Blogging community of computational and mathematical oncologists

A few weeks ago, David Basanta reached out to me (and many other members of the mathematical oncology community) about building a community blog together. This week, to coincide with the Society for Mathematical Biology meeting in Montreal, we launched the blog. In keeping with the community focus, we have an editorial board of 8 people that includes (in addition to David and me): Christina Curtis, Elana Fertig, Stacey Finley, Jakob Nikolas Kather, Jacob G. Scott, and Jeffrey West. The theme is computational and mathematical oncology, but we welcome contributions from all nearby disciplines.

The behind the scenes discussion building up to this launch was one of the motivators for my post on twitter vs blogs and science advertising versus discussion. And as you might expect, dear reader, it was important to me that this new community blog wouldn’t be just about science outreach and advertising of completed work. For me — and I think many of the editors — it is important that the blog is a place for science engagement and for developing new ideas in the open. A way to peel back the covers that hide how science is done and break the silos that inhibit a collaborative and cooperative atmosphere. A way to not only speak at the public or other scientists, but also an opportunity to listen.

For me, the blog is a challenge to the community. A challenge to engage in more flexible, interactive, and inclusive development of new ideas than is possible with traditional journals. While also allowing for a deeper, more long-form and structured discussion than is possible with twitter. If you’ve ever written a detailed research email, long discussion on Slack, or been part of an exciting journal club, lab meeting, or seminar, you know the amount of useful discussion that is foundational to science but that seldom appears in public. My hope is that we can make these discussions more public and more beneficial to the whole community.

Before pushing for the project, David made sure that he knew the lay of the land. He assembled a list of the existing blogs on computational and mathematical oncology. In our welcome post, I made sure to highlight a few of the examples of our community members developing new ideas, sharing tools and techniques, and pushing beyond outreach and advertising. But since we wanted the welcome post to be short, there was not the opportunity for a more thorough survey of our community.

In this post, I want to provide a more detailed — although never complete nor exhaustive — snapshot of the blogging community of computational and mathematical oncologists. At least the part of it that I am familiar with. If I missed you then please let me know. This is exactly what the comments on this post are for: expanding our community.

Twitter vs blogs and science advertising vs discussion

I read and write a lot of science outside the traditional medium of papers. Most often on blogs, twitter, and Reddit. And these alternative media are colliding more and more with the ‘mainstream media’ of academic publishing. A particularly visible trend has been the twitter paper thread: a collection of tweets that advertise a new paper and summarize its results. I’ve even written such a thread (5-6 March) for my recent paper on how to use cstheory to think about evolution.

Recently, David Basanta stumbled across an old (19 March) twitter thread by Dan Quintana for why people should use such twitter threads, instead of blog posts, to announce their papers. Given my passion for blogging, I think that David expected me to defend blogs against this assault. But instead of siding with David, I sided with Dan Quintana.

If you are going to be ‘announcing’ a paper via a thread then I think you should use a twitter thread, not a blog. At least, that is what I will try to stick to on TheEGG.

Yesterday, David wrote a blog post to elaborate on his position. So I thought that I would follow suit and write one to elaborate mine. Unlike David’s blog, TheEGG has comments — so I encourage you, dear reader, to use those to disagree with me.

Four stages in the relationship of computer science to other fields

This weekend, Oliver Schneider — an old high-school friend — is visiting me in the UK. He is a computer scientist working on human-computer interaction and was recently appointed as an assistant professor at the Department of Management Sciences, University of Waterloo. Back in high-school, Oliver and I would occasionally sneak out of class and head to the University of Saskatchewan to play counter strike in the campus internet cafe. Now, Oliver builds haptic interfaces that can represent virtually worlds physically so vividly that a blind person can now play a first-person shooter like counter strike. Take a look:

Now, dear reader, can you draw a connecting link between this and the algorithmic biology that I typically blog about on TheEGG?

I would not be able to find such a link. And that is what makes computer science so wonderful. It is an extremely broad discipline that encompasses many areas. I might be reading a paper on evolutionary biology or fixed-point theorems, while Oliver reads a paper on i/o-psychology or how to cut 150 micron-thick glass. Yet we still bring a computational flavour to the fields that we interface with.

A few years ago, Karp’s (2011; Xu & Tu, 2011) wrote a nice piece about the myriad ways in which computer science can interact with other disciplines. He was coming at it from a theorist’s perspective — that is compatible with TheEGG but maybe not as much with Oliver’s work — and the bias shows. But I think that the stages he identified in the relationship between computer science and others fields is still enlightening.

In this post, I want to share how Xu & Tu (2011) summarize Karp’s (2011) four phases of the relationship between computer science and other fields: (1) numerical analysis, (2) computational science, (3) e-Science, and the (4) algorithmic lens. I’ll try to motivate and prototype these stages with some of my own examples.

Poor reasons for preprints & post-publication peer-review

Last week, I revived the blog with some reflections on open science. In particular, I went into the case for pre-prints and the problem with the academic publishing system. This week, I want to continue this thread by examining three common arguments for preprints: speed, feedback, and public access. I think that these arguments are often motivated in the wrong way. In their standard presentation, they are bad arguments for a good idea. By pointing out these perceived shortcoming, I hope that we can develop more convincing arguments for preprints. Or maybe methods of publication that are even better than the current approach to preprints.

These thoughts are not completely formed, and I am eager to refine them in follow up posts. As it stand, this is more of a hastily written rant.

Preprints and a problem with academic publishing

This is the 250th post on the Theory, Evolutionary, and Games Group Blog. And although my posting pace has slowed in recent months, I see this as a milestone along the continuing road of open science. And I want to take this post as an opportunity to make some comments on open science.

To get this far, I’ve relied on a lot of help and encouragement. Both directly from all the wonderful guest posts and comments, and indirectly from general recognition. Most recently, this has taken the form of the Canadian blogging and science outreach network Science Borealis recognized us as one of the top 12 science blogs in Canada.

Given this connection, it is natural to also view me as an ally of other movements associated with open science; like, (1) preprints and (2) post-publication peer-review (PPPR). To some extent, I do support both of these activities. First, I regularly post my papers to ArXiv & BioRxiv. Just in the two preceeding months, I’ve put out a paper on the complexity of evolutionary equilibria and joint work on how fibroblasts and alectinib switch the games that cancers play. Another will follow later this month based on our project during the 2016 IMO Workshop. And I’ve been doing this for a while: the first draft of my evolutionary equilibria paper, for example, is older than BioRxiv — which only launched in November 2013. More than 20 years after physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists started using ArXiv.

Second, some might think of my blog posts as PPPRs. For example. occasionally I try to write detailed comments on preprints and published papers. For example, my post on fusion and sex in proto-cells commenting on a preprint by Sam Sinai, Jason Olejarz and their colleagues. Finally, I am impressed and made happy by the now iconic graphic on the growth of preprints in biology.

But that doesn’t mean I find these ideas to be beyond criticism, and — more importantly — it doesn’t mean that there aren’t poor reasons for supporting preprints and PPPR.

Recently, I’ve seen a number of articles and tweets written on this topic both for and against (or neutral toward) pre-prints and for PPPR. Even Nature is telling us to embrace preprints. In the coming series of posts, I want to share some of my reflections on the case for preprints, and also argue that there isn’t anything all that revolutionary or transformative in them. If we want progress then we should instead think in terms of working papers. And as for post-publications peer review — instead, we should promote a culture of commentaries, glosses, and literature review/synthesis.

Currently, we do not publish papers to share ideas. We have ideas just to publish papers. And we need to change this aspect academic culture.

In this post, I will sketch some of the problems with academic publishing. Problems that I think any model of sharing results will have to address.

EGT Reading Group 56 – 60

Since my last update in February, the evolutionary game theory reading group has passed another milestone with 5 more meetings over the last 4 months. We looked at a broad range of topics, from life histories in cancer to the effects of heterogeneity and biodiversity. From the definitions of fitness to analyzing digital pathology. Part of this variety came from suggested papers by the group members. The paper for EGT 57 was suggested by Jill Gallaher, EGT 58 by Robert Vander Velde, and the second paper for EGT 60 came from a tip by Jacob Scott. We haven’t yet recovered our goal of regular weekly meetings, but we’ve more than halved the time it took for these five meetings compared to the previous ones.

EGT Reading Group 51 – 55 and a photo

The evolutionary game theory reading group — originally part of the raison d’être for this blog — has continued at a crawling pace. Far from the weekly groups of its early days in 2010, we’ve only had 5 meetings since my last update on March 26th, 2015 — almost 11 months ago. Surprisingly, this is a doubling in pace, with the 46 to 50 milestone having taken 22 months. To celebrate, I wanted to update you on what we’ve read and discussed:

EGT Reading Group 46 – 50 and a photo

Part of the original intent for this blog was to accompany the evolutionary game theory reading group that I started running at McGill in 2010. The blog has taken off, but the reading group has waned. However, since I still have some hope to revive a regular reading group, I have continued to call occasional journal discussion meetings that I organize as the EGT reading group. These meetings are very sparse and highly irregular, not the weekly groups that they were in 2010. For example, since my last update on May 28th, 2013, around 22 months have passed with the group meeting only 5 times. Still, these 5 meetings bring us to a milestone and hence an update on the papers we’ve read:

A detailed update on readership for the first 200 posts

It is time — this is the 201st article on TheEGG — to get an update on readership since our 151st post and lament on why academics should blog. I apologize for this navel-gazing post, and it is probably of no interest to you unless you are really excited about blog statistics. I am writing this post largely for future reference and to celebrate this arbitrary milestone.

The of statistics in this article are largely superficial proxies — what does a view even mean? — and only notable because of how easy they are to track. These proxies should never be used to seriously judge academics but I do think they can serve as a useful self-tracking tool. Making your blog’s statistics available publicly can be a useful comparison for other bloggers to get an idea of what sort of readership and posting habits are typical. In keeping with this rough and lighthearted comparison, according to Jeromy Anglim’s order-of-magnitude rules of thumb, in the year since the last update the blog has been popular in terms of RSS subscribers and relatively popular in terms of annual page views.

As before, I’ll start with the public self-metrics of the viewership graph for the last 6 and a half months:

Columns are views per week at TheEGG blog since the end of August, 2014. The vertical lines separate months, and the black line is average views per day for each month. The scale for weeks is on the left, it is different from the scale for daily average, those are labeled at each height.

If you’d like to know more, dear reader, then keep reading. Otherwise, I will see you on the next post!

Why academics should blog and an update on readership

It’s that time again, TheEGG has passed a milestone — 150 posts under our belt!– and so I feel obliged to reflect on blogging plus update the curious on the readerships statistics.

About a month ago, Nicholas Kristof bemoaned the lack of public intellectuals in the New York Times. Some people responded with defenses of the ‘busy academic’, and others agreement but with a shift of conversation medium to blogs from the more traditional media Kristof was focused on. As a fellow blogger, I can’t help but support this shift, but I also can’t help but notice the conflation of two very different notions: the public intellectual and the public educator.