Blogs

Several Nature Network bloggers stick their teeth into politics this week. In a rousing call to arms, Jennifer Rohn makes the case for a better system of apprenticeship in science. The post should be read in full by everyone, but here’s the gist of Jennifer’s proposal:

In my dream, Phase I, all lab heads train only 3-5 students over their career lifetime – just enough to replace the current generation of lab heads, with a few extra in case of attrition. These students would be the very best that the universities produce, and competition would be fierce. A few more of the lab positions would be held for post-doctoral training of those few students. But the bulk of research staff in the labs of the world would be made up of permanent, professional scientists. These would be paid a lot more than ‘apprentices’, but you probably need far fewer of them to get the desired results.

Cobi Smith, meanwhile, is alarmed to discover a significant gap in the political knowledge of Australian postgraduate students:

I started by asking “how many people here know what representative democracy is?”, from which I expected to move swiftly on to the same questions about deliberative and direct democracy, explaining the latter two. To my horror, only the staff and about 2 students raised their hands.

Both Stephen Curry and Austin Elliott provide eloquent updates on the Simon Singh libel case, which Stephen attended.

Publication and referencing was another theme on the blogs this week. Martin Fenner examines a few reference management tools (with handy, colour-coded functionality table) and commented on the merits of traditional and non-traditional means of finding important papers. Nicolau Werneck takes a close look at the number of research papers, and citations to those papers, from different countries. Like Martin, he also includes some interesting graphics.

Forums and Groups

For a summary of all the most active and interesting forum discussions, see this recent update.

And finally…

The daily commute is an experience we all share, whatever country or field of science we work in. Several Nature Networkers had challenging interruptions to their routine this week. Heather Etchevers spent five times as long getting into central Paris thanks to vandalism, sparking off a whole series of unenviable anecdotes in the comments. Joe Hill might have the solution to cutting through the traffic jams and rail delays, though: hop on a sub-orbital space plane, a mode of transport that might also reap huge rewards for research.