social science space http://www.socialsciencespace.com A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social scientists Fri, 18 Apr 2014 19:40:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Please Take A More Open View Of Openness http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/please-take-a-more-open-view-of-openness/ http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/please-take-a-more-open-view-of-openness/#comments Fri, 18 Apr 2014 18:07:21 +0000 Ben Johnson http://www.socialsciencespace.com/?p=12540

openness Mozilla slide

A slide from a presentation about the Mozilla approach sums up an important concept.

In publishing its report on open access journals in the humanities and social sciences Thursday, the British Academy reminds us that the open access debate has a continuing tendency to concern itself with questions of the applicability of open access innovations to particular disciplines.

Openness will require some definition before we proceed. One definition of openness might be ‘for the many, not the few,’ as typified by notions of the public good. Open access has a strong case on these terms alone, irrespective of how limited any public utility might seem to those producing esoteric literature. Another definition might include ideas of multiple party involvement, in contrast to single party ownership. From this perspective, open access creates the potential for new utopias of collaboration and co-creation of knowledge. Thirdly, openness might simply be defined as the opposite of a certain form of ‘closed-ness,’ in which form, content, innovation, communication, benefit and critique are closely circumscribed and controlled by a guild of experts. Such closed-ness is typical of lay criticism of the academy as irrelevant.

Story info here

This piece by Ben Johnson originally appeared on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog as “To argue against open access on the grounds that it damages the reach of research is to undersell research” and is reposted under the Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0).

Each of these aspects has, at some point, encountered strong objections from particular voices within the academy when applied to research. While one ought not to be tempted to knock down straw men when invited to do so, rebuttals are often voiced by those wishing to compare and contrast the more discursive disciplines with those more deeply rooted in the scientific method. In treating each aspect of this definition in turn, we may start to see a bigger picture.

It is somewhat axiomatic that the intellectual pursuits of academics are mercifully free from questions of personal gain; indeed, it is argued that the purpose of the academy is to create the space to nurture such freedoms. However, it is also true that the driving force of self-interest is far from absent from the research world, ranging from the practices of attribution of knowledge discovery to individuals to the vagaries of Cornford’s 1908 Microcosmographia Academica. The process of knowledge dissemination straddles both worlds, in that it is through publication that one converts freely pursued research into personal attribution and credit. Though it is perhaps tempting to reduce the academy in this way, to do so entirely ignores the other side of the dissemination equation: the reader. To ignore the importance of the reader to the publication process is to reduce it to its most venal status, and academia itself becomes meanly extrapolated to a neat irrelevance.

Public funders of research, of course, cannot ignore the reader. We have the right to demand that the research we fund can fulfil its greatest potential relevance, and we have the right to place the burden of responsibility to achieve this on those being funded. Open access is an obvious way to do this, but in making research outputs more openly available, policymakers may entirely respect and preserve the symbiosis of academic freedom and credit: open access can (and I believe should) work within these parameters. HEFCE’s open access policy, with its generous exceptions, shows that it is possible to do this, and in this way, research may be more successfully conducted for the benefit of the many, as well as the few, and in ways that are entirely compatible with the economies of individual benefit.

It is also somewhat axiomatic that the new technologies of the Internet create the potential for new forms of creativity. Openness, through location-independent research and liberated reuse of material, can create new paradigms of co-creation and co-authorship. Such paradigms are often seen equally as enticing and threatening: academics working together and collaborating on new forms of open research have the potential to achieve much more than those working alone, but if this became too widespread it might threaten the highly plural nature of research demanded by the relativist epistemologies of certain disciplines.

Likewise, open access promises to liberate ‘content’ from the strictures of form, allowing maximal use and reuse of material – potentially toward an eventual abandonment of the clearly delineated research artefact. This liberation of research could potentially eradicate the delays present in the current, quantised, artefact-driven research process. But it may also undermine the status of attribution and the integrity of well-established scholarly forms and practices.

Such tensions are part and parcel of the open access debate, and their nature and provenance must be understood fully before we take bold steps to drive new paradigms. It is in this context that a layered understanding of open access is useful: well-established and defined criteria for access to material as its core; more liberated types of openness on top. A layered understanding of open access can be used to encourage innovative, intelligent and careful steps towards openness within the academy. HEFCE’s open access policy aims to do just that.

The very idea of the open academy challenges the assumptions and motivations of some scholars, and open access is perhaps resisted so vociferously precisely because it is seen as disruptive

The third aspect of openness that I want to deal with is that it may act as the antidote to destructive circumscription of academic impact. If we make the mistake of conflating the reach of particular publication venues with their prestige, we not only make a fundamental underestimate of the benefits of open access to individual research artefacts, but we also lose sight of the main goal of public research: the creation of new knowledge and insight for the benefit of all. If we preserve the academic ‘guild’ at the expense of the public benefit it brings, then we have set on a course firmly away from the ideal. It is unimaginative and self-interested, and one can well argue that public money should not prop it up. I’d like to believe that the publicly funded academy can make a better case for its continued existence.

Finally, to the fourth dimension of openness: connection. There is no doubt that ‘impact’ is becoming a more pressing agenda for governments, institutions and funders, and is indeed perceived by some as a pernicious influence on academia. While one would expect research funders to argue strongly against such a perception, I believe there is value in academics adopting a more subtle view of impact. The ‘reach’ of research must be seen as fundamentally bound up with notions of openness, not just the passive openness of research publications, but also the active processes of public engagement, influence over public life, and imaginative application of research in new ways that ‘connected openness’ implies.

There are tremendous opportunities for academics in all disciplines to reach out and make a difference on wider society – to see the work being done by researchers as so esoteric that it surely has little or no value outside the academy is simply wrong-headed. It just requires a little imagination, and encouragement, to see the opportunities for research impact and application, and then to actively pursue them. Making research publications openly available to all who might want to read them is just one dimension of this, and to argue against open access on the grounds that it damages the reach of research is, quite simply, to undersell research.

In sum, questions of openness extend far beyond the effects of technology on the publication of research materials; the very idea of the open academy challenges the assumptions and motivations of some scholars, and open access is perhaps resisted so vociferously precisely because it is seen as disruptive to these. In my view, academics must move beyond this resistance: they have so much to gain from greater openness, and so much to lose by staying closed off from the world.


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1984 Is Knocking At The Door. Let It In http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/1984-is-at-the-door-let-it-in/ http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/1984-is-at-the-door-let-it-in/#comments Fri, 18 Apr 2014 08:00:38 +0000 Mike Marinetto http://www.socialsciencespace.com/?p=12525
Winston Smith in 1984

Actor John Hurt as Winston Smith in a publicity still from MGM’s 1984 movie version of 1984. (Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.)

In George Orwell’s futuristic dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien, an apparatchik of the Thought Police come sadistic torturer, famously boasts to the book’s protagonist Winston Smith, “We create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.”

Specific article info here

This article by Mike Marinetto originally appeared at The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “Nudge can make us healthier even if it’s a bit 1984”

Similar sentiments to those of O’Brien are being echoed, not by the world’s Ingsoc-aping totalitarian states, but by longstanding democratic governments. The UK is a notable case in point. Recent UK governments of all ideological hues have come to recognize the intractability of certain social “problems.” In health this includes smoking rates, obesity and low sign-up to organ donation.

Increasingly, governments have come to favor cognitive approaches that seek to shape people’s lifestyle choices through positive reinforcement, indirect suggestion and incentives, alongside more legislative approaches. This new “educative state” is growing rapidly and its techniques becoming more prominent. In mind-altering circles, it’s simply known as “nudge.”

The individual is not rational

Behavioral economics is the intellectual cornerstone of nudge and one of its most celebrated cheerleaders, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, attacked head-on the most cherished and prized dogma of modern economics: the unshakable belief in the individual as a rational, utility-maximizing homo economicus. But it was the Chicago economist, Richard Thaler, a friend and colleague of Kahneman, who popularized behavioral economics in the form of “nudge theory,” especially among heads of state and within government departments.

In the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, which Thaler co-authored with legal scholar Cass Sunstein, the world is divided into “Econs” and “Humans,” which essentially represent reflective and automatic systems of thinking. The Humans display clueless behavior, unable to make the best decisions for themselves, and irrational forms of behavior dominate their decision-making because the Humans are, in part, dominated more by instinctive, automatic thinking than rational calculation.

This is where behavioural economics and public policy can make something of a “utopian-like” intervention: a third party – a government or a private agency – can manipulate and filter signals so that individuals make informed choices in terms of their own welfare or the collective good of society.

A question of incentives

A natural terrain for nudgery is health and physical wellbeing, and in the UK the Nudge Unit (as the Behavioural Insights Team is known colloquially in Whitehall), which spearheads this approach for the government, has turned its mind to a number of health challenges including smoking, alcohol abuse, obesity, diabetes, physical activity and teen pregnancy.

One recurrent nudge strategy used by the unit is the use of incentives, either monetary or psychological, to encourage healthier lifestyles, so paying people not to smoke. A discussion document published by the Nudge Unit on health cites Bayer’s Nintendo Didget device to make blood testing for diabetes more rewarding for children.

Local government is trying it too. Earlier this year, Stoke-on-Trent City Council began a 10-week pilot to send obese people “motivational” weight loss texts such as “use the stairs more”, “eat fruit and veg” and “keep a check on snacks and drinks” to encourage them to lose weight. The council’s aim is to cut the number of 70,000 obese adults in the city and the £50m NHS bill for tackling weight-related illnesses.

Many health professionals are keen, too. John Strang, director of the National Addiction Centre in London, contends that treatment programmes for hardened drug addicts can be improved by about 50 percent by offering incentives like shopping vouchers (Strang also chaired a watchdog committee which recommended the use of vouchers). For Strang, the use of incentives in curing addiction is both powerful and highly cost-effective.

According to the Nudge Unit paper “evidence on incentives is very mixed” and tend to be more effective in maintaining behavior if people are rewarded intermittently. There are also shortcomings as far as translating initiatives from one cultural context to another so what improves health in the US may not work in the UK. An article in the BMJ also suggested that nudge doesn’t have a consistent track record when it comes to improving health, or as the title put it: “One nudge forward, two steps back.”

A third way

Western politicians have been the most willing adherents of nudge and nudge appeals to both the left and the right of the political spectrum, from Obama to Osborne. For Tory leader David Cameron, who showed interest before the coalition government was formed, nudge theory provided something of a third way between overbearing state intervention and unrestrained free market capitalism.

There are clear implications for a democratic state, for liberal governance and civil society. The emergence of a “ministry of the mind” centers not so much on “libertarian paternalism” – as Thaler and Sunstein call it – but on paternalistic (or behavioral) panopticon. One of the key intellectual godfathers of behavioral economics, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, was aware that the modification of human behavior through the surreptitious use of choice architecture, or as he would put it, “operant conditioning”, raises significant political questions. Not only about freedom of choice for individuals but also who decides ultimately what is worthwhile or good behavior, or what happens when others – again some third party – decides what is “healthy” behavior.The Conversation


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A Radical Democrat: Ernesto Laclau, 1933-2014 http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/a-radical-democrat-ernesto-laclau-1933-2014/ http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/a-radical-democrat-ernesto-laclau-1933-2014/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2014 21:02:35 +0000 Michael Todd, Social Science Space editor http://www.socialsciencespace.com/?p=12517

Ernesto LaclauWell-known leftist political theorist Ernesto Laclau, an Argentinian who made his home in the United Kingdom and with his partner Chantal Mouffe was the leading proponent of the Essex School of discourse analysis and his ideas of “radical democracy,” has died at the age of 78. According to the Argentinian news agency Télam, Laclau suffered a heart attack on April 13 while in the Spanish city of Seville to give a lecture.

“He was the author of landmark studies of Marxist theory and of populism as a political category and social movement,” sociologist Robin Blackburn wrote in a personal obituary. “In his highly original essays and books he demonstrated the far reaching implications of the thought of Antonio Gramsci, probed the assumptions of Marxism and illuminated the modern history of Latin America, rejecting simplistic schemas linked to notions of dependency and populism.”

Political scientist Juan Manuel Abal Medina called Laclau “one of the leading political thinkers of our time,” adding that the theorist’s writings, like New Reflection on the Revolution of our Time and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, “are required reading in all universities the world.” Abal Medina is a former cabinet chief in Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration; Laclau had long been a public defender of the various Kirchner regimes. Another politician, Secretary of State for Culture Jorge Coscia, said Laclau “masterfully combined academic rigor with a deep political commitment to noble causes such as equality and freedom.”

Laclau studied history at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires in the early 1960s and made a name for himself as a Marxist thinker and social movement leader (although he insisted he was never a “dogmatic” Marxist). He left the political ferment of his homeland in 1969 for academic refuge at Oxford, where Eric Hobsbawm supported his entrance.

He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Essex, the institution where he would teach and research for more than 35 years beginning in 1973. From 1990 to 1997 he directed Essex’s Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and he established the school’s Ideology and Discourse Analysis Research Programme. After assuming an emeritus role at Essex in 2008, he took posts at two U.S. universities, Northwestern and the SUNY Buffalo.

In 1985 he and Mouffe — personal as well as professional partners — published their defining work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. While that book cemented their reputations, Laclau continued to produce influential works, such as New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time; 2008’s Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (with Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek); Emancipation(s) and On Populist Reason. His newest book, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society is expected to come out in a few weeks.

As Blackburn wrote:

Ernesto and Chantal used the work of Antonio Gramsci to reject what they saw as the reductionism and teleology of much Marxist theory. Though sometimes calling himself a ‘post-Marxist’ and an advocate of ‘radical democracy’, Ernesto insisted that he remained a radical anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. His criticisms of Marx and Marxism were made in a constructive spirit, and without a hint of rancour.


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Argentina’s Voice of Discourse: Eliseo Verón, 1935-2014 http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/the-voice-of-argentinian-discourse-eliseo-veron-1935-2014/ http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/the-voice-of-argentinian-discourse-eliseo-veron-1935-2014/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2014 17:12:50 +0000 Michael Todd, Social Science Space editor http://www.socialsciencespace.com/?p=12502

Eliseo VeronEliseo Verón, a Buenos Aires-born sociologist and anthropologist whose work introduced semiotics to Argentina, died of throat cancer in the city of his birth on Tuesday, April 15. He was 78.

Verón, the author of 20 books, was one Argentina’s leading academics, and his passing was headline news in many Spanish-speaking countries. “His book The Social Semiosis became required reading material for careers in communication and journalism from around the country,” noted the news site TN.com.

Thanks to an early stint at the Collège de France Verón became a disciple of the prominent French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Argentinian oversaw the first anthology of Lévi-Strauss in Spanish. But after attending a 1962 seminar led by Roland Barthes, Verón’s interests turned more toward Saussurian semiotics, which influenced his activities for the balance of his career and led him to his own theories of social semiosis and discourse.

“One of Verón’s great skills was that he found it easy to solve complex problems that seemed insoluble,” fellow semiotician José Luis Fernandez was quoted (in Spanish) in a release from the Asociación Argentina de Sociología, which Verón founded.

In his later years he was increasingly vocal politically, and his last interview — in November — centered on an amicus brief he’d filed with Argentina’s Supreme Court over a media regulation law.

In the late 1950s Verón studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires where he earning a degree in philosophy. He  then received the scholarship that allowed him to study with Lévi-Strauss. After several years in France he returned to Argentina and served in the sociology department of his alma mater before directing the Center for Social Research at the Torcuato di Tella Institute for two years in the late 1960s. He taught social psychology and sociology at several other Argentine universities, and won a Guggenheim fellowship for sociology in 1970.

That same year saw Verón start an eight year stint as president of the Argentine Association of Semiotics, and in 1974 along with Oscar Steinberg, Juan Carlos Indart and Oscar Traversa he founded the journal LENGUAjes, which firmly established semiotics in the Argentine academy.

He returned him to France in the mid-70s, and he taught at served at several universities, including the Sorbonne, until he returned to Argentina in 1995 to direct the graduate program in communication sciences at the Universidad Hebrea Argentina Bar Illán. Verón taught at several more institutions before settling at the University of San Andrés, where directed the master’s program in journalism for six year starting 2000. At the time of his death, Verón was emeritus professor at San Andrés.

“Eliseo was an outstanding Argentine intellectual who always maintained his creative and inquisitive spirit,” the rector of San Andres, Carlos Rosenkrantz, said in a statement.


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My Textbook is Tracking Me: An Author’s Online Solution http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/my-textbook-is-watching-me-an-authors-online-adventure/ http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/my-textbook-is-watching-me-an-authors-online-adventure/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2014 08:00:15 +0000 Michael Todd, Social Science Space editor http://www.socialsciencespace.com/?p=12483

Statistics can be a hard slog for the students taking the first, and sometimes only, jaunt through this quantitative minefield. But an understanding, or better yet a mastery, of statistics is a requirement for any successful scientific or research career.

Recognizing this tension, Purdue University professor of psychological science Gregory Francis set out to write an introductory statistics textbook that served both the needs students, whether stragglers or savants, and the professors trying to teach a roomful of both.

Francis already knew that most students don’t bother to crack their textbooks –assuming they even bought one. He also knew a fair bit professionally about human behavior, and how people interact with computers. So he took his textbook to the web, and the finished product, known as IntroStats Online (SAGE), debuted last year.  “One thing that drove me to write this was the students told me they didn’t read their book, or it was obvious that they didn’t read the book,” he explained; IntroStats requires engagement from the student and lets the instructor know just who’s been reading and who hasn’t.


Gregory Francis

Like 25 percent of students actually read the book—and these were for introductory biology classes or introductory psychology classes—and it just struck me that this was so strange. We have authors who are taking huge amounts of time, to write textbooks that are really, really well crafted, and students in some cases are paying large amounts of money for these books, and they’re not being used


“I don’t know if that’s a carrot or a stick,” he said with a laugh. But he’s been offered a carrot of his own: the Software & Information Industry Association has nominated the textbook for a CODiE Award as the Best Social Sciences Instructional Solution.

IntroStats is Francis’ first “official” textbook, although he earlier had set up an online lab experience — the well-known CogLab Online Laboratory — where students did classical cognitive psychology problems to get a sense of what authentic experiments are like. “Students would read about them in textbooks,” Francis noted, “but it wasn’t quite the same as sitting down and experiencing it.”

Social Science Space caught up with Francis at the end of a busy day at the Human Brain Project at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where’s he’s been on sabbatical since August. The American is one of the few psychologists taking part in a well-funded international effort to craft a computational neural network model of the human brain.

One of the most striking things about this textbook is that there’s no ‘book’ here.

It is an online textbook, and I think there’s a lot of advantages to having it be online. You get color for free, you get interactivity, you have immediate grading of questions, in some sense you can make certain that students are interacting with the material.

For years I used a standard textbook, and students would come a see me during office hours because there were a number of problems they had to solve, and they would say, ‘I have no idea how to compute this thing.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, if you just turn back three pages, there’s the formula right there.’ And they’d say, ‘Yeah, well I haven’t read the chapter yet.’ [Laughing] You’re in a class where there are homework problems related to the chapter — and you haven’t read it! This doesn’t make sense to me. What occurred to me with an online textbook, I can make sure that they’ve read it (or at least encourage them to read it).

So in IntroStats one of the features that I like—which I’ve never seen in any other online textbook—is that students log in, they go to a section, they read it, and the system keeps track of how long they’re on that page. And in order to get credit for it, they have to be on for a long-enough time (which isn’t that long, to be honest). At the end, they have to answer a couple of questions, very simple questions, and they get credit for the assignment. And so now if I ask that some of my students read sections 5.6 and 5.7 by Thursday, I know that they have.

In some sense it’s easy points for a student to get — which in a stats class is always good! Then I can be confident when I go into lecture that students have read those required sections.

I still have some old textbooks that I saved so I could look up things later. But with this …

I still have some old textbooks, too, but I never look at them. The Internet has changed the dissemination of information in so many ways. In particular for a subject like statistics, where someone can remember ’How exactly do I do a test for two correlations? — I can’t remember the exact details.’ Fifteen, 20 years ago, I would have looked through a textbook. Now I just go to Google and browse around a few sites I like.

I think information’s available to anyone who wants to get refreshed, particularly for this kind of information. But getting refreshed is not the same thing as learning the material in the first place. So I think IntroStats Online is good for the learning process. If people need to be refreshed the information is there, fine. They could find essentially the same information many other places, but it just doesn’t help them learn in the first place.

If you could go back to the beginning of the IntroStats process right now, what would you add?

Statistics is in a lot of flux right now. In psychology—and the textbook reflects this—it’s mostly about hypothesis testing, which is a particular way of making decisions to say whether something is different from what might happen just by chance. There’s a lot of concern about that particular approach when you build theories based on those sorts of analyses.

I think when I go back and do a revision I will attempt to address some of those sorts of issues in a meaningful way and reflect some of those changes that are happening. It’s actually quite curious, because in statistics most of the methods go back a hundred years or so, and so when you make a new version of a statistics books it’s not really about changing the content, it’s just about changing the presentation or the style, things like that.  But that’s really not the case right now. I think over the next five or six years there’s much bigger changes going on.

That’s one of the things I like about the book being online, which is that I can go in and change it relatively easily. One doesn’t necessarily — although my editor might disagree!—even go through a formal revision process. It’s just HTML. You add another chapter, and there it is.

But you’re not going to merrily go about adding material …

In principle it’s trivial to do. I log into the website, I copy and paste the new text, I save, and done. The difficulty is, you don’t want to change an online textbook in the middle of a semester. When the instructor says go read section 5.6, and the students read it, then it’s different content from what the instructor thought — one has to be careful. From a technological sense the actual work is trivial, but from a reasonableness point of view for the instructor, for students, but also for the publisher and the author, it’s a little bit harder to see.

For a textbook, it’s easy — you bought Version 1.0 or you bought Version 2.0. But for a website it’s not so obvious. It seems kind of silly to host Version 1.0 and Version 2.0 simultaneously.

What are some of the challenges of this online textbook system? You’re maintaining a living entity, not looking over static books.

Here’s something I kind of knew from the previous experience with the labs. The most common issue people have is they forget their ID. So when you login you need your ID, you need your password. They forget these things — students forget them so frequently. Well, it’s hard to know exactly what percentage it is, it seems like a lot—of course I don’t see students who pop in and say, ‘I remembered my ID!’ — but there’s enough students who forget. And instructors do as well; instructors are no better than students in this regard.  So you have to have a tech support system to enable that, particularly as people learn to use the new tech system and they’re confused by many things. I handle the tech support for the site, mainly because I need to know if things aren’t working right and they need to be changed quickly.

It is a very different style of textbook where you’re done, you sit back, let the royalties flow in, and maybe think about a revision in a couple of years. On the other hand, on the publishing royalties side, there’s no used textbooks—which are a huge problem for publishers and for authors. I have a colleague who wrote a very successful introductory psychology textbook, and he says with every new edition you see a huge royalty check, and then the bottom drops out pretty much within a semester because the used sales kick in. But for this, there are no used books.

There must be a lot of intro to stats textbooks out there. What did you think was missing, and what do you then bring to the table in IntroStats?

Really it’s just the technology, the online side of it, that I can monitor students’ activity in the book itself. I can say, read this section by this date in order to get credit for the class, and I can see if they do or they don’t. When I teach, that’s part of the course grade. I think particularly in a class like statistics, where a lot of students struggle because they’re not strong quantitatively, these are new topics, it’s strange, students need places where they get sort-of ‘gimme’ points, because they’re not going to do well on the exams and in some cases they’re going to struggle with some types of homework problems. I often look for places where I can say, ‘If you do the work, then you’ll get the grade.’

Technically, they don’t even have to read it. They can put the web browser up, play Grand Theft Auto in a different window, then once the time limit is up they can say they’ve finished the reading assignment, close the web browser, and go on their way. They don’t have to read it, but I think most students do. Anyone who goes to the trouble to set that up is going to go ahead and read it.

I looked into some previous studies about this, and apparently people have looked at how often students will buy the book, and if they then read the book, and it was almost never. Almost never! Like 25 percent of students actually read the book—and these were for introductory biology classes or introductory psychology classes—and it just struck me that this was so strange. We have authors who are taking huge amounts of time, to write textbooks that are really, really well crafted, and students in some cases are paying large amounts of money for these books, and they’re not being used. It just seems like a huge waste. And so I want to try and work around that.

It also helps them to stay up with things, instead of, ‘It’s two days before the exam and I better read chapters five, six and seven.’ Then it’s probably too late.


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How Does False Information Spread Online? http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/how-does-false-information-spread-online/ http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/how-does-false-information-spread-online/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2014 15:51:27 +0000 Farida Vis http://www.socialsciencespace.com/?p=12472

Relay race from 1912

Accurately passing on information requires new methods of hand-off in an online age.

Last summer the World Economic Forum (WEF) invited its 1,500 council members to identify top trends facing the world, including what should be done about them. The WEF consists of 80 councils covering a wide range of issues including social media. Members come from academia, industry, government, international organizations and wider civil society.

The top three issues highlighted for 2014 concerned rising societal tensions in the Middle East and North Africa; widening income disparities, and persistent structural unemployment. Perhaps surprisingly, in 10th place was a concern over the rapid spread of misinformation online, specifically social media’s role in this. At a value of 3.35 this was seen as somewhat to very significant.

Global worries for 2014

False information and the news

Within a number of professions, journalism being an obvious one, the spread and potential for reporting misinformation is a genuine concern. Being first to report breaking news has long been a key value for traditional media outlets. Though this may no longer hold the appeal it once had.

The Conversation

This article by Farida Vis originally appeared at The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “Hard Evidence: how does false information spread online?.”

Now some news organizations are instead placing higher value on being right even if that means not being first in reporting a story. This is probably a result of various high-profile mistakes made recently using social media information.

On the anniversary of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, it’s worth remembering that information posted on Reddit led to the New York Post printing images of two suspects on its front page, who had nothing to do with the bombings.

Following the disappearance of Malaysia Airways flight MH370 in March, NBC news also highlighted various false reports spreading on social media, which alleged that the plane had made a safe landing.

Time-consuming verification practices make it near impossible for newsrooms to compete with social media’s speed. Online verification is increasingly important if this allows for reporting of online information that is factually correct. Trust in the source of information understandably continues to be one of the most, if not the most important asset a news organization has.

Are internet users concerned?

While the WEF data showed the rapid spread of false information as a key trend for 2014, the 2013 Oxford Internet Survey found that trust in the reliability of online information among British internet users has changed very little in the past 10 years.

More than that — and this is especially important in relation to false information and the news — users identify the internet as the most reliable source of information over television and radio (at 3.6 on average, with 5 being totally reliable).

Reliability of Information graphic

The authors note:

This stability suggests that users have learnt to what extent they can trust information online. In this light, we can see that people have a learned level of scepticism about information that can be found online, which is contrary to many expectations of people being unduly influenced by misinformation distributed online.

But even if internet users are not terribly concerned about false information, it remains an issue.

How does information spread?

False information spreads just like accurate information. Important work is being developed on the spread and circulation of online information, specifically academic and industry studies on virality. This work seeks to better understand the circumstances under which information has or may spread. What is clear is that it is difficult to isolate specific patterns, users or types of content that may result in the spreading of information online.

But some patterns do emerge. In their analysis, Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley found the role of “gatekeepers” is central to whether something goes viral or not. These gatekeepers – people who are well placed within a network to share information with others — are often old-fashioned journalists or people “in the know”. Nahon and Hemsley provide the famous example of Keith Urbahn, chief of staff of Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense. His single tweet reporting the death of Osama bin Laden went viral before the president had been able to address the news media. This visualisation by Social Flow highlights the importance of both Urbahn and CNN’s Brian Stelter in the spread of this information.

Industry research by Face also shows that gatekeepers can be important, following on from an emotional trigger and validation by the relevant audience.

A further body of work focuses on a specific type of online content that often spreads rapidly: internet memes. Limor Shifman defines an internet meme as:

a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which b) were created with awareness of each other, and c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the internet by many users.

When it comes to memes, the idea of “false information” takes on a very different meaning compared to how journalists may verify online information.

Take for example the incident of a police officer seemingly casually pepper spraying a group of Occupy protesters at a University of California campus in late 2011. While this incident did take place it also gave birth to a popular meme. This meme shows the police officer Photoshopped in a series of art works as well as well as other contemporary and historical settings. So while the original information is accurate, its further treatment turns it into something else.

With the rapid development of platforms like Twitter, these different types of content (and different types of users, including fake and spoof accounts) all exist in the same place and can relate to the same event, which adds complication.

How do we know it’s false?

When it comes to verifying information online, journalism could be seen as a type of front-line service in dealing with false information online. Initiatives such as the Verification Handbook offer important insights and guidelines about how to deal with different types of false information. It essentially encourages readers to assume online information is false until verified.

Understanding the spread of false information online requires a better understanding of two things. First, how information spreads online; second, what we mean by false information.

In this emergent field of study we need solutions that not only help us to better understand how false information spreads online, but also how to deal with it. This requires different types of expertise: a strong understanding of social media combined with an ability to deal with large volumes of data that foreground the importance of human interpretation of information in context. The Conversation

***

Farida Vis is affiliated with the World Economic Forum. She sits on the Global Agenda Council on Social Media.


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Vote Yes (With Caveats!) for the Destruction of Knowledge http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/vote-yes-with-caveats-for-the-destruction-of-knowledge/ http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/vote-yes-with-caveats-for-the-destruction-of-knowledge/#comments Tue, 15 Apr 2014 17:31:14 +0000 Social Science Space http://www.socialsciencespace.com/?p=12381

Book burning of Cathar texts_optIn Vienna’s historic Burgtheater last week, the pre-eminence of scholarly knowledge was put on trial. And surprisingly, for jurors who were all part of the academy in one way or another, including a prominent academic publisher and a professor of journalism, their verdict was we are not only witnessing the destruction of scholarly knowledge, but furthermore, it’s about time we did.

So the title was, ‘The Destruction of Knowledge, question mark,’” Lawrence Lessig, one of four panelists at the April 6 panel discussion, reflected at the end of the event. “I think we’ve replaced the question mark with an exclamation point, so ‘The Destruction of Knowledge? Yes!’”

Lessig, a Harvard law professor and co-founder of Creative Commons, was joined by onstage by two European academics, knowledge sociologist Armin Nassehi of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (AKA the University of Munich); Sara Miller McCune, the founder and executive chairman of academic publisher SAGE; and University of Tübingen philosophy professor Cornelia Klinger. Moderating the panel was Nicholas Lemann, a professor and former dean at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

In its preliminary stages, the discussion—the culmination of several days of dialog between scholars and publishers – had the English title of “Threats to Scholarly Knowledge.” But in its final form, the discussion was titled, in German, “Die Zerstörung des Wissens?” In English, “The Destruction of Knowledge?”

The discussion was held in both English and German, and panelist Sarah Miller-McCune—the founder of academic publisher SAGE– early on in the proceedings explained how the topic distinguished between “everyday knowledge” and “scholarly knowledge.” The latter, she explained after a question from moderator Nicholas Lemann, the Columbia University journalism professor,  is produced by people who are specialists or exerts in their fields and which is then frequently critiqued by other experts in those fields. “And then,” and importantly, she added, “it is disseminated.”

In German, the word ‘knowledge’ itself is linked to the scholar: wissen for know, wissens for knowledge, and wissenschaft for science, and not just beakers-and-Bunsen burners science but the broader world of human investigation that verges on the humanities and even philosophy. The usage makes its way into the name of the institutional host (with Der Standard) for the discussion – the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen or Institute for Human Sciences.

Klinger, IWM’s interim rector, argued there have always been, and presumably always will be, threats to scholarly knowledge, in particular among the more philosophical branches. But much of the discussion held on April 6 veered away from the abstract and settled on that most concrete of subjects, money. Specifically, where does money to pay for scholarly knowledge come from, where ought it come from, and does it go to the right places.

What follows are some excerpts, in both words and video, from the event.

 ***

Destroying Un-Useful Knowledge – Lawrence Lessig

I’m in favor of knowledge destruction. I think knowledge destruction is an incredibly important step.

If you think about what we Americans knew a hundred years ago, what did we know? We knew that African Americans were inferior; we knew that women were too emotional to vote, we knew laissez faire economics was the right way to think about economics – there was no role for the government in the economy. We at Harvard were just beginning to deal with our own Jewish problem; [former Harvard President A. Lawrence] Lowell was beginning to work out the quota for Jews, that would block Jews from access to Harvard because there were too many Jews at Harvard. And we were just beginning to understand the special theory of relativity.

A hundred years later, only one of those five views is known anymore: We still believe the special theory of relativity. All those other views we now know are wrong. If you look at that, you should day the thing to worry about is the process by which knowledge is destroyed because that’s what brings us forward.

In my view, the way to preserve the destruction of knowledge is to keep focused on the two dimensions which I think are critical to that process. No. 1, independence,  that the producers of knowledge have the right kind of  independence , and no. 2, access,  because the way in which those ‘truths’ were destroyed was by spreading them among a wider group of people so that they could be criticized, so that African-Americans could begin to say, ‘Hey, you know, we are not inferior,’ and women could begin to say, ‘Yeah, you know, actually we’d be pretty good if we could vote.’

 ***

Independence – Lawrence Lessig

The real concern we have in the United States right now is the concern about corporate influence in the production of knowledge, and the ability of the people in the business of producing knowledge to threaten the funders. That’s not just in the sciences. It’s critically in the legal profession, in the production of economic knowledge, the production of sociological knowledge; this threat from corporate funding is pervasive.

***

Grass is Always Greener

Nicholas Lemann: From an American standpoint we think you guys live in paradise because there is such strong support for the state supporting the academy and academic research in particular. But are we being too rosy about that?

Cornelia Klinger: Jah!

 ***

Counter Intelligence – Lawrence Lessig

We have to be appropriately skeptical of counting, of techniques for counting. So your complaints about journalism could be replicated in every other field. In universities in America, because the Reagan administration  created something called the Bayh-Dole Act,  which gave researchers in the university the ability to patent their research findings, and earn money for the university or themselves on the basis of that, has radically changed the nature of research in a couple of ways. No. 1, it’s changed the funding. We fund research departments that will produce patents, and no. 2, as researchers, you’re not as free to share your research. So if you’re in a field in which there are patents possible, 20 years ago or 30 years ago,  you would go a to a conference and  give a paper and talk about your research. Today your lawyers for your university tell you can’t talk about this in public until the patent has been successfully prosecuted. This facility to count the value of the research by the number of patents it produces changes dramatically the character of the research.

We need to find a way to stand up to the counters and say to the counters that’s one way to look at this but it’s not the whole picture.

 ***

A Publisher’s Perspective – Sara Miller McCune

When I look at the economics, if you will, of providing resources for the creation and the dissemination of scholarly knowledge, of knowledge that has been developed by experts that may have been judged by –and usually is judged by—other experts and often criticized and made better by those judgmental experts , I see a pretty huge gap between the public resources, the private resources, the corporate resources that are brought to bear on different disciplines. So medicine, for example, if you’re trying to find the cure for a particular type of cancer, your chances of being funded are much greater that if you’re trying to solve some economic problem which may or may not help the economy provide public goods or might end up developing better bombs to kill people—you don’t know.

The opposite is also true. If you want to spend your next five or 10 years thinking great thoughts, whether they’re in the area of philosophy or creating more beautiful art, or being the next great novelist, poet, playwright, you’re going to have a much harder time to get that funding. Is that “right?” Is that what we want when we talk about public goods? I’m not all that sure.

 ***

Who pays for scholarly knowledge – Lawrence Lessig

In the United States we have to embrace the idea that it comes from the government, much more than we embrace the idea in the United States right now. I think that we have to accept that there’s a need for public funding for public goods. In the United States this is a very controversial idea –it’s kind of amazing, but there it is. The idea that the public needs to fund public goods is something that we have to argue for every day. And we need to do it more effectively, so there needs to be much more support from taxes for public research and public funding . But the commitment, then, has got to be that that research is publicly available , freely available, means licensed in a way that anyone can use it and shared and shareable not just among the rich elite universities  but shareable around the globe. This is the commitment that is nowhere close to being accepted in the United States.

I think one of the ways we get there is the public’s recognition of just how terrible the alternative is. When you can say to the public, ‘The financial collapse of 2008 was bought and paid for Goldman Sachs. And not only that, they profited from the collapse of 2008.’ When the public begins to recognize that the corruption of economic science is catastrophic for the economy, they’re more open to the idea that there ought to be a way to fund economic science that doesn’t depend on Goldman Sachs funding it. So part of the way we’re learning is to point to practical examples of how this compromise undermines peoples’ trust and confidence in what gets funded.

***

How to argue for philosophy – Lawrence Lessig

I don’t think the public is against philosophy. The people who are against philosophy are the presidents of universities who are trying to think, ‘How am I going to fund my university?’  Those presidents of universities who increasingly sit down with Exxon or representatives of Big Pharma are less eager to think about how am I going to fund departments that don’t have that kind of support. And so the real push has got to be to remind the leaders of the academy that they have an ethic which is deeper than the question of what’s the easiest way to fund my university.

 ***

Charity Begins at Home – Sara Miller McCune

Forty-nine years ago when I started SAGE  and was encouraged to do that by my late husband, I did not dream that I was going to be a millionaire, and that was not the purpose of starting the company. It became a byproduct, and I’m happy to not just support myself and my little seven-pound Maltese dog (now that my husband is dead) but also to support some worthy institutions whether they be of higher education or doing other things in what I consider to be the public good.  But just as I identify the public goods I care about, so do some people who have the exact opposite political leanings that I do, and they have even more millions, or in some cases even billions, to throw about, and for every bit of good that I may be doing, in my view they are doing as much or even more harm. How do I live with that? It’s difficult. But it is a reality in the United States. I think in Europe you may be in a similar situation without recognizing it because the money can only come from so many pockets. That money either comes from government or it comes from the wealthy or it comes from corporations. Maybe we should all go out and hunt for gold and there would be more available. But short of doing that, there are only so many sources of funds. What you do with them at the end of the day measures, to some degree, how well you can live with yourself. And how well you live with your society, with where you choose to call home.

***

Our Kids Have Become the New Soviets – Lawrence Lessig


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Tamiflu and the Ethics of the British Medical Journal http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/tamiflu-and-the-ethics-of-the-british-medical-journal/ http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/tamiflu-and-the-ethics-of-the-british-medical-journal/#comments Tue, 15 Apr 2014 09:06:55 +0000 Robert Dingwall http://www.socialsciencespace.com/?p=12409

TamifluLast week, the UK media, both traditional and social, were full of claims that the government had wasted over £500 million of public funds on stockpiling Tamiflu (oseltamivir), an anti-viral drug used in the treatment of influenza. The claims derived from a paper published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) by the influential Cochrane Collaboration. This story, however, tells us less about Tamiflu than about the circulation wars between leading medical and scientific journals, about the credulity of some science and medical journalists, about the exaggerated public expectations of modern pharmaceuticals, and about the Talibanization of the Cochrane Collaboration. If public and professional confidence in a moderately helpful drug has been damaged, it would not be a surprise if there are deaths to be laid at the doors of the BMJ and the Cochrane Collaboration.

No one in this debate is entirely free of prior interests. What are mine? I was a member of ethical advisory panels to both the UK Department of Health (2006 onwards) and Roche Pharmaceuticals (2007-10), the manufacturers of Tamiflu. As with other private clients, the latter work was carried out under a confidentiality agreement. I do not have a problem with this, not least because I do not have a problem with the idea that large corporations are entitled to create a challenge function intended to alert them to potential issues with their strategy and products before these arise in the public domain. If that challenge is performed properly, then the issues do not arise and the corporation’s reputation is not unnecessarily damaged. I do not, in fact, need to refer to information received under that contract because it was entirely consistent with what I saw as a UK government adviser, although I will draw some personal conclusions from the experience.

In 2005, looking at the death rate — as high as 40 percent — among people who had caught the H5N1 influenza virus from birds in Asia, there was a genuine, and quite rational, fear of a 1918-style pandemic. The 1918 pandemic is thought to have killed well over 50 million people: modelling studies in the last decade suggest that a similar outbreak today would result in 80-100 million deaths.

In some respects, medical science has no more to offer now than it had in 1918. Although we can make vaccines, these take about six months to develop and test, so that, in a pandemic, many deaths would happen before they became available. We have palliative measures, like ventilators and ECMO, which may sustain life long enough for the victim’s immune system to respond to the infection — but these require specialist intensive care beds and staff, whose numbers are fixed in the short term, so that access will need to be rationed. Finally, we have a moderately effective therapy, in the form of a class of drugs known as neuraminidase inhibitors. Tamiflu is the most useful of these because it comes as capsules which can be taken orally, and are easily shipped and stored.

In the light of these concerns, the UK government, in parallel with many other developed countries, began to acquire a stock of Tamiflu in 2006. These supplies were drawn down during the 2009 ‘swine flu’ (H1N1) pandemic, and have since been partially replenished. In the light of clinical experience in 2009, the drug is also being used regularly to treat influenza in high-risk groups, although annual vaccination remains the primary strategy for prevention.

However, there has long been a real anxiety within the policy community that public expectations of Tamiflu would exceed what it could actually deliver. The BMJ is talking nonsense when it suggests that national governments were victims of a confidence trick by a wicked drug company. The policy community fully understood the limitations of the evidence and the likelihood that the benefits would be moderate. No insider ever thought it was a wonder drug.

There are good technical reasons for this. Although you might compare anti-virals to antibiotics, they work in a quite different way. Very crudely, if you have a bacterial infection, like scarlet fever, antibiotics attack the infectious agent directly and immediately. If you have a viral infection, like influenza, anti-virals disrupt the virus’s replication so that your own immune system has an opportunity to catch up and deal with it. This is why the benefits of anti-virals are so closely linked to the time at which treatment begins. If you start taking them within 48 hours after your symptoms appear, they can offer a significant benefit because the virus has only replicated to a limited extent: by containing its expansion, your immune system has a chance to get into top gear. After 48 hours, they are likely to be less helpful, because the virus has got further ahead, but they may still have some benefit, especially in patients with unresponsive immune systems.

Now it is a big ask for any health care system to get anti-virals into flu victims so quickly but all those involved accepted that that was the challenge. Anti-virals would not stop a pandemic, but they might slow its movement through the population and buy time for vaccine development. They might also help particularly vulnerable patients — the old, the very young, those with compromised immune systems or underlying respiratory conditions — by reducing the immunological challenge. Finally, and for governments this was a serious issue, on top of reducing deaths and hospitalisations, they might shorten the duration of absence from work. If the extrapolations from all three pandemics of the 20th century (1918, 1957, 1968) were correct, then one third of the population might be sick at some time in a 6-12 week period. How would a government keep the society going — the lights on, food in the supermarkets, streets cleared of rubbish, even ensure that the dead were buried? That is why pandemic influenza appears at the top of the UK government’s national risk register — and remains there despite the low severity of the 2009 pandemic. Politics or Sociology 101: The maintenance of civic order is fundamentally what government is about.

You might also think that there is a problem for any major corporation that possesses what the global population believe to be a unique solution to their distress, especially if they see other people sick and dying all around them. Maybe the ‘nice little earner’ suddenly becomes a poisoned chalice. Some governments have decided not to stockpile your product. Others could not afford to. You cannot ramp up production. What do you do with the contents of your warehouses? Is there any move you can make that does not leave you open to a charge of indifference to global suffering? Plenty of people, including the BMJ, would prefer to blame a wicked drug company than a failure of global health governance.

So what was the experience with Tamiflu in 2009? Coincidentally, a study of the use of this class of drugs — mostly Tamiflu use — was published in the respected Lancet Respiratory Medicine two weeks previously. This found that, in clinical use with almost 30,000 patients world-wide during the 2009 pandemic, the drug did rather more than the symptom reductions claimed from the manufacturer’s trials: it also reduced the death rate among patients who were ill enough to need hospital treatment by 20 percent overall — and by as much as 50% among those who started anti-viral therapy within 48 hours. Even where the therapy started later, there was still evidence of benefit. Would you have known this if you were not a regular reader of Lancet Respiratory Medicine? There was a press release but the journalists who were quick to run a bad news story two weeks later did not follow this up. Indeed, you could read virtually all the coverage of the BMJ paper without being told that an equally serious study had only just published contradictory results.

Here we have a very substantial study of real patients that adds to the body of evidence that Tamiflu is a moderately useful drug, with definite benefits in reducing mortality in some patients, being contradicted by another that says, according to the theory of the clinical trial, it does not work at all. Which one should we believe?

The BMJ is known to run a slick media operation so you might think this is just down to better promotion of their story — which still raises interesting questions about the extent to which modern journalists simply rewrite press releases. It may go a little further than that, however. The BMJ did subsequently publish a letter from Jonathan Nguyen-Van-Tam, principal investigator on the other paper, complaining about their breach of the usual protocol. An embargoed article had been forwarded to the Cochrane Collaboration to produce a statistical critique which was then puffed in a news piece by a BMJ staff journalist. Both critical comments were published in the same week as the original without any immediate opportunity for rebuttal. If you are not familiar with the etiquette of these things, accepted scientific practice would be for a critique to be submitted to the journal in which the original paper had appeared and, if accepted following peer review, to be published alongside a response from the original authors. Although Nguyen-Van-Tam does not make the point explicitly, there is a clear implication that the BMJ have set out to ensure that a paper published by a rival has been trashed in favour of their own. It would be extremely interesting to know what other exchanges went on between the BMJ, Lancet Respiratory Medicine, the authors of the Cochrane paper, and the journalists who cover this beat, perhaps before the Lancet paper was even published — but I suspect we are unlikely to find out.

We now come to the Cochrane article itself. Several other commentators have remarked on the way in which it confuses its meta-analysis with another agenda about the alleged bad behaviour of the global pharmaceutical industry. If you pick away at it, numerous problems do emerge with the original trial designs. Arguably a more honest approach would have been to acknowledge that the basic data were not robust enough to justify fancy statistical manipulations. However, this would be to discount the commitment of the latter-day Cochrane evangelists for taking the hammer of their statistical methods to every problem, even if it would be better suited to a screwdriver. In many ways, it reminds me of the sort of economist who complains that practice must be wrong because it does not fit the theory. Here we have a very substantial study of real patients that adds to the body of evidence that Tamiflu is a moderately useful drug, with definite benefits in reducing mortality in some patients, being contradicted by another that says, according to the theory of the clinical trial, it does not work at all. Which one should we believe?

I never had the good fortune to meet Archie Cochrane, although I know many people who did and I worked alongside some of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration in Oxford in the 1980s. Cochrane’s own work would have an honoured place on my own bookshelf if a student had not wandered off with it in the past. He had a much better appreciation of the limitations of trials than many of his latter-day disciples: ‘Between the scientific measurements based on RCTs and the benefit measurements…in the community, there is a gulf which has been much underestimated…’. On any reading, Effectiveness and Efficiency is a more intellectually generous and less mean-spirited work than much of what has followed. This approach certainly informed the early years of the Collaboration, which now seems to bear about as much relationship to the teachings of the founders as the gospel of the Taliban does to the wisdom of the Prophet.

Where does this leave us? Firstly, Tamiflu almost certainly saved lives in 2009 — and will continue to do so if used appropriately in routine practice as a back-up to seasonal vaccination. Secondly, governments are still properly concerned about the risks of a major pandemic and, from their perspective, even a modest reduction in the severity and duration of illness is worth having for its wider benefits to maintaining economic and social functioning: £500 million is a small price alongside the potential hit to GDP from a 1918-style pandemic. Thirdly, further research and development in the field of anti-virals continues to be important, particularly in finding agents that will work more rapidly and more effectively. Finally, both the BMJ and the Cochrane Collaboration might engage in some soul-searching about the ethics of their actions. Has their evident desire for publicity, and an obsession with the supposed evils of the international pharmaceutical industry, perverted their scientific commitments? Is this really what ‘impact’ means for those who fund the Cochrane work? What is their responsibility for any deaths that may result from undermining public or professional confidence in the benefits of Tamiflu?


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Penny Wise: Why Would Anyone Gut Australia’s Science Agency? http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/penny-wise-why-would-anyone-gut-australias-science-agency/ http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/penny-wise-why-would-anyone-gut-australias-science-agency/#comments Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:46:41 +0000 Ben McNeil http://www.socialsciencespace.com/?p=12400

Penny wise and pound foolishThe Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, is said to be preparing for cuts of up to 20 percent of government funding – that’s around A$150 million – in the coming budget.

This figure is based on a worst-case scenario modeled by senior executives at the organization.

The Conversation logo_AU

This article by Ben McNeil originally appeared at The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “Scrimp now, pay later: CSIRO cuts could stifle long-term research.”

Around 60 percent of the CSIRO’s funding is from the government, and any cuts would be further compounded by the organization’s 700 job losses in the space of only a year.

The Federal Government has not commented either way on any possible CSIRO cuts but while reducing funding might help balance the Coalition’s books in the short term, where would this leave Australia in the long term?

The biggest ramifications of the cuts would likely flow through to fundamental research and long-term measurement programs, whether in astronomy, energy systems or oceanography.

Fundamental research is pursued to understand the building blocks of our world. Applied research is the practical application of fundamental research. No matter how great a practical idea is, without the basic building blocks of knowledge, applied innovation slows down.

Big ideas such as Google or Facebook only exist as a consequence of long sustained investments in basic research from government agencies such as the CSIRO, which came up with technologies such as Wi-Fi.

Even before these big cuts (if they go ahead as feared), governments have become more impatient and fickle with research laboratories who don’t provide short-term output and applications for industry.

Canada’s equivalent to the CSIRO, the National Research Council (NRC), has been transformed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to be a “business-led” research organization, with fundamental research cut dramatically.

Government science agencies such as the CSIRO are invaluable because governments can provide long-term funding certainty for critical research, without needing the short-term revenues required by industry.

University researchers generally can’t undertake long-term research programs since their funding is uncertain and based around three-year grants. But long-term research programs provide the catalyst and knowledge to which many applications can be developed.

Research needs risk-takers

Basic, fundamental research sounds wasteful and frivolous to certain politicians, but in fact is critical for future innovation in Australia, particularly given the recent downturn in traditional industries such as car manufacturing and mining.

Astrophysicist John O’Sullivan, who developed Wi-Fi at the CSIRO in the mid-1990s, wasn’t a particularly successful scientist in the 1980s. He was supported for years to search space for black holes, without any obvious benefit to society in the short-term.

But his research, funded by the CSIRO, was curiosity-driven, something that is already in the firing line for cuts from the government.

O’Sullivan never found those black holes, but in the course of his search developed a technique that revolutionized wireless communications – the modern standard of Wi-Fi we use today.

Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed back to the CSIRO from licenses and royalties – until they expired last year – which came from an initial investment into a little understood space phenomenon.

A move to short-term gain

Like government research agencies overseas, the CSIRO has been slowly morphed into less about big discovery and more about short-term political outputs and being an industry research consultancy.

Any further cuts will accelerate the decline of those many research programs that don’t have short-term industry-based revenue supporting them. That means that long-term fundamental research so important to the cycle of innovation will likely be squeezed even more than it already has.

Just like O’Sullivan’s failed detection of black holes, groundbreaking scientific discoveries most often come from passionate and curious scientists asking obscure questions about the world over a sustained period of time.

The moment we tie short-term political, economic or social goals to science is the moment we ensure we’ll slow down finding those momentous future breakthroughs that science has brought us.

It is a paradox, but one that the government needs to understand before cutting big budgets out of long-term fundamental research programs at the CSIRO.

The Conversation

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Ben McNeil receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is affiliated with thinkable.org, but currently doesn’t receive any funding from that organization.


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Look Up ‘Open Access Help’ in the University Library http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/look-up-open-access-help-in-the-university-library/ http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/look-up-open-access-help-in-the-university-library/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2014 22:26:38 +0000 Social Science Space http://www.socialsciencespace.com/?p=12383
Andrew Waller

Andrew Waller

Social Science Space reported last week how–according to one survey drawn from the STEM fields–Canadian researchers like the principle of open access scholarly publishing but shied away from it when publishers came seeking the author fees this model usually requires. The survey furter noted that a lot of researchers didn’t really know if their funders or institutions might have procedures in place to shoulder the cost of these ‘article processing charges, or APCs.

Some do, as Andrew Waller, open access librarian at the Centre for Scholarly Communication at the University of Calgary recently explained to SAGE’s Jim Gilden. Waller is a noted champion of open access; in 2011 he was named Open Access Advocate of the Year by the BioMed Central, an international open access publisher.

In a wide-ranging half-hour interview Waller answers a series of questions about Calgary’s innovative approach to OA, which includes an Open Access Authors Fund–the first ever established in Canada. (Want one at your institution? Author demand, says Waller, spurred Calgary’s decision.)

Other questions posed by Gilden, a senior field editor for SAGE, include:

What role does open access play at the University of Calgary libraries? How involved are the university librarians involved in vetting for quality OA journals for submission? How does this fund work with the university’s institutional repository? What is the relationship between the library’s OA efforts and their university press? How do the librarians support their university’s OA researchers? Is a university OA mandate in the works?


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