aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

An inappropriate hug from a 4-year-old?

I thought this had to be a hoax:

WACO, Texas - School administrators gave a 4-year-old student an in-school suspension for inappropriately touching a teacher’s aide after the pre-kindergartner hugged the woman.

A letter from La Vega school district administrators to the student’s parents said that the boy was involved in “inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment” after he hugged the woman and he “rubbed his face in the chest of (the) female employee” on Nov. 10.

They later changed the offense to “inappropriate physical contact;” it’s disturbing nonetheless.

Via Capt. Fog.

Reinventing research journals

From the Journal of Neuroscience:

Despite the arrival of the internet and multimedia, the scientific paper looks remarkably like it did 50 years ago. My thesis is that despite most journals having an electronic version, the information age is yet to hit journals in a major way. We are still at the beginning of transformation of medical journals; and yet, I believe, they cry out to be transformed. [...]

First, I don’t think that it makes any sense to continue with paper copies of research articles. Instead of the “quasi-legal” document that is the current scientific article, we should be moving to full data being available on the web together with the software that might have been used to manipulate the data, as well as multimedia presentations to back up the data. [...]

If an absence of peer review (or post-publication review, as I call it) is a step too far, then we should have an author (or rather funder) pays model. These fees could support a peer review mechanism, which should be open in that both authors and readers would know who was reviewing studies. It’s ethically unacceptable that such important judgements should be made an unidentified judge. [...]

At present credit comes from publishing in prestigious journals. Often the impact factor of the journal (a dubious and manipulated statistic) is allocated to the paper, which is wholly unscientific because there is little correlation between the citations to studies and the impact factor of the journals in which they are published, because the impact factor of a journal is driven by a small number of highly cited studies (Seglen, 1997). In the new world I’m imagining, credit would come from the buzz from researchers and hits on the study. These hits can be disclosed in real time, unlike citations, which come years after studies are published.

Via IFTF’s Future Now.