clock | July 26, 2008I had to cancel my trip to Toronto in September so, after the SciBling meetup I have nowhere to travel all the way until ConvergeSouth in October, which will be fun (this year co-organized with BlogHer), so I hope you consider showing up if you can.
clock | July 26, 2008Serbia: New Instructions and Law Regulations on Online Privacy:
On July 21, RATEL, Serbia's Republican Agency for Telecommunications, posted a Document of Instructions for Technical Requirements for Subsystems, Devices, Hardware and Installation of Internet Networks on their official web site. This news didn't go unnoticed yesterday in Serbian blogosphere and internet community, as many bloggers expressed various opinions as well as disapproval because of the potential abuse of users' privacy.
This document of instructions defines technical requirements for authorized monitoring of some…
clock | July 26, 2008Chad: Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos
Tom: What Does the Public Really Need To Know?: Science/Math edition.
Chad: The Innumeracy of Intellectuals
Janet: Fear and loathing in the academy.
Join in the fray....
clock | July 26, 2008Discussed at these sites, among others:
Chart junk-ies
When bar charts go bad
World's Most Expensive Places to Have Sex.
Catch the flaw(s).
Click here to see large.
Go under the fold to see small:
clock | July 26, 2008Pandagon is six years old today! How many is this in dog years? Congrats Amanda, Pam, Jesse and the crew!
clock | July 26, 2008From Jay Rosen:
Save this movie as a reference when someone asks you to define a Citizen Journalism in the future....
clock | July 26, 2008There has been a lot of chatter on the interwebs (for years, but again now) about the differences between the ways the political Left and Right use the Internet and blogs:
GOP losing the new-media war:
.......The right is engaged in the business of opining while the left features sites that offer a more reportorial model.
At first glance, these divergent approaches might not seem consequential. But as the 2008 campaign progresses, it's becoming increasingly clear that the absence of any websites on the right devoted to reporting -- as opposed to just commenting on the news -- is proving…
clock | July 26, 2008Here is just a brief excerpt from Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University:
The more prosaic truth emerges when you scan the titles of these epics. First, the author rarely appears alone, sharing space with two or three others. Often the collaborators are Ph.D. students who are routinely doing most of the spade work on some low grant in the hope of climbing the greasy pole. Dividing the number of titles by the author's actual contribution probably reduces those hundred papers to twenty-five. Then looking at the titles themselves, you'll see that many of the…
clock | July 25, 2008I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead - not sick, not wounded - dead.
- Woody Allen
clock | July 25, 2008I keep getting asked: why should I participate in blog carnivals?
The Wikipedia page about blog carnivals is not really accurate (it includes things that are not carnivals), and also suffers from overzealous, obsessive-compulsive, self-important administrators (who have probably never seen a carnival, never submitted a post to one, never hosted one, never started or managed one, ah well...).
I have written a lot about carnivals in the past (see especially this, this, this, this and this) so you should check those out for more "meaty" treatments, though some of the stuff in there is a little…
clock | July 25, 2008The path forward
Maxwell's Demoness
Science Matter
The Technium
The Wobbling Mind
clock | July 25, 2008Isolation-by-Distance and Outbreeding Depression Are Sufficient to Drive Parapatric Speciation in the Absence of Environmental Influences:
A commonly held view in evolutionary biology is that new species form in response to environmental factors, such as habitat differences or barriers to individual movements that sever a population. We have developed a computer model, called EvoSpace, that illustrates how new species can emerge when a species range becomes very large compared with the dispersal distances of its individuals. This situation has been called isolation-by-distance because remote…
clock | July 25, 2008Bjoern Brembs is on a roll! Check all of these out:
Incentivizing open scientific discussion:
Apart from the question of whether the perfect scientist is the one who only spends his time writing papers and doing experiments, what incentives can one think of to provide for blogging, commenting, sharing? I think because all of science relies on creativity, information and debate, the overall value of blogging, commenting and sharing can hardly be overestimated, so what incentives can there be for the individual scientist?
Journals - the dinosaurs of scientific communication:
Today's system of…
clock | July 25, 2008PLoS Genetics is celebrating its third birthday this month! Let's see what's new this week, among else...
PLoS Genetics Turns Three: Looking Back, Looking Ahead:
PLoS Genetics is three years old this month--a milestone worth celebrating! As we do, and as we recognize all who have helped us reach this point in time, we thought this would be a good opportunity to share with you a summary of our brief history and a look ahead.
Our original intent was to provide an open-access journal for the community that would "reflect the full breadth and interdisciplinary nature of genetics and genomics…
clock | July 25, 2008I have not done a Friday Weird Sex Blogging post in ages, and I won't do today either, but others did some cool blogging on various related topics: from gender disparities, to gynecological procedures, to weird animal/plant sex, so here is a little collection for this weekend:
My take on Mr. Tierney's article:
Again, I can't predict what the gender breakdown of any profession would be if we didn't live in a rather patriarchal society. Maybe it wouldn't be 50/50 if everything else was equal. But it's not. I hate to use the P-word, but consider the environment our girls are being raised in.…
clock | July 25, 2008Next edition of Berry Go Round, the carnival about all things related to plants, will alight here at A Blog Around The Clock tomorrow (probably late afternoon), so please send your submissions tonight by midnight EDT to: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com
clock | July 25, 2008Now this is a title of a paper in a scientific journal that will make one's eyebrows go up: The importance of stupidity in scientific research (by Schwartz J Cell Sci.2008; 121: 1771) :
I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We
had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science,
although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school,
went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major
environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned
to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she
said it was…