Eideard

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A former Department of Agriculture employee who was forced to resign last year after the posting of a misleading video has filed suit against Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger who posted it.

Shirley Sherrod’s suit was filed in District of Columbia Superior Court on Friday, her attorney confirmed. The civil suit accuses Breitbart of “defamation, false light and infliction of emotional distress,” according to a statement issued by the law firm representing her.

Sherrod, who is African-American, was forced to step down as the department’s director of rural development for Georgia in July after video of a speech she made was posted on the internet and reported on by the media. In the video, Sherrod seemed to suggest that she did not do her utmost to help a white farmer. It later was clarified that Sherrod’s remarks were taken out of context and that she told the story to illustrate the importance of moving beyond racial considerations.

Rightwing hypocrites will rally to defend Breitbart’s sleazy behavior and tactics. After all, they embrace and endorse crap like this on a daily basis. Just another reason why they resent not only principled journalism; but, traditional American conservatives who reject racism as a political principle.

You wouldn’t expect today’s Republicans to let truth or facts get in the way of their ideology.

Professional skeptics and pundits should skip this article as it actually deals with science instead of talking about science as if you really read anything.

It’s worth remembering that the currency among professional researchers is in publications – research papers. They are the manifestation of a research group’s work, a reference document, the bar by which a researcher is measured and the stock-in-trade of the knowledge that they produce, use, share, and archive.

The problem has always been that those research papers are on paper…

“The manner in which you become ‘literature aware’ can be slow and is limited in scope to the views and criticisms of your physically immediate peers,” said Ali Salehi-Reyhani, a researcher in single cell proteomics at Imperial College London.

“Web 2.0 throws that open to a global community of experts with tools like f1000 and Twitter.”

F1000 is a tool that highlights high impact papers and allows scientists to subject them to post-publication peer review.

“The viral nature of Twitter allows information to be rapidly and critically spread to an audience thousands to millions wide,” said Mr Salehi-Reyhani. “Tweeting scientists can exploit this to quickly pass on that hot new paper to their peers with minimal effort yet maximum effect.”

The imminent release of Google Wave could also be a boon for the cat-herding exercise of collaborating on a research paper, as each participant in a given conversation – or “wave” – using the service can add, delete, or change a given document, with a live, most-current version of a document in progress visible to everyone in the wave, no matter the time zone.

“Science always builds on what’s gone before and sharing results and data and ideas is a core part of that – it’s just that in the past we haven’t been able to do that as efficiently as we can today.”

RTFA. It’s not so much about the software utilized for the process of collaborative research, writing, editing and discussion. It’s about developing the process with what the Web has to offer 24/7.