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Tue, 07 Jul 2020
The Slack and Zoom gilded cage for astronomers
Why should astronomers not use Zoom or Slack for voice/audio/text/file communication over the Internet? Practical reasons include:
Do the ends justify the means? Independently of the practical reasons to not use Zoom or Slack (or Skype, MS Teams/GAFAM, Webex), there are ethical reasons: Ethical reasons include:
The most common counterargument to the practical and ethical arguments above is the Tyranny of Convenience [Keye 2009] (and [Wu 2018]): "It works! It works! I just want to communicate efficiently! I'm not an expert in software! Most people in our community use it, so we should too. And Zoom/Slack has feature X, which I couldn't find on Jitsi/BBB/Jami/Matrix in a five-second search." This brings us back to consequentialism, the philosophical stance according to which the ends justify the means. The question here is how bad the means are compared to the ends. Software is at the core of the biggest geopolitical and economic power struggles of the XXIst century. Is it worth it to support authoritarian software and close to totalitarian software corporations given that "it's convenient? How many people in the XXth century felt that convenience justified small actions, in themselves "non-political" but implicitly supporting the totalitarian governments of that century, only to regret it later? And how does Slack actually behave towards its employees? "Slack employees ... cannot speak out about [the propietary Slack software], for fear of retribution (so they're inherently gagged by fear over mortgage etc. or self-restraint that defies logic/ethics)", according to Roy Schestowitz. Alternatives exist! A complementary answer to the practical arguments above is that if we want text, voice and video communication — after all, we're humans and it's especially important during the pandemic to keep up the video-stream-to-video-stream contact — it feels good — then we should remember that we do already have practical free software packages to run ourselves and servers that already run that software. Checking at https://switching.software we find:
Continuing to more robust communication, the big paradox is how it's possible for people with PhDs in astrophysics to claim that they cannot handle irc. Irc is efficient, robust, light-weight and has matured through several decades of debugging and development. You can choose any client of your liking on your own computer — in a standalone gui, in a browser or in a terminal. It's not rocket science. And since we cannot do "rocket science" without typing equations, text, reasoning, specific lines of code — what's wrong with irc? For observational files, databases, software, diagrams, git repositories, all of this in the end has to be handled as text. In any case, those who want audio/video have it with Jitsi/BBB/Jami/Matrix. So not only are Zoom and Slack impractical and unethical, but there's no need to use them. They don't provide the freedom to communicate; they instead welcome us instead to prison — which, for the moment, seems to be gilded, but is still a prison with all the associated costs. en | lien permanent | RSS | trackback: ping-moi (expérimental) Commentaires : Veuillez publier votre commentaire sur un serveur du Fediverse et m'envoyez un ping dans le message : @boud@framapiaf.org. Mon, 01 Jul 2019
Science reproducibility: the software evolution problem
What is the point of publishing a scientific paper if an expert reader has to do so much extra work to independently reproduce the results that s/he is effectively discouraged from doing so? Reproducibility: brief descriptionIn the present practice of cosmology research, such a paper tends to be accepted as "scientific" if the method is described in sufficient detail and clearly enough, and if the observational data are publicly available in the case of an observational paper. However, the modern concepts of free-licensed software and efficient management of software evolution via git repositories over the Internet, as well as Internet communication in general, should make it, in principle, possible to allow an expert reader to reproduce the figures and tables of a research paper with just a small handful of commands in a terminal, to download, compile and run scripts and programs provided by the authors of the research article. This will in practice make it easier for more scientists to verify the method and results, and improve on them, rather than forcing them to rewrite everything from scratch. This idea has been floating around for several years. A very nice summary and discussion by Mohammad Akhlagi includes Akhlagi's own aim of making the complete research paper reproducible with just a few lines of shell commands, and links to several astronomical reproducible papers from 2012 to 2018, most using complementary methods. I tend to agree that using Makefiles is most likely to be the optimal overall strategy for reproducible papers. For the moment, I've used a single shell script in 1902.09064. The software evolution problemI suspect, unfortunately, that there's a fundamental dilemma in making fully reproducible papers that remain reproducible in the long term, because of software evolution. Akhlagi's approach is to download and compile all the libraries that are needed by the author(s)' software, in specific versions of the software that were used at the time of preparing the research paper. This would appear to solve the software evolution problem. My approach, at least so far in 1902.09064, is to use the native operating system (Debian GNU/Linux, in my case) recommended versions of all libraries and other software, to the extent that these are available; and to download and compile specific versions of software that are "research-level" software, either not yet available in a standard GNU/Linux family operating system, or evolving too fast to be available in those systems. Download everything: pro
Download everything: con
Prefer native libraries: pro
Prefer native libraries: con
Choosing an approachWhile the "download everything" approach is, in principle, preferable in terms of hypothetical reproducibility, it risks being heavy, could have security risks, could be difficult due to dependency hell, and might in the long term not lead to exact reproducibility anyway, for practical reasons (leaving aside theoretical Turing machines). The "prefer native libraries" approach provides, in principle, less reproducibility, but it should be more efficient, secure and convenient, and, in practice, may be sufficient to trace bugs and science errors in scientific software. en | lien permanent | RSS | trackback: ping-moi (expérimental) Commentaires : Veuillez publier votre commentaire sur un serveur du Fediverse et m'envoyez un ping dans le message : @boud@framapiaf.org. Sat, 06 Apr 2019
Why non-use of ArXiv refs in a bibliography is unethical
It has become quasi-obligatory since the late 1990s for cosmology research articles to be posted at the ArXiv preprint server, making them publicly available under green open access. Much of other astronomy, physics and mathematics articles needed for cosmology research is also available at ArXiv. In practice, this means that almost all post-mid-late-1990s literature cited in cosmology research articles is available on ArXiv. Many of these articles are posted before external peer-review by research journals, so they are literally "preprints", while others are posted after acceptance by a journal, but usually before they appear in paper versions of the journals, for those journals that are still printed on paper, or as online "officially published" articles. However, most of these "preprints" are cited before they are formally published — because they're hot-off-the-press, state-of-the-art results, or to put in plain English rather than advertising jargon, they're useful new results that need to be taken into account. Several journals, including MNRAS and A&A, insist on hiding the fact that references are easily obtainable without paywall blocks by requiring all references that have peer-reviewed bibliometry data to have their ArXiv identifiers removed from the list of references (bibliography) of any research paper! The reason cited by colleagues (there doesn't seem to be a formal public justification by MNRAS/A&A) for excluding ArXiv identifiers from the bibliography for articles that are already formally published is to restrict citations as much as possible to the peer-reviewed literature. But this is nonsense: including both the peer-reviewed identifying information (year, journal name, volume, first page) and the ArXiv identifier informs the reader that the article is peer-reviewed, while also guaranteeing that the article is available to the reader (at least) under green open access. So that reason is unconvincing. Another reason cited by colleagues is that the journal versions are more valid than the preprints, since the journal versions have usually been updated following peer-review and following language editor and proof-reader requests for corrections. This reason has some validity, but in practice is weak. Article authors quite frequently update their preprint on ArXiv to match the final accepted version of their article (in content, not in the particular details of layout, to reduce the chance of copyright complaints by the journals), because they know that many people will access the green open access version, and they want to reduce the risk that readers will refer to an out-of-date preprint version. Other authors only post their article on ArXiv once it is already accepted, in which case no significant revision is needed to match the content of the accepted version. If the reasons for hiding ArXiv references are weak, what are the reasons for including ArXiv references?
So that's why you should include ArXiv references in the bibliographies of your research articles. You can set up a LaTeX command so that if the journal asks you to remove them in the official version, you do that at the final stage for your "official" version, because you don't want to waste time trying to convince the journal about the ethical arguments above. But in your ArXiv versions and other versions that you might distribute to colleagues, you should favour the more ethical versions, which include the ArXiv references. en | lien permanent | RSS | trackback: ping-moi (expérimental) Commentaires : Veuillez publier votre commentaire sur un serveur du Fediverse et m'envoyez un ping dans le message : @boud@framapiaf.org. |
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