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ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT
Vol. CXXVII No. 4, April 2007
Cover design by Victoria Green
Cover Art by David A. Hardy
SERIAL
QUEEN OF CANDESCE, part II of IV, Karl Schroeder
Novella
TRIAL BY FIRE, Shane Tourtellotte
Novelette
THINGS THAT AREN'T, Michael A. Burstein & Robert Greenberger
Short Stories
DON'T KILL THE MESSENGER, Kim Zimring
AS YOU KNOW, BOB, John G. Hemry
CRACKERS, Jerry Oltion
Science Fact
THE ICE AGE THAT WASN'T, Richard A. Lovett
Reader's Departments
THE EDITOR'S PAGE
IN TIMES TO COME
THE ALTERNATE VIEW, Jeffery D. Kooistra
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Associate Editor
Click a Link for Easy Navigation
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL: CITIZEN SCIENCE by Stanley Schmidt
TRIAL BY FIRE by Shane Tourtellotte
SCIENCE FACT: THE ICE AGE THAT WASN'T by Richard A. Lovett
DON'T KILL THE MESSENGER by Kim Zimring
AS YOU KNOW, BOB OR, “LIVING UP TO EXPECTATIONS” by John G. Hemry
CRACKERS by JERRY OLTION
THE ALTERNATE VIEW: BASEBALL AND HURRICANES by Jeffery D. Kooistra
THINGS THAT AREN'T by Michael A. Burstein and Robert Greenberger
QUEEN OF CANDESCE: PART II OF IV by KARL SCHROEDER
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
IN TIMES TO COME
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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EDITORIAL: CITIZEN SCIENCE by Stanley Schmidt
Last summer Joyce and I did some volunteer work as part of a research program carried out under the joint auspices of a well-known university, a federal government funding agency, and a state park system. The subject of investigation was the prevalence and impact of invasive plant species on native ecosystems in the park; but there was another subject, too: us.
While the investigators’ primary interest was in ecological disturbances, they were also using the project to study the effectiveness of a slightly unorthodox system of data collection. The initial data they wanted was the presence and abundance of invasive plants at a multitude of marked points along park trails—but they wanted data from a lot more points than their paid staff could reach in the available time. So they recruited volunteers—hikers more or less familiar with the area under study—and trained us in the study protocol and identification of the twenty-some species of plants under interest. Then they assigned pairs of us to scrutinize designated checkpoints along particular stretches of trail, keeping records of which invasive species we found, and how much of each, at each point.
By using large numbers of volunteers, they could collect data from many more points, more evenly distributed over a larger area, than the principal investigators could hope to cover themselves. But since the “citizen scientists,” as they called us, would have much less training and experience than specialists in the field of study, there would naturally be questions of how reliable the data we collected would be. So the project had to include an attempt to evaluate that, too. One way they did that was by having all the volunteers, and the professionals, survey the same “control” section of trail in addition to the one for which they had primary responsibility. That way they could see how each volunteer team's results compared with the pros’ results for the same piece of land.
We've only started hearing the term “citizen scientist” recently, but the concept is much older. Originally there were only citizen scientists: people like Leonardo da Vinci, William Herschel, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, who had other means of support (such as royal patronage, family fortunes, farming, politics, or playing church organ) and studied science because they wanted to and could. It's only fairly recently that “scientist” became a distinct, generally recognized profession for which people could train and in which they could reasonably expect to find regular employment. It's even more recent that much scientific research became so complex and dependent on expensive equipment that only people with years of specialized training and skill in writing grant proposals could do it. Eventually that tendency became so pervasive and pronounced that most people assumed that all science was like that.
Through it all, though, amateurs continued to make important contributions in some fields. Astronomy, for instance: most professional astronomers are concentrating so hard on specific objects in tiny regions of the heavens that they don't have time to scan the whole sky for unexpected anomalies that might turn up at any time or place—so most new comets have been discovered by amateurs. Studies of changes in bird populations depend heavily on observations by large numbers of recreational (but often highly skilled) birders. Recently SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has been greatly expanded by enlisting large numbers of “real people” to let otherwise unused time on their computers be used to sift through potential signals.
It's now becoming apparent that the nonspecialists are potentially valuable sources of information in many other fields. The rationale for using them in our plant survey applies, for example, in a great many environmental areas, where we urgently need to understand what's going on in very large, complex systems, and there simply aren't enough pros (or funding) to collect as much data as we need in order to do that. Which is probably why, since we first heard the term, we've been hearing quite a bit about “citizen science."
So how good is data collected that way? The main difference between information collected by “citizen scientists” and that gathered by “real” scientists is likely a greater variability in its quality. The term “citizen scientist” can be misleading in either direction, both because of the nature of the work and because of the diversity of backgrounds of the people who agree to do it. In this project we were functioning solely as data collectors, and that's just the beginning of science; somebody else was doing the analysis to try to determine what the data meant. And we ranged from “real” scientists working outside our usual specialties, to people with no scientific background beyond what they got in grade school a long time ago, supplemented perhaps by occasional articles in more recent news media.
This disparity poses a bit of a practical problem in a project like ours, which a wide range of people come into for a wide variety of reasons. (It's less of a problem for amateur astronomers and ornithologists because they have self-selected themselves for interest in those fields and in many cases spent years developing skills at a practically professional level.) For the “evaluating-citizen-science-as-a-method” aspect of our study, our orientation and debriefing sessions included not just plant identification and an introduction to the project plan, but several questionnaires designed to measure people's knowledge about and attitudes toward science generally, before and after the project. For some of us, who've been working in the sciences one
way or another for decades (e.g., I'm a physicist currently editing Analog and Joyce is a medical technologist working in a research lab), these questionnaires were genuinely tedious. We felt as if, after spending years earning advanced degrees and professional certification and then using them, we were suddenly being forced to take fifth-grade general science tests. On the other hand, we know from conversations among some of our colleagues that many of the questions asked were really things they hadn't thought about before. For us, this too was educational: a reminder most scientists probably need from time to time of just how little they can for granted about their fellow citizens’ understanding of what they do. And since scientists depend on their fellow citizens for support in a multitude of ways, that's important.
And it does not necessarily imply that the volunteers without much scientific background were less important to the project. Probably most of the volunteers, ourselves included, were less good at what we were doing than the experts running it would have been. Neither Joyce nor I claim to be a botanist, and while I think we did a pretty good job of learning those plants and recognizing them in the field, I don't doubt that we overlooked a few that our project leaders would have seen at a glance. So yes, the data collected by “citizen scientists” probably aren't quite as good as those collected by experts in their field. But there are a lot more of us than them, and we face a lot of really big problems. For many of those, data collected by volunteers, even if less than perfect, are a lot more valuable than no data. So I foresee that in the years to come, more and more of “us” will be needed, if only to help the pros decide where to concentrate their efforts.
Copyright (c) 2007 Stanley Schmidt
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Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXVII, No. 4, April 2007. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST# 123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription for $43.90 in the U.S.A. and possessions, in all other countries, $53.90 (GST included in Canada) payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec. Canada Post International Publications Mail. (c) 2007 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.
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Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—H. G. Wells
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TRIAL BY FIRE by Shane Tourtellotte
Extraordinary shocks lead to extraordinary temptations....
I
The lab was in a quiet, controlled tumult. Subjects had been flowing in and out of the scanning room all day, and Lucinda Peale hadn't been out of the monitoring booth for a good five hours. She was going on inertia today, the inertia of years of doing work she had believed in.
They were scanning the last of the violent criminals on their volunteer list, filling in gaps of their knowledge of the structure and function of such brains. The team had been doing such scans for seven years, and for the last five had been treating violent pathologies and other conditions with neural overlays. Knowing the patterns of nerve connections and chemical signals in an unhealthy brain allowed one to impress those unhealthy areas electromagnetically with a pattern known to be healthy.
As much as they knew, and as practical as their knowledge proved, the brain was still profoundly complex, with more subtleties the deeper one looked. Their lab, and those at half a dozen other universities, had not charted the whole territory yet. They certainly wouldn't finish the job today, but they might answer a few more questions.
Dr. Leonard Urowsky shared the booth with Lucinda, sitting at the far end of the console. He adjusted one monitor to trace dopamine and noradrenaline release in the orbito-frontal cortex, as Dr. Dreher in the scanning room talked a subject through memories of a particularly grisly crime. He began to sag with fatigue.
"Just one more after this,” Lucinda whispered.
"Oh. Good, Dr. Peale.” He rubbed his lined face, getting a little energy back. “Then we can finish this report and have it for the committee on Friday."
The project had been politically charged from the outset. Altering minds, constructive as it could be when the minds were diseased, still held terrors. Politicians and ethicists feared its potential misuses, usually meaning any uses they disapproved of. The public saw it as a version of brainwashing. “Mind-wiping,” they called it, though “mind-cloning” was a popular alternative.
She and colleagues had spoken before state boards and legislative committees often in the past. This time, though, it went beyond California, all the way to Washington and the House Science Committee. The research team was sending its full ethics sub-group to testify: Urowsky, Dreher, and Pavel Petrusky. Dr. Petrusky had arranged the testimony, with his usual political skill.
Lucinda was not going. In her darker moments, she felt that Pavel had also arranged that with his usual political skill.
Urowsky spoke again. “And make sure to send us the results of tomorrow's synesthesia work. We can show—"
Pavel Petrusky opened the door. His eyes barely touched Lucinda before going straight to Urowsky. “Ah, Pavel,” Urowsky said, “how did the procedure go?"
"Very well. The patient should be awake now, and Dr. LaPierre will be there to check her cognition. I needed to get back for these last scans."
Urowsky looked at the main monitor, where Dreher was showing in another manacled, orange-suited man. “Last scan. Please, sit.” Petrusky put himself neatly between Urowsky and Lucinda, never turning his eyes left to her. “I was just reminding Dr. Peale to send the synesthesia data ahead to us in D.C."
"Oh, absolutely.” He took the briefest look at Lucinda. Pavel had always lobbied for study in areas away from violence and insanity, things that would taint their work with judgmentalism. “We need to let the committee know all we've done, and can do. It's an important opportunity."
He gave her another sidelong glance, and she could tell he didn't mean that in the strictest professional sense. His ideas of the social, and even political, uses of overlay were far different from hers. Pavel treated the field as engineering, with the human brain as a complex mechanism wh
ose workings should be adjusted and perfected. And he had his own definitions of perfection.
There had been a power struggle within the team, one Lucinda had lost. Pavel had gained unspoken control over the program at Berkeley, and its agenda. The testimony in two days would be the fruit of his labors.
Pavel and Urowsky were talking softly among themselves. “Fortunate we're only losing two weekdays to travel and the hearing,” Urowsky said.
"I knew it would be more convenient for us this way,” Pavel said. “It also sets up the issue perfectly for the weekend cycle of news analysis. People will be thinking about overlay on our terms for once."
Lucinda wanted to bolt. She bit her tongue and concentrated on signs of hyperactivity in the amygdala to keep herself in her seat. Soon enough, the work was done. “I'll organize the scan files,” she told Urowsky.
"Yes, thank you,” he said absently. His attention was still with Pavel. Urowsky led the overlay project in title. Lucinda wondered whether he knew yet who led it in fact.
She retreated to her office to get that work done. Moments later, there was a knock. “Sam."
"Come in."
Sam Jeung slid inside. He looked down the hall both ways, then shut the door. “It's all set. We should have five dual-casting outlets, a couple radio, a couple print. The news conference will be in the courtyard, or the lobby if the weather's bad."
Lucinda frowned. “I had hoped for more."
"You don't need more to make a big media splash. This is enough for full propagation.” He paused in his headlong discourse, almost a full second. “If you mean you hoped for more team members walking out, you could still approach Barber. She might go."
"And if Kate doesn't, she'd expose us early. The whole plan's predicated on maximum impact, striking right after the testimony. We have to play it safe here.” She took her own pause, holding up a hand to keep Sam from rushing onward. “Speaking of that, you don't really have—"
Analog SFF, April 2007 Page 1
