It is, according to my social media, World Emoji Day. No sure why that needs a day, but I’m not here to judge. Well, not, today I am, becaus...

Hypothesis : Complaints about peer review are often made by people who believe that their work is so infallible and perfect that it cannot...

With preprint servers and data repositories like Figshare gaining in popularity, a related myth is also gaining in popularity: “Giving thi...

The website Rate My Professors is getting rid of its “hotness” rating. Which means you won’t see stuff like this any more: The idea of ...

While I knew some journals won’t publish papers that had previously been posted as preprints, I didn’t know that some journals are picky. ...

Last year, I submitted a preprint to biorXiv . I was underwhelmed by the experience. But I am a great believer in the saying, “Never try ...

Making the rounds in international news in the last couple of days is a viral video that is normally described in the headlines this way: ...

Years ago, while listening to CBC's Morningside, I heard this description: "Canada is a country that works in practice, but not in ...

Never heard of the US Digital Services agency? Now you have. Meet Mollie, their mascot: Yes, those are light sabers. Slate has the sto...

Nicholas Evans wrote : The solution levied by synthetic biologists is to get more biologists doing ethics. That this is always the sugges...

In grad school, I was introduced to a nice, simple rule for giving a talk. One slide per minute. I used this rule for a long time. It se...

Mike Nitenbach wrote : Huge mistake to design scientific presentation like fucken Sherlock Holmes story. Becca replied : If you set ...

In the last few years in the United States, there’s been debate about the presence of Confederate flags and statues in public places. I c...

Warning: The following post is a piece of devil’s advocacy. I’m not sure I believe myself. The process for selecting graduate students is ...

 I’ve been teaching a completely online class this semester. I’ve done partly online classes, and practically live online anyway, so I th...

There’s no channel 1 on televisions in North America. It makes no sense. That is, it makes no sense from the point of view of an enginee...

This morning, a fine scientist congratulated two undergraduates in her lab about winning National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Researc...

When Apple launched the iPod , the company had to put a lot of effort into educating people about digital music. Mr. Jobs pulled the w...

A side effect of my bafflement yesterday over how lobsters became some sort of strange right-wing analogy for the rightness of there being ...

Miriam Goldstein and Bethany Brookshire burst my cosy bubble of ignorance. Today I learned  Jordan Peterson , a current darling of conserv...