Peer reviewers at journals are commonly paid. I know this is an old issue, but I felt the urge to comment (massage that ego, yeeaaahhh). I'm all for volunteer reviewing, which also happens, but adopting as a norm by law (implied by copyright law reform in academia) is as I said: a dangerous experiment. Scientists are busy people who already sacrifice quite a bit of their science in outreach and teaching, when they're in academia. Asking that they not get paid to be reviewers may not work out to be as beneficial as pure public access, as valuable as that would be.

I'm having trouble finding the actual study (which seems to be a meta-analysis more than original research). Does it have controls? Does it actually compare a set of people who are randomly assigned organic vs. nonorganic foods? If not, it's not at all conclusive. The fact that they desire a longitudinal study implies to me that they did not have such a control...

And don't get me wrong, the 'organic' craze has a lot of BS in it. It's not healthier by default, certainly, nor is it necessarily more environmentally sound (the rules for being organic can allow environmentally worse procedures). A lot of nutritionally worthless foods get labeled 'organic' as if that makes them healthier ('organic' butter will still go straight to your thighs...).

Then they have significantly changed their standards or are very inconsistent, lbbros.

Peer review does not end with publication, of course, but merely getting published is a substantial and important barrier, with the journal's peer reviewers being the guards. This is why citing from the peer-reviewed literature is important, for one example. It isn't perfect, but it's one extra layer of academic validity.

Does your post imply that you'd be fine with doing away with peer-reviewed journals?

What would replace the current system, exactly? Free peer review coupled with nearly-free publishing? Take a look at the PLoS, which is invaluable. However, it also does *not* have peer review because that requires maintaining a specific board of reviewers and at least one editor. This is why you can find unscientific trash like Intelligent Design 'papers' in there along with the world-class science. While I think the best situation for science would be great peer review with completely open access, I just don't see it working well without a huge amount of peer review volunteering, which could arguably switch the incentives for (peer-reviewer) performance completely around. If someone finds a solution to this, it would be great, but it's a dangerous experiment to simply throw out copyright in academia, particularly science.

It is worth the money, yes, but it's about as big as a number of Windows 7 improvements which I put under a similar header.

Funny, as 10.6 is almost entirely about developer/system efficiency updates. The Win7 dev updates are frankly pitiful when compared to the full repertoire available in OS X, but you go right ahead and miss the point :).

So let's see... Windows 7 has:


1. Performance enhancements of various kinds.

2. XP mode

3. A new, fancy taskbar

4. A more powerful calculator and similarly tiny changes to apps.


10.6 has:


1. Performance enhancements of various kinds, including a massive reduction in size.

2. A new avenue of development with OpenCL.

3. Changes comparable to a more powerful calculator.


So it looks like Windows 7 has... a new, fancy taskbar and a compatibility layer compared to 10.6. WOW, that sure justifies a $200 price difference. The grandparent will be eating his shorts, but at least he'll be able to buy about 15 more pairs.

Dawkins uses 'Darwinism' as do a lot of other scientists. It's often the term used for the theory of natural selection, which is only part of evolutionary theory (of course). I get very tired of hearing it used out of context, or worse, having evolution equated with natural selection. Scientists do it, too! I agree with the opinion piece: we need to do away with the term 'Darwinism'. It's misleading and provides way too much fodder for creationists for no good reason.

Pure ignorance, not to mention idiocy. There's so much wrong with what he's saying that it would make me look ridiculous just to debunk it. PZ Myers did a good job with a number of the claims, but really the basics are just so obvious with a bit of education. Men are having kids at a younger age? By what measure? Most have pointed out that men had a tough enough time living to 35 a lot of the time for a huge amount of our species' history, let alone reproducing then. It's painfully obvious that he wants to affirm some kind of patriarchy that makes him feel comfortable - didn't he make some kind of misogynistic joke?