Jaffe

The World According to FEMA

Yesterday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) held a press conference to brief the everyone about their response to the wildfires that have been affecting southern California for the past week.



It turns out that the 'press' at this press conference were FEMA employees. The press conference was announced only 15 minutes before it began, so the real press didn't have enough time to attend. FEMA's solution was to have their own staff ask questions, rather than wait for the actual press to show up.

This isn't the first time FEMA has been in the news for behaving badly. Their handling of Hurricane Katrina has been widely criticized. Last August, on the anniversary of Katrina, I posted this entry about a guy who drove a replica FEMA trailer to D.C. to thank President Bush for the "millions of FEMA trailers", which smelled terribly like a publicity stunt.

It's clear that FEMA is aware of their shortcomings, but rather than address them, they seem to prefer setting up smokescreens to make it seem like they're doing a great job. Unfortunately, we're not judged by the one guy who thinks we're doing great, and we can't ask our friends to be our straight-men in professional situations.

But wouldn't it be great if we could do just that? I wonder what the reviews for my next paper would look like in The World According to FEMA...

The manuscript by Jaffe et al., addresses the role of Rho GTPase signaling pathways in epithelial morphogenesis, a fundamental biological process. This paper reports the establishment of a novel model of epithelial morphogenesis, and provides data defining the role of specific Rho GTPase signaling pathways in distinct aspects of this process.

Overall, this paper was written extremely clearly and logically. There are many unique and revolutionary aspects of this study. The originality of the approaches used by Jaffe et al., are only superseded by the clarity of the data.

Major Concerns:

1) Figure 1 has too much data and should be either separated into 2 figures, or 50% of it should be 'data not shown' (although it would be a shame to leave such beautiful images to the imagination of the reader).

2) The Methods section should be expanded so everyone will be able to produce the quality of data presented in this manuscript.

3) Although this paper is clearly suitable for publication, this reviewer is left worrying that the Journal won't be setting the bar too high for other groups attempting to publish their work.

What a wonderful world that would be!

Labels: politics, social commentary

posted by Aron @ 6:02 PM