How to read a scientific abstract

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noah-gray/abstract-science_b_1923214.html

Over at the HuffPo, Noah Gray (who is a senior editor at Nature) has a really good step-by-step "how to" on reading abstracts of scientific papers. Often with prepublications, or authors' Web sites or citation sources like SSRN the abstract is all you have to go by and it's nice when an author makes the abstract clear. Gray breaks down what a (well constructed) abstract looks like.

In particular, it's often easy from an abstract to see exactly where mainstream media has gone off the rails in reporting. Though I do wish more scientists would put a little more into the well portion of "well-written abstract."

(h/t Maggie Koerth-Baker at Boingboing for the original pointer)

BoS Fire photos

https://picasaweb.google.com/105385377744489605309/BoSSpinning

I finally found a couple hours to finish the edits from the Beginning of Summer fire performance photos. Started with about 160 images, kept 62.

There's a mix of styles and timings in here. Some shots went as little as 1/1000th of a second. Others are 1-2 second exposures. I was trying hard not to pay attention to the camera settings and just shoot. I've also turned off the picture preview by default (finally) though I still find myself compulsively glancing at the back of the camera.

I want to be shooting more, but life is so overcommitted I don't know when that will happen.