Do Good Scientists Need to be Expert Mathematicians?
E. O. Wilson’s comments on mathematical skills seem to have touched few raw nerves. If your level of mathematical competence is low, plan to raise it, but meanwhile, know that you can do outstanding...
View ArticleThe Eroding Premium on Truth and Trust
The premium in America has shifted from truth to self-serving distortion, and from trust to manipulation. Charles Hugh Smith is the most insightful social commentator of recent era we came across....
View ArticleChina vs USA and Other Social Posts
We are doing our spring cleaning. All wiki-related links within the blog posts are set to the new wiki. We will start digging into codes again soon. Our own interests are in hardware implementation of...
View ArticleEpigenetics in Stem Cells – Is It a Significant Paradigm Shift in Biology?
We came across an old and interesrting feature published in Nature few years back - Language: Disputed definitions If you want to start an argument, ask the person who just said ‘paradigm shift’ what...
View ArticleWhy Blogging is Bad For Science
Please compare the following five blog posts without paying attention to the sources. Imagine someone printed and gave them to you obfuscating where they came from. Junk DNA – An Introduction Genetics...
View ArticleIs ‘Systems Biology’ a Paradigm Shift?
Hell no !! We will get to that in a minute. Possibly our mention of Thomas Kuhn angered Dan Graur so much that he held posthumous trial of Kuhn and found him guilty of perjury. That commentary started...
View ArticleGood Riddance –“Death of the Genome Paper”
David Roy Smith wrote about how genome papers are not fashionable any more. Good riddance. Too much focus on ‘genome papers’ by big journals distorted the scientific publishing landscape over the last...
View ArticleGoogle Censorship: Scariest Thing for Academic Freedom
Please forward this message widely, because it is the scariest thing that can happen to academic freedom of researchers in this country. Today Dr. Elhaik, who published a population biology paper...
View ArticleTitus Brown’s Commentary on the Cost of Open Science
Titus Brown, a professor at MSU, is conducting a social experiment with his bioinformatics research approach that he calls ‘open science’. He posted an informative commentary about what he learned so...
View ArticleCiting BioStar and SeqAnswers Papers Does not Make Sense
This odd Twitter request is a good example of how 40 years of government funding destroyed 400 years of scientific traditions. Historically, the practice of citation was followed by scholars so that...
View ArticlePLOS One Wins 16-1 against Nature, Science, GigaScience or BioMed Central
PLOS One uses not one, or two or three, but SIXTEEN google analytics IDs to give out your private information to google and then the spy agencies. Here is the relevant code - var plosGApropId=new...
View ArticleBlogs Are Dangerous – says Geoffrey North of Current Biology
Editor Geoffrey North of Current Biology is clearly losing his sleep over blogs and that is a good thing. I think there is a clear “good” side, illustrated by cases where papers making very radical...
View ArticleJournal that Sells by Hype Tells Scientists not to Hype their Work
Oh the hilarity !!!! Nature journal, which got famous last year by hyping ENCODE author Ewan Birney’s claim of rewriting text-books, advises scientists not to hype their work !! Promoting your work ‘a...
View ArticleGetting PhD for Master’s Thesis
My MS thesis was on calculating electrical current through small molecules connected between big metallic surfaces. We used Green function method, which is another way of calculating wave functions in...
View ArticleWhy Blogging is Bad For Science
Please compare the following five blog posts without paying attention to the sources. Imagine someone printed and gave them to you obfuscating where they came from. Junk DNA – An Introduction Genetics...
View ArticleSkyrocketing Cost of Publication
The following chart is getting forwarded in Twitter: @McDawg Between 1986 and 2006 journal prices have increased by 321%, while inflation has increased 68%. The trend does not make sense at all,...
View ArticleUS Science Funding – Proposal for a Better Alternative
The Shutdown Game Let us play a number-guessing game. Pick a number between 1 and 1000. Did you select 723? If not, you are a loser and the game is over !! If you think the whole point of the game is...
View ArticleUS Science Funding – Proposal for a Better Alternative (Part II)
If scientists have to recreate the science funding system today from scratch, what would the new system look like? Let us check the advantages and disadvantages of various alternatives. Please check...
View ArticleNCBI Runs out of Money and Starts a New Service
More sob-stories are coming out of NCBI. The organization is so short of money that it has to shut down a popular tandem mass spectra search engine called OMSSA. We confirmed that the tweet is correct...
View ArticleA Few Useful Terms
Publishing Getting your research report locked up so that the public cannot see. Publishing in high visibility journal Getting your research report removed from public view for ever. Recently we tried...
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