An Update from Inside the Kitchen — Progress and Potential
After a summer full of interesting posts and time to think, a bit of reflection seems in order as we head into Fall.
How Did They Get My Email Address? The Accidental and Plentiful Supply of Academic and Scientific Contacts
The open nature of email addresses on journal sites may be feeding the email harvesting machine for academic emails. Worse, it may also be exposing these for potentially fraudulent activity.
Bury Your Writing — Why Do Academic Book Chapters Fail to Generate Citations?
Books and book chapters have a competitive disadvantage in citations, but it’s not accessibility that makes the difference — there are more reasons, and more changes needed.
Photography at One Trillion Frames Per Second — Light's Glamor Shot
A new high-speed camera has the potential to reveal the world of light in completely novel ways. This video is amazing from start to finish.
Publicity at eLife — Are Media Embargoes Part of the Plan?
eLife is beginning to accept papers, but is it proper for them to promote papers they’ve accepted without having published the final versions? What will their approach be to media embargoes?
The "Facebook Fallacy" and Whipsaw Attitudes Toward Web Advertising
Facebook’s IPO has disappointed many, but to think that it presages a complete meltdown of the online ad market is a bit of an overstatement.
Sort of Significant: Are Psychology Papers Just Nipping Past the p Value?
A new paper finds unexpected disturbances around p-value ranges approaching 0.05. Is there something going on beyond mere science?
The Importance of Substantive Editing
Publishers provide editors who do much more than proofread or copyedit. They provide editors who support authors and editors — and readers. Here’s an interview that sheds some important light.
The Reproducibility Initiative — Solving a Problem, or Just Another Attempt to Draw on Research Funds?
A new initiative seeks to solve the reproducibility problem in science, but instead seems to be creating more of a drag on research funds, ignoring the incentives of scientists, and raising barriers to its very utilization.
Is the Higher Education Bubble About to Pop?
The potential higher education funding bubble may be more likely to burst, with the LIBOR scandal revealing another weakness in the system, trends in admissions and discounting showing the effects of the recession, and American politics locked up in partisan nonsense.