This
tech blog article is a charming description of how human behaviour seems
to have spread the name of a particular wireless node across america. I
think it is a lovely example of the spread of an idea driven by simple
self-interest.
A new creationisim journal ARJ.
GRRRRRRRR
I was shopping at Lidl last weekend and saw this for sale. It might be a bit of a drastic measure, but I think it would work.
Well, OK, this is probably not news, but I guess what is interesting for me
is that this is a feature that I didn't really notice until today when I
went looking for it, and hey, though that little search box had probably
been there for weeks now, I only "saw" it today when I looked for it.
A blog post from Academic
Productivity trundled across my reader this morning in which the blog
points to a paper in which the author claims that academics
are prostitutes because they modify their papers in response to the
demands of reviewers. I got a sense frisson when I read the blog post and
some of the text that is quoted there from the paper, but then I read the
comments to the blog post, and they are very good at, if you like, pointing
out that the paper is a bit weak in it's premise. OK, so I didn't read the
paper, but it seems to presuppose that all editorial boards work in the same
way and all reviewers and equally mendacious. Academic publishing is an
activity of a community and the reviewing process, whatever it's faults, is
part of that conversation. To point out the faults in such a way as this
paper does seems like complaining about norms that are accepted and are
perhaps not actually as bad as initially laid out.
