Note: I see that Stephen has beaten me to it with his post last night (does he never sleep?!?). This post overlaps with his but not totally, so I decided to put it up anyway.
Progress towards the ideal of open access continues at a dizzying pace. Continue reading
Exactly a year ago I wrote about the annual High Polymer Research Group Conference, held at the edge of the Peak District. Over the years I have watched it transform from an inward-looking cliquey organisation, where I initially sat right at the edge – a rare physicist amongst the chemists, an even rarer woman amongst the blokes – to a welcoming, i Continue reading
The open access buzz around the internet last week was all due to the announcement by senior faculty at Harvard that journal subscription prices were rising at an unsustainable rate and the call to colleagues to devote their publishing energies to open access titles.
This week Michael Eisen has written a strongly worded reality check that pours som Continue reading
Have you ever had a manuscript was accepted unconditionally without any revisions? In speaking with many scientists, it turns out that this seems to be a once in a lifetime phenomenon. Indeed, it has happened to me but once.
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was once a graduate student. Continue reading
Stephen J Gould is one of my heroes, one of my favourite scientists. One of his best books, in my opinion, is The Mismeasure of Man - which was written in part to challenge the use of IQ tests, phrenology and other ‘empirical methods’ to type people. Typing people in this manner is a dangerous game and Gould in his book very deftly ex Continue reading
Way back in May 2009, I described how being around a team of fellow grant wranglers from another department made me realise how much I miss being part of a team of peers. In my current job I’m really a team of one, responsible for all of the department’s grants and other tasks with no-one else around to learn from, bounce ideas off, or Continue reading
So as I mentioned in the final update for the regular season pool, we’re running two competitions for the NHL playoffs: a pool, in which you pick players and get points for their goals/assists/goalie wins & shutouts; and a bracket, in which you pick the winner of each series and guess how many games each match-up will run to.
The pool con Continue reading
Israel has just celebrated its Independence Day, hot on the heels of Holocaust Memorial Day. This resonates with me, as my grandparents and two aunts (infants at the time) perished in Auschwitz. The resonance increases with the idea that such gross violations of human rights should never be allowed to happen again. Never again, we say, when remembe Continue reading
I’m a fan of good quality graphs, and some just stand out. Including this one, from PLoS Biology last year:
source
It’s something to do with the reality of pervasive transcription, but frankly I don’t care.
I was amused by the throwaway comment Bettany Hughes made in her recent TV programme Divine Women about the Hindu Goddess Kali’s many arms being ideal for multitasking. Academics of all ages would benefit from growing a few more limbs, since so often it seems our jobs require us to tackle several different strands of activity simultaneously. The Continue reading
