Help NASA Find the Alphabet… From Space

Adam Voiland of NASA’s Earth Observatory found the photo above that looks like a huge, cloudy “V.” He’s even speculated about which font it may be. I think this looks like a “Z,” but Voiland clearly spends more time looking at satellite imagery than I do, so we’ll defer to him for now.
But what about the rest of the alphabet? Voiland would like to assemble the entire alphabet from space, so if you’ve seen a letter, let us know and perhaps your contribution will be featured by NASA or Wired.

Misconceptions about science

MISCONCEPTION: Scientists’ observations directly tell them how things work (i.e., knowledge is “read off” nature, not built).

CORRECTION: Because science relies on observation and because the process of science is unfamiliar to many, it may seem as though scientists build knowledge directly through observation. Observation is critical in science, but scientists often make inferences about what those observations mean. Observations are part of a complex process that involves coming up with ideas about how the natural world works and seeing if observations back those explanations up. Learning about the inner workings of the natural world is less like reading a book and more like writing a non-fiction book — trying out different ideas, rephrasing, running drafts by other people, and modifying text in order to present the clearest and most accurate explanations for what we observe in the natural world.

How Did the arXiv Succeed?

A lot of pieces talking about the failure of open access policies to catch on more widely tend to point to the success of the arXiv in physics and math as if it’s the rule and the failure of the life-science versions are the exception. But, given that physics does not lack for high-stakes job competition, or publication pressure, I think this is the wrong way around. It’s not surprising that biologists don’t embrace preprint-sharing; rather, it’s a mystery how the arXiv managed to succeed so brilliantly.

I’m wondering if it’s structural, in terms of grants and overlap of projects. It may be easier to gear up a lab to scoop someone in other areas of science, but in the high-energy physics world, where you are scheduling experiment time on an accelerator as part of a large collaboration, I think “scooping” really isn’t posing a large problem.

Quick thoughts on the what and why of science outreach

I could describe my research to other perceptual psychologists, or to other cognitive psychologists, or to other psychologists, or to other scientists, each time taking a step away from the specific knowledge of the context of distance perception research. But these steps are encouraged, the journals that reach wider audiences have more credibility and more impact. But then if I take one more step beyond Science and Nature, to the lay public, all of a sudden it becomes not science but science outreach? This seems like a bit of an arbitrary distinction. Maybe it is just that Science and Nature are super competitive, and the selectivity itself is what is solely responsible for their high currency in the scientific world?

It may be arbitrary, but drawing the line at when the audience contains scientists who might use your research or are potential collaborators doesn’t seem all that unfair. However, the observation that people outside that circle might still have useful information to share is a good one. It’s not uncommon to make a “discovery” in one field only to find it’s a very well-known phenomena in another and only a matter of where you’ve drawn these boundaries of who your audience is (or in what audience you place yourself). Cross-pollination in science, by reaching a broader audience, is quite likely to yield better science.