Richard Smith argues for doing away with pre-publication peer review. He makes some sound observations, but needs data to make his case. Perhaps his paper would have been published more quickly if he had sent it to a more topical journal instead of more general journals like the BMJ and PLoS One. 

Ultimately, I think we need to do away with journals entirely. Let’s just have databases.

The next step is to get a Stephen Fry emulator for the text-to-voice feature.

This is pretty much what I study.

Source

Since it’s initial publication in 1962, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been cited 48,341 times. That’s about once every 9 hrs for 49 yrs.

I am a big fan of Google. I use Gmail and Docs all the time, as well as Google Scholar, YouTube, News, Profile, and Search (the site and filetype limiters are very useful). I also have a history of being less than pleased with Facebook. I do not like that their default is to use a non-secure connection, to hand out my information to third-parties, and to change important settings without adequately informing me. I’ll provide citations later - I’m writing this quickly on borrowed WiFi.

So, although I never used Buzz, I was excited for Google+. I like that it is starting as invitation-only; it reminds me of GMail and Voice - two great products - and makes me think that Google is really taking its new venture more seriously.

Several things right off the bat:

1. Great user interface. Very clean. Great color scheme. It took Google+ to make me really how much I dislike Facebook’s colors.

2. It is a little strange that I cannot send a person a message the way I’m used to doing on Facebook. Maybe I can and just haven’t realized yet. More likely, Google wants users to send emails through GMail. If so, it would be nice to see an abridged version of GMail in Google+ so I could easily message a user.

3. It is also a little strange that I cannot post from my own profile. I’m used to doing that on Facebook, and it seems like I can only post from the main page.

4. I love that Google uses HTTPS instead of HTTP. Security is always a plus for me, and it’s nice that Plus is always secure.

5. Some guy with whom I am not acquainted added me to one of his circles. This bothered me a lot. I was in Facebook mode - people I know should friend/follow/add/circle me, not strangers just interested in what I have to say. Or is that not true? Maybe this is more like Twitter in that you can get followed by just about anyone. This is something I will have to consider in more depth.

6. I wonder if there will be a groups setting a la Facebook. Setting up a market may also be worthwhile.

7. I like the +1 section - basically a publicly-viewable bookmarks page - but would like better organization and searching tools for it.

8. Photo integration is terrific. Picassa is a great tool, but I have never been a big fan of the online album sharing feature. I use the desktop tool a lot. I have Flickr too and also did not really get into it. I use Facebook’s photo albums fairly frequently though, so I think Google+, by integrating Picassa and its terrific desktop software, is really going to get me here.

9. A Blogger connection might be worthwhile. Tumblr and Twitter too.

10. I really like that Google gets that life is more complicated than friend/not-friend. Being able to set up different circles is nice. Facebook does this to some extent through restricted profiles, but it is not as clean as Google.

11. Being able to switch between circles when looking at posts (that is, I can look at Family and then switch to Professional Acquaintances. I do not have to look at everyone at once) is nice. Twitter does this with lists, but not as cleanly as Google+.

I am pleased with Google+ and look forward to more of my friends, family, and acquaintances getting on. It will be nice when people stop posting on Facebook that they are also posting on Google+.

A thought: is Google becoming the alternative choice? Android is the big alternative to iPhone. Google+ is definitely going to be the big alternative to Facebook. Voice is the alternative to Skype. Docs is an alternative to Dropbox (and Microsoft Office and OpenOffice). This is an interesting trend. With Facebook teaming up with Microsoft, I can imagine that more and more people will use built-in Bing for searching (it is halfway decent). It could be that just by number of searches, FaceBing will start to eat up Google. Powerful searching will probably stay with Google, but for little things, it is possible that FaceBing may overtake Google.

I mean, theoretically.

When I was a child and my family went out to eat, a common game was to race to find the first typo in the menu. In high school, when a student made a grammatical mistake in an announcement at assembly (e.g., using ‘i.e.’ when he or she should have used ‘e.g.’, or, more commonly, using ‘myself’ instead of ‘me’), the meeting would stop and the headmaster would give a brief lecture on grammar. In college, I was a tutor and had to deal with some interesting spelling and grammar choices.

So, when I had to email professors at graduate schools to ask them if they would be interested in taking me on as a student, one of my main anxieties was caused by the advisor/adviser controversy. You can tell I’m serious about spelling and grammar because I promoted what is really more of a confusion to a full-blown “controversy”.

Purdue University has a nice blurb about the controversy here. Their advice (or is it advise?) is to do whatever your institution mandates. They deferred to the Purdue Marketing Communications Editorial Style Guide. For those of us - prospective students, for example - who are not sure if our institution has such a guide, here’s a helpful trick. Google “advisor site:InstitutionURL”, and see how many hits you get. Do it again, substituting ‘adviser’ for ‘advisor’. Here are my results:

site:mcgill.ca adviser  - about 4,470 results

site:mcgill.ca advisor - about 23,400 results

I ended up going with ‘advisor’.

Dear Delicious Day-Old Sushi,

Please do not kill me.

Thanks.

Love,

Alex

(or, in a more stereotypical format:)

dear delicious day-

old sushi please do not kill

me thanks love alex

It would be nice if there were less surprise over the fact that women play video games, but this is still an interesting article. I’m glad to see CNN covering video games.

In his 2.5-star review of The Green Lantern, Roger Ebert makes a sad observation: “This is a comic-book movie… We don’t really expect subtle acting or nuanced dialogue.” 

We should expect at least that. There are wonderful writers and actors working today, there are amazing special effect technologies, and there are skilled directors who know how to use those effects as a tool and not as a crutch. There’s no reason we can’t have great comic book movies. Look at The Dark Knight.

Here’s the reason we don’t often have great comic book movies: we’ll see your movie, even if it stinks. We’d be happier if you gave us The Dark Knight, but if we end up with The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, we’ll be satisfied. Studios are motivated by money, so they’re satisfied too.

I don’t see this ever changing, so I guess this is just a frustrated rant.