Despite all that, you’ve been a little slow lately, and I found my thoughts wandering. Earlier today, I noticed a 2collab link, and, without thinking about it, clicked over to see what has changed since last time we met. Before I knew it, I was pulling in my publications via Scopus ID, tagging papers, and joining interest groups. I’m sorry, Connotea, but the speed was just so intoxicating that I went and exported my whole library from you and went to import it to 2collab. It seems my affections weren’t returned, however, as I was slapped with the following message:
Unable to import bookmarks: org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException: Could not execute JDBC batch update
Like a bucket of cold water, that returned me to my senses, and I came back to you, ol’ Buggotea.
What forward-thinking brilliant scientist am I talking about? Why, none other than Jenny McCarthy, the renowned autism expert, who contends that “autism is an environmental illness.” Interestingly, but entirely unrelatedly, CNN has another article up next to hers, about a sperm donor who donated to 6 women, 3 of which bore autistic kids.
McCarthy:
Evan is now 5 years old and what might surprise a lot of you is that we’ve never been contacted by a single member of the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics, or any other health authority to evaluate and understand how Evan recovered from autism.
Not a single one of the other experts on the subject will even give you the time of day? You’re so misunderstood, Dr. McCarty. One day you’ll show them all, but until then, it’s a good thing we have the media to vet important health claims.
Published by Mr. Gunn on October 14, 2007
The NLM has published a comprehensive set of guidelines for citing email, usenet, websites. It’s great that they’re attempting to come up with some standard rules, but one has to wonder if the group coming up with the proposed rules has ever used our fine series of tubes.
There’s a number of issues with their recommendations, some egregiously bad, some just kinda funny. For example, they have one set of rules for citing websites, and a different set of rules for citing electronic mail and discussion forums. This, in itself isn’t so strange, but look at the subcategories in each case:
Websites
Homepages
Parts of Websites
Electronic mail and discussion forums
Electronic Mail
LISTSERVs and Similar Discussion Lists
Blogs
Wikis
Apparently “homepages” are somehow different from other Websites, and both are altogether different from blogs and wikis, which don’t even merit inclusion in the Website category. Email gets cited one way, except if it’s an email from a mailing list. That categorization is but a harbinger of the confusion shortly to become apparent.
For example, while one might cite a part of a website with the full URL to the cited page, the rules for blogs call for only citing the front page. Never mind that blogging is responsible for the invention of the permalink as we know it today. Mention of URIs or DOIs is nowhere to be found.
That’s the seriously wrong stuff, but as I said, there’s some humor to be found as well. The content type of these sources is given as “blog on the internet” or “discussion list on the internet“.
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