I decided, since there are many, to put them under the fold now. But you should check them out - some excellent, thought-provoking stuff:
Journalism is not a zero-sum game
If you think the web is useless, make it useful. If you think Wikipedia is full of errors, correct the ones you find, or shut up. If you think the web only consists of ill-informed echo chambers, get in there and add an informed view.
Along the way, you might just find that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing exactly the same thing.
Guest Post: Energy Ministers of the Americas Come Together in D.C - State Departmanet's Katherine Musgrove will respond to comments.
Conventions of Scientific Authorship:
"If scientists want to convey this information by the way their names are ordered, the method is similar to sending smoke signals, in code, on a dark, windy night." --Drummond Rennie
No government science news, please: Welcome to the UK's purdah
During purdah, government officials and organizations that work for the government are banned from sending out press releases or making other statements that might be construed as supporting or criticizing the government. That includes science and medical organizations, of course.
Measuring Reputation or Coverage?
Why is it that so many people talk about the effects of social media on reputation, but so few mention the more interesting models for measuring reputation? Instead, we argue over how to read the sentiment mood ring, or which media-oriented measurement tracks reputation. In most cases, I don't think we're measuring reputation at all. Instead, we're measuring media coverage.
ClimateGate Inquiry: No Scientific Misconduct From 'Squeaky Clean' Researchers
"We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it," says the Oxburgh report. "Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention"
More bloggers call themselves journalists. Does it matter? :
A new study published by PRWeek and PR Newswire indicates that 52% of bloggers consider themselves journalists. This is a significant increase from the 2009 study that found only 37% of bloggers called themselves journalists.
But does this change of self-definition even matter?
Friday Weird Science: Smells Fishy? Check your semen.:
This one does Jane one better: "The available studies analyzing vaginal odors have been concerned mostly with sex-attractant properties of volatile aliphatic acids of vaginal secretions." Pure poetry. Ok, maybe it's just me.
Don't t-a-a-a-a-a-a-aze me bro!:
A report in Popular Science (authored by Jeremy Hsu) points to a recent paper published in Academic Emergency Medicine. In this, Dawes and colleagues report on an investigation on the effects of TASER on sheep intoxicated with methamphetamine (MA).
According to the journal of Ethology: the International Journal of Behavioural Biology, earthworms use touch to communicate and influence each other's behavior to travel in the same direction.
This strange behavior, found in the earthworm Eisenia fetida, is the first time any worm has been shown to form active herds.
How female wallabies boost their males' testosterone :
"We believe it is a pheromone that the females are releasing, which could be from the urine, or pouch secretions, or both," she says, because "males actively sniff the urogenital opening and the pouch of the expectant mothers".
However, when the team presented male wallabies with swabs from the urogenital opening of females, some on heat, others off, to see which they preferred, the results were inconclusive.
The publication fee for a Research Article in PLoS Medicine is $2,900 and can be discounted or waived in one of two ways:
The rich are like you and me -- but so much richer:
In 2007, the top 1 percent of households accounted for 23.5 percent of the nation's income. That is to say, for every dollar of income in America, the top 1 percent got about a quarter and the rest of us split the other 76 cents.
Tonight, volcanic sunsets over Europe:
Photos from the amazing sunsets over Europe because of the ash in the air.
Publishers Need to Fail Better, Cheaper, Faster:
If you perceive that your only environment is that encompassed by your current supply chain then you're only going to adapt to changes in that environment - so the response to the digital challenge viewed in this way would be to create and sell e-books. If you put the consumer at the heart of your thinking you can consider instead each group of customers you serve and what they might want on top of what you already provide, how they might want you to serve them differently in the future. More to the point, you can ASK them, listen and respond.
That's when Pfizer played the "too big to nail" card. The company had committed a major health care fraud and if convicted, would be forbidden to bill the government for drugs prescribed to Medicaid and Medicare recipients. That's a big market. Big Pharma makes a bundle off of these federal and federal-state programs and Pfizer might have gone under if cut off. So instead of charging Pfizer with the crime, they charged a phantom subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn Corporation, created two years earlier for the same reason: to immunize Pfizer. According to CNN, this is little more than a shell company erected for the purpose of taking the rap.
A book of nude photographs for the blind/vision impaired
Poll Reveals Most Americans Don't Know They Got a Tax Cut and What's Obama Doing to Your Taxes?:
In fact, tax refunds reached an all-time high this year in part because of the stimulus, the president said in his weekly address on Saturday. Meanwhile, taxes are at their lowest levels in 60 years, according to William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center and director of the Retirement Security Project at the Brookings Institution.
Congress takes another stride toward public access to research:
Fueling the growing momentum toward openness, transparency, and accessibility to publicly funded information, the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2010 (FRPAA) has been introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) and a bi-partisan host of co-sponsors. The proposed bill would build on the success of the first U.S. mandate for public access to the published results of publicly funded research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Brigham Young student takes the first Sparky Awards Peoples' Choice Prize:
Aaron Ludwig, a sophomore animation student at Brigham Young University, has won the first-ever Sparky Awards Peoples' Choice prize for his short film, "Clueless Discovery." The video was voted the best by students and others everywhere in an open online vote held earlier this Spring.
The Future of Content Threatened By The Tyranny of Good Enough:
Some content producers will be fine, at least monetarily. They'll produce material for corporate sponsors, or they'll be in a relatively low-cost type of activity, like writing, and will have enough of a name to sell directly. Or they may have established names and followings. But emerging artists will find the going fraught with poverty because, after all, free is good enough for most consumers. Sadly, we may all end up poorer for the music, books, art, and films that we'll never get to see.
Scientists Discuss Openness on FriendFeed:
Many of the Open Science advocates I talked to for last week's story, Scientists Embrace Openness, pointed me to their active community on FriendFeed. In particular, Steve Koch of the University of New Mexico suggested that I start a discussion there after the story came out. I did, and the result (pasted below, lightly edited) was a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation on topics related to Open Science, some of which we hadn't had space to cover in the original story. Highlights include discussions about Open Notebook Science tools (OpenWetWare, Google Docs, BenchFly), the opinions of "mainstream" and young scientists about Open Science, and the obstacles to doing medical research in an open way. We even compared notes on getting "scooped" in science and journalism.
Thus, the switch from the wild to the laboratory immediately alters the evolutionary trajectory of a population -- and sure enough, within a few generations, laboratory-bred life-forms become noticeably different from their wild cousins.
Do the poor really pay no taxes?:
I'm going to be charitable on this and assume that people are biased toward their own experiences rather than playing loose with the data. For upper-income folks -- journalists, television executives, congressmen, think tank employees -- the big hit is on income taxes, so they get pretty annoyed when they hear that lots of Americans don't pay any income tax. But their experience is not typical. Most people's tax burden has a very different composition.
Twitter Finally Reveals All Its Secret Stats:
When Twitter opened up its developers conference, it dropped a ton of stats on people in the audience.
Special Podcast on Global Food Security:
The 2008 global food shortage may be a distant memory to most of us, but hunger and malnutrition remain a serious problem in many parts of the world. Today, you'll hear about a famine early warning system developed in the U.S. One scientist explains how climate change will affect agriculture. A journalist and author talks about a fungal disease threatening the world's wheat crop. Also, one scientist's efforts to develop improved crop varieties in nutrient poor parts of the world by studying roots.
What Is Beauty? Your Kids' Newest Art Critic:
Do animals create art? So far, this seems a uniquely human ability.
But do animals have a sense of the aesthetically pleasing? What about the ability to judge and critique art? Can an animal decide if a given work of art is beautiful or ugly? What is beauty in the first place? All good questions.
Meet the PhDs Facebook Is Putting Through School
Facebook named the first recipients of its new fellowship program for PhD candidates doing research in areas related to "the social web and Internet technology"
Stephen Colbert tells Jake Tapper: 'I Gut Check My Show':
ABC news interim host of "This Week," Jake Tapper, appeared on "The Colbert Report" Wednesday night to explain why he's invited PolitiFact to fact-check claims made on his show, an idea proposed by NYU professor Jay Rosen. Bill Adair, editor of PolitiFact, also appeared. (PolitiFact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by Poynter.) An unofficial -- and very funny -- transcript of the exchange appears below the video.
How germs influenced the Civil War:
Before the onset of modern medicine, infectious diseases had much influence on daily life, even during peaceful times. But it was during war, when food was scarce, sanitation was non-existent and many soldiers lived in close quarters away from home, that diseases brought on by viruses and parasites flourished.
I sometimes prefer to think of my Ph.D. work as a first job, rather than as further schooling. What many people may not realize is that the bulk of a Ph.D. student's education is not in the classroom. For us in the sciences, the vast majority of the years we spent getting our Ph.D. is actually spent working in the lab.
Are bees also addicted to caffeine and nicotine?:
Bees prefer nectar with small amounts of nicotine and caffeine over nectar that does not comprise these substances at all, a study from the University of Haifa reveals. "This could be an evolutionary development intended, as in humans, to make the bee addicted," states Prof. Ido Izhaki, one of the researchers who conducted the study.
Twitter and the Library of Congress:
If you talk to people about things shared online, you generally run into two assumptions. The first is that things shared publicly are meant for the general public. The second is that things shared publicly are meant for posterity. Both of these assumptions are dangerous.
On the bowls versus ice-cream debate:
Say I said to you that bowls weren't ice-cream. You'd look at me strangely, wouldn't you?
- on the futile bloggers vs. journalists debate.
SAS Seeks to Improve Data Mining of Social Media:
But the challenge is how to make sense of the ocean of information, find meaningful patterns and use it as guide for action. The digital tools for social media monitoring and analysis, analysts say, are still primitive. The current ones focus mainly on so-called sentiment analysis, giving companies a broad-brush approval rating at best.
Newspaper comments: Forget anonymity! The problem is management:
The great mistake so many newspapers and media outlets made was to turn on the comments software and then walk out of the room. They seemed to believe that the discussions would magically take care of themselves.
If you opened a public cafe or a bar in the downtown of a city, failed to staff it, and left it untended for months on end, would you be surprised if it ended up as a rat-infested hellhole?
Anderson, Chris. Free: The future of a radical price. New York: Hyperion, 2009. 274pp.:
This is one of those books that I just seemed to argue with constantly while I was reading it. You know, "Hey, you, book, you're just plain wrong about this!"
Doubtfully Zebrafish ever swim fast enough to make it from the Pacific to Atlantic ocean in 5 hours (especially since they are native to the southwestern Himalayan mountains), but they certainly use circadian rhythm at night to keep from exerting the energy it would take to maintain a vision system they don't need.
Twitter Updates, the 18th Century Edition:
Obviously, these diaries weren't broadcast to thousands of people, and the communication wasn't instantaneous. But Dr. Humphreys said the way people write and the things they write about are similar in both the diaries and on microblogging services. Analysis of Twitter messages has shown that the majority of posts describe activities and experiences of the people who are tweeting, as in the diaries.
One aspect of this digital triumphalism is a disturbing tendency on
the part of the technologically privileged, a group of which I am
clearly a member, to express incomprehension as to why anyone might
choose not to be online, not to have home broadband, not to set up a
Facebook profile or reveal their whereabouts through Rummble and not
to tweet incessantly about their desire for the latest laptop, tablet
or smartphone.
Questions answered on business blogging:
All too often, I fear, a "formal training in journalism" just means that journalists self-censor the good and funny bits of stories that bloggers naturally latch on to. What's more, bloggers have a much more natural voice and personality than journalists do. So it's only natural that bloggers will get more of a "following" than some guy who writes straight-down-the-line stories for the local newspaper.
Then, of course, there's the very germane fact that many highly successful bloggers didn't get a formal training in journalism because they were too busy getting a formal training in the thing they're writing about -- business, finance, economics. The likes of Yves Smith or Brad DeLong or Simon Johnson or John Hempton are popular partly because these people know what they're talking about and actually do it; it's surely an advantage to be able to use first-hand rather than second-hand knowledge when you're writing about something.
Clouds, Gestures, and Incumbents -- Two Out of Three Ain't Bad:
Publishers are tied to the tyranny of words for information exchange.
Nature Communications serves its first papers:
If most publishers try to cover the whole range of journal selectivity how may publishers will there be a market for ?
Personally, I like that my Facebook feed picks up some crossposts from a few blogs that I've included on the Networked Blogs application, that Friendfeed dovetails into it for some things, that I can receive hallelujahs from one acquaintance and radical atheist discourse and links from another, that high school friends unawares rub shoulders with colleagues of mine with whom they could never normally exchange a word, and that it's all masala. Much like my work and home life. I don't always want to think of work during official "off" time, but I often have the laptop out, and if I read personal e-mails at work, I also revise papers at midnight and make blog posts at 1:25AM. When I want to, which is key.
Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative:
The fact is, the differences between microblogging and normal blogging are insignificant. I'm going to detail five of the differences. My point in doing so is to illustrate that the best way to bootstrap an open alternative to Twitter is not by inventing a bunch of new technologies or products. Instead, I want to show that most of the pieces already exist in the current blogging ecosystem. With a few modifications, a distributed microblogging ecosystem can easily emerge.
The secrets of engaging teens with science:
A guest blog by Sophia Collins, producer of the on-line teen science event "I'm a Scientist, Get me out of Here!"
A Tax Form for the Marginally Employed
The Parochial and the Cosmopolitan - Globalization helps cooperation:
Continuing my trend of reporting on papers about cooperation, I thought I'd comment on a recent paper by Nancy Buchan and co-authors about human cooperation and globalization. I've argued previously about the role of parochialism in punishment and in theories about the evolution of war and cooperation, today, though, the theme is the extent to which more cosmopolitan countries tend to foster individuals who are more willing to cooperate globally. Sounds intuitive, but how does it work experimentally?
10 Reasons Newspaper Revenue Is Gone Forever:
If you're in print media, hemorrhaging revenue and done nothing you still need to rethink your business model. The iPad, DRM or other closed platforms are not your savior. And merely putting your content online is hardly enough.
Revenue for ad supported, text-based news content is not coming back at all. At least not in the same formats it was in previously. That party is over and the only answer is to retool and design for a connected world.
I took to the whiteboard and drew out how I think a news(paper) can be produced from WordPress, Google Docs, and Flickr (or their equivalents). We'll get to the other functions shortly.
How the Web makes cleaner kitchens:
This molecular biologist has a cause: He teaches food servers about food-borne illnesses using blogs, storytelling and social media.
A team in the Research Triangle has spent much of the past five years combining physics, chemistry and nanotechnology to build what could be tomorrow's light bulb.
Playing around where physics meets culture:
Jennifer Ouellette is a freelance science communicator, author and director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange. She writes on her personal blog, Cocktail Party Physics ( twistedphysics.typepad.com), as well as for Discovery News Space. She tweets as @JenLucPiquant. Questions and answers have been edited.
How we learn to become mediocre:
As discussed in my previous post, in any field, 10 years seems to be the minimum time needed to attain world-class level performance. However, most employees and even quite a lot of hobbyists have more than ten years or 10,000 hours experience in a certain field - why then are so many of them just mediocre at it? Is it lack of innate talent, or perhaps something else?
When a trait isn't a trait isn't a trait:
We've come a long way from the first initial wave of discussions which were prompted by the molecular genetic revolution. We have epigenetics, evo-devo and variation in gene regulation. None of these processes "overthrow" evolutionary biology, though in some ways they may revolutionize aspects of it. Science is over the long haul after all an eternal revolution, as the boundaries of comprehension keep getting pushed outward.
- Log in to post comments