Eminent British mathematician Tim Gowers has written an epic post on his attempts to get universities to disclose how much they pay for their Elsevier subscriptions. There is a lot of fascinating anecdote in there, and a shedload of important data — it’s very well worth a read. But here is the part that staggered me most.

Order up! {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10163 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10163” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/04/24/one-articulated-sauroposeidon-to-go-hold-the-perspective-distortion-with-a-side-of-stinkin-mammal/sauroposeidon-omnh-53062-articulated-right-lateral-composite-with-giraffe/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/sauroposeidon-omnh-53062-articulated-right-lateral-composite-with-giraffe.jpg”

We all remember Upchurch and Martin’s (2002) description of the Rutland Cetiosaurus , which remains by some distance the best British sauropod specimen in the literature; and the same authors’ (2003) survey of the genus Cetiosaurus . They concluded that nearly all of its many named species are either nomen dubia or misassigned, and that only C . oxoniensis is a valid, diagnosable species.

5. Brian Kraatz, 2004 In the spring of 2004, I was killing time over in Tony Barnosky’s lab at Berekeley, talking to Brian Kraatz about something–mammals, probably. Brian told me that I should consider going to the International Congress of Zoology that was happening in Beijing that fall.

I was in Oklahoma and Texas last week, seeing Sauroposeidon, Paluxysaurus, Astrophocaudia, and Alamosaurus, at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, the Shuler Museum of Paleontology at SMU, and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, respectively.

How can it be? {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10065 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10065” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/04/15/horrible-sauropod-skulls-of-the-yale-peabody-museum-part-2-brontosaurus-and-no-i-do-not-mean-apatosaurus/img_0517/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/img_0517.jpg” orig-size=“2000,1332” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"4","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot

Five days ago, I released a program for drawing comparative figures of vertebral columns, such as this one from our neural-spine bifurcation paper. With my idiot computer-scientist hat on, I gave that program the startlingly unmemorable name vcd2svg — the reasoning being that it takes Vertebral Column Descriptions and translates them into Scalable Vector Graphics.

I think it’s fair to say that this “bifurcation heat-map”, from Wedel and Taylor (2013a: figure 9), has been one of the best-received illustrations that we’ve prepared: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8009 attachment-id=“8009” permalink=“http://svpow.com/papers-by-sv-powsketeers/wedel-and-taylor-2013-on-sauropod-neural-spine-bifurcation/wedel-and-taylor-2013-bifurcation-figure-9-bifurcatogram/”

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This morning sees the publication of the new Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework from HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for England.