"Why should you read this paper? Glucose and insulin are two of the most important elements of metabolism. In an oversimplified nutshell - when we consume food our blood glucose usually increases. Consequently, the pancreas secretes insulin which lowers the glucose levels back to normal. Insulin is a hormone and is often considered to be the principal regulator of fat storage in the body (this is a bit controversial, but is mostly considered correct. Read the book "Why we get fat" by Gary Taubes for more info). Therefore knowing how the foods we eat spike our insulin levels can be helpful in determining what should be eaten for weight loss."
"JoDS is run very differently from a traditional academic publication. There’s no anonymized peer-review process, and there’s no fee to access its contents. “We wondered what does an academic paper look like when it’s more about the conversation, and less about tombstones,” Ito says, referring to a quote from Stewart Brand that likens formal academic publishing to burying ideas like the dead. The journal is published on PubPub, a platform developed at MIT that is inclusive in ways that academia and academic publishing frequently aren’t; PubPub is an experiment in radical transparency, where almost every part of the journal is open and editable. Readers can annotate each paper, adding comments and context to what the author wrote. The editing history is visible to everyone, so authorship is no longer an opaque attribution. Hillis’ paper has executable code that can be lifted directly from the journal."
