The Baloney Detection Kit: A 10-Point Checklist for Science Literacy

In fact, brainpickings.org has a lot of good posts about books, creativity, life, and writing. Enjoy surfing!

I discovered the following article a while ago, yet only have gotten around to writing about it now.

Alon, U., 2009: How to choose a good scientific problem. Molecular Cell, 35, 726-728. [PDF] [HTML]

Why the paper resonated with me is that it brought me back to choosing my research topic for my PhD. I knew the topic I wanted to work on for my PhD, and I had a good sense of what the answer was when I started in 1991, but I didn’t know how to go about proving my hypothesis was true. My advisors let me wander for two years before gently nudging me toward the methods that I would finally adopt in my PhD thesis, completed in 1996. Their valuable advice to just “go look at the weather maps and see what you see” is now being applied to a new generation of my students and postdocs.

I enjoyed scanning through Uri Alon’s Web site on nurturing young scientists here.

I just finished reading a new book Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded by Prof. Joshua Schimel, in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara.

Schimel’s book is the perfect companion to Eloquent Science. Whereas Eloquent Science provides guidance about how to write better science, Writing Science provides more specific information about how to employ that guidance, along with plenty of worked examples. Along the way, he provides some great insights into the scientific writing process. Some of my favorite quotes follow.

It is the author’s job to make the reader’s job easy. (p. 5)

Do you write “Smith (2003) found X” or do you write “X occurs (Smith 2003)”? The former tells a story about Smith and what she did; the latter, about nature and how it works. If you write the former, you are probably doing a data dump, collecting the information that seems relevant and writing it down, without synthesizing it and integrating it into a story or framing a knowledge gap. The important information is almost never that Smith found it; it is almost always what she found. So why make Smith the subject of the sentence? (p. 56)

Within a sentence, showing action is the job of verbs and it’s an important job. Good writers use their verbs well, imbuing their papers with life. Bad writers use them poorly, stealing energy from the story, leaving it dull and listless. (p. 133)

Doing science is inherently an act of both confidence and humility. Confidence in developing your own ideas and data, doing the work knowing it may fail, and then putting it out in public where people can criticize it (and you). Humility in that you know that those data and ideas are imperfect and incomplete, and you have to admit openly to the limitations. Too much confidence can blind you to the limitations; too much humility can blind you to the accomplishments. Getting the balance between confidence and humility right is one of the greatest challenges all developing scientists face, in both doing and writing science. (p. 190).

“Publish or perish” may be the basis for survival, but it is not the basis for success. (p. 206)

If you are interesting in developing your writing to a deeper level than Eloquent Science goes into, Writing Science is the perfect book for you. I am aware of no other book on the market that presents this essential information so effectively and so clearly.

Full disclosure: Prof. Schimel wrote a positive review on amazon.com about Eloquent Science.

I can speak for myself only, but it seems to me that if you send a high-quality scientific manuscript to a British journal using American English (or an American journal using British English), then, the reviewers and editor are unlikely to reject the manuscript because you spelled “favour” as “favor”. They may ask you to convert the manuscript the best you can, which is certainly not unreasonable. In the event they don’t, most quality journals with decent copyediting will make the conversion for you. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to do your best before submission.

Remember: when in Rome, do as the Romans do!

Here are a set of resources that you might find useful.

The instructions to Authors Web site for your target journal. Usually the journal may provide some instructions to the authors about style. In any case, emulate the papers that you see published in your target journal.

Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors

The Oxford Style Manual

Fowler’s Modern English Usage

And for Brits publishing in American journals:
Scientific Style And Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, And Publishers (CSE, Scientific Style and Format)

Thanks to Michelle at Corporate Writing Pro for some of the suggestions above. Image from <http://www.enduringamerica.com>.

The book I most highly recommend is “Don’t Be Such a Scientist”.
<http://eloquentscience.com/2010/01/quotes-from-dont-be-such-a-scientist/>
<http://www.dontbesuchascientist.com/>

The author definitely has an American way of writing, so nonnative American English speakers may miss some of the humor and subtlety in there, but the message is clear.

Here is another link that you may find helpful.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110126/full/469445a.html

Check out pages 19-21 in this document. Although it is directed at communicating with Congressional staff members, it is as concise a statement about how scientists need to communicate to nonscientists as I have found.
http:nufo.org/meetings/files/2006_Deborah_Koolbeck.pdf

Above all, eliminate technical and scientific jargon words from the text. Nearly everything can be explained in plain language that the public would understand. For example, instead of “lightning activity”, say “thunderstorms”. Instead of “extratropical cyclone”, say “an area of low pressure”. Or, if you use the term “extratropical cyclone” in your text, explain it as “a region of low atmospheric pressure often accompanied by rain, snow, and strong winds.”

(Image from bi.edu)

Warner, T. T., 2011: Quality assurance in atmospheric modeling. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 92, 1601–1610. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00054.1 [PDF]

1. Clearly define the scientific or practical objective.

2. Identify and develop a physical understanding of the atmospheric processes that must be accurately simulated.

3. Perform a thorough analysis of all available observations.

4. Prepare an experimental design.

5. Define the required horizontal and vertical resolutions of the model.

6. Avoid the tendency to prematurely run the model, before the above-listed steps have been completed.

7. Choose the model start time and the method of model initialization to allow for spin-up of the physical processes of interest.

8. Run test simulations of evaluate the sensitivity of model solution to the computation domain size.

9. Define the most appropriate physical process parameterizations.

10. Understand the limitations to the predictability of the phenomena being modeled.

11. Establish a verification plan before the model is run and perform a thorough verification, using appropriate metrics, of the model solution using all available observations.

12. Be well organized in maintaining a detailed experimental log and the files of model code and output.

13. Use good coding practices and well-documented and well-tested software.

14. Employ open-source software tools to improve the efficiency of the modeling process.

This paper follows from Warner’s 1997 tutorial on lateral boundary conditions.

Warner, T. T., R. A. Peterson, and R. E. Treadon, 1997: A Tutorial on Lateral Boundary Conditions as a Basic and Potentially Serious Limitation to Regional Numerical Weather Prediction. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 78, 2599–2617. [PDF]

Warner’s paper is also a natural companion to my paper on how to write effective case studies in meteorology.

Schultz, D. M., 2010: How to research and write effective case studies in meteorology. Electronic J. Severe Storms Meteor., 5 (2), 1-18. [PDF]

There is also complementary material in Chapter 18 in Eloquent Science.

Enjoy!

Alon, U., 2009: How to choose a good scientific problem. Molecular Cell, 35, 726-728. DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2009.09.013. [PDF]

I am honored to have seen page proofs of Gary Lackmann’s new book Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology: Dynamics, Analysis, and Forecasting to be published later this year by the American Meteorological Society. For this book, Gary goes back to the original meaning of the word synoptic (“forming a summary or synopsis”). Twelve chapters summarize and synthesize all scales of motion, from the planetary down to the microphysical, not just those on the synoptic scale.

This is the first new book on synoptic meteorology in 20 years, and its appearance is long overdue. Lackmann’s book updates previous textbooks with new concepts and synthesizes material that has not appeared in textbooks before. His last three chapters on numerical weather prediction, weather forecasting, and manual analysis contain some material that hasn’t been updated since Petterssen’s (1956) textbook.

What is best about this book is that it rises to the challenge offered by Rossby: to bridge the gap between theory and observations. No other book on synoptic meteorology had done this as throughly or as effectively. Lackmann skillfully weaves back and forth from QG, PV, and EnKF to cold fronts aloft, cold-air damming, and cold-air outbreaks.

I could quibble about some points, but I won’t. You’ll want this book. In terms of style and content, it is the perfect companion to Markowski and Richardson’s Mesoscale Meteorology in Midlatitudes. These two books form an ideal and unique set from which to build a solid undergraduate or graduate curriculum blending synoptic-scale and mesoscale dynamical meteorology and forecasting.

Not since the 1990s has a useful, intelligent synoptic meteorology book been written by an expert in the field. Lackmann fulfills a desperate need among today’s teachers and students.

[Disclaimer: Gary and I went to my very first Eric Clapton concert together (Tacoma 1988). Later, we ended up at SUNY Albany together, part of the early to mid 1990s milieu there. I consider him a close friend and one of the best synoptic meteorologists and teachers out there now.]

An essential list of tips about writing by the many of the experts.

Abstract:

Creative writers are well served with ‘how to’ guides, but just how much do they help? And how might they be relevant to academic authors? A recent survey of writing tips by twenty-eight creative authors has been condensed to the ten most relevant to the academic, supported by some comments on methodology and applicability.

Donovan, S. K., 2011: Ten rules of academic writing. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 42 (2).