Theodor Fontane is characterizing Adolf Menzel:
Gaben, wer hätte sie nicht.
Talent, Spielzeug für Kinder.
Erst der Ernst macht den Mann,
Erst der Fleiß das Genie.Skills, everyone has quids.
Talents, toys of the kids.
Seriousness makes a man,
dilligence the genius span.
sorry for my translation ;-)
Over and over I am flooded with emails like
Let me introduce myself to you. I am xxxxxxxxxx, completed M. Sc Micro Biology. At present I am working as a research Fellow in Centre for xxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxxxx, India. How are you sir? I am your student. How can I mean, in January 2005 you come to India. At that time your engaged some class to us in xxxxxxxxx College, Axxxxxxxx. Presently I am working on Genetics of “xxxxxxxxxxxx†under the esteemed guidance of Dr. xxxxxxxxxxx and Dr. xxxxxxxxxx. I am very much interested to do PhD. Herewith, I am sending my curriculum Vitae as attachment to your kind perusal. I assure you, I shall work with at most devotion and sincerity to give you satisfaction and also I am confident that I can lead PhD successfully with the experience I gained during my research work at xxxxxxxxx. Given a chance I will prove my caliber.
Continue reading Want to work with you
The most recent Edge issue cites
… Kahneman’s view that “the administration’s unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one’s losses—the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.”
as well as another one of Kahneman’s ideas Continue reading Unwillingness to face reality
There are great news – PLOS ONE now allows trackbacks that will show up close to the original article. Hopefully, this new feature will be extensively used. As Jim Giles speculated last year only the most successful researchers are confident enough to criticize others in this public way…
We have a heated debate here in Munich about the Transrapid, a magnetic monorail system that could connect Munich central station & Munich airport. It is being announced as a technical innvation reducing travel time form ~30 min down to ~5 min, however, as I would have to change trains, it wouldn´t save me anything. Instead of using it as a technical showcase – the estimated budget is ~1.8 billion € – I would certainly vote for our tax money go directly into science. German science funding agency DFG has an annual budget of € 1.3 billion only, yea, yea.
It is difficult if not impossible to foresee future research results. I am sharing the belief with many other colleagues that grant applications are largely a waste of time (in particular if most applications fail). A recent correspondence letter in Nature applauds Continue reading How to predict good research
The German portal academics has a rather long narrative about the failure of German science – and an excerpt from “Richard Münch, Die akademische Elite. Zur sozialen Konstruktion wissenschaftlicher Exzellenz, Frankfurt a.M.: Edition Suhrkamp, 2007”. Continue reading German science
This is just to promote the 10 simple rules collection. Rule #1 for reviewers “Do Not Accept a Review Assignment unless You Can Accomplish the Task in the Requested Timeframe—Learn to Say No” is what I have learned only recently. The most important one is “Write Reviews You Would Be Satisfied with as an Author”.
The ever proliferating number of review requests comes like a denial of service attack – just like hacking attacks to high-profile web servers.
Best of all – however – it is a self limiting process. There is no more editor on the phone Continue reading A denial of service attack
Yes, some scientists can think and write pretty fast while others are much slower. Software created for the Dark Web Project of the Artifical Intelligence Lab U Arizona can measure that and identify an author by Continue reading Don’t let them hear you typing
Although not so much appreciated by big companies, peer to peer technologies have a great success in sharing communities. Peer to peer might even work with mobile phones in Africa as shown recently by a Swedish company.
I wonder if peer to peer would also work. Continue reading Peer to peer publication
SPIEGEL online points to a retrospective of former SCIENCE editor Daniel Koshland on the science typologies challenge, chance and charge.
Challenge – putting the pieces together like the discovery of the DNA structure of Watson & Crick.
Charge – solving longstanding ubiquitous problems like gravity laws by Newton, a rare event.
Chance – events like the development of PCR by Mullis.
I could add cha-uvinism (ignoring previous work), cha-os (also called creativity), cha-racter (???), cha-rity (work for nothing), cha-rade (also called congresses), cha-pter (many to write), cha-lk (many lectures), cha-nge (not really), cha-mpion (a few), cha-ir (less), cha-ff (most), cha-rts (hundreds), cha-t and cha-rivari (always), yea,yea.
I had a dream tonight. I do the final revision of a paper following many months of work and submit it to an internet server. Only 30 minutes later the first science journal agent contacts me offering immediate publication. More and more offers arrive and I finally decide to hand it over to nice publishing company that will pay so much money to continue my research.
I woke up and Continue reading I had a dream tonight
Sciencesque has an anonymous update of the impact factor and peer review discussion Continue reading < I often only have time to read abstracts >
Here is a little tale that could have happened every day. An author sends a major paper to a major journal. The major journal has a major editor that asks other major reviewers before writing a major email. Continue reading An editor is one who separates wheat from chaff and then prints the chaff I