The headline screams “You’re 45% more likely to be murdered in de Blasio’s Manhattan”. The evidence? Sixteen people have been killed so far this year in Manhattan, against only eleven over the same period last year. Does this evidence indicate you are more likely to be murdered, as the headline says? To find out, I tested whether a constant murder rate could explain the results.

I made the below slide for a talk in 2012 to show that the biggest corporate scientific publishers are outrageously profitable.  But that was 3 years ago. How do they look now? Outdated figures, created in 2012 The 40% figure for Wiley in my original slide at left may have been “overinflated”, as a helpful someone explained on twitter.

Elsevier has a history of unethical behaviour: Elsevier created fake medical journals to promote Merck products. Elsevier sponsored arms fairs for the international sale of weapons. Elsevier sponsored a bill that would have eliminated the NIH mandate that medical research be make freely available within 12 months of publication.

Evaluating scientists is hard work. Assessing quality requires digging deep into a researcher’s papers, scrutinising methodological details and the numbers behind the narrative.

There has been renewed interest in fast-track fees, after Nature Scientific Reports began piloting their use. Back in 2011, we wrote a protest letter to seven journals that were using fast-track fees at that time (some have since discontinued). The original website where we posted the letter is defunct, so I am re-posting here. We write to ask that you discontinue the policy of fast-tracking submissions for a fee.

My collaborators and I have started using a new behavioural technique to better understand attentional selection from a rapid stream of stimuli.

Nature Scientific Reports has adopted is piloting fast-tracking for a fee. Four years ago, I noticed that several journals had adopted such a policy. I raised a number of concerns, such as What happens if the fast-tracking period elapses and a reviewer hasn’t gotten their review in yet? Will the decision about the manuscript be made without that review? How is the additional money used? Does any go to reviewers?

I started tweeting under the name VisFact, in addition to my normal account. To make vision science more interesting to undergrads, I frequently contrast human visual abilities with those of various animals. Vision is so important that some animals have evolved eyes bigger than their brain. So vision is definitely important enough to deserve this twitter account!

The below letter was spearheaded by Erin McKiernan and requests that the Society for Neuroscience bring its new open-access policy in line with emerging best practices for sharing of data and ability to re-use content.

Below is the text of a recent open letter I signed, spearheaded by Jon Tennant. Here he explains why he spearheaded the below letter to the AAAS requesting they make changes to their policy regarding their new open access journal, Science Advances. Dear  AAAS, This is an open letter concerning the recent launch of the new open access journal, Science Advances.

At first, I was underwhelmed by this one. But what it does is demonstrate the existence of stretch receptors in our system for the sensation of touch. Running an object (like a stick, or a pen) along the fine teeth of a comb, causes successive teeth of the comb to deflect laterally. There is no appreciable up-and-down component to the teeth’s movement, just the side-to-side movement.