Friday night at the cafe-Science Soap Opera

Matt had plans for an epic bike ride tonight, which I bowed out on. With all this free time to myself, I decided to get a jump start on some homework- I am supposed to present a recent research paper to the lab for journal club on Monday. I chose a paper from an author who is coming to give a talk next week, in no small part because I didn't know anything about it, but I am supposed to go to his talk anyway. My job is to lead a directed discussion on the research.

That is how I find myself at the cafe around the corner on a Friday night, three slides into my powerpoint presentation, mostly watching people walk past the big open window. (Shabbasth Shalom!) The window is so big the guy at the table next to me keeps stepping in and out of it to use the phone. How polite.

A good journal club would lay out the questions in the field, show how the paper addresses them and then we can talk about if we agree. Usually, we just look at the experiments in the paper because everyone already knows what the questions are in our field. I am trying to dig up stuff on this field that is really different from what we usually talk about, and I start by looking for literature reviews. Turns out the guest speaker wrote one in 2006- good start. But isn't there one more recent? Then I hit the jackpot. I found a review from another group that trounced the first guys review. There is a separate table (a table!) to summarize the ways that the first guy's model was wrong, and then it puts together another one. Ouch, burn!

Back to the paper I am supposed to present- they don't even CITE the review that slammed them (in this same journal, 2 years ago!). Oh, that's cold. Especially since the model at the end of their paper looks... well, kinda like the second model. Oh, it's gonna be a good journal club on Monday.