Journal of Negative Results

I'm curious about the future of "open-source journals." You don't need to drive by the swank Dupont Circle office of the OSA or AAAS to suspect they may have become about more about a leadership that was to the manor born than producing quality scientific publications. But it helps.

I am pessimistic, and believe that the optimism about these publications will disappear when the new boss is found to passing resemble the old one. There is a need to allocate money and so many of the problems (cronyism, falsification of data, hype, etc.) with are symptomatic and not causes.

Still, it's good to have a debate [=> @Nature]. And there's plenty of room for crazy ideas: The Journal of Negative Results. I'm curious about how the reviewing criteria will work out. Anyway, here's a quote I stuck on the front of my dissertation:

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work. . .
- Richard P. Feynman - Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965.

Pretty much.

The Surreal Life of Carlos Barrios Orta

Meet Carlos Barrios Orta, Mexico City Sewer Diver.

Deep-Slime Divers Keep Vast and Smelly Sewers Flowing
By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

[...]

It was 11 a.m. in a massive drain underneath Mexico City, where the smell of human waste and rotting trash was so strong it was hard for a visitor not to vomit. But it didn't seem to bother Barrios, one of four divers who maintain the 600 miles of sewers and pipes beneath the biggest city in North America. He was just doing his job: keeping pumps and sewers clear.

[...]

In the darkness of the sewer, Barrios could see nothing. He doesn't bother to carry a light, because it would be of no use in the thick waters. He inched forward in his bright red suit, an airtight model that sealed away the disease all around him, feeling his way with his rubber gloves, listening in the darkness. He could hear the powerful, whirring pump that pushed the flow through a six-foot-wide pipe. His mission was to clear away the debris around it so it wouldn't back up into city streets. Thousands of homes have been flooded in the past by dammed-up wastewater.

[...]

Now Barrios was singing. "I live in the water, lah-deh-dah-dum." It was a popular children's song, "The Pretty Little Fish," and Barrios sang it like he couldn't possibly have been happier. He loves his job. Two years ago, he gave up a career in accounting for this -- which, he noted, says something about accounting

Barrios, a happy-go-lucky father of three, said none of it bothers him -- not the smell, not the dangerous spinning pump blades, not even the two cadavers. He never found out who they were, because they were carried off in the flowing waters. The police were not called. The divers, who periodically encounter bodies because sewers are popular spots for dumping murder victims, only call police when they bring a body to the surface.

Hmm, I wonder why the WaPo would report on sewer divers? And while I can understand wanting to leave an accounting job, they really don't say why he picked sewer diving as his dream-job alternative. Weird. Via Pruned.