Getting back up to speed

Well, I'm back. Haven't had a chance to do any real work, which includes actually reading any journals or following up any new sources of data. I have, however, pretty much caught up on my blogroll and the interesting posts therein. Some of the things that caught my attention:

Spitshine talked about an essay in the editorial of PLoS Medicine entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, and joked about the mainstream media headline that would accompany that news. OK, not joked, accurately predicted. The Bad Science column in The Guardian (thanks Snowdeal) written by Ben Goldacre talked about mainstream media's portrayal of science in general, and in particular how it creates a parody of science which it can then critique with impunity. It too mentions the essay:

It predictably generated a small flurry of ecstatic pieces from humanities graduates in the media, along the lines of science is made-up, self-aggrandising, hegemony-maintaining, transient fad nonsense; and this is the perfect example of the parody hypothesis that we'll see later. Scientists know how to read a paper. That's what they do for a living: read papers, pick them apart, pull out what's good and bad.

Ben puts the blame on PR and editorial departments who lack science graduates (fair enough), a reliance on authority figures with questionable credentials (Kevin Warwick, say no more) and... well, there's an eloquent rant about humanities graduates being angry at science, which I'm not so sure about.

There's more blogging goodness about the PLoS essay over at Universal Acid.

Meanwhile, over at Nodalpoint there's a post by Pedro about the idea of virtual collaborations. It's kind of like open source research, I guess. Personally I think it's a good idea - especially given some of the refinements suggested in the comments posted after the story. For example, Greg comments:

The main barrier to entry will be social, someone will likely have to take a leading role in the development, do organization etc. And the project must maintain focus. Basically the same kind of social issues that crop up in regular research environments (labs). So I guess this is a virtual opportunity to try you hand at being a PI :)

Now I think with the right kind of question all these issues can be handled. I think this needs to be done outside of the context of existing institutions (too much social baggage) and it must be very grass-roots.

I agree. I'm keen to participate in collaborative projects like the ones mentioned; my only worry is justifying the time spent to my PI. "So who are these people that you're working with... science bloggers? And your chances of publication are... you don't know yet?". At least with BioPerl contributions you may have had to write the relevant module for an existing project. Still, I'm all for it.