For those who love reading and writing books…
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore won the Oscar for Best Animated Short last night. Enjoy!
The politicization of the scientific publishing process
February 25, 2012 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing
On one topic, Congress seemed to be moving in the right direction. Over the past few years, emphasis was placed on making the research that taxpayers funded open access—in other words, free for all to view. According to a recent article by Wired, a bill called the Research Works Act introduced by Reps Carolyn Maloney […]
A letter from the frustrated author of a journal paper
February 9, 2012 Filed under Blog, Featured, Humor, Publishing
Paul Roebber sent me this hilarious letter written by a frustrated author to the Editor. Enjoy! Glass, R. L., 2000: A letter from the frustrated author of a journal paper. The Journal of Systems and Software, 54, 1. [PDF] Image from http://lightsallaround.wordpress.com/author/jackieleasommers/
The decreasing number of studies with negative results
February 8, 2012 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing
When I lived in Oklahoma, Chuck Doswell used to lament to me that it was difficult to publish null cases in meteorology (for example, when something was forecast to happen, but didn’t). Later, when talking to Roseanne McNamee at the University of Manchester, she lamented the same. There are even several journals for negative results: […]
Even the University President gets rejected
From the weekly update by University of Manchester President and Vice Chancellor Dame Nancy J. Rothwell, DBE, FRS: I had some bad news on the research publication front, my research group had a great paper rejected by completely unreasonable referees – they were obviously biased – or at least we think so. More work to […]
Collaborative research
Matt Bunkers forwarded me this article from the New York Times about collaborative research in science and how social networking and other collaborations are resulting in new scientific progress at a faster rate. I had seen the Michael Nielsen quoted in the article speak at the University of Manchester back in September. It was an […]
Best Practices for Numerical Weather Prediction Studies
The late Tom Warner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research just published an article entitled “Quality Assurance in Atmospheric Modeling”. You may not get it from the title, but this is a powerful paper that lays out 14 steps for improving modeling practices. All students and users of models need to read this paper […]
Plain English Campaign gets it wrong
In almost all cases, I support the Plain English Campaign, who aim to improve the readability of government documents, corporate letters, web sites, and other forms of communication. In their 2011 Golden Bull Awards, however, the Plain English Campaign got it dead wrong. The UK Met Office won an award for ‘empowering people to make […]
Scientists Behaving Badly
Fabrication of data, plagiarism, theft, retraction, image duplication, destruction of property, and death. These are the results from the Top Science Scandals of 2011, as determined by The Scientist magazine. (Thanks to Dave Topping for pointing this out.)
Monkey See, Monkey Do
December 19, 2011 Filed under Blog, Featured, Presentations
In writing my book and questioning the “standard” approach that people have used to give scientific presentations, I have often wondered if people stick to convention because that’s all they’ve seen. They see an outline slide or a meaningless “thank you!” slide and think, “Yeah, that’s the way to do it right.” The question is […]
