Although it is wordier than warm or cold, the meaning is precise.

I have these nifty Eloquent Science 4-GB flashdrives for sale. They cost £10/€15/$15 if you see me in person, or add £3/€5/$6 for postage. The drive comes preloaded with lots of great resources:

• Excerpts and outtakes from Eloquent Science
• 21 direct links to online resources
• 61 articles specifically designed to help develop your scientific communication skills

Contact me eloquentscience at gmail for more information.

Upon packing up my house in Oklahoma, I discovered a small stash of Skew T–logp thermodynamic diagrams that I had saved when Charlie Crisp cleaned out his office at NSSL. (I also have a huge stash of blank U.S. surface maps, in case anyone is interested in them.)

Geraint Vaughan at Manchester had been lamenting that he had a hard time finding blank thermodynamic diagrams. Here are some good sources that I found online.

From Grant Petty (University of Wisconsin) [high-quality PDF]:
http://www.sundogpublishing.com/AtmosThermo/Resources/SkewT.html
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skew-T_log-P_diagram

If you prefer a tephigram, try Maarten Ambaum’s site (University of Reading) or the Wikipedia page.

Or, if you absolutely have to have a Stüve diagram, here’s one at Wikipedia.

Brooks describes that at least one problem contributing to the poor quality of the student writing is that students are doing less writing in K-12 and it is not being rigorously graded. Should we instructors be spending more time on the basics and less time on “the fun stuff”? Here, Brooks describes examples of “the fun stuff”: short film adaptations from The Scarlet Letter, class discussions, peer reviewing—all of which the students prefer, but doesn’t seem to substantially impact the quality of their composition and writing skills.

Brooks doesn’t offer any firm conclusions on how to improve the system, merely raising the point that maybe students don’t get rigorous enough training in writing in high schools. Thus, they come to college or university unprepared.

As a specialist in your field of research, we are pleased to invite you to contribute to our forthcoming Open Access book, XXXXXX.

The book will be published by XXXXXX, Open Access publisher of books and journals in the fields of science, technology and medicine.

XXXXX is a pioneer in the publication of Open Access books, with a collection currently comprising over 400 books written by more than 25,000 renowned authors. The complete collection is available for free full-text download on our reading platform, www.XXXXXXX.com.

This will be a reviewed book that will cover the latest research in the field, and will serve as a free, open access resource for scientists and researchers around the world. The book will be edited by an experienced scientist in the field and written by a team of international experts.

Have you received such an email? If so, congratulations on being a “specialist” or an “expert” in your field. Your qualifications were probably recognized by a search-engine mining the titles of recently published articles.

No doubt that open access has done a lot of good for science: making more of the science that we publish available to everyone for free. There is no free lunch, however. Someone must pay for the publisher to copyedit, layout, and host the published articles online indefinitely. The cost of publishing open-access articles is usually borne by the author, through his or her research grants. (Not all scientific disciplines have abundant research grants to draw upon, so this is one of the limiting factors to wider open access for all sciences.)

And, there is the secret to success. Publishers looking to make money have embraced open access. Use the existing reward structure of science (scientists need a place to publish their work), stroke their egos (publish in an edited open-access book along with other experts), get volunteer peer-reviewers to improve the submissions, and collect the money for publishing the book from the authors.

In the last year, I’ve received spam from no less than 7 new publishers, inviting me to contribute to their open-access journals or books.

• Global Meteorology.
• International Journal of Geosciences.
• Atmospheric and Climate Sciences.
• Natural Science.
• Atmosphere.
• Journal of Atmospheric Dynamics, Journal of Atmospheric Structures, Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry, Journal of Atmospheric Phenomena (all published by Mehta Press).

Thu hubris of Mehta Press to squat on all four of these titles is amazing. What do you think distinguishes Journal of Atmospheric Phenomena from Journal of Atmospheric Structures?

That at least some of these publishers are only in it for the money is confirmed by this report of a totally made-up scientific article being accepted for $800. It is also interesting that Wiley, a commercial publisher, felt obliged to post something about the affair on their blog.

Friends, it may look good, it may stroke your ego, but I would suggest being cautious about publishing your work in these fora. Choose existing journals supported by professional societies that you belong to. Choose existing journals that have good reputations and reach the audience that you want. Contribute to open-access journals and books that are edited by respected members of your discipline and have a clear plan with a known table of contents.

Which all goes to prove something that I’ve argued for some time now: No matter how bad your paper is, you can always get it published somewhere.

Caleb Emmons, Professor of Mathematics at Pacific University, is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Universal Rejection. The Web site of the journal promotes the advantages of the journal.

• You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.

• There are no page-fees.
  
• You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).
  
• The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. Merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.
  
• You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.
  
• Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission.
  

Often in the literature, you will hear about the Monin-Obukhov length (30,400 results in google today) and Monin-Obukhov similarity theory (9520 results in google today).

Monin-Obukhov similarity theory is the correct term.

But, the length L should only be referred to as the Obkhov Obukhov length, as correctly stated in the AMS Glossary and on Wikipedia.

(Image of Prof. Andrei Sergeevich Monin from P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences)

In Eloquent Science (pp. 96–97), Mark Stoelinga discusses the introduction of new scientific terminology. His essay arose out of a discussion the two of us had about how bad terminology would get into the literature (sometimes by authors who seemed intent on always giving a new name to something that didn’t necessarily need a new name). Then, these terms would be almost impossible to get rid of. His four points:

1. Use existing terminology whenever possible.

2. Follow existing customs and conventions.

3. Terms must be scientifically accurate, precise, and descriptive.

4. Try to get terminology right the first time, and avoid subsequent changes.

So, if you agree with the above four points, is introducing a new term upsidence really needed?

Schultz, D. M., 2010: A university laboratory course to improve scientific communication skills. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 91, 1259–1266, ES25–34.

Download the article here, along with its Electronic Supplement.