Magnetic Resonance Imaging news, information, and journal club, with minimal spin.
RefScan has been pretty moribund of late, mainly because I have been preparing for a cross country move and tying up loose ends at my postdoc. Please rest assured that there will be new content regularly appearing again in the near future. For a few weeks though, the dry spell will continue.
Also, incidentally, upgrading to Wordpress 2.2 kind of hosed our K2 theme install, so we are looking a bit retro until I can fix that.
I’m adding the DTI feed to the right sidebar now instead of its own page. I still would like to solicit suggestions for other real-time feeds off of PubMed, so leave a comment with your favorite queries.
The PubMed query for the DTI feed is as follows: Continue reading ‘Diffusion Tensor Imaging feed’
I have decided that my inaugural post on this respectable, scientific blog should, of course, be filled with rampant speculation and ungrounded commentary. Sadly, Aziz does not have that “Organizing the Secret (Yet Open-Source) Cabal that Shall Rule ISMRM” tag for this blog…Respectable commentary on image reconstruction coming later in the week.
One thing that I have followed with some interest is the recent open peer review/open access movement. One comment I’ve heard is that if “pre-publication” review is shortened or eliminated, various negative consequences will ensue: scientists will have little motivation to send in comments, mean quality of a publication will suffer, etc.
So, here’s a crazy idea: create an open-PR MR journal (make it electronic only, even) and focus it on the areas of MR that are not well-served by the current paradigm. Have an editor give submissions a cursory check, and send it off. Focus it in the following (non-exhaustive list of) areas:
Basically, make a purposefully low-impact journal, at least as an initial experiment. Give it a small audience, so that people can keep up with it. Make it over simple topics so that you don’t feel nervous if you want to use it in your own research. And then see how it works.
What does everone else in the blogosphere think?
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 science bloggers is thus:
Bloggers who self-identify as scientists and science writers should post on:
1. Published, peer-reviewed research and their own research.
2. Their expert opinion on actual scientific debates - think review articles.
3. Descriptions of natural phenomena (e.g., why slugs dissolve when you put salt on them, or what causes sun flares; scientific knowledge that has reached the level of fact)
We at Reference Scan will be participating in the Just Science Challenge. In fact if you registered as a user here at RefScan you might find that I’ve already upgraded your account to be able to post to the front page, because I can use the help!
There’s already an extensive list of participating science blogs. Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a field that is uniquely abused by anti-science and one that I think needs to be represented in the online scientific community. So let’s plant our flag and meet the challenge. Should be fun!
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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