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The crayfish / crawfish / crawdad war

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Business Insider features this heat map of what people call crayfish in the United States. It’s all very confusing.

First, the question asks what people call “miniature lobsters”. I’m not sure that’s helpful. Do you have any idea how many kinds of crustaceans are called “lobsters”? There are clawed lobsters, spiny lobsters, slipper lobsters, squat lobsters...

Second, I’m particularly puzzled by people use “crawdad.” Not that they do, but that there are two disconnected blobs of green. I would have expected more continuity.

Maybe Americans should follow the lead of the Australians and call them all “yabbies.”

Hat tip to P.Z. Myers.

External links

22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other
It’s “crawdads”!

Crayfiction

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, a druid’s just got to catch some crayfish.

In this short story by Kevin Hearne, “A Test of Mettle,” druid initiate Granuaile MacTiernan is tasked with controlling invasive crayfish:

With Sonora’s guidance, sensed through the turquoise sphere at the base of my throat, I can feel the flow of water there, feel the gentle slowness under the rock, the place where a large crawdad has made its home. A crawdad from the Midwest that doesn’t belong on this side of the continental divide, an invasive species that’s been killing off the native fish by eating their eggs. Elementary school kids dumped them in here at the end of their crustacean unit, and their teachers, who should have known better, let them ravage an ecosystem in the process.

This story, and some others, is available for free from Kevin’s website. Thanks, Kevin, for bringing crayfish to art!

External links

Kevin Hearne: Short Stories
Kevin Hearne on Twitter

The Ecdysiast feature

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:23:00 +0000

The newest issue of The Crustacean Society’s newsletter, The Ecdysiast, is now available for viewing here. There are several articles of interest for readers. One is coverage of the SICB crayfish symposium that occurred in January It includes a note of the untimely death of Francesca Gherardi.

Also of interest are articles by Fred Schram, the general editor for the Journal of Crustacean Biology. In particular, “To be open or not to be open: That is the question” (page 7) is a look at open access from the perspective of someone in the thick of trying to maintain a journal in the face of a changing market, which includes declining Society membership.

Is OA the wave of the future? – maybe. However, we might suggest that “efficient” application of the OA model will lead to the collapse of many journals, especially those produced by small scholarly societies.

(Plug: If you are interested in crustacean biology, you should join the Society!)

“Your heart stops”: Marmorkrebs in Scotland

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Scotsman.com reports on the seizure of Marmorkrebs in the Central Belt.

Dr Colin Bean, science and policy advisor on freshwater biology at Scottish Natural Heritage, formally identified the recovered species in the current case.

He said: “Your heart stops really because American signal are bad enough. The biggest difference between marbled crayfish and other crayfish species is that the others need a male and a female to reproduce, but marbled crayfish are parthenogenic [reproduce asexually] which means you only need one to establish a population.

Yet again, these were Marmorkrebs sold through the pet trade. Kudos to the Scots for taking the task of monitoring exotics seriously:

Anyone caught in possession of non-native crayfish in Scotland can be jailed for up to six months and fined £40,000.

Some species distribution models suggest Scotland could be suitable habitat for Marmorkrebs. At right is an excerpt from Figure 3D in Feria and Faulkes (2011). There are three other models in that figure, and the other three predict much less habitat. Given the number of Marmorkrebs found in Europe since that paper was prepared, though, this version is probably the better reflection of the possible suitable habitat than the others.

Lastly, I appreciate that the news article carries on the European tabloid tradition of referring to small crayfish with monster movie descriptions, calling Marmorkrebs:

A voracious alien predator

Well, most crayfish do catch and eat other animals... but predator? Not what you would usually use to describe an omnivore that eats snails and other small benthic invertebrates.

External link

Scots wildlife at risk from alien crayfish breeds

Reference

Feria TP, Faulkes Z. 2011. Forecasting the distribution of Marmorkrebs, a parthenogenetic crayfish with high invasive potential, in Madagascar, Europe, and North America. Aquatic Invasions 6(1): 55-67. http://dx.doi.org/10.3391/ai.2011.6.1.07

A third parthenogenetic crayfish species?

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:30:00 +0000

Probably not. This passage in a new paper by Rogowski and colleagues about the virile crayfish (Orconectes virilis; right) is interesting, however:

An interesting observation in the laboratory was the production of eggs and juveniles by a female that was collected in July and kept in isolation. This would suggest that females can maintain viable sperm for an extended period, potentially over 1 year (Reynolds, 2002), or that they will produce viable eggs even if they are not fertilised. Other crayfish have been known to reproduce clonally, for example Orconectes limosus (Buřič et al., 2011) and the marbled crayfish Procambarus fallax (Scholtz et al., 2003). Whether this individual maintained sperm from a previous mating or whether it was parthenogenetic is unknown.

If I were to bet, I would bet on sperm storage, which so many arthropods can do. While the evidence for Orconectes limosus being a facultative parthenogen is quite solid, even that has yet to be replicated. Either way, there seems to be much more work necessary to distinguish these two scenarios.

Reference

Rogowski DL, Sitko S, Bonar SA. Optimising control of invasive crayfish using life-history information. Freshwater Biology. in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/fwb.12126

Calming

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Faulkes, 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:03:00 +0000

Faulkes Z. 2012. How much is that crayfish in the window? Online monitoring of Marmorkrebs, Procambarus fallax f. virginalis (Hagen, 1870) in the North American pet trade. Freshwater Crayfish 19(1): 39-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.5869/fc.2013.v19.039

Abstract

Marmorkrebs were discovered by European pet owners in the 1990s. Because there is no known native population of Marmorkrebs, the distribution of these crayfish is purely the result of human activity. Marmorkrebs are now spread throughout the pet trade worldwide and are introduced species in several countries. Given that the pet trade has been the suspected or confirmed source of introduction of many introduced species, I monitored online social activity for information about the use and spread of Marmorkrebs in North America. This revealed several new jurisdictions where Marmorkrebs had not been previously reported. Several records were found in jurisdictions where the local laws prohibited the owners from having Marmorkrebs. Tracking such records could be useful in determining the risk of Marmorkrebs introductions from release by pet owners.

Keywords: marbled crayfish • pet trade

Remembering Francesca Gherardi

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:29:00 +0000

Oh, no.

Sad news indeed on the CRUST-L email list:

Dear friends,

we sadly have to inform you that yesterday our dear friend and colleague Francesca Gherardi passed away.

It was only weeks ago that I met Dr. Gherardi for the first time at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting, where she was a speaker at the special session on crayfish. She was having terrible problems with her throat. She could barely whisper, but this did not diminish her presentation, once she got her hands on the microphone.

I caught a few pictures of her from the session; here is one.

She was a fine scientist, and will be much missed.

“Most curious creature, Captain...”

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 13:00:00 +0000

I have to thank Nicole Gugliucci. Over the weekend, I was participating a a Google Plus hangout with Nicole and a few other people, describing some of the research I’ve been doing on the pet trade in Marmorkrebs. I made a comment like, “If you have Marmorkrebs as a pet, you always end up with surplus, because you can’t stop them from reproducing.”

And Nicole said, “They’re like tribbles.”

I was stunned. Marmorkrebs are totally like tribbles! How could I not have realized this before?

Dr. McCoy: [on reasons for the tribbles' high reproduction rate] Well, the nearest thing I can figure out is that they're born pregnant. Which seems to be quite a time saver.

Indeed, the original episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles,” contains this bit of dialogue that could be applied to any number of invasive species:

Spock: Surely you must have realized what would happen if you removed the tribbles from their predator-filled environment into an environment where their natural multiplicative proclivities would have no restraining factors.
Cyrano Jones: [all in one breath] Well, of cour... What did you say?
Spock: [irritated but patient] By removing the tribbles from their natural habitat, you have, so to speak, removed the cork from the bottle and allowed the genie to escape.

I am so going to use this comparison in a talk

Shen and colleagues, 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 17:34:00 +0000

Shen H, Braband A, Scholtz G. 2013. Mitogenomic analysis of decapod crustacean phylogeny corroborates traditional views on their relationships. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 66(3): 776-789.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2012.11.002

Abstract

Phylogenetic relationships within decapod crustaceans are highly controversial. Even recent analyses based on molecular datasets have shown largely contradictory results. Previous studies using mitochondrial genomes are promising but suffer from a poor and unbalanced taxon sampling. To fill these gaps we sequenced the (nearly) complete mitochondrial genomes of 13 decapod species: Stenopus hispidus, Polycheles typhlops, Panulirus versicolor, Scyllarides latus, Enoplometopus occidentalis, Homarus gammarus, Procambarus fallax f. virginalis, Upogebia major, Neaxius acanthus, Calocaris macandreae, Corallianassa coutierei, Cryptolithodes sitchensis, Neopetrolisthes maculatus, and add that of Dromia personata. Our new data allow for comprehensive analyses of decapod phylogeny using the mitochondrial genomes of 50 species covering all major taxa of the Decapoda. Five species of Stomatopoda and one species of Euphausiacea serve as outgroups. Most of our analyses using Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Bayesian inference (BI) of nucleotide and amino acid datasets revealed congruent topologies for higher level decapod relationships: (((((((Anomala, Brachyura), Thalassinida: Gebiidea), Thalassinida: Axiidea), (Astacidea, Polychelida), Achelata), Stenopodidea), Caridea), Dendrobranchiata). This result corroborates several traditional morphological views and adds new perspectives. In particular, the position of Polychelida is surprising. Nevertheless, some problems can be identified. In a minority of analyses the basal branching of Reptantia is not fully resolved, Thalassinida are monophyletic; Polychelida are the sister group to Achelata, and Stenopodidea are resolved as sister group to Caridea. Despite this and although some nodal supports are low in our phylogenetic trees, we think that the largely stable topology of the trees regardless of different types of analyses suggests that mitochondrial genomes show good potential to resolve the relationship within Decapoda.

Keywords: mitochondrial genomes • Reptantia • Thalassinidans • Aliscore

Soedarini and colleagues, 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Soedarini B, Klaver L, Giesen D, Roessink I, Widianarko B, van Straalen NM, van Gestel CAM. 2013. Effect of copper exposure on histamine concentrations in the marbled crayfish (Procambarus fallax forma virginalis). Animal Biology 63(2): 139–147. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15707563-00002401

Abstract

Crustaceans can store excess copper in the hepatopancreas, an organ playing a role in digestive activity as well as in neurosecretory control. Here, we studied the effect of copper exposure on the level of histamine, an indicator of food spoilage in edible crustaceans. Histamine is also a neuromodulator in the intestinal nervous system of crustaceans, and a human allergen. Marbled crayfish (Procambarus fallax forma virginalis) were exposed to average measured values of 0.031 mg Cu/l and 0.38 mg Cu/l, respectively, for 14 days and then transferred to copper-free water for another 14 days. Concentrations of copper and histamine in the hepatopancreas and muscle were evaluated at different time points. Histamine levels were significantly higher in hepatopancreas and muscle tissues at the highest exposure level, but only after transfer of the animals to copper-free water. The increased histamine concentration following copper exposure may be explained by a (delayed) stress response, and by up-regulated histidine synthesis induced by copper, followed by decarboxylation to histamine.

Keywords: copper • hepatopancreas • histamine • intestinal nervous system • neuromodulator

Updated map of introductions

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:12:00 +0000

Just wanted to post that the map of Marmorkrebs introductions has just been given a big update. In particular, it now includes all the locations listed in Chucholl et al. (2012). The map is not identical to Table 1 in that paper, however. The table only includes locations where there were either pictures of crayfish or voucher specimens to confirm the identification; my map includes some without those.

I’ve also used different placemarkers to distinguish locations with populations (dot in the middle of the placemarker) and those where there are single specimens, or the status is unclear (no dot).

Reference

Chucholl C, Morawetz K, Groß H. 2012. The clones are coming – strong increase in Marmorkrebs [Procambarus fallax (Hagen, 1870) f. virginalis] records from Europe. Aquatic Invasions 7: 511-519.

Vogt, 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:22:00 +0000

Vogt G. 2013. Abbreviation of larval development and extension of brood care as key features of the evolution of freshwater Decapoda. Biological Reviews 88(1): 81-116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-185X.2012.00241.x

Abstract

The transition from marine to freshwater habitats is one of the major steps in the evolution of life. In the decapod crustaceans, four groups have colonized fresh water at different geological times since the Triassic, the freshwater shrimps, freshwater crayfish, freshwater crabs and freshwater anomurans. Some families have even colonized terrestrial habitats via the freshwater route or directly via the sea shore. Since none of these taxa has ever reinvaded its environment of origin the Decapoda appear particularly suitable to investigate life-history adaptations to fresh water. Evolutionary comparison of marine, freshwater and terrestrial decapods suggests that the reduction of egg number, abbreviation of larval development, extension of brood care and lecithotrophy of the first posthatching life stages are key adaptations to fresh water. Marine decapods usually have high numbers of small eggs and develop through a prolonged planktonic larval cycle, whereas the production of small numbers of large eggs, direct development and extended brood care until the juvenile stage is the rule in freshwater crayfish, primary freshwater crabs and aeglid anomurans. The amphidromous freshwater shrimp and freshwater crab species and all terrestrial decapods that invaded land via the sea shore have retained ocean-type planktonic development. Abbreviation of larval development and extension of brood care are interpreted as adaptations to the particularly strong variations of hydrodynamic parameters, physico-chemical factors and phytoplankton availability in freshwater habitats. These life-history changes increase fitness of the offspring and are obviously favoured by natural selection, explaining their multiple origins in fresh water. There is no evidence for their early evolution in the marine ancestors of the extant freshwater groups and a preadaptive role for the conquest of fresh water. The costs of the shift from relative r- to K-strategy in freshwater decapods are traded-off against fecundity, future reproduction and growth of females and perhaps against size of species but not against longevity of species. Direct development and extension of brood care is associated with the reduction of dispersal and gene flow among populations, which may explain the high degree of speciation and endemism in directly developing freshwater decapods. Direct development and extended brood care also favour the evolution of social systems, which in freshwater decapods range from simple subsocial organization to eusociality. Hermaphroditism and parthenogenesis, which have evolved in some terrestrial crayfish burrowers and invasive open water crayfish, respectively, may enable populations to adapt to restrictive or new environments by spatio-temporal alteration of their socio-ecological characteristics. Under conditions of rapid habitat loss, environmental pollution and global warming, the reduced dispersal ability of direct developers may turn into a severe disadvantage, posing a higher threat of extinction to freshwater crayfish, primary freshwater crabs, aeglids and landlocked freshwater shrimps as compared to amphidromous freshwater shrimps and secondary freshwater crabs.

Keywords: marine-freshwater transition • Crustacea • life-history • development • parental care • trade-off • speciation • social systems • extinction threat

SICB 2013 special session on crayfish

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:05:00 +0000

The special session on crayfish biology at SICB may well have been one of the busiest days for Marmorkrebs news and announcements in a long while. There were at least three major pieces of new information about our favourite crustacean.

Polyploidy

Peer Martin provided evidence that Marmorkrebs are triploid. This is an important step forward in understanding the original of asexual reproduction in this species. This strongly suggests that this may have been a "one off" chance event, either through some sort of incomplete separation of chromosomes or duplication of chromosomes, or hybridization.

Crayfish plague

As part of Peer Martin's talk, he discussed whether Marmorkrebs are "the perfect invader" as they were so memorably called. He included a discussion about the importance of crayfish plague as an issue in the invasive potential for Marmorkrebs. In the questions, I asked whether anyone had actually tested whether Marmorkrebs carry the plague, or whether it was simply assumed they were resistance, because essentially all North American species are. There is apparently one doctoral thesis that reports a Marmorkrebs carrying crayfish plague. That said, many in the lab, and one wild-caught animal, have tested for the disease.

More introductions in the wild

Chris Chucholl reported that there are now six confirmed populations in Europe, five of which are in Germany. During my talk, I reported the "breaking news bulletin" that I'd blogged while waiting in line at Starbuck's for a croissant that Marmorkrebs had been found in Sweden. Tadashi Kawai mentioned that a population had been found in Sapporo, but that it apparently died out.

Other highlights

Marmorkrebs was not the only only game in town in this session, however.

Tonio Garza de YTa discussed his experiences over a decade in working with farmers to develop sustainable, productive, profitable aquaculture for red-clawed crayfish in Mexico. The lessons he had were to develop the market first. There is no point in producing food nobody will buy. Secondly, make sure your product does not give itself away. The red-clawed crayfish got away from their cultured ponds and successfully established populations, which could be harvested more cheaply than the aquacultured crayfish.

Francesca Gherhardi talked about the importance of understanding behaviour of potentially invasive species. To give just one example, she examined the interaction between temperature and fighting between different invasive crayfish species. Spinycheek crayfish (Orconectes limosus) become more less active and more likely to seek shelter as temperatures increase. Signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) become less competitive as water warms. Red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) change their aggressive behaviour very little, meaning swamp crayfish are poised to be the winners as temperatures warm under climate change.

Incidentally, my sympathy goes to Francesca, who was having quite severe voice problems. She had to whisper her whole talk. This worked to her advantage, as it gave her presentation an urgent, conspiratorial tone

Keith Crandall talked somewhat about some new research he is co-authoring on crayfish relationships, but much of his talk was geared to discussing tree of life projects, IN particular, I'm excited about opentreeoflife.org. Most taxonomic papers now are published as PDFs, which are great to look at, but hard to re-use any data in them.

The goals of the Open Tree of Life project are, in part, things near and dear to much of the online science community. They want to encourage refinement of the tree, annotation, and promote a culture of data sharing, not simply publication. Currently, people are as consistent about putting things into Treebase or Dryad as they are into GenBank.

Oh yes, and they want to assemble a complete tree of life in three years. Keith mentioned that the National Science Foundation has been supporting various tree of life related projects for about a decade now, and are getting quite eager to see a tree. This project will make it easier to identify holes in the existing tree.

A great session marred only by the fact that I had to run to catch my plane, and couldn’t stay and chat more with the other speakers! Much thanks to Tadashi Kawai for organizing the session!

First record of Marmorkrebs in Sweden

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 15:11:00 +0000

I am preparing for today's crayfish special session at SICB, but this is too imporatant not to share immediately: marbled crayfish found in the wild in Sweden.

I will try to discover more details soon.

Update, 8 January 2013:

I have found the original press release from 5 December 2012. It describes the find of Marmorkrebs in the river “a few weeks ago,” so about November. That there are “several sizes” is suggestive of a population, but does not confirm it.

The map of Marmorkrebs introductions has been updated accordingly.

2012 was an average year for Marmorkrebs research

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 07:00:00 +0000

After the boom of 2010 and the bust of 2011, Marmorkrebs research publications are back on a more even keel this year...

That’s not including Chucholl, 2013, which, despite an official 2013 publication date, was published in December.

2013 shall start with a bang, with the crayfish symposium at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco in mere days!

The parthenogenesis slideshow

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 20:19:00 +0000

The Science Now blog, part of Science magazine, has a nice slideshow of animals that undergo parthenogenesis. Marmorkrebs appear as entry number five out of eight. The caption reads:

The parthenogenetic form of the North American crayfish Procambarus fallax, marmorkrebs are a popular aquarium pet. Their capacity for virgin birth was first discovered in Germany in 2003, when aquarium owners noticed that crayfish housed alone were laying eggs that developed into healthy adults. Genetic analysis and laboratory experiments confirmed that the animals were reproducing through parthenogenesis. Ecologists worry that their accidental release into the wild could seriously harm native crayfish, because a single individual can start a self-sustaining population, leading some states to prohibit their ownership.

“Some states” is currently a bit of an overestimate, since that number is, as far as I know, one.

Check out the other seven entries here.

Chucholl, 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:14:00 +0000

Chucholl C. 2013. Invaders for sale: trade and determinants of introduction of ornamental freshwater crayfish. Biological Invasions 15(1): 125-141. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10530-012-0273-2

Abstract

The trade of live ornamental freshwater crayfish has grown rapidly in the last decade and has become the major pathway for new non-indigenous crayfish species (NICS) introductions into Europe. Here, I report on the German ornamental crayfish trade, the main importer of non-indigenous crayfish into Europe. In total, 120 NICS have been available as ornamental aquarium species. One hundred and five species originate from North or Central America and are, therefore, suspected to be crayfish plague vectors. The import rate since 2005 was estimated to be seven new species per year. Despite many species being imported, only eleven species were found to be very common in the trade. In 2009, 16 online shops offered at least 37 NICS. The availability, price, and size of the offered species were used to predict their introduction status. Multiple binary logistic regression analysis showed that species’ availability and size were the principal predictors of the likelihood of being recorded as introduced from aquaria. NICS introduced from aquaria were found to be more available and larger than those present only in aquaria, and their potential invasiveness was also higher. The findings are consistent with the propagule pressure hypothesis in that a greater availability is likely related to more release events, and large species may be released more frequently as a result of overpopulating or outgrowing their aquaria. Efforts to mitigate the risk of further harmful crayfish introductions from aquaria should aim to drastically reduce the availability of high-risk species.

Keywords: live animal trade • introduction pathway • alien crayfish • aquarium discards

I’d read that

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Oddly soothing

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 13:00:00 +0000

#SciFund recovery

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 14:23:00 +0000

“Dream come true” sounds too hokey. “I love it when a plan comes together” sounds too smug.

It was a long week of hard work, much of it hard physical labour, with a lot of mistakes and frustrations. By the end of it, I felt like this:

Ready for it to be over.

But I achieved everything I set out to achieve... in miniature. This is in line with the spirit of #SciFund, since #SciFund was a miniature grant.

I set out for crayfish, and I got crayfish:

I got small animals, little tiny hatchlings. These are going to have to grow for a while before they’re any good to me.

I set out for sand crabs, and I got sand crabs:

I got a small number of animals, less than the number of my fingers. I have enough for to be useful for at least one project.

All the way through the trip I was very aware that this was possible because of the generosity of people who donated to #SciFund. I was frequently updating a blog I created for supporters, and journaling the expedition for an audience made the trip a little less isolating.

Would I have liked to have had a few more data points, the important thing was that I did not come away empty handed. It was wonderful to be out in the field, trying to tackle problems and do things that I had been thinking about for a couple of years. Now I will have to spend a few more months thinking and working before I know what to do next.

(Crossposted from NeuroDojo.)

#SciFund update

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 13:00:00 +0000

I swear to you, this is purely coincidence.

It is purely coincidence that today:

I am getting on a plane to Florida on a crustacean collecting trip powered by #SciFund support, and...
Round three of #SciFund launches!

It’s been a long time coming for my #SciFund expedition. Round 1 was about this time last year. Then, I was so focused on doing the project that I didn’t realize that the slough crayfish I wanted to collect were seasonal, and the best time to collect them was November.

I will be blogging about my #SciFund trip here, but only a little bit. My supporters from round 1 and 2 will be getting access to s special expedition blog, Amazons and Goliaths, where I will be blogging much more extensively and in a much different format than here.

I should also say that Kyle McLea, who had a Marmorkrebs project in Round 2 of #SciFund, recently got a whole lot of crayfish shipped to him. So his crowdfunded research is on a roll now, too.

As for round three of #SciFund, this is the first time I do not have a horse in this race, so to speak. But you should go to Rockethub and check out all the cool projects!

Chucholl and colleagues, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 14:57:00 +0000

Chucholl C, Morawetz K, Groß H. 2012. The clones are coming – strong increase in Marmorkrebs [Procambarus fallax (Hagen, 1870) f. virginalis] records from Europe. Aquatic Invasions 7(4): 511-519. http://dx.doi.org/10.3391/ai.2012.7.4.008

Abstract

We describe a new occurrence of parthenogenetic Marmorkrebs in southwestern Germany and give a synopsis of recent records of this species in Europe. Including the most recent records, 15 Marmorkrebs records are currently known, most of which are from Germany. At least six records represent established populations, which is an alarming increase beyond the one Marmorkrebs population known prior to 2010. Most established populations occur in lentic habitats near conurbations, typically in highly frequented secondary habitats, such as gravel pit lakes. In three instances, Marmorkrebs migrated over land, demonstrating their potential for active spread, and two invasive populations endanger indigenous crayfish populations. Most Marmorkrebs populations are large and are most likely several years old, suggesting a considerable lag between introduction and detection. Marmorkrebs populations in Europe are most likely the result of deliberate releases from aquaria, although secondary introductions may have occurred in one instance. Because Marmorkrebs are still widespread in the European pet trade, which most likely generates substantial propagule pressure, it is likely that the number of established populations will further increase over time. To mitigate the risk of further harmful crayfish releases, we suggest the prohibition of trading live high-risk crayfish species, including Marmorkrebs.

Keywords: aquarium introductions • marbled crayfish • invasiveness

Marmorkrebs on the road: SICB 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 13:00:00 +0000

The new newsletter of The Crustacean Society has this to say about the Society for INtegrative and Comparative Biology meeting in January:

TCS winter meeting / Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB)
January 3-7, 2013, San Francisco

The Crustacean Society winter meeting is held in conjunction with the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) and this year the meeting will take place from January 3-7, 2013 at the Hilton near Union Square in downtown San Francisco. Tadashi Kawai (co-editor of Biology of Freshwater Crayfish) will chair a special session on the Biology of Crayfish which features talks by Gerhard Scholtz, Zen Faulkes, Keith Crandall, Peer Martin, Christoph Chuchold, Antonio Garza de Yta, Teresa Feria, and Francesca Gherardi. The Special Session will take place on Monday January 7th from 8:00-12:00. The Special Session is being sponsored in part by TCS. Additionally there will be over 40 other talks and posters related to Crustacea. There are 12 diverse symposia and I would like to draw your attention to one symposium co-organized by Todd Oakley from the University of California Santa Barbara (Integrating Genomics with Comparative Vision Research of the Invertebrates) as there are multiple crustacean talks included. On a more social note, TCS in conjunction with the Division of Invertebrate Zoology and American Microscopical Society will host a social on Sunday January 6th in the evening from 6:15 until 9:15. The TCS business meeting will be concurrent with the social from 6:15-7:15. Last year it worked out well to grab a bit of food, attend the business meeting and then rejoin non TCS colleagues at the social. There will be the Libbie Hyman auction hosted by Division of Invertebrate Zoology also in conjunction with our social. Be prepared to bid on some exciting invertebrate treasures. We are very fortunate that Burke and Associates negotiated very reasonable room rates for San Francisco ($129/night) which is quite inexpensive for this city. There are plenty of reasons to attend this meeting in addition to the great science. Extend your visit to San Francisco and walk over the Golden Gate Bridge, visit China town, spend a day at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park or browse the shelves at the City Lights Book Store in North Beach. Please plan on attending this year’s winter meeting and dropping by the TCS booth to say hello. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me (sltamone@uas.alaska.edu).

Sherry Tamone

SICB Liaison Officer

More Marmorkrebs meetings in San Francisco

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:27:00 +0000

There will be a special session on Marmorkrebs at the next Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in San Francisco. It's not exactly a full blown regular symposium, so you won’t see it in the schedule yet. But it will be happening, and I will post more details as I learn them.

You can find more details about the meeting here.

Early registration for the meeting closes 3 December. You can still register after that, but then prices go up.

Movie magic

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 14:07:56 +0000

Now You See Me
★★★

We hear the phrase “movie magic” all the time (hence my title). But movies about magic are actually the opposite of magic. By which I mean this:

In a great magic show, you expect to see something dazzling and surprising, and it is never explained. The quality of the show is judged on how inexplicable the whole thing is.

For a movie about magic, you expect to see something dazzling and surprising, and it has to be explained. The quality of the movie is judged on how good the explanation is.

In a caper film like this, it is all about the script, and it is all about the ending. Yes, you have a great ensemble cast here. including veterans like Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. The film starts with four independent magicians who are brought together to form a magic “superteam,” as it were, the Four Horsemen. And as part of their Vegas show, they rob a bank. This brings the law, and other magicians, and… let the caper begin.

And have a great looking film, with a lot of gloss and sleek looks and good production values.

It certainly isn’t a perfect execution. There are a few plot threads that seem irrelevant. And I would have preferred the film stick with real illusions, rather than resorting to special effects from time to time.

But ultimately, whether this movie succeeds will be on whether the audience feels satisfied when the trick is revealed. Now You See Me manages to pull it off.

Forest gumption

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:35:00 +0000

Epic
★★½

In this day and age, giving a movie a title like Epic seems to be just asking for trouble. It just leads to the temptation for someone to slap it with “Epic win” or “Epic fail” in a review. My take is somewhere in the middle.

At its core, Epic is about two forces battling for control of a forest. On the one hand, you have Leaf Men, working for growth, and on the other, you have the boggins, the source of rot and decay. But there are a lot of sub-plots going on.

First, let’s add in the viewpoint character, a young human girl, M.K. (voice of Amanda Seyfried), daughter of a goofy scientist who is obsessed with the idea of tiny people living in the forest. Then there’s rowdy Nod (Josh Hutcherson), a sort of Leaf Man in training following his late father. Nod is at odds with Ronin (voice of Colin Farrell), the commander of the Leaf Men, who, incidentally, has a thing for Queen Tara (voice of Beyoncé Knowles). And then you have comedic sidekicks, Mug and Grub, Nim, and the treacherous toad Bufo… There are so many little subplots that each one feels shortchanged.

Similarly, I wish the film had a more consistent style. The design of the Leaf Men are modeled on samurai, and the lead is named Ronin, for crying out loud, which makes the Colin Farrell’s Irish accent a bit jarring. It wouldn’t be so bad if if the other Leaf Me sounded like him… but they don’t. The comedy similarly feels tacked on. M.K.’s dad is incredibly cartoony, which grates with the more realistic animation for much of the rest of the film. And Nim gets a musical number for no apparent reason, except that he’s voiced by Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler.

The movie looks gorgeous, though. The design and direction give the forest scenery lots of depth. See it in 3-D if you can.

Now that I think about it, Epic feels very much like a lot of other films from Blue Sky Studios: looks great, but can’t get the story in focus.

Stellar flares

Sat, 25 May 2013 14:03:00 +0000

Star Trek Into Darkness
★★½

I already have an almost reflex reaction to Michael Giacchino’s new Star Trek theme, even though this is only the second movie. When it swells, I have the same sort of sense of anticpation that I get when I hear the twanging guitars in the James Bond theme, or the staccato first bars of the Indiana Jones theme. When I hear those notes, I am ready for Star Trek.

This movie aims high. You may have heard that you want to see it cold, before anyone tells you about it, for there are some great plot twists. They have a great guest villain in Benedict Cumberbatch, who has never simultaneously looked more gorgeous and more badass. We get to see some other familar favourites return to this version of the Trek universe.

And holy cow, does this movie look amazing in 3-D. Particularly the space scenes. It has some of the best space battles I’ve seen on the screen in ages, I love me some spaceships, and it’s been a long time since such obvious screen love was given to them. I fell in love with the U.S.S. Enterprise again.

Then we got to the ending.

Weak.

The screenwriters fall back on a cheap trick. It’s far from the first movie to use this trick, but it’s particularly manipulative here. (Details not listed here to avoid spoilers.) “Okay, everyone, feel shocked and sad. Got that? Okay now, we’re going to undo all that in three… two… one…” It’s maddening, given that the filmmakers are deliberately paying homage to a powerful, meaningful scene from film history.

I still recommend this film. It is thrilling, has a great cast, and is generally well-written. In fact, I am seriously considering seeing it again. But I wish I could recommend it with no reservations.

P.S.—Enough with the lens flares, J.J. and Dan. Just… enough.

Stark contrast

Sun, 05 May 2013 12:26:00 +0000

Iron Man Three
★★★

What’s better than a hot new hero? A hero who hasn’t lost it. A hero that finds his way back.

Conventional wisdom holds that the second film of a trilogy is usually the best, but that is not the case here. After a serious misstep with Iron Man 2, I would not have believed that Iron Man Three could be as smart, as sharply written, and as exciting as it is.

The film is very cleverly scripted for a summer blockbuster, taking turns that, to paraphrase The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), you’ll never see coming. (By the way, studios, I love that the previews didn’t give stuff away. More of that, please.)

I was particularly impressed by some of the big action set pieces. The best ones have a “How’s he going to pull that off?” element to them, creating an intellectual tension as well as a visceral one. The big battles are great because they all show that Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) wins because he is a thinker, not because of the suit (though, admittedly, the armours are fun).

Downey continues to shine as Tony Stark. With four outings now under his belt, this is turning into the signature role of his career. Downey’s combination of “smart” and “smartass” is irresistible.

There are some weak elements to the movie. This is a big movie that would probably benefit from being more tightly edited and ten to twenty minutes shorter. For instance, the filmmakers try to connect this film to The Avengers with a recurring plot point about Tony having panic attacks brought on by the stress of the invasion that ended that film. It just doesn’t quite click.

Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is, despite a couple of great scenes, mostly the “damsel in distress.” That said, the presence of scientist Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hill) means for all its testosterone, this movie passes a feminist film test: there are two women who have a conversation about something other than a guy.

Still, this is a better film than we had any right to expect, and a great kick-off to summer movie blockbuster season. As summer movie blockbuster season commences, let’s hope there are more summer movies as well done as this one.

Do not leave when the credits begin to roll!

Old time future time

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:55:30 +0000

Oblivion
★★

Oblivion is an ambitious, but ultimately flawed, old school SF film.

The set up is that Earth has been on the losing side of an alien invasion. Most of the population has evacuated, with only a few small clean-up crews (one led by Tom Cruise, playing a “Jack” again for the second time in half a year) to make a few last preparations before the human race evacuates to Titan once and for all.

The screenwriters badly want to surprise the audience as the film unravels. Unfortunately, the script feels forced: there are times when characters withhold explanations from each other for no good reason except to delay a revelation until later. Then, there’s the strange juxtaposition of highbrow poetry and lowbrow language in the film’s big finale.

Oblivion feels like SF films of the late 60s and early 70s: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes. The look harkens back to how films used to envision the future*: pristine, sterile, desolate. There is some great design, such as the drones that patrol throughout the film.

The story-telling is slow and plot driven, and has generous helpings of paranoia that also informed those old SF films. All of this will appeal to a certain kind of audience member.

Maybe the best way to experience this movie might be to get a bunch of your smartest, SF savvy friends together, watch the film, then go to a favourite local hangout, and pick apart the plot holes and influences over drinks and a plate of fries.

*That is, before Blade Runner turned the future dirty and crowded in the 80s.

Paleoterrific

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 02:06:35 +0000

The Croods
★★★

From the previews, I was expecting The Croods to be a story of rebellious female empowerment mixed with a little teenage romance. That was in the movie… but there was more to it.

Eep Crood (voice of Emma Stone) is a teenage caveman, who is the only one in her family who is not on board with the rule set down by her father, Grug (voice of Nicholas Cage): “Never not be afraid.” Eep wants some fun. While out of the cave when she shouldn’t be (the female empowerment bit), she meets Guy (voice of Ryan Reynolds), who is decidedly more Cro-Magnon than Neanderthal, if you catch my drift (the romantic teenage bit).

What I did not expect was the focus shifted away from Eep and Guy as the film went on. The Croods is well-named: this is a film about a family, not one character. (I love when previews don’t give away too much of the movie!)

The film’s environment is visually lush. I almost wished the film used creatures that were based on the wonderful real creatures from prehistory, but the there are all sorts of fun and interesting creatures chasing, or occasionally being chased by, our heroes. Belt is almost a scene-stealer, but the filmmakers show a little restraint in using him. I suspect the movie all looks great in 3-D, (Due to projector malfunction, I saw the film in its flat version).

At a time when a lot of animated movies are trying to do as much as possible - more jokes, more characters, faster pace - The Croods succeeds because it pares down and has one clear story.

Do not leave when the credits begin to roll!

He’s off to be the wizard

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:16:00 +0000

Oz the Great and Powerful
★★

How does a con artistman from Kansas become the ruler of an Emerald CIty? Good question! I like the idea of this Wizard of Oz prequel more than its actual execution.

When a movie is named after one character in it, the character has to be engaging. Oscar, a.k.a. Oz (James Franco), comes close. Franco fills the part well, but it is a bit inconsistently written. Sometimes he’s a cad, sometimes not. He’s a magician, but his idol is apparently Thomas Edison.

Along his journeys, Oz acquires a little entourage, which is also inconsistently written. On the plus side, there is a little living china doll (voice of Joey King), who steals scenes and hearts; you can’t help but love her. On the minus side, there’s Finley the flying monkey (voice of Zach Braff), who talks only like a certain brand of modern movie comedians. Every time he opens his mouth, the words are completely out of place.

The film tries to straddle between the style and sensibilities of the original movie and modern films…. and it just can’t do it successfully.

P.S.-Oz fans know there are four witches in Oz. Wicked witches of the west and east, and good witches of the north and south. Yet there are only three witches to be seen in this movie…

FlapJack

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:23:00 +0000

Jack the Giant Slayer
★½

For a 3-D movie, and a Bryan Singer movie, Jack the Giant Slayer is surprisingly flat. It’s not so much that it’s bad… it’s just that there’s not all much that really works well.

The script is just odd. The lead, Jack (Nicholas Hoult) is woefully underwritten, almost entirely bereft of motivation or character. Jack is surrounded by a cast of supporting charactes who range from looking like they walked out of a serious historical film (Elmont, played by the always fine Ewan Macgregor) to walking off the set of Blackadder (scheming Roderick, played by Stanley Tucci). Characters who you think are going to be important are disposed of halfway through the film or earlier.

The giants, which should be the film’s centerpiece, are dull looking. The filmmakers try to give the lead giant, General Fallon (Bill Nighy in motion capture), a little more interest by giving him a second head. But the second head ends up looking kind of dumb rather than menacing. And even Fallon suffers from the script’s strange habit of switching focus from character to character for no apparent reason.

The film does conclude with one good set-piece. The scene of giants attacking the castle is exciting, and takes some unexpected twists and turns. Unfortunately, the spectacle can’t make up for the fact that you just don’t care much about what happens to the characters by that point in the film.

Blue man group

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:26:00 +0000

Escape From Planet Earth
★★

So… Gary Supernova is the mission controller for his little brother (agewise) who is also his big brother (sizewise) Scorch, who is the idol of millions (except Gary) on the planet Baab, including Gary’s son (Scorch’s nephew) Kip, whose mother Kira used to work in mission control with Gary, but who has been replaced by Lena, who, unknown to all, has struck a deal with General Shanker on Earth, who is holding Doc, Io, and Thurman hostage, who have to be saved by Scorch, except that Shanker captures Scorch, so Kip resolves to save Scorch, but is prevented by Gary, who then…

As you can see, it’s all a bit complicated. You practically need a flowchat to keep tabs on all the relationships between the characters. This is Rainmaker Studio’s first film, and it feels like wanted to throw absolutely everything they had in here. Instead of a clean, powerful story, Escape from Planet Earth feels slightly hyperactive and out of breath at every turn.

Not only does this movie feel like it’s running from shiny object to shiny object, it feels familiar, too. In particular, Area 51, the General, the captured aliens, all bring to mind Monsters vs. Aliens from a few years back.

Still, there is a lot to like here. There jokes are funny, the voice cast is top notch, and the 3-D is gorgeous. But telling just one story, instead of five or six, might have served this film better.

ZomCom

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:03:30 +0000

Warm Bodies
★★★½

I never thought I’s say this about a zombie movie… but this is lovely.

Warm Bodies is in that strange genre known as “paranormal romance.” There’s been a zombie apocalypse, and our male lead, has succumbed. Despite a surprisingly articulate inner monologue, he can’t remember anything about his name besides “R” (Nicholas Hoult).

R meets the female lead, Julie (Theresa Palmer), while she is out on a mission to recover supplies for the human survivors who are hunkered down behind walls. R does not eat Julie, but somehow manages to suppress his hunger and saves her.

As R and Julie get closer emotionally, R slowly starts getting less, well, dead. The reason why this happens is never adequately explained, but in my mind, it was simply this:

Love brings life.

The film is hard to characterize. It’s often funny (R saying to himself, “Don’t be creepy, don’t be creepy” around Julie when he’s still a grunting corpse), but never hysterically so. It’s often tense, but it’s never scary. Yet it all somehow works, maintaining its delicate balance all the way through.

And it ends on one of the most pitch perfect final images I’ve seen in a movie in years.

Another time, another crime

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:40:00 +0000

Parker
★★

And here were have Jason Statham again playing a criminal who is a little less scummy than all the criminals around him. Statham plays these roles well, but I do wish he could get slight different parts from time to time.

The set up is that Parker is part of a robbery team that doesn’t come off as planned. When the other members of the team want him to put in his share as seed money for another theft, he refuses, and is soon left for dead by the side of the road.

Parker then goes after the remaining thieves, not because he wants the money or revenge as much as he is a man driven by rules. Weirdly, one of those rules is honesty: he does what he says he’ll do.

After the initial robbery, the film muddles along with a somewhat plodding pace. It regains a bit of flow when real estate agent Leslie Rodgers (Jennifer Lopez) comes on board. She has a different set of problems and motivations, and keeps the film from being quite so grim. Disappointingly, though, in the end she does sort of end up as the girl who needs rescuing

We don’t know Jack

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 04:40:00 +0000

Jack Reacher
★★½

When you have a title with the name of your lead character, you had better make sure he is either well known, or compelling enough to carry the movie off on his or her own.

I didn’t know who Jack Reacher was walking in. His character was good, and well played by Tom Cruise, but by the end of it, I didn’t think he was the most compelling thing in the movie.

Jack Reacher is, at its heart, a murder mystery. It starts with a sniper attack in a city that leaves about half a dozen people dead. An investigation has the sniper seemingly dead to rights, and he is caught in a matter of hours. The suspect writes “Get Jack Reacher” before being beaten into a coma on his way to prison.

It’s a good introduction to the character. You wonder why he’s being called in by someone Reacher repeatedly says is “not my friend.” Why would someone call for an investigator who is not on his side?

The mystery unravels in a mostly satisfying way. There’s enough genuine “Did he or didn’t he?” to keep you guessing for a while.

One other surprising plus for this film is Werner Herzog. Herzog is a director of many other films. In Jack Reacher, he shows up in a role that is short, but that leaves an utterly indelible impression.

Director Christopher McQuarrie gets credit for some very good visual storytelling. The opening sniper scene is long and wordless and tense. However, he also gets credit for some very clunky dialogue. There are moments you can hear him writing. People say things that maybe you can get away with in books, but sound false when spoken out loud. Nobody says, “that very morning”.

The other distraction was the “Tom Cruise: he’s still got it” moments. There’s Tom driving muscle cars very fast. There’s Tom with his shirt off, looking buff. There are a whole bunch of shots of women smiling at Tom to show they’re thinking, “Oooooh, I’d give him my number.” Yes, Tom looks good. Now will you guys get back to the plot?

No reason to be Smaug

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 19:52:48 +0000

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
★★½

When creators of a successful project re-unite, you always wonder if lightning can strike twice.

The lightning that electrified The Lord of the Rings hasn’t struck for The Hobbit. Yet.

It is great to see Middle-Earth again, but part of the joy of The Lord of the Rings was how fresh it all was. It’s been about a decade since we’ve seen those films (my goodness, already?), and the scenery, the music, all the world making environments are familiar to us. It doesn’t have the same impact now, and it’s not surprising that it doesn’t. There are some exceptions, where the filmmakers surprise, though. The Goblin King is like nothing we saw in The Lord of the Rings, and is a phenomenal character.

My main disappointment was how little character work there was. Most of the dwarves are largely indistinguishable and do nothing memorable to set them apart from each other. Even Bilbo comes off as a bit flat through much of the film, though he does pick up and start to develop at the end.

While I’m not still convinced this story had to be split over three films, this first one has a respectable pace. But I cannot wait until we gets to the dragon.

Nipping at your nose

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 04:03:37 +0000

Rise of the Guardians
★★¾

Nobody believes in Jack Frost.

Three hundred years ago, he woke up, and has been drifting ever since. Jack has no idea why he can do what he does, or why nobody can see him.

That quest for identity runs through Rise of the Guardians, where Jack is called upon to team up with Santa Clause (voice of Alec Baldwin), the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher), and the Sandman against the Boogeyman.

Jack looks cool (appropriately enough), and Chris Pine plays the voice of Jack well. But, as sometimes happens in animated movies, a supporting character steals the show. And in this one, it’s the Easter Bunny. The Bunny is turned into an boomerang-wielding Aussie rabbit. It’ is a perfect blend of character animation and Hugh Jackman’s vocal performance, playing a broader Australian accent than he probably has. The Bunny’s constant annoyance with Jack is a great foil to Jack’s irreverence.

While the fresh take on the Bunny works, the other leads are less successful. Santa Claus (who is repeatedly called “North” for reasons that are never explained) is transformed into a tattooed Russian… um… pirate? I think that’s what they’re going for, with the cutlasses he’s carrying all the time. And he has yeti supplementing the elves.

When this film works, it works extremely well. There are some truly ecstatic fun scenes here. But there is something lacking that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s the weird combination of holiday-based Guardians and other characters, or something in the internal consistency of the world the filmmakers created. I had a good time at this film, yet I don’t think I’d seek it out to watch again.

Do not leave when the credit start to roll!

Resurrection

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 03:51:00 +0000

Skyfall
★★★

There has never been a Bond film like this one.

The pacing, the structure, is nothing like what we’ve come to expect. And by and large, that’s a good thing.

The later Bond films had become trapped by the checklist formula set by the first few films. Opening gunbarrel: check. Weapons lecture from Q: check. Quips: check. Woman with unlikely sexy name: check. Impregnable fortress to be destroyed at end: check. Relying of formula all but strangled most of Pierce Brosnan’s films.

When Daniel Craig took over, it was clear that the film makers wanted a fresh start, but this is the first with Craig in the role to shrug off the chains. You just don’t know where this is going. The checklist is all but thrown away in Skyfall.

Skyfall is so successful at not following formula that the few references to the earlier films feel forced.

While I admire much about this film – the uniformly excellent acting, the daring to change it up – it’s not flawless. It feels too long, and the villain is not always effective. But this dialogue from the film is a fair summing up of the movie:

Everyone needs a hobby…
So what’s yours?
Resurrection.

Power up

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 00:23:42 +0000

Wreck-It Ralph
★★★½

What Toy Story did for plastic, Wreck-It Ralph does for pixels.

Consider the parallels. Like Toy Story, both films start with the premise that the characters you know from your childhood have real lives of their own when you’re not looking. And part of the fun is seeing all the characters from different companies wandering around on the screen at the same time.

Ralph is the bad guy in an old-school arcade game. He’s tired of being beaten and alone, and decides that if he can just get a medal, everything will be different. So he goes off to get a medal.

The film threatens to start off as a formulaic hero’s journey, and you expect Ralph is going to get his medal at the end of the film. But somewhat surprisingly, it doesn’t take that long for Ralph to grab the gold. Just like a good video game, what starts as something simple (Ralph getting a medal) becomes more and more complicated.

There are a surprising number of layers of plot that get added on as the story progresses. And it’s done quite elegantly from a plot standpoint. From a character standpoint, this movie has humour and emotion to spare.

For instance, you’d think Ralph’s in-game nemesis, Fix-It Felix, Jr., would be his main opponent in the movie. Nope. Instead, Felix gets a subplot that is unexpected, funny, and sweet.

One of the things I love about animated films is their ability to turn actors I hate into characters I love. John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman? I would normally cross to street to avoid their movies. But they both do great work here, freed from their normal mugging and stage personas that just don’t work for me.

This is a love letter to all the arcades and consoles of the last three decades. And I love it. Wreck-It Ralph is definitely one of my top three films of the year.

Stay ‘til the very end after credits start!

Embassy games

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 03:47:36 +0000

Argo
★★★

Confession time: I’m old enough, and Canadian enough, to remember the events depicted in this film. But I never knew the story shown here.

And this is a great story.

The film opens with a short potted history lesson explaining the political situation in a voiceover. But the tension quickly ramps up with the opening scene showing the storming of the American embassy. Six embassy staffers escape, and are given refuge in the Canadian ambassador’s house, hiding from the squadrons of Iranians.

Back in the US, Tony Mendez (director Ben Affleck) has the “best bad idea” to get the Americans out of Iran: pretend that they’re Canadians scouting the locations for a science fiction movie. Affleck’s performance is highly restrained, but effective.

In the middle of this gritty, life and death situation, the mood is suddenly lightened as we’re introduced to two filmmakers who are going to build the cover story for the operation: producer Lester Seigel (Alan Arkin) and make-up artist John Chambers (John Goodman). And this is where the film gains something special: these two make the movie. The film is frequently laugh out loud funny, with even poker-faced Affleck getting some good lines.

The film has the problem that true stories often do: you know the ending. This makes it hard to generate tension, though goodness knows, this film does its best. But it’s always a little unsatisfying, since the protagonists and the antagonists can never confront each other directly. All the important action for one has to happen while the other is somewhere else.

The film nails the look of the period, right down to the opening Warner Brothers logo, which they pulled from the 70s period rather than using the current one. The film’s dedication to detail is even more impressive when you see the documents and photos of the real individuals involved at the end.

Burtonesque

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 04:19:58 +0000

Frankenweenie
★★½

Say what you will about Tim Burton: the man is an auteur. There’s no mistaking one of his films for one by anyone else.

A young Victor Frankenstein lives in the suburbs of New Holland (because Frankenstein movies need a windmill, doncha know) with his dog Sparky, doting but slightly clueless parents, and with the overbearing mayor as neighbour. He goes to school where he is taught by a new science teacher, Mr. Rzykruski (voice of Martin Landau, in an great performance). When Sparky meets a tragic end, something Victor hears in science class gives him the notion to bring Sparky back.

Victor tries to keep this a secret. He fails. Soon, other kids are setting kites into the New Holland skies with the hope of catching a lightning bolt…

Frankenweenie is one of Burton’s more Burtonesque films in a while. We’ve got weirdness in the suburbs, stop motion, and a distinct combination of crazy hair and big eyes, homages to monster movies, and more. It has good production values, quirky characters, and fun situations.

I like it, but I wanted to like it even more. There is one unsatisfying thing about this story: there are no character arcs. Everyone ends up at the same place at the end of the movie where they started. Nobody changes. Nobody grows (well, except Shelly). The characters who go through this wild set of experiences, but they seem oddly unaffected by it all.

Dracula’s daughter

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 22:49:42 +0000

Hotel Transylvania
★★½

In the nineteenth century, Count Dracula (voice of Adam Sandler) builds a refuge for monsters. He does it not for the business – despite it being billed as Hotel Transylvania – as a way to keep his new daughter, Mavis (voice of Selena Gomez) safe from the outside world.

The film moves to today, where Mavis is celebrating her 118^th birthday, and she’s feeling restless. She wants to explore the big wide world! But the Count wants nothing of it, fearing she will be hunted by humans, as all monsters are hunted.

But a world-travelling, backpacking human named Jonathan (voice of Andy Samberg) arrives by accident. It’s a good set-up for gags, as the Count tries to keep human Jonathan hidden from all the other guests in the hotel, not least of all Mavis. First he tries to get him out, then the disguise, and then trying to keep up the charade. It’s Dracula as two parts over-protective dad and one part Basil Fawlty.

As funny as the film is, its characterization is uneven. At one point, some of the other monsters refer to Dracula as a “control freak” who has to look after everything, but it doesn’t come across much in the film. Instead, he’s one of the more relaxed Draculas in film history, even at the start of the film, which goes to great lengths to show him as caring daddy.

Mavis, on the other hand, is an irresistible smart Goth girl. This makes her pairing with Jonathan… well…. Jonathan is a party-lovin’ bro, whose IQ is barely above room temperature. Mavis (and the audience) is supposed to look at Joanathan and feel, “Zing!” Instead, you look at them and wonder:

“What does she see in that guy?”

Training day, Mega-City One style

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 22:38:50 +0000

Dredd
★★½

In his native comics, Judge Dredd pulls off surprisingly sophisticated balancing act. On the surface, Dredd is little more than a blunt object, a vehicle for telling crime stories. But the SF setting was often home for some sharp satire of American culture.

The first attempt to bring Judge Dredd to the screen - I liked it more than most. (I won’t say it’s a good film, but I think it’s an underrated one.) The most common criticism of the 1995 film was that it deviated too far from the character.

Dredd nails its two main characters. They make the film. As I said, Judge Dredd is not a complicated character, and Karl Urban isn’t called upon to do any deep acting here. But screenwriter Alex Garland has given Dredd a foil, rookie Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), one of the classic characters from the comics. The mismatched partnership of veteran and rookie has appeared in a lot of cop stories, yes, but that’s because it works. And it works again here. Dredd is the faceless bulldozer, while Anderson is barely a wisp in comparison, never covering her eyes with her helmet. They haven’t gone for easy laughs in this pairing, although there are some laugh out moments. I completely enjoyed watching how these two characters interacting with each other.

The two police officers are charged with investigating a series of death in a huge, self-contained living complex (a “block”), which is controlled by a criminal boss Ma-Ma. As Ma-Ma, Lena Headey delivers a convincing performance despite an unconvincing make-up. When Dredd and Anderson get inside the block, Ma-Ma, shuts it down, forcing the two to run the gauntlet to the top of the tower.

Despite the interest the leads held for me, the overall movie felt… unambitious. This is a standard cop plot: veteran and rookie making a drug bust. There’s none of the sharpness or satire or craziness that made the comic so popular. There’s not much reason for this movie to have Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson instead of Random Veteran Cop and Random Rookie Cop.

The lack of ambition (or maybe budget) is even more obvious in the production design. The look of this film is hugely disappointing. Take out the judges’ costumes, and this could a contemporary city slum from any one of a hundred different movies. In the comics, Mega-City One itself is a character: its inhabitants, its slang, its architecture. Mega-City One doesn’t look or feel much like Mega-City One, particularly in the film’s beginning, which is all important for setting the tone and selling the locale.

Do not bother springing for the 3-D version of this film, though. This movie has one of the worst conversions to 3-D since Clash of the Titans.

There’s no crime here, but I think this character is going to the cubes for a another decade or more before someone tries again to put the definitive translation of Judge Dredd on screen.

Sight sighing: This is an embarrassment

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:52:00 +0000

Our university is going to merge and grow with the aim of becoming an emerging research institution, and is going to establish a medical school in the process. Given that these are the state goals of our institution, that this appeared in my inbox this morning was a bit of a shock.

I am very pleased to announce that Braco has accepted our invitation to come to South Texas and share his talent of “Gazing” with the community at large and the UTPA community starting this Wednesday, June 19th, at 2 p.m. with a FREE web live streaming, we can all have access via a computer, iPad, iPhone, etc., from all over the world. ...

The weekend of June 22nd & 23rd, Braco will be at the Holiday Inn Airport McAllen, TX doing group sessions for all who want to experience firsthand from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. for the community at large. ... During the event, Spanish/English translation will be available for each session.

Then for his last day in Texas, Braco has accepted to allow FREE access to all UTPA staff, faculty and students of the web live streaming at the Student Union on Monday June 24th from 11 – 5 pm. Just bring your UTPA ID with you to get in! Come and be engaged with the gazing of Braco hourly for 5-7 minutes!

I also want to take this opportunity to extend this invitation to South Texas College (STC) and University of Texas-Brownsville (UTB) nursing & other health-related field students & faculty to join us for this event. Bring your school ID with you! Not open to the public in general!

This is an embarrassment to our university. Although most of the material concerning Braco (pronounced braht-zo) tosses around the word “healer,” a better one is “charlatan.”

Braco normally charges $8 for him to gaze on you for about five to eight minutes. He does not speak in public. And there is a distinct lack of promises:

Braco also comes with many disclaimers. He does not call himself a healer or guarantee any results. He does not consider himself a prophet or a religious leader, does not espouse a particular philosophy and does not want anyone to follow him. The impact of his gaze may be sudden or gradual, subtle or profound. If there’s any impact at all.

Another article also uses the word “healing,” and notes:

A promotional video features many followers who attest to experiencing healing miracles, and one who claims to have seen Braco shape-shift. (Disappointingly, this follower does not say what shape Braco shifted into.) ...

Less mysterious – he also says he’s got an advanced degree in economics – is the Braco line of 14-karat gold jewellery.

Karen Stollznow notes in a CSICOP article:

Braco makes many claims for someone who claims to not make any claims.

As Skepchick put it:

Best. scam. evah.

Why has Braco agreed to do this for the university? I wager that he will use this to promote his credibility: “Braco has been invited to the prestigious University of Texas system!” Because the email describes this as being sponsored by our Department of Nursing. The email concludes:

This event has been sponsored by the University of Texas-Pan American Nursing Department and Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing Pi Omicron Chapter 397.

Why would a Nursing department sponsor this? (Additional: In an email to me, the department chair says, “We are not providing any financial support or ‘supporting this event’ in any way other than providing an announcement. ... The nursing honor society Pi Omicron has organized this event.” That’s a very limited set of activities, and I wouldn’t normally call it “sponsorship.” ) The email again:

“At UTPA Nursing Department, we strive to prepare our graduates to meet the health care needs of a culturally diverse society. We do so by preparing our students to develop critical thinking skills in order to provide holistic (mind-body-spirit) care to people who have interwoven spiritual, biopsychosocial, and cultural characteristics. Although these unique people are viewed as being ultimately responsible to act in their own best interests, our students, as client advocates, can help people maximize their mind-body-spirit wellness. As such, it is imperative to expose our students to many myriad complementary approaches to wellness and wellness-restoration from the lay, folk, and professional health sectors.”

The word “holistic” appears a lot on the department’s description of “BSN Philosophy,” too. Poor “holism”; a perfectly good word ruined by overuse by those practising pseudoscience. The degree philosophy purports to be in favour of critical thinking, but this is very much not in evidence here.

If you found out another department in your university was promoting this, what would you do? (Additional: As noted above, the Department’s involvement is minimal. It is a student honors society organizing it, which is almost as disappointing.)

External links

Braco the gazer
Gazing balls: I’m looking at you, Braco
Braco The Gazer: A New Age Guru With Nothing To Say
Braco brings his healing gaze to Arlington
Braco Gazing Event: Long-Haired Croatian 'Healer' Will Stare At You For $8 At Crystal City Sheraton

Tuesday Crustie: National Lobster Day, 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

This past Saturday was National Lobster Day (15 June every year), and I thank Kayle Goff for her devotion to the cause:

It’s the law! Governor signs off on new Texas university

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:01:00 +0000

This snuck by me on Friday: Governor Perry has signed the bill that will create a new university in South Texas.

Perry highlighted the Valley university legislation as some of the most important to emerge from this year’s session.

“This session will expand opportunities for success, and help us keep our state the best place in the nation to live, work, raise a family and run a business," he said in a statement.

UT System said a ceremonial bill signing in the Valley will happen sometime in the next few weeks.

Relevant to my interests are these:

In the more immediate future, is nearly $200 million for construction at UTPA and UTB; $100 million of that earmarked for a new UTB campus, the rest for a Science Building II at UTPA.

Time ran out on securing the funds this regular session in the Legislature.

The science building, where I work, was not completed and had much empty shell space when I arrived. But it has been full for several years now, and there is a desperate need for new research and office space.

External links

Perry signs bill to merge Rio Grande Valley universities

Comments for first half of June 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Inkfish covers a paper that asks people at various stages of education to draw neurons. Hey, did they copy from me?

I make a cameo appearance on Surprising Science, a Smithsonian Museum blog, about that idea that lobsters are immortal. I say again: lobsters are not immortal, despite what the Singularity blog claims. I have my severe doubts about the other four, too.

You gotta see this fish. Deep Sea News covers the first video of the elusive oarfish alive and in the wild. Just amazing stuff.

Undergraduates, Charles Lin has done you a favour in compiling a great list of advice on how to get involved in undergraduate research.

Terry McGlynn about going to conferences as a researcher from a not well known for research university at Small Pond Science.

“Exploit your size”

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Nina K. Simon is one of those writers who writes about one thing on the surface, but has lessons that apply to many areas. In her list of what she has learned in reviving a museum, a few things resonated with me:

Exploit your size. There are unique advantages to every budget level. Big organizations seem comfortable with this – they make big plays based on their scale. But many small organizations seem to spend too much time trying to emulate big organizations rather than exploiting the opportunity to be more personal, more idiosyncratic, and less bureaucratic. No one opens a small coffeeshop and thinks, “we’ll really be successful if we are just like Starbucks.” The whole point is to not be Starbucks. Instead of apologizing for the “lack of professionalism” of small institutions, we should celebrate the ways that our programming can lead to stronger engagement on an individual level. My first year at the MAH, I would often say that we are a “no money, no bullshit” operation. We may not have funding for your project, but we won’t tie it up in red tape either. You want to have an artist collective sleepover at the museum? Sure. Want to give visitors sledgehammers and invite them to help make a giant metal sculpture? Sounds great. Want to give free admission spontaneously as a gift to visitors who need it? No problem. Just as a large organization can exploit its resources, we can do the same in a different way as a small organization.

This made me think a lot about #Scifund, crowdfunding, and “small science” as I have dubbed it. It may have been Nina’s “no red tape” comments. I see many people who say “crowdfunding can’t work,” when what they really mean is, “crowdfunding can’t work for me.” They may be true, but maybe others have different goals and advantages than you do.

Unfortunately, at an institutional level, there often seems to be little interest in supporting this kind of diversity. This is why her last tip also matters:

Remember why you got into this. The reason that we do this revolutionary work is in service of a bigger mission(.) Whatever your personal focus, it’s worth thinking about whether you are working on a problem that you consider to be truly important. ... Find a problem that is truly important, and you will find a revolution worth fighting for.

Go read the rest if you are at all interested in making positive change.

External links

Memo from the Revolution: Six Things I’ve Learned from our Institutional Transformation

Is this good advice?

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 17:37:00 +0000

Things that a student heard at a workshop for students wanting to go into doctoral programs:

A 3 page CV is too long.
Ph.D. programs are looking for “well rounded students”, not people who are just focused on research, so not appearing “well rounded” is a weakness in a CV.
Don’t include relevant classes that you have taken.
Include clubs in your CV.
Include community service in your CV, and volunteer activities.
Don’t put so much research activities.

I think this is terrible advice. This sounds like advice from someone used to industry resumes (which usually are limited to 1-2 pages), not academic CVs. And especially not CVs from students looking to get into grad school in STEM fields. Less emphasis on research?

Thoughts?

Additional: Reactions from Twitter:

Neuroscience doesn’t need a grand theory to advance

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

In a new post on the planned BRAIN Initiative, the National Science Foundation characterizes neuroscience as:

Desperately seeking a theory

Not just seeking, but desperately seeking.

In other words, scientists lack a basic, overarching theory about healthy brain function that would explain how memories, thoughts and behaviors emerge from dynamic activities in the brain – any brain.

That doesn’t sound like a theory of the brain. That sounds like what is desired is a theory of consciousness. This does not surprise me; it’s the big hairy audacious goal for many neuroscientists. I have a message for my fellow neuroscientists about this.

People, chill out. You don’t need a theory to make excellent progress in understanding how any of those things work.

Let me draw a parallel. Consciousness is a network property of certain combinations of matter. Life is also a network property of certain combinations of matter. We want to explain what are the conditions necessary for those network properties to appear. So, the task of understanding consciousness for neuroscientists is very similar to the task of understanding of life for biologists.

We do not have a theory of life in biology.

By this I mean no theory predicts what configurations of matter are capable of life. Could you have a silicon based life form? A life form that exists in liquid methane instead of water? We have no idea. We have been surprised by extremophiles on Earth that live in conditions that were generally predicted not to be able to support life.

In my estimation, one of the last hopes for a unifying theory that separated life from non-live was vitalism: the idea that all living things had an “essence” that non-living ones did not. But we now know that there is no clear distinction between animate and inanimate matter, and vitalism is dead.

Of course, we may develop a theory of life, particularly if we can ever discover other independent origins of life, whether it be “shadow life” on our planet, evidence of life on other planets, or develop artificial life.

It’s not that we lack theories in biology; we do have them. Evolutionary theory and cell theory are the two main (some would argue only) theories in biology. But neither of these do the job of predicting what configurations of matter have what properties of life, and which don’t.

Similarly, neuroscience does have has theories: neuron theory, for instance. It doesn’t explain the “consciousness, but then again, its biological relative, cell theory, doesn’t explain “life,” either.

Yet this lack of a theory has not prevented an explosion in our understanding of biology. Inheritance and the development of complex multi-celled embryos from single cells were once viewed as great mysteries. Work on DNA and stem cells and gene regulation and so much more means that we have extremely good understanding of these processes. We did all of that without a “theory of life,” and there is no end in sight for biological discoveries. Biologists are not complaining that not having a “theory of life” is limiting their research. Almost nobody in biology is worrying about it.

I am not saying it wouldn't be nice to have a grand unified theory for consciousness. Theories are wonderful things to have. With the Society for Neuroscience meeting being one of the biggest scientific meetings in the world, it seems that neuroscientists are not being limited in making discoveries by their lack of an overarching theory.

Hat tip to Erin McKiernan.

Related posts

When is neuroscience not neuroscience? When it’s neurobiology
Nominees for the Newton of neuroscience

External links

Prying open the black box of the brain

Photo by FunGi_on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons licence.

How could it be there’d never been a woman in charge of Science before?

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:35:00 +0000

On a Science magazine policy podcast, incoming editor Marcia McNutt was asked about being Science’s first woman editor (5 minutes into the podcast). She replied:

Well, I think it’s perhaps rather remarkable that here in the year 2013, I would be the first, because in my view, there have been stellar women who have been the backbone of Science magazine for many, many years. If you look at the top editorial staff members, and the top brains behind the business of Science magazine, it has been largely a female enterprise for many, many years. So the fact that it has taken this long to have a female editor-in-chief is somewhat perhaps unusual.

Sadly, I’d argue that never having a woman in a top editorial job before is neither “remarkable” nor “unusual.” It’s called sexism. And this is not a problem of the past, it is a current problem. I’m not saying Science has been sexist. What I am saying is that women are still poorly represented in leadership roles in scientific societies and journals in science generally. That a journal has never had a female editor before is not surprising. I hope that a journal not having a more equal representation will be surprising now and in the future.

Don’t whitewash the long history of sexist behaviour in science.

External links

Marcia McNutt interview

Sharing responsibility for bad papers

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

When you read a bad paper, whose fault is it?

Robert Horvitz (quoted in Box 1 here; hat tip to Mike Taylor) and Fred Schram (who I quoted a couple of years back) both put the burden squarely on the authors. This bothers me, as I started to articulate yesterday.

Journals routinely take credit when things go right. Journals and publishers love to talk about how they “add value” to papers. Journals talk about “attracting” high quality submissions. They have “rigorous” peer review. When impact factors go up, it must be due to the good job the journal’s editorial board is doing.

But when things go wrong, and a journal is faced with charges that a paper should not have been published, it is all to easy for editors to wash their hands of the whole thing and let the authors twist in the wind. For instance:

Peer review does not end with publication. In the event that an accepted manuscript is questioned by the scientific community on the basis that the authors acted unethically, plagiarized, or where there are queries relating to the data or interpretation of the data, the editors will contact the authors to investigate unethical/fraudulent/plagiarized works or the journal editor will invite or accept letters to the editors.

Notice anything there about acknowledging a bad decision? About apologizing? About ensuring that reviewers are not asked to review for a journal again? Anything about investigating the process that led to a bad decision? I’m not even saying it was necessary in that case, but it exemplifies the “we followed procedure, we did nothing wrong” arguments that are routinely pulled out in response to criticism.

Some journals are quite good at critical self-appraisal of their overall processes. For instance, Nature showed some good reflection about sexism in their editorial process. But it is much rarer for a journal to show the same reflection over any single paper, except perhaps for clerical errors. Again, I struggle to think of cases.

I know it’s human nature to want to take credit and avoid blame, but mature people suck it up and take the heat as well as the glory. Editors and journals should share some of the load when poor papers get through their editorial decision making. I would also like it if reviewers would admit some culpability, but am not holding my breath, given the reviewing procedures at most journals protect anonymity to the extent they do.

Related posts

The Crustacean Society 2011: Day 3
Back room science

External links

Caustic volleys and the sting of peer review: what’s the solution?

Photo by !anaughty! on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Tuesday Crustie: Up periscope!

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Fiddler crabs’ eyestalks let them get a peek above the waterline.

Photo by hankplank on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Back room science

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 20:00:00 +0000

We now return to one of our regular features, “Let’s impugn all the bloggers.” Let’s start with Geoffrey North, using the pulpit of Current Biology.

But there is also, I think, a danger here, which lies in the very speed of response, and the way that blogs are essentially “vanity publications” which lack the constraints of more conventional publishing — they are not reviewed, and do not even have to pass the critical eye of any editor.

North is not alone. Fred Schram, the Journal of Crustacean Biology editor, recently wrote much the same, as a closing note in a piece mostly about open access (albeit in a society newsletter rather than an editorial in the journal itself):

One can already see what lies down the road beyond that point, something truly (open access) – the blogosphere! But do we want to collect our scholarly information by monitoring personal blogs. There will be no peer review, no quality control of data presentation, no fixed PDFs, no assurance that what we read represents actual work has been done as claimed.

What strikes me about both North’s and Schram’s comments is they reflect a desire for there to be a back room. You know, the place where work gets done, out of sight. Then, after all the real deals are made, a glossy fait accompli version that lacks blemishes is presented for “the official record.”

There’s a reason that people don’t like back room dealings. It shuts people out. There’s no transparency. David Brin has often noted that we tend to demand transparency for everyone else, but privacy for ourselves.

Blogs have allowed a bunch of scientists who don’t often get invited into the back room to start commenting on what comes out of it. It’s no surprise that those in the back room, unused to the glare, might hate this.

These arguments also seem weird to me in emphasizing “the scientific record.” While vetting and quality control are good things, they have hardly produced a pristine “scientific record” (see Retraction Watch). It’s always been messy.

North continues:

I do think there are dangers in a world where the critics are less accountable than in the more “traditional” system of peer-reviewed journals (which I well appreciate can be frustratingly slow in processing critical feedback).

How are journals, and their editors, more accountable than “critics”? It seems that more often than not, getting even egregious abuses of editorial power corrected is like pulling teeth. The arsenic life paper has been discredited, but not retracted, and there has never been any explanation of how the paper passed peer review. A weak paper claiming genetically modified corn caused cancer in rats rated responses, but not retraction, and there was never any explanation of how the paper passed peer review. An investigative journalist had to be the one to hold the feet of The Lancet and its editor, Richard Horton, to the fire after Andrew Wakefield’s untrue anti-vaccine paper was published. Editors can just say of problematic papers, “This passed peer review. Peer review is anonymous, so we can’t tell you anything about who the reviewers were or what they said.” This is a strange version of accountability.

Many journals have no “letters to the editor” section, or comments, or anything similar. And even if a journal does have such a section, who decides what is fit to see print? The self-same editors. Direct critiques of journal editorial processes in the same journals, or even different journals have been, in my estimation, rare. I am trying to think of examples. If anyone has them, please add them to the comments.

Journal editors may have a skewed view of this issue, given that they alone have an overview of the entire editorial process. Nobody else does. Everyone else is kept at least partially in the dark, deliberately so. Authors generally don’t know who reviewers are. Reviewers don’t communicate with each other. And none of them have much opportunity to have a dialogue with the editor.

North asks:

What is the solution here? How can one have a system that allows for rapid critical assessment, but ensures any such criticism is fair and reasonably based, not based on misunderstanding or ill-motivated?

Everything that North concern trolls about the blogosphere has always been happening at scientific conferences. And yet somehow, scientific discourse does not collapse at conferences. Nobody there talks about the need for “solutions” for the problems of criticisms at conferences.

We’ve been down this road before. Here’s a small sample taste of how the authors of a review in BioEssays dismissed Rosie Redfield (and anything else that might be on the Internet) blogging about on arsenic life:

(T)hese “chat room” environments are not constrained or screened and at times become ad hominem attacks, which have no place in the scientific literature.

Let us not forget that a representative of the American Chemical Society said this of bloggers:

“We find little constructive dialogue can be had on blogs and other listservs where logic, balance, and common courtesy are not practiced and observed,” Glenn S. Ruskin, the group’s director of public affairs, said in an e-mail message.

We had L. Henry Edmunds, Jr., the editor of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, ranting against “bloggists”, telling Retraction Watch:

It’s none of your damn business.

I’m grateful to Embargo Watch for recording the reaction of the public information officer of a major university, the University of Manchester’s Aeron Haworth, brushing off Ed Yong (who told this story on the now defunct Posterous website):

I think you have all you need for a blog.

Common factors in all of these? For one, most have vested interests in the status quo of scholarly publishing: editors, society representatives, and so on. Large institutions used to be able to control attention because of the vast infrastructure needed to reach a mass audience. They are now freaking out that their infrastructure doesn’t mean that much. They face competition from people like bloggers who gain attention by doing remarkable things.

As Christie Wilcox pointed out, North’s article does not give any examples of where something bad happened. Not one. Not a single, solitary case where bloggers resulted in some poor scientists unfairly being tarnished. In contrast, North provides a positive example of where blogging had a good effect (Rosie Redfield’s critique of arsenic life).

Here’s my challenge: instead of jumping to “The Internet is bad” meme with both feet, instead of just bemoaning the blogs are bad, point some fingers. Name some names. Be specific about events that unfolded in ways harmful to the general scientific community, and not just things that make journals look bad.

Previously, I said nobody can assert they have authority. I’d like to note that the flip side is also true: you cannot dismiss authority, either. When editors and journals try to claim they have authority and bloggers don’t, they lose the very thing they want to have.

Hat tip to Malcolm M. Campbell, who asked for blogger’s response to this editorial.

Additional: Matthew Francis and Justin Kinney both counter the fetishization of journal peer review evidenced above by pointing out the success of arXiv.

I also became aware of PubPeer through this article, and reposted this piece there.

References

North G. 2013. Social media likes and dislikes. Current Biology 23(11): R461. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.073; free full text
Schram F. 2013. To be open or not to be open: That is the question. The Ecdysiast 32(1): 7. http://www.thecrustaceansociety.org/uploads/Ecdysiast_32-1_May_2013.pdf

Related posts

Wrong approach
Arsenic life, four months later: pay no attention to the internet
Arsenic life, four months (and a bit) later: Reviewers with shovels
The deal is rotten
Dear Virginia
Taxonomists as science survivalists
Retraction classic: physics and feminism

External links

On Current Biology editorial
On The Danger Posed By Non-Expert Critiques Published To Large Audiences
Speak up and matter

Others
ACS to bloggers: Shove it
Why was that paper retracted? Editor to Retraction Watch: “It’s none of your damn business”
How to demonstrate you’re not about transparency — and piss off reporters — as a PIO

Picture by by LALLA - ALI on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

How to make a zombie: The SICB symposium

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Some time ago, I hatched a plot with Kelly Weinersmith. It was like this:

Yes, exactly like that. It was an idea that pinged around and got rejected once before it ultimately found a home.

But I am proud to announce that at the next Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting, to be held here in Texas, Kelly and I will be co-organizing the symposium, “Parasitic manipulation of host phenotype, or how to make a zombie.”

We’re excited to have this symposium at SICB, because this is truly an integrative topic. Trying to crack this problem requires the help of taxonomists, ethologists, ecologists, neurobiologists, and more. SICB is one of the few meetings where workings in all those different kinds of disciplines mingle together.

Mark the meeting on your calendar! It’s 3-7 January, 2014.
Now that we have embarked on a nefarious plot, we are in the market for a skull-shaped island.

Team CloneZombie... doing our part to keep Austin weird!

External links

SICB parasite symposium page
SICB 2014 meeting page
Symposium: Parasitic manipulation of host phenotype, or how to make a zombie (Co-organizer Kelly Weinersmith’s blog)

Tuesday Crustie: Strictly speaking, it’s a nice pleon

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

As with the last week or two, you may need to click to enlarge to see some of the fine print.

Carnival of Evolution #60: Party like it’s 1953

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 17:17:00 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a special edition of the Carnival of Evolution. It’s the big six oh!

In honor of that achievement, we shall share this carnival’s space with other events celebrating their sixtieth anniversary.

Trillions and trillions... if viruses were dollars, we’d all be as rich as Richie Rich (debuted 1953). Carl Zimmer brings us the story in Meet Your New Symbionts: Trillions of Viruses.

“Think of the happiest things / It’s the same as having wings...” is what they sing in Peter Pan (Disney version debuted 1953). Birds may beg to differ, having gone to hard way to evolving flight. The feathers on a new dinosaur, Auronis xui are examined at the Pterosaur Heresies.

Evolution can be fast and relentless, like a Chevy Corvette (first built in Flint, Michigan in 1953). If that’s your thing, you need to check this post on Relentless Evolution at The Molecular Ecologist.

Evolution can be fast, like the first plane to hit twice the speed of sound (Mach 2 reached November 1953). The Digital Cuttlefish has the story about how roach bait lost it sweet allure for its intended targets, who now find the traps bitter.

The physics of sound are demanding. Test pilots like Jackie Cochrane (first women to fly past Mach 1) could attest to this. An unassuming moth, like Cochrane, broke a new record in sound this month, with its ability to detect extraordinarily high sound frequencies, covered here at NeuroDojo. (But what’s the selective pressure?)

Look! In the manuscript! Is it a cladogram? Is it a phylogeny? It’s... supertree! No, this is no parody, like Superduperman (appeared in Mad magazine in 1953), but a real method in evolutionary biology. Learn more about the Supertree method at Teaching Biology.

Sometimes, the ruthless anti-hero James Bond (who first appeared in Casino Royale in 1953) is described as a bit of an animal. This means he has tight junctions and radial cleavage. (I saw lots of cleavage in the Bond stories, but not like that...) At least, that’s what Teaching Biology tells us in the examination of what it means to be an animal.

In 1953, Russell and Monroe proclaimed that gentlemen prefer blondes. However, being brunette might be better indicators of fitness, given that dark pigments are costly to produce. At least, that’s the case in for dark colour in crickets, covered here at NeuroDojo.

Many considered the first issue of Playboy magazine a scourge (released December 1953), but let’s face it, a magazine is an amateur scourge compared to the blight that destroyed the potato crops of Ireland, leaving the Irish with nothing to eat. John Hawks covers some recent work on the potato pathogen at John Hawks’ weblog.

In 1953, you could get over 70% of American households turning into watch one television show, like I Love Lucy. Mass media was here! Today, there are all kinds of media, including the pervasive podcast! Neuroanthropology tells us about a recent Neuroanthropology podcast that answers such pressing questions as, “What is it and why should I care?”

For those with a taste for live performance, Broadway say the debut of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in 1953. The Galápagos Islands have sometimes been called a crucible of evolution for all the wonderful organisms that have invaded and adapted to those hard specks of land in the ocean. Many biologists want to go there, and Eco-evolutionary Dynamics got the chance and describes the trip to the Galápagos for us.

It has not escaped our notice that the announcement of DNA structure occurred in 1953 as a trio of papers in Nature, which ultimately led to the proliferation of modern molecular techniques so widely used in evolutionary biology today. For instance, gene expression is used to examine the evolution of the eyes of cave bugs, covered here at NeuroDojo.

Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, and became the first Queen of Canada, which matters to Canadians like myself and T. Ryan Gregory. The debate over whether the monarchy is superfluous invites almost as much controversy as whether large swathes of DNA are also superfluous. Ryan examines genome reduction in the context of ongoing “junk DNA” debates at Genomicron.

Viruses were big news in 1953, particularly with the announcement of the polio vaccine. Viruses are central figures in this Story behind the paper at The Tree of Life. It’s largely about snot... or, to use the technical term, mucus.

Another evolutionary controversy... one might even say a war (though not an interplanetary war, like the one depicted in George Pal’s classic telling of War of the Worlds) concerns group selection. David Sloan Wilson has been a long-time proponent of the idea. Evolving Economics examines Wilson’s paper on intentional change.

Speaking of worlds, in the World Series of baseball, the New York Yankees were on an incredible winning streak. They won their fifth world series in a row in 1953. Did modern humans have a similar winning streak against our Neanderthal relatives? Trapped by the Box investigates the possible role of culture in the eventual extinction of the Neanderthal lineage.

And for the big finale, the pinnacle, the Everest, as it were (which was first climbed in 1953 by Hillary and Norgay), we have God and Evolution, the conclusion from John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts.

Want more? Join the Carnival of Evolution on your favourite social media site!

Want more 1953? Here is more and more and more!

What...? Sixty installments for the Carnival of Evolution, not sixty years?

Comments for second half of May 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 05:00:00 +0000

NeuroPolarBear thinks we may be stuck with Impact Factor as a way of measuring single articles, as much as we hate them.

What’s in your trunk? Prof-like Substance wants to know!

If you’re a Star Wars fan, you need to read this amazing retrospective of the design of the film’s iconic title.

Small Pond Science looks at the prospect of moving between universities. Also check out this post about how students address instructors. Then there’s the issue of sabbaticals.

The Cellular Scale asks what makes something an experiment.

Just go read Bug Girl's post on Insect Carl Sagan. Go now!

In Baby Attach Mode asks how you deal with rejection. I just expect it, because I suck.

Empirical Planet looks for science panel discussions. Unfilled niche, people! Someone grab it!

Eleven years of science blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Thu, 30 May 2013 12:12:00 +0000

Eleventh anniversaries are tricky. I mean, when you hit ten, it’s like watching the odometer on the car roll over and you go, “Look at all the zeroes!” It’s a whole new order of magnitude. But after that, that leading numeral “one” is just stuck there for year after year.

Today is the eleventh blogiversary of NeuroDojo. I’m very happy about that, and with the longevity of this project.

Thanks to:

Neil Gaiman for the original inspiration to start this.
Blogger for continued hosting and service; literally from the very beginning.
Flickr for being my best source of Creative Commons graphics.
You, even though you readers and commenters are slightly too numerous to single out.

Despite a post that reflected some weariness earlier this week, I see no end in sight for this blog. It’s still fun.

P.S.—It seems appropriate to include this “Blogging for the long haul” session I did with the mighty Sci at Science Online:

Watch live streaming video from scienceonline at livestream.com

Still not explaining the masks.

Related posts

Ten years of blogging
Science Online 2013: “Blogging for the long haul”
“Blogging for the long haul” session up!

Photo by imago on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Which is harder: resurrecting a mammoth, or a scientific career?

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Wed, 29 May 2013 19:56:00 +0000

Woo-suk Hwang’s career seemed to have flamed out a few years ago among charges of data fabrication.

Today, I read that he is still doing science. And that he is part of a deal to clone a mammoth.

This is surprising to me in several ways. First, that Hwang is still doing any sort of science at all caught me off guard. Second, it is a bit weird that of all the things Hwang’s name re-emerges in connection with, it would be something as fringe sounding as mammoth cloning.

I am also surprised that in the press release, Hwang’s ethical issues are notable only for their absence:

Last year, Grigoryev’s Northeastern Federal University signed a deal with cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk of South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, who in 2005 created the world’s first cloned dog.

In contrast, Wired UK does not overlook this:

Also, while Northeastern University did sign a prominent agreement with South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in 2011 to clone a mammoth using recovered mammoth bone marrow, there has been little news from the programme since. Many observers have been sceptical it can achieve its aims, especially as it's led by geneticist Hwang Woo-Suk -- the man who was exposed for faking research in 2006 when he claimed to have cloned human stem cells.

Nor does CNET:

North-Eastern Federal University has partnered with controversial South Korean cloning scientist Hwang Woo-Suk (who was found to have faked data involving a procedure to clone human embryonic stem cells) for a mammoth-cloning effort.

What should the reporting of this story be? Should Hwang’s past be mentioned? I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I do believe that people can change. Hwang’s past may not be relevant to this project. Hwang did achieve many genuine successes, notably the first cloned dog, Snuppy. The scientific community has, in general, not given people found guilty of data fabrication second chances. And Hwang’s record is, well, note-worthy.

External links

Russian scientists make rare find of 'blood' in mammoth
Scientists poke frozen mammoth, liquid blood squirts out
Scientists uncover frozen mammoth, blood flows out
New mammoth comes with grains of salt
Nature’s special report on Woo-suk Hwang

Frankenstein and Galileo, revisited: are they the same story?

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Wed, 29 May 2013 12:05:00 +0000

I’ve been following the story of Eric Weinstein with some interest, since his work was promoted in the Guardian last week (here and here). I was thinking about why it has attracted so much attention. I thought back to an earlier post of mine, in which I claimed there are two extremely popular science narratives that we tell over and over and over again. One is Frankenstein (science leads to tragedy) and one is Galileo (science triumphs!).

The initial Weinstein articles very much set the tone, raising the possibility that Weinstein might be one of these Galileo type figures: the plucky, lone outsider taking on the establishment. Jha writes (my emphasis):

He may have an impressive CV, but Weinstein is in no way part of the academic physics community. ...

David Kaplan, a particle theorist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has seen and discussed some of Weinstein's ideas with him. On the plus side, Kaplan says it is "phenomenal" that someone coming from outside academia could put together something so coherent. "There are many people who come from the outside with crazy theories, but they are not serious. Eric is serious."

In response, established jobbing scientists in academia stepped into their proscribed role as stuffed shirt party poopers (my emphasis).

That is not to say he doesn't have anything to contribute, but he will have to go through the proper channels. Physicists are inherently conservative. New claims, especially bold ones, face stiff resistance. That's for a good reason: faster-than-light neutrinos, anyone? ...

Grand claims like Weinstein's would – in the normal course of science – be accompanied by a technical paper explaining their foundations. We could then take a deep breath and puzzle over whether they're consistent with the vast knowledge of nature arising from centuries of experiment and observation.

Jennifer Oulette’s post also fits that mold. Oulette is a smart enough storyteller to recognize the importance of the way the story has been framed as a potential a Galileo-style triumph in giving this story “legs”:

Admittedly, it’s a very seductive narrative. Who doesn’t thrill to the idea of an obscure unknown genius toiling away in the shadows, snubbed by the stuffy, closed-minded academic establishment, who defies the odds and manages to achieve what all those brilliant scholars failed to do, thereby ensuring his or her scientific immortality?

The story is important. In thinking about Weinstein’s lecture being framed as a Galileo-style story, it occurred to me that Frankenstein and Galileo are not two stories; they are one story.

Pride goes before a fall.

Frankenstein and Galileo are both stories of pride going before a fall, and then getting knocked down a peg. The only difference is in who has the pride. In Frankenstein, it’s the scientist. In Galileo, it’s the establishment.

This is perhaps nor surprising, given the nature of science. Science is about determining the nature of reality. And reality always wins. A story that is truly about science will always have anyone who wants to live with their wishes, or deny the facts, or think they can trump the natural world losing in the end.

I am still looking for the shapes of other scientific stories. It seems to me that the most common one in reality makes an uninteresting one in narrative: “Work very hard for a long time, and maybe you can to make a few small dents in our ignorance.”

Additional: I made a few comments about this on Andrea Kuszewski’s post on G+.

Related posts

Frankenstein and Galileo

External links

Roll over Einstein: meet Weinstein
Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics' biggest problems
Weinstein's theory of everything is probably nothing
Dear Guardian: you’ve been played
An Outsider’s Theory of Everything
A tale of two Oxford talks
David Nutt and science’s Galileo complex

Tides and doldrums in science communication

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 28 May 2013 16:41:00 +0000

Sometimes, you feel tired. Or small. Or both.

Last week, I went after a claim about “immortal lobsters.”

No, lobsters are not immortal. Lobsters have shorter lives than humans. But there is a tiny little sliver of truth that gets mangled somehow into a bigger claim that “lobsters are immortal.”

I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on the post (which has been updated several times), tracking down references, making pictures, and editing Wikipedia. I was gratified by the response to my post. It was one of my most popular blog posts in a long time. But then, I was dishearted to see that my posts didn’t even have 1% of the reach of a silly lobster picture. And I probably shouldn’t have searched Twitter for “immortal lobsters” to see how many people were accepting this and retweeting this claim.

Last night, I realized I had it easy. At least I don’t have to put up with the stuff the real marine biologists have to deal with, like a cable television network promoting the idea that mermaids are real.

Seriously. What the hell.

Because it apparently needs saying... mermaids are not real.

You want to make a dent in the foolishness. But sometimes, you just wonder if you can.

And then we scientists get told we are not doing enough.

What about the rest of you guys doing great work that not enough people know about? Who’s helping you communicate what you do?

Sigh. You mean besides blogging non-stop for eleven years as of this week?

Scicurious has a long response to that, which says a lot of things I would probably say. I guess I’ll just add here that I can’t compete with viral memes and entire television networks. Even if I wasn’t trying to teach students and do actual original research, too, how far could I go when the tide seems so relentless and so fast?

This is not to say that I am going to give up. This is a good fight. But sometimes, you wish there was a lull in the fight instead of a never-ending battle.

Additional, 29 May 2013: Apparently, this week’s “mermaids” show gave the network that aired it its biggest audience ever. Hope for humanity fading...

More additional, 29 May 2013: If my post is one of fatigue, Bug Girl's post bookends mine with wonderful enthusiasm. Hope for humanity rising...

External links

Why Science Needs Help Talking About Itself
Calling all Brave Travelers
Insect Carl Sagan and science communication

Related posts

All lobsters are mortal
I want to be Carl Sagan, but can’t

Tuesday Crustie: Be gentle

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 28 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

You may need to click to enlarge to see the fine print on this one...

All lobsters are mortal

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:24:00 +0000

This appeared earlier today on the Facebook feed I Fucking Love Science:

Argh!

I remember seeing a shark documentary as a kid, hosted by Burgess Meredith, if I remember correctly. It made the same basic claim about great white sharks: too big to have predators, nobody had ever seen them die except by accident or by human hands, blah blah blah, therefore “some have suggested” they are immortal.

That I can remember the end of the show all these years later shows you what a terrific close the “immortal” idea makes. But it only sounds plausible because of our disconnect with that natural environment. It plays on our lack of knowledge about the natural world, and that we have a hard time tracking these sorts of things. It’s like asking most city dwellers, “Have you ever seen a baby pigeon?” “No, I haven’t. And you know what, I’ve never seen a dead pigeon, either! Oh my goodness, pigeons must be immortal!”

Sharks and lobsters have a few things in common, too, that makes the “immortality” claim easy to make. They live in the oceans, which means they are hard to track, and few people have first hand experience with them. They are long lived species, and it’s not easy to look at one and know how old it is. Wolff (1978) says of lobsters:

The scanty data presented above demonstrate the great difficulty in estimating the age of the very large lobsters.

When you add in “they only die from external causes,” you have a huge out. Most animals, including humans, die from external causes, broadly construed. Sure, a predator is an external cause. A bacterial or viral infection is an external cause. What would not count as an “external cause”? The definition is so loose that you can make exceptions for almost every possible counter-example.

And, of course, it links out, not to an actual scientific paper, which would be the sort of action you might expect from a group that proclaims to love science, but to a radio interview.

This is not a slap against the participants in the interview. Jelle Atema is a good scientist with real bona fides. But this radio interview is a long way from the sort of careful science you would need to do to show lobsters are “functionally immortal.”

There is some interesting science to this. Many decapod crustaceans have indeterminate growth (mentioned by Vogt 2008, 2010, who cites others). This means that they keep growing throughout their life, and do not have a set upper limit for size. It’s not just lobsters that do this, as far as I know; crayfish do, too. Lobsters are probably in this meme because they get so much larger than crayfish. It’s easier to people to believe a big animal like a lobster could be so much older than a small animal like a crayfish.

There is about one paper that I have been able to find on lobster longevity by Klapper and colleagues (1998). The introduction says:

Lobsters grow continuously throughout their lifespan, only decreasing growth rates with age. Furthermore, and again in contrast to humans, they are able to regenerate whole limbs even at a high age.

This cites a book chapter by Govind, on... muscle innervation?! The chapter talks a little bit about sarcomeres being added throughout life, but that’s about it. It’s not a chapter on aging and senescence.

More provocatively, the abstract of the Klapper and colleagues says (my emphasis):

Lobsters (Homarus americanus) grow throughout their life and the occurrence of senescence is slow.

But there is no citation for the “slow senescence” claim. And there is no original empirical data supporting that in the Klapper paper (e.g., longevity and activity and health and mortality data). The paper shows that adult lobsters still make an enzyme called telomerase, but it does not show that lobsters are long lived because of it.

How old does this “functionally immortal” lobster get? If lobsters really were “functionally immortal,” why would you note expect them to live for centuries?

Wolff (1978) wrote:

I also believe that Herrick gets pretty close to the truth in his poetic conclusion (1911: 199): “Giants weighing from 25 to 35 pounds [11.5-16 kg] have possibly weathered the storms of life half a century or more”.

More recently, Sheehy and colleagues wrote (1999; my emphasis):

The exceptional ages attained by some of the largest lobsters (males: average 31 years, maximum 42 ± 5 years; females: average 54 years, maximum 72 ± 9 years) are explained by ageing theory, indicate natural mortality rates, M, of 0.15 and 0.08 for males and females, respectively, and point to the existence of an offshore refuge.

Bodnar (2009) has a table that puts the oldest lobster on record in the 50-100 range; a bit more liberal than Wolff or Sheehy and company. Bodnar cites Finch (1990), which again does not seem to have much more than a table with an estimated maximum lifespan, connected to another reference I haven’t been able to track down. Nobody seems to define what “slow senescence” is, or how it has been measured in lobsters.

Regardless, a “functionally immortal” animal that has a shorter recorded maximum lifespan than a human? Colour me unimpressed.

For such a bold claim, it has been disappointingly hard to track down the real science. It’s also disappointing to see such a credulous claim come from a source that contends it fucking loves science. I think it is fair to call this one:

Sadly, I suspect this myth might have a longer lifespan than many lobsters.

Additional, 24 May 2013: Fighting fire with fire. Fire, and frickin’ awesome big crustaceans.

Additional, 26 May 2013: Welcome Redditors who found this post though this thread.

I also found this meme, made three days ago, apparently in response to the I Fucking Love Science post.

I got criticized a bit on I Fucking Love Science for promoting this post by characterizing the original IFLS picture as saying lobsters “live forever,” when the original picture said, “functionally immortal.” This meme shows that people are not picking up on the nuance. “Functionally immortal” became “biologically immortal,” which, I think, shows people are just going to remember “immortal.”

So, at this point, the original picture on I Fucking Love Science was probably seen by a few million people (over five million have liked it, and over four million are talking about it, says Facebook). The meme above has 689,321 views to far. This post has about 5,000 views so far.

I am going to have to put up with people asking me about immortal lobsters for years, aren’t I?

Additional, 27 May 2013: More evidence that people are seeing lobsters as pretty much straight-up immortal:

Is it true Lobsters can’t die from old age, are they immortal apart from sickness and injury?

I also finally turned to what may have been the source of the claim. Wikipedia. A section on biological immortality contained (until I edited):

Some scientists have claimed that (lobsters) could effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, or capture.

The good bit was that it had a reference. To a journal article. With a relevant looking title:

Guerin JC. 2004. Emerging area of aging research: long-lived animals with “negligible senescence”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1019(1): 518-520. http://dx.doi.org/10.1196/annals.1297.096

Aha! Maybe this would be the source of the claim that lobsters are slow to undergo senescence! Maybe there is actual data!

I got it, and searched for “lobster.” It was fast; there are only two pages in the paper besides the references. It cites Finch (1990), again, with the reference that I haven’t yet been able to track down. Guerin notes that Finch listed several animals that might have negligible senescence, “including rockfish, sturgeon, turtles, bivalves, and possibly lobsters.” My emphasis: possibly.

That’s all. That’s weak stuff compared to “some scientist claim” lobsters could live indefinitely. Instead, lobsters might have little senescence. Maybe.

It seems that the source of all these “immortal lobsters” factoids are whatever research Finch is citing. I’ll continue to try to track it down, and report back on what I find.

Additional, 3 June 2013: The Surprising Science blog also tackles this story. That post is not just a repeat of information here (though this post does make a cameo). There are excellent comments from several other lobster biologists. For instance:

According to Carl Wilson, lead lobster biologist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, between 10 and 15 percent of lobsters die naturally each year as they shed their exoskeletons because the exertion proves to be too much. Each molting process requires more and more energy than the one before it as lobsters grow in size.

Finally, older crustaceans stop shedding their exoskeletons altogether—a clue that they’re near the end of their lifespans. They run out of metabolic energy to molt, and their worn-and-torn shells contract bacterial infections that weaken them. Shell disease, in which bacteria seeps into lobster shells and forms scar tissue, adheres the crustaceans’ bodies to their shells. The lobster, attempting to molt, gets stuck and dies. The disease also makes lobsters susceptible to other ailments, and in extreme cases, the entire shell can rot, killing the animal inside.

Reference

Bodnar AG. 2009. Marine invertebrates as models for aging research. Experimental Gerontology 44(8): 477-484. DOI: 10.1016/j.exger.2009.05.001

Govind CK. 1995. Muscles and their innervation. In: Factor, J.R. (Ed.), Biology of the Lobster Homarus americanus, pp. 291–312, Academic Press, San Diego, CA.

Klapper W, Kühne K, Singh KK, Heidorn K, Parwaresch R, Krupp G. 1998. Longevity of lobsters is linked to ubiquitous telomerase expression. FEBS Letters 439(1-2): 143-146. DOI: 10.1016/S0014-5793(98)01357-X

Sheehy MRJ, Bannister RCA, Wickins JF, Shelton PMJ. 1999. New perspectives on the growth and longevity of the European lobster (Homarus gammarus). Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 56: 1904-1915. DOI: 10.1139/f99-116

Vogt G. 2008. How to minimize formation and growth of tumours: Potential benefits of decapod crustaceans for cancer research. International Journal of Cancer 123: 2727-2734. DOI: 10.1002/ijc.23947

Vogt G. 2008. The marbled crayfish: a new model organism for research on development, epigenetics and evolutionary biology. Journal of Zoology 276: 1-13. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7998.2008.00473.x

Vogt G. 2010. Suitability of the clonal marbled crayfish for biogerontological research: A review and perspective, with remarks on some further crustaceans. Biogerontology 11: 643-669. DOI: 10.1007/s10522-010-9291-6

Wolff T. 1978. Maximum size of lobsters (Homarus) (Decapoda, Nephropidae). Crustaceana 34: 1-14. DOI: 10.2307/20103244

Hat tip to Chris Vitek for “Someone is wrong” picture.

University of Texas Brownsville struggles while waiting for merger into new Texas university

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:34:00 +0000

In discussing the plans for a new research university in South Texas, I have told a lot of people that my institution is not the one that will benefit the most. I told them about how the other institutions in the lower Rio Grande Valley have been struggling. A new article in the Texas Observer documents more officially what I had only heard informally.

It is uglier than I had heard. Not surprising when you get rid of a fifth of your faculty, including many with tenure.

Early in March 2012, UT-Brownsville formed review committees to determine which faculty would stay with the school, and which would be let go. The committees ranked faculty based on advanced degrees or tenure status. Teachers at the bottom of the list got cut. The goal was to create an objective rubric for the type of faculty each department wanted to keep—but some departments were so small, it was obvious who would lose their jobs. Fuss-Sommer, whose layoff came in that second round, calls it “a perfect opportunity to get rid of people you don’t like.” ...

The layoffs began in late March 2012, with 30 adjunct professors who taught trade courses like air conditioning or car maintenance. At the end of April, Fuss-Sommer and 104 other faculty members—nearly a fifth of the school’s 518 total faculty—were also let go. Of those laid off, 53 were tenured. ...

“There’s no consistency to it,” Ramirez says. “Some people are staying without Ph.D.s and other people aren’t. … It really looks like cronyism to me, where they’re just picking all of the people that they want or they don’t want.”

Ramirez calls it a “really baroque system” developed by UT-Brownsville Provost Alan Artibise to “shield what he’s really doing, which is firing tenured professors.”

I truly hope the merger into a new university stabilizes things.

External links

In Brownsville, Two Colleges Split and a Community Suffers

Picture by final_station on ; used under a Creative Commons license.

Down in the underground, scuds lose eyes but keep genes

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

When animals live caves full time, their descendents often lose their eyes. It has happened over and over and over and over again, in all different kinds of animals. But how this happens is not obvious. Stephen Jay Gould wrote that some people would use cave fish as an argument that “Lamarck must have been on to something” with his idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited. Well, no, that’s not that case, but it is a good example of how tricky thinking about losses can be.

The latest paper to try to sort out eye loss uses small amphipod crustaceans (Gammarus minus). An advantage of working with this particular species is that some populations live out in the sunshine with us, but several populations have gone down in the underground. In this case, Carlini and colleagues have three separate populations that went into caves, and they have their closest relatives, which are not cave dwellers. Each pair of populations acts as a natural experiment.

The eyes do change with the habita, as expected. The amphipods that live “above” in springs have eyes with about 40 facets (ommatidia), while the cave dwellers’eyes have about 5 ommatidia.

Using genetic tests, the team found that the genes for making visual pigments, the opsins, were still intact. They had not turned into non-working genes (“pseudogenes”). The genes for the opsins were extremely similar, and in no way as different as the eyes of these little guys were.

What they did find was that the expression of these genes was dialed way down compared to their surface dwelling relatives:

Carlini and colleagues note that this could be related to the overall reduction of the eye, but they attempted to control for this by scaling expression to the size of the eyes.

Carlini and colleagues suggest that the opsin genes are under some sort of pressure to stay “intact” in this species (contrary to suggestion here that there is an advantage to blindness in caves). But the team doesn’t have a suggestion for what the opsin genes might be needed for, although they suggest it might be a non-visual function.

This doesn’t solve the matter of how the animals are reducing the amount of opsins they make. Presumably there is some mutation in a regulatory gene, perhaps even a gene one specific to the visual system.

They should keep an eye out for that.

Reference

Carlini DB, Satish S, Fong DW. 2013. Parallel reduction in expression, but no loss of functional constraint, in two opsin paralogs within cave populations of Gammarus minus (Crustacea: Amphipoda). BMC Evolutionary Biology 13(1): 89. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-13-89

Related posts

“What big eyes you have!”
Turning light and going blind: A tale of caves and genes
Once more into the cave
Better off blind

Picture from here.

Tuesday Crustie: Burtonesque

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Quick! What does this make you think of?

David Legg looked at these, and immediately thought of this:

And thus the stage was set for the fossil to be named Kooteninchela deppi, named for actor Johnny Depp. Here is a reconstruction:

(Okay, yes, strictly speaking this is an arthropod and not necessarily a crustacean, but the press is reporting it as a lobster, so I’m going to let it ride.)

Reference

Legg D. 2013. Multi-segmented arthropods from the Middle Cambrian of British Columbia (Canada). Journal of Paleontology 87(3): 493-501. http://www.psjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1666/12-112.1

Fossil from here; reconstruction from here.

Baby geniuses: young guppies show number skills

noreply@blogger.com (Zen Faulkes) — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

I have vague memories of the first time I counted to a hundred. It felt like one of those landmarks like tying your shoes for yourself the first time, or riding the bicycle more than a few feet without the training wheels or dad holding you up.

Of course, I don't come anywhere near Adam Spencer:

Once when I was about 7, I counted to 10,000 just to check the numbers didn't run out before then #NerdConfessions

Counting large numbers is not something that comes easily for us humans. A new paper claims this little guy, a baby guppy, may be a superior number cruncher as soon as it pops out of mama’s belly:

A couple of years ago, I reported on a paper that looked at the development of “counting” ability in guppies. In that paper, they claimed that it took about 40 days for guppies to develop the sort of ability to distinguish numbers that they had as adults. Now, the same team is back, testing very young guppies again, but this time using new methods.

The team asked these tiny guppies if they recognized numbers of things by showing animals dots while they have them food. Here are the three stimuli the team used.

Both A and B differ in the number of spots, but A also differs in the average sizes of those spots (which the authors call a “continuous variable). C differs in size, but not in the number. This is try to control for the fact that when you change number of things, you also change many other factors, like amount of area reflecting light, etc.

The authors then measured the amount of time the guppies spent near each set of dots as an indication of “preference”, on the assumption that the guppies are more likely to spend time near the dots where they got food if they learned certain dots meant food. If animals don’t learn where the food is, they may well not be able to tell the stimuli apart.

The authors place these pairs of dots at the end of the tank while fish are feeding when they were four and five days old. As a control, they either feed the fish food or just in a little water without food. On day six, they placed the babies in the tank to see which set of dots they gravitate to. On day seven, they repeat this, but flip the positions of the dots.

The fish were significantly more likely to be around the set of dots that promised food when they differed by number (A and B, above), but not when the dots varied in size. That said, the guppies were not great at this. The guppies got it right only 60% of the time, which is only a slight improvement on a coin toss.

However, the authors themselves admit that this paper is hard to compare with their previous one because the stimuli are so different. The previous paper used other live fish as the stimulus, not just static dots. They also note that this test is slightly different from other training tests, which generally ask the animal to do something even more specific than “hang out at one end of an aquarium.”

It is an interesting suggestion, though, that animals so small and so young can cope with differences in number. But I still think I’ll beat them at counting to a hundred.

Reference

Piffer L, Miletto Petrazzini ME, Agrillo C. 2013. Large number discrimination in newborn fish. PLOS ONE 8(4): e62466 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0062466

Related posts

One fish, two fish... can fish count?

Picture by Shaojung on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

02288 Day 5 shells

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zfaulkes posted a photo:

02281 Day 5 plaza mayor 2

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02280 Day 5 plaza mayor 1

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02255 Day 5 banquet menu

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02231 Day 5 new cathedral 3

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Now you see why Salamanca was called the "golden city."

02228 Day 5 new cathedral 2

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02227 Day 5 new cathedral 1

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02213 Day 5 nun

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02190 Day 5 stonework 1

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02179 Day 5 train

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"Trains" used for short tours around the city.

02164 Day 4 church at night

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02133 Day 4 Palacio de congresos

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02067 Day 3 house of shells 2

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02066 Day 3 sunburst shells

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02061 Day 3 shells

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02060 Day 3 house of shells 1

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02053 Day 3 typeface

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02110 Day 3 graffiti

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Surprised that graffiti was a problem in this city.

02018 Day 1 monkey

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zfaulkes posted a photo:

Famous "money eating ice cream" carving on new cathedral.

02006 Day 1 university

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More lessons from lingerie: details versus decoration

Zen Faulkes — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 07:00:00 +0000

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about bras. And I ended with a lesson that I thought could use a little more clarification.

Here we have a fairly utilitarian bra. It has everything needed, but no more. It does its job, and but clocks in at 9:00 am and clocks out at 5:00 pm precisely. It does what is needed of it and no more.

Here is a poster equivalent, spotted on my campus recently:

Like the bra above, about the only thing you can say in its favour is that leaving the space uncovered might be more embarrassing. At least it’s covered.

Here we have the sort of bra that is close to what I was talking about. This is a bra that puts in a little extra effort. Someone has made some decisions about fabrics, colours, scalloped edges. It is pretty. And it’s pretty because someone thought about the details. As I wrote a few weeks back:

Lesson 3: Detailing. Most bras are very similar, when you come down to it: cups, straps, and snaps. Sure, strictly speaking, you don’t need that little rosebud here, that extra bit of lace there... but what a difference it can make to the overall impression it leaves. It’s the details that make the difference between boring and daring.

On a poster, the details can be things like the choice of typeface, paying attention to aligning text on the page, picking complementary colours. Most of the posters I show on the blog are at least trying to make an effort in this direction.

But don’t confuse detailing with decorating.

This bra is covered in diamonds. It is something that nobody can use in day to day life. The cost of diamonds make it completely impractical for anyone to wear outside of a runway costume. You can’t afford the insurance to wear it.

Then there’s that big dangling thing in the middle, which seems like it would catch on any clothing worn over top. Bras are generally undergarments, after all.

That’s not detailing. That’s decorating. It is overkill. It is pursuing the aesthetic so hard that it stops being something that anyone can use.

The equivalent on conference posters are things like 3-D effects in graphs and gaudy colours:

Photographic backgrounds and an overabundance of typefaces:

Sure, you might think it looks attractive in theory, but when you actually get it out into the field, it’s like you suddenly have a big dangly diamond thing under your cleavage that is catching on your shirt. It won’t actually work in real world conditions.

And here we have decoration...

...that is just very odd.

Related posts

Lessons from lingerie
Communicate, don’t decorate

Critique and makeover: Peruvian medicine

Zen Faulkes — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Today’s contribution comes from Kenzo Koike at USF Health Morsani College of Medicine in Florida, and is used with his permission. Click to get the bigger view:

The first things that jumped out at me were:

With three very different logos in the title, it’s impossible for that title to be centered gracefully.
There are myriad things that are not aligned, which is common in PowerPoint posters.
The “peek-a-boo” light blue boxes against the dark blue background are a classic example of boxology.

The first revamp addresses these, while hopefully keeping the style intact. I moved the title to the left and the logos to the right. I eliminated the dark blue and made the light blue even lighter. I started working on the alignment issues.

Evening out spaces and lining things up was a sizable project, and I could probably spend hours fiddling even with the revised version below. But the version below is where I stopped and sent it back to Kenzo.

I moving the single reference from the bottom to directly underneath the table. This means a reader no longer has to go hunting for the reference, because it’s now at the point of need. It also creates a text element under the table, so it parallels all the other images around it, allowing more things to be lined up.

Consequently, this allowed the bottom box to become narrower. The top box was made narrower, too, by moving the purpose statement to the right of the word “Purpose” instead of underneath it. This also let me make the “Purpose” statement bigger, more fitting its importance.

That both the wide boxes got skinnier also let me make the title bigger again. The title should always be the biggest, clearest text element on a poster. In the first version, it’s fighting too much with the dark blue background and the logos.

There are still some design elements of this poster that I dislike, and would normally recommend against. The wide boxes spanning the length of the entire poster at the top and bottom will be something of a nightmare to a reader. The different image sizes of the SIS sign photo and the blog screen capture frustrate me to no end, because there will just be no good solution to make those align as they should.

As always, the goal here is improvement, not perfection.

Related posts

Boxism

Link roundup for May 2013

Zen Faulkes — Thu, 30 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

SpotON

A bit of old news that came out just after last month’s link roundup. Better Posters was one of the social media case studies at SpotOn (short for Science Policy, Outreach and Tools Online). If I may, I liked how this turn of phrase came out when I was asked for advice on tips:

Find a problem and help people fix it. The Internet produces criticism as easily as most of us produce carbon dioxide and heat – it’s so much part of you, you don’t even realize that you’re doing it most of the time. Creating a resource that people can use, and offering to help, stands out from the crowd.

Logos

Design lessons from game logos. One of the mantras of this blog is “Design is all about decisions.” With that in mind, look at the number of explicit, conscious decisions that were made as you read through this.

Here’s a look at the creation of another logo, this time from Duarte Design. I’ll call out two notes from the article:

Never underestimate the power of music in the creative process.
Always take a moment to step away from intense ideation and give your mind a break from the assignment at hand.

And, here’s a third logo design, this one from Alex Jay. This one was done a while ago, so it was done with paper, pencil, and rulers!

I’ve saved the most familiar logo for last. If you’re a Star Wars fan, you need to read this amazing retrospective of the design of the film’s iconic title. Alex Jay again.

Typefaces

Seth Godin reminds us that sometimes, you should just make simple choices in your type, and embrace the power of pastiche:

(D)on’t call attention to your typeface choices unless you want the typeface to speak for you. Instead, start with the look and feel of the industry leaders and go from there. ...

It’s a bit like wearing a dark blue suit to a meeting with a banker. You can wear something else, sure, but make sure you want it to be noticed, because it will be.

Or, to put it another way... here’s today’s Comic Sans bon mot from David Shiffman:

If you give a conference presentation using Comic Sans font, that's what 100% of the twitter discussion of your talk will be about.

Seth’s piece also reminds us of this xkcd comic:

Garamond will save you ink. (Hat tip to Biochem Belle.)

Would you like to know what that cool typeface is? Type identification is a tricky and subtle art that requires a lot of knowledge. MyFonts provides a tool that might get you part of the way home. (Hat tip to Stacy Baker and Holly Bik.)

Lawsuits

Colin Purrington updates us on the bizarre plagiarism charge for his old poster website.

Fame and glory

Readers of this blog are, I hope, people who care about doing good job on data and graphics and visualization. I would love it of one of my readers were to make a splash in the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science magazine. The rules and entry forms and all that good stuff are here.

The Symbiartic blog has announcements for two scientific illustration conferences this summer. Cool! Now there are two meetings where I’d love to walk through the poster sessions!

Lessons from lingerie

Zen Faulkes — Thu, 23 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

I have said before that inspiration and design can come from anywhere. Today, I think I am really putting that claim to the test. I want to make the case that there are lessons to be learned about conference posters... from looking at bras.

There’s a phrase in this bra commercial^* that you can apply to conference posters:

“Lift... and separate.”

Lesson 1: Lift. A good bra does not allow things to droop. Keep your key information – the question you’re investigating, your critical results, or your take-home message – just underneath your title. If possible, avoid sticking them down at the bottom of the poster.

Here’s another (sort of) bra-related way to remember this advice:

“My eyes are up here.” Remember where people’s eyes are, and you will have a much better chance of getting people to look at the right stuff on your poster, and of having a good interaction with them. Put your important information at eye level. If you’re pointlessely tall or of compact stature, put your information where most people’s eye are, not necessarily where yours are.

Lesson 2: Separate. A good bra makes it clear that a woman has two breasts. A good bra is structured to create space between them, avoiding smooshing, squishing, and the dreaded “uniboob” look. (Well, normally dreaded...)

Conference posters commit the uniboob mistake all the time. Here is an example that was sent to me recently from Adam Wolfe (click to enlarge):

Adam wrote:

I have already removed one logo (a duplicated “old well” logo with different text for the hospital underneath). I am also going against the grain of a standardize template we usually use in hopes of showcasing some new “standard” designs.

This file showed me the bottom right corner when it opened, and I my very first thought was, “Oooh, that’s a lot of reading.” If it were my poster, I would be trying to shorten the text, and convert it to regular paragraphs instead of so many bullet points.

There’s much to like here. The headers work well at pulling apart the different sections. The colour scheme is consistent and attractive.

When I looked a bit longer, I found the uniboob moments, where there wasn’t enough separation between elements (highlighted in orange):

I first noticed in in Figure 3, which drove me bonkers. Text should not overlap lines. The other examples are not as bad, but “not overlapping” is too lax a standard for separating items on a page.

Margins and white spaces are undervalued. To show this, let’s me ask you for a quick, “off the top of your head” estimate:

How much of a typical piece of paper is white space?

A standard 8½ × 11" piece of paper (or 93.5 square inches) usually has a one inch margin. That means the space you’re putting your words on is confined to an area of 6½ × 9" (or 58.5 square inches).

The white space from margins alone is taking up about 37% of the page. And we’re not even considering spaces between lines or spaces between words. I’d be willing to guess that most people would probably name a number about half that amount if they were trying to figure out how much white space should be on a poster.

In my revision, I follow the “bra rule,” and separated text with white space. I moved some of the text in the figures away from the edges. Adam’s poster isn’t heavy handed in its use of boxes or the data prison, but I still ended up removing a lot of lines and just using white space, particularly in the tables.

I also removed the “±” sign between the mean and standard deviation from Table 1, following the advice of Curran-Everett and Benos (2004). You can’t have a negative standard deviation, so “±” is “superfluous.”

I also changed much of the text to sentence casing rather than headline casing.

The final result is only subtly different. A major redo would tackle the amount of text on the page, but you can get a lot of improvement in the overall look just by tackling the details.

The details are often things that always end up making the difference between an okay looking poster and a smart one. Just like in a bra.

Lesson 3: Detailing. Most bras are very similar, when you come down to it: cups, straps, and snaps. Sure, strictly speaking, you don’t need that little rosebud here, that extra bit of lace there... but what a difference it can make to the overall impression it leaves. It’s the details that make the difference between boring and daring.

Related posts

Poster real estate
The data prison

Reference

Curran-Everett D, Benos DJ. 2004. Guidelines for reporting statistics in journals published by the American Physiological Society. American Journal of Physiology - Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology 287: G307-G309, doi: 10.1152/ajpgi.00229.2004

Pictures from here; here; here; here; here.

* Including this commercial is in no way an endorsement; other bras are available.

Undo the underline

Zen Faulkes — Thu, 16 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Next time you’re reading a book – or, indeed, any professionally typeset publication, whether it be a journal or a magazine or a newspaper – look for something. Look for underlined text. You know, like this.

I pulled a dozen different books off my bookshelf while writing this post. I opened them up at random, to a different two page spread. I scanned the pages. The number of underlines I saw was zero.

Yet I see people underlining stuff on posters all the time. There are two reasons for this.

Underlining is the quickest and easiest way to emphasize text in handwriting. But everyone makes conference posters with computers, where other formatting tools are are available as air.
The silly little underline button is visible in a prominent place on every piece of basic office software. It sits there, tempting you to press it. “Come on, baby. You’ve pressed pressed bold. You pressed italic. Why can’t you press me, too?”

Pro typesetters normally use italics for emphasis, particularly for long texts. You also see bold used for emphasis, but less often. Bold text is good for posters, however, because it is more recognizable when skimming text. An underline crosses and obscures the shape of descending letters, like g, j, and q, making the text harder to read.

Underlining is one of those little signs that scream “Amateur!” once you recognize it. Just don’t touch it.

Related posts

The data prison

Critique and makeover: Healthcare

Zen Faulkes — Thu, 09 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Today’s poster comes from reader Chris Skedgel, and is shown with permission (click to enlarge):

Chris wrote:

I recognise that it is heavy on text, and although I appreciate your advice to think of a poster as a business card rather than a condensed manuscript, I am loathe to hang a poster that I believe doesn’t sufficiently explain what I'm doing or my results. My compromise was to use a font large enough to be read at a distance, with some whitespace to avoid the dreaded “wall of text.”

The tension between completeness and readability is very real. Some of the earliest posts on the blog were about the decision to “writing down everything” and “write very little.” It takes a lot of practice (and ruthlessness) to cut, and cut, and cut, and say the most important stuff in the fewest words. Academics don't always get the most practice at being concise. Usually, comprehensiveness is valued more than concision.

Chris continues:

I also know your thoughts on logos, but I stuck with the institutional template rather than rock the boat. It does crowd out the title a bit, but I also think it looks sharp.

This is one case where I actually like the logo. First, that the white box bleeds off the page. That makes it clear that it’s a deliberate design element, not slapdash addition. Second, there's a single logo, rather than the usual bookends. No duplication. The logo makes its point once, and is done with it.

Here’s a makeover, with some mild chances to the text.

First, the underlined text went away. You almost never see underlines in professionally typeset text. Bold or italics do the job. When I showed this, Chris replied, “I see your point about underlining – it does look a lot cleaner now.”

Speaking of emphasis, I removed the bold from the Conclusions, and the "read more". The less bold, the more punch the remaining bold has. When everything is emphasized, nothing is.

The title, authors, and institutions looked far too crowded; I opened up some space between them. Because the logo was offset and only on one side, centering the title in the remaining space at top made little sense because it didn’t line up with anything below it. The difference is not huge, though. Likewise, I removed the shadowing from the title, but I don’t mind it with the shadowing. Just trying alternate looks.

Personally, I find the font for the main text to be a little fussy and doesn’t read terribly well from a distance. It does have a bit of personality, so I didn’t change it, not wanting to mess with the poster’s style too much.

I tweaked the placement of the uni logo very slightly to align with the edge of the main text box.

One thing I could not do with the file Chris sent me, but would like to, would be to make the font in the graphs the same as the rest of the poster.

Update: At the suggestion of Mike Taylor in the comments, here is a version of the poster without the frame:

Lessons from Samurai Jack

Zen Faulkes — Thu, 02 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

The animated television show Samurai Jack (created by Gennedy Tartakovsky) won rave reviews for its bold, distinctive designs. A key element to the show’s look was the extensive use of colour holds (at least, that’s what I’ve heard it called in comics). See if you can spot the difference. Here’s Jack:

Now compare Jack to a previous Tartakovsky project, The Powerpuff Girls. What’s different?

Here’s an explanation of colour holds (my emphasis):

“Overlays” or “color holds” (where there is no black outline or the outline is in a specific colour) are done on a separate sheet of acetate or vellum overlaying the original art. This is usually done by the penciler or inker as a special effect – simulating invisibility or colours in a fire or explosion.

Now back to Jack. The only place you see black lines is to delineate his eyes and a couple of other facial features.

Early in the “making of” clip below, creator Tartakovsky talks about the design, saying:

If you look at cartoons, every character has a black outline around them. For us, we took the line completely off, so if it’s a white robe, you just see the white shape, you see no linework around it.

I seem to remember a longer version of this interview where Tartakovsky said this style, with no lines around objects, was something you saw a lot in kid’s books. And this gave that kind of artwork a real charm.

Here’s a clip that shows the astonishing design and graphics sensibilities the creative team brought to the show. It takes about a minute for the ball to get rolling, but when it does...

Note that this amazing action sequence depends on characters not having lines around them.

I thought about this when I received this request for feedback from Svetoslava Antonova-Baumann (as always, click for a closer look). She wrote:

Before coming across your blog last week, I hadn’t made a single poster in my life. Armed with your advice, I managed to produce my first specimen today.

My first thought was, “Oh no, not boxes again.” Lines around every section! I went Samurai Jack on this, erasing the first, most obvious, set of black lines around the boxes:

Just that one change immediately lifts and lightens the poster. Next, I eliminated the horizontal dividers within the columns:

Then I thought, “Maybe we can get rid of some more black outlines in the flowchart in the center.”

But I will add lines back in, in this case, to create an explicit X axis in the graphs at right, while taking out the horizontal gridlines:

Then I went about removing the white box around the institutional logo, and resizing and moving the author’s picture so that they both sit at a more comfortable distance from the title.

And a final, small move to the last “Conclusions and future work” section heading, again moving it away from the text.

Differences in colour alone can do the job of dividing spaces just fine. Black lines are almost always gratuitous.

I sent this last version to Svetoslava, who replied:

I really like the new version without the black frames. It feels somewhat “fresher”.

Samurai means “to serve.” I live to serve.

Related posts

Boxism
Critique and makeover: Aptamer biosensors

Link roundup for April 2013

Zen Faulkes — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Hat tip to Matt Thompson for spotting this comic:

An interview with Amanda Cox on data visualization. Cox is the graphics designer for the New York Times, which has a reputation for fine graphics. Lots of very interesting ideas here. For instance:

The ability to ask good questions is really what we start with. I come from a statistics background, and I’m finding statistics students’ portfolios are crazy weak compared to the computer science students, even though they’re playing with the same problems. I think it’s because comp sci students are encouraged to play, whereas stats majors it’s, “here’s your rule book, now make things.”

Don’t do this. Logo fails. Each one makes an interesting study: can you figure out why they failed?

Seth Godin talks about rules for public things. To sum up, with my comments in parentheses:

The more often a device is used by first-time users, the more standardized the interface should be. (Most academics at a conference are early career researchers.)
Who gets left out is the most important question. (No poster is meant for everyone. Also, think about people with less than perfect vision.)
The best interface is no interface.

The Scholarly Kitchen has an interview with Michael Bierut about type. It includes this bit about science:

Q: The Higgs Boson — perhaps the most important scientific discovery of the past 50 years — was announced via a PowerPoint deck that used the Comic Sans typeface extensively. Why do you think the scientists chose this? Was it a wise choice?

A: Well, as I understand it, the scientists at CERN were actually surprised that people commented on this. Reportedly Fabiola Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs Boson, was asked why she had selected Comic Sans. She simply said, “Because I like it.”

Dennis Eckmeier provides a nice examination of the shortcomings of the standard bar graph.

Elizabeth J. Petro tweeted how to put a poster away (snipped):

Just observed an incredibly clever poster rolling method: leave one side attached to board while rolling; then detach.

Oh, and while I have talked about the usefulness of QR codes here on the blog, even I have to admit this post kind of has a point:

Critique: antifungal drugs

Zen Faulkes — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:30:00 +0000

The call came out on Twitter:

presenter wants feedback on layout of poster. Thoughts?

The tweet contained a link to this picture (click to enlarge):

The image size prevents a more detailed critique, but I sent back links to four posts here on the blog.

Abstract abolition: I put this one first, because just days before, I had done a critique where the main pathway to improving the poster was getting rid of the abstract. The abstract here is chewing up about 10% of the main text for no good purpose.

The epic logo post: The institutional logos make me cringe. These huge slab serif logos bookending the title completely overpowers the title, which is barely readable in the photo. A logo should never, never be more important than the title.

The data prison: Dense tables are the enemy of attracting viewers. I continue to be surprised by the fact that nobody seems to notice how journals lay out tables, with only a few horizontal lines.

Should your first presentation be a poster?: I provided this as an example of the problem of too much text. (I could have also used this post.)

As a bloggy bonus link, I add:

Boxism: This particular poster isn't bad, because at least the boxes are only one set deep. Boxes around just the columns would be an improvement over every single item on the poster.

And I don’t know what that bar over the three righthand columns at the top is doing.

That said, it appears the reading order is clear, and I also like the consistent colour scheme.

Hat tip to Biochem Belle for bringing this to my attention.

Critique and makeover: atlases

Zen Faulkes — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Today’s poster comes from Justin Ducote, who was kind enough to give me permission to show this poster. Click to enlarge:

Justin made with a PowerPoint template, and sent me the original file. This made it easy to do a fast makeover. I opened up the file, shuddered a bit at the vast amount of text, and went at it with two major goals in mind.

Fewer words.
Bigger words.

It was easy to hit those goals. First, I removed the abstract (goal #1). Remember what abstracts were created to do: to summarize an article when you couldn’t read the rest of the article. Abstracts make no sense when the “rest of the article” is on the same piece of paper.

The abstract was chewing up a fifth of the poster. Removing that abstract gave lots of room to maneuver on the left side of the poster. I made the head shots as big as I could, as they’re the most recognizable and attractive graphic on the poster.

Originally, the headings measured 25 points in size and the main text was 23 points: almost indistinguishable in size. I made the headings 44% bigger (goal #2), increasing them from from 25 point to 36 points. Similarly, the main text got 21% bigger, moving from 23 to 28 points.

Having said goal #2 was to make words bigger, it might seem contradictory at first that I made some of the print smaller. I shrunk references and figure legends by 22%, down to 18 points from 23. This allowed the main text to fit, and it created a visual hierarchy. Instead of two text sizes that were almost the same size, there are three text sizes that are all distinctly different, clearly signalling their relative importance.

The right side of the poster required only a little more finessing. I reduced the contact information, and cut out one phrase in the Discussion to make the text fit.

I rearranged the title and the logos. The logo bookends were forcing the title to be off-centered. Given the logos were so different in proportion, the simplest solution was to embrace the asymmetry and put the title on the left. I could make the title bigger by removing the logos entirely, but I wanted to work with the original style as much as I can.

The University of California logo is obviously informing the colour palette of the poster, so I thought, “Why not just go all the way with it?” Originally, the scatterplots on the right had the only red on the poster. The revision uses blue and gold, like the rest of the poster.

Additional: Radical_Rave on Twitter offers some more suggestions.

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