Category: Uncategorized

Papers per person per year

The subject of prolificacy came up in lab the other day. A study from the 80s (pdf) plotted the number of papers from a lab versus the number of people in…



1 yr mark

Labrigger has been going for one year now.

105
Blog posts to date. That’s 0.29/day.

12.2%
Average monthly increase in traffic. This is excluding the first…



Idex CVI Melles Griot

Acquisition news. In May 2007, CVI bought Melles Griot for $60 million. CVI was itself owned by Norwest Equity Partners. The new CVI Melles Griot then…



White House budget proposal 2012

Funding is tight all over. The question is only: How tight? The White House released its budget today. It’s just a proposal, and…



In over your head

My Ph.D. program had a more traditional, comprehensive written qualifying exam following the coursework. However, many of my contemporaries in different programs had the new…



Reviewer comments



Some bits from others

Similar to the last post, here are some more choice bits from other people:

New vocab

Helpful Vocabulary for Journal Reviewers

The post offers some…



Pubmed limbo

In my experience, PubMed works beautifully the vast majority of the time. It does an excellent job parsing search terms and they’re always adding new features (e.g., you can search using full…



Watts per photon

Fun conversion of the day: photon count to watts. This is high school physics, but it’s a good reminder of…



Shot noise-limited imaging

What is the advantage of imaging fast in population calcium imaging? Here’s a quick qualitative comparison. The prep was mouse visual…



NIH grants: Score correlations

NIH grants are scored on five dimensions:
1. Significance
2. Investigator
3. Innovation
4. Approach
5. Environment
(link)

What are the correlations between these different dimensions and ultimate grant funding success?
Here’s a table of all the NIH institutions, and the correlation coefficients for these scoring dimensions and ultimate funding success.



Citizen science article in NN

Nature Neuroscience has a great article on citizen science in the September issue (link, subscription required).

In the article, they discuss that although the public already recognizes the value of publicly funded research,…



DIY open access

Even if you publish in a “closed” journal, you are typically allowed to post the PDF of your article on your…



Open Science Summit videos

There are videos from the talks at the Open Science Summit online now. The topics include the OpenPCR and Otyp projects, open source drug discovery,…



Open science

“Open” is a nice sounding word, not unlike “free”, that is used rather liberally whenever some bit of intellectual property is shared with the public. However, it can mean very different things…