Book week, day 1

Over on Facebook, Quentin May tagged me in a kind of internet chain letter. The challenge is to post 7 books I love (1 per day). No explanations, no reviews. Just covers.

I’m also supposed to nominate a friends to take up the challenge, but I won’t be calling out anyone by name. If you’d like to participate, consider yourself challenged.

Let’s promote literacy and a book list. (Does this promote literacy? You are, even now, reading words.)

“No Comment” by Shirvanian

Risky business

My paper with Dan Hicks and Jessey Wright, Inductive Risk, Science, and Values: a reply to MacGillivray, has been accepted at the journal Risk Analysis. It went from social media musing to accepted publication in just a few months.

Back in July, Dan wrote a tweet that concluded “Anyone want to write a little response with me?” Jessey and I replied that we’d be game for it. E-mails followed. We each wrote a snippet of prose. The snippets got worked together into one document, and that document went through a bunch of revisions. We used a google doc, which highlighted changes and allowed us to make comments back and forth in the document itself. Other than a few e-mails, that’s how we interacted. No realtime conversations, even via skype.

I still use LaTeX for my own writing, but the collaborative workflow of the google doc worked really well for this project.