Petitions #10 has the full details:
2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before … we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing … Continue reading Justice for Alan Turing
From a press release
Today, the open-access publisher the Public Library of Science (PLoS; www.plos.org), announces the release of an expanded set of article-level metrics Continue reading First major publisher releases article metrics
Overfunding of research seems to be a largely neglected area. Getting money twice for the same project (or doing something different than being in the application) seems to be the “creative” Continue reading How to cheat with timesheet
A very useful Firefox add-on is the Search Bar Plugin which allows any given search field on any given website to be moved to Continue reading A useful FF search add-on
NG has a remarkable retraction – one of the few that are ever published which is a fact that that may otherwise rise severe doubts Continue reading So few retractions
If you are writing some kind of online diary your mood is already surveilled by wefeelfine.
However, if you are an allergic patient, you may be interested in a new project of the German Pollenstiftung that runs an online pollen diary. We have pollen counts for a long time but we do not know so much about thresholds and individual variation.
Continue reading We feel good
As I could now get an update for my quicktext plugin, I finally switched to Thunderbird 3. I like the new clean interface and the immediate access to many folders.
The only question that I have – is there any way to force the “new email window” into a tab?
What’s possible and what’s unlikely to be possible: sportsscientists.com discusses the recent watt burst of the TdF winner at the Verbier climb. Continue reading VO2max of 99.5ml/kg/min and 440 Watt?
A new Science paper is worried about internet neutrality:
… Researchers who support “network neutrality” have become worried that the Internet may lose its innovative edge. They are concerned that control could be shifting from the edges of the Internet toward the service providers at the center, which would allow the providers to have “gatekeeper” capacity and would contradict the Internet’s “end-to-end” principle . This core tenet states that control over information flows should take place, to the extent possible, at the end points of the network…
While politicians are still debating on that issue, Continue reading Internet neutrality
Only recently I learned about the “mere exposure” effect (author’s website) / paper)
Participants named landmarks shown on photographs. In two experimental conditions, the photographs also unobtrusively showed posters depicting the logo of either a lemon candy or a peppermint candy; in a control condition, no posters were shown. Later participants could choose between the two products as a reward. Participants who had been exposed to the lemon logo and control participants chose the lemon candy more frequently, whereas for participants who had been exposed to the peppermint logo, this preference reversed: they chose the peppermint candy more frequently.
I think that’s a great study. I am wondering, however, about the impact on current science. Continue reading Mere exposure effect, peppermints and your next experiment
As I am currently in London, here comes only a quick link for all R users. It goes to crantastic, a community site for R packages where you can search for, review and tag CRAN packages.
Yea, yea.
Finally, here is a technical solution to a proposal that I made here earlier
Ok, we are aware that recovery is always possible with cut & paste into other applications or printing a text -so we may better think about some watermarked graphics. “Don’t ever say anything on e-mail or text messaging that you don’t want to come back and bite you.”
NI has an editorial on hyping research
Although these attention-grabbing headlines might help sell papers and increase traffic to newspaper websites, such reporting is irresponsible to the public and to science in general. Even if the article itself is more balanced, it must be remembered that many readers never get much beyond the headline. The net result is the public comes away with much misinformation.
Continue reading Attention grabbing headlines