In Italy, seismologists who allegedly misled citizens into staying put and dying in the 6 April 2009 L'Aquila earthquake are being put on trial for manslaughter (see past posts here, here and here). Now a wiretap recording has arisen that will make scientists' blood boil.

Before the earthquake, local Civil Protection officials gathered a panel of seismologists to advise them. After that meeting the deputy head announced to the press, "The scientific community tells me there is no danger because there is an ongoing discharge of energy." This was supposed to reassure the public that no quake was imminent. The trouble is, no seismologist in the world would say such a thing—and the scientists in the panel swore that was not their advice.

The wiretap, revealed last week by La Repubblica, caught the spokesman's boss saying the day before the meeting, "I will send them there mostly as a media move. They are the best experts in Italy, and they will say that it is better to have a hundred shocks at 4 Richter than silence, because a hundred shocks release energy, so that there will never be the big one." In other words, the "authority" had his speech written already, based on an urban legend, when he pretended to listen to science.

This is why so many scientists are leery of engaging the public: they can get screwed, whether by misunderstanding or outright malevolence.

My source: Nature News Blog
Essential background: "Earthquake Prediction: Mission Impossible"

The lifeblood of science is publication of papers in journals. Many journals are nonprofits supported by scientific societies, while others are commercial ventures. One recent change in this field is a U.S. law that requires publically funded research papers to be freely available to the public. This has been widely hailed as a good thing.

For-profit journals are fighting back at the idea that they should give away even a modest part of this content. Now a law is in the works, called the Research Works Act or RWA, that would totally lock that content away. How can I be so sure it's "totally"? Here's how: the bill exempts peer-reviewed work from free access. That basically means all science.

Peer review is a longstanding system in which journal editors take submitted papers and send them to a small number of peer reviewers—colleagues who know the subject deeply and have volunteered to evaluate research papers. My colleague Kris Hirst, of About.com Archaeology, gives a more detailed explanation here. What I want to emphasize is that all the work of peer review, from the editor's time to the reviewers' time to the author's time in responding and rewriting, is offered free of charge, part of the professional norms of science.

The journal's burden under this system is no more than a little clerking. But the publishers (exemplified by the Association of American Publishers) want the law to declare that this routine, professional practice is their own value-added contribution. It is not. If they want to claim that, the journals should hire the editors and reviewers at a decent salary instead of paying them nothing while relying on their dedicated work.

Here's more: The RWA also mentions editing as part of a "value-added contribution" in the bill, and at that I have to laugh. I make part of my living as a copy editor of journal papers, and I'm quite familiar with the practices of for-profit journal publishers. They don't edit anything beyond simple mechanical matters like formatting. Authors instead hire a specialized firm or individual practitioner, at their own expense, to do the demanding level of editing needed on a paper by scientists for whom English is a second or third language. The journal does none of that.

In sum, journals make peer review and editing externalized expenses. Cheaper for them to lobby for a law that would put the profession's goodwill and third-party labor like mine onto their books by fiat. Suddenly they want to claim our work as their own? No way.

Related blogs:
SVPOW: "Publishers Do Not Provide Peer Review. We Do."
Richard Poynder, "BioMed Central Opposes RWA"
Harvard Open Access Project: "Notes on the RWA"
Sandra Porter: "How Much Does It Cost to Get a Scientific Paper?"
Chronicle of Higher Education: "Who Gets to See Published Research?"

The mountains of California have been bare of snow until just yesterday, allowing people to drive all over Yosemite seeing places that are inaccessible in the winter. My sister, an old Yosemite hand, visited Tenaya Lake above Yosemite Valley and reported that the ice-covered lake was making loud sounds "like the sounds of whales." There's a name for that, according to the AGI Glossary of Geology: ice yowling.

It turns out that Henry David Thoreau described the phenomenon in detail in Walden—not at Walden Pond, but at Flint's Pond on 24 February 1850: "The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun's rays upon it from over the hills; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing his influence. . . . The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring."

Ice yowling has been on my geologic life list for a long time. Three other sounds are on it: the audible report of an earthquake, the booming sounds of large sand dunes and the cracking sounds of cooling basalt lava. I've checked off the first two, but it may be a while before I witness the third.

What other geologic sounds should be on a life list?
_{Tenaya Lake — courtesy Bruce Fincham}

In some respects, science is so far advanced that something the experts consider trivial is astonishing to the public. For a long time, many decades, we've routinely monitored the Earth's daily rotation to within tiny fractions of a second. But nobody notices until the planet gets a little off, and the clocks need to be adjusted. The first "leap second" was inserted into the record 40 years ago, in 1972. Now the telecom gurus who run the world's central communication systems are getting tired of dealing with leap seconds and want to call them off. Who cares about the planet any more, they argue. Scientists care, of course, and other extreme precisionists. But the dispute, which came up at a Geneva meeting of the International Telecommunication Union when a recommendation to drop leap seconds could not be agreed upon, is considered headline news today because it just seems so bizarre to everyday people.

I've written an explainer about the larger field of length-of-day studies. This line of research has been going on for centuries and is unexpectedly fruitful.