Tipping Open Lab 2010

As part of a writing class I am teaching, I had my students read a lot of the submissions to Open Laboratory 2010. They started before the final submission deadline, so what they read was in no way a comprehensive survey of all the nominated posts, but they read a decent fraction of them. Then, they voted on the posts they liked the best.

In case you’ve started a betting competition for who will be in the next Open Laboratory anthology, these might have good odds...

1. Wired Science: Freaky Sleep Paralysis: Being Awake in Your Nightmares
2. White Coat Underground: Fountain Pens
3. Neurophilosophy: Voluntary amputation and extra phantom limbs
4. Plus Magazine: You aren't what your mother eats
5. The Quantum Lobe Chronicles: The peripheral attention deficit of primary psychopaths
6. Neurotopia: The Value of Stupidity: are we doing it right?
7. Mauka to Makai: Baby-Making
8. The Primate Diaries: Does Taking Birth Control Alter Women's Sexual Choices?
9. The Quantum Lobe Chronicles: Did sleepwalking once serve as an adaptive function?

That said, the students I think keyed more into the novelty of the topic being discussed in a lot of cases more than the actual level of writing.