The Business of Publishing

I saw two news items today, on opposite ends of the spectrum (from amazing to abjectly horrible).

I. Archive.Org sued

Putting a positivie spin on it, Slashdot.org fielded this

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/06/11/194226/activists-rally-to-save-internet-archive-as-lawsuit-threatens-site

II. One more University (MIT) faces down Elsevier

https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/06/11/2114259/mit-ends-elsevier-negotiations

Just how long have we known about climate change anyways?

CO2 and other sad tales.

 

Notice the red line at the right of the CO2 trace. Also notice how many thousands of years are represented. The red line is what we have been doing. Even the clean air from the lockdowns does not help this problem.  


This is US happening to the Atmosphere. I didn't mean United States. Pun not intentional, but interesting. 

Remember Marshall MacLuhan's The Medium is the Massage?  We have a collective short memory.   McCluhan categorized media as hot or cold (IIRC). I wonder what he'd say about Facebook. A clearly incendiary "medium" (is that a fair category?). I know and am related to people who seem to have had their brains eaten out by Triffids that Facebook infected them with. I have noticed that I myself get sucked in to the "conversations" as I try to overwhelm their echo chambers. 

 Some media, such as the movies, were "hot"—that is, they enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with "cool" TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of the viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value^{.(From Wikipedia)}

 

This graph is for real. Taken from https://www.co2.earth/co2-ice-core-data

Have you noticed? (Blue Skies and Birds)

This too may soon pass. 

    Lockdown yields first global sound map of spring dawn chorus birds

A massive disconnect: Publicly funded research behind paywalls [Opinion]

An increasing number of scientific journals allow at least some of their articles to be available to the public.  Some publishers are more onerous than others; for example, Elsevier, subscriptions to which the University of California libraries have refused to renew.  This is a nuisance to many, but the libraries have pledged to help obtain these articles.

To some, pay-walled articles are an even more insidious barrier.  As a science teacher in Micronesia, access to up-to-date scientific information is of crucial importance, especially on issues which may affect the peoples of the islands.  Global climate change is not a proprietary issue only in the West, where most publishers reside; it is beyond immoral to sequester such knowledge.

I unexpectedly found myself teaching environmental science.  As a recent graduate with a BA in Zoology, and as a graduate student in Marine Biology, I was in a wonderful position to explain the science to the most innocent victims of fallout from the higher standard of living touted by alien visitors from far shores.  All was not well; every aspect of life in the islands was being profoundly altered by the infusion of the "good life," of consumer goods and a new life style.   New political realities were foisted off on islanders, with promise of more and more and better and better.

As an educator, it has been incumbent upon me to ride the crest of the wave of scientific knowledge, to interpret  consequences unforseen even by the purveyors of these changes.

Today, a series of articles came to my attention, focused on plastics.  Plastics, as it turns out, must be seen by third world peoples as a miracle material.  But the greatest part of the miracle, and the least part of the consequences, fall to the corporations and investors who have generated this consequential avalanche on the planet.

Here is a screenshot of the what I encountered when I tried to download a pdf from the website heralding this article, or perhaps group of articles.

In the lower right hand corner of this image may be seen a disclosure of funding sources.  Clearly this publication is a product of research funded by public funds.

I am not now living in Micronesia, so I can obtain copies of these papers.  It is a reminder of the many, many publications I was unable to read when they were needed most.

A rhetorical question suggests itself.  In Micronesia, very few persons work, and the "minimum wage" of less than $1.00/hour  is far from sufficient to feed an extended family of a dozen or more; it was insufficient for a family member I knew to drive his motor boat once a week to the district center island.  It is common to say that subsistence for a government worker is subsidized by "local production," that is to say, breadfruit, sea cucumbers, fish, taro, sweet potatoes... the list goes on, and many persons are involved.  

Not only this!  A wholesale change is sweeping through the islands: the concept of "family" is undergoing a profound re-definition.  On Guam, I heard the complaint that younger family members no longer cared to share their income with the extended family.  A wedge has been driven.  Ways have fallen.  Culture has been redefined, in much the same way that Hawaiian music and culture have been profoundly reshaped by forces of tourism. 

So you see, it is not merely that the benevolent colonial masters have swooped down upon islands with a toxic package of gifts; with the proprietary walling in of knowledge, the islands are just as helpless as the consumers of the developed countries, in the face of insurmountable changes to health, environment, food supply, natural resources.

Plastics.  Just one part of the story.

Why do people distrust science? A thought.

It's close to universal: secrecy cloaking specialist knowledge.  A medicine man on a Pacific Island is terrified of the consequences of revealing his knowledge of a cure or cures, and chooses his successor carefully.  Is that appalling?  The cure might be lost.  On the other hand, loose lips sink ships.  This appears to represent a mechanism for ensuring the continuity and fidelity of knowledge over generations.

In Western societies, Physicians write prescriptions in handwriting that is almost impossible to read, and in Latin, no less.  What's the difference?

We live in a time of peril, due to global climate change, and a plethora of other anthropogenic woes: introduced species, extinct species, plastic pollution, toxic waste, radioactive pollution, to name but a few.  Coral reefs are dying.  Scientists working on these problems often with public funding, yet their results are often hidden behind "paywalls." 

I almost laughed, when I saw that almost every article in Science Magazine bears an icon similar to this one.  But it isn't funny.

Climate scientists I follow are concerned with science communication. Yet, how can scientists communicate with the public when their work is turned to the profit of the publishing giants, which seldom grant free access to the articles in their pages, or online. 

Yay!  For the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and libraries like the University of California Library System that stands up to the publishers who demand obscene subscription charges for access to articles generated by even the faculties of these institutions. 

How are people going to trust something when they are prevented from knowing about it?

When are two pictures worth ten thousand pictures?

Two pictures.   This scenario is playing out in thousands of places on our ball of dirt.  Two pictures cannot say it all.  Yet they reverberate and harmonize across the Planet.  Languages, cultural practices, survival skills.  We are losing more than what we have destroyed, a cruel synergism.

From Siberia

The loss of permafrost threatens to extinguish a culture of Raindeer peoples, and others, I don't know what all. 

From the New York Times. 

 “At some point they talked about abandoning the village, but people did not want to move out,” said Octyabrina R. Novoseltseva, chairwoman of the Northern Indigenous People’s Association in the Srednekolymsk region. “They would lose everything, the culture would all disappear.”

From Kiribati and the Marshall Islands

 Does this sound familiar? Sea Level Rise...

And yet, while we’ve long known the dangers global warming poses to low-lying island nations like Kiribati, the world may not realize that Kiribati is also grappling with climate denialism, even as it faces the reality of being wiped from the map by 2100. The current president, Taneti Maamau, believes that while climate change is real, it is not man-made. Consequently, Maamau has announced his government’s official intention to “put aside the misleading and pessimistic scenario of a sinking, deserted nation.”

This is a statement from a Washington Post article by a former president of Kiribati.

 

All over Earth, cultures are being lost.  While the Military-Industrial complex reminds one of a giant snow ball, growing and growing while it tumbles headlong, wreaking destruction all on it's path.  Everywhere I go, it's different.  And it's the same.

As an environmental educator, I had to recognize that my generation will not be able to right the ship.  There is no time.  Again, as an educator you ask "what can one person possibly do?"

It belongs to the kids

"We did not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; he have borrowed it from our children."  

Who said that?

We must give the tools to the kids to fix the broken system they are inheriting from foregoing generations.