Blog networks' problems links
I've collected several links over the past few days to people thinking about the role of blog networks in the science blogome. Several essays worth reading if you care about meta-navelgazing blog...
View ArticleDown with supplements
The editor of the Journal of Neuroscience, John Maunsell, has announced that the journal will no longer permit authors to add "supplementary" material to their papers [1]. I've railed against...
View ArticleAre the human sciences "busted"?
From Opinionated Bastards, a doleful critique of the human sciences: "Are We Busted, Irrevocably?" Almost four decades have gone by, with perhaps as many major revisions in Chomsky’s views on language....
View ArticleLag times of biological invasions
A biological invasion occurs when a species rapidly colonizes a new geographical area. The new area is often very far from the regions considered to be part of the species' native range. Well-known...
View ArticlePeer review fixes
An article in The Scientist runs through a slew of new approaches to peer review: "I hate your paper." A handful of other journals have taken a different tactic altogether to tackle the problem of...
View ArticleCalifornia quashes student gene testing at UC-Berkeley
LA Times: "UC Berkeley adjusts freshman orientation's gene-testing program." Where "adjusts" means the state's Public Health Department blocked them from reporting any test results to individual...
View ArticleMaking a Hawking
Cosmos posts a long biographical retrospective from Stephen Hawking about his life and work. A lot of it will be review for people well-read on the history of cosmology -- but I hadn't realized this:...
View ArticleSauna cooking
Everyday Biology has some science following on the tragic sauna competition. People even voluntarily expose themselves to much higher temperatures (70-80°C) in saunas. Which raises an interesting...
View ArticlePlagiarism season
It's that time of year again, when newspapers start reminding us that cheating and plagiarism happen. "Lines on plagiarism for students blur in the digital age" “If you are not so worried about...
View ArticleSink Australopithecus!
Dennis Etler has been going great guns on his blog, Sinanthropus. Last week's article claiming cutmarks on A. afarensis-aged fauna from Dikika (Australopithecus afarensis used stone tools) got Dennis...
View Article"Why do I need a big Web site to benefit from this?"
Kent Anderson: "Do you really need all that website?" We reflect site-centric thinking when we do usability testing, for instance. I’ll bet that most of your usability testing has been about the site,...
View ArticleDrilling down career choices
Gretchen sends this link: "Seven rock-solid careers from the Stone Age. A little slide show with some recent anthro-stories, including: "The holes were so perfect, so nice," study co-author David...
View ArticleAnthroSource sleeps furiously
Savage Minds' crew has been discussing the future of publishing in the American Anthropological Association recently. Rex Golub compares Open Folklore to AnthroSource: How has OpenFolklore gotten on...
View ArticleShoe ecology and invasive species
On the topic of invasive species, here's one about algae spreading worldwide on the soles of hip waders: "Fly Fishers Serving as Transports for Noxious Little Invaders". “We people are clearly the...
View ArticleTime to revise the mtDNA timescale?
Krzysztof Cyran and Marek Kimmel (2010) have presented a revised set of estimates of the human mtDNA most recent common ancestor (MRCA). It's an interesting theoretical paper, written for the purpose...
View ArticleLong run paper trail
Gordon Watts writes an interesting story of tenure review and the productivity of a long-lasting experiment in particle physics: "200 Run 2 Papers from DZERO." Let's just say that the journal cuts off...
View ArticleHauser update
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on an "internal document" from the Marc Hauser investigation: "Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard". The Chronicle story begins by detailing how...
View ArticleMigration thinking
Murray Cox and Michael Hammer have a short commentary piece in the current BMC Biology, titled, "A question of scale: Human migrations writ large and small" [1]. They review a few recent papers...
View ArticleExperts are usually wrong
Do high rejection-rates perversely make some journals more likely to be wrong? That's the question that occurred to me, reading a column by David Freedman ("Why experts are usually wrong"). Freedman,...
View ArticlePubMed at 20 million
Twenty Million Papers in PubMed: A Triumph or a Tragedy? That’s a lot of data and it’s growing at a rate of about one paper per minute (on average). A full list of "triumphs" and "tragedies" at the...
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