Science Practice:
Being out of the lab, out of science, and out of funding for a while also means that I have not been at a scientific conference for a few years now, not even my favourite meeting of the Society for...
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Posted on April 12, 2008 4:27 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A post from December 5, 2007: Communication Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors -...
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Posted on April 8, 2008 4:59 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As many of you may be aware, yesterday was the first day of the implementation of the new NIH law which requires all articles describing research funded by NIH to be deposited into PubMed Central within 12 months of publication....
Posted on April 8, 2008 11:52 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Bee and Michael and Chad and Eva and Timo and Cameron will be there. And so will I. And many other interesting people. Where? At the Science in the 21st Century conference at the Perimeter Institute (Waterloo, Ontario) on Sep....
Posted on April 7, 2008 11:04 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Science Communication Consortium presents: Science and Congress: The Role of Think Tanks and Congressional Science Committees Thursday, April 24, 2008 7:00-8:30pm CUNY - 365 Fifth Avenue, NY NY (directions below) Recent years have seen a rise in prominence of...
Posted on April 7, 2008 10:44 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There have recently been several articles in the media about brain enhancers, so-called Nootropics, or "smart drugs". They have been abused by college students for many years now, but they are now seeping into other places where long periods of...
Posted on April 1, 2008 11:47 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
SEA will train scientists to run for office: SEA is holding a workshop to train scientists to run for office on May 10th at Georgetown University. If you are a scientist or engineer and have been considering running for office...
Posted on March 30, 2008 8:44 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The WiSE panel earlier today was fun and informative. On the content - later. Perhaps two other SciBlings who were in the audience will have better renditions anyway. The panel was recorded and once the recording and other blog posts...
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Posted on March 21, 2008 9:35 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
WiSE, a network of Women in Science and Engineering at Duke University is hosting a panel Shaping the world, one job at a time: An altruistic/alternative career panel tomorrow, Friday, at noon in Teer 203. If you want to show...
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Posted on March 20, 2008 8:56 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Got an e-mail from AAAS and will try to go if at all possible: The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and North Carolina State University, will be holding a...
Posted on March 14, 2008 11:24 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[rant]So, if you organize a study-group online instead of in meat-space, the old fogies who still remember dinosaurs go all berserk. A student is threatened by expulsion for organizing a Facebook group for studying chemistry. Moreover, as each student got...
Posted on March 8, 2008 11:16 PM • 35 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Jane is the cool new tool that everyone is talking about - see the commentary on The Tree of Life, on Nature Network and on Of Two Minds. In short, the Journal/Author Name Estimator is a website where you can...
Posted on March 4, 2008 10:30 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Anne-Marie reviews two books that appear to be useful in thinking about one's career in science: The Beginner's Guide to Winning a Nobel Prize, by Peter Doherty, and The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology, by Chandler,...
Posted on March 2, 2008 3:09 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Are you confused with the new NIH Policy and unsure as to what you need to do? If so, Association of Research Libraries has assembled a very useful website that explains the process step by step. But the easiest thing...
Posted on February 21, 2008 9:10 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What is the difference between Free Access Beer and Open Access Beer? You go to a bar to get your Free Access Beer. You sit down. You show your ID. The barista gives you a bottle. You don't need to...
Posted on February 18, 2008 3:36 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Open Students is a new blog for students about open access to research. It is run by Gavin Baker (who also recently joined Peter Suber at Open Access News - Congratulations!) and sponsored by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic...
Posted on February 5, 2008 7:33 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Aetosaurs. No, I have not heard of them until now. But that does not matter - the big story about them today is the possibility - not 100% demonstrated yet, to be fair - that some unethical things surround their...
Posted on January 31, 2008 9:08 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From Sage Ross, via John Lynch come exciting news about a new Open Access Journal - Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science Spontaneous Generations is a new online academic journal published by graduate students at...
Posted on January 22, 2008 8:59 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
OK, this may not be very new, but for all of you taking a look at science in North Carolina next week due to the focus on the Science Blogging Conference, The Scientist has published a number of essays looking...
Posted on January 12, 2008 11:51 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Two grape genomes were published this year, one in Nature, the other in PLoS ONE. Larry Moran explains the methodologies and results of both and discusses the trustworthiness of each. The Nature paper is explained in The Grapevine Genome, and...
Posted on December 29, 2007 12:39 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the wake of the signed omnibus bill that funds NIH and ensures open deposition of NIH-funded research, here are some thoughtful questions: Why the NIH bill does not require copyright violation: The great advantage of the requirement to deposit...
Posted on December 28, 2007 12:36 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
First: the difference between theory and practice. Second: the theory. Third: still to come, I hope, a YouTube video of Steinn demonstrating the practice of parallel parking....
Posted on December 23, 2007 1:34 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I buried this among a bunch of other cool links yesterday, but there was a study the other day, in the Journal of Cell Biology, that seriously calls in question the methodology used by Thompson Scientific to calculate the sacred...
Posted on December 20, 2007 9:45 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Subscription-supported journals are like the qwerty keyboard: Are there solutions? One reason for optimism is that changing how we pay the costs of disseminating research is not an all-or-nothing change like switching from qwerty to Dvorak keyboards. Some new open-access...
Posted on December 8, 2007 1:26 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Communication Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors - official conventions. The term "constrained" I...
Posted on December 5, 2007 12:02 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Zotero is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to manage and cite research papers. They just announced that Zotero now works with PLoS papers. If you have no idea what I am talking about, Rich Cave explains....
Posted on December 4, 2007 12:35 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
JoVE, SciVee, LabAction and DnaTube are mentioned in this nice article, also found in a number of other newspapers, e.g., USA Today and Seattle Times....
Posted on December 4, 2007 11:01 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
CBC has started a series of interviews (later available as podcasts) with scientists and others about the nature of science, the public undrestanding of science and related issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to blog about...
Posted on November 30, 2007 2:35 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
That is, if you are a shrew and do not want to be just a dead data-point for some ingenious young ecologists....who at least clean up the tricky trash left by drunk drivers....
Posted on November 26, 2007 9:00 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's been a while since I came back from Boston, but the big dinosaur story kept me busy all last week so I never managed to find time and energy to write my own recap of the Harvard Conference. Anna...
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Posted on November 21, 2007 11:47 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry. But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science...
Posted on November 6, 2007 11:43 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The fifth Science Festival is going on right now in Genoa, Italy. It is a longish affair, from 25th October till 6th November, so if you just happen to be in the area you can still make it. They have...
Posted on November 1, 2007 11:24 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My brain is fried. My flight home was horrifying - the pilot warned us before we even left the gate that the weather is nasty and that he ordered the stewardess to remain seated at least the first 30 minutes...
Posted on October 24, 2007 5:36 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Nobel Prizes are not the only awards given in Stockholm these day. Karolinska Institute also gives an annual Lennart Nilsson Award for photography. This year's prize has just been announced and I am happy to report that the recepient is...
Posted on October 17, 2007 9:17 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So far this week, my blogging had a distinctly local slant on Nobel Prizes, so now I want to do something different. Quite a lot of people have noticed how many science prizes this year went to Europeans. Read the...
Posted on October 14, 2007 4:55 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A couple of years ago, a blog post of mine appeared in the List of References of a paper. Unfortunately, the form in which it was cited was this: #16 Zivkovic B. Clock tutorial #6: To entrain or not to...
Posted on October 14, 2007 3:37 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Smithies is not the only winner of this year's Nobel Prize with a local connection. The Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded this morning and one of the recepients is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The chair of...
Posted on October 12, 2007 7:25 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Of course they fight against Open Access Publishing - too much sunshine scares them and would make them scurry away in panic...
Posted on October 11, 2007 12:46 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
You may remember, from several months ago, that Attila started a contest for the best designed lab web page. Soon, the project became too big for a lone blogger to tackle. Especially after an article about this appeared on the...
Posted on October 9, 2007 5:04 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The recent return of Journal Clubs on PLoS ONE has been quite a success so far. People are watching from outside and they like what they see. The first Journal Club article, on microbial metagenomics, has already, in just one...
Posted on October 9, 2007 11:15 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Dr. Oliver Smithies, the Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA, together with Mario R. Capecchi and Martin J. Evans, won this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine: This year's...
Posted on October 8, 2007 8:42 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Before two papers passed the peer-review and got published, WHO (which was given the data) made its own interpretation of the findings and included it in its press kit, including the errors they made in that interpretation. A complex story...
Posted on October 3, 2007 2:12 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Yes, I'll be there this Friday. Come by and say Hello if you are in the building or close at lunchtime....
Posted on October 1, 2007 10:42 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Back in July, the House of Representatives passed a bill that requires all the NIH-funded research to be made freely available to the public within at most 12 months subsequent to publication. The equivalent bill has passed the Senate Appropriations...
Posted on September 27, 2007 12:39 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Johanna Dehlinger writes: In September, PLoS Computational Biology begins a series entitled "Developing Computational Biology" about the pursuit of scientific endeavors in computational biology around the world. Each country has unique features in areas from educational programs, types of research...
Posted on September 25, 2007 1:54 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
BBC reports that scientists working in the UK government have adopted a Scientific Ethics Code, written by Professor Sir David King. Here is the Code: Act with skill and care, keep skills up to date Prevent corrupt practice and...
Posted on September 14, 2007 9:50 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Copyfraud...
Posted on September 8, 2007 10:02 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In a commentary and a blog post, the editors of PLoS Medicine ask: ....is there still a reluctance to accept that anything useful can be learned from research without numbers? An old question that tends to generate a lot of...
Posted on August 31, 2007 9:59 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There is a good reason why scientists in general despise MS Excel. It is cumbersome, non-common-sensical, and the stats cannot be trusted. The graphs are ugly. I am sure it took a lot of hard work to design Excel (and...
Posted on August 27, 2007 1:06 PM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There are some die-hards in the comment thread of this post on Evolgen who assert that the only thing that makes one an author of something is the act of writing, i.e., using writing materials to commit language to paper....
Posted on August 23, 2007 3:44 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Maxine Clarke: In printing the statement verbatim every week as we have done, making it clear when it originated, we have hitherto assumed that readers will excuse the wording in the interests of historical integrity. But feedback from readers of...
Posted on August 21, 2007 5:04 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So, you look around to see if there is anything edible! Of course, it's easy if you work with tasty animals....(just ask the guys in the next door lab who work on lobsters, crayfish and oysters...or wait until you get...
Posted on August 15, 2007 1:07 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have linked to and posted pictures of Eva Vertes from SciFoo before and you may ask: "Who is she? Why was she invited there?" The Wikipedia page I linked to earlier is a short stub and full of errors....
Posted on August 11, 2007 4:19 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Ruchira comments on the article in the Discover Magazine and their choice of seven most magical eureka moments in the history of science. They are: * Otto Lowei: discovering the chemical transmission of nerve impulses * Rene Descartes: developing the...
Posted on July 18, 2007 11:09 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There is a long and interesting comment thread on this article on The Scientist blog. What do you think? (Hat-tip: Tanja)...
Posted on July 16, 2007 3:02 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I missed this by weeks, but Dave asked a set of questions that I was pondering on, but found no time and energy to answer until now. PZ, Janet, Martin, Chad and RPM responded (I am assuming some people outside...
Posted on July 15, 2007 7:10 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Four excellent, thought-provoking articles all in some way related to the idea of Open Science. One by Bill Hooker: Competition in science: too much of a good thing and three by Janet Stemwedel: Clarity and obfuscation in scientific papers Does...
Posted on July 12, 2007 8:02 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I had a great pleasure recently to be able to interview Senator - and now Democratic Presidential candidate - John Edwards for my blog. The interview was conducted by e-mail last week. As I am at work and unable to...
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Posted on July 9, 2007 8:59 AM • • 0 TrackBacks
Books: "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. It's 2025 - What happened to science, politics and journalism? Well, you know I'd be intrigued. After all, a person whose taste in science fiction I trust (my brother) told me to read this...
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Posted on July 2, 2007 10:52 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Stem-Cell research is easier in some places than others. Help us locate exactly where. When is the North Carolina/Triangle community going to try to push hard for state funding of stem-cell research? Or have I missed something?...
Posted on June 28, 2007 7:11 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Nature News just had an article announcing a new social networking site for physicians and biomedical scientists called Prometeo Network. Another one to check out and add to the ever-growing list of such new sites....
Posted on June 27, 2007 4:30 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here is some chemistry of bisphenol A, but what is really interesting is this article about Fred vom Saal. It is quite revealing about the way industry produces bad science in order to protect its financial interests: "The moment we...
Posted on June 27, 2007 1:25 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Union of Concerned Scientists has picked the 12 finalists in their cartoon contest and it is now your turn to vote for the best one. While I personally prefer the TomTomorrowesque #9, I think that the simpler cartoons, e.g.,...
Posted on June 26, 2007 8:01 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A few days ago, Nature launched its newest Web 2.0 baby, the Nature Precedings. It is very interesting to see the initial responses, questions and possible misunderstandings of the new site, so browse through these posts and attached comments by...
Posted on June 25, 2007 6:36 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A paper in press in Current Biology (press release here) looks at mitochondrial DNA of mammoths and advances a primarily environmental cause for the mammoth extinction. Razib explains why such a black-and-white dichotomy is unhealthy. Looking at a different hypothesis,...
Posted on June 8, 2007 12:50 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Yesterday, PLoS-ONE celebrated the publication of the 500th paper (and additional 13). Here are some quick stats: 1,411 submissions 513 published paper 360 member editorial board and growing 19 day average acceptance to publication 600+ post publication comments posted I...
Posted on June 6, 2007 11:07 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Social Science and Humanities bloggers have been doing it for quite a while, but natural scientists have largely been very reluctant to do this. Now, with approval of his PI, Attila Csordas will start posting parts of his Dissertation on...
Posted on June 5, 2007 9:13 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Remember back in November, when everyone got excited about JoVe (the Journal of Visulized Experiments)? Well, it is not alone in its niche any more. There is now another site similar to that: Lab Action. Of course I homed in...
Posted on May 29, 2007 9:52 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
