Disproving sex-based biological determinism in one graph from No Ceilings, with more data on the phenomenon at their website.
HT: @Bailiuchan
Biological Determinism is False
Category: Follies of the Human Condition
Amateur Racism
NBA basketball, well all basketball, well, really, all sports are not what a metaphysical philosopher would call “important”. University of Michigan* professor Yago Colas’ deconstructing criticism of LeBron James to reveal the inherent class and racial biases in perceptions of modern basketball is important. You don’t need to care about the NBA or LeBron James to need to read this post. You simply need to care about how our cultural idioms reinforces social inequality – and, if you don’t care about those things…WOW:
Referring to the athlete who plays for the love of the sport, the concept [ameteurism] came to imply…the amateur is motivated by rewards intrinsic to the sport, rather than by extrinsic rewards such as fame or money…This effectively kept working class athletes, who had neither the resources nor the leisure time, from challenging upper-class domination of sport so that, in effect, amateurism “established a system of ‘sports apartheid’ with white males from the upper classes enjoying the advantages.”
Because the amateur ideal took root in basketball culture while the sport was still segregated, the values came unconsciously to be associated with whiteness.
–Yago Colas, “On LeBron James and Coaching”
I also thoroughly endorse Yago’s suggestion that LeBron become the first player-coach-owner in forever.
*It take a lot for me to say nice things about the State Up North. GO BUCKS!!!
Science for the People: Biohacking
This week Science for the People is talking about do-it-yourself biology, and the community labs that are changing the biotech landscape from the grassroots up. We’ll discuss open-source genetics and biohacking spaces with Will Canine of Brooklyn lab Genspace, and Tito Jankowski, co-founder of Silicon Valley’s BioCurious. We’ll also talk to transdisciplinary artist and educator Heather Dewey-Hagborg about her art projects exploring our relationship with genetics and privacy.
*Josh provides research & social media help to Science for the People and is, therefore, completely biased.
Sunday Science Poem: How Fossils Inspire Awe
Lindley Williams Hubbell’s’ “Ordovician Fossil Algae” (1965)
To become a fossil, it takes a lot of luck. Your carcass needs to be buried rapidly and then lie undisturbed for tens of thousands, hundreds of millions, or even billions of years. It’s a process that seems best suited to tough, hardy organisms – ancient sea shells, armored trilobites and giant dinosaur bones are what typically comes to mind when we think of fossils. Delicate and beautifully detailed fossils of the gently curved leaves and stems of exotic plants, the veined wings of strange insects, and the mussed feathers of dinosaurs defy our expectations. Fossils that capture such fragile details are a startlingly clear window to an alien world. At the same time they make that world seem very familiar.
In Lindley Williams Hubbell’s poem about fossils, it’s this defiance of expectations that induces a sense of awe and a feeling of the continuity of life across “some odd billion years.” Hubbell is particularly inspired by the fern-like fossil algae from the Ordovician Period, which followed the Cambrian, beginning about 490 million years ago and lasting for about 45 million years. The Ordovician was a great period of invertebrates and algae, all living in the oceans. Vertebrates, particularly jawless, armored fish, were also beginning to show up in greater numbers. And by the end of the Ordovician, there was a major development: the earliest fossils of land-dwelling organisms appear. It was a time of major change and and also major extinction. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: How Fossils Inspire Awe”
Great Experiments in Science Publishing
It’s a great time to follow scientific publishing: right now there are some innovative and even radical experiments happening. Open access has, of course, been the biggest (and most successful) experiment. But figuring out how to run a good journal without a paywall is more of an economic innovation, rather than an innovation in how we communicate science. There are other fascinating experiments underway that go beyond open access.
PLOS One goes all-in on post-publication peer review, publishing papers after a review for methodological soundness, and letting the community decide whether the work is significant. eLife tries to make the traditional publishing approach less wasteful by forcing editors and reviewers to talk to each other to produce a consensus review. Faculty of 1000, PeerJ, and The Winnower are trying various more radical experiments in peer review. And Academia.edu and ResearchGate are both trying to harness the power of social media to help researchers communicate their work with each other.
These are fascinating experiments, but do they work? It’s a hard question to answer, but in my latest Pacific Standard column, I take a look at a recent study by Academia.edu, which found that papers posted to their site had a citation advantage — on average, 83 percent more five years after publication. The study is not published in a peer-reviewed journal (for now), but it’s out there for the community to review: the authors have released all their code and data alongside the report.
The question of whether there is a citation advantage for certain types of publications (e.g., open access journals) has been controversial and hard to resolve. There are clearly many potentially confounding variables that have to be controlled for if you want to make a convincing case. The Academia.edu study takes a stab at this, and it is a provocative attempt to get the scientific publishing community to focus not just on the question of open access in general, but specifically on how it’s implemented:
Beyond Academia.edu, our work raises questions about how characteristics of venues matter for open access citations. To our knowledge there has been no research on what features of open access repositories or databases make articles easier to discover, and to what extent that leads to increased citations.
As Academia.edu’s founder, Richard Price told me, we need to explore whether savvier use of social media tools will make for a better publishing system, one that helps people find work that otherwise would have gone unnoticed:
Certain open access platforms are push networks: articles are pushed out to followers on upload, and sometimes there are viral properties where followers can re-share the article with their followers. A tentative conclusion is that push networks with viral properties generate more exposure for papers, and this exposure leads to citations.
The Finch and Pea 