Category Archives: Uncategorized

WOW! Junk DNA as a metaphor! We have arrived!

In an article in The New Republic about how Republicans are being disingenous by opposing the health care bill on account of its length, Harold Pollack writes: Most of the junk DNA of the Senate bill is the usual block-and-tackle of complicated legislation, and is of no particular ideological or partisan concern. Many of the [...]

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Thoughts on the Berkeley protests

I’ve made no secret of my opposition to this week’s protests at Berkeley and other UC campuses. The tactics were stale, the targets were wrong, and the rhetoric was ineffective. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think what’s going on at UC doesn’t completely suck. The immediate cause of the protests was the 32% [...]

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Why I don’t support the UC faculty walkout

I sent this letter to some colleagues who are supporting the proposed UC faculty walkout on September 24th. I want to thank you and the others who are spending their time and energy trying to figure out how to deal with challenges of the UC budget. I understand the appeal and value of a collective [...]

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Letter to the editor in Science

Science 17 July 2009: Vol. 325. no. 5938, p. 266 DOI: 10.1126/science.325_266c Letters Open Access: The Sooner the Better In the Brevia “Open access and global participation in science” (20 February, p. 1025), J. A. Evans and J. Reimer argue that a research article published online is only modestly (8%) more likely to be cited [...]

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The pleasure and importance of print journals???

Nature ran a weird Correspondence from Swiss organic chemist François Diederich. Sir, I am shocked to read in Nature News online that the American Chemical Society intends to stop all personal subscriptions to its printed journals by 2010, and to start introducing major changes this year (‘Chemistry publisher moving towards online-only journals’ http://tinyurl.com/llae53). The attractive [...]

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