Monthly Archives: August 2011

Scientific American: Scientists Take Peer Review Public

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Keith Brown

The episodes have cheered supporters of the open-science movement, but some critics worry that the debates might descend into cacophony. All Together Now: Scientists Take Peer Review Public: Scientific American.

Posted in Open Access, Peer Review, Public Pedagogy, Public Philosophizing, TechnoScience & Technoscientism | Leave a comment

The Specter of Sustainability

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Robert Frodeman

A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of sustainability. All the powers of old Europe (America, China, etc.) have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: politicians and university presidents, the IMF and the Worldbank, academic radicals … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Open access and epistemology

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Kelli Barr

In a recent Nature piece, Paul Ginsparg recounts the evolution of ArXiv, an online repository for preprint article submissions in physics that he created two decades ago at the dawn of the Internet, and reflects on the compartmentalized nature of … Continue reading →

Posted in Future of the University, Libraries, Open Access | Leave a comment

Let the games begin!

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Kelli Barr

Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic are upping the stakes in the burgeoning industry of scientific metrics. These free, widely-available online platforms allow users to search for academics or academic scholarship and also compute citation metrics, such as the H- and … Continue reading →

Posted in Metrics, Open Access | Leave a comment

‪A short history of fossil fuels

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Kelli Barr

The video is called “300 years of fossil fuels in 300 seconds,” produced by the Post Carbon Institute. That the central focus of this historical overview is on the modern age is no accidental quality. There is something pernicious about … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate Change, Environmental policy, Sustainability, Risk Management, & Long-Term Security | Leave a comment

I am large, I contain ‘multiverses’

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Keith Brown

First observational test of the ‘multiverse’. Thank heaven there is an algorithm to protect the scientists from their natural human bias: One of many dilemmas facing physicists is that humans are very good at cherry-picking patterns in the data that … Continue reading →

Posted in TechnoScience & Technoscientism | Leave a comment