Edis doubted the rumors of funds from U.S. creationists, saying: “American creationists I talk to basically envy Harun Yahya’s financial resources. If there were any fund flowing, it would be from Adnan Oktar to the creationists.”

Of all the social software built on the web in the last two decades, none are as important yet as little talked about as reputation systems. Reputation systems have driven the entire business at eBay.com, much of the business at Amazon.com, drives activity at Digg.com, powers the moderation system at Slashdot, etc…and yet for all the millions of words written about web design very few of them have been dedicated to this type of software.

From an author’s perspective PLoS ONE cuts out the crap in getting papers published. The traditional approach (send to Nature/Science/Cell, get rejected, send to Nature/Science/Cell baby journal, get rejected, send to top tier specific journal, get rejected, end up eventually going to a journal that no-one subscribes to) takes time and effort and by the time you win someone else has usually published it anyway. It also costs the authors money in staff time to re-format, rejig, appease referees, re-jig again to appease a different set of referees. I haven’t done the sums but worst case scenario this could probably cost as much as a PLoS ONE publication charge.  Save time, save money, still get indexed in PubMed. It starts to sound good, especially for all that material that you are not quite sure where to pitch.
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To me the truly radical thing about PLoS ONE is that is has redefined the nature of peer review and that people have bought into this model. The idea of dropping any assessment of ‘importance’ as a criterion for publication had very serious and very real risks for PLoS. It was entirely possible that the costs wouldn’t be usefully reduced. It was more than possible that authors simply wouldn’t submit to such a journal. PLoS ONE has successfully used a difference in its peer review process as the core of its appeal to its customers. The top tier journals have effectively done this for years at one end of the market. The success of PLoS ONE shows that it can be done in other market segments. What is more it suggests it can be done across  existing market segments. That radical shift in the way scientific publishing works that we keep talking about? It’s starting to happen.

I am sceptical about the value of ‘microcredit’ systems where a person’s diverse and perhaps diffuse contributions are aggregated together to come up with some sort of ‘contribution’ value, a number by which job candidates can be compared. Philosophically I think it’s a great idea, but in practice I can see this turning into multiple different calculations, each of which can be gamed. We already have citation counts, H-factors, publication number, integrated impact factor as ways of measuring and comparing one type of output. What will happen when there are ten or 50 different types of output being aggregated? Especially as no-one will agree on how to weight them. What I do believe is that those of us who mentor staff, or who make hiring decisions should encourage people to describe these contributions, to include them in their CVs. If we value them, then they will value them. We don’t need to compare the number of my blog posts to someone else’s – but we can ask which is the most influential – we can compare, if subjectively, the importance of a set of papers to a set of blog posts. But the bottom line is that we should actively value these contributions – let’s start asking the questions ‘Why don’t you write online? Why don’t you make your data available? Where are your protocols described? Where is your software, your workflows?’

Our past experience is one of the primary sources of information when faced with a choice. We ask ourselves: "what will happen if I do this?"
Accurately predicting the consequences of our actions is usually modeled by operant (instrumental) learning experiments. These types of experiments are often contrasted with classical (Pavlovian) conditioning experiments in a dichotomy. And indeed, different brain circuits mediate the acquisition of skills and habits (via operant/instrumental learning) and the acquisition of facts (via classical/Pavlovian learning). However, realistic learning situations always comprise interactions of skill- and fact-learning components (composite learning). Fixed flying Drosophila melanogaster at the torque meter provide one of the very few systems where the relationship of operant and classical predictors in composite learning can be studied with sufficient rigor. The latest experiments show that the textbook operant/classical dichotomy is misleading and that instead composite learning consists of multiple interacting memory systems. These interactions between predictive stimuli (classical component) and goal-directed actions (operant component) make composite conditioning more effective than the operant and classical components alone (learning-by-doing, generation effect). Rutabaga (rut) mutants are impaired in learning about the (classical) stimuli, but show improved (operant) behavior learning. This is the first evidence that operant and classical conditioning differ not only at the circuit, but also at the molecular level. The interaction between operant and classical components is reciprocal and hierarchical, such that the classical suppresses the operant component. Experiments with transgenic flies demonstrate that this suppression of operant learning is mediated by the mushroom-bodies and serves to ensure that the classical memories can be generalized for access by other behaviors. Extended training can overcome this suppression and transforms goal-directed actions into habitual responses. This interaction leads to efficient learning, enables generalization and prevents premature habit-formation.

Five defining characteristics of stupidity, it seems to me, are readily apparent. First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government functions and who's in charge. Second, is negligence: The disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important news events. Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of public policies that are mutually contradictory, or contrary to the country's long-term interests. Fifth, and finally, is a broad category I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.

Public Library of Science (PLoS), the poster child of the open-access publishing movement, is following an haute couture model of science publishing — relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals.

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PLoS One uses a system of 'light' peer-review to publish any article considered methodologically sound.

Nature Neuroscience aims to send 30-35% of papers out to review, so getting past that stage is the biggest hurdle.