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Stop what you’re doing and go read Cameron Neylon’s blog. Specifically, read his new post, Improving on “Access to Research”. Regular readers of SV-POW! might legitimately complain that my so-called advocacy consists mostly of whining about how rubbish things are.

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In a recent comment, Doug wrote: If I want to be a truly educated observer of Tyrannosaurus rex mounts, what 5 things should I look for in a reconstruction to assess if it is true to our current scientific understanding? I’m not talking tail dragging/upright at this point…we are well past that I hope.

Recently I had the opportunity to give a talk on photographing specimens and preparing illustrations in Jim Parham’s phylogenetics course at Cal State Fullerton. Jim is having each student (1) write a description of a specimen, (2) run a phylogenetic analysis, and (3) do some kind of calibration on their tree. I think that’s rad.

From the files of J. K. Rowling. Publisher #1 Dear Ms. Rowling, Thank you for submitting your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will be happy to consider it for publication. However we have some concerns about the excessive length of this manuscript. We usually handle works of 5-20 pages, sometimes as much as 30 pages. Your 1337-page manuscript exceeds these limits, and requires some trimming.

Lost in the stacks bills itself as “the one-and-only research-library rock’n’ roll radio show”. Every Friday, they broadcast a one-hour show on WREK Atlanta, where they chat about research-library issues and play tenuously relevant songs. The week’s show features Matt and me chatting about open access (and a bit about sauropods), interspersed with dinosaur-themed songs.

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[ Introduction from Mike. I’m on the OKFN’s open-access mailing list, where we’re currently embroiled in a rather tedious reiteration of the debate about the merits of the various open-access licences.

Following on from Matt’s post about the difficulty of photographing big specimens without distortion, I thought I’d have a play with our best Sauroposeidon C8 photo, which I think is this one: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9635 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9635” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/01/30/playing-with-sauroposeidon-photos/sauroposeidon-c8-alone/”