Blogs
Post of the Week goes to birthday boy Richard Grant. He offers a trenchant rebuttal of recent comments on a Nature News article that called for peer review to be ‘universally rejected’.
The point of peer review, actually, is neither to suppress nor promote good, bad, wacky, conventional, nuclear or world-changing Ideas. The major question that peer review is designed to answer, and is best at answering, is, “Is it done right?” It’s not some vast conspiracy to keep ideas down, nor to deny lunatics a forum or grant money. It’s there to help workaday scientists (some of whom will have brilliant, paradigm-shifting Ideas) do their research, without having to wade through a Stygian morass of ill thought-out crap.
In a beautifully written post, Heather Etchevers distinguishes between lifecasting and mindcasting – using social software to interact with friends versus exchanging information for intellectual or professional purposes – and draws examples from the scientific community.
Science policy and politics were once again at the forefront of debate. The news that the British Chiropractic Association are dropping their libel case against author Simon Singh (who questioned certain medical claims made by the BCA) was heralded with joy by Austin Elliott and others (and was preceded by this account from Sara Fletcher). Austin also covered the battle going on inside London’s Royal Institution, where the ongoing wrangle between former Director Susan Greenfield and the current management came to a vote. Finally, Ian Brooks invokes the spirit of Henry V to rally support for increased postdoc funding in the USA.
Forums
For those in the UK, it’s almost impossible to escape election coverage at the moment, even on Nature Network. In the UK science policy forum, Branwen Hide has summarised the manifestos of the three major parties with respect to science and research
Nature Biotechnology’s Bioentrepreneur forum
, continues to provoke discussion in this thread concerning the recent legal ruling over gene patenting.
And Finally…
After Eva found this birthday card, the ensuing discussion turned towards a game of geek Scrabble – making words from the symbols of the Periodic Table. Richard Wintle managed this salutation:
HArPPY bIrThDy, RICHArDy P GeRaNTi
What’s the best you can do?