Taking a break from proofing/editing a manuscript (In order to in place of simply To, intercalate between and display instead of have are my current bugbears. Plus the deliberate nixing of all my gerunds in favour of that. Grr), I see that everyone’s favourite cell biology journal has launched the JCB DataViewer.
This interesting little widget makes any published image as accessible to readers as if they had acquired it_, according to Executive Editor Emma Hill. For microscopy junkies such as myselffair.html this is definitely an early Christmas present. You can re-scale and scroll through stacks, look at 2D projections of intensities and generally waste hours looking at someone else’s data.
The reader can thus access a maximum amount of information from published images, far more than can be gleaned from a single, two-dimensional optical slice.
which is all to the good, surely?
It might even help combat fraud: it’s a lot harder to disguise things in apparently ‘raw’ data than in the processed, ‘typical’ images we see in final articles. Especially if submitting all raw images becomes mandatory—see the Editorial for more discussion. JCB are quite hot on combatting scientific fraud (or ‘promoting scientific integrity’, to be slightly more positive), and this reminds me that I have a half-written weblog entry somewhere talking about it.
In the meantime, look! Pretty!
Do you want to swap? I’ll edit your manuscript, and you can mark the remainder of my pile of student’s science writing assignments. I just read an assignment that used the word “important” SIX times in the first FOUR sentences, but at least that one did not use “has been known to be” instead of “is”, which is my current pet peeve. (After seeing that phrase a gazillion times in student assignments I also saw it a few times in my own thesis [blush] and probably didn’t even remember to correct them all…) In general the students are pretty good, though, and I’ve been (known to be) more impressed than annoyed.
How many assignments?
deliberate nixing of all my gerunds
When I read that, it made my eyes water.
As well it should. Poor little things.
How many assignments?
Five. Ten. A million. I try not to count. There were 34 when I started marking, but the pile doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller.
Gerundocide?
gerundissimo