Welcome to the 4th edition of Praxis, and the first edition to be held at the home of Praxis, and embarassingly late due to a temporary blockage in the Windsor internet pipes or something. So without further ado, here are the entries for this month!

I'm going to start with not one entry, but an entire debate that had the science blogosphere all of a twitter. It all started when Dr Isis criticized a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Janszky and Ljung concerning the relationship between changing the clocks and heart attacks. Now, this is not the place for me to judge the authors' (crappy) interpretation of their (crappy) evidence. If I wanted to discuss their (crappy) letter, then I'd write a (crappy) blog post about it.

However, laboratory goddess Dr. Isis begged to differ, summing up her views on the authors' analysis with the following diagram, subtitled "Janszky and Ljung interpret their data":

Now the scientists in question happened upon our antagonistic protagonist Dr. Isis and were somewhat miffed, leaving a reply in the comments which Dr. Isis presented and rebutted in a blog post. It said something along the lines of "curse you bloggers, you think you're clever, but if you're so clever why aren't you publishing your criticism somewhere proper, like a journal letter!"

Little did our hapless duo know that telling the science blogosphere that blogs are not an appropriate place to, erm, discuss science was about as dumb a thing to do as walking into a turkey pen with a jar of cranberry sauce, and before long assorted denizens of the science blogosphere were clucking and pecking and squawking and flapping and doing all sorts of other things that birds do except for fly, because Turkeys can't fly because they're too far. Not that science bloggers are fat. Well some of them are, but we don't know if they're particularly, y'know, fatter as a proportion of... oh sorry, you want the posts don't you.

Drug Monkey waded in with more criticism, which got the two even more riled. "How thoughtful of you to repeat the Teddy bear picture", they exclaimed in the comments, referring of course to this picture, which I'll repost just in case you missed it the first time.

Bora then added a little more weight to the debate with a more comprehensive take down of the original letter, adding some further commentary on the by-now-infamous teddy bear picture. The scientists will still somewhat pissed though, but what was really notable was this comment: "An anonymous blogger, with her background not clear for us.." Erm, why should somebody's background be important to the validity of their criticism?

Dr. Isis was of course by this time rather weak-kneed at all the bloggerly (see, it's like "brotherly", but for bloggers and gender-neutral) love, even as the debate rolled on, and reached the pages of the mighty Pharyngulista empire.

DrugMonkey came back again with some more considered opinion, as did Abel Pharmboy, both looking in more depth at the fundamental issue - can blogging be useful to peer review? Of course it can. Of course it can.

Some criticism did sneak its way through though. Did the original post really have to be, well, quite so snarky? Propter Doc also took this line, expressing disappointment that this interaction between bloggers and journal authors had to be quite so fractious.

My role model in the blogging world, PalMD then stepped in with some words of advice for the authors. "Bloggers are freaks", but we're lovable freaks, and you should join us rather than fear us, because frankly a paper discussed here will probably get a bigger audience than in the letter pages of some stuffy journal anyway.

Join us. Joinnn usss.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

And now onto the rest of the show.

Careers:

How do you make the step up from a Ph.D., and in fact do you even need one in the first place? And once you're in, should you remain a lone-wolf,, or join an empire of rampaging academic tribespeople?

And in these fledgling years, how important is it for students to get to know their professors, and how important is it for us to get to know our students? After all, they're not just temperamental tools for paper production. Apparently.

Blogging and Online/Open Science
How can online communities help advance science? Chad Orzel asks why blogging doesn't generate more science, while Michael Nielson describes the problems with doing science "in the open".

What is the use of blogging? That's the question asked by Steinn at the Dynamics of Cats, and it's such a good question that Mike the Mad Biologist feels the need to ask it a second time!

And of course no section on Open Science would be complete without The Obligatory Copyright Essay!

Equality in Science
Dr. Isis has not only taken flak for her analyses this month, but also had to defend herself from a fellow science blogging lady for apparently not writing in a feminist enough tone. Zuska also comes to her aid. My comment on this is that to while I find Dr. Isis to be both hot, interesting and challenging, I find KH frankly rather tedious and unintelligent for suggesting that every time I stumble across a literary goddess I think she must be a bimbo. Men do actually read the words between the pictures, you know.

Another form of discrimination in science is the plummeting level of grant awards to young researchers, a topic discussed here by DrugMonkey.

And Finally:
A beautiful post in semi-response to the earlier posts about relating to students, describing one woman's reaction to the death of her friend when they were studying together.

And Greg Laden tells us tales from the whacky world of 1970s Archaeology Grad Student Scene (some say it spawned Punk).

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

So that's it for this month's edition of Praxis! The next edition will be up at Effortless Incitement on December 15th, so get writing!