Partially Attended

Arecent blog post on Action Potential pointed me towards the neuroscience peer review consortium. Theyhave a description here about theconsortium and a list ofparticipating journals. I have no doubt that this is the future of peerreview. At the moment the peer review system is horribly inefficient forpapers that get rejected. Rejection from a journal can occur because a paperis crap, but often it happens for many other reasons, because the journalhas already met it's pagequota, the journal is publishing a set of special issues on another topic,the editors of the journal are interested in shifting the focus of thejournal, the topic of the paper is slightly away from the main interests ofthe editorial board, the paper is good, but just gets edged out by a set ofbetter papers that come in. ... (more)

I just posted the below as a comment on a blog, but it was good so I thoughtI'd repost here What is open science and what is the system? Well I am sure that there aremany viewpoints on this, so I am going to just put forward one here. At a fundamental level 'the system' is how we ascribe credit toparticipation in science. The credit is converted to grant money, thedollars keep the food on the plate. ... (more)

Below follows a long comment that I posted to an article on O'Reilly Radar about patents. The original blog post is here There is an interesting compliment to the patent system in the domain of assigning credit to ideas, which is the academic peer-review system. The inventor of the idea in the case of academia is the author. The equivalent to the patent office is the editorial board of the academic journal that the author submits to. ... (more)

I wonder how long it's going to be before we see a children's TV series setat Hogwarts. I predict within the next 5 years. tags: Harry Potter, TV ... (more)

Thistutorial delves into pythonic ways of coding. I'm learning from it. tags: python, hoto, tutorial ... (more)

I got the email below a few days ago: Hello to you all,Please forgive the bulk email! We hope all is well with you.We will be opening our new restaurant on December 1st. Please visit our newwebsite at www.bayou-berlin.com You are able to book hotel reservations onour site using our corporate discount rate. We hope to see you sometimesoon,All the best,Steve and Brandon Earlier this year I was on holiday in Nerja in the south of Spain. ... (more)

I'm a Sci-Foo lurker, as I didn't make the cut to go this year, but I'vebeen lapping up the news seeping out of the meeting. So far my favoriteTwitter post about the meeting comes from Richard Ackerman's feed: "Timo and Tim are trying to kill us. Doesn't cult brainwashing start withsleep deprivation? Fun so far, anyway" ... (more)

Yesterday one of the guy's at the office interviewed the producer of TheSimpsons. As a result he had to do quite a lot of research yesterday onSimsonalia, and decided to use the make your own simpson avatar tool on theSimpsons movie page to make all of us our own simpson character, this iswhat I would look like if I were a simpson. Tags: simpsons, avatar IansSimpson. ... (more)

From the Guardian today, a group of ultra-right wing MEP's were unable toform a group within the European Parliament owing to internal xenophobia. http://www.guardian.co.uk/farright/story/0,,2211167,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12 ... (more)

Thistech blog article is a charming description of how human behaviour seemsto have spread the name of a particular wireless node across america. Ithink it is a lovely example of the spread of an idea driven by simpleself-interest. ... (more)