Help me find this notebook
January 30, 2017
TL;DR: if you know where I can get a notebook just like this one, or from the same manufacturer and made to the same specs, or have one of your own that I could buy off you (provided it’s mostly unused), please let me know in the comments.
Long version:
This is the best notebook I’ve ever used. The cover is 7.25 x 10 inches, made of some kind of dense and probably recycled paper board. It’s twin-loop wire bound, has a button-and-string closure and a separate loop of board inside the back cover to hold a pen or pencil. Heavyweight cream paper. Has a fossil fish, Eoholocentrum macrocephalum, embossed on the cover, with the Linnean binomial properly capitalized and italicized.
I’ve used loads of other notebooks, including several sizes and designs of Moleskine and Rite-in-the-Rain, and this one is by far my favorite. Why? It lies flat when open or folded back on itself, the wire binding has never hung up, torn a page, or otherwise malfunctioned in over four years of travel and heavy use, and the pen holder and button string closure are perfect for my purposes. I’ve never had a notebook with an elastic band that didn’t wear out, and I usually have to build my own pen loops out of tape.
The one I have was a gift from Mark Hallett, who picked it up at SVP some years ago. Neither of us know who made it. But I’d really like to have another one, because mine is almost full. So far all of my searching online and off has failed to turn up a notebook like this, either another original or one with the same features made to the same specs. So if you know something about this, please pass it on!
What should we do now Beall’s List has gone?
January 26, 2017
It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why, but there are rumblings that he has been hit with a legal threat that he doesn’t want to defend.
To get this out of the way: it’s always a bad thing when legal threats make information quietly disappear; to that extent, at least, Beall has my sympathy.
That said — over all, I think making Beall’s List was probably not a good thing to do in the first place, being an essentially negative approach, as opposed to DOAJ’s more constructive whitelisting approach. But under Beall’s sole stewardship it was a disaster, due to his well-known ideological opposition to all open access. So I think it’s a net win that the list is gone.
But, more than that, I would prefer that it not be replaced.
Researchers need to learn the very very basic research skills required to tell a real journal from a fake one. Giving them a blacklist or a whitelist only conceals the real issue, which is that you need those skills if you’re going to be a researcher.
Finally, and I’m sorry if this is harsh, I have very little sympathy with anyone who is caught by a predatory journal. Why would you be so stupid? How can you expect to have a future as a researcher if your critical thinking skills are that lame? Think Check Submit is all the guidance that anyone needs; and frankly much more than people really need.
Here is the only thing you need to know, in order to avoid predatory journals, whether open-access or subscription-based: if you are not already familiar with a journal — because it’s published research you respect, or colleagues who you respect have published in it or are on the editorial board — then do not submit your work to that journal.
It really is that simple.
So what should we do now Beall’s List has gone? Nothing. Don’t replace it. Just teach researchers how to do research. (And supervisors who are not doing that already are not doing their jobs.)
My talk on copyright, from the University of Manchester’s “Open Knowledge in Higher Education” course
January 5, 2017
Back in February last year, I had the privilege of giving one of the talks in the University of Manchester’s PGCert course “Open Knowledge in Higher Education“. I took the subject “Should science always be open?”
My plan was to give an extended version of a talk I’d given previously at ESOF 2014. But the sessions before mine raised all sorts of issues about copyright, and its effect on scholarly communication and the progress of science, and so I found myself veering off piste. The first eight and a half minutes are as planned; from there, I go off on an extended tangent. Well. See what you think.
The money quote (starting at 12m10s): “What is copyright? It’s a machine for preventing the creation of wealth.”
Beware over-interpreting photos of fossils
January 2, 2017
Welcome to 2017! Let’s start the year with a cautionary tale. I’ll leap straight to the moral, then give an example: it’s very easy to reach the wrong conclusion about fossils from photos. That’s because no single photo can give an accurate impression of distortion. For that, you need at least a much bigger selection of photos; or better still, a 3d model; or of course best of all, the fossil itself.
Here’s the motivating example:
Cervical vertebrae 8-16 of Barosaurus lentus AMNH 6341; and BYU 9024 “Supersaurus” cervical ?9. All in left lateral view.
A correspondent — I will not divulge his or her name unless the person in question chooses to reveal it — had looked over the slides for our 2016 SVPCA talk on new Barosaurus specimens, which claims that Jensen’s Dry Mesa “Supersaurus” cervical BYU 9024 actually belongs to Barosaurus.
Matt and I felt, based largely on the degree of neural spine bifurcation, that the BYU vertebra compares most similarly to C9 of the AMNH specimen — the middle one in the top row of the composite illustration above. But my correspondent put together the composite, and wrote [lightly edited for clarity]:
I’ve already compared BYU 9024 with the AMNH cervicals, I attach a photo, because for me it is also very similar to C14: the centrum is much more similar to C14 than C9, I think. What do you think about this?
Like I said: you always need to be careful about interpreting any one view of a fossil. In this case, BYU 9024 is misleading in lateral view because the CPOLs are folded upwards and inwards, and the ventrolateral flanges are (to a lesser extent) folded downwards and inwards — making the posterior part of the centrum look much taller (and rather narrower) than it really is.
This is hard to see in photos, because the fossil is so smashed up and the matrix is so visually similar to the bone, but take a look at the posterior view (with dorsal to the right of the photo):
Here are the key parts, annotated, as best I can make out. (And bear in mind that even I am not sure, after having spent a whole day with the fossil, and with literally hundreds of photos to consult.)
As you can see, the centrum accounts for only a small proportion of the apparent height of the posterior end of the vertebra — and even that is probably exaggerated, as the eccentricity of the condyle indicates that crushing has increased its height at the expense of its width.
Put it all together, and Jensen’s much-derided sculpture of what the vertebra should have looked like is actually pretty good:
The upshot of this anecdote is an obvious one, but it bears repeating: you simply cannot do a meaningful description of a fossil without seeing it yourself — or at the very least a high-quality 3d model. Photos just won’t cut it.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 