The Turret is going to see a few new bloggers this semester, undergraduate students taking the Communication in Engineering course here at McGill.
To kick this off, it is my great pleasure to welcome Pauline (and her little brother).
We are all looking forward to hearing what Pauline will share with us on The Turret (no pressure!).
There is a new hashtag getting attention this week: #SixWordPeerReview
Researchers are expressing their frustrations with the peer-review process and sharing some interesting six word responses from referees.
Open science publisher, F1000Research, sums it up on Storify and points out how their peer-review model addresses some of the concerns.
According to Jason Dunn, fail early and fail often should be the mantra for private industry in order to learn and move forward. He is an engineer and a cofounder of Made in Space, a company with a NASA contract to take 3D printer technology and apply it to space missions.
We have posted before on 3D printers in The Turret, and lately articles on the application of 3D printing in the world of food are everywhere: spooky meat-like bio-pastes, chocolate(!), and NASA’s hopes of using 3D printing to make space food. Made in Space is taking this further and proposing that rather than build equipment needed in space on Earth, and spend decades getting it right, it is possible to build everything in space with 3D printers. We can email hardware to space.
After you watch the video from TEDxTalks, you may want to read the book that inspired Jason Dunn to want to build colonies in space – The high frontier: Human colonies in space by Gerard K O’Neillvideo – that he discussed in a previous TEDxTalk.
I am a big promoter of using concept mapping to access the implicit knowledge that is trapped in our brains. Concept maps are graphic representations of knowledge that facilitate the organization of information, whether it is for a project we are planning or for research we are engaged in. I use the CmapTools software since it also allows me to save concept maps on a server and share them online.
It is, however, not the only technique for concept visualization, which is why I have often turned to the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for inspiration. The table also includes methods for visualizing quantitative data (pie charts, line graphs, etc.) mapped to the alkali metals, methods for information visualization that transform data into images (data maps, flow charts, etc.), strategy visualization used commonly in management (such as stakeholder maps), metaphor visualization to convey insights about information (metro maps, bridges, etc.), and, lastly, compound visualization methods that bring together multiple graphical representation formats. Each element box also has additional information, such as the mode of thinking.
If you have any trouble scrolling over the element boxes and would like to see each of the methods separately, Chris Wallace has implemented an XML page that allows you to hide or view each image and also links out to Google images and Wikipedia entries.
Next week I will be attending the Visual Thinking with Mind-Mapping and Creative Modeling workshop at the School of Continuing Studies. I will be sure to post on what I learn there and share any new resources I come across. If you have any to share please do so in the comments box.
Have fun expressing yourself with these visualization methods!
If you have ever imagined yourself on The Price is Right, spinning the Big Wheel to make it to the Showcase Showdown then what you need is Slate’s Ultimate The Price is Right Cheat Sheet – seriously.
Google has started this site, Helpouts, connecting people who need one-on-one help with people who can offer it. Some of them cost money but many are free. Here are the broad categories: Art & Music, Computers & Electronics, Cooking, Education & Careers, Fashion & Beauty, Fitness & Nutrition, Health, Home & Garden. You can even sign up and offer your own face-to-face Helpouts and schedule appointments to teach others what you know. Of course, if you’d like to schedule an online appointment with a science and engineering librarian at Schulich Library we’d be happy to set up a date and time.
I had never really considered the deforestation involved in carving out the Canada / U.S. border. It is a long (8,800 km) deforested wonky line.
Video from CGP Grey
There is a lot to keep in mind when deciding where to publish and it takes time to investigate individual journals and explore their websites. Not everyone considers the same things as important to them. For some it is about a journal’s prestige while for others it is about the audience that they can reach or about ensuring that their work is open access and available freely to all.
Unfortunately, there are publishers out there that are less than honest and provide false or misleading information about who they are and the impact that they have on a field. There are also publishers with hidden fees that send out invoices to authors after publishing their papers. These are commonly referred to as predatory publishers and they have fooled many a researcher.
One site that can help is Beall’s List of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publishers. Jeffrey Beall uses a set of criteria to create this list that makes a lot of sense. I urge you to take a close look at these publishers before deciding to send them your work.
When it comes to evaluating scientific papers, citation counts are mentioned more often than not. A paper can be cited for a variety of reasons but it is generally agreed that citations are one of many indicators of impact. There are a number of resources that are either free or subscribed to by the Library for looking up citing references, such as Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science.
The authors of The Wisdom of Citing Scientists discuss the limitations of citing references for assessing the usefulness of papers. For example, one cannot assume that a paper with few citations has been widely read and critiqued. It is possible that the paper was not found by others or that it did have some influence on future writings. They argue that cited references in a paper tell a more complete story, revealing a scientist’s preference for particular journals and theoretical approaches, and his/her ability to identify relevant, current, and high quality publications. As librarians we are always stressing the importance of examining the reference list of a paper so it was quite nice to see this articulated.
The “Cited by” option in Google Scholar now includes a link to citations in Web of Science. Take a look under the reference to the article in this screen shot. Google found 7289 citations from all sorts of items on the web, but also links to the 701 citing articles in the multidisciplinary database, Web of Science. I was using Google Scholar today to send references over to EndNote but this is a nice new feature that I will be sure to explore further.