From the monthly archives:

January 2007

reviewing Peer Review

by Aziz on January 31, 2007

Ars Technica has a nice summary of a recent paper in PLoS that attempted to assess the quality of the peer review process. From the Ars summary:
To examine what makes a good reviewer, they took advantage of the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine, which has maintained a detailed database of reviewers and post-review ratings (on [...]

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SlideShare

by Aziz on January 28, 2007

in Education

Here’s a great resource for sharing powerpoint slides online: SlideShare. Many of us have useful presentations that we’ve created for various academic or professional purposes; if you upload a presentation to that service please tag it “@refscan” so we can create an automatic table of contents for presentations here. I’ll update this post and upload [...]

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FDA Advisory on Gadolinium contrast agents

by Aziz on January 28, 2007

in Safety

The FDA has an updated Public Health Advisory on the safety of gadolinium-based MRI contrast agents. In a nutshell, patients with any sort of renal disease or otherwise compromised kidney function are at high risk of developing Nephrogenic Systemic Fibrosis (NSF) or Nephrogenic Fibrosing Dermopathy (NFD) if they receive gadolinium contrast agents for MRI imaging. [...]

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the Just Science challenge

by Aziz on January 25, 2007

in Meta

What if anti-Science didn’t exist? In other words, what if public outreach by scientists didn’t have to allocate a significant fraction of resources to combating pseudo-science and conspiracy theories? That’s the world that the Just Science Challenge wants to create, if only for a week, starting February 5th (monday). During that week, the challenge to [...]

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the Patron Saint of MRI

by Aziz on January 24, 2007

in Meta

Technically, magnetos are the exact opposite of an electromagnet, but the Marvel Comics character remains our field’s patron saint by virtue of artistic license.

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