MDPI

 Minimum Deliverable Published Item

How the Grinch ruined reviewing

 

Everyone who has ever published scientific results knows about the dread Reviewer Two: The reviewer who is unduly harsh, or just doesn’t get it, or who is inappropriately negative. Yet although we all complain about having been harshly judged by reviewer two, we never talk about the reviews we dish out. So, because it is Christmas, I am posting my harshest ever review below. I actually had to do it twice- I was a naive sucker, and I sheepishly went along when they asked me to do their dirty work for them. Here is part one:

Dear G&G editors:

This paper appears to be plagiarized from Haggerty 2014 Carbonado: Physical and chemical properties, a critical evaluation of proposed origins, and a revised genetic model. Earth Science Reviews 130 49-72 (hereafter: H14).

The first sentence of this manuscript is directly plagiarized from the first sentence of Haggerty (2014), without citation:

"Carbonado-diamond is the most controversial of all diamond types and is found only in Brazil, and the Central African Republic (Bangui)." H14

"Carbonado is the most controversial of all diamond types." this paper

This pattern continues:

"Selected physical properties are presented and the proposed origins, diverse

in character and imaginatively novel, are critically reviewed." H14

"Selected physical and chemical properties are presented and the proposed origins, diverse in character and imaginatively novel, are critically reviewed."

Similarly, entire sentences and phrases from the introduction and descriptive sections seem to be cut and pasted from various parts of H14, while this paper is only referenced (and incorrectly as 2013) occasionally.

There is no author affiliation on the manuscript you sent me.  If it is anyone other than Haggerty, you should probably report them to their Dean, or misconduct board.  If it is Haggerty, then I guess it depends on your policy on large-scale self-cut and pasting and what constitutes an original paper.  I have attached the first page of H14 (just one page, to stay within fair use guidelines) as a comparison- please compare this abstract to the abstract and first introductory paragraph on the manuscript you sent me.

I thought I should inform you of this ASAP. Would you like me to continue with the review?

sincerely,

Chuck Magee

Anyway, the editors replied saying that Haggerty was in fact the author, and that a full review would be appreciated. So I provided the following:

 

Dear G&G editors:

This paper appears to be heavily self-plagairized from Haggerty 2014 Carbonado: Physical and chemical properties, a critical evaluation of proposed origins, and a revised genetic model. Earth Science Reviews 130 49-72 (hereafter: H14).

Specific, paragraph-by-paragraph notes:

The Abstract is heavily cribbed from that of H14, including an identical opening sentence.

The introduction is heavily cribbed from the second half of the H14 abstract. “Selected physical [and chemical] properties are presented and the proposed origins, diverse in character and imaginatively novel, are critically reviewed.”;

Point 2 in this manuscript is point 1 in H14 abstract;

Point 3 in this manuscript is point 2 in H14 abstract;

Point 4 in this manuscript is point 3 in H14 abstract.

Point 1 in this manuscript is the first sentence of H14 Introduction.

Paragraph 1 of this manuscript’s “Geological Setting” section is copied from paragraph 1 of the “Geologic Setting” section of H14.

Paragraph 2 of this manuscript’s “Geological Setting” section is copied from paragraph 2 of the “Geologic Setting” section of H14.

Paragraph 3 of this manuscript’s “Geological Setting” section is copied from the beginning of paragraph 3 of the “Geologic Setting” section of H14.

Paragraph 4 of this manuscript’s “Geological Setting” section is copied from the middle and end of paragraph 3 of the “Geologic Setting” section of H14.

Paragraph 1 of this manuscript’s “Carbonado” section is copied from paragraph 4 of the Introduction of H14.

The first half of the “overall appearance” subsection is copied from the “Overall appearance” section of H14. The second half is cribbed heavily from the “Surface and internal textures” section of H14.

The “porosity” subsection is copied with minor changes from the porosity section of H14

The “Hardness and toughness” subsection is copied with minor changes from the “Hardness & Toughness” section of H14

The “Mineralogy” subsection is copied and summarized from from the “Mineralogy” section of H14

The “Chemistry” subsection is copied virtually intact from the “chemistry” section of H14

The “Optical properties” subsection is copied with minor changes (1,2,3 becomes a,b,c) and condensed from the “optical properties” section of H14

The “synthesis” subsection is copied with minor changes from the “synthesis” section of H14

The Objections to Proposed origins section in this manuscript is somewhat mixed up from H14:

point 1 was point 5

point 2 was point 9

point 3 was point 1

point 4 was point 13

point 5 was point 14

point 6 was point 7

point 7 was point 2

point 8 was point 3

point 9 was point 3

point 10 was point 4

point 11 was point 8

point 12 was point 10

point 13 was point 11

point 14 was point 12

point 15-18 are the same.

The summarizing paragraph is cut and pasted from the summarizing paragraph of H14

The Extra-terrestrial Origin section of this manuscript copies 6 of the 7 ennumerated points from H14.

The first “stellar sources” paragraph is heavily cribbed from the third “Extra-terrestrial origin” section of H14.

The second “stellar sources” paragraph of this manuscript appears to be similar to the last paragraph of the “Extra-Terrestrial origin” section of H14

The third “stellar sources” paragraph of this manuscript is similar for the first paragraph of the “new cosmic model” section of H14.

The fourth “stellar sources” paragraph appears to be copied from the fourth “A new cosmic model” section of H14

The “Exoplanets” paragraph is cribbed heavily from the middle of the second “A new cosmic model” paragraph of H14

The 1st “solar system” paragraph is drawn heavile from the end of the second “A new cosmic model” paragraph of H14

The second “Solar System” paragraph is drawn from the last “origin in the solar system” paragraph in H14

The first “When and how did carbonado reach earth” paragraph Is based on the first and third “Transporting media” paragraphs of H14

The second “When and how did carbonado reach earth” paragraph is copied from the second “Transporting media” paragraph of H14

The first “Other host rocks” paragraph of this manuscript is copied from the second “Rarity of carbonado” paragraph of H14

The second “Other host rocks” paragraph is cut and pasted from the “Geological implications” paragraph of H14

The first “Industrial applications” paragraph of this manuscript is copied from the “Industrial applications” paragraph of H14.

The first “conclusions” paragraph of this paper is cribbed from the “Conclusions” paragraph of H14.

In summary, this manuscript does not contain a single paragraph that is not either a partial or complete restatement of part of H14. More importantly, it does not address any of the serious problems with H14.

The idea of glassy carbon forming from a melt is nonsensical; the melting temperature of C is so high that it has not yet been reliably snythesized, however the temperatures required are such that there is no expectation that an amorphous quench product can be contained.  Even if it could, there is no reason to expect it to look similar to a silicate glass.  So the argument that patina = molten carbon is baseless. Most carbonado researchers since Milledge et al. 1998 have favored the view that the patina is a surface layer amorphosed at low temperature by radiation damage.

Similarly, the pores have been known to be open to exchange with the environment since Trueb & de Wys 1971, so there is no way to determine whether or not they are primary, or what originally filled them. So it is not valid to infer that they are vesicles.

Finally, the author has a conflict of interest in that he owns the largest private carbonado collection around, so if he can convince potential buyers that carbonado is exotic, he stands to benefit financially.

This manuscript should be rejected.

Sincerely,

Chuck Magee

This was a dumb way to write a review, and like all reviewer twos, I only hurt myself. In addition to the time spent documenting all the repeated content, all I ended up doing was giving the editors and author a cheat sheet for redrafting in a way to better hide the lack of originality in the manuscript. As you can see from the published version of the paper, all the cuts and pastes were redrafted.

 Furthermore, listing pages and pages of plagiarism had the effect of de-emphasizing the substantive criticisms of science and conflict of interest that I squeezed into the last few paragraphs. In short, this was a lazy review written with the naive assumption that self-plagiarism was something that editors would reject a paper over.

All I did was to waste my own time and give the editors and author a how-to guide to destroy the evidence that the work was derivative. Being pedantically critical was not a useful reviewing strategy.

Shameless self-promotion and self-organizing

I keep losing the link to the Supplementary Information from my Geology paper (summarized as Geosonnet 42), so I'm posting the direct link here, where I hopefully won't lose it.
http://www.geosociety.org/datarepository/2016/2016176.pdf
And before you tell me a better way to keep track of things in the digital age, GET OFF MY LAWN!

IPCC 1.5 degrees of obfuscation

So, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released an important document today, allegedly demonstrating that 1.5 degrees of warming is preferable to 2 degrees, and that with an enormous about of effort, we might actually be able to achieve it. I, an Earth Scientist with a PhD and 17 years of professional experience, tried to read it, because it is important, and good scientist citizens ought to at least try to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, the report, as I found it on the IPCC website, is an incomprehensible tangle of bureaucratese and parenthetical rabbit holes. For example:

A1.2.
Warming greater than the global annual average is being experienced in many land regions  and seasons, including two to three times higher in the Arctic. Warming is generally higher over  land than over the ocean. ( high confidence) {1.2.1, 1.2.2, Figure 1.1, Figure 1.3, 3.3.1, 3.3.2}

A1.3.
Trends in intensity and frequency of some climate and weather extremes have been detected  over time spans during which about 0.5 ° C of global warming occurred (medium confidence). This  assessment is based on several lines of evidence, including attribution studies for changes in  extremes since 1950. {3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.3.3}

A.2. Warming from anthropogenic emissions from the pre -industrial period to the present  will persist for centuries to millennia and will continue to cause further long-term changes in  the climate system, such as sea level rise, with associated impacts (high confidence), but these  emissions alone are  unlikely to cause global warming of 1.5°C (medium confidence ) {1.2, 3.3,
Figure 1.5, Figure SPM.1}

 It has all of the pitfalls the 9/11 report managed to avoid, in terms of failing to ensure accessability, readability, and currency to your average human being. In fact, it comes across as a fantasy edict beamed down by aliens, which is probably not too bad a description of Ivory Tower science these days. For example, It spends lots- perhaps most (I've pretty much glazed over a third of the way through the Summary for Policy Makers- you know, the part that should be clear and simple for non-specialists) of the time describing the benefits of aiming for a 1.5C warming target instead of a 2 degree target.

Of course, we aren't on course to hit a 2 degree target. We are on course for a 3 or 4 degree target. So the relevance of the report is completely at odds with the reality of the world we live in. Now, there are technical reasons why it is hard to write a report describing the difference between 4 degrees and 3.5 degrees. It has been tens of millions of years since the world was that warm, so reconstructing that climate is much more difficult than a 1 or 2 degree warmer world, which we had an order of magnitude more recently. So explaining where we are going is actually quite hard. But they don't even try, or acknowledge this. Instead they are off in this fantasy land where we all have ponies, and they want to sell us on the benefits of unicorn horns and sparkles in the manes.

However, this may be more of a dark fantasy than a rainbow pony fantasy. The "target" CO2 emission reductions curves (Figure SPM.3a) they show have no rollover or transition period, but drop precipitously from the present day at a rate comparable only with that seen in the collapse of the USSR. They don't explicitly talk about this, but there is a blathering world government waffling towards the end that goes:

D7.2.
Cooperation on strengthened accountable multilevel governance that includes non-
state actors such as industry, civil society and scientific institutions, coordinated sectoral and cross-
sectoral policies at various governance levels, gender-sensitive policies, finance including innovative
financing and cooperation on technology development and transfer can ensure participation,
transparency, capacity building, and learning among different players (high confidence). {2.5.2,
4.2.2, 4.4.1, 4.4.2, 4.4.3, 4.4.4, 4.5.3, Cross-Chapter Box 9 in Chapter 4, 5.3.1, 4.4.5, 5.5.3, Cross-Chapter Box 13 in Chapter 5, 5.6.1, 5.6.3}

In otherwords, the governments of the world, which are currently assassinating skeptical journalists,. locking up children, and dropping trillions of dollars of bombs in proxy wars which endanger millions of people,  all just have to join together and sing kum-by-yah while dismantling their transportation and industrial facilities, and we'll all be fine. Frankly, I suspect we're more likely to solve global warming with nuclear winter at this point, at the IPCC report gives me no hope that they have a more reasonable or concrete plan.

In summary, the world experts on climate got together and wrote an unreadable report.  If you piece the bits and pieces that might mean something together, it awkwardly hints that saving the planet is completely possible if the entirely of human nature and politics is magically transformed in the next year.

In other words we, every one of the 7.8 billion of us, is totally, completely, and thoroughly fucked.

Effect of impact energy on SIMS U–Pb zircon geochronology

I have a paper out in pre-publication online availability. The basic gist of it is that we are investigating exactly why SHRIMP is so good at geochronology.  It is a short format conference proceedings paper, so there isn't that much to it.  Basically, we investigated the oxide formation used to calibrate relative U/Pb ionization yields by bombarding natural zircon with a primary ion beam made of ¹⁸O₂^- ions.  This way, all the molecular oxide ions were isotopically labeled- ¹⁶O if the oxygen originated in the sample, ¹⁸O if it was from the primary beam.  We then varied the ion impact energy to see what effect this had on the overall collection efficiency.

One of the other different things about this paper is that I co-wrote it with my dad.  He doesn't know any geology, but since I was about five he has been using SIMS (not SHRIMP, other brands) analysing semiconductors.  He still lives in America, so I don't get to see him much any more, and he's not getting any younger.  So it was nice to have a structured activity to work on together.  The middle author, Jim Ferris, did the atomic force microscopy. Unfortunately due to the short format, we didn't have space for any of his pictures, but he measured the sputter crater volumes, which we needed to calculated useful yields.



Magee C. Jr., Ferris J. and Magee C. Sr. (2014), Effect of impact energy on SIMS U–Pb zircon geochronology, Surface and Interface Analysis, DOI: 10.1002/sia.5629

Editors ask the wrong questions

Attached is a screen pic from the summary sheet of a review I did for an academic journal a while back.  Note the phrasing of the middle question, and how the poor wording on the summary sheet required an out-of-the-box answer.

Table and figures are a good thing.  The tables, in particular, contain all the data that everything else in the paper is based on (I don't review pure theory papers.  Theorists should be thankful). Frankly, I don't understand the trend towards depositing data and methods, rather than publishing them.  Depositing a machine readable version of datasets IN ADDITION to publishing them (or a representative sample of data, for really large sets) is a sensible thing to do, but in general we would all be better off if papers contained data and results, and the speculative waffling, overly broad impacts, and long bows stretched to make the paper seem to appeal to fields it doesn't really effect were all banished to the online supplementary material.

The best book you've never read...

My current job involves a fair amount of long haul air travel. This isn't great, but it does mean that I get to read a bit more than I used to. I generally chew through a paperpack per long haul flight.  So I've knocked off the usual suspects- Hunger games, Game of Thrones, various offerings, cultural and otherwise, from the late Iain M. Banks.  But I've also been lucky enough to catch some lesser known books.

The Woodenman series by Harry Connolly is a prime example.  A rare example of navel-gazeless urban fantasy, these books combine the velocity of a page-turning action story with the twists and turns of a whodunnit against the backdrop of unimaginable Lovecraftian horror. Refreshingly free of pretense and unapologetically relentless in their depiction of the corruption of power, the series balances accessibility and heft with style. The final book in the series is particularly gripping and poignant.  But just as Ray, the protagonist, is relentlessly drawn into battles between forces crueler and greater than himself, so went the books themselves.  "Circle of Enemies" was released just as the bookselling giant Borders was demolished, and failed to sell enough copies to extend the series.  Which makes is a very good book with a tiny circulation- a rare treasure in the ponderous landscape of pulp.
Ironically, though the loss of a bookstore chain doomed this story, its ghost lives on in the purgatory of the online retailer that slew it.  The e-books can still be conjured up via the internet, and even some paperbacks seem to still be in stock.
I'm don't know if the novelist will be publishing anything else- for all I know he's just a well constructed pseudonym of J. K. Rowling- but I hope he gets another chance, as his first three books were quite enjoyable.
 

这是一个语言的科学吗

Since the end of WW II, English has been the dominant language of science.  This was not always the case.  The late 19th century industrial and scientific explosion in Germany made German a potential contender before geopolitical events depopulated Germany of its scientists.  And earlier in the 19th century French, and originally Latin, were the languages of the day.

The reasons for this are simple.  England has long been a leader in scientific inquiry, and the post-war assimilation of European scientists by the USA and subsequent technological revolution there during the space race and information revolution has kept English on the forefront.

None-the-less, many scientists do still publish in their native languages.  And even when they do publish in English, there are many Journals, such as the Journal of South American Geology Earth Sciences, which offer abstracts in other languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish, the dominant languages of that continent.  Similarly, Geostandards and Geoanalytical Research publishes French Abstract, since is is based in France and published by a French research organisation.

None-the-less, I was surprised to see that the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences is now publishing abstracts in Chinese for its English articles.  Australia is an English speaking country, and although there are small but locally important groups of immigrants who speak various Chinese languages, they are not over-represented in the Earth Sciences.  And while Chinese geologists compete internationally better than their scientists on other fields, and Chinese investment is important in the Australian mineral export industry, it is still a bold move by the AJES editors to pick Chinese as the next language of science.

p.s. If you can't read the title, check that your operating system has Asian characters enabled.

How many of your co-authors have you actually met?

In my meandering career from academia to government to private sector, and back into all the grey areas in between, I've been an author on a few journal articles, government reports, and other publications. Usually, these are collaborations between groups of separated people, not all of whom interact with every other member of the team.  For example, in the academic literature, I have a total of 21 co-authors, of whom I have met 9.  If we include government reports as well as papers, then I have 42 co-authors, of whom I have met 17.  I find it interesting that this ratio is so similar between the two types of reporting (about 40%).  So I was wondering: for those of you who read this blog and publish, is your ratio about the same?

Even bigotry has a silver lining

Professor Anne Jefferson has recently been complaining about a banal sexist article that recently appeared in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. While it is understandable that she has been offended by this insipid and thoughtless piece of writing, there is an obvious lesson here for her and other scientists looking to advance their careers. It is so simple that I can lay it out in outline form:

1. Publishing in Nature is good for your career. There is no doubt about this. For better or worse, Nature has one of the highest profiles of any scientific journal. Some prestigious institutions, when looking for high-impact, earth-shaking original research, tally up only papers published in Nature and Science. So there is no doubt that getting a paper into Nature will be good for your career.
2. Nature will publish tripe. This is obvious from reading the article by Dr. Rybicki which has casued this kerfuffle. “Womanspace” contains no original thoughts, no new insights, and no hint of creativity or intellect.
3. Therefore, anyone looking to advance their career should submit anything and everything to Nature for publication. If you can string 700 words together in an incoherent, vaguely offensive story with jokes as flat as an abyssal plain, then you are at least Dr. Rybicki’s equal. And should you actually put a smidgeon of thought into your writing, well then you’re in like Flynn. So don’t hold back! That inconclusive master’s project? Submit it to Nature. Your high school science fair experiment? Nature. Your 7th grade essay on pea horticulture? Fire away.

Nature has sent a clear message to the scientific community that the standards which once gave their publication its prestige no longer apply. Sure, you could spend years leading a major research effort, like scientists Dea Slade, Jessica Altöldi, or Lisa Welp did. And their research efforts deserve major acclaim. But the publisher of Nature has but their gruelling scientific accomplishments side-by-side with:

“I'd been staying with my friend Russell in Canberra, trying to sort out how we were going to get our book on virus structure together, when Russell's wife Lilia decided that their youngest daughter needed new school knickers. She was too busy making supper…”

Nature has sent a clear message to the scientific community. Nature is no longer interested in keen intellectual arguments or brilliant insight. They now want to publish garbage. Submit it to them, and send the good stuff to Science.

Is this how circles are supposed to work in Google plus?

Google plus circles can be used to classify people in order of perfidy. Click to enlarge.

Or here is a blow-up if you didn't click the one above.

Warning: Associating geologists who study surface processes with "basement" may cause offence.

Taking the niggers out of Huck Finn

At the beginning of this year, there was an internet brouhaha over the politically correct decision to replace all instances of the word “nigger” with "slave" in a forthcoming edition of the American classic novel, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. I have been vehemently opposed to political correctness ever since I was told at college orientation that exercising my first amendment rights was grounds for dismissal from university. So when I read about this controversy, I chose to react in the most politically incorrect manner possible: I decided to take the time to re-read the book instead of spouting off instantly and emotionally. Six months later, the internet has long since forgotten about this event, and I’m finally ready to comment.

Being politically incorrect, my first reaction was that, if they were going to start substituting words, they ought to be adding slurs, not removing them. For example, the text of Huck Finn contains 51 instances of “white”. What if we were to replace all these with “trailer trash”?

The answer, of course, is that the story starts to make less sense. For example, consider the introduction of Huck’s father:

There warn't no color in his face, where his face showed; it was trailer trash; not like another man's trailer trash, but a trailer trash to make a body sick, a trailer trash to make a body's flesh crawl -- a tree-toad trailer trash, a fish-belly trailer trash.

Since more than three quarters of the instances of “white” in the story do not refer to race, it requires a bit of picking and choosing to get this substitution to work:

And here comes the trailer trash woman running from the house, about forty-five or fifty year old, bareheaded, and her spinning-stick in her hand; and behind her comes her little trailer trash children, acting the same way the little niggers was going.

Of course, trailers are an anachronism, and as far as epithets go, “trailer trash” is about as mild as they get: the only people likely to be offended by it probably haven’t discovered the internet yet. And it isn't even politically incorrect, since the only people it is politically correct to slur are the uneducated rural whites. So let’s try something else.

One obvious use of politically uncorrect substitution is to determine whether words are being used derogatorily. For example, if "lady" is used in a class warfare, resentful, or sarcastic context, then substituting a politically incorrect derogatory synonym (of which there are many) should preserve the tone of the passage. Performing the substitution allows us to test this hypothesis, which the very first of the 12 substitutions finds wanting:

Three big men with guns pointed at me, which made me wince, I tell you; the oldest, gray and about sixty, the other two thirty or more -- all of them fine and handsome -- and the sweetest old gray-headed cunt, and back of her two young women which I couldn't see right well.

Rachel Grangerford (the grey-haired lady/cunt) is depicted as a sympathetic, motherly character. Even in outback Australian trucking circles, where every fourth word is cunt, the above passage would be incongruous. She is the subject of five of the first seven instances of ‘lady’, and the other two refer wistfully to drawings made by Emmeline Grangerford, another sympathetic character. Most of the rest of the uses of ‘lady’ refer to fine-looking circus performers, who are not viewed particularly badly.

In fact, there are relatively few horrible female characters in Huck Finn. The least sympathetic would probably be Miss Watson, the evangelizing sister of Huck’s legal guardian who tries to sell Jim downriver. The following passage retains most of its original meaning, for example:

I noticed dey wuz a nigger trader roun' de place considable lately, en I begin to git oneasy. Well, one night I creeps to de do' pooty late, en de do' warn't quite shet, en I hear de old cunt tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn' want to, but she could git eight hund'd dollars for me, en it 'uz sich a big stack o' money she couldn' resis'. De widder she try to git her to say she wouldn' do it, but I never waited to hear de res'. I lit out mighty quick, I tell you.

Of course, one has to be careful doing an automatic search and replace of all 110 instances of “miss”. Firstly, cunt is not a verb, and secondly, the story is set on the Missouri bank of the Mississippi river.

But I digress. The uproar about this book is not the cunts. It is the niggers. And if the politically correct way of addressing this is to turn all instances of nigger to slave, then the politically anticorrect response should be to change all the original uses of the word slave to nigger. And this is where things get interesting.

Despite the word nigger appearing in the text 212 times, slave only appears 11. Five of those are in “slavery”, and another refers to “slave country”. The remaining five are related to Jim’s sale to the Phelps family by the King, Huck stealing him, and the news that Miss Watson freed Jim in her will on account of feeling bad about trying to sell him.

The word slave is only used to specifically refer to the condition of someone (usually Jim) being owned. It is not used to refer to people as human beings. In the original text, it is simply not interchangeable with nigger, or black, or any other reference to people, African-American or otherwise.

Slavery is an institution that quite literally reduces people to mere property- it is the ultimate form of objectification. So the original texts refusal to label the people subjected to this institution with the word slave is probably important, given that the author had hundreds of chances to do so. In this way, the text condemns the institution in a way that would be lost in the politically correct rewording.

Of course, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is not the only form of literature to have been deniggered. For example, the well known nursery school rhyme:

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a nigger by the toe.
If it hollers let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

Has been edited to replace nigger with tiger. To the best of my knowledge, this did not precipitate howls of outrage among the self-appointed internet literati. However, such a substitution might be a bit awkward for Huck Finn:

Tigers would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any tiger in that country. Strange tigers would stand with their mouths open and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder. Tigers is always talking about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire; but whenever one was talking and letting on to know all about such things, Jim would happen in and say, "Hm! What you know 'bout witches?" and that tiger was corked up and had to take a back seat. Jim always kept that five-center piece round his neck with a string, and said it was a charm the devil give to him with his own hands, and told him he could cure anybody with it and fetch witches whenever he wanted to just by saying something to it; but he never told what it was he said to it. Tigers would come from all around there and give Jim anything they had, just for a sight of that five-center piece; but they wouldn't touch it, because the devil had had his hands on it.

It may be that politically correct readers wish to substitute something other than slave or tiger throughout this novel; feel free to leave suggestions, with examples of replaced text, in comments.

A more general point is that experimental search and replace is an interesting tool of textural analysis. Obviously it can only be used in the case of works available in an editable format, which for practical purposes means the public domain. But it shows that the traditional scientific methods of exploring a system by changing one variable at a time can be applied to literature. There has be much in the news of late about the controversial practice of statistically mining literature. So experimentation is the next obvious step in the sciencification of literary analysis.

Systematically changing the language of various masterpieces is a useful analytical tool. But I suspect that anti-science traditionalists will see this technique as blasphemous vandalism which is even more offensive than the derogatory words used freely in this post.

SHRIMP U-Pb age of zircons from the Jequie complex, Sao Francisco Craton, Bahia Brazil

This abstract describes the age for the igneous precursors to several high-grade metamorphic rocks (enderbites and charnokites. They fall in the 2.67-2.81 GA range that it typical for the Jequie complex of the central Sao Francisco Craton. There is a single trans-Amazonian measurement and a single 3.0 Ga inherited core.

As far as I know, the results have not been published in an English language journal, so there is no research blogging link.

Alibert, C., and Vidal, P., 1992, SHRIMP U-Pb age of zircons from the Jequie complex, Sao Francisco Craton, Bahia Brazil, in Fr., S.G., ed., 14th R. S. T.: Toulouse, p. 4.

NftFC #1: Assembling West Gondwana in the Neoproterozoic: Clues from the São Francisco craton region, Brazil

This paper summarizes the assembly of the various mesoproterozoic blocks into West Gondwanaland. In this model, The SaoFrancisco/Congo craton first collides with the Rio de la Plata craton around 730 MA. This combined Sf-C-RdlP craton then collides with the Amazonia/ W. Africa craton at around 630 MA, sandwiching and deforming the Borborema terrane, and causing internal deformation in the SF-C-PdlP block. The ~Cambrian assembly of West and East Gondwana into Gondwanaland is not discussed.

Since all of these events postdate my rocks of interest by hundreds of millions of years, I read it uncritically for a general overview, rather than for any particular piece of information.

1. Fernando F. Alkmim, 2. Stephen Marshak, & 3. Marco A. Fonseca (2001). Assembling West Gondwana in the Neoproterozoic: Clues from the São Francisco craton region, Brazil Geology, 29 (4), 319-322

The madness takes control: NftFC introduction

Notes from the filing cabinet: introduction

During my last little stint between jobs, I got a little bit organized. In fact, I sorted through and filed all my papers. Then my computer died, deferring by dream of referential organization.


But I will not be stopped. I've started the long and slow process of feeding all of them into my Zotero, and I thought I would invite all of you along for the ride. I have been a bit slack in the Researchblogging department recently, so here's my big chance.

Many of the papers are things I haven't read for over a decade- or even worse, papers that it feels like I haven't read in over a decade, even if they were published in the 21st century. So I am making some short notes to myself so that I don't have to reread them to know why I thought they were important enough to sneak out of the library at 2 in the morning to Xerox. And I figured, if I'm doing this anyway, why not contaminate the blogosphere with a little bit of science.

Note that these will not be formal outreach-style explanations of the work. Rather, they will be scientist working notes- Why I found it interesting, what the points I got out of it are, what I think is crap. So if any of you normal readers who are brave enough to still be reading here want to see how scientists* think about research, here's your big chance.

The rest of you have better run. Now.

* Well, this scientist. As with all single sample populations, YMMV.