- The Asia-Pacific region increased its global share of published science articles from 13 percent in the early 1980s to just over 30 percent in 2009
- China is leading the way, having increased its share of articles to 11 percent in 2009 from just 0.4 percent in the early 1980s
- Japan is next, accounting for 6.7 percent, followed by India with 3.4 percent
- The proportion of articles from the United States dropped to 28 percent in 2009, down from 40 percent in the early 1980s

(via New York Times)

To adhere to the scientific method in the face of the transformations arising from changes in technology and the Internet, we must be able to reproduce computational results. Reproducibility will let each generation of scientists build on the previous generations' achievements.... Reproducible research is best facilitated through interlocking efforts in scientific practice, publication mechanisms, and university and funding agency policies occurring across the spectrum of computational scientific research. To ultimately succeed, however, reproducibility must be embraced at the cultural level within the computational science community. Envisioning and developing tools and policies that encourage and facilitate code and data release among individuals is a crucial step in that direction.

"Reproducible Research," Computing in Science and Engineering, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 8-13, Sep./Oct. 2010, doi:10.1109/MCSE.2010.113

Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

Will be interesting to follow the Shakespeare Quarterly experiment...

(via swissmiss)

The key to the Alzheimer's project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

Stephen participated in a Seed Salon a few years ago with Laurie David. I just re-read it and found this quote: "My students are always asking, 'Aren't you frustrated to death? Nothing you do makes any immediate difference.' What I keep trying to tell them is, the truth matters, but it's on a generational time frame."

Did anyone have Stephen as a professor or advisor at Stanford?

From the obituary in the New York Times:

Dr. Schneider wrote books on the effects of climate change on areas as diverse as politics and wildlife. He advised the administration of every president from Richard M. Nixon to Barack Obama and was part of a United Nations panel on climate change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

Mr. Gore called Dr. Schneider "a prolific researcher and author, co-founder of the journal Climatic Change and a wonderful communicator" who greatly contributed "to the advancement of climate science."

In an interview on Monday, the biologist and population expert Paul R. Ehrlich said, "I don't think anybody has worked harder and longer to educate the public on climate issues in particular and science issues in general."

The language of science, with its specialized vocabulary and clipped rhythm, has a distinctive architecture.

The functional elegance of this rarefied speak is uniquely captured in one of its most inconspicuous words: "so." This isn't "so" the intensifier ("so expensive"); it's not the "so" that joins two clauses. This is the "so" that introduces a sentence, as in "So as we can see, modified Newtonian dynamics cannot account for the rotation of any of the three observed galaxies."

This "so" is key to a basic unit of scientific talk: the explanation.

First announced in 2001, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is an ambitious effort to share MIT's education resources freely and openly on the web to improve formal and informal learning worldwide. ... Since the site was launched in 2002, OCW materials have been visited on the MIT site or partner translation sites 98 million times by an estimated 70 million visitors from around the world.

Even before we've been able to take stock of the enormous diversity that today exists -- from undescribed microbes to undocumented tongues -- this epidemic carries away an entire human language every two weeks, destroys a domesticated food-crop variety every six hours, and kills off an entire species every few minutes. The fallout isn't merely an assault to our aesthetic or even ethical values: As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

Here's the article by Seed's Maywa Montenegro and author/blogger Terry Glavin.

UPDATE: The New York Times picked this article as their Idea of the Day for July 14.

Today's idea: Is the loss of language and culture connected to the extinction of plant and animal species in a globalized "epidemic of sameness"? Welcome to the "science of resilience" -- an interdisciplinary study of the value of diversity in complex systems.

(via Atlantic Ideas Festival)

"We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies."

-- Walt Disney

I think it probably also rings true for many scientists.

We ran a department in Seed for a couple of years called "Why I Do Science" edited by Josh Roebke and Lee Billings with personal essays written by scientists (one of my favorite departments). Here's one by Brazilian neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro. I'll find some more and post them.

Why do you do science?

From On the Surface of Things (MIT Harvard University Press):

Colored drops of water respond to a grid of hydrophobic and hydrophilic materials on a flat surface.

The water drops take squarish shapes by spreading across the hydrophilic surface and stopping at hydrophobic gridlines etched at 3 mm intervals. The hydrophilic surface is a self-assembled monolayer.

Laboratory of George Whitesides, Harvard. Image by Felice Frankel, MIT.

The first photo I ever saw from Felice Frankel... and forever an inspiration. It's going to rain this weekend in New York -- just imagine if it looked like this.