Valid criticisms, I think. I suppose the intention is that peer review will be sufficient to weed out the crazies* (maybe the reviewer's names should be made public ?). I'd like to see what happens : maybe it will degenerate into farce, maybe it will produce something interesting. The journal itself is the experiment...
* Cough cough TIME TRAVELLING ALIEN OCTOPUS cough cough cough...
There is one major problem here though :
For the reader of a paper, attaching authors to papers is important to help them decide how seriously to take the results. Here the difference between anonymous and pseudonymous authorship becomes important: if an author uses the same pseudonym over a period of time, the academic community can begin to get a sense of how good their work is (consider the Bourbaki pseudonym, which has been in use long enough to get a track-record), but if a publication is anonymous, the audience must rely solely on the credibility of the publishing journal and its editors.
What about the content itself ? Judging the content by the author is something we'd do well to avoid. Maybe all papers should be anonymous for six months after publishing, or something. I dunno. Anyway, I'm curious to see what happens with this.
THE CONTROVERSIAL JOURNAL OF CONTROVERSIAL IDEAS
"The Journal of Controversial Ideas ...proposes to allow academics to publish papers on controversial topics under a pseudonym. The hope is that this will allow researchers to write freely on controversial topics without the danger of social disapproval or threats. Thus the journal removes the author’s motivations, conflicts of interests and worldview from the presentation of a potentially controversial idea. This proposal heralds the death of the academic author – and, unlike Barthes, we think believe this is a bad thing."
"Defenders of The Journal of Controversial Ideas see it as a forum for true academic freedom. While academic freedom is important, it is not an unlimited right. Freedom without responsibility is recklessness. It is a lack of regard for the danger or consequences of one’s ideas. True academic freedom does not mean that writers get to choose when to avoid controversy. The pseudonymous authorship proposal allows authors to manipulate the credit and blame systems of the academy in the name of academic freedom."
"When it is working well, academic inquiry is a conversation. Researchers make claims and counterclaims, exchange reasons, and work together to open up new fields of inquiry. A conversation needs speakers: we need to keep track of who is talking, what they have said before, and who they are talking to. Pseudonymous authorship is an opt-out from the conversation, and the academic community will be worse off if its members no longer want to engage in intellectual conversation."
http://theconversation.com/the-journal-of-controversial-ideas-its-academic-freedom-without-responsibility-and-thats-recklessness-107106?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1542706990
Thursday, 22 November 2018
Tuesday, 20 November 2018
Risky research means failure is always an option
In astronomy we often have to do repeat observations of potential detections to confirm they're real. A good confirmation rate is about 50%. Much less than this and we'd be wasting telescope time, and we'd start to worry that some of the sources we thought were real might not be so secure. Conversely, a much higher fraction would also be a waste of time, and would imply that we hadn't been as careful in our search as we thought - there'd still be other interesting things hidden in the data that we hadn't seen.
I suggest that this is also true to some extent in psychology. There seems a science-wide call for more risky, controversial research. Well, risky, controversial research requires a certain failure rate : if every finding was replicated, that would suggest the research wasn't been risky enough; if none of them were, that would imply lousy research practises. The actual replication rate turns out to be, by happy coincidence, about 50%.
But likewise, in astronomy we don't write a paper in which we consider sources we haven't confirmed yet (or at least it's a very bad idea to do so). We wait until we've got those repeat observations before drawing any conclusions. Risky, preliminary pilot studies ought to have a failure rate by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be risky at all. The big "end-result" studies on the other hand, the ones that are actually used to draw secure conclusions and, in the case of psychology, influence social policy, well those you'd want at least their basic results to be on a secure footing.
The Many Labs 2 project was specifically designed to address these criticisms. With 15,305 participants in total, the new experiments had, on average, 60 times as many volunteers as the studies they were attempting to replicate. The researchers involved worked with the scientists behind the original studies to vet and check every detail of the experiments beforehand. And they repeated those experiments many times over, with volunteers from 36 different countries, to see if the studies would replicate in some cultures and contexts but not others.
Despite the large sample sizes and the blessings of the original teams, the team failed to replicate half of the studies it focused on. It couldn’t, for example, show that people subconsciously exposed to the concept of heat were more likely to believe in global warming, or that moral transgressions create a need for physical cleanliness in the style of Lady Macbeth, or that people who grow up with more siblings are more altruistic. And as in previous big projects, online bettors were surprisingly good at predicting beforehand which studies would ultimately replicate. Somehow, they could intuit which studies were reliable.
Maybe anecdotes are evidence, after all... :P
Many Labs 2 “was explicitly designed to examine how much effects varied from place to place, from culture to culture,” says Katie Corker, the chair of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. “And here’s the surprising result: The results do not show much variability at all.” If one of the participating teams successfully replicated a study, others did, too. If a study failed to replicate, it tended to fail everywhere.
Many researchers have noted that volunteers from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries—weird nations—are an unusual slice of humanity who think differently than those from other parts of the world. In the majority of the Many Labs 2 experiments, the team found very few differences between weird volunteers and those from other countries. But Miyamoto notes that its analysis was a little crude—in considering “non-weird countries” together, it’s lumping together people from cultures as diverse as Mexico, Japan, and South Africa. “Cross-cultural research,” she writes, “must be informed with thorough analyses of each and all of the cultural contexts involved.”
Sanjay Srivastava from the University of Oregon says the lack of variation in Many Labs 2 is actually a positive thing. Sure, it suggests that the large number of failed replications really might be due to sloppy science. But it also hints that the fundamental business of psychology—creating careful lab experiments to study the tricky, slippery, complicated world of the human mind—works pretty well. “Outside the lab, real-world phenomena can and probably do vary by context,” he says. “But within our carefully designed studies and experiments, the results are not chaotic or unpredictable. That means we can do valid social-science research.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/
I suggest that this is also true to some extent in psychology. There seems a science-wide call for more risky, controversial research. Well, risky, controversial research requires a certain failure rate : if every finding was replicated, that would suggest the research wasn't been risky enough; if none of them were, that would imply lousy research practises. The actual replication rate turns out to be, by happy coincidence, about 50%.
But likewise, in astronomy we don't write a paper in which we consider sources we haven't confirmed yet (or at least it's a very bad idea to do so). We wait until we've got those repeat observations before drawing any conclusions. Risky, preliminary pilot studies ought to have a failure rate by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be risky at all. The big "end-result" studies on the other hand, the ones that are actually used to draw secure conclusions and, in the case of psychology, influence social policy, well those you'd want at least their basic results to be on a secure footing.
The Many Labs 2 project was specifically designed to address these criticisms. With 15,305 participants in total, the new experiments had, on average, 60 times as many volunteers as the studies they were attempting to replicate. The researchers involved worked with the scientists behind the original studies to vet and check every detail of the experiments beforehand. And they repeated those experiments many times over, with volunteers from 36 different countries, to see if the studies would replicate in some cultures and contexts but not others.
Despite the large sample sizes and the blessings of the original teams, the team failed to replicate half of the studies it focused on. It couldn’t, for example, show that people subconsciously exposed to the concept of heat were more likely to believe in global warming, or that moral transgressions create a need for physical cleanliness in the style of Lady Macbeth, or that people who grow up with more siblings are more altruistic. And as in previous big projects, online bettors were surprisingly good at predicting beforehand which studies would ultimately replicate. Somehow, they could intuit which studies were reliable.
Maybe anecdotes are evidence, after all... :P
Many Labs 2 “was explicitly designed to examine how much effects varied from place to place, from culture to culture,” says Katie Corker, the chair of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. “And here’s the surprising result: The results do not show much variability at all.” If one of the participating teams successfully replicated a study, others did, too. If a study failed to replicate, it tended to fail everywhere.
Many researchers have noted that volunteers from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries—weird nations—are an unusual slice of humanity who think differently than those from other parts of the world. In the majority of the Many Labs 2 experiments, the team found very few differences between weird volunteers and those from other countries. But Miyamoto notes that its analysis was a little crude—in considering “non-weird countries” together, it’s lumping together people from cultures as diverse as Mexico, Japan, and South Africa. “Cross-cultural research,” she writes, “must be informed with thorough analyses of each and all of the cultural contexts involved.”
Sanjay Srivastava from the University of Oregon says the lack of variation in Many Labs 2 is actually a positive thing. Sure, it suggests that the large number of failed replications really might be due to sloppy science. But it also hints that the fundamental business of psychology—creating careful lab experiments to study the tricky, slippery, complicated world of the human mind—works pretty well. “Outside the lab, real-world phenomena can and probably do vary by context,” he says. “But within our carefully designed studies and experiments, the results are not chaotic or unpredictable. That means we can do valid social-science research.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/
Thursday, 15 November 2018
It's not what you know, it's who you know
Does being on a telescope time allocation committee get you a better chance of being awarded observing time ? Yes, says Jane Greaves of Cardiff University (who I do not know) - it boosts your chances by a factor of three. And this doesn't seem to be because being on the TAC gives you better knowledge of how to write a good proposal, because when people stop serving on the TAC, their success rate drops right back down again. They probably don't submit a massively higher number of proposals either, since this is usually a very time-consuming procedure. Could they be motivated to write the best possible proposals while on the TAC but don't care so much afterwards ? I guess, but it doesn't seem likely.
The obvious and most likely inference is that TACs are biased towards serving members. Someone should give a sample of proposals to external members for review and compare their scores with that of the TAC.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.05790.pdf
The obvious and most likely inference is that TACs are biased towards serving members. Someone should give a sample of proposals to external members for review and compare their scores with that of the TAC.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.05790.pdf
Tuesday, 13 November 2018
A Gigantic Stealthy Dwarf With Lazy Stars
This really needs a press release when it's accepted for publication.
Astronomers love three-word acronyms, preferably containing the word "ultra" because it makes us feel ultra-important. Also we're hugely unimaginative at naming things, as the Very Large Array testifies. Anyway, while I'm especially interested in Ultra Diffuse Galaxies - big, fluffy star systems that may or may not be chock-full of dark matter - Ultra Faint Galaxies are interesting too. Not so much my speciality though, so bear that in mind.
Ultra Diffuse Galaxies are defined as having few stars per unit area. But because their total area can be very large, overall they can be quite "bright", at least in the sense of radiating lots of energy. Imagine if you could make a light that sent out the same total power of a floodlight but was ten metres on a side - close up, it'd look pretty dim to the eye, even though the total amount of energy per second was the same as a smaller floodlight.
Ultra Faint Galaxies, in contrast, are defined simply by the total amount of light they emit. They can be small and compact or big and fluffy.
This UFG is of the big and fluffy variety (not as big and fluffy as UDGs mind you). The paper is unusually thorough and complete, describing the discovery, follow-up observations, significance, and modelling. They even comment on the chemistry and possible gamma-ray emission of the object. And the icing on the cake is they actually manage to make the paper readable, so huge kudos to them for that.
While UDGs can be detected at large distances, UFGs are really only detectable in our Local Group. They're important because they might help understand the missing satellite problem (that models predict that we should find more small, nearby galaxies than we actually do) and also for studying galaxy dynamics. One such recent discovery (Crater II) was found to have unusually slow-moving stars, which, taken at face value, contradicts the standard model where galaxies are all dominated by massive dark matter halos - generally their stars are moving much more quickly.
It would be a mistake to think that Crater II is definitive evidence against the dark matter model though. While such an object is indeed compatible with alternative theories of gravity, it's also possible that it's simply lost much of its dark matter through tidal encounters. With pathetically small statistics, every object discovered in this class is significant.
That's where Antila 2 comes in. The authors discovered this using Gaia data. Gaia provides direct distance measurements to nearby stars but also proper motion (that's motion across the sky) data as well. In this case, it was by looking at the proper motions that the authors noticed a group of stars that hadn't been seen before. Gaia also makes this much easier in this region, where the density of stars, gas and dust towards the plane of the Galactic disc makes it difficult to spot anything at all. And by the standards of dwarf galaxies, Antila 2 is a biggie - much bigger than Crater II, and even comparable in size to the Large Magellanic Cloud (which has been known since prehistoric times). Only its incredible faintness - it's 4,000 times fainter than the LMC ! - and crowded location have kept it hidden for this long. That's no match for Gaia, however.
Antila 2 is also very cool. That is, like Crater II, its stars aren't moving very quickly. Unlike larger galaxies it doesn't seem to be rotating at all, the stars are just buzzing around randomly. That's not at all unusual for dwarf galaxies. What is unusual is that the stars only appear to be moving at around ~6 km/s, whereas for an object this size, ~20 km/s might be expected. Taken at face value, this would mean that Antila 2's dark matter halo has the lowest density of any such halo. So how could the stars end up being so dang lazy ? Is it a super-extreme object or did it start life as something more normal and have lethargy thrust upon it ?
There are several possibilities. One is that maybe the shape of the dark matter isn't typical. The usual assumption, based on models, is that dark matter halos have a central "cusp" (a horrible term we just have to live with), meaning a rapid increase in density in the centre. Antila 2 might instead have a "core" - a flatter density distribution in the centre. This could happen in two ways : 1) Early feedback (explosions and winds) by young stars could have removed so much gas that the sheer mass of the moving material could have disrupted the dark matter by its gravitational influence; 2) A tidal encounter with another galaxy (i.e. the Milky Way) could have stripped away much of its dark matter. In either case the end result is that there wouldn't be so much extra mass to accelerate the stars. Any stars which were moving too quickly would have been removed, and the pathetic remnant of the dark matter halo would only have been massive enough to hold on to the most sluggish.
The authors test these scenarios. Neither seems to work by itself, but together they might be able to do it. Thanks to the proper motion data of Gaia, they're able to work out the orbit of the galaxy so they can find out how close it's come to the Milky Way and thus they can estimate the tidal forces. Their initial conditions are necessarily a bit speculative but based on more typical dwarf galaxies. What seems to work is an initially cored dwarf (presumably formed via feedback) that then has a few disruptive orbits around the Milky Way.
There's some observational evidence to support this. Antila 2 appears to be stretched in its direction of motion, its chemical content appears unusual for its brightness (suggesting much of its original stellar content has been lost). On the other hand, the disruption ought to make the object more spherical than observed, but it's not certain if this is a crippling problem or not. Such an object would be able to survive for a few gigayears - long, but it probably implies it fell into the Milky Way's orbit much later than other satellites.
Overall, the conclusions are starkly different to the final sentence in the abstract saying this object may challenge the cold dark mater model, but that was the only inconsistency I spotted. They deserve a press release for this, I just hope it's as good as the paper. :)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018arXiv181104082T
Astronomers love three-word acronyms, preferably containing the word "ultra" because it makes us feel ultra-important. Also we're hugely unimaginative at naming things, as the Very Large Array testifies. Anyway, while I'm especially interested in Ultra Diffuse Galaxies - big, fluffy star systems that may or may not be chock-full of dark matter - Ultra Faint Galaxies are interesting too. Not so much my speciality though, so bear that in mind.
Ultra Diffuse Galaxies are defined as having few stars per unit area. But because their total area can be very large, overall they can be quite "bright", at least in the sense of radiating lots of energy. Imagine if you could make a light that sent out the same total power of a floodlight but was ten metres on a side - close up, it'd look pretty dim to the eye, even though the total amount of energy per second was the same as a smaller floodlight.
Ultra Faint Galaxies, in contrast, are defined simply by the total amount of light they emit. They can be small and compact or big and fluffy.
This UFG is of the big and fluffy variety (not as big and fluffy as UDGs mind you). The paper is unusually thorough and complete, describing the discovery, follow-up observations, significance, and modelling. They even comment on the chemistry and possible gamma-ray emission of the object. And the icing on the cake is they actually manage to make the paper readable, so huge kudos to them for that.
While UDGs can be detected at large distances, UFGs are really only detectable in our Local Group. They're important because they might help understand the missing satellite problem (that models predict that we should find more small, nearby galaxies than we actually do) and also for studying galaxy dynamics. One such recent discovery (Crater II) was found to have unusually slow-moving stars, which, taken at face value, contradicts the standard model where galaxies are all dominated by massive dark matter halos - generally their stars are moving much more quickly.
It would be a mistake to think that Crater II is definitive evidence against the dark matter model though. While such an object is indeed compatible with alternative theories of gravity, it's also possible that it's simply lost much of its dark matter through tidal encounters. With pathetically small statistics, every object discovered in this class is significant.
That's where Antila 2 comes in. The authors discovered this using Gaia data. Gaia provides direct distance measurements to nearby stars but also proper motion (that's motion across the sky) data as well. In this case, it was by looking at the proper motions that the authors noticed a group of stars that hadn't been seen before. Gaia also makes this much easier in this region, where the density of stars, gas and dust towards the plane of the Galactic disc makes it difficult to spot anything at all. And by the standards of dwarf galaxies, Antila 2 is a biggie - much bigger than Crater II, and even comparable in size to the Large Magellanic Cloud (which has been known since prehistoric times). Only its incredible faintness - it's 4,000 times fainter than the LMC ! - and crowded location have kept it hidden for this long. That's no match for Gaia, however.
Antila 2 is also very cool. That is, like Crater II, its stars aren't moving very quickly. Unlike larger galaxies it doesn't seem to be rotating at all, the stars are just buzzing around randomly. That's not at all unusual for dwarf galaxies. What is unusual is that the stars only appear to be moving at around ~6 km/s, whereas for an object this size, ~20 km/s might be expected. Taken at face value, this would mean that Antila 2's dark matter halo has the lowest density of any such halo. So how could the stars end up being so dang lazy ? Is it a super-extreme object or did it start life as something more normal and have lethargy thrust upon it ?
There are several possibilities. One is that maybe the shape of the dark matter isn't typical. The usual assumption, based on models, is that dark matter halos have a central "cusp" (a horrible term we just have to live with), meaning a rapid increase in density in the centre. Antila 2 might instead have a "core" - a flatter density distribution in the centre. This could happen in two ways : 1) Early feedback (explosions and winds) by young stars could have removed so much gas that the sheer mass of the moving material could have disrupted the dark matter by its gravitational influence; 2) A tidal encounter with another galaxy (i.e. the Milky Way) could have stripped away much of its dark matter. In either case the end result is that there wouldn't be so much extra mass to accelerate the stars. Any stars which were moving too quickly would have been removed, and the pathetic remnant of the dark matter halo would only have been massive enough to hold on to the most sluggish.
The authors test these scenarios. Neither seems to work by itself, but together they might be able to do it. Thanks to the proper motion data of Gaia, they're able to work out the orbit of the galaxy so they can find out how close it's come to the Milky Way and thus they can estimate the tidal forces. Their initial conditions are necessarily a bit speculative but based on more typical dwarf galaxies. What seems to work is an initially cored dwarf (presumably formed via feedback) that then has a few disruptive orbits around the Milky Way.
There's some observational evidence to support this. Antila 2 appears to be stretched in its direction of motion, its chemical content appears unusual for its brightness (suggesting much of its original stellar content has been lost). On the other hand, the disruption ought to make the object more spherical than observed, but it's not certain if this is a crippling problem or not. Such an object would be able to survive for a few gigayears - long, but it probably implies it fell into the Milky Way's orbit much later than other satellites.
Overall, the conclusions are starkly different to the final sentence in the abstract saying this object may challenge the cold dark mater model, but that was the only inconsistency I spotted. They deserve a press release for this, I just hope it's as good as the paper. :)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018arXiv181104082T
Huge dwarfs or ghostly giants ?
Ultra-diffuse galaxies are enormous but have very few stars. That makes it particularly difficult to say whether their total mass is very high or very small with their stars being spread especially thin. What's especially annoying is that these things are found in large numbers, which has annoyed a lot of people who hoped they might be rare exceptions.
(For a longer introduction see https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/07/ultra-diffuse-galaxies-revenge-of-ghosts.html; couple of non-crucial missing images, will fix later)
Measuring the total mass directly is difficult, but it's relatively easy to compare them with "normal", brighter galaxies whose mass is more well-determined. In this paper, the authors compare the size vs. brightness relation of the UDGs. They find, unsurprisingly, that they're bigger and fainter than normal galaxies (duh !) but more interestingly they form a continuous relation with brighter galaxies : they aren't a distinctly different population. This contradicts previous studies which found that the size-luminosity relation didn't have much scatter. The authors argue that this isn't because anyone did anything wrong, but just because the previous studies wouldn't have been able to detect UDGs.
What this means for the mass of the UDGs is unclear. They also find that the structural properties of the UDGs and bright galaxies are different : the shape of the distribution of stars varies in a different way depending on their brightness. Even more confusingly, the UDGs appear to be different from both normal faint and bright galaxies. Which means the things are bloomin' complicated.
This paper is still under review and it's only a letter, but I think there are several parts here that could be explained a lot more clearly (especially the comparisons to normal galaxies). The two main ideas of UDGs have been either that they're basically low-mass galaxies that have been "inflated" by encounters with other galaxies, or that they formed exactly how they are and are as massive as other galaxies of comparable size (AFAIK, no-one has come up with a way for low-mass galaxies to form yet be so hugely extended from birth - the only way is for them to grow over time).
Unfortunately both scenarios could be compatible with the different relations. A dwarf galaxy that becomes much more extended might also be structurally affected in the process (detailed intro on galaxy structure : https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-dark-side-of-galaxy-evolution-ii.html). But a giant galaxy that's born with very few stars might also have a different light profile from a brighter object. It would have been nice if the UDGs had been clear outliers from the general trends rather than a continuous extension of existing relations, but the Universe isn't cooperating. On the other hand, these measurements give an extra constraint for anyone trying to simulate the formation of these ghostly irritants.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018arXiv181101962D
(For a longer introduction see https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/07/ultra-diffuse-galaxies-revenge-of-ghosts.html; couple of non-crucial missing images, will fix later)
Measuring the total mass directly is difficult, but it's relatively easy to compare them with "normal", brighter galaxies whose mass is more well-determined. In this paper, the authors compare the size vs. brightness relation of the UDGs. They find, unsurprisingly, that they're bigger and fainter than normal galaxies (duh !) but more interestingly they form a continuous relation with brighter galaxies : they aren't a distinctly different population. This contradicts previous studies which found that the size-luminosity relation didn't have much scatter. The authors argue that this isn't because anyone did anything wrong, but just because the previous studies wouldn't have been able to detect UDGs.
What this means for the mass of the UDGs is unclear. They also find that the structural properties of the UDGs and bright galaxies are different : the shape of the distribution of stars varies in a different way depending on their brightness. Even more confusingly, the UDGs appear to be different from both normal faint and bright galaxies. Which means the things are bloomin' complicated.
This paper is still under review and it's only a letter, but I think there are several parts here that could be explained a lot more clearly (especially the comparisons to normal galaxies). The two main ideas of UDGs have been either that they're basically low-mass galaxies that have been "inflated" by encounters with other galaxies, or that they formed exactly how they are and are as massive as other galaxies of comparable size (AFAIK, no-one has come up with a way for low-mass galaxies to form yet be so hugely extended from birth - the only way is for them to grow over time).
Unfortunately both scenarios could be compatible with the different relations. A dwarf galaxy that becomes much more extended might also be structurally affected in the process (detailed intro on galaxy structure : https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-dark-side-of-galaxy-evolution-ii.html). But a giant galaxy that's born with very few stars might also have a different light profile from a brighter object. It would have been nice if the UDGs had been clear outliers from the general trends rather than a continuous extension of existing relations, but the Universe isn't cooperating. On the other hand, these measurements give an extra constraint for anyone trying to simulate the formation of these ghostly irritants.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018arXiv181101962D
Monday, 5 November 2018
Missing dark matter in dwarf galaxies?
Of course, I would have gone for a different title :
Yo Dawg, Herd You Like Missing Matter, So We Stole Some Of Your Missing Matter So You Can Miss Matter From Your Missing Matter
Some time ago you may remember I was going on about ultra diffuse galaxies (UDGs). These ghostly systems are comparable in size to the Milky Way but 100-1000x fainter. And you might remember I posted something like the plot shown below :
This is the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (TFR). It plots the total mass of stars and gas as a function of how fast a galaxy is rotating (which is usually a good proxy for total mass of dark matter).
In the plot you can see that normal galaxies, in blue, lie on a nice neat straight line. It's possible to derive this line analytically. The problem is that the analysis predicts a population of galaxies which don't sit on the same line, which haven't hitherto been found.
The red points here show UDGs where it was possible to measure their rotation speed. Clearly they don't lie on the normal TFR. So good news, right ? Not necessarily. Those velocity measurements are uncertain because it's hard to estimate the viewing angle we're looking at, which can strongly affect the estimated rotation velocity. We can only get a direct measurement of rotation if we're lucky enough to see the galaxy edge-on; if we see them face-on, we can't measure the rotation at all. The fainter the galaxy, the harder it is to estimate the viewing (inclination) angle and the less accurate the correction will be. Which is bad news for things as faint as UDGs. Nevertheless, at least some UDGs do appear to deviate from the usual TFR.
The black points are the optically dark hydrogen clouds I've been investigating in the Virgo cluster. Their velocity widths are more secure, though their possible origins are more complicated.
Much to my delight, today's paper by Oman et al. is all about objects with those strange deviations from the TFR in both directions. They phrase things a bit differently, largely talking about galaxy formation efficiency. In essence, galaxies with higher baryonic (stars and gas) masses than expected have apparently high formation efficiency, in the sense that a small dark matter halo has accumulated more gas and stars than usual. Galaxies with lower baryonic masses than expected have correspondingly lower formation efficiencies. Or if you prefer, you can talk about galaxies with higher or lower rotation velocities than expected, it doesn't really matter.
Slightly annoyingly, Oman et al. don't cite either the Lesiman et al. UDG paper (red points) or my own dark clouds (black points)*. On the positive side, they discuss other systems previously unknown to me that also deviate from the TFR, in both directions. And these galaxies are not especially weird in other ways : they have much more normal levels of surface brightness. So it isn't just weirdly extreme objects that deviate from the TFR - more normal galaxies can do it too. And that's very reassuring.
* More oddly, they don't even mention that famous galaxy without dark matter so I guess it's nothing personal. :P
What could explain the deviations ? If I understand them correctly, there's not much problem explaining objects of low formation efficiency (fast rotators). Those would just be objects where the gas and stars are very extended. But cases of high formation efficiency (slow rotators), they say, are not compatible with the standard model. In fact, although the model does predict stronger scatter in the TFR in this regime, it would actually have the opposite effect to what the observations indicate.
The standard model could be wrong, of course, but let's leave that one on the "maybe" pile for now. Other options they suggest are that the gas and stars may not probe the full dark matter halo so their measurements underestimate the maximum rotation speed (this is also possible for some cluster galaxies which have experienced extreme amounts of gas loss, leaving behind only a remnant core of gas in their central regions - http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013MNRAS.428..459T). But that doesn't seem to work here because they have full rotation curves, and they're flat. So even if the gas and stars were more extended, the measured rotation would be the same. Another option could be that there's less dark matter than expected in the central regions of the galaxies, but simulations show that effect is far too weak.
Could it simply be a measurement error ? The distance estimates seem secure. Could they galaxies have been stripped, like those in Virgo ? No, they're too isolated.
What about the viewing angle ? It's hard to be sure, but this is definitely their favoured option. The measured rotational velocities of the deviant galaxies are very small, ~20 km/s (the Milky Way is more like 250 km/s), and a change to 30 km/s would be enough, in at least one case, to bring them back into agreement with normal galaxies. It only needs a very small error to explain this. The same problem could affect low-efficiency, fast-rotating galaxies too. If their viewing angle is estimated to be too low, then this will exaggerate the calculated rotation speed.
As far as I know this is entirely plausible for the systems they discuss here. But what about the ones in the plot ? I'm more skeptical. I went through the UDGs manually, and dang it, at least some of them really look like we're viewing them close to edge-on, so their velocities should be accurate. And for the dark clouds the velocity width is a lower limit, so they can only be wider than plotted here, not narrower.
What's the answer ? Dunno. Sorry.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01026
Yo Dawg, Herd You Like Missing Matter, So We Stole Some Of Your Missing Matter So You Can Miss Matter From Your Missing Matter
Some time ago you may remember I was going on about ultra diffuse galaxies (UDGs). These ghostly systems are comparable in size to the Milky Way but 100-1000x fainter. And you might remember I posted something like the plot shown below :
This is the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (TFR). It plots the total mass of stars and gas as a function of how fast a galaxy is rotating (which is usually a good proxy for total mass of dark matter).
In the plot you can see that normal galaxies, in blue, lie on a nice neat straight line. It's possible to derive this line analytically. The problem is that the analysis predicts a population of galaxies which don't sit on the same line, which haven't hitherto been found.
The red points here show UDGs where it was possible to measure their rotation speed. Clearly they don't lie on the normal TFR. So good news, right ? Not necessarily. Those velocity measurements are uncertain because it's hard to estimate the viewing angle we're looking at, which can strongly affect the estimated rotation velocity. We can only get a direct measurement of rotation if we're lucky enough to see the galaxy edge-on; if we see them face-on, we can't measure the rotation at all. The fainter the galaxy, the harder it is to estimate the viewing (inclination) angle and the less accurate the correction will be. Which is bad news for things as faint as UDGs. Nevertheless, at least some UDGs do appear to deviate from the usual TFR.
The black points are the optically dark hydrogen clouds I've been investigating in the Virgo cluster. Their velocity widths are more secure, though their possible origins are more complicated.
Much to my delight, today's paper by Oman et al. is all about objects with those strange deviations from the TFR in both directions. They phrase things a bit differently, largely talking about galaxy formation efficiency. In essence, galaxies with higher baryonic (stars and gas) masses than expected have apparently high formation efficiency, in the sense that a small dark matter halo has accumulated more gas and stars than usual. Galaxies with lower baryonic masses than expected have correspondingly lower formation efficiencies. Or if you prefer, you can talk about galaxies with higher or lower rotation velocities than expected, it doesn't really matter.
Slightly annoyingly, Oman et al. don't cite either the Lesiman et al. UDG paper (red points) or my own dark clouds (black points)*. On the positive side, they discuss other systems previously unknown to me that also deviate from the TFR, in both directions. And these galaxies are not especially weird in other ways : they have much more normal levels of surface brightness. So it isn't just weirdly extreme objects that deviate from the TFR - more normal galaxies can do it too. And that's very reassuring.
* More oddly, they don't even mention that famous galaxy without dark matter so I guess it's nothing personal. :P
What could explain the deviations ? If I understand them correctly, there's not much problem explaining objects of low formation efficiency (fast rotators). Those would just be objects where the gas and stars are very extended. But cases of high formation efficiency (slow rotators), they say, are not compatible with the standard model. In fact, although the model does predict stronger scatter in the TFR in this regime, it would actually have the opposite effect to what the observations indicate.
The standard model could be wrong, of course, but let's leave that one on the "maybe" pile for now. Other options they suggest are that the gas and stars may not probe the full dark matter halo so their measurements underestimate the maximum rotation speed (this is also possible for some cluster galaxies which have experienced extreme amounts of gas loss, leaving behind only a remnant core of gas in their central regions - http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013MNRAS.428..459T). But that doesn't seem to work here because they have full rotation curves, and they're flat. So even if the gas and stars were more extended, the measured rotation would be the same. Another option could be that there's less dark matter than expected in the central regions of the galaxies, but simulations show that effect is far too weak.
Could it simply be a measurement error ? The distance estimates seem secure. Could they galaxies have been stripped, like those in Virgo ? No, they're too isolated.
What about the viewing angle ? It's hard to be sure, but this is definitely their favoured option. The measured rotational velocities of the deviant galaxies are very small, ~20 km/s (the Milky Way is more like 250 km/s), and a change to 30 km/s would be enough, in at least one case, to bring them back into agreement with normal galaxies. It only needs a very small error to explain this. The same problem could affect low-efficiency, fast-rotating galaxies too. If their viewing angle is estimated to be too low, then this will exaggerate the calculated rotation speed.
As far as I know this is entirely plausible for the systems they discuss here. But what about the ones in the plot ? I'm more skeptical. I went through the UDGs manually, and dang it, at least some of them really look like we're viewing them close to edge-on, so their velocities should be accurate. And for the dark clouds the velocity width is a lower limit, so they can only be wider than plotted here, not narrower.
What's the answer ? Dunno. Sorry.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01026
Wednesday, 31 October 2018
The importance of good science journalism
This is an ideal case, of course, but no less important for that. In such an ideal scenario, time currently spent writing grant proposals would be spent on outreach. It's probably easier to turn scientists into journalists than the other way around, but at the same time, journalists bring a much wider perspective.
Scientists and journalists share a passion for questioning assumptions and biases. We are trained to uncover hidden narratives in the pursuit of deeper understandings. And we share an enthusiasm for revealing new knowledge that can be shared with the world.
These values cannot be taken for granted, especially in our current political environment. It is no secret that both scientists and journalists are facing a concerted wave of allegations around “bias” and “fake news.” This type of regressive criticism is not new. Throughout history, those who have sought to suppress the truth have endeavored to muffle the voices of scientists and journalists. Without these voices societies decay. Therefore, when confronted with the current assaults, we cannot allow ourselves to recoil into our protective harbors and wait for the storm to pass. We cannot wait for others to step into the void. We have to shrug off whatever reluctances we may have and find ways to share the stories of science with a world in desperate need of hearing them.
We recognize that there are differences between the ways journalists and scientists perform their professions, and those differences could serve as barriers for cooperation. Scientists often are wary of the way their work might be presented by journalists. They have seen nuanced research oversimplified or hyped for more dramatic (and sometimes misleading) headlines. At the same time, journalists can be frustrated by scientists who respond to straightforward questions with jargon and are unable or unwilling to explain the essence of their discoveries without caveats and qualifiers.
We believe, however, this mistrust is superficial and can be overcome for the benefit of all of society. Scientists and journalists share core aspirations. Both disciplines are about observing the world, questioning the unknown and collecting facts. Both scientists and journalists know their work is built on the work of others and they must find a way to share their discoveries. Scientists may tell their stories in papers they publish to share with their colleagues in the field. Journalists may tell their stories in print, radio or film, often trying to reach as wide an audience as possible. But the mission is the same. Knowledge can only have an impact if others hear about it.
As far as journalism goes, it seems to me that poor science reporting is (mostly) simply due to ignorance. Maybe there ought to be more outreach courses aimed at journalists. Of course you need experts to tell you about the technical details and the results themselves. But beyond that, many of the techniques of critical analysis aren't that hard.
From the political perspective something much more sinister looks to be going on. It feels less of a case of simple ignorance and more of wilful bullshitting : not caring about the evidence rather than (but not excluding the case of) not understanding it. It's not difficult to understand, say, that something being possible doesn't mean it isn't fantastically unlikely, or that because something did happen once it doesn't mean that it happened much less often than other incidents. False degrees of confidence in or against a result aren't because politicians don't understand this, it's because they don't care (not always out of malevolence or even stupidity, but sometimes). When you strip away the objective evidence, all you have is subjective, emotion-driven ideology. And where it may be difficult to argue with a fact, it's easy to argue with an emotion.
That's not to say that there aren't media outlets that are hugely partisan and essentially nothing but the mouthpieces of their favourite political tribe : there are. These institutions attempt to discredit science but only as part of a larger campaign of discrediting anyone and anything (from any field) that even hints at disagreement with their moral values. Anyone who says otherwise, regardless of their status, is branded as a member of the controlling elite, and conversely, anyone agreeing with them is One of The People. They don't actually care a damn about The People, of course; mostly this kind of rhetoric is used by people who are far more out of touch than the "elite" they like to deride. It is merely a rhetorical tool to sow division, nothing more. The underlying theme is one of avoiding and ignoring the evidence, because even imperfect evidence is, if analysed sensibly, a damn sight harder to argue with than a whimsical feeling.
So yes, improving science journalism is important. But this is only one expression of the root problem, not the problem itself.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-journalists-and-scientists-have-in-common/
Scientists and journalists share a passion for questioning assumptions and biases. We are trained to uncover hidden narratives in the pursuit of deeper understandings. And we share an enthusiasm for revealing new knowledge that can be shared with the world.
These values cannot be taken for granted, especially in our current political environment. It is no secret that both scientists and journalists are facing a concerted wave of allegations around “bias” and “fake news.” This type of regressive criticism is not new. Throughout history, those who have sought to suppress the truth have endeavored to muffle the voices of scientists and journalists. Without these voices societies decay. Therefore, when confronted with the current assaults, we cannot allow ourselves to recoil into our protective harbors and wait for the storm to pass. We cannot wait for others to step into the void. We have to shrug off whatever reluctances we may have and find ways to share the stories of science with a world in desperate need of hearing them.
We recognize that there are differences between the ways journalists and scientists perform their professions, and those differences could serve as barriers for cooperation. Scientists often are wary of the way their work might be presented by journalists. They have seen nuanced research oversimplified or hyped for more dramatic (and sometimes misleading) headlines. At the same time, journalists can be frustrated by scientists who respond to straightforward questions with jargon and are unable or unwilling to explain the essence of their discoveries without caveats and qualifiers.
We believe, however, this mistrust is superficial and can be overcome for the benefit of all of society. Scientists and journalists share core aspirations. Both disciplines are about observing the world, questioning the unknown and collecting facts. Both scientists and journalists know their work is built on the work of others and they must find a way to share their discoveries. Scientists may tell their stories in papers they publish to share with their colleagues in the field. Journalists may tell their stories in print, radio or film, often trying to reach as wide an audience as possible. But the mission is the same. Knowledge can only have an impact if others hear about it.
As far as journalism goes, it seems to me that poor science reporting is (mostly) simply due to ignorance. Maybe there ought to be more outreach courses aimed at journalists. Of course you need experts to tell you about the technical details and the results themselves. But beyond that, many of the techniques of critical analysis aren't that hard.
From the political perspective something much more sinister looks to be going on. It feels less of a case of simple ignorance and more of wilful bullshitting : not caring about the evidence rather than (but not excluding the case of) not understanding it. It's not difficult to understand, say, that something being possible doesn't mean it isn't fantastically unlikely, or that because something did happen once it doesn't mean that it happened much less often than other incidents. False degrees of confidence in or against a result aren't because politicians don't understand this, it's because they don't care (not always out of malevolence or even stupidity, but sometimes). When you strip away the objective evidence, all you have is subjective, emotion-driven ideology. And where it may be difficult to argue with a fact, it's easy to argue with an emotion.
That's not to say that there aren't media outlets that are hugely partisan and essentially nothing but the mouthpieces of their favourite political tribe : there are. These institutions attempt to discredit science but only as part of a larger campaign of discrediting anyone and anything (from any field) that even hints at disagreement with their moral values. Anyone who says otherwise, regardless of their status, is branded as a member of the controlling elite, and conversely, anyone agreeing with them is One of The People. They don't actually care a damn about The People, of course; mostly this kind of rhetoric is used by people who are far more out of touch than the "elite" they like to deride. It is merely a rhetorical tool to sow division, nothing more. The underlying theme is one of avoiding and ignoring the evidence, because even imperfect evidence is, if analysed sensibly, a damn sight harder to argue with than a whimsical feeling.
So yes, improving science journalism is important. But this is only one expression of the root problem, not the problem itself.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-journalists-and-scientists-have-in-common/
Thursday, 18 October 2018
The Big One-Zero
Submitted my tenth paper as first author :
Faint and fading tails : the fate of stripped HI gas in Virgo cluster galaxies
Although many galaxies in the Virgo cluster are known to have lost significant amounts of HI gas, only about a dozen features are known where the HI extends significantly outside its parent galaxy. Previous numerical simulations have predicted that HI removed by ram pressure stripping should have column densities far in excess of the sensitivity limits of observational surveys. We construct a simple model to try and quantify how many streams we might expect to detect. This accounts for the expected random orientation of the streams in position and velocity space as well as the expected stream length and mass of stripped HI. Using archival data from the Arecibo Galaxy Environment Survey, we search for any streams which might previously have been missed in earlier analyses. We report the confident discovery of nine streams as well as sixteen other less sure detections. We show that these well-match our analytic predictions for which galaxies should be actively losing gas, however the mass of the streams is typically far below the amount of missing HI in their parent galaxies, implying that a phase change and/or dispersal renders the gas undetectable. By estimating the orbital timescales we estimate that dissolution rates of 1-10 M⊙ yr−1 are able to explain both the presence of a few long, massive streams and the greater number of shorter, less massive features.
And now to pray to the Journal Gods for a fair and fast referee....
Faint and fading tails : the fate of stripped HI gas in Virgo cluster galaxies
Although many galaxies in the Virgo cluster are known to have lost significant amounts of HI gas, only about a dozen features are known where the HI extends significantly outside its parent galaxy. Previous numerical simulations have predicted that HI removed by ram pressure stripping should have column densities far in excess of the sensitivity limits of observational surveys. We construct a simple model to try and quantify how many streams we might expect to detect. This accounts for the expected random orientation of the streams in position and velocity space as well as the expected stream length and mass of stripped HI. Using archival data from the Arecibo Galaxy Environment Survey, we search for any streams which might previously have been missed in earlier analyses. We report the confident discovery of nine streams as well as sixteen other less sure detections. We show that these well-match our analytic predictions for which galaxies should be actively losing gas, however the mass of the streams is typically far below the amount of missing HI in their parent galaxies, implying that a phase change and/or dispersal renders the gas undetectable. By estimating the orbital timescales we estimate that dissolution rates of 1-10 M⊙ yr−1 are able to explain both the presence of a few long, massive streams and the greater number of shorter, less massive features.
And now to pray to the Journal Gods for a fair and fast referee....
Wednesday, 10 October 2018
A Volumetric Law For Star Formation
It's well-known that there's a correlation between galaxy gas density and star formation rate. The problem is that no-one's clear on exactly what sort of correlation it is, or what sort of gas it is. In general, galaxies which have significant amounts of atomic hydrogen (which is relatively warm) tend to be forming stars, so there's definitely some sort of connection there. But recent studies have found the correlation is much better when considering only the colder, molecular hydrogen, which gives a much nicer linear relation. And that makes physical sense too, since to form a star you need higher gas density, which is easier if the gas is cold as it can't use thermal pressure to support itself against collapse. Perhaps most convincing were the discovery of holes in the atomic gas component of some spiral galaxies, which seem to be the result of star formation consuming all the gas. Also, the atomic gas has a strict upper density limit, beyond which all gas seems to become molecular.
The shape of the correlation between the gas and star formation rate is somewhat unclear as well. Mostly it's a nice power law, but there's some evidence for a density threshold below which the star formation activity drops sharply. This, say the authors of this work, is quite controversial (more so than I realised, and I'm supposed to know about this stuff), as is the choice of which gas component to use.
There are lots of uncertainties, but perhaps the main one is the gas density (of either the cold or the warm component). We can estimate the gas density per unit area (surface density) easily enough, but the true volume density is much harder because we can't directly measure the thickness of the gas disc. Here the authors attempt to overcome this. They assume the gas is in hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning that its outward pressure (due to thermal and other motions) is balanced by its tendency to collapse under gravity. This isn't straightforward : it requires detailed knowledge of the mass and distribution of stars and dark matter as well as that of the gas, and also it needs the velocity dispersion and overall rotation curve of the gas. This is currently only possible for quite nearby galaxies since you need very detailed, well-resolved data to do this properly. Even then there are still uncertainties and assumptions that have to be made.
This paper is under review, but it seems to me to be a careful, detailed work more in need of correcting typos than methodological revisions. After describing their methods with considerable precision, they find that both the atomic and molecular components show very clear, power-law correlations with star formation. There's no change of slope with density either. They say this could be because the thickness of the gas disc varies significantly depending on where you are in the galaxy : it's much fatter in the low-density outskirts than the centre. The surface density measurement would give a misleadingly high estimate in the outer regions.
The fact that both warm gas correlates with star formation is also very interesting. Previously the tendency had been to assume that this connection would be somewhat secondary : the picture has been shifting to the atomic gas having to transition to molecular gas before forming stars. So the correlation is expected to be rather rough, but in fact it's very clear - certainly no worse than that of the molecular gas. They give two interpretations :
- The warm gas is a good tracer of the cold gas. The connection between atomic gas and star formation could then still be indirect. It would also mean that there could be undetected cold gas (which is very difficult to detect directly - normally other components have to be used) in the outskirts of galaxies, where star formation activity has previously been puzzling.
- The warm gas can form stars directly. This is theoretically possible : there are conditions under which the warm gas could cool so quickly that there's no time for molecular gas to form and it goes directly into stars.
There's a lot of work to be done, but this isn't the only evidence for atomic gas being directly involved in star formation. The idea that actually this complex process is governed by a rather simple condition - true density - but that this condition is hard to measure is very appealing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03616
The shape of the correlation between the gas and star formation rate is somewhat unclear as well. Mostly it's a nice power law, but there's some evidence for a density threshold below which the star formation activity drops sharply. This, say the authors of this work, is quite controversial (more so than I realised, and I'm supposed to know about this stuff), as is the choice of which gas component to use.
There are lots of uncertainties, but perhaps the main one is the gas density (of either the cold or the warm component). We can estimate the gas density per unit area (surface density) easily enough, but the true volume density is much harder because we can't directly measure the thickness of the gas disc. Here the authors attempt to overcome this. They assume the gas is in hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning that its outward pressure (due to thermal and other motions) is balanced by its tendency to collapse under gravity. This isn't straightforward : it requires detailed knowledge of the mass and distribution of stars and dark matter as well as that of the gas, and also it needs the velocity dispersion and overall rotation curve of the gas. This is currently only possible for quite nearby galaxies since you need very detailed, well-resolved data to do this properly. Even then there are still uncertainties and assumptions that have to be made.
This paper is under review, but it seems to me to be a careful, detailed work more in need of correcting typos than methodological revisions. After describing their methods with considerable precision, they find that both the atomic and molecular components show very clear, power-law correlations with star formation. There's no change of slope with density either. They say this could be because the thickness of the gas disc varies significantly depending on where you are in the galaxy : it's much fatter in the low-density outskirts than the centre. The surface density measurement would give a misleadingly high estimate in the outer regions.
The fact that both warm gas correlates with star formation is also very interesting. Previously the tendency had been to assume that this connection would be somewhat secondary : the picture has been shifting to the atomic gas having to transition to molecular gas before forming stars. So the correlation is expected to be rather rough, but in fact it's very clear - certainly no worse than that of the molecular gas. They give two interpretations :
- The warm gas is a good tracer of the cold gas. The connection between atomic gas and star formation could then still be indirect. It would also mean that there could be undetected cold gas (which is very difficult to detect directly - normally other components have to be used) in the outskirts of galaxies, where star formation activity has previously been puzzling.
- The warm gas can form stars directly. This is theoretically possible : there are conditions under which the warm gas could cool so quickly that there's no time for molecular gas to form and it goes directly into stars.
There's a lot of work to be done, but this isn't the only evidence for atomic gas being directly involved in star formation. The idea that actually this complex process is governed by a rather simple condition - true density - but that this condition is hard to measure is very appealing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03616
Tuesday, 2 October 2018
"Freedom from" versus "freedom to" in the world of science journals
A central charge, from some publishers and some academics is that Plan S is an infringement of academic freedom to choose how and where your work is published and it therefore unethical.
Blink.
Whut ?
Kudos to the author of this piece for the detailed legalistic analysis of why this is wrong, but surely from an ethical standpoint this is Bloody Obvious ?
As I understand it, the Plan calls for all publically-funded research to be made Open Access, i.e. freely available to the public. Since the public funded the research, they ought to get to read it if they want to. As far as I know it doesn't affect private research, and nor should it. If you privately commission a study, I don't think you're invariably, necessarily obligated to release its findings or data (though that's not to say there might not be some cases, e.g. legal proceedings, in which release could be demanded) to the public. But you wouldn't expect the researchers to turn around and say, "I've published the findings in this journal you can't read, because I'm exercising my academic freedom". You'd feel a common-sense entitlement to see what you'd paid for, unless for some strange reason you'd previously agreed an exception with the researchers. Could happen, but unlikely. Generally speaking you'd say the researcher was being unethical by denying your right to inspect the findings.
And so if the public fund research and the researcher has the option and ability to make it publicly visible, then the default expectation should be that it will be public. For them to actively choose an alternative, unless their are compelling reasons to do so (currently Open Access is frickin' expensive), is clearly unethical. Removing a freedom to do an unethical thing isn't itself a fundamentally unethical act - it's normally known as, for instance, "justice". Unless I'm missing something obvious, I find this "infringes academic freedom" argument to be so stupid I can't believe this is really what's bothering them, even if they think it is (with the possible exception of a few Randian devotees).
People are weird.
http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2018/10/01/academic-freedom-and-responsibility-why-plan-s-is-not-unethical/
Blink.
Whut ?
Kudos to the author of this piece for the detailed legalistic analysis of why this is wrong, but surely from an ethical standpoint this is Bloody Obvious ?
As I understand it, the Plan calls for all publically-funded research to be made Open Access, i.e. freely available to the public. Since the public funded the research, they ought to get to read it if they want to. As far as I know it doesn't affect private research, and nor should it. If you privately commission a study, I don't think you're invariably, necessarily obligated to release its findings or data (though that's not to say there might not be some cases, e.g. legal proceedings, in which release could be demanded) to the public. But you wouldn't expect the researchers to turn around and say, "I've published the findings in this journal you can't read, because I'm exercising my academic freedom". You'd feel a common-sense entitlement to see what you'd paid for, unless for some strange reason you'd previously agreed an exception with the researchers. Could happen, but unlikely. Generally speaking you'd say the researcher was being unethical by denying your right to inspect the findings.
And so if the public fund research and the researcher has the option and ability to make it publicly visible, then the default expectation should be that it will be public. For them to actively choose an alternative, unless their are compelling reasons to do so (currently Open Access is frickin' expensive), is clearly unethical. Removing a freedom to do an unethical thing isn't itself a fundamentally unethical act - it's normally known as, for instance, "justice". Unless I'm missing something obvious, I find this "infringes academic freedom" argument to be so stupid I can't believe this is really what's bothering them, even if they think it is (with the possible exception of a few Randian devotees).
People are weird.
http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2018/10/01/academic-freedom-and-responsibility-why-plan-s-is-not-unethical/
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