I go back to work next week. Most of today has been spent dealing with things that need to be sorted in my family that need time — that will simply not be available during the year. Even when on holiday, I have been keeping a eye on the emails (and deleting the ones that do not matter) — which means that I have nothing but the difficult ones to deal with on day one. But that’s the breaks, I work for a university, and the grind is about to start.

Time to get the tools working

• Revman for meta analysis.
• Strut for teaching, with the json files nicely held in a gmail account.
• Zotero and Libreoffice for writing. Libreoffice allows for you to structure your work, and it now exports to word fairly well.
• and Rkward (which is R with a pretty face) for analysis.

Because the truth is that a fair amount of what i do in the year is not difficult, but takes time. It needs to be done either in the office or at night. This year will be about grinding.

When you’re doing research-based academic work that kind of thing tends to happen. You are constantly under scrutiny, your bosses are people that haven’t been outside of academia for any parts of their lives, you get paid shit money, and it’s generally an unfriendly and unwelcoming environment. I realized this when I met more PhDs, male and female, from various fields. All of them had the same story. This girl mistook difficulty for sexism. Getting a PhD is so hard that there is a popular niche comic describing the rigors of professional academia (PhD Comics). Their humor won’t resonate with everyone, but every single PhD I know loves it.

So yes, STEM is indeed easier for women. Everyone wants then to succeed. Everyone needs them to succeed. No matter what the cost.

But you know who I respect the most? The grinders. The girls that work hard, the girls that learn, the girls that try to make a difference in the world on the same playing field as boys. Because, in reality, there is no sexism in science. In fact, there is no “-ism” in science. It’s a meritocracy, with knowledge and achievement as the main focus. And I can respect that.

This is exactly why the “bro” culture will persist. Science can not be held to the same politically correct standards as plain old office work. Because if I’m working with you at 4 am, fueled by pizza, mountain dew and cricket matches on TV, no matter who you are, man or woman, you’re gonna be my bro. Because that’s the only way anything will get done.

Well, yes. As I noted this morning, I like grinders. I like people who follow the data and say what they think. Even if they disagree with me: in fact I defend at times people who violently disagree with me. But the scientific publishing world is now full of editors, who have other ideas.

Copernicus Publications started publishing the journal Pattern Recognition in Physics (PRP) in March 2013. The journal idea was brought to Copernicus’ attention and was taken rather critically in the beginning, since the designated Editors-in-Chief were mentioned in the context of the debates of climate skeptics. However, the initiators asserted that the aim of the journal was to publish articles about patterns recognized in the full spectrum of physical disciplines rather than to focus on climate-research-related topics.

Recently, a special issue was compiled entitled “Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts”. Besides papers dealing with the observed patterns in the heliosphere, the special issue editors ultimately submitted their conclusions in which they “doubt the continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project” (Pattern Recogn. Phys., 1, 205–206, 2013).

Copernicus Publications published the work and other special issue papers to provide the spectrum of the related papers to the scientists for their individual judgment. Following best practice in scholarly publishing, published articles cannot be removed afterwards.

We at Copernicus Publications wish to distance ourselves from the apparent misuse of the originally agreed aims & scope of the journal and decided on 17 January 2014 to cease the publication of PRP. Of course, scientific dispute is controversial and should allow contradictory opinions which can then be discussed within the scientific community. However, the recent developments including the expressed implications (see above) have led us to this drastic decision.

Well, I am not sure about the science here (Anthony Watts, who follows this issue, thinks that Planetary Tidal Influences do not affect climate), but shutting down a scholarly journal because you disagree with it? Overkill.

But I have seen similar. I have seen people demand that academics get sacked because they publish results they do not like. Regardless of the rigour of the analysis, and the care with which the paper was written.

The trouble is that this has a chilling effect within science. You do one of three things.

Firstly, you don’t go near that topic. You may be aware of the question, but you know you will not get funding to work on it (and one of the metrics of academic performance is getting funding) so you don’t try.

Secondly, (since you cannot get funding) you cannot use the best tools to investigate the question. Consider herbal treatments for anxiety. There is data on this (because the German authorities required it to licence them) but any researcher in this area has to find a six figure sum to run a properly powered controlled trial (just like the big pharma companies). At this level, science is expensive. It’s cheaper (but not easier) to do a qualitative study, or a case control study, which may support the hypothesis but nor answer the questions.

Thirdly, no one will publish your results: the data enters the Grey Literature — that which is sitting in the bottom filing cabinet (with the other failed projects that accumulate over a career).

It is a form of censorship: one that you test for (in meta analysis, you always look for publication bias) and anyone who thinks that scientists are not influenced by these things has not spent enough time in the field.

But this is the first time I have heard of a journal closing for poltiical reasons. Journals close all the time — because the area they are investigation dries out, and because they cannot get good enough quality articles. (and James Annan, who is crowing about getting this journal shut down, should be hanging his head in shame).

The better response is rebuttal. Get their data, look at it, publish the flaws. And let truth come out of the debate. Otherwise the Golden Weather — the analogy is to the brief New Zealand Summer — will end, and we will be left writing to our bottom drawer, advancing knowledge by private correspondance, and subverting the system.