Deep thoughts and silliness

(this was meant to nicely complements a post at Nature’s Journal Club
, but it looks as if we’ll have to wait for that one to appear in public)
One of science’s great secrets is that the most influential scientist of the early 20^th^ century was not Einstein, but R.A. Fisher. Einstein did some cool stuff in physics, but confined his science to this area. On the other hand, Fisher managed to father both modern statistics and evolutionary biology. the latter work also had a huge effect on agriculture and breeding (over and above his working out how to do field trials properly).

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The theme at NN this week has been popularity and trying to get attention. Always one to charge after a bandwagon, demanding to be let on board, I thought I would chime in.
Even better, there are two bandwagons I can try not to be pushed off. Whilst he’s enjoying himself in Norfolk, Bora’s blog has leapt into action and produced a post on posters. This is too good an opportunity to miss, so I’m reprising the most popular post from my previous place.

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The big news in scientific publishing this week is that the NIH has gone open access. I’m sure that almost everyone on the scientific blogosphere will be saying how wonderful it is that research has to be made public, and the advocates for open access will be happy. So, I’ll take a slightly contrary position. Whilst open access is certainly good in principle, will it work so well in practice? I’m not 100% sure, I can see some problems.

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Is it wrong to just nick something off Ben Goldacre’s del.icio.us feed? Anyway, I’ll have to look at this later. Apparently it contains footage of vocal chords being distorted by their owners singing in a variety of styles. All to prove that Lemmy isn’t destroying his vocal chords.
What I want to know, though, is what is the effect on your vocal chords of being asked to scream after having an endoscope stuffed down your throat?

I’m taking a course in university pedagogy, and last week we were discussing how to use the web in our teaching. As well as being introduced to software like Moodle, we also discussed using blogs and wikis in learning.
Now after reading Jennifer’s post, I’ve also started musing about using these tools in research.

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NZ man ‘used hedgehog as weapon’
Whenever I read stories like these, I’m torn between amusement and feeling sorry for the poor animal. Next time, use a hairbrush, mate. That way you’ll avoid fleas too.

Because I’m generally interested in such things, I’ve read a reasonable amount of philosophy of science. Most of it has made some sort of sense, but there always seemed to be something missing. But I think I can see where part of the problem is.
last week, John Wilkins posted his delight that physicists are taking up stamp collecting. At about the same time, Andrew Gelman posted on some comments by Irene Pepperberg saying that testing hypotheses is over-rated. This got me thinking.

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I just found this in The Best of Beachcomber), whilst looking for something else:

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Technorati Profile

I’m not sure whether to be worried about this or not. For some odd reason, although I’m based at the University of Helsinki, I’m actually employed directly by the Academy of Finland. They largely leave me to my own devices/have as little to do with me as possible (delete as appropriate), so I was a bit surprised to get an email from them yesterday.

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