An interesting piece in the Chronical of Higher Education about the least-publishable unit: the smallest chunk of research that could be written up into a paper, and why academics might choose to focus on those instead of the Big Important Paper.
Huzzah, have submitted the magnum opus to the Ministry, and am now gainfully employed in one of those fabulous postdoc things. More on the exact nature of that later. I started composing a list in my head of things NOT to say to PhD students in the final death throes of writing up, but decided … Read more
I hate the academic colon. I think it is a specious piece of punctuation that, when applied to the title of a work, cries out for abuse via the lame pun. I am the first to admit gratuitous cringe-worthy use of the colon and its licensing of the pop-culture reference/foreign phrase/alliterative list, but I want … Read more
Today I am pondering the use of the passive and active in scientific writing. I’ve seen the first person being used more frequently in journals–mainly in method sections–and the collegial “we” has become much less passive and directly related to hypotheses. Personally I approve. I see the need for the science to stand separate from … Read more
Andy Purvis‘s cheeky letter to TREE made me giggle. About the h index: it’s presumably a random number until you get more than about eight publications? Hmm. I think that possibly this is just more MeyersBriggsian pigeonholing, or perhaps it satisfies a numerological fetish that academics are too lofty to admit. Heh. I think mine … Read more
(Pretentious latin post title for the win!) The tension in academia–especially science–between communication and discretion fascinates me. On the one hand, you want to be able to discuss your ideas with as many people as possible; on the other, those ideas are your intellectual currency and you don't want them stolen or misappropriated. The publishing … Read more
Eagleton, C. & Spencer, M. 2006. Copying and conflation in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the astrolabe : a stemmatic analysis using phylogenetic software. Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A [link] Chaucer’s works seem to be the focus of what one might call literary phylogenetics. This new paper uses network methods to try … Read more
Regarding the general student reaction to the recent industrial action by the University and College Union (which I wholeheartedly endorse and therefore exempt myself from the classification in this post's title, heh) Edward Hall writes in sp!ked: This lack of solidarity within higher education was detrimental to the UCU’s quest for higher pay. The media … Read more
Today at Culture Club [1] we discussed a recent paper by Eerkens & Lipo [link], where they present a null model of copying errors in cultural transmission. One of the notions they discuss is something I learnt a million years ago in Stage 1 Experimental Psychology: Weber's Fraction, or the Just Noticeable Difference. Interestingly, they … Read more
(Everything is funnier when you reference the Ultimate Showdown) The Guardian technology blog links to EB’s response to the claims by that journal that EB was no more accurate than Wikipedia. The 20-page EB response is an exercise in the most miffed sort of quibbling, especially the appendix where they address the reviewers point by … Read more