Booed for Keeping Speakers on Time
February 3, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Presentations
I was session chair at a recent meeting. The meeting was running behind, and they crammed a speaker from the morning session into mine, effectively taking away my 15 minutes of free discussion time at the end. Each slot was 20 minutes long, which as most experienced speakers would infer means that you get 15 […]
Time management skills: Walking
As time gets ever more precious to me and I have an increasing number of scientific articles that I want to write, I have found that I have had to develop more efficiency in my writing. Naturally, as I’ve becoming more experienced, I spent less time making the same mistakes that I did before. But, […]
Book Review: Fake Science 101
OK, it’s not strictly about communicating science, but this book was so freaking funny, I had to post something about it here. Fake Science 101: A Less-Than-Factual Guide to Our Amazing World. Here are some snapshots of the type of humor this book contains. Scientific fact: In order to save money, the Ivory Tower is […]
Review of Explaining Research by Dennis Meredith
January 16, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Presentations, Resources
I love to read books, journal articles, and magazines. During the academic semester, I have almost no time to read. I try to catch up during the summers and the Christmas break. This break was no exception, and I got to wrap my fingers around Dennis Meredith’s Explaining Research: How to Reach Key Audiences to […]
Peer review is like a box of chocolates.
January 16, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing, Reviewing
In talking with Gary Lackmann recently about my philosophy of peer review, the issue came up about how much you can push authors to submit to your will as Editor. I thought about what G. K. Batchelor said in his article in Journal of Fluid Mechanics “Preoccupations of a journal editor” that you don’t have […]
Most scientific paper retractions due to misconduct
December 23, 2012 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing
Raw Story reports that “When a biomedical study is retracted, most of the time it is because of misconduct rather than error, a report published Monday said. Two-thirds of all retractions around the world stem from acts like fraud, suspected fraud or plagiarism, it added.” The relevant paper is the Fang et al. (2012). Fang, […]
How to Prepare a Really Lousy Submission: Water Resources Research Editorial Team
Sent to me from colleagues at the University of Utah. [PDF]
How NOT to review a paper. The tools and techniques of the adversarial reviewer
A paper by Graham Cormode (2009) [PDF], sent to me by Rene Garreaud. The abstract gives you a flavor of how this paper reads…. There are several useful guides available for how to review a paper in Computer Science. These are soberly presented, carefully reasoned and sensibly argued. As a result, they are not much […]
“Utilize” versus “Use”
December 18, 2012 Filed under Blog, Featured, Uncategorized, Writing
From The Telegraph (sent to me by Jamie Gilmour): When the American writer David Foster Wallace died four years ago, he left behind the following fragments: notes towards a dictionary all of his own. Utilize A noxious puff-word. Since it does nothing that good old use doesn’t do, its extra letters and syllables don’t make […]
Wanted: Copyeditor. Inquire with God.
(From slate.com)
