For me, one of the more appealing aspects of open access publishing is that by making costs transparent it could stimulate competition between publishers and generate innovative solutions to drive down prices.
Today sees the launch of one such innovation: a new open access platform for life and medical sciences called PeerJ.
Exam marking being much on my mind, as discussed in the last post, I was thinking about the way we annotate the scripts as we mark. The practice I am familiar with (although I have no idea how standard this is, even across Cambridge) is to use red ink for first marking and green for second. This approach has the advantage it removes all ambiguity Continue reading
Guilty. Not guilty.
The moment in the courtroom when a verdict is delivered is a moment of high drama, potentially a life-changing decision for the accused.
Continue readingWhat happens to someone who is “swallowed up” by work commitments? You start to imagine–or think you do…
The departmental hallway, recently
I have been deluged with several signs portents signs from our Latin America Correspondent, Dr A. C. of Santiago de Chile. There’s this;
this;
this;
and, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, this;
I wonder what this is trying to tell us?
I started off this morning by thinking about, of all things, the Canadian Senate, what its uses are, and whether the country needs it or not.
But then, thanks to a couple of tip-offs via Twitter, I remembered that today, there are other things to think about, and remember, for many different reasons.
The years may be wrong, but the messages were c Continue reading
I was determined not to miss the transit of Venus today. Life’s too short. But this week I have relocated to St Raphael in the south of France for a conference on picornaviruses and had to leave my telescope behind.
Despite this lack of equipment I roused myself from bed at 5:20 and went in search of the sunrise, hoping to be able to catch th Continue reading
Being as it is the occasion of One’s Jubilee, it is perhaps fitting to grace these pages with a Royal Anecdote, however tangential. Mrs Crox has more connection with H. M. than many. Her late father was in the horse guards; kept vigil at one corner of the coffin of the late King George VI; and was one of the horse guards riding behind the Que Continue reading
