Thermodynamic diagrams for free
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 […]
How science progresses (a cynical viewpoint)
May 29, 2011 Filed under Blog, Featured, Humor, Potpourri, Presentations
This is one of the most hilarious movies I’ve seen about how science works (or doesn’t work, as the case may be). Although it is a discussion between two physicists, you can imagine your favorite subdisciplines in your own field interacting this way.
Are students prepared for university-level writing?
Kim Brooks has this essay “Death to High School English” published in Salon.com. She details her experiences with finding students who don’t know the basics of writing: composition, structure, thesis statements, grammar, punctuation, and plagiarism. My own experiences here in the UK with final-year environmental-science majors were remarkably similar to hers, so the problem isn’t […]
The Increasing Number of Open-Access Publishers: A Good Thing?
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 […]
The most prestigious journal in the world
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 […]
Giving proper credit to Monin and Obukhov
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 […]
Upsidence?
Dave Mechem (University of Kansas) and my Manchester colleagues have been telling me about a new term that has been adopted from geology into atmospheric science: upsidence. My understanding of upsidence is that the term means ascent in an environment with otherwise large-scale descent. The term is used to refer to an “upsidence wave”, a […]
Teaching Scientific Communication Skills – BAMS article
My experiences teaching a scientific communications laboratory course based on Eloquent Science is described in a recent article published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 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 […]
Checklist for Statistics
I came across this statistical checklist from Nature. It details some common errors that many authors make in their manuscript, and Nature encourages authors to check this list before submission. I thought some were pretty obvious, but, then again, maybe people need to hear the obvious anyway. http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/Statistical_checklist.doc Nature also has encourages additions to this […]
Who wrote the first abstract in a scientific journal article?
I have often wondered how we came to the modern scientific article. One question that I had that I researched, but was unable to turn up anything on was who started the boldface and italics in the reference format for journal volume number and journal name (varies by discipline and by journal). One question that […]
