Isolated galaxies with AGES

MOOOAAR PAPERS ! Congratulations Robert Minchin and Olivia Keenan. And me, too... :)

We looked at some isolated galaxies in case they weren't actually isolated, but it turns out that they were. Oh well, never mind.

Maybe I'll do less pithy analysis when I have time...
http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.08715

False consensus

Another long and rambling article I'm afraid. Concision isn't my strong point. There's just something about the idea that scientists are closed-mined that really winds me up the wrong way.

This time I look at the idea that a scientific consensus doesn't mean anything because scientists all want to / have to agree with each other. In astronomy at least, this isn't true. There's an abundance of examples, past and present, of people publishing very non-mainstream ideas in reputable journals. One reason it might appear so is that there is a media obsession with making things exciting. This tends to happen at the slightest provocation without good evidence. It's great for generating enthusiasm, but that turns sour if astronomers have to keep saying, "nope, that's not true" all the time.

There's nothing wrong with being excited, it's just that scientists hate getting excited about things which aren't true.

On the other hand there are some scientific trends which should start warning bells ringing. Astronomy is a competitive subject made of many different small groups each trying to outdo the other. This means there's very little incentive for everyone to agree and lots of incentive to claim new, unexpected discoveries. With projects that requires hundreds of people, this rivalry is by necessity much reduced. We don't need to eliminate huge project groups by any means, but it would be a mistake to rely exclusively on large groups.

There's also a "publish or perish culture" which is potentially more serious. You cannot sensibly evaluate someone's abilities in a multifarious subject like astronomy using only the number of papers they've published. If your ranking as an astronomer depends only on this, there's a strong motivation to publish a lot of mediocre papers rather than a few good ones. Which encourages you to go for small, easy, boring projects.

Finally, the "research grant" funding system. It doesn't exactly encourage a false consensus, but it comes close. Grants typically expect a certain number of publications relating to their given topic. This is hardly a sensible way to encourage original thinking and innovation. The postdoctoral system (which is where most of the research is done) is ever-more reliant on this model of funding, and that's dangerous.

https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2015/10/false-consensus.html

Scientists are pirates now, and with good cause

"In many countries, it's against the law to download copyrighted material without paying for it - whether it's a music track, a movie, or an academic paper. Published research is protected by the same laws, and access is generally restricted to scientists - or institutions - who subscribe to journals. But some scientists argue that their need to access the latest knowledge justifies flouting the law, and they're using a Twitter hashtag to help pirate scientific papers."

"...Elsevier wouldn't comment on the case, but did give a statement to BBC Trending saying that they recognise that access and publishing options are key for researchers. The company says it provides open access journals, rental options, individual article purchases and other means of disseminating research papers."

They do, but open access is much more expensive for authors than the standard license (>$1000-2000). Individual article purchases are not a sensible alternative : it's rare to read a paper in its entirety, far more often you just need to know one particular measurement or conclusion. It's not expensive per paper but it very quickly adds up since most papers cites >~30 papers each (currently I'm working on one that cites 90, which would come to $2700 at $30 per article EDIT : And that doesn't even begin to count the number of papers I had to look at to determine that they weren't relevant, which at a minimum would double this).


The great thing about astronomy is that we have http://arxiv.org/ which provides free access to pretty much everything these days, regardless of journal license.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-34572462

Open reviewing isn't that much better than normal reviewing

I'd be wary of disclosing the identity of reviewers. There's a risk that they won't want to be seen as supporting unconventional research, thereby establishing a false consensus. However I do think that publishing the author-reviewer correspondence as well as the research itself might be a good idea.

I'm surprised that the difference in quality is so low (5% better using the alternative method), but I haven't read the original report yet.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/open-peer-review-better-quality-than-traditional-process

A thousand galaxies just isn't enough

A Thousand Galaxies Discovered In The Coma Cluster... but it's still not enough

In this article linked below I cover a few different papers. At least 300 galaxies have been recently discovered in the Coma cluster which are about as large as the Milky Way, but a thousand times fainter. Hundreds more smaller galaxies have also been found there, and also in the closer Virgo cluster by another team. Hooray, more galaxies ? Everyone loves galaxies, right ?

Well, sort-of. Galaxies are definitely, objectively awesome. But cosmological models predict far more galaxies than we actually observe. The new discoveries are spectacular in that they uncover a huge population of what were unusually large, faint objects, which probably need a lot of dark matter just to survive being torn apart inside the clusters. On the other hand, the numbers of smaller galaxies being found is just nowhere near enough to save the models.

Could it be that those models are just plain wrong ? Sure. But right now, there are so many difficulties in the details of establishing exactly what the models predict, it's probably premature to throw them out just yet. The only safe conclusion is that for now, we don't really understand what's going on.

... with guest appearances by the Doctor, Godzilla, and Gimli the dwarf...

Placeholder post intended to be replaced with a better summary.