Bibliometria

Por cá a bibliometria ainda "só" afecta as avaliações dos centros da FCT, e não sei muito bem como se passam as coisas nas áreas menos propensas a essas contas.

Mas no Reino Unido, onde as questões da avaliação (das pessoas, das instituições, dos produtos e serviços) não são despicientes, a bibliometria vai passar a ter muito peso na renovação de contratos e na progressão na carreira dos docentes universitários.

Vem mesmo a tempo, portanto, o relatório da International Mathematical Union, "Citation Statistics". Transcrevo do sumário, sem mais comentários:

This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using "simple and objective" methods is increasingly prevalent today. The "simple and objective" methods are broadly interpreted as bibliometrics, that is, citation data and the statistics derived from them. There is a belief that citation statistics are inherently more accurate because they substitute simple numbers for complex judgments, and hence overcome the possible subjectivity of peer review. But this belief is unfounded.

• Relying on statistics is not more accurate when the statistics are improperly used. Indeed, statistics can mislead when they are misapplied or misunderstood. Much of modern bibliometrics seems to rely on experience and intuition about the interpretation and validity of citation statistics.
• While numbers appear to be "objective", their objectivity can be illusory. The meaning of a citation can be even more subjective than peer review. Because this subjectivity is less obvious for citations, those who use citation data are less likely to understand their limitations.
• The sole reliance on citation data provides at best an incomplete and often shallow understanding of research—an understanding that is valid only when reinforced by other judgments. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgments.

[...]We hope those involved in assessment will read both the commentary and the details of this report in order to understand not only the limitations of citation statistics but also how better to use them. If we set high standards for the conduct of science, surely we should set equally high standards for assessing its quality.

Encontrei um! ENCONTREI UM!

Afinal sempre há economistas ecológicos. Pelo menos um, mas de peso: Herman E. Daly.

Foi economista sénior do Departamento de Ambiente do Banco Mundial, tendo escrito um livro intitulado Steady-State Economics" em 1977 (!). Outros livros cujos título dão uma ideia do seu pensamento incluem Valuing the Earth (1993), Beyond Growth (1996), e Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics (1999). Sim, aceito ofertas, e entretanto vou ler os seus artigos. Mas não sem deixar uma figura auto-explicativa dos limites para o crescimento (achei delicioso o futility limit):

O que é ser humano?

Foto de Michael "Nick" Nichols

Jane Goodall foi enviada para a Tanzânia em 1960 por Louis Leaky, o conhecido paleoantropólogo. Sem nenhuma formação académica relevante (era uma secretária que gostava de animais) esta britânica de 26 anos iria fazer uma série de importantes descobertas que revolucionariam a forma como na altura se perspectivava a posição humana no reino animal.

Até essa altura, a capacidade de construir e utilizar ferramentas era considerada exclusivamente humana, de facto aquilo que separava os humanos dos (restantes) animais. Quando recebeu o relatório em que Jane reportou a sua descoberta de que os chimpanzés usavam ferramentas (preparavam ramos e os utilizavam para extrair térmitas dos seus buracos), Leaky telefonou-lhe:

"Agora temos que redefinir ferramenta, redefinir homem, ou aceitar os chimpanzés como humanos."

E é por esta terceira hipótese que Jane optou, e eu com ela.

Crueldades

Uma horrível descrição de uma cena de caça do século passado, mas que podia ser de hoje se ainda houvesse esta abundância.


Listen to the sensitive but uneducated Bill House [...] talking about what it was like to shoot egrets [garças] for their feathers. Hunters, he tells us, always shot early in the breeding season when the plumes were coming out "real good," and a man with a Flobert rifle could stand in a big rookery and pick off birds as fast as he could reload:

A broke-up rookery, that ain't a picture you want to think about too much. The pile of carcasses left behind when you strip the plumes and move on to the next place is just pitiful, and it's a piss-poor way to harvest, cause there ain't no adults left to feed them young and protect 'em from the sun and rain, let alone the crows and buzzards that come sailing and flopping in, tear 'em to pieces....

It's the dead silence after all the shooting that comes back today, though I never stuck around to hear it; I kind of remember it when I am dreaming. Them ghosty trees on dead white guano ground, the sun and silence and dry stink, the squawking and flopping of their wings, and varmints hurrying in without no sound, coons, rats, and possums, biting and biting, and the ants flowing up all them white trees in their dark ribbons to eat at them raw scrawny things that's backed up to the edge of the nest, gullets pulsing and mouths open wide for the food and water that ain't never going to come. Luckiest ones will perish before something finds 'em, cause they's so many young that the carrion birds just can't keep up. Damn vultures set hunched up on them dead limbs so stuffed they can't hardly fly.

Such a description, quite early in the book, sets the stage for the often senseless and violent deaths to follow, while also registering for our twenty-first-century ears the horror surrounding this steady destruction of a species:

A real big rookery like that one the Frenchman worked up Tampa Bay had four-five hundred acres of black mangrove, maybe ten nests to a tree. Might take you three-four years to clean it out but after that them birds are gone for good.

An Epic of the Everglades
By Michael Dirda