Organized Science and Its Dirty Little Secret

If there is a recognized deity in the world of organized science, one of its names is “Peer Review”. Before results of any serious scientific investigation are published in a reputable journal, an associate editor farms out the submitted paper to “peers” of the hopeful author(s) (in a few cases the editor may reject a submission without review). Much of the time this process works fairly well; the reviewers provide an evaluation of the would-be contribution: its novelty (has somebody else has produced the same result?), evidence (and further testability), coherence (do the data support the interpretation), and citation of appropriate sources, and makes a recommendation: accept as is (rare), accept with modifications (more common), or go back to the salt mines and here’s why (most common). The editor may solicit numerous reviewers and from the typically one or two returned reviews makes his or her decision on the submission.

Jean Francheteau: RIP

I was saddened to hear of the death of geophysicist Jean Francheteau. While he made many, many contributions in geophysics, he was perhaps best known for his coauthorship of Plate Tectonics with Xavier LePichon and Jean Bonnin. A list of many of his publications can be found here.


I became familiar with his dissertation, Paleomagnetism and Plate Tectonics, while I was still in graduate school, and made use of his quaternion complex matrix formulation for plate rotations and compositions (more completely documented beyond the description in Plate Tectonics). I made use of the formulation in my first published paper, "A method for finite plate reconstructions, with applications to Pacific‐Nazca Plate evolution," and a number of subsequent papers. I recommended (but didn't require) Plate Tectonics for a graduate class on the subject I taught for many years.


RIP.

Faulty Lines - Geoscience Community Adoption?

In fairness to the media I admonish in the previous post, a contemporary search for "fault lines" produces a link to a mainstream governmental geology site which uses the term. It's a curious development, perhaps representing a desire on the part of some geoscientists, at least those employed on the USGS's public relations side, to cater to mainstream media.

Faulty Lines

In light of a newly published pop-economics book, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, here is a redacted (***) and edited (...) message I sent to a well-known blogger a couple of years ago:

I'm a working geophysicist (for close to 40 years in industry and academia), among other things (and faithful reader of *** -- good work!). Please allow me a nerdy quibble. 

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Can be found at: http://plate-frames.blogspot.com/