Bill Silvert writes: > I think that Patrick Foley has the right idea - let's just put our ideas out > there for everone to criticise.
This is an important topic, and it's not one just debated in ecological circles. Every scientific and technical discipline is repeating the debate. In that regard, let me offer three opinions somewhat contrary to Bill's and Patrick's. The first comes from Charles Cooper, editor of C|Net, an on-line technical site for computer professionals in the Bay Area. Cooper wrote just a month ago: ======================================================== Web 2.0--the folly of amateurs? By Charles Cooper http://news.com.com/Web+2.0-the+folly+of+amateurs/2010-1025_3-6173903.html Story last modified Fri Apr 06 05:21:42 PDT 2007 Andrew Keen doesn't fit the profile of your garden-variety bomb thrower. But make no mistake about this erudite British-born entrepreneur: He is out to rattle Silicon Valley and the geekerati by detonating many of the comfortable myths attending the Web 2.0 era. In a deliciously subversive new book, "The Cult of the Amateur," which debuts in June, Keen recounts the many ways in which technology is remaking our culture and society... The subtitle of his book states his thesis bluntly: "How the democratization of the digital world is assaulting our economy, our culture, and our values." Keen bemoans the advent of "an endless digital forest of mediocrity" as the number of new blogs doubles each six months. Them be fighting words, to be sure, and Keen is being purposely provocative. But he's worth reading. Keen's not writing from the uninformed point of view of a technophobe. In his previous life, he was the founder of Audiocafe.com. That said, he's not at all happy about where things are headed, bemoaning the advent of "an endless digital forest of mediocrity" as the number of new blogs doubles each six months. Here's a typical snippet: "If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture [and especially science]. Blogs have become so dizzyingly infinite, that they've undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary. These days, kids can't tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com." Keen finds little to celebrate in the rising cult of the amateur. Same for the emerging age of citizen journalism, and he frets about the growing influence of short-form bloggers at the expense of the wisdom of long-form essays of scholars and experts. He worries about the wisdom-of-the-crowd phenomena represented by the likes of Wikipedia or YouTube and the impact they're having on an ADD-prone generation that embraces editor-free news sites. Technology is our friend? Don't kid yourself, is Keen's response. The crowd has often proved itself to be anything but wise. We may have strong opinions but so many of us remain uninformed. =========================================================== The second opinion comes from Matt Cartmill of the Duke's Biological Anthropology Department. Before reading the article below I only knew Cartmill by this quote of his, which is one of my favorites: "As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls." Cartmill's father is famous among science-fiction devotees, and he talks about not only that fame but the subject at hand in a "View on Science" note he wrote in the American Journal of Physical Anthropolgy seven years ago. The full text of his note is at: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/73500863/PDFSTART I've copied the most relevant parts of his note here: =========================================================== Twenty years ago, the only way to secure a worldwide audience for a new idea or discovery was to get it into a prestigious international journal. Nowadays, anyone who knows how to set up a Web site can secure a worldwide audience in a few hours. And an on-line journal is just another Web site. The potential audience for an article in Nature on line is exactly the same as that for an article posted on the Web by the kid down the block namely, anyone, anywhere, any time, who wants to read it. The kid down the block may even have a few advantages over the Nature Publishing Group: he can track new trends and technologies more rapidly, and people can read his stuff for free. The 21st century is going to be the golden age of samizdat self-publication. We ought to welcome this development. It makes more sense to circulate ideas by pushing electrons than by moving millions of tons of paper around. And the democratization of discourse that the Internet makes possible is a good thing in itself, at least in principle. But the new regime also poses some big problems for science and education. For one thing, the Internet makes it possible for holders of any minority opinion to attain critical mass by pulling themselves together into a worldwide virtual community. The result is likely to be an unending fragmentation of once-shared concerns and consensuses. (This process is evident today on the World Wide Web, where sites devoted to wild-eyed conspiracy theories, loony alternative therapies, and weird sexual idiosyncracies multiply and diversify with dizzying speed.) This sort of fragmentation is bound to strengthen the centrifugal forces that work to partition science into specializations of infinitely narrowing focus. Before 2100, we may find the AAPA broken up into a meteoric swarm of tiny bits, each with its own idiosyncratic agenda, theories, Web site, on-line journal, and virtual annual meeting. The recent history of the American Anthropological Association gives us some idea of where this process might lead. Another big problem is that the Internet bypasses all the traditional mechanisms of quality control. In the past, readers could feel fairly confident that scientific ideas and claims that made it into the worldwide distribution networks had passed through a stringent review, which could be counted on to detect and throw out defective items. Now we have to deal with the kid down the block, who can reach an indefinitely large audience with an on-line journal purveying any sort of craziness he favors. This is a whole new ballgame, in which Web users have no umpires no institutionalized structures of authority to help them tell line drives from foul balls. Authority is becoming an increasingly rare and valuable commodity, and it is one of the few things that a scientific society like the AAPA has to sell. For seventy years, our Association has served the discipline ofphysical anthropology by assuring that there would be a widely read journal of high quality that covered all aspects of our science, and by sponsoring an annual meeting at which physical anthropologists could come together to get to know each other and exchange ideas. But the Internet is becoming an environment in which these services could be carried out in other ways for example, by establishing Web sites on which articles and posters can be displayed for free general access, linked to electronic bulletin boards or chat groups for discussion and evaluation. In this new environment, the student needs some means of distinguishing meritorious claims, which have passed these sorts of trials, from baseless fancies and obsessions hung out on the Web by cliques of enthusiasts. No builder of Web sites or publisher of journals can provide this sort of warrant. It takes a community of scientists to establish and maintain the structures of authority in their discipline. We need to think about building some new ones for physical anthropology and about what we would like to get in exchange. =========================================================== Finally, the third opinion comes in the form of new requirements for publishing on ArXiv (pronounced "archive"; the "X" is the Greek letter Chi), a preprint server for physicists, astronomers and astrophysicists. Physicists are a much smaller community than biologists, or even a subgroup such as ecologists. Long before the advent of the internet, it was their habit to pass around mimeographed copies of their papers before they were even submitted to journals, and they were often referenced in that form. With the arrival of the internet, one physicist at Los Alamos, on his own initiative, set up a small server under his desk to perform the same service. Ultimately, that server came to be so important to the community that the server's contents were duplicated at a half dozen mirror sites around the world and the project was begun to be financed by NSF and DOE. It's now run out of permanently staffed office at Cornell: http://arxiv.org/ and it has extended its range of subjects a bit. Virtually everything that's published in these fields is also made available here first, at no charge. The same papers appear in archived journals later, with all of their access fees and page charges, but both mechanisms play an important role. One provides open access. The other quality assurance. Originally, anyone could upload anything on the preprint server, but when its presence was discovered by the kooks, cranks and loonies of the world, the governing board found that they too had to institute a form of peer-review a few years ago. The papers submitted now aren't read or reviewed for content or quality, but they do have to be either written by someone who has been deemed authoritative or endorsed by such a person before they can be uploaded now: http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement For older documents, a separate process exists. NASA and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have teamed together to scan in every paper written in essentially every journal prior to 1995-2006 (dependent on the agreements with the various journals), as you can see in their list of holdings here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/journals_service.html If you're an astronomer or astrophysicist, there is no reason for you to ever step foot in a library ever again. All of the astronomical literature is now on-line, searchable and freely accessible to anyone, regardless of where in the world you are, and it obviously represents a tremendous resource. This is of course all that any of us want for ecology as well. But, as the opinions above express, some sense of authoritative approval seems still eminently requisite. Wirt Atmar
