Category Archives: Uncategorized

President Obama published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association today discussing the current state of his health care reform initiatives. Fortunately, the article is not behind a paywall. But JAMA nonetheless asserts their ownership and right to control the article’s use, as they do on all articles they publish, by attaching […]

What more is there to say? Another case where a senior member of the Berkeley faculty, this time Berkeley Law Dean Sujit Choudhry, was found to have violated the campus’s sexual harassment policy, and was given a slap on the wrists by the administration. Astronomer Geoff Marcy’s punishment for years of harassment of students was a […]

I posted some pictures of this Thanksgiving themes picnic pie (completely vegan) on Twitter and Facebook. A bunch of people asked me for my recipe. Unfortunately, it was almost completely improvised, so I don’t have a recipe. But here is roughly what I did. First of all, a few weeks ago I had no idea what a […]

      I’ve been feeling the need for some new publishing related t-shirts, and somehow this idea popped into my head.   For those of you who don’t know, it’s based on the popular 80’s computer game Oregon Trail, where games would often end with the alert that “You Have Died Of Dysentery” I made […]

I just received the following announcement from Elsevier: Nominations opened today for the Elsevier Foundation Awards for Early-Career Women Scientists in the Developing World, a high-profile honor for scientific and career achievements by women from developing countries in five regions: Latin America and theCaribbean; the Arab region; Sub-Saharan Africa; Central and South Asia; and East […]

Several weeks ago my Berkeley colleague Lior Pachter posted a challenge on his blog offering a prize for computing a p-value for a claim made in a 2004 Nature paper. While cheeky in its formulation, Pachter had an important point – he believed that a claim from this paper was based on faulty reasoning, and the p-value prize […]

People who know me or read my blog will know that, in 1987, my father, a scientist at the NIH, killed himself after a member of his lab committed scientific fraud and he got caught up in the investigation. So I found the news this morning that Yoshiki Sasai, a Japanese stem cell scientist, committed suicide […]

Yesterday a bi-partisan group of legislatures – Rep. Doyle (D-PA), Rep. Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Yoder (R-KS), Sen. Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Cornyn (R-TX) – introduced legislation that would require federal agencies that fund scientific and medical research to make works they fund available to the public. This bill – known as the Fair Access to […]