Getting published in the illustrious British scientific journal Nature is, frankly, a bitch. It’s not just the years you spend designing the perfect experiment, or the hustling for grant money to collect the data. It’s not even the long nights of trying to figure out how to express all that work elegantly in the cold language of scientific communication. No – the real trick is getting the editors at Nature to like it.

But that’s still just the beginning: Those editors pick three or so relevant experts – from a list Nature requires you to submit – to anonymously assess your work’s technical accuracy and overall merit. Those experts bounce it back to the editors, who add their own comments and send it to you asking for more work. If you decide it’s worth the time and effort, you do it. And revise. And send it back to the reviewers. In the end, if everyone’s satisfied, the article runs. If not, you submit it to another journal, one tier down, and do it all again. The process takes about four months.

That rigmarole is called peer review. Almost every journal does it, from marquee pubs like Nature to highly specialized periodicals like International Journal of Chemical Reactor Engineering. (No offense to IJCRE – you guys are a helluva read.) When it works, it’s genius – quality control that ensures the best papers get into the appropriate pages, lubricating communication and debate. It’s the quiet soul of the scientific method: After forming hypotheses, collecting data, and crunching numbers, you report the results to learned colleagues and ask, “What do you folks think?”

But science is done by humans, and humans occasionally screw up. They plagiarize, fake data, take incorrect readings. And when they do? Oy! Somebody always blames peer review. The process is lousy at policing research. Bad papers get published, and work that’s merely competent (boring) or wildly speculative (maverick) often gets rejected, enforcing a plodding conservatism. It seems silly to say this about a system that’s been in development since the mid-1700s, but the whole thing seems kind of antiquated. “Peer review was brilliant when distribution was a problem and you had to be selective about what you could publish,” says Chris Surridge, managing editor of the online interdisciplinary journal PLoS ONE. But the Web has remapped the universe of scientific publishing – and as a result, peer review may finally get fixed.

The proof: In June, Nature began experimenting with a new method online. Authors submitting papers can choose a two-track process. While the work goes through the usual peer review drill, a preprint version gets posted on the Web. Anyone – even you – can comment, as long as you attach your name, affiliation, and email address. As of July, 25 articles had undergone this process, and the journal plans to issue a report late this year on how the test went. (Full disclosure: Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson participated in the project.) “The whole point of peer review is to help the editors select papers that are going to move science forward,” says Linda Miller, US executive editor of Nature and the Nature research journals (Nature Biotechnology, Nature Genetics, et cetera). “If there’s a better way, then why not? How could I say no?”

In other quarters, traditional peer review has already been abandoned. Physicists and mathematicians today mainly communicate via a Web site called arXiv. (The X is supposed to be the Greek letter chi; it’s pronounced “archive.” If you were a physicist, you’d find that hilarious.) Since 1991, arXiv has been allowing researchers to post prepublication papers for their colleagues to read. The online journal Biology Direct publishes any article for which the author can find three members of its editorial board to write reviews. (The journal also posts the reviews – author names attached.) And when PLoS ONE launches later this year, the papers on its site will have been evaluated only for technical merit – do the work right and acceptance is guaranteed. “Data becomes useful only if it’s shared,” Surridge says. “At the moment, our mechanisms for sharing information are the traditional journals, and if they’re hard to get into, data is completely lost.”

No one’s sure which of these ideas, if any, will prevail. Sure, discarding anonymity will go a long way toward breaking up the old-boys’ network, and open comments are great for nailing fakes and plagiarists. (The online community, not peer review, helped bust the South Korean stem cell fraud Woo Suk Hwang.) But Nature is an elite journal that accepts few submissions, a kind of exclusivity that lets universities use publication as a proxy for worth in hiring and promotion decisions. How can they assess papers published online and “reviewed” by an honors physics teacher? Have papers that went through an open process and got rejected been essentially published already? Plus, the idea of all these articles online, free for the Googling, terrifies the lucrative journal-publishing industry.

But seriously: Who cares? An up-and-coming researcher can get more attention from the right experts by publishing something earthshaking on arXiv than by pushing it through the usual channels. Crazy ideas will get batted around in moderated forums, which is pretty much what the Internet is for. Eventually, printed journal articles will be quaint artifacts. Scientific papers will be living documents with data published on Web pages – commented on, linked to, and mirrored by labs doing the same work 6,000 miles away. Every research effort will have thousands of reviewers working in real time. Today’s undergrads have never thought about the world any differently – they’ve never functioned without IM and Wikipedia and arXiv, and they’re going to demand different kinds of review for different kinds of papers. It’s in their nature.

– Adam Rogers

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/start.html?pg=3

While we are always willing to negotiate as equals, the era of union busting, contract trashing, and strike breaking is at an end. Today, we say that when you pick a fight with any of us, you pick a fight with all of us! And that when you push us, we will push back! ~ Richard Trumka (1995)

The power of a movement lies in the fact that it can indeed change the habits of people. This change is not the result of force but of dedication, of moral persuasion. ~ Steve Biko (1946-77)

Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and bruised itself. We have been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, and deceived by politicians. ‘But notwithstanding all this and all these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun. ~ Eugene V. Debs (1894)

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. ~ Frederick Douglas, 1857

I want you to pledge to yourselves in this convention to stand as one solid army against the foes of human labor. Think of the thousands who are killed every year and there is no redress for it. We will fight until the mines are made secure and human life valued more than props. Look things in the face. Don’t’ fear a governor; don’t fear anybody. You pay the governor; he has the right to protect you. You are the biggest part of the population in the state. You create its wealth, so I say, “let the fight go on; if nobody else will keep on, I will.” ~ Mother Jones (1913)

Anyone with a part-time job works full-time for half salary. ~ Denise D. Lynn

http://home.earthlink.net/~solidarity/quotes.html

An article about Self Importance. Tall poppy, are you a legend in your own mind? I first came face to face with Tall Poppy Syndrome when promoting my programs some years ago. Any marketer will tell you … make your product enticing, needed and bigger than Ben Hurr.

Over the years I have worked on the launch of literally thousands of products, services and other people, where these power marketing principals were hugely successful. This time however, the product was “myself”, which I have to admit, I found much more difficult.

I am not alone, as most people find it quite challenging to promote themselves. The reason we find self promotion more confronting, is because, the majority of normal human beings are affected by the same deep seated “feelings” of inferiority around fame.

Why? Well because most of us had it drummed into our heads, from early childhood, that a display of self promotion was, well … just not good manners.

It was considered that we were showing off, being egotistical, bragging, being a know-all, or sounding dogmatic and were then “tossed off” by the group, until the behavior was modified. We soon learned that if we wanted to get along, we would have to go along (a paramount need of children) and that any display of individuality or leadership was going to be met with rejection in the form of a rebuff, scoffing, ridicule or withdrawal.

We did eventually grow up, but instead of this dynamic moving along with our childhood, it lingered on in our lives to become what is now colloquially named “Tall Poppy Syndrome”. Tall Poppy is a deploringly distrustful force that (not unsimilar to a dangling meat cleaver), is poised ready to chop down any identity that may get “too big for their boots”.

Tall Poppy shows up in our community via the media, on the radio or television, in our clubs, throughout the work place and even within our families. In fact … anybody who attempts to stand out or be different, will attract an element of Tall Poppy, whether they want it, or not!

Taking on a Leadership role means moving beyond the Tall Poppy issue, and insulating ourselves from the potential influences of those who will invariably wish to bring us down.

It is a well known Leadership phenomenon, that humans tend to fall back into a child-parent role-play scenario within groups. Particularly in the case of a “Committee” or “Board”, if not monitored, a kind of “them and us” thing can develop. Just like children testing the boundaries of their parents, the group can unconsciously band together to “bring down” the leadership … it’s nothing personal, that’s just Tall Poppy Syndrome in action.

So .. just who do you think you are anyway?

We must briefly mention our champions of Tall Poppy Syndrome – I was introduced to Miss. X. You must know somebody like Miss X … Leader of the Opposition … Tall Poppy Syndrome on legs … you recognize them for their need to “expose” your inefficiencies by competing with your knowledge and tweaking your inner most fears with an alarming display of competition.

The loaded question indignantly came… “So, just who do you think you are anyway?”

It was exactly at that point that I was so thankful that I had spent all those years aspiring to conscious relationships. I realized in that instant that I no longer believed that I was anybody in particular at all … I was free … and just “me” doing the best I could to inspire other humans towards the same internal freedom. As a result I came through the inquisition intact, whereas in years gone by, my ego may not have survived.

It is so easy to fall into the dominating clasps of our own belief system to degenerate into the ugly airs of superiority.

Many leaders unintentionally fall into the self importance trap … illusion becomes delusion and what now exists is a “Legend-In-Their-Own-Mind”. They have lost sight of the fact that we are all on one level, hierarchy is a mere fantasy and nobody is better than another.Legend behavior is like a honey pot to the bees of Tall Poppy Syndrome.

Leadership is merely a role being played out by the courageous and that always deserves respect.

So ask yourself this question truthfully .. are you a Legend In Your Own Mind? … or do you walk through life with a drain pipe full of TPS stuck up your nose?

Cryptic? Well ~ Think about it!

MadamSplash

http://www.splash.net.au/articles/legend.html

Investments and union dues are concepts that are not often paired together. But from an economic standpoint, union dues are one of the best investments that anyone can make. If you put savings in the bank you will get a return in the 5-6% range.

Certificates of Deposit return slightly more, but your money is tied up and is not readily available. The rate of return on Real Estate investments has averaged nearly 20%. History has shown that investments in the stock market have returned an average of 11-12% per year since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

It is axiomatic, the greater the risk – the greater the reward. In order to get the relatively high rates of return on real estate or stocks yon need to put in personal time and effort. When you invest, you assume the risk that the bottom will fall out of the real estate market in your area or there will be a major “correction” in the stock market that can send prices tumbling 20-30%, or more. Union dues require no risk, no time and little effort from the union member.

According to statistics prepared by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Earnings (January 1999), the average union wage earner in the United States will earn 32% more salary than their non-union counterparts. Benefits for union members including health care, disability benefits and retirement are all superior to what the average non-union worker receives.

The advantages received from paying dues go far beyond wages and benefits. Dues can be looked at as insurance – job insurance. Just as homeowner’s or auto insurance won’t stop an accident, they do provide a measure of security if an accident should happen. By paying dues you are not guaranteed future employment. An insurance policy always has some exclusion. You will not be reimbursed in all circumstances. Paying union dues does not mean that you can never be terminated. It does mean that you can only be terminated for “just cause” or some other legitimate business reason. If you are unjustly terminated, the union will right to save your job – at no cost to you. Dues are also used to pay the cost of negotiating and then enforcing the contract that you work -under.

It is the collective efforts of many and the relatively small contributions that each member pays in the form of dues that allows for all of these advantages. Many employees have worked their whole career under the umbrella of a union contract. Some employees look at dues as a costly inconvenience. They believe everything they have was given to them by their employer or earned throughout their own efforts. For them, union dues are just another deduction on their paycheck. The most dedicated union members are often those who are new to the union. They have worked for non-union employers for low wages, have been fearful when they stood up for their rights and have kept quiet when less senior or less qualified co-workers received promotions. These workers know that dues are not an expense, dues are an investment.

When you join a Union Local you have more then the staff at the Local standing behind you; you leave the entire Local fighting, for your cause. The resources of the International Offices are available to your local’s staff and officers. Wherever you go you are part of a Brotherhood.

By Mike McElfresh

http://www.ibew103.com/node/112

Behavioral economists at UC San Diego recently conducted a study in which tokens were distributed among experimental subjects, with a few getting a concentrated chunk of the wealth and a majority getting little. They offered the “poor” subjects the opportunity to pay a price to take money away from the rich. The catch was that rather than being redistributed, the money would simply disappear. Economic orthodoxy predicts that few would snap at the chance, since they’d be paying for something that would confer no direct benefit. But they did. In spades.

Though only one data point, it suggests that people have a profound sense of economic fairness, that we are all, more or less, intuitive socialists. As far back as Edmund Burke, conservatives have suspected as much and feared democracy for that very reason. Read James Madison in the Federalist Papers and it’s clear that many of the Constitution’s undemocratic elements were designed to prevent the expropriation of wealth from an outnumbered elite.

This central tension between laissez faire capitalism and the redistributive whims of a democratic electorate isn’t discussed much. But it can poke through the surface during moments of clarity, such as the last election, when minimum wage increases passed in every state—red and blue—where they were on the ballot.

For Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, the minimum wage is an iconic example of the economically backwards policies favored by the foolish masses. “In theory,” he writes, “democracy is a bulwark against socially harmful policies, but in practice it gives them safe harbor.” Examining this “paradox” takes up the rest of the book, but his explanation is pretty simple: Voters are crazy.

The Myth of the Rational Voter is best understood in the context of a long-standing academic debate over whether democracy works. It’s a question that has two related, but distinct, sub-components: Do democracies produce optimal policies for its citizens? And do democracies produce policies that accurately reflect the will of the majority?

The most sanguine observers say “yes” on both counts. But given that surveys consistently show that voters are distressingly ignorant about both the rudiments of policy (whether we spend more on foreign aid or social security) and politics (how many senators each state has), it’s a difficult case to make. Another strain of thought is the so-called Public Choice school, which answers “no” to both questions. Public Choice theorists tend, like Caplan, to be free market enthusiasts and argue that democracies inevitably lead to bloated bureaucracies, trade protectionism and inefficient subsidies. These sub-optimal economic policies occur not because of their widespread popularity, but rather because the state’s agenda is so easily manipulated by special interests looking to make easy money by regulating their competitors or getting their hands on taxpayer dollars.

Caplan disagrees: Democracy fails to produce good policies precisely because it reflects the will of the majority. Or, as H.L. Mencken once put it: “Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

What the people want, according to Caplan, is economic bollocks. To establish this point, he devotes a chapter to the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy (SAEE). Conducted in 1996, the survey asked economists and members of the general public questions about the economy, and found a divergence of opinion on almost every principle of policy: whether taxes, immigration and foreign aid are major or minor contributors to the nation’s economic health, whether “business profits are too high,” and whether “downsizing” is hurting the economy.

Caplan attributes this divergence to four basic biases of the unwashed masses—anti-market bias (a skepticism that the price mechanism works), anti-foreign bias, make-work bias (a desire to create jobs even if it’s inefficient) and pessimistic bias, the tendency to believe the economy’s getting worse instead of better. Imagine the worldview of Lou Dobbs, and that’s roughly the belief system Caplan thinks is typical. Because these biases make people feel good about themselves, people hold to them even in the face of countervailing evidence. Or, more precisely, they hold to them irrationally.

But this argument puts Caplan in a precarious position. The consensus economic model that he subscribes to—and that forms the worldview of the economists that he cites as definitive—is grounded on the assumption that people are rational. Pull out that Jenga block and the edifice of Caplan’s economic worldview tumbles down with it: If people aren’t rational, there’s no reason to assume that they’ll respond predictably to incentives or market signals.

So Caplan requires extra dexterity to withdraw the “rational voter” from the architecture of his theoretical framework. He must somehow maintain that the same person can be rational as a consumer, worker or business owner, but irrational as a citizen and a voter. In other words, voters must be somehow possessed of what Caplan calls “rational irrationality.”

The idea is this: People are rational when they pay for the consequences of their decisions. But in elections, the odds of your vote determining a given election are so slim that the price of voting your irrational whims is nil. This gives people the freedom to indulge delusional notions about the economy. And that results in a populace who are capitalists in the market place and socialists in the voting booth. Needless to say, Caplan thinks we’re at our best in the former case and quotes legendary economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe the latter: “[T]he typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.”

“If people are rational as consumers and irrational as voters,” Caplan writes, “it is a good idea to rely more on markets and less on politics.”

The first and most obvious problem with Caplan’s argument is that it quickly leads to some very dark places. He notes, enthusiastically, that education makes people think more like economists and that, luckily, the highly educated vote at higher rates than the less educated. But why leave it to chance? You could instead give more votes to businessmen and university graduates, as Caplan comes close to proposing, or simply require people to “pass a test of economic literacy to vote.”

Which brings us to the second problem: what constitutes economic consensus. Caplan spends considerable time attempting to persuade the reader that if experts and the general public disagree, the experts are right and the public wrong. That may often be the case, but it’s not a static proposition: What experts believe evolves over time, and the same is true of the public. In 1996, the public thought taxes were too high, but recent polling suggests that’s no longer the case. The kinds of social democratic market interventions that Caplan holds in such low regard were prominent features of the post-war economies of the United States, Canada and Western Europe, which were some of the most productive and equitable in human history. Not only were the policies relatively effective, they were also largely popular with both the public and economists. Caplan’s book wouldn’t have made much sense 40 years ago, which prompts the question: Will it make much sense in the future? Caplan thinks he’s describing the fundamentals about human nature, but he might just be elaborating on the contingencies of an era.

What’s more, sometimes the public is right and the experts are wrong. Economic experts used to believe in price controls. Foreign policy experts thought we should go to war with Iraq. The record of expertise in matters of public policy is an uneven one, to say the least.

Finally, Caplan over-interprets the degree of economic consensus. He stresses that, appearances to the contrary, economists agree on a broad range of principles, and the data from SAEE bear this out. But governments don’t legislate principles; they legislate policies, and when it comes to policies the disagreement is tremendous. Caplan thinks the minimum wage borders on quackery, but last year more than 500 economists, including a half-dozen Nobel laureates, signed a petition in favor of raising it.

Indeed, in this respect, the book eats its own tail. Caplan wants to grant a presumptive authority to the consensus view of economists, but the consensus view of economists is that voters are rational, which is, of course, precisely the position he wants to convince us is wrong.

It’s tempting to dismiss Caplan’s thesis out of hand, because it’s so self-consciously “provocative” and because he’s translating an old discredited anti-democratic argument into the jargon of econocentric elite-speak. But if you support democracy, you must confront the fact that voters can often be stunningly under-informed and that majoritarianism run amok can lead to persecution, hatred and injustice. Reading Caplan’s book, then, is both bracing and necessary because it forces the reader to stare into the abyss—an abyss the author seems only too happy to jump into.Ê

Caplan’s willingness to embrace the darkness, however, is what makes this book so important: It articulates in lurid detail the obscene id of Chicago-school, Grover-Norquist-style, free market fundamentalism (a term Caplan spends a chapter rebutting). Given a choice between democracy without free markets or free markets without democracy, many conservatives would gladly choose the latter. Hence Milton Friedman advising Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the Bush administration’s support of a coup in Venezuela.

And the book’s manifest elitism is not fringe. It is blurbed by economist Alan Blinder, who advised President Clinton, and N. Gregory Mankiw, who headed the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush. Over the last 30 years, conservatives have made political hay by railing against liberal “elitists” who want to substitute the judgment of faceless bureaucrats, activist judges and pointy-headed intellectuals for that of the common man. Yet if you got some prominent conservatives off the record—after plying them with a few drinks—I bet more than a few would agree with Caplan: Voters are fools.

Good thing our campaign donors are the ones who really run things.

Christopher Hayes

http://www.chrishayes.org/

From what, though, do we need to be protected? From the efforts of the Employer to increase and alter our workloads and teaching loads in view of the pressures of these interesting times. What do these efforts look like? Most typically, a Dean will ask you to increase the size of your class, or take on extra graduate students, or do more advising because, as we all are told, York University is in financial straits, because we all have to pull together in order to provide a good educational environment, because we all want new appointments and / or because we all have a vested interest in improving our professional and academic programmes. Because of such arguments in the past, individuals and units often agreed to do more work. When they did this, their new work level became the new normal; it became their current practice. So a year down the road, four years down the road, everyone was working harder and longer. And they are still doing so.

How does one stop this escalation? There are several alternatives. The first alternative is to say “no” to a request that you increase your work. In such a case, the Dean or Principal will either withdraw the request or will order you to do the work. According to labour law, you must comply if ordered. However, you can then file a grievance. Because our Collective Agreement only permits “minor, year-to-year fluctuations” for individuals, and because the teaching load of units is defined by the collegium, your workload will have to go back to the old normal. By filing a grievance, the individual or the unit is also stating that a new normal or a new current practice is not being established.

The second alternative is for a unit to make the workload changes which the Employer (Dean / Principal) has requested but to do so only by passing a clear motion, at a unit meeting, that such changes “to individual teaching loads and / or the normal workload of the unit are temporary fluctuations and do not constitute a change to current practice(s) as defined in the Workload Document.” By this means, the individual(s) and / or unit can insist that, sometime in the future, they can go back to the status quo ante, to their former workload because that workload is their normal current practice. In other words, your Workload Document defines your current practices; and your current practices are protected by the Collective Agreement. Without a Workload Document which details clearly the teaching work that you do and how it is determined and delineated, you are vulnerable to escalating demands. Without a detailed Workload Document, you can never prove what your current teaching practices are or were. It should also be pointed out here that a unit should never alter the practices in this Document without a formal motion, always bearing in mind that such a motion reflects collegial practices and thus sets outs what is your normal workload.

[full article : http://www.yufa.org/stewards/workload.html]