Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Dickson Despommier, Alan Dove, Rich Condit, Kathy Spindler, and Ben tenOever
Ben joins the TWiV team to reveal the winner of his contest in which influenza viruses carrying different interferon-stimulated genes vie against one another in mice.
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Download TWiV 263 (75 MB .mp3, 104 min)
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Links for this episode
- Virusninja
- Game of clones (Vax Rep)
- Game of clones bracket
- Letters read on TWiV 263
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There are a lot of papers out there, and most scientists are too busy to keep up. So it’s simple to let someone, such as a credible journal, curate what research on which one should keep abreast.
But there are some machine learning recommender-based paper curators popping up. As the automated curators get better and metrics by which papers are rated improve, people will pay less attention to where something is actually published. For example, when I watch something auto-recommended to me on Netfilx, I’m oblivious to what channel it aired on. And more importantly, I’m unlikely to care.
What I’m getting at is, once these curators/aggregators are adopted, assuming they aren’t strewn with paid-for recommended paper advertisements, the top journals won’t be nearly as important. Or that’s what I believe anyway. Until then though, I’m mostly reading Nature because it’s a convenient way to consume papers, so I’ll put emphasis on being published in it.