clock | July 18, 2007Mindy discovered a cool series of videos on YouTube, done by a physics teacher.
The first one is called The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See:
Then, to respond to questions and comments, he added Patching Holes #1, Patching Holes #2 and Patching Holes #3, also well worth watching. This is certainly no Al Gore!
clock | July 18, 2007There are 21 new papers on PLoS ONE published this week. Here are some titles that got my personal attention:
Climate Change, Genetics or Human Choice: Why Were the Shells of Mankind's Earliest Ornament Larger in the Pleistocene Than in the Holocene? by Peter R. Teske, Isabelle Papadopoulos, Christopher D. McQuaid, Brent K. Newman and Nigel P. Barker:
The southern African tick shell, Nassarius kraussianus, is the earliest ornament known to be used by humans, dating back ~75,000 years. This study investigates why beads made from these shells in more recent times are smaller. It is likely due…
clock | July 18, 2007Tangled Bank #84 is up on Voltage Gate.
The Ever-Present Past: Your Nearest Site - a one-time local-archaeology carnival (still accepting entries for a couple of more days) is up on Aardvarchaeology.
The Carnival Of Education #128 is up on The Education Wonks.
Carnival of the Liberals #43 is up on Stump Lane.
clock | July 18, 2007Curtis, one of the founders of JeffsBench wrote a very interesting article comparing JeffsBench to PLoS ONE in their roles in fostering online scientific discussions. Register, look around and comment....
clock | July 18, 2007Well, I have the reputation about blogging around the clock, but every year more and more bloggers take that idea literally and they do it for one day for good cause, as a part of Blogathon.
Bill explains:
The mechanics are simple: bloggers sign up to blog for their chosen charity, and sponsors pledge either a lump sum or an amount per hour blogged. The goal is to blog for 24 hours straight, with one post every 30 minutes.
Over the past few years, more and more bloggers have been signing up and raising substantial amounts of money for good causes. Sign up here, then blog all day on the 28th…
clock | July 18, 2007I can't stay away (a charming spell?) from the series that Anne-Marie is churning out at a supernatural rate (what kind of magic?). Here are the latest three installments, totally enchanting:
Conservation Biology
The Botany of Wands
Kin selection
clock | July 18, 2007The third post in the series on entrainment, first written on April 10, 2005, starts slowly to get into the meat of things...As always, clicking on the spider-clock icon will take you to the site of the original post.
In the previous post, I introduced the concept of entrainment of circadian rhythms to environmental cycles. As I stated there, I will focus on non-parametric effects of light (i.e., the timing of onsets and offsets of light) on the phase and period of the clock.
Entrainment is a mechanism that forces the internal period (&tau - tau) of the biological clock to assume the…
clock | July 17, 2007I have lived, tomorrow, I shall sleep in glory.
- Georges Jacques Danton (1759-94)
clock | July 17, 2007Kim of Emergiblog explains nicely why you should support Open Access publishing:
The Public Library of Science:
You are writing a paper. You need to do some research, so you google your topic.
Ah ha! There it is! The perfect article for your paper. The abstract is right in front of you, but you must go to the actual journal for the full text.
Hmmm...you can access the full text of the article, but you must pay to do it! Anywhere from nine dollars to almost thirty dollars for twenty-four hour access.
"No way", you say! "I have access to my university's online library, I'll just go there and…
clock | July 17, 2007The Purloined Bibliography:
My training in medieval history had acquainted me with the practice of identifying dependencies among manuscripts by tracing the repetition of errors. By analogy, I thought, if there were additional idiosyncratic errors on my Web site that also appeared in the book, each instance would be a discrete piece of evidence showing that the volume had lifted material from my work.
I found myself in the unusual position of hoping that I had made more mistakes. Could I find more evidence than just two bizarrely placed asterisks?
clock | July 17, 2007My SciBling Rob Knop is leaving the academic circus for a cool job: designing Universes or some such astronomical stuff on Second Life. Just as he is about to leave his University, though, he got a nice parting gift from the academic world for his work on the expansion of the Universe - the Gruber Prize in Cosmology. Please go and say Hello and Congratulations to Rob!
Related:
Farewell and Hail
Science blogger (and soon to be former academic) shares Gruber Prize.
Is getting tenure Mission Impossible?
Kudos for Rob
I have shilled
clock | July 17, 2007A very interesting new paper was published today in PLoS Biology:
Flight Speeds among Bird Species: Allometric and Phylogenetic Effects by Thomas Alerstam, Mikael Rosen, Johan Backman, Per G. P. Ericson and Olof Hellgren:
Analysing the variation in flight speed among bird species is important in understanding flight. We tested if the cruising speed of different migrating bird species in flapping flight scales with body mass and wing loading according to predictions from aerodynamic theory and to what extent phylogeny provides an additional explanation for variation in speed. Flight speeds…
clock | July 17, 2007The Tripoli 6 had their death sentence commuted to life in prison. Revere has the details.
Update: There is more.
clock | July 17, 2007Oekologie #7 is up on The Evangelical Ecologist.
Four Stone Hearth #19 is up on Sherd Nerd.
Encephalon #27 is up on Neurocontrarian.
Gene Genie #11 is up on Med Journal Watch.
Grand Rounds, Volume 3, Number 43, are up on Vitum Medicinus.
The 12th Carnival of Mathematics is up on The Vedic Maths Forum India Blog.
Carnival of the Green #86 is up on AIDG Blog.
Pediatric Grand Rounds - A Blogging Anniversary - is up on Parenting Solved.
Carnival of Homeschooling #81 is up on Principled Discovery.
clock | July 17, 2007ASIS&T 2008 meeting - Joining Research and Practice: Social Computing and Information Science will be held in Milwaukee on October 19-24, 2007. The Program is now available online and it is very exciting. Especially this session ;-)
clock | July 17, 2007Jonathan Eisen demonstrates with a personal example.
First he did a keyword search for the topic of his interest and expertise. Then he read a paper that came up in the search. Then he rated the paper and left a brief comment with the rating.
Then he came back to his blog, wrote in more detail and linked back to the paper itself.
In other related news: Pedro takes a quick look at last week's first two days of ratings.
Bjoern looks at competition in science and how Open Access can help alleviate it.
Bill Hooker discovers another Open Notebook Science example - a PhD thesis being written on a…
clock | July 17, 2007Prompted by the WSJ article about blogs, Scoble, Scott Rosenberg, Duncan Riley, Dave Winer, CrunchNotes and Rex Hammock and others discuss the history of blogging.
clock | July 17, 2007This is the second in a series of posts on the analysis of entrainment, originally written on April 10, 2005.
The natural, endogenous period of circadian rhythms, as measured in constant conditions, is almost never exactly 24 hours. In the real world, however, the light-dark cycle provided by the Earth's rotation around its axis is exactly 24 hours long. Utility of biological clocks is in retaining a constant phase between environmental cycles and activities of the organism (so the organism always "does" stuff at the same, most appropriate time of day).
Thus, a mechanism must exist to…
clock | July 16, 2007Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one has to stay awake all day.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche