Here comes the second comment on the Annual Edge Question 2008.
When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s theology.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.
What have you changed your mind about? Why?
I would have done it in a different way: Continue reading Edge Question wrong
I have been asked to give an evening lecture about science and religion here at a local congregation. At the first moment, I did not want to do that, but finally promised to take up this challenge – there are so many heroes where I could get some inspiration. I remember having read a wonderful paper by an author but could not recall his name. Continue reading In memory of Peter Lipton
One of the main reasons that there is not so much progress in asthma and COPD research is a missing good animal model. Despite some caveats such a model could tremendously push a field. A new editorial in the AJRRCCM now believes there could be such a model: Continue reading A first mouse with asthma?
It is always a tough decision when to start a research project. The research question is often obvious for a long time but when should you go for it? Or continue waiting if somebody else is doing all this work and write Continue reading Lazy option is best
Thr r stll tw rmrkbl pcs frm th lst yr hr n my dsk – n s bk rvw by Dr. Jrm Kssrr (th frmr NJM dtr) nd th scnd s bt bk by Dr. Rchrd Smth (th frmr BMJ dtr – s nly Dr. Rchrd Hrtn frm th Lnct s mssng frm ths lst f th mst nflntl mdcl dtrs drng th pst dcd).
Wht mks m wndr tht bth dtrs hv rthr crtcl ccnt n phrmctcl thcs. Dr. Kssrr s wrtng n pn Mdcn Continue reading thcs n phrmctcl cmpns
There are still two remarkable pieces from the last year here on my desk – one is a book review by Dr. Jerome Kassirer (the former NEJM editor) and the second is about a book by Dr. Richard Smith (the former BMJ editor – so only Dr. Richard Horton from the Lancet is missing Continue reading Ethics in pharmaceutical companies
Sorry about the many abbreviations here – I promise to switch back to science with the next blog entry. When I had to install iTunes last year Continue reading iPOD goes TC
This is about Gaggle that I came across only very recently in a new Cell paper on predictive models of transcriptional control. It is not about Google; is it really true Continue reading Gaggle not Google
This morning I discovered numerous entries in Pubmed by 1948 (and 1949). Seems that the topics were quite the same as in 2008 ;-) a somewhat disturbing fact, yea, yea. Continue reading Hey what’s going on here?
Here is a tool that will automatically rename the most recently downloaded PDF with the most recently entered Zotero entry. You may call it directly from the browser by setting a link in the toolbar to file:///c:/system/test.000 while setting the file association for 000 in the Content tab to the location of ZoteroRename.exe.
ZoteroRename.zip includes the source perl script including a compiled windows version.
|wj_ZoteroRename.txt|
Here is what the University of Cologne published recently
An der Medizinischen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln ist unter den Voraussetzungen des § 36 des Hochschulfreiheitsgesetzes des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen baldmöglichst eine W 2-Professur für Theorie und Ethik des Gesundheitsmanagements zu besetzen. Die Bewerbung setzt voraus, dass sich die Bewerberin / der Bewerber gleichzeitig bei der DFG um eine Heisenberg-Professur bewirbt. Die Berufung erfolgt dann vorbehaltlich der Bewilligung der Heisenberg-Professur nach den Richtlinien der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Eine Zwischenevaluierung nach drei Jahren ist vorgesehen und entscheidend für die Üernahme in den Etat der Hochschule nach fünf Jahren.
It says that can try to get a salary from the German Science Association which will be honored in turn by a position at the medical faculty. When writing this post I did a typing error, writing slavery instead of salary, yea, yea.
Over the last weekend I worked on redesigning my workflow of handling PDFs while taking into account the many new capabilities of the Zotero literature management. Continue reading A workflow for managing PDFs with Zotero
A paper in J Drug Target shows a nice property of a cell line
Eight repeats of the glucocorticoid response element (GRE) were cloned into […] vector, and the resulting recombinant plasmid […] was stably transfected into the 293E cells. The stable and sensitive cell line […] was selected by dexamethasone (DEX) using fluorescent microscopy and fluorescence-activated cell sorting. […] The expression of GFP4 in the cell line was under the control of GRE, up-regulated by DEX treatment and down-regulated by phorbol myristate acetate (PMA).
as it could be nicely used for the steroid activity of any compound.
That was even worth a note in Nature News that finally a free journal-ranking tool entered the citation market. The attack came by an article in JCB (“Show me the data“), the response was weak. Sooooooo we have a choice now which of the metric indices is being the worsest way to rate a researcher (if you can’t understand otherwise what she/he his doing).
BTW individual IF reporting was never intended but ISI but is now common use in many countries. I don´t believe (as Decan Butler explains) that there is so much difference between popularity and prestige – but there is a big difference between popularity and quality.