Curious, I phoned the public relations officers with the recycling departments in several small cities in the Northeast.  I asked one extremely cheerful and energetic young woman how her city could justify asking people to put their garbage in the dishwasher.  Isn’t that pretty expensive, in terms of human time, and the energy to heat the water, compared to the value of the garbage?

Using the same tone of voice one would use to talk to a five year old—she clearly thought I was not the sharpest can lid in the recycle bin—she gave me the most concise explanation I have encountered in the whole genre.  She said, “Oh, you have to understand, sir.  Recycling is always cheaper, no matter how much it costs!”  For her, and for millions of people like her, recycling is not an economic activity at all, but a moral duty, without limits and for which cost is irrelevant.

This is a brilliant article on the topic of “Why We Recycle.” Read the whole thing. I have stood at the sink, rinsing out a glass bottle or can, and wondering if the cost in energy to purify and pump the water, dispose of the dirty rinse water, drive trucks to pick up the recycled bin separately from the trash bin, sort it, then ship it to a plant which reuses the material is really worth it in net terms to the environment. But I still do it, because if feels so virtuous!

No one had ever said, “Recycle because it’s cheaper”; instead, they had been told “Don’t throw anything into the landfill, because it’s wrong!”  By that logic, the protesters had a point:  moral imperatives shouldn’t respond to relative scarcity.  If it’s wrong to throw things into the landfill, it’s not an excuse to say “it’s expensive.”  Using moral suasion to solve the problem of charging a low price for landfill is actually dangerous, because people confuse sensible frugality, contingent on prices, with morality, which is only contingent on the good or bad character of the citizen.

The Scientific method requires that scientists communicate their findings, clearly, accurately, honestly, and truthfully. Sir Isaac Newton said “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.” Each insight builds upon the framework of countless insights before, and the observations that vouched for their truth. Insight leads to hypothesis, hypothesis leads to predictions, predictions lead to experiments, observations, and measurements, and we compare the predictions to the empirical data and accept, adjust, or discard the hypothesis. Reporting on this cycle of predict, measure, compare, adjust is how scientists disseminate knowledge.

Since no one is infallible, modern scientific scholarship relies on the evaluation of people with similar competence to the original researchers; their peers. The peers review the research report for relevance, quality, and accuracy. This process of peer-review helps expose any flaws and areas that are unclear or need improvement. Research work may be accepted, sent back for revision, or even rejected. Only when a researcher’s peers are satisfied with the quality of the research is the resulting report said to be peer reviewed. It is the gold standard of scientific quality. But the peer reviewers are human as well, and in many cases are in competition with the researchers whose work they are judging. It is a testament to the intellectual integrity of the vast majority of researchers that the peer-review system works as well as it has to date.

A very interesting paper, peer-reviewed!, appeared three decades ago, entitled “Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles, submitted again” I found the results fascinating.

A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables.

The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.

So, what do you think happened?

With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated.

There is a lot of food for thought here. I did a quick check and found a single citation of this paper. I think I’ll dig a little deeper and see if other studies of the peer review process itself have been done over the last couple of decades.

From the National Post.

An international research team reported Wednesday that miners near Timmins are tapping into an ancient underground oasis that may harbour prehistoric microbes. The water flowing out of fractures and bore holes in one mine near Timmins dates back more than a billion years, perhaps 2.6 billion, making it the oldest water known to exist on Earth, says the team that details the discovery in the journal Nature.

This water doesn’t predate life on Earth–we think life first appeared around 3.5B years ago–but it suggests that life may have originated below the Earth’s surface, where it would have been protected from UV radiation from the Sun. Before the evolution of bluegreen algae and the subsequent increase of atmospheric oxygen necessary to form the ozone layer which today protects the Earth’s surface from harmful amounts of UV radiation, life would have been restricted to the oceans. And now, perhaps underground as well. If ancient living organisms are found in the isolated underground water… I find this simply amazing to contemplate.

Near the end of April, a record setting Gamma Ray Burst was observed in the constellation Leo. Not only did scientists observe the highest energy gamma ray photons ever measured from such an event, about 35 billion times more energetic than photons of visible light, but the duration of the event also set records. The hours-long ‘burst’ enabled other telescopes to observe the region of the sky containing the source object. The redshift distance was remarkably small for GRBs, too. This GRB was exceptionally energetic, remarkably long-lived, and closer to us than 95% of other GRBs seen. The image below is from NASA’s Swift X-ray telescope.

The followup observations are expected to find a supernova remnant by the middle of May. The data collected may reveal new information about the physical processes involved in creating the most luminous events in the Universe.