As with children’s toys and clothes, books aimed at children tend to be targeted in a gender-stereotyped way. This is a bit depressing.

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Raw Data: A novel on Life in Science by Pernille Rørth (Springer, 2016) {.alignleft .size-medium .wp-image-786 loading=“lazy” decoding=“async” attachment-id=“786” permalink=“https://quantixed.org/41txjjrwibl- sx328_bo1204203200 /” orig-file=“https://i0.wp.com/quantixed.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/41txjjrwibl- sx328_bo1204203200 .jpg?fit=330%2C499&ssl=1” orig-size=“330,499”

Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty Ben Ratliff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) {.alignleft .size-medium .wp-image-756 loading=“lazy” decoding=“async” attachment-id=“756” permalink=“https://quantixed.org/41lkbxvsugl- sx329_bo1204203200 /” orig-file=“https://i0.wp.com/quantixed.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/41lkbxvsugl- sx329_bo1204203200 .jpg?fit=331%2C499&ssl=1”

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[Europe PMC Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life sciences, healthcare and medical humanities. It includes full text reports from government agencies, like the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the US’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and content allowed by participating publishers.

I have just finished reading this excellent book, Statistics done wrong: a woefully complete guide by Alex Reinhart . I’d recommend it to anyone interested in quantitative biology and particularly to PhD students starting out in biomedical science.

Books about the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology are plentiful. If you haven’t read any, the best place to start are the books written by some of the Nobelists themselves: “I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier” by Perutz, “My Life in Science” by Brenner.

Imagine, if you will, open access as a train, running up and down the length of the country, travelling anywhere track is laid, delivering papers, books, ideas to all and sundry. Research funders have the opportunity to man the signal boxes and set the open access movement’s direction of travel.

One advantage of flying to the US is the chance to do some reading. At Newark (EWR) I picked up Guy Kawasaki's "Reality Check", which is a fun read. You can get a flavour of the book from this presentation Guy gave in 2006. While at MIT for the Elsevier Challenge I was browsing in the MIT book shop and stumbled across "Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge" by Frenchman Jean-Noël Jeanneney. It's, um, very French.