clock | December 17, 2009There are 16 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Pre-Exposure to Moving Form Enhances Static Form Sensitivity:
Motion-defined form can seem to persist briefly after motion ceases, before seeming to gradually disappear into the background. Here we…
clock | December 17, 2009A nice, thought-provoking interview. Starts with the discussion of Clay Shirky's post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable and the reactions collected by Jay Rosen and discussed in Rosen's Flying Seminar In The Future of News:
Since the clips are set on auto-start, I placed them all under the fold:
clock | December 16, 2009In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
- Bertrand Russell
clock | December 16, 2009
As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.
Rick MacPherson is the Director of Conservation Programs at Coral Reef Alliance, and a blogger. I interviewed Rick last year. At this conference, Rick will co-moderate the session on Broader Impact Done Right.
Pamela Blizzard is the Executive Director of the Contemporary Science Center, this year's institutional partner of the conference. She is also on Twitter.
Eric…
clock | December 16, 2009
I know there is a nice subset of my readers who can read Serbian language. If you are one of those, you may be interested in the last issue of 'Pancevacko Citaliste'. Along with several interesting articles about science publishing and librarianship, there is also an interview with me by Ana Ivkovic, librarian at the Oncology Institute in Belgrade. The journal is Open Access, so you can download and read the PDF here.
clock | December 16, 2009The winners of the NESCent blogging competition were announced yesterday.
What do the winners get? A travel grant to come to ScienceOnline2010 in January! Yes, we kept those two spots open for the winners.
And the winners are Christie Lynn Wilcox (for the post When Good Genes Go Bad) and Jeremy Yoder (for the post How it does a body good: The selective advantage of drinking milk depends where you drink it).
w00t!
Congratulations to the winners....and see you both in January!
clock | December 16, 2009There are 25 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
The Secret Life of Oilbirds: New Insights into the Movement Ecology of a Unique Avian Frugivore:
Steatornis caripensis (the oilbird) is a very unusual bird. It supposedly never sees daylight, roosting in…
clock | December 15, 2009 It is the time we have now, and all our wasted time sinks into the sea and is swallowed up without a trace. The past is dust and ashes, and this incommensurably wide way leads to the pragmatic and kinetic future.
- John Ashbery
clock | December 15, 2009
As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.
Jean-Claude Bradley is a professor of Chemistry at Drexel University. He runs the Open Notebook Science wiki for his lab, blogs on Useful Chemistry and tweets. He is one of two people who will not just attend for the fourth time, but also present for the fourth time. At the next conference, Jean-Claude will give an Ignite-style talk "Games in Open Science Education…
clock | December 15, 2009Applied Climate-Change Analysis: The Climate Wizard Tool:
Although the message of "global climate change" is catalyzing international action, it is local and regional changes that directly affect people and ecosystems and are of immediate concern to scientists, managers, and policy makers. A major barrier preventing informed climate-change adaptation planning is the difficulty accessing, analyzing, and interpreting climate-change information. To address this problem, we developed a powerful, yet easy to use, web-based tool called Climate Wizard (http://ClimateWizard.org) that provides non-…
clock | December 14, 2009Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation.
- Bertrand Russell
clock | December 14, 2009Please join us on NC State's Centennial Campus on Wednesday, Dec. 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. for two special speakers.
Our "seasonal" speaker is Dr. Larry Silverberg (aka Dr. Silverbell), NC State professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and world-renowned expert on the "Science of Santa." Dr. Silverbell will present his latest research on the advanced material properties of Santa's sleigh and review previous research on toy delivery and time travel.
Continuing with the theme that science and engineering can be fun and educational, Dr. Laura Bottomley, electrical engineer and director of…
clock | December 14, 2009Next Sigma Xi pizza lunch science talk:
Pizza lunch returns at noon, Tuesday, Dec. 15 with a talk by marine biologist Craig R. McClain, assistant director of science for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham. McClain conducts deep-sea research and has participated in expeditions to the Antarctic and to remote regions of the Pacific and Atlantic. Expect him to dive into puzzling realms with his talk: An Empire Lacking Food: The Astonishing Existence of Life on the Deep Sea Floor.
American Scientist Pizza Lunch is free and open to science journalists and science communicators of…
clock | December 14, 2009
As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.
Scott Baker is the Fisheries Specialist at North Carolina Sea Grant. If you are a reader of my blog, you may remember I blogged about his use of texting and twitter to collect data from fishermen about fish-catch. At the conference, Scott will co-moderate the session on Citizen Science and do a demo of Text message based angler reporting method: twitter and fishcatch…
clock | December 14, 2009There are 54 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Tropical Mosquito Assemblages Demonstrate 'Textbook' Annual Cycles:
Annual biological rhythms are often depicted as predictably cyclic, but quantitative evaluations are few and rarely both cyclic and…
clock | December 13, 2009It is appropriate here to recall that the so-called Dark Ages began with the flight of the individuals into the protection of lords or chapters and came to an end when the individual again found it to his advantage to set forth on his own. We live at a time when everything conspires to push the individual into the fold.
- Bertrand de Jouvenal
clock | December 12, 2009Conscience is that still, small voice that is sometimes too loud for comfort.
- Bert Murray
clock | December 12, 2009Last year, at ScienceOnline09, it appears that the overarching theme of the meeting emerged, and it was Power, in various meanings of the word.
This year, looking at the titles and descriptions of the sessions on the Program, the keyword of the meeting will be Trust. Again, in various meanings of that word: how do you know who to trust (e.g., journalists, scientists and press officers), and how do you behave online in order to be trusted. The debate over recent hacking of e-mails concerning climate change also hinges on the trust and how language affects the perception of who is trustworthy.…