> People ask me all the time, "What's with the bees?"
We all get asked. It is not too difficult to distill down.
I explain that bees face the same exact problem that all agriculture faces,
planetwide. Invasive, exotic, diseases and pests arriving in containers of
cargo that could be easily fumigated, but won't be until the exporters and
importers of iPads, Xboxes, and Flat Screens are required by law to spend
the extra buck ninety-eight it costs to protect biosecurity.
This is quick enough to give time for follow up questions before the
elevator reaches anyone's floor.
> taking on the hard problems.
> For example, bee decline.
> a computer simulation [claiming] that pesticides are the most plausible
cause
> IAPV... multiplies in bees' brains and [claimed to be] leading to colony
collapse
> a "systems approach" [proposed] to understand bee decline
I think it is easy to pick out the paper worth reading from the two not
worth the time, even from my one-line summaries above.
I'd read the middle one - the one looking at real bees.
In addition to the problem noted by Juanse, where DEFRA in the UK wants
blue-ribbon panels to separate the chaff of biased advocacy from the wheat
of science:
http://www.nature.com/news/research-a-standard-for-policy-relevant-science-1
.13699
http://tinyurl.com/k546lbl
we also have:
The paywalled journal "Science" knocking the open-access journals that doom
it to irrelevancy:
http://sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
http://tinyurl.com/ojf9nwa
by pretending to "discover" the Asian journals with no more peer review than
the Ladies' Home Journal, yet charging steep fees for "publication costs".
Science did not mention the a symbiotic industry of ghost-writers to churn
out fake papers for (mostly) clients in China, where "publish or perish" has
sparked a "free-market solution", bogus papers, published in bogus journals,
making it a closed-loop scheme.
While checking the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor of the journals "outed"
would reveal that their papers were rarely cited, it now seems that even
this is not as reliable or consistent a metric for "quality" as claimed:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982207015163
http://tinyurl.com/oy2oggh
So, it does seem dire. But "popular" subjects always have more work done
around them - CCD stands for "Cash Cow Discovery", so it still holds
speculative value for highly speculative work. Before 2006, the problem in
bee research was despair over a lack of funding and a lack of concern about
the problems of bees and beekeeping. Now the illusion of both funding and
attention fuels a "gold rush" mentality. I'd rather have more funding, as I
trust that that good work will always shatter bad.
An early philosopher noted that the trick is to keep banging the rocks
TOGETHER.
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