In this final post, I want to give some form of grocery list to get an idea of the reliability of scientific communication performed by general purpose media. To do this, I necessarily had to introduce some nomenclature in the previous posts, in particular about citations, type of article, structure of an article, Impact Factors, [...]
This article continues my series of three articles on how to defend yourself from bad scientific communication perpetrated by non-scientific newspapers. The first post detailed the scientific article and the mechanism of citations. In this post I will proceed detailing the peer reviewing process, and two numbers, the Impact Factor and the h-Index, to obtain [...]
April 30, 2011 – 12:00 pm
I see a lot of news announcements with new and extraordinary claims about scientific discoveries, mainly from daily newspapers or websites shown by news feeds. I think it’s time for me to present my point of view about how damaging this process is to correct scientific perception to the public. In addition, I will try [...]
Some time ago, I proposed the foundation of a Question and Answer site for Academia. Now, the Academia StackExchange has reached commitment phase, meaning that the proposal aggregated a consistent number of people who may have an interest in it, and further aggregation of active participant is sought after. You may report your interest in [...]
February 7, 2011 – 3:03 pm
As you probably recall, some time ago I proposed to associate scientific dissemination and research to a symbol. I chose this symbol to be the tulip, and I planted some bulbs. As winter will turn into spring soon, they start peeking out of the cold soil Satisfying! This year, I decided to donate my royalties [...]
December 4, 2010 – 1:54 am
As you probably heard in the news, two days ago everyone was ablaze for a mysterious announcement from NASA. Speculation started on how the new discovery would “impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Someone found a habitable planet? Found a message with Seti@HOME? Discovered the primordial soup composition? The buzz resonated and amplified at [...]
September 13, 2010 – 11:25 pm
I read with strong interest this post “How Hard Science Saves Lives” from Bente Lilja Bye at Science 2.0. I will make a very short summary for presentation purposes, but I encourage to read through her very interesting post. The point being made, shortly stated, is the argument between hard-science and soft-science representatives on saving [...]
The kind folks behind StackOverflow, a free Question/Answers website for programming questions, recently decided to open new Q/A websites for many additional interesting topics, from wine tasting and cooking to mathematics. The fundamental requisite for such new sites to be opened is a rather strict community review and development of a critical mass of contributors [...]
Please take a look at this This technology is probably the future of entertainment. It needs no batteries, has a nice resolution both for pictures and text, it can be easily bookmarked or annotated (although sometimes there’s not enough space). It can be bought both online and in a shop, brand new or used. It [...]