Category: Items of Interest

The Publishing Engine

Am I unreasonably excited that my favorite webcomic, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, is going to be published as a book? No. For those of you familiar with the funny, hyper-referential, quirky work of Sydney Padua, my excitement would be considered entirely reasonable in its grandiosity.

Now it my great pleasure to announce that this humble comic has been elevated to the PANTHEON one might say, actually, one would definitely say, because Pantheon Bookshas heard your pleas (a lot more effectively than I have it seems) and we are going to do Lovelace and Babbage: The Papery Thing with Ink On!

If you were wondering what to get me for my birthday next year. . .

Infinite love

Quoth The Frogger: “Mommy, I love you more than I love you.”

Which is much more poetic than saying “I love you infinity”. Technically, it is the same thing.

The success of Guess How Much I Love You testifies to the fact that accurate mathematical expression of emotion is far less poetic and profitable than off-beat, grammatically dubious phrases.

Biomedical science… is there a problem?

The big news around the ‘net today, as far as the life sciences are concerned, is the dramatic increase in the number of papers that are retracted, as documented (yet again) in this paper, and told in this NY Times piece by Carl Zimmer. (Check out some of the buzz here and here and here.) This story is primarily about the biomedical sciences, and so the question naturally arises, is the biomedical science community dysfunctional?

I’m going to say yes – but perhaps not in the way you think. As someone at a vulnerable career stage, whose future career path depends on the health of the biomedical community, I’ve experienced some of the problems in the community, and so I will offer you my opinion based on anecdotal evidence, for whatever it’s worth:

The biomedical community is dysfunctional because it has increasingly become a system based on a rigged lottery. Continue reading “Biomedical science… is there a problem?”

Career holding pattern

Carl Zimmer in the NY Times:

In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent.

I’ve always had a hunch that this was true…

Retracted Science and the Retraction Index:

A plot of the journal retraction index versus the impact factor revealed a surprisingly robust correlation between the journal retraction index and its impact factor (P < 0.0001 by Spearman rank correlation) (Fig. 1). Although correlation does not imply causality, this preliminary investigation suggests that the probability that an article published in a higher-impact journal will be retracted is higher than that for an article published in a lower-impact journal.

The charitable interpretation is that high-impact journals are willing to take higher risks in exchange for a bigger splash. And of course there is a not-so-charitable interpretation… a focus on big splash and getting a big scoop trumps scientific rigor.

(h/t io9)