During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.

This post was originally published on the London School of Economics “Impact of Social Sciences” blog, on July 30, 2013: In various fields of scholarship, scholars accrue reputation via the proxy of the containers they publish their articles in. In most if not all fields, scholarly journals are ranked in a hierarchy of prestige.

You’d be forgiven if after reading the title of this post, you thought scholars have started to revolt against journal rank. Unfortunately, while there is DORA and of course the evidence that journal rank is like homeopathy, most researchers are still fine with ex-scientists rejecting 92% of all submitted articles and charging a grand sum of more than US$30,000 per article that they select on a whim.

This third installment of my tweetlog covers July 10-18: Cytoskeletal Determinants of Stimulus-Response Habits https://feedly.com/k/15OdS3q Wow!

In the process of migrating content from the old site to WordPress, I’m also moving some articles from there and re-publishing them here as posts. This one is such a case, originally published on December 7, 2006.

This is a slightly edited (amended, essentially) version of my article published today at The Conversation. In cases where a problem within a community is detected and collective action is required to address the problem. one needs to strike a fine line or any efforts to convince the community that action is required will fail.

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I want to use this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This is the first post in this series, just to see if it works and what needs to be tweaked.

This is the tweetlog covering July 3-5: Interesting! We find something similar in flies: Live fast, die young: Long-lived mice are less active https://feedly.com/k/16RDz21 It smells fishy: Copper prevents fish from avoiding danger https://feedly.com/k/12gw14F @ biocs @ google Yes!

Yesterday, Alex Kacelnik published yet another fascinating discovery – one of many over the years out of his lab. This time, they show how birds can pick even five consecutive locks to get to a food reward: According to the authors, the birds solve this problem by trial and error, i.e., in the operant, goal-directed way, which is the learning mechanism we study in our lab.

This morning I was reminded of the age of some of the technology we’re using. Hyperlinks were developed at Stanford University and first demonstrated by their inventor Douglas Engelbart (using the first mouse) in 1968: On Tuesday, Douglas Engelbart died, even before the scholarly literature was able to fully implement the technology he invented, 45 years and counting.