Deep thoughts and silliness

I’ve been asked to write something for the BES newsletter on double-blinding for journals. So I thought I would try out this Web2.0 thingy, so here’s a draft for you to pick over and comment on. It’s a bit too long, so most suggestions for where to cut will be welcome. Oh, and I couldn’t work out how to have multiple footnotes on the same word, but I hope you can work it out.

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A couple of quick links showing how the review process should work.
Your Review is Hereby Summarily Rejected
How to deal with a Rejection Letter
You have probably already read this one from Henry, but it’s still worth revisiting the rejection letter all editors would like to have the balls to send.
(HT for the first two, well the first from which I found the second: Chad Orzel)

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I’ve just received an email about a conference on the evolution of sex and recombination. For reason that should be obvious, the title of the email was

Conference: S#X & R#COMBINATION…Registration still open!

I guess this is also an appropriate time to point out that I’ve started a collaboration with a project on social pharmacy. I’m only doing it because I want to be invited to one of their parties.

Over the past couple of months at Nature Network, there have been a variety of discussions about good writing (these discussions seems to have started shortly after I arrived. Are they trying to tell me something?). One of the early well written papers was commended for the quality of the language, which was simple and clear, and so enjoyable to read. Unfortunately, many papers have sentences that seem to be written with a different aim: to loose the reader in a whirl of syntactic complexities before finally beating them over the head with a dangling modifier, painfully.

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A couple of years ago I read an interview with a scientist from the US. One of the things he explained was that his strategy for continuing to do research was to avoid administration. Just like we’d all like to do. What’s even more impressive was that he had worked out a strategy that worked.

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… and when you eventually publish an old posts, it keeps the date it was first saved.

In today’s Observer there is a story that will gladden the hearts of conservationists across the UK. The new way to tackle invasive species is to eat them. According to the paper, grey squirrel (the invasive American species) is the latest meat to hit the shelves. The normal methods of eradication is not going to work (well, I guess we could put poisoned peanuts in ridiculous places where no sane animal would go), so why not eat them?
The Beast agrees of course, although he wonders why we bother to burn it first. He also doesn’t understand the difference between nasty American gr*-a-*ey squirrels and good European red squirrels, which might be a problem if we asked him to help. In fairness, he has only tasted the European species.
This is an effort I can get behind, and I think it should be tried for other species too. But it might take a bit longer before someone comes up with a good recipe for cane toad.

Bora has a post up about impact factors that links to a discussion in Epidemiology. It’s the usual stuff: how awful they are because they have all sorts of problems. We all know this, but of course it doesn’t stop us all checking the IFs of the journals we want to submit to, and assiduously following our h-index (if anyone would care to cite this paper or this one I’d appreciate it. Thanks).

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Tag clouds are a neat way of summarising the common topics on blogs (the cloud on HolfordWatch is amusing, and this one for the Democratic race is neat). This week they’ve hit the science blogging world. The author of Clastic Detritus applied tag clouds to their papers. This is too neat an idea for me not to join in, so…

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I never got any further with this. I’ll post it anyway, and please leave a comment if you notice this post!