Google search on Elin Oxenhielm turns up 1990 hits. (About a week ago it was about 1500.)
Blog discussions on Oxenhielm began at around the end of November and has become somewhat less frequent during the last week, according to the data from Waypath buzz maker :
Elin Oxenhielm will publish a book:
I have received lots of comments on my paper, and I will publish answers to those in my upcoming popular book. This book will be about the second part of Hilberts 16th problem and my attempt to solve it. I will publish more information about this book at this web page soon, so bookmark this page if you are interested!
Oxenhielm’s homepage has recently been updated (thanks, Peter!) with information of the upcoming book.
Elin Oxenhielm has not been afraid to go out in the open on her homepage with criticism of Yishao Zhou - what tone will the book have? What possible effects will a book have on her future at the university? She is, after all, working as teaching assistant at a university department.
And what will happen with the homepage? Oxenhielm has published her rationale for setting up oxenhielm.com and publishing her (former?) teacher’s e-mail messages there: “Now I have realized that I must use this information channel to take action against these rumours.” One could imagine the homepage becoming a kind of “weapon” used by Oxenhielm in the publicity campaigning. But what form will her homepage take; it has, this far, not been very active; will she set up a blog-like regularly updated site?
We have, methinks, only seen the beginning of a trend where scientists increasingly will use the web to further their careers. We have had the ordinary homepage for quite some time - about as long as the web itself - where a scientist publish his or her cv, perhaps some preprints and a fuzzy photo of the cats or kids at home. This will change.
In contested areas we are beginning to see a new use for the webb; scientists/scholars using the homepage as a repository of arguments in a controversy. Two obvious examples are lomborg.com and anti-lomborg.com.
And in non-contested fields there will also be an extended use of the web. Just about any major scientific site - a lab, an observatory - is on the web, with material for journalists, outreach materials. Every university nowadays has a major webpresence, with press releases professionally produced. These are in turn aggregated and disseminated by boundary organizations such as EurekAlert. The press releases are boundary objects, useful for both journalists, scientists, and policy makers. Media exposure is a policy instrument.
But we also have the individuals. Some scientists will excel in the personalization of their webpresence. Media alliances has for a long time been of use to scientific entrepreneurs and they will use the web/bloggosphere in similar ways as they have in earlier times used popular science. (I’m doing it as I write …)
The use of the web by scholars will be the subject of The Boundary Works, a new blog - coming soon to a browser near you! - by that eminent scholar Alf Rehn and the undersigned. We plan to survey the use of websites by scientists. More information as it goes live.
More links to Oxenhielm discussions (the first three via Håkan Kjellerstrand, thanks!):
Also, I have now got the press release that originally was on O:s homepage. I haven’t had time for a thorough analysis yet, but spontaneously I can’t see that there is a big difference between the tone in that press release and much of the stuff that appears on AlphaGalileo, Eurekalert and similar sites. The big difference is not in the text but in the fact that those press releases as a rule are “official”: published by the university’s publicity unit, using logotype of university, “guaranteed” by the professors. A kind of peer review of press releases …
O. sent out a press release herself instead of going through the university press unit. One wonders why.
I am looking for the press release sent out by Elin Oxenhielm, but have been unable to find it. Any help appreciated!
Also, I have been scanning the web for some of the discussions of the Oxenhielm case. What aspects are people discussing? Here are some links:
(The threads at unstruct.org linked to earlier are also interesting.)
I have not linked to traditional media because I am more interested in the roles played by discourse in new/electronic media.
What is so special about the Oxenhielm case?
It is not the fallacy of the peer review system. I have a suspicion that the time a reviewer spends reviewing a submitted paper has been going downhill the last couple of decades. My only concrete “evidence” for this is that sometimes you hear scientists complain about the lack of adequate time for peer review (and the question would of course need to be studied in more detail). The number of papers and journals has been increasing. Even if 99.999 % of all papers are “correct”, the vast amount of science published today (remember, 90 percent of all scientists that ever lived are still alive) means that there are a number of faulty papers every now and then that slip through the peer review system. (And then there are the papers that aren’t outright wrong, but somewhere in the grey area, on the spectrum between pathological science and good, solid methodology.) Another suspicion I have - though I can’t back it up, it’s just a guess - is that the peer review system is not at all as fool-proof as some people seem to think. Jan Hendrik Schön kept publishing papers, many in the most prestigious of high-impact journals, for quite some time before someone became suspicious and decided to check out what was going on.
Is it the fact that it is mathematics? We could invoke good old Comte and say that maths was the first science to reach high levels of reliability. Either you convince your colleagues about the deductions or you don’t (and then it won’t be published), whereas in empirical sciences you could do all kinds of massaging of datapoints, selection of measurements &c; your peers will have to trust you on that. Therefore, a fault in peer review in maths would become all the more visible and people get all worked up.
Is it the fact that Elin Oxenhielm is young and will not be portraied by Russell Crowe when the movie is made? That could account for much of the media interest. Media is always interested in putting the “human factor” in their storytelling about academic life.
But let’s leave the media aside for a moment and instead look at two comment threads on the blog unstruct.org; here and here. There are a number of people discussing the affair there and several seem to me to be knowledgeable in the field of maths, some are really advanced: Grigori Rozenblium, professor of mathematics at Chalmers technical university is one of the writers there, another one is a PhD &c. It is, thus, not the letters column of your average daily newspaper. Topics include womens’ role in the academic system, proofs in mathematics, the peer review system &c.
These winding threads contain, among other things, comments that used to be buried in other media: letters to colleagues, e-mail, gossip over beer at conferences, discussions in workshops &c. But where do the threads at unstruct.org fit in?
Now, I suspect that you could have at least two quite distinct paths taken in the development. You could have the peer review the peer reviewers scenario. Here, scientists decide to use the force of the Net, social software such as blogs, preprint archives and what have you, to make a more or less open discussion about the quality of papers, published or un-published. You would still have peer review, but since that is obviously not always to be trusted, you would have a semi-public discussion (yes, semi-public instead of public, not because it would be locked away behind passwords but rather because ordinary citizens would not be able to understand a word) about papers and other results. The Net result would be better science through public scrutiny and an opening up of scientific practice, just like when the guys at Royal Society decided to do things in the open some 360 years ago. It would not be a world without peer review. It would be a world with a better peer review.
Or you could have the don’t rock the boat scenario. Anything that would take place outside of the classical arenas - peer review, publication, conferences, &c - would be deemed bad science. Some of the old school players among the publishing corporations could perhaps be interested in such a path.
Peter Lindberg has covered the Elin Oxenhielm case on his blog Tesugen (see also his post here) and, most recently, here. Follow Tesugen for a thorough coverage of the Oxenhielm case as it unfolds!
By now you would probably have heard about the 22 year old teaching assistant in maths (Stockholm university) that has a paper in the pipeline in the journal Nonlinear analysis. The paper was accepted for publication on October 3, the proofs has been corrected and it is now in press. It is available here.
According to sources referenced by Peter Lindberg, Oxenhielm has met with criticism from colleagues who claims that the paper should not have been accepted. Professor Grigori Rozenblioum writes to Nonlinear analysis:
Dear Editors of Nonlinear Analysis,
Probably, this was not meant to be so, but the paper by Elin Oxenhielm, on the 16-th Hilbert problem, to be published soon in ‘Nonlinear Analysis’ has caused an ‘unhealthy’ publicity here in Sweden, in various media. I have downloaded the paper and I have a very strong feeling that it was a heavy mistake to publish it in such a respectable journal.
The letter is available in full on Tesugen.
Now, what I find particularly interesting is neither the tale of the young mathematician finding something that is criticised by older, more established, colleagues nor the mechanisms in which media enters the research process. Scientific controversies played up in media is, after all, quite common, as is glitches in the peer review system. Oxenhielm’s interest in publishing a popular book about the proof - several popular maths and science books have sold a lot in recent years - is also interesting, but not unusual. The gender aspect of some of the media reporting is, alas, not unusual.
What is interesting is the role of the net.
Oxenhielms (former) teacher Yishao Zhou (she seems to have supervised Oxenhielm’s masters thesis, but not the paper for Nonlinear analysis) has published an open letter on her homepage that is quite critical. I have a suspicion that we will see something more at Oxenhielm’s homepage www.oxenhielm.com in the future, at the moment it is an empty page displaying a 403 Forbidden message. E-mail messages have been made public on the blog Tesugen. There is an interesting interface between mathematicians such as Grigori Rozenblioum and other interested people in the long debate at unstruct.org.
I guess that this will become more common in the future. We already have public preprint archives such as arxiv.org and electronic publishing has been gaining momentum for quite some time (PLoS and others). Scientists in the biomedical fields discuss questions at biologging. Will electronic publishing + public electronic discussion/blogging self-evolve to some kind of open or semi-public peer review? Or will scholars use the web for furthering their causes in controversies, such as the Oxenhielm case? Or both?
UpdateNow (11.50 am), Elin Oxenhielm’s web page is active.
Grading.
You know. Grading.
Aarrgh.
But here is a little poem by David Hildebrand. Recommended for all those graders out there.
On Monday, Wilhelm and I are off to Tullverket (the Swedish Customs) for a half day course. We will talk about the perception of danger, intelligence and forecasting, technological utopias and dystopias &c.
My startingpoint will be the Butler case. And then I will move on to Norman Bel Geddes, the Challenger disaster, and space weather.
What will the people in customs be like?
The other day, images from the CCTV at the NK department store, where foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death, leaked to the media. Until now, these images have been published in Swedish media with the face blurred.
Now, the police will publish the pictures unblurred, according to Svenska Dagbladet.
Incoming links My del.icio.us Det perfekta tomrummet