Botany picture #119: Hibbertia riparia

Hibbertia riparia (Dilleniaceae), Australian Capital Territory, 2013. The genus Hibbertia has many species in Australia. It is one of those weird cases (another one would be Calceolaria) where a large group is extremely diverse vegetatively, to the point of including vines, shrubs and small herbs, while being extremely uniform in flower morphology. One can immediately recognize Hibbertia flowers because they basically all look the same.

Sience spam number the infinity

There is so much science spam these days that I comment only on the most atrocious eMails I get. Today is one of those occasions.

My inbox recently featured a message from an organization called "RRP" with a call for articles. The text was a charming all bold ca 14-16 pt (?) font in dark red on a bright blue background. I will keep that combination in mind for future PowerPoint presentations just in case I ever have the need to deliberately cause headaches and vomiting in my audience. The text ran as follows:

Dear Colleague [ my work eMail address ],

That is an interesting start. Not only are those square brackets in the original, making abundantly clear that this is a field into which an anonymous algorithm has pasted a list entry, they do not even use a name. They don't say, dear Joe Average, they say, dear [ joe.average@workplace.au ]. Is that supposed to impress anybody?

Call for Articles:
RRP ( http://rrpjournals.org/ ) is a well-known publisher and has Journals whose scopes and policies fit with yours.

The first half of that sentence is a blatant lie, and the second half is gibberish. I am not aware of having scopes. Can I get mediation against them somewhere?

We have done some WWW searches and came across one or more of your articles.

Gosh. Do you want a cookie for that? And again, you could at least make a half-hearted attempt at concealing that this is a spam message and that you have not actually looked into my research. "One or more" indeed.

So we believe you may be interested in publishing you valuable work in one/some of our journals.

Your are sadly mistaken. Please feel free to take that R and see if you might need it somewhere.

I briefly summarize what makes RRP Journals unique and desirable in the following sentences. Why our journals are unique and desirable:

1.) "RRP Journals" offers detailed feedback on all submitted manuscript. We do not just publish good research and review papers, we help authors grow.

You could increase the desirability of your journals, albeit probably at the cost of their uniqueness, by learning a bit more about English grammar. Also: randomly placing quotation marks around names? Always a nice touch. Sorry, do continue.

2.) "RRP Journals" has online manuscript tracking system. This allows authors to keep track of the status of/progress on their manuscripts any day any time.
3.) "RRP Journals" has article tracking system through which authors can keep track of their published articles, and know who read their articles. 

Is it time to say gosh again? I think you are confusing two things here: "unique" and "standard practice of most scientific journals". Look up what those terms mean.

4.) "RRP Journals" is currently bilingual in that we publish abstract s of all articles in both English and French. We hope to add two more languages in 2014.

Admittedly that is not a bad idea from the reader's perspective; not sure why it is supposed to be a selling point to prospective authors here.

5.) "RRP Journals" offers various forms of assistances to authors. If you require any form of help at any time, you can easily contact us through the form available here ( http://rrpjournals.org/contact_us ).

How pleasantly vague. It is, unfortunately, to be assumed that they are mostly interested in helping the author if they are unsure about where to pay the article processing fee or however else RRP call their publication charges.

We hope you will:
[A] submit ( http://goo.gl/c7La3p ) your valuable manuscript to us for possible publication in any of RRP Journals, and/or
[B] join our editorial board/become a peer-reviewer ( http://goo.gl/VMbiye ) for one/some of our Journals.

Yep, that's a sure sign we are dealing with a serious and professional publisher: mass-spamming random people with requests to join whatever editorial board they fancy. Isn't that how all the good journals do it?

I think we are done here.

Botany picture #118: Scribblygum

I am really not very good at knowing eucalyptuses, which are here commonly called 'gum trees'. The various important groups are then distinguished with some terms that refer to their bark or wood qualities, their ecology or colours. Examples are ironbark, yellowbox, or river red gum. One group that even I can easily recognize are the scribblygums, such as this one. Their name derives from the tunnels that mining insect larvae eat into the bark.

Free will once more, with a growing realization

Round and round it goes, perhaps forever. One may be forgiven for wondering whether one side is so sure that it is right that it is not actually listening to what the other says.

It could be either side. Note, however, that the discussion, at least as conducted over at the linked comment threads, is quite asymmetrical: Incompatibilists say quite openly that they consider compatibilism to be merely a crutch manufactured to soften the blow of determinism, that compatibilists are deluded or even outright dishonest, and that everybody should stop using the term "free will" and, depending on their mood, sometimes also the term "choice", because they supposedly mean something supernatural. Compatibilists, on the other side, merely reply that these terms do not necessarily mean something supernatural, and would you please stop talking about us in this aggressive and demeaning way when the discussion is only about terminology anyway?

Or in other words: Incompatibilists condescend towards compatibilists but the compatibilists do not condescend back. That might explain something about the dynamics of this discussion.

To recap: When discussing free will vis a vis determinism, it is generally assumed that there are three different positions, or groups of people:

1. Those who hold that we have a form of free will that allows us to make decisions independently from the laws of physics, our genetic makeup, the environmental influences that shaped us, our current state of brain chemistry, whatever, either because our body is steered by a supernatural soul (contra-causal/dualist free will) or without any attempt at explanation because it is a necessary premise for libertarian ideology (libertarian free will).
2. Those who hold that everything is determined by cause-and-effect, with perhaps a bit of (quantum) randomness thrown in, and thus our decisions are also predetermined with a bit of random, and thus it does not make sense to speak of free will and choice because those terms are commonly understood in the sense that the first group is advocating* (incompatibilism).
3. Those who hold that everything is determined by cause-and-effect, with perhaps a bit of (quantum) randomness thrown in, and thus our decisions are also predetermined with a bit of random, but it still makes sense to speak of free will and choice because those words do not necessarily imply anything contra-causal and supernatural*, and even given determinism we still need some terms to describe the difference between somebody acting out of their own free will and being forced to do something, or between a kleptomaniac and somebody stealing for profit (compatibilism).

For me, at least one thing came out of the discussions linked to above: I am increasingly coming to the realization that the first two positions are not actually, really, in practice, held by any significant number of people, or at least not by anybody who is sound of mind. And yes, I realize that this can be seen as at least as condescending as the idea that compatibilism is nothing but motivated reasoning because it may be taken to mean that the incompatibilists are either deluded or dishonest; but I would prefer to stress that the difference between the second and third position boils down to semantics anyway.

So why would I think that the first two positions do not really exist? Aren't there a lot of people advancing them?

Frankenstein

I had long decided to read more classics when I came upon Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at the last Book Fair. I have recently finished it and must sadly admit to some disappointment, although it is probably mostly an issue of wrong prior expectations.

Obviously: Spoilers ahead.

Botany picture #117: Leucopogon microphyllus

Leucopogon microphyllus (Ericaceae), Australian Capital Territory, 2013. Does this heath not simply have awesome flowers? They are tiny, yes, but how cute when you look at them more closely...

What makes reviewing a paper enjoyable?

One more about peer review. To get our papers published, we all have to go through it, and the pleasantness of that experience can vary depending on the reviewers you run into.

But the same goes for the other side. In my role as peer reviewer, I find myself sometimes enjoying it very much and sometimes hating it. Apart from the obvious fact that it is no fun to do it if you have too much work already, what makes the process enjoyable?

Well, papers that are fun to review are the ones that inspire, that present new methods or insights, that make one think "I wish I had come up with that", while bad papers are often formulaic and uninspiring. As for quality, it is a pleasure to review a well written, concise and coherent, high quality paper because it is just a good read and you do not have a lot to criticize.

But interestingly, at least to me there is another peak on the fun/quality graph at the bad end of the spectrum. In a perverse way, reviewing becomes enjoyable again when the manuscript is sufficiently atrocious.

So really the papers that I enjoy reviewing least are somewhere around the middle. The ones that contain reasonably competent but completely uninteresting research, the ones that could actually be good if the authors knew how to write a coherent sentence and develop a clear line of thought, and, crucially, the ones containing overall sound science but a suffocating number of individually minor mistakes. In other words, those that have potential merit but force you to write pages and pages of suggestions on how to make them publishable.

The really hopeless manuscripts make for short reviewer's reports, just like the really good ones. If the science is completely bonkers, it is easy to decide what to recommend. If the entire text is beyond repair, you don't need to bother with making suggestions for individual sentences any more. But most importantly, if a paper is sufficiently bad, reading it can be a very invigorating experience. You may laugh, you may pull your hair, but at least you emote instead of getting bogged down in drudgery.