"science publishing" entries

Four short links: 27 April 2015

Four short links: 27 April 2015

Living Figures, Design vs Architecture, Faceted Browsing, and Byzantine Comedy

  1. ‘Living Figures’ Make Their Debut (Nature) — In July last year, neurobiologist Björn Brembs published a paper about how fruit flies walk. Nine months on, his paper looks different: another group has fed its data into the article, altering one of the figures. The update — to figure 4 — marks the debut of what the paper’s London-based publisher, Faculty of 1000 (F1000), is calling a living figure, a concept that it hopes will catch on in other articles. Brembs, at the University of Regensburg in Germany, says that three other groups have so far agreed to add their data, using software he wrote that automatically redraws the figure as new data come in.
  2. Strategies Against Architecture (Seb Chan and Aaron Straup Cope) — the story of the design of the Cooper Hewitt’s clever “pen,” which visitors to the design museum use to collect the info from their favourite exhibits. (Visit the Cooper Hewitt when you’re next in NYC; it’s magnificent.)
  3. Two Way Streetan independent explorer for The British Museum collection, letting you browse by year acquired, year created, type of object, etc. I note there are more things from a place called “Brak” than there are from USA. Facets are awesome. (via Courtney Johnston)
  4. The Saddest Moment (PDF) — “How can you make a reliable computer service?” the presenter will ask in an innocent voice before continuing, “It may be difficult if you can’t trust anything and the entire concept of happiness is a lie designed by unseen overlords of endless deceptive power.” The presenter never explicitly says that last part, but everybody understands what’s happening. Making distributed systems reliable is inherently impossible; we cling to Byzantine fault tolerance like Charlton Heston clings to his guns, hoping that a series of complex software protocols will somehow protect us from the oncoming storm of furious apes who have somehow learned how to wear pants and maliciously tamper with our network packets. Hilarious. (via Tracy Chou)
Four short links: 18 October 2013

Four short links: 18 October 2013

Publishing Bad Research, Reproducing Research, DIY Police Scanner, and Inventing the Future

  1. Science Not as Self-Correcting As It Thinks (Economist) — REALLY good discussion of the shortcomings in statistical practice by scientists, peer-review failures, and the complexities of experimental procedure and fuzziness of what reproducibility might actually mean.
  2. Reproducibility Initiative Receives Grant to Validate Landmark Cancer StudiesThe key experimental findings from each cancer study will be replicated by experts from the Science Exchange network according to best practices for replication established by the Center for Open Science through the Center’s Open Science Framework, and the impact of the replications will be tracked on Mendeley’s research analytics platform. All of the ultimate publications and data will be freely available online, providing the first publicly available complete dataset of replicated biomedical research and representing a major advancement in the study of reproducibility of research.
  3. $20 SDR Police Scanner — using software-defined radio to listen to the police band.
  4. Reimagine the Chemistry Set — $50k prize in contest to design a “chemistry set” type kit that will engage kids as young as 8 and inspire people who are 88. We’re looking for ideas that encourage kids to explore, create, build and question. We’re looking for ideas that honor kids’ curiosity about how things work. Backed by the Moore Foundation and Society for Science and the Public.
Four short links: 12 March 2013

Four short links: 12 March 2013

Chrome Tricks, Sins of Journaling, Icon Font, and Sweet PD

  1. One Tab — turn tabs into lists, easily. (via Andy Baio)
  2. Deep Impact: Unintended Consequences of Journal RankThese data confirm previous suspicions: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether.
  3. Genericons — useful straightforward icon font.
  4. Public Domain Review FundraisingOver the course of our two years we’ve created a large and ever growing archive of some of the most interesting and unusual artefacts in the history of art, literature and ideas. Love the idea of some limited edition reprints of these gorgeous works!
Four short links: 5 March 2013

Four short links: 5 March 2013

Video Magnification Code, Copyright MOOC, Open Access Cost-Effectiveness, and SCADA Security (Sucks)

  1. Eulerian Video Magnification — papers and the MatLab source code for that amazing effect of exaggerating small changes in file. (*This work is patent pending)
  2. CopyrightX — MOOC on current law of copyright and the ongoing debates concerning how that law should be reformed. Through a combination of pre-recorded lectures, live webcasts, and weekly online seminars, participants in the course will examine and assess the ways in which law seeks to stimulate and regulate creative expression. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Cost Effectiveness for Open Access JournalsThis plot reveals the prestige (Article Influence score) and publication charges for open access journals.
  4. Results of SANS SCADA Survey 2013 (PDF) — Unfortunately, at this time they seem unable to monitor the PLCs, terminal units and connections to field equipment due to lack of native security in the control systems themselves. (via InfoSecIsland)
Four short links: 30 August 2012

Four short links: 30 August 2012

Decoding ToS, Impact Factors are Nonsense, Crappy Open Source Code, and Data Mining History

  1. TOS;DR — terms of service rendered comprehensible. “Make the hard stuff easy” is a great template for good ideas, and this just nails it.
  2. Sick of Impact Factorstypically only 15% of the papers in a journal account for half the total citations. Therefore only this minority of the articles has more than the average number of citations denoted by the journal impact factor. Take a moment to think about what that means: the vast majority of the journal’s papers — fully 85% — have fewer citations than the average. The impact factor is a statistically indefensible indicator of journal performance; it flatters to deceive, distributing credit that has been earned by only a small fraction of its published papers. (via Sci Blogs)
  3. A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (ACM) — Today’s Unix/Posix-like operating systems, even including IBM’s z/OS mainframe version, as seen with 1980 eyes are identical; yet the 31,085 lines of configure for libtool still check if and exist, even though the Unixen, which lacked them, had neither sufficient memory to execute libtool nor disks big enough for its 16-MB source code. […] That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT “professionals” who wouldn’t recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution. (Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.)
  4. History as Science (Nature) — Turchin and his allies contend that the time is ripe to revisit general laws, thanks to tools such as nonlinear mathematics, simulations that can model the interactions of thousands or millions of individuals at once, and informatics technologies for gathering and analysing huge databases of historical information.