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You're not convinced about what, exactly?

I am not convinced that there is some sort of "blind spot" in our knowledge of glaciers due to the fact that males have studied glaciers. I am not even convinced that female contributions to glacier science have been rejected. Was my writing unclear?

Presumably one thing that has got you bothered is that the authors are pushing the idea that the cultural lens through which we understand scientific knowledge means we don't understand things we really ought to know about glaciers as well as we could be.

You believe that? Show me!

The major thing that has got me bothered is that the authors made assertion after assertion without offering any examples at all, let alone statistics from a broad base of facts, to support their assertions.

Suppose I wanted to write a paper about dogmatic adherence to an old idea in the face of new evidence. I might include the example of J. Harlen Bretz, who was ridiculed for his idea that some geologic features could have been produced by sudden catastrophe; he turned out to be correct. I might include the example of plate tectonics, another theory that was rejected for decades but turned out to be correct. I might include the example of the theory that bacteria could cause ulcers. But if I wrote a long paper saying "People might be slow to accept a new idea. This might lead to slowness in the advancement of science." (only in a lot more words) the paper wouldn't be wrong, but I hope you would not respect it very much. And I hope nobody would get paid $400K in grant money for a paper like that.

All of section VI is a discussion of paintings, fiction stories, and other art, with breathless praise for how these can lead to seeing glaciers in a new way. Okay, give me just one example of how the scientific understanding of glaciers is improved by a painting that has a timestamp on it, or a short story about two women who travel to the South Pole in secret and don't tell anyone about it. If you are going to argue that I'm missing something by not looking at these paintings or reading that story, give me even one example of just what it is that I am missing.

Now it's true that communicating tricky ideas with clarity can be mighty difficult.

Here's a section from the paper:

Despite their perceived remoteness, glaciers are central sites — often contested and multifaceted — experiencing the effects of global change, where science, policy, knowledge, and society interact in dynamic social-ecological systems. Today, there is a need for a much more profound analysis of societies living in and engaging with mountains and cold regions (Halvorson, 2002; Byers and Sainju, 1994; Bloom et al., 2008), including the social, economic, political, cultural, epistemological, and religious aspects of glaciers (see e.g. Allison, 2015; Gagné et al., 2014).

IMHO this is not clearly explaining anything. I see a string of assertions. There is a "need" for a "more profound" analysis... why? If we want to study the cross-section of a glacier, the accepted technique would be to drill for an ice core and inspect the core... this is "penetrating" and "exploiting" the glacier in manly male fashion; what then is the alternative? Can we learn more about the glacier by painting a picture of it and putting a timestamp on the painting? If so, give me even one example.

(FWIW I do understand it, because I've been trained to do so).

The Reason piece can be summarized as "there is very little value in this paper, but it cost the taxpayers $400K." When I read the paper, it seemed like a parody of science, complete with passages about how m

I found this question on their measure of scientific literacy. See page 77,
"The universe began with a huge explosion".
They marked it as correct if you answered "true".
sigh.

Also, I found a weird one:
"listened to a science program on the radio"
avg. annual frequency: 3.6
% who engaged at least once in the past 3 months: 30

Seriously? There are science shows on Canadian radio that a third of the population listened to?
Why yes, there is and they do.
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/
http://legacy.jyi.org/volumes/...

Now I'm impressed.

http://www.whaletimes.org/hagfish.htm

'Hagfish have been seen as deep as 16,405 feet (5000 m)'

do not doubt cthulhu's minions

even worse:

'Looking closer, one might discover an alarming sight: Those dead organisms resting on the deep sea floor are actually pulsating! What could cause such movements? Usually, it's a passel of scavenging hagfish feeding on the carcasses from the inside out.'

http://www.jyi.org/volumes/volume5/issue7/features/lee.html

I would spare relatives the idea that human bodies would be found pulsating from within as they are consumed by hagfish. hagfish are the fate of all bodies that go to the deep. i don't want to know the details

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrates/basalfish/myxini.html

'The adjective which best describes the Myxini is "Lovecraftian".'

In 1994 Leonard M. Adleman solved the travelling salesman problem in 7 days with a DNA computer. I think that is probably what you are thinking of. (Article about it here)

Except that the standard for "beauty" changes over time. I'm not sure I'm buying this.

Also the standard for beauty changes from person to person. I consider Paris Hilton ugly and Jessica Alba beautiful, and others disagree. There's no universal "standard" for beauty, and the closest you'll get is symmetry. But even an assymetric appearance is attractive to some. I still think that the old "we grow up to marry our parents" is more accurate, or at least as close as we can get. However I'd change "parents" for "role models" to be more precise.

Hmm. Deja vu here. DNA was used to solve this exact problem:

http://www.jyi.org/volumes/volume8/issue2/features/srivastava.html

It should be noted, however, that even though the DNA would be able to compute the routes in a massively parallel fashion, you still would have to search all the solutions to identify the shortest one, so that kind of defeats the purpose of it. Unless the DNA or the bacteria could compute all the results _and_ identify the correct and optimal answer, then as far as we are concerned the problem is still gotta be close to NP complete (IE strands of DNA to check go up exponentially with problem size). Sounds like these bacteria change color, so maybe that helps reduce the size of the answer set.

There are some empirical evidences that make beauty quantifiable. Most of it is relevant to how symmetrical your face is, and the closer that is to perfect, the better you'll score across subjective ratings. There's also adherence to the golden mean or golden spiral ratios. If you ever watch the Fox Reality show (yeah, I know) Battle of the Bods, you'll see that it's pretty easy to build consensus on subjective measures. While not every group gets every order right, the highs and lows tend to be unanimous. That is to say that it's easy to pick really pretty people and really ugly people, but not relevant to each other within their appropriate group.

This problem seems to lend itself very well to creative solutions. Perhaps because it is pretty simple and it readily corresponds with many geometric/structural systems that can be used to compute a solution. As far as I know, this was the first problem that was solved using DNA

I had to teach a class about this in my last CS class in college. It wasn't a selector that was used to eliminate invalid paths. The only invalid paths possible would be of an incorrect length, all you had to do was use gel electrophoresis to detect strands of the right length and that was your answer pool.

This article explains it pretty well. The original article done by Adleman is in the August 1998 issue of Scientific American.

"You'll get the "always used stored procedures" answer from people who actually do real database work and the "never use stored procedures" from the people who hack small websites in PHP."

Can we add "proof by claiming to work in a bigger company" to the list of stupid assertions?

Interesting n'all, but I wonder about the "averaging" algorithm they used; it seems to create a lot of symmetry, which is apparently one of the major factors in "beauty." One other dubitable tidbit there has to do with the skin tone and clarity of those "average" folks. Given any point on the face, the vast majority of us don't have any kind of "blemish" or "spot" or what have you there, so averaging it out for each point would produce no blemish. However, a person without *any* such "imperfections" is decidedly not average (read: "typical").

Hell will never freeze over: http://www.jyi.org/resources/humor/hell.html