So we were honored to visit the residence where Gandhi and King both stayed--Mani Bhavan. We were humbled to pay our respects at Raj Ghat.Via: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/11/027679.php
Just a small number of bad referees can significantly undermine the ability of the peer-review system to select the best scientific papers. That is according to a pair of complex systems researchers in Austria who have modelled an academic publishing system and showed that human foibles can have a dramatic effect on the quality of published science.
....
While the concept of peer review is widely considered the most appropriate system for regulating scientific publications, it is not without its critics. Some feel that the system's reliance on impartiality and the lack of remuneration for referees mean that in practice the process is not as open as it should be. This may be particularly apparent when referees are asked to review more controversial ideas that could damage their own standing within the community if they give their approval.The PW article is referenced by a shorter article on the Sante Fe Institute (SFI) website:
Just a small number of impartial, complacent, or incompetent referees can significantly undermine the ability of the scholarly peer-review system to select the best scientific papers.
SFI External Professor Stefan Thurner and collaborator Rudolph Hanel, both of the Medical University of Vienna, created a model of a generic specialist field where referees fall into one of five categories ranging from always correct to impartial.Note that the first sentence of the SFI article is identical to the first sentence of the PW article (to which the former article links). But, the PW article is about research by an SFI-affiliated scholar. Neither article provides a link to a document describing the original research.
When asked by physicsworld.com to offer an alternative to the current peer-review system, Thurner argues that science would benefit from the creation of a "market for scientific work". He envisages a situation where journal editors and their "scouts" search preprint servers for the most innovative papers before approaching authors with an offer of publication. The best papers, he believes, would naturally be picked up by a number of editors leaving it up to authors to choose their journal. "Papers that no-one wants to publish remain on the server and are open to everyone – but without the 'prestigious' quality stamp of a journal," Thurner explains.
This research is described in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server.arXiv is itself a preprint server. (Count the fractals - even strange loops.)
11th Sept. 2010
Dear WM, I would like to bring your attention to an interesting article posted on the website of the Santa Fe Institute "Modeling shows scientific peer review system sensitive to bad refereeing"– Romain MeyerI found the article apparently referred to: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1008/1008.4324v1.pdf
It's surreal to see President Obama play the class-warfare card against the Republicans while on his way to vacation on the tony Maine coast... The truth is that the real big money and the lifestyles that go with it are now firmly liberal Democratic.
[E]vidence ...
- the preponderance of Wall Street money that went to Obama over McCain in 2008,
- the liberal voting patterns of the high-income blue-state congressional districts,
- the anecdotal evidence of a Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or George Soros, or
- the ease by which an eco-populist like Al Gore buys estates and creates corporations, or
- the rarified tastes of men of the people like John Edwards of two-nations fame, or
- John Kerry of multiple estate residences. [bullets are mine]
[Alfred Dreyfus] was disgracefully railroaded from the moment in October 1894 that he was summoned to the office of Commandant Armand du Paty de Clam (a name so Clouseau-like that Art Buchwald would have shrunk from inventing it) and tricked into writing a “dictation” that supposedly matched the handwriting on a secret letter recovered from the wastebasket of the German embassy.Inspector Clouseau's long-suffering and periodically insane supervisor/commissioner beginning with A Shot in the Dark was an imaginary "Dreyfus - Charles," namesake of another, actual Charles Dreyfus, distant relative of the unfortunate, all-too-real-life Alfred Dreyfus.
“For Washington consultants to sit around and personally disparage the governor anonymously to reporters is unfortunate and counterproductive and frankly immature,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.Be careful, team; anonymity cuts both ways, anonymously [he wrote, semi-anonymously].
The President’s Executive Order makes clear that federal funds may not be used for abortion under the Affordable Care Act – including the pre-existing condition insurance pools currently being implemented in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and other states across the country.
"In fact, when the Executive Order was signed, it was widely seen as simply reiterating what was already in the PPACA and current law. ... Abortion opponents who participated in the [executive order] bargaining did not raise concerns about high risk pools or other specific potential sources of federal funding, and they should be able to live with the deal they made."
