Author: John Bartos

When I went off to university 23 years ago, there were professors that were still using a textbook and chalk on a board.   The big innovation was using overhead projectors to put figures up on a screen.  Some professors actually wrote on the overhead projectors.  This was in the days before the internet took off and people used Quatro Pro for their spreadsheets.  The big thing as a student was the programmable HP calculator and you might be able to put a couple of equations in it to sneak into a test.   I had a great IBM computer that had a 10MBs processor.

Twenty three years later, the professors in the class are using a projector that has a Powerpoint presentation instead of an overhead projector.  The chalk boards are replaced with the dry erase boards.  That is it.  Every student now has a laptop instead of a piece of paper for their notes.  The gradebook and the assignment are online instead outside of a professor’s door. My computer is not a Dell with 128 GB processor. My chlidren’s class room now has a “smart board” where they can access the internet and can get their class room announcements for the whole school district.   These boards have not got to the university yet.

I don’t have much confidence in the innovation in the classroom for the next 23 years.   I see the innovation in the laboratory and in the field with more technology being introduced.  I hope that I am wrong so my children will have a better university education experience than I did 23 years ago.

 

 

The Lead: Researchers with UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Princeton University recently walked back scientific findings published last month that showed oceans have been heating up dramatically faster than previously thought as a result of climate change.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/environment/sd-me-climate-study-error-20181113-story.html

This study was published in Nature and was used at the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  It was used to point out that the collection of gas samples of oxygen and nitrogen collected diffusing from the ocean had an problem.  The error bars were to small.  These samples were supposed to be independent proof of warming oceans that did not involved buoy temperature measurements.    The Princeton researcher stated “It’s a promising new method, but we didn’t get the precision right on the first pass.”   He went on and said, “Our error margins are too big now to really weigh in on the precise amount of warming that’s going on in the ocean,” Keeling said. “We really muffed the error margins.”

This paper went through review from two different universities and the editorial board for the journal Nature.  Yet, they muffed the error margins.  From the article, “Keeling said they have since redone the calculations, finding the ocean is still likely warmer than the estimate used by the IPCC. However, that increase in heat has a larger range of probability than initially thought — between 10 percent and 70 percent, as other studies have already found.”

A correction was added to the journal Nature so everything is fine.  It is a good thing that there a climate deniers like Nic Lewis.  He is described in the articles as a “critic of the scientific consensus around human-induced warming.”  Yet, he was the one who found the mistake.   Did he report it to Nature?  No, he had to go to independent news outlet in the form of a blog of Judith Curry.    Here is the blog website: https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/06/a-major-problem-with-the-resplandy-et-al-ocean-heat-uptake-paper/

Here is Nic Lewis’ conclusion on the blog which summed it up:

The findings of the Resplandy et al paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media. Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results. Just a few hours of analysis and calculations, based only on published information, was sufficient to uncover apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations.

Moreover, even if the paper’s results had been correct, they would not have justified its findings regarding an increase to 2.0°C in the lower bound of the equilibrium climate sensitivity range and a 25% reduction in the carbon budget for 2°C global warming.

Because of the wide dissemination of the paper’s results, it is extremely important that these errors are acknowledged by the authors without delay and then corrected.

Of course, it is also very important that the media outlets that unquestioningly trumpeted the paper’s findings now correct the record too.

But perhaps that is too much to hope for.

Yes, Nic is might be too much to hope for.

 

 

 

I sat through the open access class with the librarians and Dean DePauw.   I did extra research looking at the open access available for my field, Geosciences.   I have spend 25 years looking at tomes of journals in a the back stacks of libraries with photocopies in binder after binder.   Now, the journals are found online without going through the dust and paper cuts.   The advent of google scholar and databases online allowed for research to be conducted much more effectively now at your fingertips (without paper cuts).

This advances cost money.  The computers, storage, web hosting cost money.  At the same time, the major publishing companies have exponentially increase the number of journals allowing for even more publishing and spread of knowledge.

I think people should make a profit on what they do.   I felt the panel had an anti-profit stance.  I do not defend the companies but this is the system that has been setup.   It won’t be the university libraries, the administrators, or the governments that will change the system.  The system will be changed at the tenure committee only.   When the tenure committee recognizes an open access journal as much a high standing paid journal for tenure, then the for-profit journal will have less hold over the library.

I found this article particularity interesting because it close to home.   My former advisor at Syracuse University came under “fire” when it came out that he published data that was supplied and paid for by an industrial company without declaring it in a journal article.    The article was controversial because it was looking at methane concentrations in private drinking wells in Pennsylvania due to the influence from nearby wells that were “fracking” Marcelleus Shale.  The paper came out in the prestigious Environmental Science and Technology.

The sample results that were given from Chesapeake Energy and they provided funding to Syracuse University for an assistantship and paid directly the professor for speaking fees (paid consultancies) when there was public meetings for when the State of New York was deciding to allow fracing or not later.     From the newspaper article, they stated “The guidelines also state that authors must disclose funding sources for their papers and any interests that might detract from an author’s objectivity in the presentation of study results should be disclosed.”

Both the professor and Chesapeake Energy made the argument that it was an “oversight”.  A spokesman continued that “He just presumed everybody would know we’re using Chesapeake’s database, so of course we’re working for Chesapeake,” Azzolina said. “There is no impropriety here.”     The authors for the paper submitted a new disclosure statement to the journal and the professor went in front of Syracuse University’s ethics committee and was reprimanded.

What I feel sorry for the Master Student who prepared and wrote a thesis that had nothing to do with the ethical problems that her advisor did not disclose everything.   I think her name should not be put through the mud.

https://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2015/04/fracking_study_syracuse_university_chesapeake_energy_methane_wells.html

http://dailyorange.com/2015/05/department-chair-at-syracuse-university-has-fracking-research-corrected-due-to-conflict-of-interest/