Mailund on the Internet

It’s been a week, so time for me to list my favorite posts from last week.

Chimps

• Chimpanzee collects ammo for “premediated” tourist-stoning (Not exactly rocket science)
• The premeditated chimp (John Hawks)

Programming

• How to … review code (Programming for Scientists)
• How to be a program manager (Joel on Software)
• Sharpening the saw (Coding Horror)
• Ordered sublists. A brute force approach (Word Aligned)
• Longest common subsequence (Word Aligned)

Research

• The value of stupidity: are we doing it right? (Neurotopia)

I’ve been invited to join the editorial board of PLoS One (invited by Jason Stajich, thanks!).

The philosophy behind PLoS One is to publish everything that is sound research, and then open up for discussions through blogging and similar.  This is similar to BMC Research Notes (where I’m already on the editorial board).

I think it is important to have a place where “less interesting” papers can get published.  Negative results and such.  It is important research, even if there are no exciting results.

We spend a lot of time working on ideas that turn out not to work out the way we hoped.  And the same ideas are probably worked on several times if they look good but are dead ends.  Simply because there is no way to learn from other people’s experience when it comes to negative results.

We need those published!

Another cool thing is the open discussion that PLoS One aims at.  They want blog-like discussion of the papers.  I don’t know how well that works yet, but I look forward to find out.

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