clock | February 19, 2008Earlier today I went to UNC to talk about Science On The Web in Javed Mostafa's graduate course on Enabling Usability of Cyberinfrastructures for Learning, Inquiry, and Discovery. I showed and talked about the following sites:
The rapidly growing List of Open Access journals and how the recent NIH law and Harvard vote are pushing publishing inexorably towards the OA model.
PLoS, Open Access, the TOPAZ platform for a new breed of journals like PLoS ONE (and a couple of examples of user activity on ONE papers), as an example of the leader of OA publishing (and also the story of how I got to…
clock | February 19, 2008While I was busy, I heard Castro resigned, Musharaff's party lost the elections, and Kosovo declared independence. Wake me up when something really important happens, e.g., Bush leaves the White House....
clock | February 19, 2008Grand Rounds - Vol 4, No. 22 - are up on DailyInterview
The 112th Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Homeschool Blog Awards
clock | February 19, 2008Brian Russell, who is building a coworking space in Carrboro, just alerted me to an excellent new article about this in the San Francisco Chronicle: Shared work spaces a wave of the future. Well worth a read.
clock | February 19, 2008Today I have to be very, very careful, because Liz Allen is the person who hired me for PLoS and is my immediate supervisor. This means, in PLoS terms, that we work great as a team, talk on the phone a couple of times per week and exchange approximately five gigazillion e-mails every day, enjoying every second of it as we are both true believers in our mission - getting everyone to LOVE Open Access and Public Library of Science. Liz is the Director of Marketing and Business Development at PLoS and the person in charge of communications, online and offline. Some of you had the good fortune…
clock | February 19, 2008I tried to understand what DNA barcoding is, as everyone is talking about it. And I tried reading a couple of papers about it - I am a biologist, so I should have understood them, but nope, I was still in the dark.
So, what does one do? Waits for a science blogger to explain it. And so it happens, Karen explained it yesterday. I read it. Slowly and carefully. Only once. And I grokked it all!
clock | February 18, 2008I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.
- Charles R. Darwin
Support The Beagle Project
Read the Beagle Project Blog
Buy the Beagle Project swag
Prepare ahead for the Darwin Bicentennial
Read Darwin for yourself.
clock | February 18, 2008
(from here; hat-tip)
Or perhaps Gabe has been right all along and I am not really a science blogger....
clock | February 18, 2008Orac: The American Academy of Pediatrics versus antivaccinationist hypocrisy
Drake Bennett: Black man vs. white woman
Sheril R. Kirshenbaum: The Presidential Science Debate That Happened TODAY In Boston! and The Boston Debate
Mike Dunford: The Role of Science in Politics: A Plea for Activism
John S. Wilkins: The 'design' mistake and, Brian Switek: No thanks, Ken; that argument is poorly designed
Ed reports on how we are messing up with future historians: I Always Wondered Where Those Things Went. How many historical artefacts and writings we believe to be true, but are not?
Paul Jones:…
clock | February 18, 2008Encephalon - Briefing the Next US President on 24 Neuroscience and Psychology Issues - is up on SharpBrains
Carnival of the Green # 115 is up on The greener side
clock | February 18, 2008Cheating Is Easy For The Social Amoeba:
Cheating is easy and seemingly without cost for the social amoeba known as Dictyostelium discoideum, said a team of researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University in Houston who conducted the first genome-scale search for social genes and found more than 100 mutant genes that allow cheating.
Warming Waters May Make Antarctica Hospitable To Sharks: Potentially Disastrous Consequences:
It has been 40 million years since the waters around Antarctica have been warm enough to sustain populations of sharks and most fish, but they may return…
clock | February 18, 2008Science Cafe on Teenage Brains :
Teenagers sometimes act as though they were from a different planet. On Tuesday February 19, the Museum of Natural Sciences will host a science cafe entitled "Altered States: Inside the Teenage Brain" at Tir Na Nog in Raleigh at 6:30p.m. The session will be led by Wilkie Wilson, Duke professor and director of BrainWorks, a program for brain research and education. Wilson studies the effects of drugs on learning and memory, and has helped write several books on teenage drug use. RSVP to Katey Ahmann by Monday, February 18.
clock | February 18, 2008What is the difference between Free Access Beer and Open Access Beer?
You go to a bar to get your Free Access Beer. You sit down. You show your ID. The barista gives you a bottle. You don't need to pay anything for it - it's free, after all. You take your own bottle-opener from your pocket and open the bottle. You drink the beer from the bottle. You return the empty bottle to the barista. You go home.
You order you Open Access Beer online or by phone. You pick what kind of beer you want. It gets delivered to your door really fast. The delivery man opens the bottle for you. You are…
clock | February 18, 2008Tom Levenson is the author of three cool books so far: Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science, Einstein in Berlin and Ice Time: Climate, Science, and Life on Earth and has recently taken the science blogging world by storm with his new blog, the Inverse Square. We finally got to meet at the second Science Blogging Conference four weeks ago.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job?
I'm Tom Levenson - and my career feels to me much more as a…
clock | February 17, 2008On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: "An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work'"
- Charles R. Darwin
Support The Beagle Project
Read the Beagle Project Blog
Buy the Beagle Project swag
Prepare ahead for the Darwin Bicentennial
Read Darwin for yourself.
clock | February 17, 2008A guide to hiring women.
Obsolete technical skills (I have them all except #11!)
The social source of religion.
Charles Barkley for President!
clock | February 17, 2008I've bumped into Christina's blog every now and then before, but only started reading it more regularly when she signed up for the first Science Blogging Conference. We also met at the ASIS&T meeting in Milwaukee, and then again at the second Science Blogging Conference four weeks ago.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background?
Hi Everyone! Thanks for inviting me to interview, Bora!
My background is a bit unusual. From high school (a small rural school in Maryland), I went to the…
clock | February 17, 2008Medicine 2.0, edition #18 is up on ScienceRoll
Gene Genie #25 is up at The Gene Sherpa
clock | February 17, 2008Yes and No. But the article is not from the 'Onion', it's from the Hot Medical News. It's about an onion, in a strange place....