On Bricolage

I first came across the word bricolage about 20 years ago from a French student who was working with me. He used it in an affectionate way to describe a piece of scientific equipment that he and I had put together from pieces of kit we had lying around the lab. It was his description of the process of tinkering around that we had used to make the thing work. 

The key characteristic of bricolage as a way of working is the use and re-use of materials that already exist to create something new. It is the recruiting of already available bits and pieces to solve the new and immediate problem. It is the opposite of top down, rational design, it is evolutionary and open-ended. It is also great fun. 

I was first taught how to do bricolage by my Dad who was by training a motor mechanic. He had learnt in the 1940's that in order to have a chance of mending a car, for which parts and spares may be non-existent or rare, one had better have a good odds & sods box of screws, springs, bushes, bolts, angle brackets and other assorted pieces of material that may be useful at some indeterminate point in the future. People with a more tidy cast of mind would describe the contents of a good odds & sods box as junk.

The French molecular biologist and Nobel laureate François Jacob (1920 - 2013) famously described evolution as bricolage. At the level of genes, evolution is surprisingly conservative and once a useful piece of biology has been obtained through natural selection it is used and re-used again and again. In The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998) Ursula Goodenough defines bricolage in this context as; the construction of things using what is at hand, the patchwork quilt.

  
The trader turned philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb also uses the idea of bricolage to describe his approach to optionality in research and investment.

Bricolage comes from the French word bricoleur. As far as I know there is no single english word that translates this word well. Candidates would include bodger and tinker, but both have a negative connotation or imply a low level of skill. Nevertheless, I think bodger is the best we have. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the earliest use of the word as:

1552   R. Huloet Abcedarium Anglico Latinum,   Bodger, botcher, mender, or patcher of olde garmentes.

This is close perhaps to the idea of patchwork, which is appropriate.

Once you have bricolage in mind, you can find examples everywhere. 

The public open space of the City of London as it is today, the result of nearly five hundred years of building, re-building, tinkering and bricolage. Original image from Space Is The Machine by Bill Hillier, cleaned up and re-coloured.

uARM

The uARM is a fun robotic arm kit that is currently being funded on Kickstarter. 

The designs and software will be open-sourced after May 2014.

The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains 1901

Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers has a chapter called Harlan, Kentucky, that describes the culture of honour that is found in the American South and Kentucky. 

In 1901 the American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple wrote a pioneering study called The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A study in Anthropogeography. It is a report of Semple's fieldwork and describes the cultural impact of the specific geography of Kentucky. 

It begins as follows:

In one of the most progressive and productive countries of the world, and in that section of the country which has had its civilization and its wealth longest, we find a large area where the people are still living the frontier life of the backwoods, where civilization is that of the eighteenth century, where the people speak the English of Shakespeare's time, where the majority of the inhabitants have never seen a steamboat or railroad, where money is as scarce as in colonial days, and all trade is barter. It is the great upheaved mass of the Southern Appalachians which, with the conserving power of the mountains, has caused these conditions to survive, carrying a bit of the eighteenth century intact over into this strongly contrasted twentieth century, and presenting an anachronism all the more marked because found in the heart of the bustling, money-making, novelty-loving United States. These conditions are to be found throughout the broad belt of the Southern Appalachians, but nowhere in such purity or covering so large an area as in the mountain region of Kentucky.

Originally published in the Geographical Journal (London) June, 1901.

Kentucky still has pockets of poverty. The per capita income of Harlan County is $18,665 and Kentucky as a state has 16 of the poorest counties in the US. One third of households in Harlan County have no indoor plumbing.

 For more on Semple see HERE.

Time Geography

The Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand (1916-2004) was a pioneer in the study of Time Geography. A key part of his work was the development of methods for visualising worldlines. Most commonly he used three dimensional diagrams, with a 2D plane showing position on the ground, and the vertical axis time. 

He called these visualisations spacetime aquariums.

Both images from HERE

Light Painting Worldlines

Whilst going about our daily lives we all leave behind worldlines in spacetime: the four dimensional blend of space and time within which events unfold. 

Worldlines are ghostly, insubstantial filaments, silken yarns that follow us through our lives forever. They cannot be seen or felt. If worldlines could be visualised then I imagine they would look like incredibly complex  versions of light paintings.

Below is a light painting by the american photographer and visual artist Barbara Morgan (1900-1992):  Pure Energy and Neurotic Man (1940).

And how the One of Time, of Space the Three, Might in the Chain of Symbols girdled be.

Perhaps the most notable of all the Royal Astronomers of Ireland, and Irelands greatest mathematician, was Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865).  In addition to his work on optics, mechanics and mathematics he invented quaternions in 1843, a key step in the development of modern ideas of four dimensional spacetime and quantum mechanics (a fundamental element in quantum mechanical calculations is known as the Hamiltonian). 

Hamilton was a child prodigy and he was appointed to the Andrews Professorship of Astronomy in the University of Dublin when he was just 22 (before he had even graduated). He moved to the Dunsink Observatory near Dublin  and lived there for the rest of his life. 

Dunsink Observatory is about four miles north-west of Dublin castle on a low limestone hill with a view south to the Wicklow hills; ...It is a handsome building, presenting in front a facade of two wings, and a projecting centre, crowned by a dome.  

Hamilton did not have the happiest of private lives and died in 1865 after a severe attack of gout.

Image from HERE

The Return of Pelican Books

Pelican Books is returning as an imprint (HERE).

Below from 1974. Five Hundred Years of Printing by S.H. Steinberg.

Image from HERE.

New edition by Oak Knoll Press HERE.

Oak Knoll Press & The British Library

The Process of Observation

From Abraham Kaplan's book  The Conduct of Inquiry (1964).

An observation in science is first of all something done, an act performed by the scientist; only thereby is it something seen, a product of the process in which the scientist is engaged. As process, observation is a part of what Nagel calls "controlled investigation". Scientific observation is deliberate search, carried out with care and forethought, as contrasted with the casual and largely passive perceptions of everyday life. It is this deliberateness and control of the process of observation that is distinctive of science, not merely the use of special instruments (important as they are) – save as this use is itself indicative of forethought and care. Tycho Brahe was one of the greatest of astronomical observers though he had no telescope; Darwin also relied heavily on the naked eye; De Tocqueville was a superb observer without any of the data-gathering devices of contemporary social research. 

 

Observation is purposive behavior, directed towards ends that lie beyond the act of observation itself: the aim is to secure materials that will play a part in other phases of inquiry, like the formation and validation of hypotheses. When observation is thought as passive exposure to perception, its instrumentality is left out of account. The scientist becomes a voyeur, finding satisfaction in the unproductive experience of just looking at nature. No doubt there is always some gratification in uncovering secrets, exposing what is hidden; but the scientific motivation is more mature in its demands. In science, observation is a search for what is hidden, not just because it is hidden, but because its exposure will facilitate an intimate, sustained, and productive relationship with the world.

Agnes Arber: The Mind and the Eye

Agnes Arber was an outstanding botanist, artist and biologist. Here is one of her microscopic drawings from her book on water plants (HERE).

X-Ray Art

By Hugh Turvey

A Modest Proposal (1989)

In the late 1980's Tim Berners-Lee had a bright idea. He wrote a paper about the idea which he then sent to his boss (who called it Vague but exciting ...).

The idea was arguably the biggest that any physicist has had in the last 25 years, in terms of impact on the planet. It is nothing to do with science or physics. It was, of course, the basic architecture of the World Wide Web.

The diagram is wonderfully self-referential.

 

Image Copyright CERN

 

Physics Envy Unmasked

HERE is a very entertainingly written article in the Guardian about the de-bunking of a highly cited paper on positive psychology that had used Lorenzian complex dynamic maths. It is a textbook case of Physics Envy. The debunking paper is HERE. 

The 3 conclusions of the Berelson & Steiner Book on Human Behaviour are worth calling to mind in any quantitative study of humans:

- Some Do, Some Don't.

- The Differences Aren't Very Great.

- It's More Complicated Than That.

 

Across the Plains

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)  wrote novels, essays, letters and poetry. He is best known for classics such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

In 1879 Stevenson began a romantic and adventurous journey to be united with his lover Fanny Vandegrift. After sailing in second-class on the Devonia from Scotland he traveled from New York City overland by train to California. The journey almost killed him. 

Stevenson recounts his journey across the US and his stay in Monterey in Across The Plains. He stayed in Monterey, California in the house below.

Smiths Map 1815

William Smiths Map of Geology 1815

A Map of the Gulf Stream 1871

In 1855 the American oceanographer Mathew Maury described the Gulf Stream in the following lyrical terms;  

There is a river in the ocean. In the severest droughts it never fails, and in the mightiest floods it never overflows. Its banks and its bottoms are of cold water, while its currents are warm. The Gulf of Mexico is its fountain and its mouth is in the Arctic Seas. It is the Gulf Stream. There is in the world no other such majestic flow of waters. Its current is more rapid than the Mississippi or the Amazon.

 Below is a map of the Gulf Stream presented in Light science for leisure hours. A series of familiar esays on scientific subjects, natural phenomena, &c., &c (1871) by Richard Proctor (HERE).The map is an isographic projection. 

The Foldscope

I met Manu Prakash last year at a TED conference in Edinburgh. He is a very smart young professor at Stanford University.

With a couple of co-workers he has invented the Foldscope. A folding, $1 microscope, that uses origami techniques to go from completely flat to functional. He has filed a patent (WO2013120091). An abstract of what it can do is below (with an illustration from the patent application indicating the Foldscopes response to being stomped upon by a person).

Cheshire - 1819

The history of the county palatine and city of Chester: compiled from original evidences in public offices, the Harleian and Cottonian mss., parochial registers, private muniments, unpublished ms. collections of successive Cheshire antiquaries, and a personal survey of every township in the county; incorporated with a republication of King's Vale royal, and Leycester's Cheshire antiquities. By George Ormerod (1819).
 

 

A detailed Bathymetric Map of the Dee estuary

The Dee Estuary is large and is dominated by dynamically changing sand bars and channels.

Figure 5.1 of Ramachandran, K. (2010): Tidal morphodynamic modelling in the Dee Estuary,UK., MSc thesis, University of Southampton, UK.

Earls of Chester

The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester. Vol III
George Ormerod, London 1819

Liverpool 1680

From Bygone Liverpool (1913) HERE.

Nature Through Microsope and Camera

The image below shows Arthur E Smith, an expert at photo micrography, at work in his studio, and an example of his craft. 

From

Nature Through Microsope and Camera

by Richard Kerr

With photo-micrographs by Arthur E. Smith
Published 1909 by The Religious Tract Society. London.

From the Introduction:

Charles Kingsley has said, `I have seen the cultivated man craving for travel, and for success in life, pent up in the drudgery of London work, and yet keeping his spirit calm and his morals all the more righteous, by spending over his microscope evenings which he would too probably have been gradually wasted at the theatre'.

 

Available to download HERE.

...there are some things we can predict and others that we can only measure.

For my birthday I got a copy of Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society. Edited by Bill Bryson and published by HarperPress. 

All round it is a good read.

The Chapter that stands out for me is by John D Barrow, SIMPLE, REALLY: FROM SIMPLICITY TO COMPLEXITY - AND BACK AGAIN.  In it Barrow explains where we are at on the development of Grand Unified Theories (GUT's) & Theories Of Everything (TOE's) and how ordinary physical laws based on symmetries relate to Chaos. 

The following passage introduces a great distinction that on reflection is straightforward, but nevertheless very well expressed;

The simplicity and economy of the laws and symmetries that govern Nature's fundamental forces are not the end of the story. When we look around us we do not observe the laws of Nature; rather we see the outcomes of those laws. The distinction is crucial. Outcomes are much more complicated than the laws that govern them because they do not have to respect the symmetries displayed by the laws. By this subtle interplay, it is possible to have a world which displays an unlimited number of complicated asymmetrical structures yet is governed by a few, very simple, symmetrical laws. This is one of the secrets of the universe.  

   

He also goes on to explain that "it would be a strange (non-Copernican) universe that allowed us to determine everything that we want about it. We may just have to get used to the fact that there are some things we can predict and others that we can only measure".  

Barrow's piece also references the work of Mitchell Feigenbaum on the universal behaviour of non-linear systems (latterly often referred to as Chaos). The image above is from the front cover of the first issue of Los Alamos Science from 1980, showing a visualisation of some of Feigenbaum's work (HERE). 

Microscope teachings : descriptions of various objects of especial interest and beauty

From 1866 by Mrs Ward. Microscope teachings : descriptions of various objects of especial interest and beauty : adapted for microscopic observation.

 

Apollo 17 Moon Maps

Here are some incredible high resolution maps of the Moon's surface from Apollo 17 - this is an index map for the photos that were taken on that mission. 

Above is a full width Map and below that a portion of the map showing the Sea of Serenity and Sea of Tranquility.

A perambulation of the Hundred of Wirral...

 

A perambulation of the Hundred of Wirral in the county of Chester

 1909

From HERE

A Truncated Octahedron & Non-Overlapping Germ-Grain Model Light

Tom Dixon is a pretty cool British company that designs and manufactures lighting and furniture. The company was established in 2002. Tom Dixon launches new collections annually. One of his recent collections, launched at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, is Etch a collection of acid etched brass, copper and stainless steel lights. 

The Etch candle holder is in the form of a truncated octahedron about 13 centimetres in diameter. The truncated octahedron is an Archimedean solid with 8 regular hexagon faces and 6 square faces. In this candle holder one face is missing, but the others are pierced with a patterned array of circular holes. Multiple units can be bolted together with small brass nuts and bolts.

The image below shows:

TOP - Tom Dixon's Etch.
MIDDLE - The array of circular holes.
BOTTOM - A truncated Octahedron.

The Tom Dixon website says that these lights are "inspired by the logic of pure mathematics". Although this sounds like a bit of marketing hoopla it is not without merit. 

Archimedean solids, such as the truncated octahedron that is the basis of the Etch design, are a venerable subject for mathematical study. 

The pattern is a bit more tricksy. I don't have any idea of what, if any, mathematical method Tom Dixon used to create the piercing patterns, but they do remind me a little bit of 2D spatial patterns that can be created using a class of stochastic model known as 'non-overlapping Germ-Grain' models. For those interested Jenny Andersson has a doctoral thesis and published papers on these models including realisations of them (HERE). Another pertinent paper is available on arXiv HERE.

Below is an example of a realisation of a non-overlapping Germ-Grain model from Andersson's thesis. It's not quite the Etch pattern but I can convince myself that the Etch pattern may well be 'inspired' by the logic of this type of pattern.

 

Xmas Eve 1968

Image from NASA (HERE).

State of the art topgraphic images of the Moon 1805 & 2013

The image below shows two state of the art topographic images of the moons surface. 

The image to the left is a Lunar Planisphere engraved by John Russell RA in 1805 based on almost 40 years of detailed sketching and manual measurements using a micrometer and telescope. It is the Moon viewed in full sunlight. 

"This plate exhibits an accurate view of the lunar disk in a state of direct opposition to the sun, when from the absence of shadow the eminences and depressions are undetermined, and every intricate part arising from local colour or other hitherto inexplicable causes is developed and fully expressed. In a mean state of libration".

 

It is an incredible feat of scientific imagination.

The image to the right is from NASA in 2011 - it is an image created from detailed altimetry data and application of information about the phase and libration of the moon (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio). 

Two hundred years separate these two images. It is remarkable how similar in detail both images are and also remarkable that neither are directly captured images of the moon. The first took Russell upwards of 20 years to engrave and the second is based on a lunar elevation map captured from amongst other things by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter LOLA. 

  

The Forum Inscription

Talking of a boustrophedon below is a stone rubbing of the Forum inscription taken from the Epigraphy to John Edwin Sandys A Companion to Latin Studies. Cambridge University Press, 1913; p. 732, plate 107. This, in turn, credits Domenico Comparetti (1835-1927), Iscrizione arcaica del Foro Romano, Firenze, 1900. The full book is available HERE. 

Libration & Phases of the Moon

NASA have an incredible depth and breadth of image data that they allow people to use pretty freely in various ways. For example, I had been reading up on the libration of the moon (the observed 'wobble' it undergoes as part of its normal orbit. This means more than 50% of the moons face is seen from Earth - in fact about 60%) and wanted to create a day-by-day sequence of images that showed what you would observe of the moons surface from Earth as both phase and libration changed. It so happens that NASA have a nice web interface that allows you to create hour-by-hour visualizations of the phase and libration of the moon based on their detailed moon surface topographic data. They also have nice video visualisations of these images.

Above is a series of these images from 9th May 2011 to 17th May 2011. Each image is at 0 hours UT. I have arranged the images in boustrophedon fashion beginning top left. I found that this was the best way I could find so that each step in the image sequence is immediately 'adjacent' to the previous step and the next one.

Note that these are not images captured from a ground based telescope, they are visualisations of data collected from a diverse set of experimental data - such as LOLA the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter measurements of moon topography. 

Created from NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio images from HERE.

German Printing 1485

The Vatican and Bodleian libraries have launched an online archive of ancient religious texts scanned at high resolution. Below is an image from a German bible printed in 1485. This is the first volume of a German incunable Bible, printed in Strasbourg in 1485 by Johann Gruninger. It contains a number of woodcuts painted in full colour, as well as decorated initials and rubrication.

Image from HERE

The Wells of Bolonchén, Campeche (1844)

From Views of the Ancient Monuments in Central America Chiapas and Yucatan by Frederick Catherwood (1844).

More on Catherwood HERE and Bolonchén HERE.

The birth of scientific measurement

Early in 1609 a leading Renaissance explorer, mathematician and natural philosopher turned his recently acquired optical device skywards to study the surface of the Moon. The observations he recorded are the first ever to be made with a technology that could extend the natural resolution of the naked eye. The observer was a relatively little known Englishman called Thomas Harriot (ca 1560 - 1621). Just a few months after Harriot made his observations, the much better known Renasissance natural philosopher Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to look at the surface of the moon and recorded what he saw. Harriot and Galileo were not the first astronomers, but they were the first to show how the naked eye could be definitively outclassed in observational power by an eye that was equipped with a magnifier.  Although measurement per se is thousands of years old, Harriot was the first to use measurement in a distinctively modern and scientific manner. 

Images from HERE

Scientific measurement is defined by the use of specialised instruments that extend our innate human capacity to resolve differences. In the case of the telescopes used by Harriott and Galileo the improved resolution led them to see features on the surface of the moon that simply could never have been seen before by human beings. Improved optical resolution led directly to scientific discovery.

The relationship between scientific measurement and resolution is not just nostalgic and historical, there is an integral connection between the two:

The history of science over the centuries can be written in terms of improvements in resolution... Scientific resolution has increased an average 10,000,000 to 100,000,000 times per century in each of the 4 centuries since Galileo. (Edward Tufte -  Visual Explanations 2003)

The pursuit of resolution drives science on today. The Large Hadron Collider search for Higgs Boson and the Map of the Universe are examples.

Within a matter of months of each other, and completely independently, Thomas Harriot and Galileo began the scientific study of the surface of the moon, more broadly observational astronomy and also scientific measurement. 

Although Harriot has priority over Galileo for this landmark in human history, he did not publish his observations as rapidly, coherently and comprehensively as Galileo did.  Thomas Harriott was known by his contemporaries to be both brilliant and seemingly uninterested in claiming priority for his work, much of which was later re-discovered by others. He left a disorganised but rich legacy of work in optics, astronomy, exploration and mathematics. It is only over the past few decades that a fuller appreciation has developed of the quality of his scientific and mathematical work. 

A taste of more recent scholarly interest in Harriot can be gleaned from the articles and bibliography in the volume edited by Robert Fox Thomas Harriot and His World: Mathematics, Exploration, and Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England.

FULL MOON

 Image Credit NASA - From HERE

Michael Light is an American photographer who published a book called Full Moon in 1999. Light had obtained permission from NASA to work with the original photographic master negatives from the Moon missions. He created very large digital prints from the images and made a traveling exhibition of them. A selection of the prints are on permanent exhibit at the America Museum of Natural History in New York.

From Lights website:

FULL MOON offers a single composite journey to the Moon and back comprised of imagery from the 9 actual Apollo missions, along with Earth orbital imagery from the Gemini missions.  One of the primary goals of the project was to think about the some 33,000 Apollo images in terms of the traditions and meanings of landscape representation, rather than science, cold-war politics, and exploration alone.

The site is here - FULL MOON

A pocket Map of the Universe

One of my favourite artefacts is the set of pop-out maps made by PopOut products. They have cleverly identified both a need - high resolution spatial data in a pocket friendly format without the need for connectivity or power (i.e. a map) with a way of packaging it into a pocket sized unit.

The company was founded in 1992 - according to the company history:

1992 - Having spotted a need to cure what he calls 'Map Stress Syndrome' after watching numerous tourists around the City of Bath, England, battling with oversized maps, founder Derek Dacey recalls the invaluable miniature charts he used during his days as a commercial pilot. Aiming to bring this level of usability to the city map market, a small team of designers is recruited to realise what would soon become the PopOut.

Here is an example of the PopOut map of London UK showing the cunning folding mechanism that allows the centre of London to be packed into the pocket sized format. Good old fashioned ingenuity, high quality printing, paper and card put to great use. 

Copyright Compass Maps Ltd.

Pretty cool - but not expansive. 

Below is the Mother of all Pocket Maps. Created in 2005 it shows the whole of the known Universe. Moving out from the centre of the Earth in powers of ten multiples of the radius of the Earth (6371 Kilometres). 

 Further details can be found in the paper HERE.

The first recorded observation of the moons surface in 1609

On the evening of July 26th 1609 the Englishman Thomas Harriot made a sketch of the surface of the  moon as he had observed it through a telescope. This was four months before Galileo did the same.

Copyright Lord Egremont, Petworth House Archives HMC 241/9 fol 26. West Sussex Record Office, Chichester


More HERE.

The Face of the Moon

John Russell (1745 –  1806) was an English painter and member of the Royal Academy who specialised in oil and pastel portraits. He was also a gifted amateur astronomer who worked to make an accurate record of the lunar surface he was observing through his telescopes. 

One of Russell's masterpieces is a detailed pastel of the moons surface measuring 5ft that he completed in 1795.

More detail HERE.

Below is one of Russell's observational drawings, from July 10th 1787 (from HERE).

Things exist whole and entire within it...

Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) was an English engraver who used metal-engraving tools on boxwood that was cut across the grain - a major innovation in how illustrations were printed.

Bewick is best known for his illustrated volumes on the History of British Birds. Along with the main subjects of the book, the birds, Bewick also included numerous tiny and beautifully engraved vignettes which helped pad out the visual space of the pages.

"The crucial point about Bewick's vignettes is that they don't have a defined edge. They're not bounded by a formal rectangle or oval... The image's edge is the edge of a rock, a hill, a bush, a tree. Or sometimes, with a stretch of ground or water or sky, the image just fades out at the margin.

Either way, unlike most pictures, these vignettes lack a window frame. The picture is just an extract. The scene continues off-picture. Not so the vignette. In the vignette, the scene does not lead off-picture. You notice how, in Bewick, things like trees and houses are never half-cutoff by the edge of the image, to suggest that the world goes on. Things exist whole and entire within it".

Tom Lubbock The Independent 15th December 2006 (HERE).

Below, one of Bewick's Vignettes, apparently of Bewick himself, as a thirsty traveler drinking from his hat, drawn and engraved by Bewick (1797) from HERE.

One of the remarkable features of these Vignettes is how small they are - in 1971 the Black Cat Press published a limited edition miniature book containing fifteen vignettes printed from original Bewick blocks on Japanese paper. The book was bound in red Moroccan leather and measured just 66mm x 54mm.

Dynamic projections of 3D onto 2D (or a Bird Ballet)

The French film maker Neels Castillon has made a beautiful short film on the movements of thousands of starlings in the evening in the skies around Marseille.

The film is a series of images of a complex and dynamic three dimensional structure - the flock of individually moving starlings - projected onto a two dimensional plane - the CCD chip of the (mainly) stationary video camera.

Below is a set of stills from the video and below that the original film.

All images Copyright N. Castillion.

More background on the animal behaviour studies around this type of flocking (HERE). 

It's that time of year...

 Copyright M.G. Reed 2010

"Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis … "

More rather bleak stuff on the state of scientific publishing - Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications. F.C. Fang, R. Grant Steen & A. Casadevall. (2012) PNAS. 109 No 42 17028-17033.

Casadevall and co-authors looked hard at more than 2,000 retracted biomedical research papers since 1977. Of the papers they looked at more than two-thirds were retracted because of fraud, suspected fraud, duplicate publication or plagiarism. Only a fifth of the retractions were the result of error. They estimated that the percentage of scientific papers being retracted due to fraud had increased about 10-fold since the early 1970's.

And some good pieces in the Guardian on the ongoing debates around post-publication peer review - enabled by blogs and sharp eyed readers of scientific journals.

Accusations of fraud spur a revolution in scientific publishing.

Not breaking news: many scientific studies are ultimately proved wrong!