clock | April 9, 2007If so, go tell Bill:
There must be more. Who else is doing, or planning to do, open science? And further, how can we help each other?
My working hypothesis is that open, collaborative models should out-produce the current standard model of research, which involves a great deal of inefficiency in the form of secrecy and mistrust. Open science barely exists at the moment -- infancy would be an overly optimistic term for its developmental state. Right now, one of the most important things open science advocates can do is find and support each other (and remember, openness is inclusive of a range…
clock | April 9, 2007It appears that scientists are not the only ones who do not grok framing. Jeffrey Feldman's book got blasted by some ninkompoop in NY Times yesterday. Jeff responds:
Indeed, when I read that passage I wondered if the reviewer had given up on reading my book just after glancing through the table of contents. It seems that, instead of writing about my book, Fairbanks popped in a DVD of "The Matrix," or maybe "A Clockwork Orange," and then churned out a piece of creative non-fiction reacting to those other works of sci-fi.
Update: More about the "fairbanksing" of Feldman here, here and here.
clock | April 9, 2007Go say Hello to Jennifer Jacquet and Randy Olson (aka 'Dodo') at Shifting Baselines
clock | April 8, 2007Good. Everyone expected it, but it is nice to have it tested and confirmed. Makes life easier and research cheaper.
Measuring Movement To Assess And Manage Sleep Disorders:
Actigraphy, the use of a portable device that records movement over extended periods of time, and has been used extensively in the study of sleep and circadian rhythms, provides an acceptably accurate estimate of sleep patterns in normal, healthy adult populations and in-patients suspected of certain sleep disorders, according to practice parameters published in the April 1st issue of the journal SLEEP.
This means that…
clock | April 8, 2007Pediatric Grand Rounds 1:26 are up on Flea's blog. It is a carnival every entomologist will like....
clock | April 8, 2007I have updated my uber-long post about framing science. I added a lot more links to the blogospheric responses, as well as my own response to critics at the very bottom of the post. I have also re-posted it as a Diary on DailyKos which I hope you will visit to see the comments and to recommend (if you are a Kossian).
clock | April 8, 2007I am thinking about going - this is only about 2 miles from me:
Tuesday, April 10th is our first ever MoveOn Virtual Town Hall meeting with the '08 presidential candidates. (The full list of candidates invited to attend is below.) The topic is Iraq, and we want you to have a front row seat.
You can join other members of your community and tune in via the Internet to hear the top candidates answer questions chosen by MoveOn members. Afterward, you'll have a chance to discuss what you heard, and then vote by email on who will do the best job of bringing our troops home.
Can you attend a town…
clock | April 8, 2007Talking about the hermetic cabal of scientists who never let any outsiders in....
Climate change fruitful for fungi:
A remarkable father-and-son research project has revealed how rising temperatures are affecting fungi in southern England.
Fungus enthusiast Edward Gange amassed 52,000 sightings of mushroom and toadstools during walks around Salisbury over a 50-year period.
Analysis by his son Alan, published in the journal Science, shows some fungi have started to fruit twice a year.
It is among the first studies to show a biological impact of warming in autumn.
"My father was a stonemason,…
clock | April 8, 2007Transcription Factor
Entertaining Research
Café Philos: an internet café
The skeptical alchemist
VirusHead
Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes
El PaleoFreak
Shakesville (formerly Shakespeare's Sister)
Amardeep Singh
The Radula
clock | April 8, 2007Flies Don't Buzz About Aimlessly:
Have you ever stopped to wonder how a fruit fly is able to locate and blissfully drown in your wine glass on a warm summer evening, especially since its flight path seems to be so erratic? Mark Frye at the University of California and Andy Reynolds at Rothamsted Research in the United Kingdom have been pondering this very question. Fruit flies explore their environment using a series of straight flight paths punctuated by rapid 90° body-saccades. Some of these manoeuvres avoid obstacles in their path. But many others seem to appear spontaneously. Are the…
clock | April 7, 2007Here, have a go at it. Even better, if you can get the actual paper and dissect it on your blog, let me know so I can link to that. Have fun!
Good Behavior, Religiousness May Be Genetic:
A new study in Journal of Personality shows that selfless and social behavior is not purely a product of environment, specifically religious environment. After studying the behavior of adult twins, researchers found that, while altruistic behavior and religiousness tended to appear together, the correlation was due to both environmental and genetic factors.
According to study author Laura Koenig, the…
clock | April 7, 2007The Bodies Exhibition is coming to The Streets at Southpoint in Durham.
My wife saw it last year in NYC. My daughter will probably be too squeamish for it, but I'll try to get my son to come with me.
Once I go....well, it is certainly a bloggable event.
clock | April 7, 2007Earlier this afternoon, my wife and I went to the Weaver Street Market in Southern Village (which also has a blog) for some wine tasting. You can see the wine list here (pdf).
As the first rule of blogging is never to blog drunk, I had a to wait a couple of hours afterwards before I started to write this post. I wasn't really drunk, but I was happy enough to seriously consider singing on our walk home. I guess I am quite a lightweight...
Our strategy was for Mrs.Coturnix to taste the whites (and occasional red I recommend) and for me to taste the reds (and occasional white she recommends…
clock | April 6, 2007My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet just published an article in 'Science' (which, considering its topic is, ironically, behind the subscription wall, but you can check the short press release) about "Framing Science"
Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, Mike Dunford (also check the comments here), John Fleck, Larry Moran, Dietram Scheufele, Kristina Chew, Randy Olson, James Hrynyshyn, Paul Sunstone and Alan Boyle have, so far, responded and their responses (and the comment threads) are worth your time to read. Chris and Matt respond to some of them. Matt has more in-depth explanations here, here and…
clock | April 6, 2007Behavioral Ecology: Late Breeding Female Birds Surprisingly Had More Offspring:
Starting to breed late in life is a bad idea if you want to maximise the number of offspring that you produce - or so the theory goes. But doubt has now been cast on this hypothesis - one of the biggest assumptions in behavioural ecology - by researchers from the universities of Bristol and Cape Town and published today in Current Biology.
Climate Change: Natural Wonders Of The World Face Destruction:
From the Amazon to the Himalayas, ten of the world's greatest natural wonders face destruction if the climate…
clock | April 5, 2007Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions.
- John Randolph