ably

According to the Thomson Reuters National Science Indicators, an annual database that records the number of articles published in about 12,000 internationally recognized journals: - The Asia-Pacific region increased its global share of published science articles from 13 percent in the early 1980s…

Brian Lehrer was kind enough to invite me onto his show the other day along with Kathleen Fitzpatrick of MediaCommons and Katherine Rowe, guest editor of the ground-breaking openly peer reviewed issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, to discuss digital scholarship, peer review, and open science. Our…

Our friend Victoria Stodden is the lead author on a paper published today in Computing in Science and Engineering summarizing the recommendations of a roundtable we participated in at Yale on data (and code) sharing in (computational) science. Seed's Joy Moore is an additional author on the paper.…

From the New York Times: 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…

Journey to the Center of a Triangle (1976) 8m, dir. Bruce & Katharine Cornwell, presents a series of animated constructions that determine the center of a variety of triangles, including circumcenter, incenter, centroid and orthocenter. (via swissmiss)

From the New York Times 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…

Stephen Schneider, a friend of Seed's and a giant of climate science, passed away yesterday. He was 65. 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…

It's summer and Seed's running a few classic articles online. This weekend, read about "So"... 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…

I just read that MIT's ground-breaking OpenCourseWare initiative passed the 2,000-course mark this month. That's a lot of free lectures, course notes, and videos from some of the best scientific minds of the planet... First announced in 2001, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is an ambitious effort to share…

I just received a box of "Science is Culture" galleys from HarperCollins -- it's pretty exciting... Here's a sneak peek.

From The Atlantic's Niraj Chokshi: "Seed magazine explores the idea that humans are eradicating cultural, language and species differences. Rates of species extinction have grown by as much as 10,000 because of us and half of the world's languages are expected to vanish by the end of the century. A…

Kim Bottomly, Wellesley College's 13th President, discusses the importance of making science a core skill in various professional fields, and how to engage more women in this effort. (via Atlantic Ideas Festival)

I've had this quote up on my wall since the very beginning. "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…

Steve Shapin, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, and author of the excellent book, A Scientific Life, wrote an essay for Seed in 2008 on the state of the scientist that has new relevance. In one sense, the enfolding of science in structures that produce wealth and project power is just…

Here's David Brooks in today's New York Times Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students. It's better at distinguishing the important from the…

After hosting blogs for four years, it's about time I started my own. So, welcome! Let me begin with a bit about me and what I believe. I believe that science has the unique potential to improve the state of the world. I think this potential is being hindered today by a lack of science literacy…

We have removed Food Frontiers from SB. We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way. How…

Paul J. Steinhardt Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University and is on the faculty in the Department of Physics and in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. He received his B.S. in Physics at Caltech in 1974; his M.A. in Physics in 1975 and Ph.D. in…

What ideas, themes, questions emerged from our April 4 salon on visualization? Here are some of our observations: i) As technology affords scientists greater amounts of data (genetics, cosmology, etc.), visualization and design have become increasingly important as a tool for understanding and for…

The aim of this blog is to foster an ongoing conversation among the participants of the MoMA/Seed Salon. We'll update the blog regularly with new images, links, and thoughts that we hope will spark discussion. If you have any suggestions, please let us know!