In the world of academia, the number of citations an article receives means money at grant review time, and that means career success.However, with the emergence of new article metrics, researchers are increasingly looking to usage data (downloads and article views) and other article-level metrics, such as social media mentions, to understand a paper's impact. Last year, Elsevier ran a pilot for...
read moreWhile America has drastically reduced its greenhouse gas emissions - CO2 from energy is back at early 1990s levels and emissions from coal are back at early 1980s levels - that isn't good enough for many environmentalists. Meanwhile, China is setting the stage to offset all of the greenhouse emissions cuts by the rest of the world while claiming they lead in clean energy. read...
read moreIt is often the case that I get yelled at for being both too liberal and too conservative in the same week. It happens because the science under discussion violates the motivated reasoning of someone's political beliefs. No conservative ever complains that the policy implication of a science issue is a conservative one, obviously, but you can bet left-wing people will, and vice-versa. read...
read moreA magnitude-5.3 earthquake has hit the Japanese prefecture that is home to the nuclear power plant crippled in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake struck early Friday at a depth of about 13 miles under Fukushima Prefecture and about 110 miles northeast of Tokyo.The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not issue an alert and the Japanese news agency Kyodo...
read moreA year ago I noted an alarming increase in celiac disease patients - it seemed to be afflicting a lot of rich, white, American women.Outrage and scorn were delivered to my door; dozens of comments vilified me for saying it was not a real disease - which would have been fine, had I actually said that. Yet dwarfing those comments by hundreds were the anecdotal claims of people who had...
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