clock | August 6, 2008Tangled Bank #111 is up on Denialism blog
Linnaeus' Legacy #10 is up on A DC Birding blog
The 62nd Carnival of Feminists is up on Rage Against the Man-chine
The 183nd edition of The Carnival Of Education is up on Pass The Torch
The 136th Carnival of Homeschooling is up on The Homeschool Cafe
clock | August 5, 2008True genius is being able to find that which has been there all the time.
- Gabrelas
clock | August 5, 2008There are 69 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Comparison of Pattern Detection Methods in Microarray Time Series of the Segmentation Clock:
While genome-wide gene expression data are generated at an increasing rate, the repertoire of approaches for pattern discovery in these data is still limited. Identifying subtle patterns of interest in large amounts of data (tens of thousands of profiles)…
clock | August 5, 2008Novel Kind Of Learning Gene Discovered:
Scientists at the Freie Universität Berlin have come one step closer to unraveling the molecular basis of learning. A team led by neurobiologist Björn Brembs has discovered the first gene for operant conditioning in the fruit fly Drosophila.
Family Type Has Less-than-expected Impact On Parental Involvement, Study Finds:
Children in step-families and in other non-traditional families get just as much quality time with their parents as those in traditional families, with only a few exceptions, according to research to be presented at the annual meeting…
clock | August 5, 2008Last week, most of the attention of the media, Old and New, revolved around the question if it is McCain supporters or Obama supporters who are more likely to think that Britney Spears is teh hawt (dunno what the answer is, but I recall seeing some statistics about the overwhelming lead by the Red States in porn consumption, TV watching, numbers of adult establishments and number of visits to such establishments per capita, and this may or may not correlate with the perception of Britney Spears as attractive to certain subsets of the male population).
But her name has also been mentioned a…
clock | August 5, 2008Today, I have everything I need on my computer, and so do most working scientists as well. Papers can be found online because journals are online (and more and more are Open Access). Protocols are online. Books are online. Writing and collaboration tools are online. Communication tools are online. Data collection and data analysis and data graphing and paper-writing tools are all on the computer. No need for having any paper in the office, right? Right.
But remember how new that all is. The pictures (under the fold, the t-shirt is of Acrocanthosaurus at the NC Museum of Natural…
clock | August 5, 2008Mild Opinons
Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants
It's Lovely! I'll Take It!
Margaret McCartney
clock | August 5, 2008
The website is up, read the rules carefully, check out the categories, think deeply, collect all the needed URLs and start nominating. But first, why don't you drop those URLs in the comments here as well, so we can all discover bloggers we may not know about as well?
For the LGBT category, there is nobody who can beat Pam.
But for the "Best Science/Technology Blog" category, you know there will be techies there galore. Can we nominate, promote and vote for a science blogger?
How about my SciBling Karen Ventii?
Or Samia?
Or Clifford?
Or The Urban Scientist?
Who am I missing?
Perhaps if we…
clock | August 5, 2008Encephalon #51 is up on The Mouse Trap
Grand Rounds Vol. 4 #46 are up on Pure Pedantry
clock | August 5, 2008I heard that this is how it happened: when I went to Belgrade and talked about OA at the med school at University of Belgrade, I mentioned that Vedran is the local Web guru for them if they need anything. Someone from the Oncology hospital was there and later she contacted Vedran and asked him to make a blog aggregator that pulls together what people are writing about cancer. So, he did it - the Oncology Blog Aggregator is now live. If you know of good cancer blogs that should be included in the aggregator, let me know in the comments.
clock | August 4, 2008What a terrible time this is to be a Christian. The churches have failed and betrayed us, and the ministry preaches hate and murder. If there is a sane and reasoning voice in the Christian church today it is sadly silent.
- Francois Auguste Rene Rodin (November 12, 1840-November 17, 1917)
clock | August 4, 2008Thomas Frank, the author of the popular book What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, has a new book out - The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule - which sounds even better. He was the guest on NPR's Fresh Air tonight (listen to the podcast - it's worth your time) and I have to say I agree with him 100%.
Heck, I wrote about this many times before, and especially focused in this post and this one - conservatism is antithetical to Free Market.
As conservatives tend to do, they say one thing and think the opposite (you know, black is white, up is down,…
clock | August 4, 2008Obligatory readings of the day:
FNB Politics
Contradictions don't phase us, as we outgrew thinking long ago
clock | August 4, 2008When writing about blogs, the Corporate Media does not always make total fools of themselves. For instance, this article on medblogging is quite even-handed and good.
clock | August 4, 2008Michael Shermer - Toward a Type 1 civilization. Ignore the nutty libertarianism - read only this sentence:
Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access, with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone.
clock | August 4, 2008
From, via:
Did you know that some six million eligible voters live abroad? Amazing the stuff you learn at Frameshop. And it's all free.
So...now that I shared that with you, here's what you can do for me in return: Post this video everywhere! I mean absolutely everywhere. It's a snappy video created specifically to circle the globe via the world wide interweb--a viral get-out-the-Democrats-abroad-vote for every Dem living outside of the U.S. of A.
Post it everywhere, post it now. Help spread the word.
Special bonus: once you post it a few places, feel free to say that you and Gwyneth…
clock | August 4, 2008In about a month, we at Scienceblogs will start our own traditional DonorsChoose drive, when we will pick and choose worthy science/math educational projects and ask you to donate your money to fund them.
But, before we do that, you can do a little warm-up exercise! And you don't even have to pay anything - just click. A media website called BigThink is in the middle of a DonorsChoose drive, and we've agreed to help them out:
Basically, they've negotiated a deal with Pfizer where for every person who clicks on the "Vote for this video profile" button on this page (http://www.bigthink.com/…
clock | August 4, 2008It's Monday afternoon, time to take a look at the brand new articles in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology:
Tasting the Bitter Sunlight:
Have you ever had that gut reaction to your surroundings, some physical sensation that something isn't quite right? Maybe a squirmy, uneasy feeling in your stomach or an acrid taste on your tongue that makes you want to leave the scene? When the nematode C. elegans encounters an offensive sensation--whether a pungent, potentially dangerous odor (such as those associated with fungal parasites), extreme temperature, or the poking probe of a researcher--it wastes…