I reckon we all are. At least to some extent, from time to time. How at the end of the day could one avoid that while flipping through a stack of very important printouts spat out from a common room printer and which have not been ever collected ?!
(That much for astrophysicists being environmentally conscious btw ...) And well every so often your eyes inadvertently stay too long on a page, longer than it really is necessary to get the point that this is not your printout. Not yours beyond any doubt. It seems to me that this "common room printer feature" is rather generally recognized given a number of cover sheets with a provocative "top secret" marked on them in big bold letters (yet another testament of this environmental consciousness mentioned above ...) and which seem to remain unwaveringly popular in so many labs and departments around the world. And then every so often you do surprise somebody, or, worse, get surprised, in your local printer room. Well, happens ...
It is not that those, who print and do not care should be absolve of any collusion here (and transgressing on the environment). Even less so, if they happen to print a potentially ground-breaking internal note of a billion euro experiment. But then there is still a difference between reading one extra line of a printout, which you already know is not yours, and scrutinizing it in a detail worth a peer-reviewed journal referee and then share that with a world hidden behind a nickname ...
This is what seemed to have happened in the famous by now, and two months old, Higgs detection case ... I bet you all heard or read about that, so it will not be a spoiler if I say right away that no they have not got'em yet ... Now I am sure that that specific blog post I refer to, and in which the author recounts his/her surprise in finding an ATLAS collaboration internal note on a common printer at Fermilab and then briefly reports on its content, was the only channel by which the news got out to the external world. Most likely not, But what really ticked me off, and still does after those two months, which have passed since, is that matter-of-fact tone of the post. Well, the printer story is recounted, as at least it seems so, solely to boost the credibility of the post, and even while typing those couple of hundred words contained in it, it does not seem that a thought crossed the writer's mind that it may not be actually a right thing to do. Well, old-fashioned I may be, but it does not sound right to me ... to say the least.
And yep I have heard the tax-payer money argument ... and that of sharing the excitement of doing science with the general public in real time ... or of freedom of information acts etc ... And I do of course see areas where these amply apply ... and where some times they may need to be even enforced. But an internal, collaboration note is, what it is, an internal collaboration note. They have a right to be wrong, often too far-fetched, badly written, and, at least to uninformed eye, misleading, just because they are supposed to be that ... internal, part of the research process, not its final and public finale. To undermine that so flagrantly as in this case is to compromise one of the most basic means of communication typical of some of the biggest, and thus necessarily geographically-distributed collaborations. And would that be in the best interest of the tax-payers' money and the public interest in science ?! I doubt that.
Well a crusader I am not ... (just a ranter I guess) so my personal upshot from all of this, is just to run faster a floor up to grab my printouts before anybody else ... ;-) Not that anybody rushes to post or even read them anyway ... ;-( Maybe I need a "top secret" cover page ...
No comments:
Post a Comment