Fair enough, I'll tell Chris Surridge (the editor) to make this a little clearer in the description.
And no, no offense taken.
Please, do submit you work to PLoS One! The editors and referees really only look for the technical merit. This means that your manuscript will be judged only on it's scientific validity and not on some fashion fad that may or may not be going on at the time of submission.
If reason wins over politics, PLoS One will be the publication of the future with impact not determined by the negotiations with a monopoly company, but by your peers.
Erm, PLoS One is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, just like all the others. Three external referees have reviewed our manuscript before it was published. In fact, one referee had such fantastic recommendations, that it took us over 6 months to implement the changes, due to the computations necessary. In case you refuse to read original literature:
Received: October 23, 2006; Accepted: April 18, 2007; Published: May 16, 2007
There you have it!:-)
On top of all this, you can also leave comments and annotation with the paper. Get your facts straight, buddy, before you slander scientific work you have neither read nor understood.
Bjoern
Wow! I've been/.ed. Well, I never...:-)
Once I realized it, I felt so compelled... I, I just had to address the/. discussion, I think I've lost my free will. Now where did I put it? Anybody here seen it? Maybe these pesky flies stole it?:-)
Of course, our original study makes no mention of free will, it is not a scientific concept.
However, spontaneity even in flies makes us ponder what, if anything, this might entail for our subjective experience of free will in a macrocosm we believe to be largely deterministic. Therefore we addressed the issue with an ironic question in our press release: "Do fruit flies have free will?" http://brembs.net/spontaneous
Of course, the media will drop the question mark, because questions don't sell. Some journalists even told me their editors told them to emphasize the free will thing precisely for this reason.
That's fine with me. The debate got re-ignited and that's a good thing, I believe. The discussion here shows that. You can see all the coverage and blogosphere discussion linked at: http://bjoern.brembs.net/
Scientifically, the most important aspect (which understandably got a little buried by the media) is that we found evidence for a brain function which appears evolutionarily designed to always spontaneously vary ongoing behavior. There is tentative evidence that such a function may be very widespread in the animal kingdom, including humans. Why would all brains have this function? If this were indeed the case, we might have discovered the first evidence for something truly fundamental to our understanding of brains.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, I'll tell Chris Surridge (the editor) to make this a little clearer in the description. And no, no offense taken.
Please, do submit you work to PLoS One! The editors and referees really only look for the technical merit. This means that your manuscript will be judged only on it's scientific validity and not on some fashion fad that may or may not be going on at the time of submission.
If reason wins over politics, PLoS One will be the publication of the future with impact not determined by the negotiations with a monopoly company, but by your peers.
Erm, PLoS One is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, just like all the others. Three external referees have reviewed our manuscript before it was published. In fact, one referee had such fantastic recommendations, that it took us over 6 months to implement the changes, due to the computations necessary. In case you refuse to read original literature: Received: October 23, 2006; Accepted: April 18, 2007; Published: May 16, 2007 There you have it! :-)
On top of all this, you can also leave comments and annotation with the paper. Get your facts straight, buddy, before you slander scientific work you have neither read nor understood.
Bjoern
Wow! I've been /.ed. Well, I never... :-)
/. discussion, I think I've lost my free will. Now where did I put it? Anybody here seen it? Maybe these pesky flies stole it? :-)
Once I realized it, I felt so compelled... I, I just had to address the
Of course, our original study makes no mention of free will, it is not a scientific concept. However, spontaneity even in flies makes us ponder what, if anything, this might entail for our subjective experience of free will in a macrocosm we believe to be largely deterministic. Therefore we addressed the issue with an ironic question in our press release: "Do fruit flies have free will?"
http://brembs.net/spontaneous
Of course, the media will drop the question mark, because questions don't sell. Some journalists even told me their editors told them to emphasize the free will thing precisely for this reason. That's fine with me. The debate got re-ignited and that's a good thing, I believe. The discussion here shows that. You can see all the coverage and blogosphere discussion linked at:
http://bjoern.brembs.net/
Scientifically, the most important aspect (which understandably got a little buried by the media) is that we found evidence for a brain function which appears evolutionarily designed to always spontaneously vary ongoing behavior. There is tentative evidence that such a function may be very widespread in the animal kingdom, including humans. Why would all brains have this function? If this were indeed the case, we might have discovered the first evidence for something truly fundamental to our understanding of brains.
Take it easy folks,
Bjoern