What You’re Doing Is Rather Desperate

Academia takes a very narrow view of what constitutes “output”. Rewards (such as funding or tenure) are given out on the basis of (1) publications, preferably first-author, preferably in so-called high-impact journals; (2) citations, in the same journals and (3) previous rewards – “demonstrated ability in securing funding”. I always find that last catch-22 clause particularly amusing.

I started to think about this when I read What is principal component analysis? [DOI 10.1038/nbt0308-303], in the current issue of Nature Biotechnology (subscription only). Now, I’m not criticising the article or its publication: it’s well-written, educational and a good basic overview of PCA for biologists who have not previously encountered the method. However, my first reaction was to recall a number of excellent blog posts on the same topic that I’ve read recently. For example:

• Deriving biological meaning from principal components analysis – by Mike
• PCA at Open Mind part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4

The Nature Biotechnology article is recognised by academia and qualifies for academic rewards. The blog posts – which are longer, more detailed, written by enthusiastic communicators and in theory, accessible to a much wider audience (as opposed to people with a subscription to Nature Biotechnology) – are not.

It doesn’t seem right to me. How does your institution evaluate and reward “non-traditional” output?

In yet another moment of BBGM synchronicity, I started to think about lifestreaming and its applications as Deepak wrote about it. My inspiration was the recent article 35 ways to stream your life.

I’ve tried (and you can find me at):

• Mugshot – aggregates a limited number of sources, doesn’t seem to update properly from del.icio.us, has conversation features (quips, comments)
• FriendFeed – nice look and feel, a limited number of sources, has conversation features (comments, ratings)
• Profilactic – by far my favourite in terms of look/feel and sources (you can add anything that has a feed) but no conversations as yet

Lifestreams are fun. I don’t expect anyone to care about what I just played on last.fm (and likewise), but these are all ways of broadcasting yourself and making connections. Read Deepak’s post for some thoughts on how this might apply to science.

Here’s a crazy idea – the workstream:

• Neil parsed SwissProt entry Q38897 using parser script swiss2features.pl
• Bob calculated all intersubunit contacts in PDB entry 2jdq using CCP4 package contact

No?