I bought a phone! Granted, it’s not the latest and greatest. I even bought it used; it was less than $70 on a certain jungle-themed shopping website. I’ll be doing some international travel soon, and it’s useful to have an unlocked, multi-band GSM smartphone. This fits the bill, and it gives me an opportunity […]
I can honestly say that I’ve never thought of myself as a flower. Perhaps that’s why an invitation to join the editorial board of a journal in “the bouquet of STM JOURNALS” [sic] doesn’t really speak to me. Or perhaps it’s because STM is on Beall’s list, and their invitation doesn’t quite ring true. It […]
This is the state of my Lync problem as of today. Yes, I changed the background. The rest looks the same. Bounce, bounce, login, crash. I never stopped to think about this before, but if you’re Microsoft, people obviously blame you for everything wrong with their computer. Dodgy hardware crashes Windows? Microsoft sucks! A pirated […]
These last few days I’ve had a few unpleasant run-ins with support for different companies. These were not the result of mean people, but of uncaring and somewhat incompetent companies. Today I’ll be mocking the software titan, Microsoft. I use Microsoft Lync a lot at work. It’s a good IM solution, and used to work […]
Straight from my gmail spam folder, the other side of the coin: solicitations for publications. Now that’s an enthusiastic Greetings!!! usually reserved for people promising me miracle drugs. Nigerian barristers tend to be more somber, which is reasonable given that they are usually informing me of the passing of previously unheard of (but very dear, […]
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You, too, can be an editor!
Part of being a scientist is curating the work of other scientists. This is called peer review. Peer review is critical to the well-being of science, because it helps ensure that the scientific record is important, correct, and has passed some level of validation before being put in front of other people. Peer review is […]
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False-Positive Psychology
Fantastic post over at Slate Star Codex on how people use statistics to cheat at science. I already gave my take on the pressures scientists face, and the culture that leads to it. I wish I had written that post, or its linked articles. Go read.
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Complexity in MEDLINE – part 1
This is my first not-a-paper publication. I wrote it in a much more conversational style, which I greatly prefer. After Randy Sheckman’s statements on journals such as Nature, Science, etc. I started wondering if there was a way to quantify what kinds of articles these journals publish. After all, the general perception (notwithstanding the allegations of […]
There’s a big debate in science about research and what to do with negative results. It boils down to more or less this: We scientists publish only positive results. There’s a lot of reasons for this, some more valid than others. The first one is that it’s hard to prove things beyond a shadow of […]
Like any modern household, we deal with piles and piles of paperwork. From the legally vital (house deed), through the hope-I-don’t-need-to-use-it (various insurance things, contracts), to the obnoxious (no-interest* balance transfer checks for credit cards). For the latter, I have a good shredder and I’m not afraid to use it. But the former poses a […]