🎮 Getting into Pentiment now, and I don’t know what I like more: the use of typography in the dialogues, the dialogues themselves, or the fact that I can role-play a late medieval craftsman who studied theology in Flanders and specialized in Latin and the occult.
As of this year, eLife no longer has “accept/reject” decisions after peer review: Which I learned via Andrew Gelman.
All papers that have been peer-reviewed will be published on the eLife website as Reviewed Preprints, accompanied by:
- An eLife assessment
- Public reviews
Authors will then receive a paper with a full DOI that can be used on funding applications. They will be able to include a response to the assessment and reviews, and decide what to do next:
- Revise and resubmit
- Declare the Reviewed Preprint as the final Version of Record
This is as it should be in the age of unlimited digital space.
The quality of public peer review on eLife seems above average: I have once, as the sole peer review of this paper from a double-digit impact factor journal, Impact factor of eLife, per Wikipedia, is 8.7 received a single sentence which amounted to “sample size too small”, but with more spelling errors and the same lack of punctuation. If your goal when reading a paper is both critical appraisal and learning, you could do worse than reading this exchange.
But! Eleven reviewed preprints total in the last 5 months seems… low? Am I missing other public reviews? I would, for example, very much like to learn what the reviewers said about this.
More generally, I am worried that this will make eLife become the default publication of last resort — trouble for the Infection and Immunity and Leukemia and Lymphomas of the world, but not exactly the killing blow to Science or Nature or most of its million offshoots.
The current, bizarre, inefficient, unsustainable — Byzantine, if you will, thought that is too disrespectful of Byzantium — keeps itself alive through force of reputation. Critical thinking is hard, so unless I am in the opposing team and my goal is to tear down your data I will save many a mental cycle by “trusting the process” and taking the conclusion, abstract, that one piece of information I need to cite in my own work… at face value. And evidence to the contrary be damned, say published in NEJM to a clinician and their ears will perk up.
So we are in a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts. Take a group of one hundred researchers: the average benefit to all of them, and to science in general, would be greater if all published in eLife. But, if 90 of the 100 submit to CNS journals or NEJM first then go down the impact factor list and only 10 shmucks go straight to eLife, there will be only a handful of “winners”, the state of science remains what it is, and everyone ends up wasting so… much… time.
It doesn’t have to be this way – and Covid did expedite some reputational decay – so this is a good a time as any to place a chisel in the crack. What’s needed now is some forceful movement of the hammer and, well, I guess people who publish People who review are equally important, but maybe just maybe we will at one point be able to leave that to an algorithm. It would certainly do a better job than most! are the hammer in this strained analogy.
Should I start with myself? I do have a handful of side projects which are neither industry nor strictly academic — myself having no academic affiliation. Stay tuned.
A Skynet update:
Popcorn, please.
🕹️ Unavowed was an unexpected surprise: beautiful 16-bit graphics, engaging, mature story, and just the right amount of 4th wall breaking. If only the puzzles were a bit tougher.
🍿 The Pale Blue Eye was big on feels, short on plot. For a murder mystery, that is a death sentence. I do want to see more of Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe but please, Netflix, let’s not turn this into another franchise.
One of the reasons why 24-hour time is better than the am/pm shenanigans the English-speaking world insists on is that it would avoid this type of embarrassment: a haiku competition submission form closing at noon when it was clearly meant to close at midnight.
The allure to report anything as a medical breakthrough is strong. So strong that even the Financial Times can’t avoid it:
New diagnostic technology that uses fibre optics to find the causes of heart disease has begun Emphasis mine. clinical testing at London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
The iKOr device, developed at Barts Health and University College London, measures blood flow around the heart. Researchers say it could eventually help many thousands of patients suffering from cardiovascular symptoms such as chest pains, whose cause cannot be identified with current techniques.
“This new device is a game-changer in how we manage heart disease, making it a lot easier to assess the health of a person’s heart,” said Anthony Mathur, clinical director for interventional cardiology at Barts.
Three patients have undergone testing to date, out of 10 planned in the first phase. Another 100 may, subject to regulatory approval, before the device could potentially become commercially available, if it’s demonstrated to work. There is, it goes without saying, no clinical data published to date.
How does this change the game, exactly, when we don’t yet know if it works? The use of undeserved superlatives in cancer drug reporting is well documented so it’s not a surprise to see cardiology, that other lucrative medical subspecialty, being much the same.
What is a surprise is seeing the usually reliable FT falling down to the level of The New York Times in spreding medical jingoism. How interesting that in both cases it was a local hospital — Memorial Sloan Kettering for NYT, St Bart’s for FT — serving as the source. So interesting that I have to think there were some personal behind-the-scenes goings on.
NIH has always made most of its lectures available to public. With the pandemic, the production values have gotten better, and more people have gotten used to viewing lectures online. Here are a few interesting ones scheduled for this month. Some of them are part of NIH’s Demystifying Medicine series which is open to public and tries to target the curious layperson Alas, not always successfully. to the best of presenters' abilities.
People enthralled with Microsoft’s innovation streak must never have used Teams. Like nails on a chalkboard.
Yes, yes, America has terrible health care — even a tech podcast says so — while paying an order of magnitude more for it than other rich countries. But hear me out: what if the costs are so high because Americans are (unsuccessfully) trying to buy their way out of poor policy decisions, from dependence on cars, to the early 2000s' promotion of opioids, to the widespread availability of cheap but nutrient-less calories, and no amount of fiddling with who pays for what in healthcare will be able to fix that?
Which is to say: it’s fine to look at specific costs and specific outcomes — I have done so myself — but what exactly is the action item after reading a report like The Commonwealth Fund’s cited by Ars Technica?