Haibane.info

Month: January 2007

  • reviewing Peer Review

    Ars Technica has a nice summary of a recent paper in PLoS that attempted to assess the quality of the peer review process. From the Ars summary:

    To examine what makes a good reviewer, they took advantage of the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine, which has maintained a detailed database of reviewers and post-review ratings (on a five-point scale) of their work, performed by the editors of the journal. The researchers contacted the reviewers and surveyed them about various factors that might contribute to skill in the process. A diverse set of 306 reviewers who had performed a total of nearly 3,000 reviews were used as the data set.

    […]

    In news that may be disturbing for journal editors everywhere, very few factors leapt out as having a consistent and significant correlation with the quality of a review, although some factors did have strong correlations in individual tests. The only positive factors linked to quality of reviews were age (younger reviewers were better) and working at an academic hospital. Ironically, service on an Institutional Review Board, which evaluates and approves experiments on humans, consistently correlated with lower-quality peer reviews. Even these factors, however, were only slightly better than random at predicting review quality.

    Ultimately the peer review process is always going to have a subjective component to it, since the processes of intuition and patterning that are fundamental to scientific insight and understanding are not really very deterministic. But there’s another possible reason why the study failed to find strong correlates of review quality; the very assessment of quality itself is equally subjective. I personally believe that the peer review system is like democracy – far from ideal but better than anything else out there. The best way to ensure general quality is to ensure that a maximum number of scientists in a given field participate in the process. Perhaps one way to achieve this would be to extend reviewer privileges to graduate students who have passed oral qualifiers?

    Journal article citation: Callaham ML, Tercier J (2007) The Relationship of Previous Training and Experience of Journal Peer Reviewers to Subsequent Review Quality. PLoS Med 4(1): e40 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040040

    Related article: Kotchen TA, Lindquist T, Miller Sostek A, Hoffmann R, Malik K, Stanfield B. Outcomes of National Institutes of Health peer review of clinical grant applications. J Investig Med. 2006 Jan;54(1):13-9. PMID: 16409886

  • Thinkpad a wannabe Wii

    Since IBM Thinkpads come with a built-in accelerometer, which serves to protect thehard drive if sudden movement is detected, some enterprising folks figured out a way to use the entire laptop as a motion controller similar to the Nintendo Wii. They have a simple file to download that works with a few games like Tux Racer and Blazetris (a Tetris clone) – you just move the laptop physically around to control the game action. This isn’t some third-party hack but an actual research project at IBM. I am tempted to try this out, though the idea of shaking my precious laptop in the air has me abit leery…

  • Microsoft Vista is its own grandfather

    Vista is so advanced, that it serves as its own upgrade. Take that, Mac OS X!

    UPDATE: Do you only have Vista Basic installed, but want to try a feature of Ultimate out for a while? Here’s a nifty trick for extending the activation grace period from 30 days to 120 days. Fully legitimate, using a documented Windows command.

  • Dreamworks and Aardman split

    This is unfortunate news, but the long-term impact will impact Dreamworks more than it does Aardman:

    After a critically lauded but commercially troubled six-year partnership with DreamWorks Animation, Aardman is back on its own.

    The British claymation giant, best known for its signature Wallace and Gromit characters and 2000 hit “Chicken Run,” officially terminated its five-picture deal with DreamWorks on Tuesday.

    The main reason is that neither the Wallace and Gromit film nor Flushed Away did well enough at the box-office. To be honest, the latter film actually bored my daughter, who is probably Aardman’s prime demographic. If Aardman can return to its roots in claymation and build up a decent CG capability in house, or even better if they can find a way to merge the two, then they will do fine on their own. Or maybe they will just get picked up by Pixar 🙂

    This puts Dreamworks at a major content/talent disadvantage relative to Disney, though. Other than Shrek, what does Dreamworks really have?

    AICN also has the story and will be talking to people inside Dreamworks for more details.

  • cell phone television the easy way

    This article at Ars about the economics and technical challenges of watching TV on your cel phone leaves me confused. For one thing, Sprint already offers TV, and they seem to meet the affordability problem by simply charging up the wazoo. My cell phone can support streaming TV but I’d have to pay an extra $15/month at minimum for the service; a more realistic unlimited usage plan is a $40 addon.

    But what’s even more puzzling is why cell phones don’t just allow you to watch standard TV. Rather than muck about with bandwidth concerns over the cell network, just receive the TV signal from actual TV towers. Am I missing something here? Doesn’t that seem the easiest route? The resolution on my cell phone LCD is probably higher than my analog TV anyway; with HDTV that won’t be the case but the signal can always be downsampled in realtime (easier than upsampling since there’s no interpolation involved).

    Sure, the cell phone companies don’t get any revenue by this, but the cell phone makers could certainly sell it as a value-added feature on upscale phones. People would pay; I know I’d watch TV on my cell phone while commuting on the bus, for example – much easier than dealing with digital downloads and portable DVD players and whatnot.

    UPDATE: The Japanese have had analog TV on their cell phones since 2003, and now have digital TV too.

  • SlideShare

    Here’s a great resource for sharing powerpoint slides online: SlideShare. Many of us have useful presentations that we’ve created for various academic or professional purposes; if you upload a presentation to that service please tag it “@refscan” so we can create an automatic table of contents for presentations here. I’ll update this post and upload a simple one later this weekend here as a demo.

  • FDA Advisory on Gadolinium contrast agents

    The FDA has an updated Public Health Advisory on the safety of gadolinium-based MRI contrast agents. In a nutshell, patients with any sort of renal disease or otherwise compromised kidney function are at high risk of developing Nephrogenic Systemic Fibrosis (NSF) or Nephrogenic Fibrosing Dermopathy (NFD) if they receive gadolinium contrast agents for MRI imaging. There seems to be no risk for patients without compromised kidney function.

    (more…)

  • Reference Scan

    I’ve been a bit preoccupied with a few things – the coolest of which is this: Reference Scan, the re-incarnation of my old MRI blog. Not much to look at yet but eventually I intend to really push the envelope on how you can use a blog medium for academic information and discussion. If anyone has any interest in magnetic resonance imaging, do stop by.

    I won’t be abandoning Haibane.info, rest assured. I even intend to talk about anime here! seriously! I want to try to upgrade to WP 2.1 first though… I see that Shamus pulled it off without a hitch, but his code-fu is stronger than mine.

  • the Just Science challenge

    What if anti-Science didn’t exist? In other words, what if public outreach by scientists didn’t have to allocate a significant fraction of resources to combating pseudo-science and conspiracy theories? That’s the world that the Just Science Challenge wants to create, if only for a week, starting February 5th (monday). During that week, the challenge to science bloggers is thus:

    Bloggers who self-identify as scientists and science writers should post on:

    1. Published, peer-reviewed research and their own research.
    2. Their expert opinion on actual scientific debates – think review articles.
    3. Descriptions of natural phenomena (e.g., why slugs dissolve when you put salt on them, or what causes sun flares; scientific knowledge that has reached the level of fact)

    We at Reference Scan will be participating in the Just Science Challenge. In fact if you registered as a user here at RefScan you might find that I’ve already upgraded your account to be able to post to the front page, because I can use the help!

    There’s already an extensive list of participating science blogs. Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a field that is uniquely abused by anti-science and one that I think needs to be represented in the online scientific community. So let’s plant our flag and meet the challenge. Should be fun!

  • the Patron Saint of MRI

    Technically, magnetos are the exact opposite of an electromagnet, but the Marvel Comics character remains our field’s patron saint by virtue of artistic license.

    Magneto