The Evil Monkey has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from a southeastern U.S. university. After a postdoctoral nightmare of Inquisitorial proportions, he is currently working in a laboratory and an adjunct assistant professor at a nearby state university.
Scicurious is a graduate student wrestling with a PhD in Physiology at a southern institution. She is a nerd, a geek, and also a dork. And yes, that really is her brain.
NotoriousLTP is an MD-PhD student in New York City. After finishing (hopefully soon) his PhD in behavioral neuroscience, he will re-enter the fun vortex that is medical education.
The first Open Lab 2009 review is up over at Sciblogs! Sci was amused that the reviewer notes that editor (editress? editrix?) is listed by her pseud, but agrees that it's all part of the blog experience. :)
The reviewer, Grant Jacobs, follows with a hopefully representative list of some of the posts in the book, calling Dr. Jekyll's Breatstatistics "delightfully tongue in cheek", calls Ambivalent Academic's dissection of academia "wonderful", and calls the writing overall "great"! However, I have to quibble with his description of our beer post, Good head, as being quintessentially male. Sci herself learned a LOT from that post which she intends to use in her future pours, and which she has already shared with her friends of both sexes, to their interest and delight ("really? Cool! Let's get another beer and try this...").
Sci is sorry for the lack of physical science that Jacobs notes, but we work with what we have, and in general the submissions for biology and neuroscience FAR outnumbered those of physics, astronomy, etc (for a full list of 2009 submissions, see here). So next year, y'all are just going to have to submit more physics!! And math, we could use some more math...
But you won't know what is lacking, and what is not, unless you buy it yourself!
Education
Information Science
Comments
**Hastily attempts to shift the goal posts** Quibbling back at you I would offer that I didn't write that the 'Great Beer' post was quintessentially male, but that the question it addressed was ;-) Here I am demonstrating a quintessentially male tendency to make excuses :-)
I'm kidding here. (Of course.) Shifting from the post to the question doesn't exactly improve the point after all. And—seriously—I'm glad I'm wrong.
I wouldn't apologise about the lack of physical science articles. I had a feeling that it reflected the submissions at the time, and probably should have said so to make clear I meant that and not the editorial choice. I've added a footnote to clarify this.
When I think about it my own research field (computational structural biology, which I would very, very much like a research grant for) can involve all three of biology, physics and maths. Maybe next year I ought to get a submission in that contributes to all three disciplines?!
(I didn't offer one this year. In hindsight there are a few I should I have at least offered, but that's hindsight for you.)
Great job on the book, it must have been a huge effort to get that much together.
Posted by: Grant | March 2, 2010 2:17 AM
Hehe. No reason to backpedal, Grant. Though really, the question of the chemical composition of beer head and the affect it has on beer flavor is really more of a gender neutral question. :)
Yes! Submit for next year! People often feel weird to submit there own stuff, but no one will know, and if you don't submit it, can you be assured that your readers will? Of course not! If you want something done right, gotta do it yourself. :)
Thanks for the book review!
Posted by: Scicurious | March 2, 2010 9:55 AM
Ha. I'm sure my maleness colours my writing, but I actually thought it was quintessentially grad student when I wrote it (and that's probably not true either).
Thanks for the mention - I'm glad it was informative!
Posted by: Kamel | March 2, 2010 12:36 PM
OMG YOU GUYS! I just had a good grad student experiment idea. We need to compare different beers in terms of their quality with and without beer head. I am particularly interested in the low end of the price curve. Does Bud Lite taste any better with head? What about Miller Lite? This could be of great importance to college students and poverty stricken grad students everywhere...
Who's in?! I can make a study design...
Posted by: Scicurious | March 2, 2010 1:38 PM
That's a great idea! I'm sure there will be no shortage of volunteers....
Posted by: Kamel | March 2, 2010 3:41 PM