3D pdf and interactive 3D data in scientific publishing

Prof. Goodman at the Harvard astronomy department published her latest
Nature paper with 3D figure that you can rotate and manipulate inside
the pdf.

The 3D pdf can be downloaded here though the
link on the right "PDF 3D version."

A movie demonstrating the features of the 3D PDF can be found on
Goodman's webpage.

I downloaded the 3D pdf and it really does work. (I used Acrobat Reader
8.1)

This seems like an interesting way to visualize complicated data.

Shady "self-publication" in Elsevier journal

One of the hot topics in science these days in the case of Dr. El Naschie, editor-in-chief of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, an Elsevier journal. Apparently, Dr. Naschle has 322 published papers in the journal including 5 of the 36 articles published in the December 2008 issue (all self-authored). This blatant case of editorial abuse forced El Naschle to retire, effective January 2009. For more details, see John Baez's blog post.

Einstein versus the Physical Review

Not many people know that Einstein submitted an article proposing that gravitational waves don't exist and then had his article rejected by Physical Review. There is a nice historical account in Physics Today.

I guess this article shows that peer review has its benefits -- like saving a giant of the field from publishing an embarrassingly incorrect result.

Physical Review now allows Chinese character author names

I saw an editorial in Physical Review Letters today. There are too many Chinese characters that are phonetically identical, so for instance, you can end up with eight different names that would be written as Wei Wang. So now Physical Review will allow some authors (which some?) to put their name in script next to their English name. Hmm, I should try that.

Yahoo Pipes for more efficient reading

One of my colleagues complained that there are too many journal articles. I think a way to fix that problem is to use Yahoo Pipes. A good place to start is a nice tutorial from Lifehacker. You just give Yahoo Pipes one or more feeds, some filtering criteria, and then Yahoo Pipes will generate a custom feed for you. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like a great idea.

Journals for negative results

I have been told by more than one person that it would be useful to know what *didn't* work so that people wouldn't constantly go down the wrong path designing and building their experiments. Apparently, there is at least one real journal for negative results: Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine.

Homepage

There are all kinds of homepages nowadays including iGoogle, Pageflakes, and Netvibes.

I'm still a fan of the hand-written HTML homepage. I've posted my personal homepage below. Recently, I added search forms for Physical Review, Wikipedia, and yourDictionary. I prefer to read my RSS feeds elsewhere (enough distraction as it is). Too bad I don't know how to add weather and calendar widgets.

Link of the day: APS Virtual Journals

The APS Virtual Journals aggregates journal articles from APS, AIP, Nature, Science, IEEE and others for various hot topics in physics. The articles are selected by a board of editors. Currently, Virtual Journals includes sections on applications of superconductivity, biological physics, nanoscience, quantum information, and ultrafast science. Pretty cool!

Link of the day: Open peer review and bad referees

Over at Biocurious, Phillip writes about open peer review at Nature and PLoS. On the Reference Frame, Tommy Anderberg discusses peer review in general and complains about poor treatment from referees.

h number

What is the best quantitative measure of a person's quality of research? This is an interesting problem since tenure decisions are judged by many people who don't work directly in the candidate's field. It would be good to have something like an SAT score as a benchmark.

I learned today about one promising measure called h number. As Eugene Wallingford explains, your h number is determined in the following way. Suppose you have n publications. Your h number is determined by having h publications with >= h citations each and (n-h) publications with < h citations each.

I won't bother to calculate my own h number since I have a mere two publications...