This is a review of a blog post by Amardeep Singh blogged about Idea for Discussion: An Academic Blog Review.

In theory, like others, I think the idea of a peer reviewed system for blogs is a good idea. Peer review has several advantages over the status quo; it offers authors feedback on posts they have written, it offers guildance to readers on where to find good posts, and blogs would possibly be able to be used in academic pursuits.

Blogs already have a feedback mechanism for authors. It’s called comments, and to a lesser extent trackbacks. However, these comments are almost always made anonymously or pseudo-anonymously such that nobody knows who actually wrote them. I always sign all my comments as N. Johnson with a link to my blog. It’s not hard to figure out who I am, I just like making people look a little for it. When the author of a comment is not know, his or her expertise can not be accurately judged. But when the identity of a reviewer is known, they sometimes are not as truthful if they think the article is not as good as it should be, perhaps fearing retaliation. I believe any peer reviewed for blogs would need to be an anonymous system such that the reviewers were previously vetted and were found to be experts in their field.

However, as Cognitive Daily: Peer review for blogs points out, the current academic peer review system doesn’t work all that great. It’s hard to get academics to review papers. Not because they don’t think it’s important, but because it requires a large amount of time which could be spent on other things, such as their own research. He quotes Singh’s answer to this problem.

My idea is to have a system of academic blog reviewing, where people self-select individual blog posts they’ve written for review by others, perhaps using a combination of Technorati tags and emailed links. The reviewers could consist of fellow bloggers (credentials no bar) as well as non-blogging academics in a given discipline, who would publish their reviews on a central site. The reviewers could choose to be “onymous” or pseudonymous (as long as it is a consistent pseudonym, and contact information is available to site admins), and be asked to write a significant evaluation to the post in question (say, 250 words). Other reviewers and readers of the reviews could also evaluate the reviewers’ comments, as a way of maintaining standards for reviewers. Troll-like, unfair reviews would be deleted, and their authors denied reviewing privileges.

As I said above, I don’t think having reviews open to everyone is a good idea. We already have that in comments. Reviews must be done by someone knowledgable about the topic. For instance, I would feel vastly unqualified to comment on blog posts at Cognitive Daily, but I may feel qualified (depending on the specific subtopic) to comment on posts at Fermi Paradox. Some people naturally only comment where they know they know they have enough specific knowledge to add something to the discussion, others just like to comment to comment. So besides that issue with his proposal, I think it sounds good; we need a way to evaluate posts and even entire blogs. I hope someone soon implements a system of peer reviews for blogs and it gets used.

As I’ve written about before, I’m using principle components analysis (PDF) in an attempt to distinguish two processes that occur in stratocumulus clouds. The problem - or so I’ve been told - is that PCA will separate covariance into orthogonal basis vectors regardless if there are two processes or not. Therefore, when attempting to interprete, it’s important to make sure that the results tell you exactly what you think they tell you. In my case, it’s fairly easy to do: I just look at a different day. Happily, when I did, I got the same results as before… kinda… but I cheated. Okay, cheated isn’t the right word. But when I looked at day x+1, the results were slightly different than day x. Argh. When I looked at day x+2 though, I was in heaven. Exactly the same as day x. I rushed to find the advisor, but he had already left for the weekend - and who could blame him, it was 7:30pm. I decided since he was gone, that was a good excuse for me to leave too, though I probably should have stayed and looked at some other stuff. Add to that that I’m terribly unproductive on Monday mornings. Is anyone productive on Monday morning? Maybe the weekend should be extended until noon on Monday. I’d gladly give up Friday nights so I didn’t have to come into work on Monday.

So there isn’t a series, and it isn’t really fortunate nor an event, but I’m writing about it anyway.

On an impromptu quiz, a student misspelled ‘atmosphere’ as ‘atmospie’. Wouldn’t that be nice to have an atmosphere that tasted like pie? Mmmmm. The only problem? It would soon be gone because I’d eat it all! I love pie.

I’m grading papers… again. This is a compilation of things I wanted to write on them.

The assignment asked you to find a severe weather event for an area, give a brief overview of the climatology of severe weather in the area, and then describe a single extraordinary event and how it impacted the community. [ed. - the actual assignment was more detailed, but I've outlied the important points] You gave no climatology at all, that was an important part of the assignment. It was unfortunate for you that the brief severe weather overview was worth a substantial percentage of the grade. I appreciated you skipping that because it kept me from reading another paragraph of your intensely poor grammar [ed. - which the assignment specified would be graded]. Your understanding of meteorology, even being in an introductory weather and climate class, is at a fifth grade level. You do not understand the difference between a warm and cold front, a high pressure system and low pressure system, nor even a topic as simple as east and west. Your examination of the event - that you chose - was taken almost directly from one website, albeit a good one, though that was probably just luck. In your almost direct copying, you did manage to use the thesaurus on a few of the longer words - hopefully by using Microsoft Word and choosing the first word it suggested - and to change the sentence structure when it suited you. Though you did cite your reference [ed. - yes, just one]. The organizational structure of your paper, as with many other aspects, mirrors your source. However, in your putrid attempt to summarize the meteorological condition which led to the event you chose, you failed; perhaps due to above said lack of understanding of things a college student should know, like the difference between east and west. Overall, if a first grader had written this, it would have received two gold stars. However, since basic literacy should be a prerequisite for graduation from high school - something I am presupposing you did, even though your performance on this assignment leads me to believe otherwise - and graduation from high school [or a G.E.D.] is a prerequisite for college, you will be failing this assignment. This will dramatically lower you grade since you seem to have done well on the previous exams and homework assignments - which obviously did not accurately judge the expertise of the students. I hope you actually pass this class so I don’t have to read your papers next semester.