This morning I gave a short talk at the “Astronomy Tea” at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy. No prizes for guessing what I talked about. The talk was followed by questions and then by a huge thunderstorm.
Here are the slides:
P.S. Today was the first day of teaching of the new academic year at the University of Sydney, so the campus was much busier today than it has been.
Yesterday I received two different emails from predatory publishers. The first invited me to submit a manuscript to the OSP Journal of Physics & Astronomy. I am informed that the journal is fully open access, with an Article Processing Charge of “only” $950. Of course $950 is $950 more than I’ll ever be prepared to pay for an APC, but did have a look at the website and found this:
A pretty good clue that OSP is a predatory publisher is that can spell neither “Scientific” nor “submit”…
Anyway, if you’re interested – and if I were you I wouldn’t be – you can find the OSP Journal of Physics & Astronomy here. I’ve skimmed the latest issue and the quality of articles is just as I expected.
The Second Encounter of the Predatory Kind was an email that begins thus:
I’ve never heard of the Auricle Global Society of Education and Research (AGSER) but the Open Journal of Astrophysics is not for sale to them (nor to anyone else, for that matter). Of course I don’t own OJAp anyway, but even if I did I wouldn’t sell it at any price. The only terms that I would agree to a takeover would be if the new owners committed to keep it as Diamond Open Access (i.e. free to authors and readers), and I can’t see any predators offering that!
I don’t know how AGSER arrived at a valuation of $70K but it got me thinking. We have so far published 128 articles at OJAp. Taking the APC for MNRAS of £2500 (approx $3000) as typical then we have saved the community about $384,000 in unnecessary publication charges.
I took a stroll this afternoon in Sydney’s splendid Royal Botanic Garden. It was quite warm, so I soon had to retreat into a bar for some light refreshment, but not before I took a few snaps. The last one, incidentally, is of a wedding ceremony…
Two of the pictures show examples of Australian birds that are common in Sydney. The Australian White Ibis – called “Bin Chickens” because of their scavenging habits – look rather elegant from a distance but close up look rather manky. The smaller bird on the arm of the bench is a Noisy Miner. These are aggressively territorial, rather like the Eurasian Robin familiar to folk in the Northern hemisphere. They are also rather noisy. The other common native bird I see frequently is the Cockatoo. I’ll do a separate post about these very peculiar creatures when I get some decent pictures.
It’s Saturday morning here in Sydney, which means it is time for another weekly update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics. In fact there is only one paper to report this week, being the 13th paper in Volume 7 (2024) and the 128th altogether. It was published on February 15th 2024.
The title is “Jet – counter-jet asymmetry in the jittering jets explosion mechanism of supernovae” and it This one is in the folder called High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The paper presents a discussion of the production of jets in core-collapse supernovae and the resulting formation of neutron stars, and the implications for the morphology of the supernova remnant.
The sole author of the paper is Noam Soker of Technion, Haifa, in Israel.
Here is the overlay of the paper containing the abstract:
You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.
Time, I think, a bit of local news. There’s an ongoing asbestos crisis not only in Sydney but across all New South Wales. It seems that the mulch that has been used in many public parks, school grounds and even a hospital garden is contaminated with asbestos. One affected site is Victoria Park, which I walk through from my flat to the University. At least the park is still open, so you can walk on the paths and sit on the lawns, but all areas with mulch are fenced off:
As it happens, Victoria Park was to be used for one of the events planned for Sydney Mardi Gras, which starts today*, but that particular event has been cancelled though many others are unaffected.
The contaminated mulch at all the sites affected was supplied by the same company, Greenlife Resource Recovery. I hope they have to foot the bill for clearing it all up!
*It is, of course, a complete coincidence that this LGBT festival coincides with my stay in Sydney…
I mentioned in my last post that I plan to visit the ongoing Kandinsky Exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales so I thought I’d share this little video introducing the artist and the exhibition:
Taking a few moments over breakfast to post about life in Sydney. This morning is cooler than it has been for a while and it’s all a bit rainy. It was very warm (by my standards) earlier in the week (up to 31°C) and very humid, culminating in thunderstorms but those were some way off in the distance so didn’t affect us greatly. Since then it’s been in the mid-20s with a mixture of clouds, light rain, and sunshine. You have to be careful here, though, as it is perfectly possible to get sunburn when it’s cloudy. I’m definitely glad I brought my hat.
Other than the weather, the main thing at the University is that it’s Orientation Week, when the new students arrive. Campus has been much busier this week than it was last week, as you can see from the pictures above; I wanted to stand in the same spot for the second picture but there were too many people. Lectures start next week, for both new and returning students, so it should get even busier.
I’ve managed to book tickets for two different performances at the Opera, The Magic Flute and La Traviata. These weren’t cheap but I couldn’t resist seeing the Sydney Opera House from the inside. I’m also planning a trip to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, were there is a special exhibition of art by Wassily Kandinsky which I must see. I’m also going to travel around a bit to give a few talks in the Sydney area.
My diary is filling up, so the second half of this visit will be rather busier than the first, but it should all be interesting!
A month ago I wrote a piece about observations of an apparent “Big Ring” of absorption systems that was claimed to be inconsistent with the Cosmological Principle and hence with the standard cosmological model. At the time there was no paper describing the results, but a preprint has now appeared on arXiv. I haven’t read it carefully yet, but at a cursory reading it confirms my prior expectation that it does not contain a comparison of the observations with predictions of the standard model. I’ll say more after I’ve had a chance to digest the paper.
One of the things that irked me at the time of the announcement of this “discovery” was that there was no way to scrutinize the claims because they hadn’t been written up. Another was that the media covering the Big Ring did not appear to want to present balancing opinions.
An exception was Danish journalist Peter Harmsen who writes for the weekly broadsheet Weekendavisen who asked me for an interview after seeing my sceptical blog post. The results appeared in an article that came out yesterday (13th February). It’s behind a paywall but here’s a screengrab to give you an idea (if you can read Danish):
The word “store” in Danish means “big” or “large”; it comes up quite often if you want to buy a beer in Denmark. The key quote of mine is
Det er meget dårlig stil at fremsætte resultater i offentlige fora, uden at de er nedfældet skriftligt
Weekendavisen, 13th February 2024
I actually kept a transcript of the interview which I thought it might be useful to share here in the form of questions and answers. You will find the original English version of the above quote in my response to the last question.
| Fundamentally, do you think that the cosmological principle still stands or is in need of adjustment or even replacement? | The Cosmological Principle, in the form used in the standard cosmological model, requires the Universe to be sufficiently homogeneous and isotropic on large scales that its behaviour can be described by relatively simple solutions of Einstein’s equations called the Friedman equations. We know the Universe is not exactly homogenous and isotropic, and the standard model predicts actually fluctuations on rather large scales that do not violate it. Of course the part of the Universe we have actually observed directly is relatively small, but as I see it there is no compelling evidence that the Cosmological Principle is violated. |
| Specifically regarding the research on the so-called Big Ring, is the jury still out on whether the people behind the research are on to something, pending publication of a peer-reviewed paper, or is it your assessment, based on what has been made public so far, that it is probably not the breakthrough that it has been made out to be in some reports? | I am sceptical of the claims made about the Big Ring because there is no scientific paper describing the result. Based on what I have seen, however, just like other claims of arcs and filaments, the structure described does not seem to be on a sufficiently large scale to violate the cosmological principle. A careful comparison of the results with simulations would be required to draw more definite conclusions. I am not aware that the authors have done that. |
| The PhD student credited with the research is quoted in the Financial Times as making the following remark: “Lots of people are excited but, having said that, you do get this [resistant] attitude in cosmology that you don’t generally find elsewhere in science… Good science should be about pushing back and testing our fundamental assumptions but there are clearly people who want to protect the Standard Model.” What is your comment on this? Is cosmology stifled by a scientific community resistant to change? | Science is – or should be – based on evidence. In my view the weight of evidence supporting the standard model is substantial, but that does not mean that it is proven to be true; it is a working hypothesis. If anyone does come up with evidence that shows it to be wrong then that would be the most exciting thing possible. I don’t see such evidence here. There are of course many people working on alternative theories , for example involving different forms of gravitational theory. I’d say cosmologists are very open to such ideas. Indeed we know that the standard model is incomplete and will eventually be replaced by a more complete theory. That has to be driven by evidence. |
| You describe in your blog “an increasing tendency for university press offices to see themselves entirely as marketing agencies.” Have there been other recent examples of universities being a little too eager to sell their scientific advances to the public? | There’s quite a lot of this about, and I have to say that scientists, sadly, are often willing participants. A famous example from some years ago was the BICEP2 “discovery” concerning the cosmic microwave background, which made headlines around the world but was later shown to be false. More recently there have been many claims that very distant galaxies observed with JWST are incompatible with the standard cosmology. In that case some of the observations turned out to be incorrect and the theoretical interpretation misleading. Very high redshift galaxies would indeed be difficult to account for in the standard model, but we haven’t seen enough evidence yet. |
| The narrative of a young scholar proposing revolutionary new ideas despite resistance from established science seems to resonate with the public and has echoes of Galilei and Darwin. Are we, the lay public, too easy victims of such dramatic story-telling, and does it give us a wrong idea about how science actually works? | I think the public don’t really understand how science really works for a number of reasons. I think many people expect scientists to be certain about things, when really it’s about dealing with statistical evidence in as careful and rational a way as possible. Earlier you asked me about the Cosmological Principle. If you asked me if the Cosmological Principle is valid I would answer “I don’t know, but as a working hypothesis it accounts very well for the reliable data”. That sort of statement, however, does not make headlines. A significant problem is that extravagant unsubstantiated claims make headlines, but subsequent retractions don’t. This presents a very misleading picture to the public. |
| In your blog, you write that headline-hunting without the presence of even a pre-print is “not the sort of thing PhD supervisors should be allowing their PhD students to do.” Is it because it is harmful to science as a whole, or because there is a risk of derailing a young scientist’s career before it has even begun due to an early debacle? | My objection is more that I think it is very bad form to present in public results which have not even been written up, let alone subject to proper peer review. It’s essential for science that this happens, so that the claims can be properly evaluated by experts in the field. Bypassing this is potentially extremely damaging to the proper public understanding of this subject. |
It’s a lovely sunny Saint Ash Valentine’s Wednesday Day in Australia though I’m not sure what day it is at the 2nd Lagrange Point of the Earth-Sun system. Nevertheless, as I mentioned last week, Euclid’s Wide Survey starts today; here is the official announcement of this from ESA. To mark this momentous event here is another nice video update showing the preparations that have been going on ahead of the arrival of the deluge of real data:
Among other things, you will see an appearance by Henry Joy McCracken whose namesake led the United Irishmen in the Rebellion of 1798.
Last year I wrote a piece about the resignation of the entire Editorial Board of an Elsevier journal. The main reason for this action was `extreme’ Article Processing Charges imposed by the publisher for so-called Gold Open Access to the papers. As I wrote then, the
… current system of ‘Gold’ Open Access is a scam, and it’s a terrible shame we have ended up having it foisted upon us. Fortunately, being forced to pay APCs of many thousands of euros to publish their papers, researchers are at last starting to realize that they are being ripped off. Recently, the entire Editorial Board of Neuroimage and its sister journal Neuroimage: Reports resigned in protest at the `extreme’ APC levels imposed by the publisher, Elsevier. I’m sure other academics will follow this example, as it becomes more and more obvious that the current arrangements are unsustainable. Previously the profits of the big publishers were hidden in library budgets. Now they are hitting researchers and their grants directly, as authors now have to pay, and people who previously hadn’t thought much about the absurdity of it all are now realizing what a racket academic publishing really is.
Well, the new journal founded by former Editorial Board of Neuroimage and Neuroimage: Reports has now appeared. It’s called Imaging Neuroscience and its rather website can be found here.
Good news, you would think.
But no…
Imaging Neuroscience is itself a Gold Open Access journal which charges an APC of $1600 per paper. That’s about half the Elsevier were charging ($3,450) but is still far too high. It simply does not cost this much to publish papers online! (There’s a paper that gives a summary of the commercial costs of different aspects of publishing here.) The journal claims to be non-profit making so I’d love to see what they are spending this money on. It can’t be on their website, which is very rudimentary.
It seems that the neuroscientists concerned have just decided to replace Elsevier’s absurd APCs with their own absurd APCs. Oh dear. And they seemed so close to getting it…
In the Dark 