I had the privilege yesterday of handling various snakes, including a ground boa (shown below) and slug-eating snake. This was after #filming several spitting #cobra species from around Indonesia, which were being sunbathed (and were very unhappy about it).
I should have the footage up soon, but am still deciding if I should go back and get more before publishing.
A reminder that I grew up with a phobia of snakes, and would be frightened by random photos of them. I still crept backwards like a coward when the cobras approached me (even though I trusted the handler to protect me), but from being unable to see a picture of even the most harmless snakes to handling them is proof that anyone can concur their fears!
My approach — get face-to-face with cobras and vipers — is a bit extreme, I admit, but you can do it! 😊
@dandelion Precisely. 😅 My first experience with a snake was in southern Africa, when I was five years old, and lifting some paper bags in the garden. The sudden sight of a slender body scampering away gave me a fright that persisted in my nightmares for decades! 😂 I'm so fortunate now that I've met people who have helped me reduce my fear... in Indonesia, it's especially helpful.
Good: I finished filming another part of our exploration of the life in #Yogyakarta's rivers.
Bad: one of the cards got corrupted, so I might lose some of the footage. Still working on recovery and we'll see how that goes (I have no idea what I'm doing :blobpeek:).
Success! Full credit to the mysteries of the universe, because I had to move my laptop and when I plugged the SD card in again, it worked again. I have no idea what changed but I'll take it.
The films "The Wind Rises" and "Howl's Moving Castle" lost the Oscar to "Wallace and Gromit" and "Frozen", and well, "Ponyo" wasn't even nominated. I find it hard to believe that Miyazaki has only won 2 Oscars instead of 6?. Although it is also true that this surely has no importance for him, since these are data that define the quality of the Oscars more than that of Miyazaki's films 😒
One thing that sucks about #PeerReview being so broken and a vector of domination rather that cooperation is that, in the best case, they can be skillshares as much as anything else. In some code reviews I have given and received, I have taught and learned how to do things that I or the other person wished they knew how to do, but didnt.
That literally cant happen in the traditional model of review, where reviews are strict, terse, and noninteractive. Traditional review also happens way too late, when all the projected work is done. Collaborative, open, early review literally inverts the dreaded "damn reviewers want us to do infinity more experiments" dynamic. Instead, wouldnt it be lovely if during or even before you do an experiment, having a designated person to be like "hey have you thought about doing it this way? If not i can show you how"
The adversarial system forces you into a position where you have to defend your approach as The Correct One and any change in your Genius Tier experimental design must be only to validate the basic findings of the original design. Reviewers cannot be considered as collaborators, and thus have little incentive to review with any other spirit than "gatekeeper of science."
If instead we adopted some lessons from open source and thought of some parts of reviews as "pull requests" - where fixing a bug is somewhat the responsibility of the person who thinks it should be done differently, but then they also get credit for that work in the same way that the original authors do, we could
a) share techniques and knowledge between labs in a more systematic way,
b) have better outcomes from moving beyond the sole genius model of science,
c) avoid a ton of experimental waste from either unnecessary extra experiments or improperly done original experiments,
d) build a system of reviewing that actually rewards reviewers for being collegial and cooperative
edit: to be super clear here i know i am not saying anything new, just reflecting on it as i am doing an open review
@jonny I'm just spitballing based on two hours of sleep, but I think one way designated reviewer doesn't work is that it relies on the scientist's network, and many (especially introverts and non-westerners) have limited networks. I like there being, like, a roving expert in x procedure who just advises people on it, though. A lot of methodological mistakes are made by students, which are only caught after submission by a competent reviewer.
@jonny Also, I conjured a git-based journal a couple years ago that was based on the idea of authors and reviewers submitting pull requests, making it a 100% transparent journal. Didn't go past experimentation, partly because git is annoying and a friend pointed out a Wiki journal would be easier. (I think you've written something similar, but am too tired to recall right now). But conceptually, an open github pages (or equivalent) site where every step is publicly recorded is quite elegant.
@jonny@joss@pyOpenSci It would be fantastic to see in ecology, honestly, now that you're mentioning it.
I feel terrible for students (it's always students with inattentive professors) who go to all the effort of conducting grueling field work, and then are blindsided by someone telling them they used the wrong method. And they just don't see the problem until someone who knows sees it.
"A study published in the journal Science reveals that an area the size of France is under threat by forest restoration initiatives due to inappropriate restoration in the form of tree-planting."
"They warn that planting trees in these grassy areas [..] could be a risk to wildlife such as rhinos and wildebeest, as well as people who depend on these #ecosystems."
@richard The paper's title says it, but people need to stop confusing the meaning of restoration. These ecosystems are grassland; planting trees means altering them.
New ethical academic practice: accept every spam article and partial name match google proposes on google scholar to start an inflationary arms race of SEO spam that finally kills the h-index dead
I've returned from Jakarta! It's not an appealing city, I'm afraid, and had my wife not told me to go before the election, I may have continued to put it off.
Fortunately, it turned out to be less stressful than expected, thanks to Beatriz and Rossy at the Portuguese embassy. They were delightful and incredibly helpful. 🥰
During my walk from/to the train station, I counted at least 20 cats and met a young women who feeds them. They were just chilling there, unbothered by the traffic. 🥴
Additionally, the 14 hours on the train really flew by. The whole trip was extremely exhausting, but I love riding trains, and Indonesia has great ones.
Is offering to add random people as authors on a paper - in order to share and thus reduce publication costs - fraud or a valid response to excessive publication costs and broken performance metrics?
(Not planning to do this myself btw, I'm fortunate enough not to need to, but not everyone is so lucky.)
@neuralreckoning@antoniahamilton (Although, cynically, my wife proffered that the publisher might be fine with granting the waiver because they don't think the article will be accepted anyway. 🤪 )