What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.—Herbert Alexander Simon, economist, Nobel laureate (1916-2001)
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. What an interesting concept: attention consumption. I wonder if part of the energy drainage we feel from the assault of information comes from the quality of attention we “pay.” Buddhists have a concept often called “bare attention.”
It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories. It just looks. [Bare attention] registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it were occurring for the first time. It is not analysis, which is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process…
Mindfulness creates its own distinct feeling in consciousness. It has a flavor—a light, clear, energetic flavor. By comparison, conscious thought is heavy, ponderous, and picky.—Bhante Gunaratana
Bare attention, rather than draining energy, may increase it, or at least increase the “flavor” of energy in one's mind.
Also, I’ve observed in myself that energy drainage comes not so much from an overabundance of information as from its fragmentation. I call this a poverty of integration, not attention.
As the federal government cuts back on funding for research, scientists are now forced to rely more and more on financial assistance from corporations; this raises troubling questions about whether the results from these studies will be impartial and objective or favorable to the companies that paid for them. Paul D. Thacker
The article quoted above that appeared in Environmental Science and Technology (published by the American Chemical Society) last week provides insight into one incresingly common way “science” enters the public consciousness.
The Weinberg proposal: A scientific consulting firm says that it aids companies in trouble, but critics say that it manufactures uncertainty and undermines science, by Paul D. Thacker, discusses a five-page letter from P. Terrence Gaffney, vice president for “product defense” of the Weinberg Group (a consulting firm with the tagline: We get you where you want to go. No matter where you are.), addressed to DuPont’s vice president of special initiatives, Jane Brooks. In the letter, Gaffney lays out ideas for how the Weinberg Group proposes to help DuPont deal with a growing regulatory and legal crisis involving PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid), a common building block of the perfluorocarbon family of chemicals, used in the manufacture of thousands of industrial and consumer products.
Thacker found the letter tucked into an official Environmental Protection Agency folder containing materials involved in the agency’s investigation of PFOA. I urge you to read Thacker's article and the entire Gaffney memo reproduced there.
In Gaffney's opening paragraphs, he emphasizes: “The constant theme which permeates our recommendations on the issues faced by DuPont is that DUPONT MUST SHAPE THE DEBATE AT ALL LEVELS.” [Emphasis in the original.]
Among the bona fides Gaffney presents for the Weinberg Group:
Beginning with Agent Orange in 1983, we have successfully guided clients through myriad regulatory, litigation, and public relations challenges posed by those whose agenda is to grossly over regulate, extract settlements from, or otherwise damage the chemical manufacturing industry….The following will describe some of our capabilities [for] implementing a strategy to limit the effect of litigation and regulation on the revenue stream generated by PFOA.
The memo goes on to offer, among other services, to design studies and employ a variety of experts:
[T]o harness, focus, and involve the scientific and intellectual capacity of our company with one goal in mind: creating the outcome our client desires.These in-house experts are scientists and physicians holding advanced degrees in such areas as statistics & bioepidemiology, pharmacology, pathology, toxicology, oncology, molecular biology, regulatory strategy and product defense.
Weinberg promises to reshape the “debate,” not merely through defending the product, but by repositioning PFOA as beneficial to human health.
Manufacturers must be the aggressors. A defensive posture, in our opinion, would be disastrous.[Dupont must] reshape the debate by identifying the likely known health benefits of PFOA exposure …and/or constructing a study to establish not only that FOA is safe…but that it offers real health benefits (oxygen carrying capacity and prevention of CAD [coronary artery disease].
Under the heading, Needed: new scientific norms for emergency times,
“Revere,” the collective name for several anonymous public health scientists and officials who blog at Effect Measure, today addresses the matter of “scientific hoarding” among leading scientists in several nations, including China and the U.S—in this case hoarding information critical to understanding of the transmission and evolution of the H5N1 avian influenza that threatens to trigger a global pandemic.
Revere points to two reasons for such hoarding. The first involves “scientists who want as much credit as possible for their individual scientific accomplishments.”
I understand this completely. I have spent a great deal of my professional career in academia. Publications, not money, are the coin of the realm in our world, the keys to promotion, reputation, lab space, grant funding and much else. This serves a useful function for science, acting as an incentive for high quality publications and sharing of results with the world community of scientists. But it can also have the opposite effect, leading to polluting the literature with the “least publishable unit” (splitting up a body of work into as many publications as possible to build a resumé), hesitation about sharing samples, data and techniques until they have been maximally milked, embargoing of scientific work by journals seeking to make news -- and distressingly often, nasty authorship disputes.
Revere points to a second reason, namely, “issues of national pride and the knowledge that viral isolates are an economic resource if they are used as seed for a vaccine.
But then, the hard reality:
Viruses move across borders much more quickly than data, even though the latter are capable of moving with the speed of electrons. The speed bottle neck here is social and political. Neither the outmoded system of international relations nor the twentieth century mentality that governs senior academic researchers and journal editors works in this situation. In an emergency there must be some recognition that the usual criteria of personal and national credit are suspended. That might entail both a real and a perceived sacrifice in recognition, credit and perhaps economic benefit. Since that is a lot to ask of people and nations, we see the best antidote is worldwide censure of behavior that in other circumstances would be considered acceptable and usual but in this circumstance is reprehensible.
“In neither instance does it bring credit on the nations and scientists involved. In the context of an impending pandemic it is the worst possible outcome of an unlovely reality of academic science,” Revere opines.
Censure—an appeal based on a moral imperative—as a means of provoking rapid change in a deeply entrenched academic/scientific model? An intriguing idea.
There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. Here I will examine the key factors that influence this problem and some corollaries thereof. John P. A. Ioannidis
“In modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”
Yesterday, I made reference to how the open-access online Public Library of Science (PLOS) has begun changing the face of peer review in science.
Poking around on the current homepage of PLOS Medicine brought me to Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, by John P. A. Ioannidis, a medical doctor affiliated with the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.
Two major sub-heads reflect the main conclusions of Ioannidis’s work:
:Most Research Findings Are False for Most Research Designs and for Most Fields
Claimed Research Findings May Often Be Simply Accurate Measures of the Prevailing Bias
“Research” in human health and well being
Some Extension professionals rely on the findings of clinical trials published in major medical journals. For a sobering look at why educators mightcheck out this companion article in PLOS Medicine: Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies, by Richard Smith.
Here’s his intro:
No wild-eyed, left-leaning investigative reporter, Smith served as editor of the prestigious British Medical Journal for 25 years. Under the sub-head, Peer Review Doesn't Solve the Problem
he candidly admits:
Journal editors are becoming increasingly aware of how they are being manipulated and are fighting back, but I must confess that it took me almost a quarter of a century editing for the BMJ to wake up to what was happening.
Read the whole article for more context and Smith’s suggestions for ways to confront this problem.
So, might blogging be subversive precisely because it makes real the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never managed to achieve? Robert S. Boynton Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs
An interesting Feb. 16 piece by Daniel Gross in the online journal Slate, Twilight of the Blogs: Are they over as a business?, about the “death” of blogging as a commercial enterprise, linked to an equally fascinating Nov. 16, 2005, piece by Robert S. Boynton, Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs: When academics post online, do they risk their jobs?
I found Boynton’s piece especially notable for its insights into the concept of peer review. Boynton opens by noting the current concern in academia about the effects of blogging on academic careers. He cites an anonymous official from a Midwestern college quoted in an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know 'the real them'—better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more,” wrote the pseudonymous columnist.
For me the subtext here suggests that a candidate’s blog probably makes a better tool for getting to know the quality of his or her work than a page of references and a 30-page CV.
Many [academics] perceive blogs as evidence of a scholar's lack of seriousness. Shouldn't he be putting more time into scholarship, they wonder, and less into his blog? And if a blogger does have something serious to say, why is he presenting it in a superficial medium, rather than a peer-reviewed journal?
Speaking of “serious mediums,” Boynton gets right to the point:
At the same time, it is hardly a secret that lots of peer-reviewed material and articles in prestigious academic reviews are neither very good nor widely read, while some of what appears on academic blogs is of high quality and has a large readership (some of it, obviously, isn't and doesn't). So, it's worth taking a closer look at the question: How can a system that ostensibly cares only about the quality of one's arguments and research automatically include the former and exclude the latter?
In many respects, Drezner's predicament was merely a cyber-version of an age-old dilemma. Whether online or off, the kind of accessible and widely read work that brings an academic public recognition is likely to draw the scorn and suspicion of his colleagues. Furthermore, so-called public-intellectual work won't count for much when it comes time to decide whether one gets tenure. In most disciplines at large research universities, tenure is directly related to the number of peer-reviewed books and articles one publishes. Teaching and community service are factored in but are usually far less important than one's publishing record.
Generations of Cooperative Extension workers have suffered under this reality. The tenure and promotion system often privileges academic research and writing and devalues the informal outreach and applied research work we do. Not that our work lacks integrity or rigor, but much of it lies outside the narrow, implicit and explicit boundaries academia has drawn for itself.
Writes Boynton:
Peer review, however, is not a static practice. Some disciplines in the sciences, physics in particular, have had great success bypassing the cumbersome apparatus of traditional peer review (in which a large corporation owns a journal, which has a standard board of editors and is published regularly, and sold at a very high price) in favor of self-policed Web sites on which scientists (often the same ones who edit the expensive journals) post and critique their research papers. Rather than waiting months for publication, and then months more for reaction, they receive immediate editorial scrutiny from the very set of peers they most want to hear from.Perhaps the most significant challenge to the traditional peer-review practices comes from open-source projects like the Public Library of Science, which, though their journals are peer-reviewed, are available to all readers.
For me, all this represents evidence of change, not just technological change, but the fundamental changes to established institutions and to human consciousness itself that arrive with any new method of communication.
The “twilight” Boynton refers to may indeed signal the demise of hopes for the blog as a wealth-producing vehicle. It may signal a decrease in dominance of our current systems for validating the quality of research and intellectual ideas.
But I doubt it signals the end of weblogging and its electronic heirs.