This is climate skeptics’ top argument about Antarctica — and why it’s wrong

The Washigton Post

By Chris Mooney March 18

On Monday we learned some troubling news about the continent at the bottom of the world — Antarctica. Most of Antarctica is covered with a vast, thick sheet of ice, an area larger than the continental United States and over two miles thick in some places. The smaller, western part of this ice sheet was already believed to have been destabilized — potentially triggering over 10 feet of sea level rise. But now it looks like one key sector of the far larger eastern region (known as the Totten Glacier) may be going through a similar ice loss.

Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

John Bohannon

A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals.

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

Writing Interesting and Better Science Publications

by Dennis Baldocchi - November 23, 2014

http://ameriflux.lbl.gov/suggests-publications/

I have just stepped down as editor in chief of JGR Biogeosciences.  After having handled over a 1000 papers many trends have emerged regarding the quality of papers, the expectations of referees and seeing what published papers become more successful than others.  Much of it gets down to writing clearly and presenting new and novel results that are of interest to the community.  We are grateful that many past flux papers have met this criterion, but we also want to keep the momentum going and the quality of the next generation of papers high. Below is a list I posted on the JGR Biogeoscience web site. Is it the perfect and final word for writing a better paper, obviously not.  But many of the suggestions are worth considering, especially for young scientists.

The minimum sample size for kriging

September 17, 2011    Posted by karmadsen under blog, Geostatistics, Modeling Software, Statistics      

2 Comments

In attempting to find a rule of thumb for the minimum number of observation points needed for kriging, I found out that it’s not particularly straightforward.  Kriging is a linear least squares estimation algorithm. Even in simple least square regression there is a lot of guess work involved in determining the minimum sample size needed prior to conducting a study.  Various estimation methods exists to help researchers design regression analysis studies based on the number of variables and the the desired power level.  But in kriging, there are added levels of complexity.  The x,y distribution of points matters (i.e. they shouldn’t all be clumped together).  The volatility of the z-value matters (i.e. you need more points to capture busy spatial trends).