New on...

...the intertubes. Busy week. Here are some good links:

Leaving your literary estate to the public domain:

This page has been circulating around the Web in recent days (apparently since February 26 or later). It depicts a sticker which an individual can apply to her ID card, in the manner of an organ donor sticker, indicating the individual wishes her copyrights to be released to the public domain upon her death.

The cloning of the bulls:

The story adds to last year's discussion about horse cloning (horserace horse cloning?). But here the main theme is the affection that owners have for their bulls.

Hyena-Primate Convergence: The Social Brain Hypothesis:

They suggest that the intricate social dynamics of spotted hyena society has led to selection pressures on cognition which are analogous to primate brain evolution.

Why do people publish in Open Access journals?:

Just talked to a job candidate, who must remain nameless for now, whose work is involved in looking into who publishes in Open Access journals and who doesn't and why? This got me to thinking of the various factors that academics weigh when deciding where to publish an article (also part of his work) and what kinds of things can be done to influence those choices.

Audubon's Birds of America:

The University of Pittsburgh is fortunate to own one of the rare, complete sets of John James Audubon's Birds of America. It is considered to be the single most valuable set of volumes in the collections of the University Library System (ULS). Indeed, only 120 complete sets are known to exist.

While Audubon was creating Birds of America, he was also working on a companion publication, namely, his Ornithological Biography. Both of these sets were acquired by William M. Darlington in the mid-nineteenth century and later donated, as part of his extensive library, to the University of Pittsburgh. Recognizing that the Darlington Library includes significant historical materials, such as rare books, maps, atlases, illustrations, and manuscripts, the ULS charted an ambitious course to digitize a large portion of Mr. Darlington's collection, including the Birds of America.

We are pleased to present our complete double elephant folio set of Audubon's Birds of America, accompanied by his Ornithological Biography, through this Web site. Together these sets comprise an unprecedented online combination.

All Peer Reviewers are Equal, But Some Peer Reviewers are More Equal Than Others:

Ok, so the journal has these lists of scientists on the Editorial Board. What are they doing?

Teachers Under Fire:

In other words, when it comes to teaching evolutionary biology in the public school classroom, the creationists have won the battle: They've forced evolution into a corner, surrounded it, eviscerated, driven it into the swamp.

Henry Gee: Against Stupidity (with which I vehemently disagree on almost every point):

It used to be that scientists did what they did, and would attempt to explain this to the uncaring multitudes, in as reasonable a way as possible, cognizant of the fact that whereas the multitudes might understand little of what the scientists were on about, the scientists had a duty to try to explain their activities nonetheless, gently, given that the multitudes, untimately, paid their wages.

Fortunately, Mike Dunford picked up on a small positive piece of it and responded:

Huns, Visigoths, and the Citadel of Science:

When there's a horde of angry, armed people outside your walls, and they start settling in and making themselves at home, you might start to wonder if you're looking at a siege. When the catapults come out and rocks, stones, jars of burning oil, and diseased animal carcasses start flying over the walls, the folks inside often feel besieged. By the time the attackers disappear in the middle of the night, leaving behind only the remains of their camp, a long-term sanitation crisis, and a large wooden rabbit, the full-fledged siege mentality has usually set in.

Henry responds: The Release Of Calcium From Intracellular Stores (And Other Stuff):

The problem, in my experience, is an attitude that whereas it might take years of training and a certain skill to write a scientific paper, any half-baked twit can write a press release, irrespective of experience. Writing press releases is often delegated to the most junior member of staff, when crafting an effective press release is extremely hard, requires a certain authorial skill and, if it is about science, the scientific knowledge equal to that of any science journalist.

And Mike responds again: Elephants, Mice, Red Flags, Bulls, and Science:

We don't need to do a better job of talking to the general public. We need to start talking to the general public.

Related: The Scientist Delusion? Nature Column on AAAS Panel:

In the column titled "The Scientist Delusion," Goldston notes that even very religious publics often strongly support many areas of science.

Why Opting Out Isn't Really an Option:

So the system stinks. It demands the impossible of us. When we see a mom leave the lab bench, professoriate, engineering firm, or courtroom, she's not gaily deciding to spend more time baking cookies. She's agonized, stressed out, exhausted. She's probably reached her breaking point. Given the unrelenting demands of her family and her job, she's decided that the job has to go, because she has moral and legal obligations to take care of her family.

Puzzling Research Interpretations :

You may remember an earlier study which found an elevated breast cancer risk for women who had taken hormone replacement therapy at menopause, compared to a control group who took a placebo. Now a follow-up study suggests that the higher breast cancer risk remains, even after the women had ceased taking estrogen and progestin. I'm unhappy with some of the interpretations that this study has been given.

Social Science:

The stereotype that a lot of scientists are not well socially adjusted has a lot of supporting evidence. Some of the most awkward people I have ever met have been scientists. People who think that plaid on plaid makes for a well-matched outfit weird. No conversation skills kind of weird.

Why Republicans Reject Science:

To summarize, I think some Republicans do not reject science per se, rather what they reject is the tendency for scientific facts to be used for planning. By planning, I mean active organization of a system to achieve a desirable (to some) outcome. Planning can be applied to any complex system -- societies, economies, climate, etc., and it is predicated on the assumption the knowledge of how a system works gives one the ability to control the outcome.

A win for the cetaceans:

I've been trying to monitor the situation involving the Bush administration's attempts to bypass the law and proceed with its cetacean-killing sonar tests along the Pacific Coast. This week there was an important victory on this front, picked up by Hunter at Random -- a court ruling requiring the Navy to stop with its current plans.

Prozac and Placebos:

Anyway, it turns out that this study was misinterpreted by the press more than most...

Should I be ABD before I have a baby? (and other questions about academic motherhood):

If I were comparing my emotional and mental well being during my grad school pregnancies and their aftermath to that of a normal human being, it might not be a favorable comparison. On the other hand, compared to my emotional and mental well being as a graduate student struggling to find a topic and write a dissertation prior to the pregnancy and parenting? Pregnancy and parenting may actually have been better for me.

Moths remember what they learn as caterpillars:

According to popular belief, within the pupa, the caterpillar's body is completely overhauled, broken down into a form of soup and rebuilt into a winged adult. Richard Buckmister Fuller once said that "there is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly." Indeed, as the butterfly or moth quite literally flies off into a new world, it is tempting to think that there is no connection between its new life and its old existence as an eating machine. But not so.

Beef and dairy can be good for the planet: Making a case for cows:

For starters, cow farts aren't really the problem; burps are. As it turns out, bovine burps are responsible for the vast majority of the methane released. But that is far from the only misconception about cows' role in making the planet suitable--or not--for human habitation.

New adventures in science:

Back in the late 1980s, many gay men--like me--had two sets of medical records. At the outset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, no one wanted his chart to show an HIV diagnosis, nor the fact that you had simply taken the HIV antibody test, because that meant--some way, some how--that you considered yourself at risk for the disease even if your results proved otherwise. Notably, we feared this information becoming known to health insurers, even our employers, sometimes our friends and families, because of the very real possibility of discrimination. That's why my doctor kept two sets of records: the one on the right side of my chart was the official one; the other side harbored our secrets.

Colonization of the New World:

One of the problems I see in this sort of analysis is placing the evinced genetic splits in populations in space. This paper does a reasonably good job at arguing for an early split in Asia and subsequent population changes happening in the New World. However, if we change the timing of when the Ice Free Corrider was available to facilitate the movement of people, or if we change the rate of DNA mutation that is used to place population events in time, then the model may change fundamentally. I do not have lot of faith in the estimates used for DNA mutation rates. Nonetheless, this is a good, the best so far, synthesis of the available data with new information added.