Palimpsest

Category: research

  • Financiamiento de investigación

    Financiamiento de investigación

    He pospuesto muchas veces este post, así es que va en su estado actual, incompleto, parcialmente digerido, como para empezar una conversación. Como investigador me beneficia decir que todos los países deberían investir (¿o será gastar?) más recursos en investigación. Mientras más grande sea el presupuesto, más probable es que me va a tocar una […]

  • Excel, fanaticism and R

    This week I’ve been feeling tired of excessive fanaticism (or zealotry) of open source software (OSS) and R in general. I do use a fair amount of OSS and pushed for the adoption of R in our courses; in fact, I do think OSS is a Good ThingTM. I do not like, however, constant yabbering […]

  • Should I reject a manuscript because the analyses weren’t done using open source software?

    Should I reject a manuscript because the analyses weren’t done using open source software?

    “Should I reject a manuscript because the analyses weren’t done using open software?” I overheard a couple of young researchers discussing. Initially I thought it was a joke but, to my surprise, it was not funny at all. There is an unsettling, underlying idea in that question: the value of a scientific work can be […]

  • If one were to invent scientific journals today

    While taking a shower I was daydreaming about what would happen if one were to invent journals today, with a very low cost of publication and no physical limits to the size of a publication. My shower answer was that there would be little chance for a model like traditional printed journals. One could create […]

  • When R, or any other language, is not enough

    When R, or any other language, is not enough

    This post is tangential to R, although R has a fair share of the issues I mention here, which include research reproducibility, open source, paying for software, multiple languages, salt and pepper. There is an increasing interest in the reproducibility of research. In many topics we face multiple, often conflicting claims and as researchers we […]