhance the reputation of his website.

That ain't gonna work. Any website that emails such lies does not even deserve a link.

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Howler Monkeys in New York

 
Here's a photo of some Howler Monkeys in New York City. I've met some of them. I'm not sure I want to meet the others ... just kidding. :-)

How many can you recognize? (Check here for their identities.)

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Map That Campus Returns

 
After a lengthy hiatus, the ever-popular feature on Alex Pallazzo's blog has returned. See Map That Campus XLVII. (Extra bonus points if you can translate XLVII into a real number!)

There's actually three campuses this week. You need to get all three before you can pat yourself on the back. No looking at the comments before giving your answer!

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Lunch with a winner

 
Cody Cobb was the winner of Monday's Molecule #129. He lives in New Jersey where he is about to start graduate school at Rutgers.

If you live in New Jersey you look forward to traveling, so Cody decided to fly up to Toronto for the day to collect his lunch. Because this was his first time in Canada, I decided to splurge and take him to a restaurant with white table cloths.

Cody has been blogging for many years—much longer than me. We had a good time talking about blogs and their lack of impact on science. Here we are at lunch with Alex Palazzo, another blogger [The Daily Transcript]. Note that Alex has a beer in front of him. This is proof that I've paid off on the bet we made a year ago.

Of course no first time visit to Canada would be complete without ...

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How Many People Have a Tape Worm Named After Them?

 

How many people have a tape worm named after them? Quite a few, as it turns out.

Do you know any of these people? Yes [A Tapeworm To Call My Own].

Ugh!

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Another Blogger Leaves the SEED Blogs (ScienceBlogs.con)

 
Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge is the latest blog to jump ship. That makes three or four blogs that have left the SEED group in the past few weeks. Most of them have been fairly cryptic about their reasons for leaving but Kevin Beck hints at something sinister happening behind the scenes [Bon(obo) voyage: the chimps are loping away from ScienceBlogs.com].

I also want to be open about what I say without fear of being castigated as a misogynist (a term often used inaccurately - try "sexist," folks), a tremendously ironic notion given that I harbor genuine ovaries (although going dormant) and had some pretty hair-raising experiences during my fairly long scientific career which allow me to speak from a solid platform of experience and credibility.

The latter sniping derives from my stumbling upon some very shoddy behavior in the back rooms of Science Blogs, stuff that removed any doubt that leaving Science Blogs for an independent venue was the thing to do. The majority of the folks that blog here do not participate in this -- uh -- "community" forum, but the ones who do are fairly heavy hitters and like it or not, they set a tone.

Does anyone out there want to explain this? What's going on n the back rooms of ScienceBlogs?

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March on Sandwalk

 
Bora's doing it and Greg Laden is doing it. They're revisiting their posts from last month.

Now I'm doing it too.

Last month Sandwalk attracted 107,747 page views and 75,156 visits from all over the world. That's a new record. I posted 123 times.



The month began with an account of my streetcar ride and the atheist sign campaign in Toronto [The Streetcar We Desire]. I also celebrated the 35th anniversary of my thesis defense.

There were three debates that took up a lot of posting time.

One of them was about positive selection in humans, especially the idea that human evolution might have accelerated in the past 10,000 years. I tried to explain why some of the data looks suspicious in Signals of Positive Selection in Humans?.

We also talked a lot about the quality of science journalism. The two topics were combined when I reviewed SEED magazine's coverage of a recent book on accelerated human evolution [SEED Reviews The 10,000 Year Explosion].

The third debate was about Canada's science minister, Gary Goodyear, and the fact that he is a creationist [Gary Goodyear "Clarifies" His Stance on Evolution].

I'm pretty proud of this posting: Casey Luskin on Junk DNA and Junk RNA. It generated some comments and got a mention on several blogs.

Speaking of comments, one other posting caught the attention of Sandwalk readers and stimulated comments. You were interested to know why I Hate Cilantro/Coriander!.

In terms of most popular postings there was nothing in March that's going to make the top 20 postings. I still get a lot of traffic from people who want to learn about The Genetics of Eye Color from a posting in February 2007. Another popular posting is The Genetics of ABO Blood Types, also from February 2007.

As usual, there were lots of people who tried to guess Monday's molecule. There are a small number of regulars who get most of the prizes, The rest of you are going to have to be faster. I think I'll try and post much earlier in the day to give my European readers a better chance. We don't need to worry about giving the Australians a chance 'cause they probably wouldn't win anyway! :-)

We had an interesting group of Nobel Laureates. These postings always get looked at but nobody leaves comments. I guess there isn't much to say. The most interesting Nobel Laureates from my perspective were Frederick Banting and J.J.R. Macleod because they're from the University of Toronto. Several of the recent prize winners were controvesial, especially Selman Waksman.

Does anyone have suggestions for future postings?

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2,296,911 visits?

 
It's April 1st and PZ Myers tells us that Pharyngula had 2,296,911 visits last month [What are all you people doing here?].

Problem is, I don't think this is an April Fool's joke.¹

There are already 225 comments to that posting, which is probably what PZ means when he asks what everyone is doing there. Now he knows—they're posting comments!

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Sandwalk had 107,747 visits or less than 5% of the number that visited Pharyngula.

The Future of Science Blogging

 
Daniel Brown of Biochemical Soul is looking for feedback on the future of science blogging [Science Blogging: The Future of Science Communication & Why You Should be a Part of it].

Personally I don't think the science blogosphere is going to attract more than a few percent of scientists and science students. Most of them don't have the time or the interest. Most of my colleagues are completely turned off by blogs. They see blogs as a negative influence on science.

The science blogosphere is a fun and interesting playground for those of us who have eclectic interests and are willing to invest the time and effort to read a few dozen blogs a day, but that's not going to appeal to the average scientist. Daniel does a good job of listing all the benefits of blogging and reading blogs but, in my experience, none of these benefits are convincing for the average scientist.

Frankly I think that's a good thing. My experience with newsgroups over the past twenty years indicates that it's much better to have a small number of really dedicated and interested participants than to try and expand to cover everyone. Besides, the more science blogs there are out there, the most difficult it is to read them all.

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Happy Birthday PZ!

 
Today is PZ Meirirz birthday.

So far he's not having a good one [No More Birthday] so don't bother to send him an email message.

Wait until tomorrow.

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