The "Replication Issue" as written up in the Economist….

The article is here. Their money quote:

“Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour [sic] of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics.”

The Replication Issue is a complicated one and is something that I am actively working on with colleagues around the country. I am most definitely not for getting rid of peer review. BUt the post-publications comments might be a good idea to add on.

On sexism and the mentor…

Many of us have been following the twitter controversy regarding Scientific American Blogs. What started out as bad, got a lot worse. Laura Helmuth at Slate has the complete story here. I’m appalled.

The notion of using a mentorship role to sexually harass is just wrong. Where we find it, we should call it out.

Richard Florida on DC…

Paraphrased here in the Washington Post. Bottom line? It’s a boom town. Even with the recently ended shutdown, this area feels so different from the rest of the US economy. Perhaps that’s part of the problem?

Where are our readers?

From our analytics: Advanced Studies readers are truly international. Thank you for continuing to support us and we’ll continue to call them as we see them….

The future of non-wet lab bioscience….

Story is behind Science Magazine’s firewall, but the abstract is here. The overall meme is of course Big Data….but….at some point, we’ll continue to need new data, so there is a future for wet-lab science too.

Norman Augustine on the shutdown’s effect on US Antarctic research…

From today’s Chronicle, behind their pay wall:

“I do not know what the cost of the shutdown will be,” Mr. Augustine said when asked for an estimate of the losses that could result from an Antarctic shutdown. “It is just one more example of what we are doing to rip apart at the grassroots level the fabric of what is one of America’s few remaining competitive advantages: our research and education system. No enemy could have been so effective.”

I couldn’t have said it better.

Nobel rules….

Of the game, explained here, in The Economist. They may need to be slightly adjusted for the 21st century to handle big-team science.

The power of the corpus callosum…

For Albert Einstein that is, story here. I’ll note that the Director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine mentioned in the story (where Einstein’s brain currently resides) is none other than our Advisory Board Chair, Dr. Adrianne Noe.