There is predatory, and then there is predatory:

When Björn Johansson received an email in July 2020 inviting him to speak at an online debate on COVID-19 modeling, he didn’t think twice. “I was interested in the topic and I agreed to participate,” says Johansson, a medical doctor and researcher at the Karolinska Institute. “I thought it was going to be an ordinary academic seminar. It was an easy decision for me.”

…

All the scientists interviewed by Science say Ferensby’s initial messages never mentioned conference fees. When one speaker, Francesco Piazza, a physicist now at the University of Florence, directly asked Ferensby whether the organizers would request a fee, Ferensby replied, “No, we are talking about science and COVID-19.”

But after the events, the speakers were approached by a conference secretary, who asked them to sign and return a license agreement that would give Villa Europa—named in the document as the conference organizer—permission to publish the webinar recordings. Most of the contracts Science has seen state that the researcher must pay the company €790 “for webinar debate fees and open access publication required for the debate proceedings” plus €2785 “to cover editorial work.” These fees are mentioned in a long clause in the last page of the contract, and are written out in words rather than numbers, without any highlighting.

What an absolute nightmare. Predatory journals at least have the decency to ask you for them money up front.

And let’s take a moment to contemplate the ridiculousness of the current academic publishing and conference model. Note that there is nothing unusual in academic conferences requiring attendance fees from speakers. If you have an scientific abstract accepted for oral or poster presentation at ASCO, let’s say, you will still have to pony up for the registration fee. And publication fees for a legitimate open access journal can be north of $3,000. So how is a judge to know whether the organizer’s claims are legitimate?

The difference, of course, is that the good ones — both journals and conferences — don’t solicit submissions; you have to beg them to take your money. Which only makes the situation more ridiculous, not less.

📚 Currently reading about sea life in Oceanarium, our 4-year-old’s favorite book. You can learn fun and interesting things this way.

For example, it is clear that peacock mantis shrimps are neither peacocks nor mantises, but did you know they weren’t even shrimps? They are, however, mantis shrimps. Not confusing at all!

🍿Mary Poppins (1964) is 139 minutes long! This may explain why I had never seen it beginning to end until recently. Did children actually sit in the movie theater for more than two hours back in the 1960s to watch this?

Don’t get me wrong, it is a good movie. But much too long.

Through much trial and even more error, I have finagled @pimoore’s wonderful Tufte theme to organize itself into a scripting.com-like chronological/reverse-chronological format. The next step is to fix everything I broke in the process. And to find ever better fonts, of course.

Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic:

I first encountered The Making of the Atomic Bomb in March, when I spoke with an AI researcher who said he carts the doorstop-size book around every day. (It’s a reminder that his mandate is to push the bounds of technological progress, he explained—and a motivational tool to work 17-hour days.) Since then, I’ve heard the book mentioned on podcasts and cited in conversations I’ve had with people who fear that artificial intelligence will doom us all.

I can see the appeal, but calling The Making of… “The Doomer Bible” is uncharitable to both books.

A new guilty pleasure in our household — and I mean really guilty, as in I could find ten thousand reasons why it’s bad yet still I watch — is Guy’s Grocery Games. All that is good and bad about American TV, packed into 30 minutes. 📺

A group of cancer researchers proposes an updated definition of cancer:

While reflecting past insights, current definitions have not kept pace with the understanding that the cancer cell is itself transformed and evolving. We propose a revised definition of cancer: Cancer is a disease of uncontrolled proliferation by transformed cells subject to evolution by natural selection.

I like it!

Side note: the opinion came out in Molecular Cancer Research. It is a journal published by a reputable organization with an impact factor of 5.2. No shame in that, but… Many predatory journals now have IFs that are the same or even higher ⊕ See also: Goodhart’s law. And also, this is a good example of why a metric becomes meaningless over time without context, or at least a denominator.so unless the impact factor is mid-to-high double digits, it no longer carries much information on the journal’s credibility or readership.

A side note to the side note: a paper published in a journal listed as predatory is the second-highest cited of any I co-authored: 100 and counting. I also think it is a very good paper, although a review article getting that many citations is a sign that too many people are not citing primary literature, which is bad! ⊕ And my most highly cited paper is also a review! This is embarassing for me, but speaks even worse for the people doing all that review-citing. But maybe having a journal listed as predatory no longer carries much information on the articles there not being worth a read?

Chris Arnade walking across Japan, part 2:

So the technocrat/policy types look at Japan’s last few decades of relative economic stagnation as a failure, while the Japanese just shrug it off and chalk it up to one of the costs of maintaining their cultural identity.

Haven’t thought about it that way before, but isn’t another country set on preserving its identity also in a period of economic stagnation? Craig Mod noted how and why they are not the same, however, and I like Japan’s prospects better.