A long post, in which you’ll have to slog or scroll through several paragraphs to get to the real question: can we navigate using fallen sticks? These days we seem to be inundated with deeply flawed scientific papers, often featuring shaky conclusions boldly drawn from noisy data, results that can’t be replicated, or both. I … Continue reading On the replication crisis in science and the twigs in my backyard
Two posts ago, I wondered about how long the average peer-review of a journal article takes to write. Most people I know reported “a few hours” as the average time, with the upper end of the range being a day or two. I emailed several journals — mostly ones that I’ve reviewed papers for or … Continue reading Review times revisited
There’s an interesting question about peer-review of journal articles that I’ve never seen addressed: How long does it take to review a paper? I don’t mean the three weeks or so between getting a request and submitting a review, but rather the time spent actually reviewing. In other words, how many hours does a reviewer … Continue reading In the future, my reviews will consist solely of one carefully picked emoji
The University of Oregon’s Research Development Services (RDS) sends a weekly email listing funding opportunities — grants, fellowships, and awards that we might be interested in. It’s a good thing to do, and each week there’s a nice variety of programs from many federal and private funding agencies. RDS might be a bit too permissive … Continue reading And the funders said, “Let there be funds,” and there were funds
Today’s illustration doesn’t have anything to do with the topic below. I made it for a ten minute talk I’ll give tomorrow, at the local “Physics Slam.” You can see the program here. Short version: Six physics faculty will have ten minutes each to explain something. The audience votes on their favorite presentation. Apparently, when … Continue reading You should appreciate the infrequency of my blog posts
I’ll finish a “real” post soon: Part 2 of my recap of a freshman seminar course on models. (I made the painting for it already!) But, since I’ve written about funding issues in science before (e.g. here), I can’t resist a small post on a proposed new NIH funding program. There is, of course, a … Continue reading Notice how I’m transferring knowledge, for free
I was thrilled yesterday morning to learn that super-resolution microscopy is the subject of a Nobel Prize this year. (Or more accurately, that Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William E. Moerner were awarded the Nobel Prize “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.”) Super-resolution microscopy is wonderful, as I’ve written before. In all its various … Continue reading The 2014 Nobel Prizes: Switched at Birth?
I came across recently (via [1]) a neat interactive graph from the US census bureau illustrating the career paths that STEM majors take: One can click on particular categories of majors, revealing for example that more than half of engineering majors end up doing engineering, but that only about a tenth of physical science majors … Continue reading Branching STEMs
As in each of the past six years, I co-organized a Physics + Human Physiology day camp for 11th graders for a week in July, in which we explored wide swathes of science and also learned a bit about how college works. (It’s part of the SAIL umbrella of camps — see here and here.) … Continue reading The ice cream and the dead people
…0.004 ! There is, these days, no shortage of metrics for quantifying scientists’ impact. Aside from simple counts of citations (i.e. how many times one’s research papers are cited by other papers), there’s the now ubiquitous h-index [1] that combines the number of papers one has published and the citations per paper, as well as … Continue reading My Kardashian index is…
The Eighteenth Elephant 