There are several excellent book reviews in the latest American Scientist. Check them out for reviews of Dennett and Collins books, if nothing else, but the one that caught my eye was the review of Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University by William Clark, which I will, just because of this review, put on my Amazon wish list. It is a history of academia and how it got to be organized the way it does today.
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Over at the Nature blogs, they're soliciting comments and opinions about open peer review:
One of the much-hyped benefits of social networking is that it provides a way to get personalized recommendations about businesses from a wider network. If I want to tell the world that the coffee place in my neighborhood has the best cappuccino this side of Seattle, I can do that (and it does)!
A long time ago, in a blog far far away, I ran a small poll about paper refereeing. The poll asked "What is your ratio of reviewed to submitted manuscripts?". The results were
I came across this Science letter to the editor about a "gradual peer review process" by the associate editor for Plant Signalling and Behavior, Co
- Robert Green Ingersoll