(Re)Mind the Gap

We were pleasantly surprised to find out that BSL postdoc Kristian Valen-Sendstad's paper in press with AJNR, "Mind the gap: Impact of CFD solution strategy on prediction of intracranial aneurysm hemodynamics and rupture status indicators", is the subject of a commentary -- all the more surprising because  AJNR wasn't too keen on the paper when it was first submitted :-)  Way to go Kristian!

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

Courtesy of the Onion: http://www.theonion.com/articles/evangelical-scientists-refute-gravity-with-new-int,1778/.  It would be funny if it didn't ring so true.  *sigh*

We need to talk about TED

Couldn't have said it better myself: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted.  Thanks to Roberta Buiani for posting this on her Facebook page.

Paper Published: Carotid Bifurcation Geometry Is an Independent Predictor of Early Wall Thickening at the Carotid Bulb

This paper, just published online by Stroke, is the culmination of nearly a decade's worth of effort (e.g., see here, here, here, and here) trying to answer a deceptively simple question: can carotid bifurcation geometry be considered an additional risk factor for atherosclerosis.

As it turns out, the answer is "yes, but".  "Yes", because we did tease out a significant and independent association between early wall thickening and bifurcation flare & curvature geometric parameters; "but", because the association was relatively weak.

An equally interesting aspect of the study was the care we had to take to exclude secondary effects of thickening on geometry.  Had we not done so -- and as we showed -- the associations would have been even weaker or, worse, significantly stronger but inverse to what they should have been.

WANTED: PhD or Postdoc in Art-Inspired Visualization and/or sonification

Click here for PDF

Google me this: What's wrong with this picture?

Whither Peer Review?

Er, thanks(?) to former BSL postdoc Yiemeng Hoi for sending me this depressing story about the ugly side of open-access publishing: http://scicomm.scimagdev.org/.

Not that traditional journals are exempt.  There are simply too many journals, and good peer-reviewers are overworked, meaning that a lot of stuff gets relegated to potentially unqualified reviewers. And the pressure to publish N papers per year has led to a "let's throw it at the wall and see if it sticks" attitude to journal article submission. Science suffers from all of this noise, and we have only ourselves to blame for falling into the bibliometric trap set for us by the bean-counters.

Which makes me wonder.  Should I review articles from groups I know and trust to be careful and honest, and nit pick their papers to make sure they are rock solid and bullet-proof?  Or should I spend time instead reviewing for lesser journals and novice authors, where the reviewer is implicitly being asked to teach the authors how to write a paper, to make sure that crap doesn't inadvertently make it into the system?