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podcasting Journal Clubs

Posted: May 01 2005
by Jochen Weller
Hi all

I know that many groups around the world have weekly journal clubs.
Was wondering what people thought about providing a forum where
either podcasts or webstreams of the clubs are available ?
Or is a journal club a too intimate affair ?

Yours
Jochen

podcasting Journal Clubs

Posted: May 02 2005
by Sarah Bridle
Hi,
Would like to be able to hear other people's journal clubs!

Not sure how many people would send them in though. As you say, would surely change the dynamic. Lets face it, people are not always as prepared as they might be for these things, and the thought that the author might actually listen to you attempting to discuss their paper could be a bit off-putting. I dare you to be the first!

Would like some podcasts of something that keeps me up to date though...

Was looking into text-to-speech to do podcasting of new arxiv abstracts (after filtering - see http://cosmocoffee.info/arxiv_new.php), but it is a bit difficult to listen to a machine reading things.
Shows how much more info we get from a human voice versus text I suppose. Or alternatively how much effort we put in subconsciously when reading text.

If authors provided simply a spoken version of their new arxiv abstracts then this would already be handy for listening on the ipod..
mp3s of short talks might go down well too!

But back to journal clubs: what I'd really ideally like is a potted summary of other people's journal clubs! Alan Peel sent one in to cosmocoffee which was great. I should admit that the Majumdar & Mohr post I sent in was as a result of reading the paper for a journal club that Marusa Bradac organised at Stanford. I hesitated to include other people's viewpoints in my posting because I thought people might not want to be quoted, on the other hand I didn't want to quote them without giving them the credit either. Would have been better if I'd suggested at the journal club that we compose a joint post etc.

It would be great if someone per journal club were be nominated to send a post into cosmocoffee! Composing the post would be a good exercise in itself. Could then circulate to those present to check before posting? No need to include everything the journal club discussed, just e.g. the main impressions and/or remaining questions.

Sarah