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Skepchickcon is this weekend!

Skepchickcon is a Track at Convergence 2009. Convergence 2009 is one of those science fiction conventions where everyone dresses up as Klingons and such. I've never been to one but I've sure seen plenty of them on TV and in the movies. Skepchickcon is a "Track," which means it is a series of panels and stuff integrated with systematic planned partying parallel to other "Tracks" at the convention. Personally, I'm on three of the panels: Blogging Skeptically; Science Online, and Evolution 101. Plus I'll try to attend some of the parties. Here is my schedule: I'm less sure about the…

Teaching low-income women math to help them get better jobs

There's an article on the New York Times Online about Allannah Thomas, founder of Helicon, a non-profit that helps low-income women learn math skills they need for better jobs. Thomas's courses are called "math boot camp" because of their focus on fundamental skills, and she works with women to help them develop those skills you need for business, quantitative reasoning, scaling, or technical work. The article reminds me a bit of the philosophy of Bob Moses, founder of the Algebra Project -- somehow, we live in a culture where it is somehow okay for adults to say to kids asking for help on…

The world in 1989

The Beloit College Class of 2011 Mindset list has been released. It features aspects of the worldview of 18 year-olds in the fall of 2007, i.e. those born in 1989. Some things that make me feel old: What Berlin wall? They never "rolled down" a car window. They have grown up with bottled water. Russia has always had a multi-party political system. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre. MTV has never featured music videos. The space program has never really caught their attention except in disasters. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were…

Do Cellphones Brings Us Together or Pull Us Apart?

Are you an information technology optimist or skeptic? Chances are, if you are a regular blog reader or poster, you fall in the former category. Yet ever feel like all that time you spend online might be displacing time spent in more meaningful face-to-face interactions? Are the social relationships forged via Web 2.0 and various mobile phone innovations really as quality as real world conversations? At American University, it's a question I ask my sophomore-level class on Communication & Society to research and debate every semester. (This past semester's debate is available here.) On…

Dance Your Ph.D. - 2013 Winners Announced!

It's time again for John Bohannon's annual "Dance Your Ph.D." contest. This year, in my opinion, there are even more high quality entries than in previous years! (I was one of the judges who did the first round of choices...the "winners" were then chosen by a panel that includes several professional dancers (for several years it has been members of Pilobulus)).  And they are all now posted online ("winners" at the link above - all the videos are posted here - because really they are ALL winners in my opinion. And if you can come up with more difficult ways to try to explain science - we could…

Toxoplasma, a mind-boggling parasite

Toxoplasma must be one of the most mind-boggling (oh! sweet pun!) parasite. Maggie Wittlin has a fascinating report about this parasite at Seed Magazine. "In a paper published in the online edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society, United States Geological Survey researcher Kevin Lafferty argues that a significant factor in why some countries exhibit higher levels of neuroticism than others may be the prevalence of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. The study also indicates that it may influence a society's preference for strict laws, an expression of uncertainty avoidance, and its valuation…

TSZ is Rated R!!!

It seems all the Science Bloggers are doing it... ...submitting their blogs for rating at this site. I am so proud to say TSZ came up with an R rating. Mingle2 - Online Dating Bora has an NC-17 but he's the only one. He's the only one in lots of ways, though, you know?? (I mean that in a good way, Bora!) My rating was based on the presence of the following words: sex (8x) pain (3x) poop (2x) puke (1x) Now, I am absolutely sure that the word "puke" appears more than one time on this blog, so maybe I really should have an NC-17. But, whatever. I'm no "G" blogger like PZ, Doc…

Revisionist historian walks free, rightly so

Frederick Toben is an awful man, who denies the plain fact that the Nazis killed six million Jews and between nine and eleven million Jews, Slavs, Romany, homosexuals, Soviets (civilians and POWs), Poles, disabled, and so on. But what he thinks is not a crime, either in Australia, where he lives, or in the United Kingdom, where he was arrested on a German warrant for breaking German laws. And it was right that he was released by the British courts. If people can be arrested and charged for breaking laws online in jurisdictions where they do not reside, no matter how awful their views are,…

Lusi Lecture

I vaguely knew that the U.S. Geological Survey's Menlo Park office runs a series of public lectures, but I didn't realize they were all videotaped and archived online for my blogging convenience. Ace! Now we just need to chop them up into bits and put them on YouTube. Anyway, Thursday night's lecture was about the ongoing eruption of the Lusi mud volcano in Indonesia (which Chris has covered in the past). You can watch it here. It's a little long, but quite suitable to put on as background material for your weekend housecleaning. The good science bits start about 15 minutes in. Now, I've got…

The Best Google Maps Hack

For all you runners and cyclists out there, I give you a toy you're sure to enjoy: Gmaps Pedometer. Ever had a ride or run you wanted to do, but weren't sure how long it was or the elevation change? Enter Gmaps Pedometer. It works with the Google Maps interface, by far the best online maps application. You tell it where you want to start, enter checkpoints by double clicking, and that's it. It tells you mileage, elevation change, and you can save your routes. There is a website that has good information on local rides in my area, but it gets boring doing the same routes every time. I started…

Help me nominate a non-profit

Move On Dot Org will be transferring funds to various non-profits, or otherwise be supporting them. Unfortunately, I don't think Moveon has a rule against religious non-profis. But I do, and so do you. Please suggest a non-profit or two for me to nominate. If you area member of moveon as well, you can do this too. Here are the guidelines: Nominated organizations must be non-profit groups focused on causes, consequences, and solutions relating to the economic crisis. They may provide direct services such as homeless assistance, jobless help, child services, food assistance, etc., or they…

Julie MacDonald quits

The civil engineer who saw fit to rewrite the conclusions of Interior Department scientists, and who sent confidential documents to a virtual friend on an online role-playing game, has resigned. This was part of her clever ploy to escape Congressional questioning. They can't over see her work if she isn't working for the government anymore! Ms. MacDonald was deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, giving her responsibilities for overseeing implementation of the Endangered Species Act, among other things. In that capacity, she altered the scientific conclusions of agency…

Oklahoma…you have left me speechless

They're considering a new law to keep women ignorant and ashamed. The governor of Oklahoma is considering tough new abortion bills that would allow doctors to withhold test results showing foetal defects and require women to answer intrusive questions. The results of the questionnaires would be posted online. Women would also be required to have a vaginal ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the embryo or foetus in a third bill passed by the legislature on Monday. So let me get this straight. If a woman in Oklahoma thinks she is pregnant, she can go in for "testing"…but she…

Stupid poll

So, Greta Van Susteren, Fox News babbler, got some hate mail telling her how stupid she is. Instead of just chucking it in the trash, or simply making fun of it (the guy made a spelling error, of course), she had to go out of her way to demonstrate that maybe the fellow was right. How? She turned it into an online poll, asking who was dumber, Brian or Greta. The fact that she used a poll made the answer obvious. Who is dumber? Greta? 73% Brian for spending his time watching someone he thinks is dumb 27% You can see how it is going. Pile on if you want. I can't believe she did that. I know…

Penguin ebooks & The Research Works Act: Publishers gain, communities lose

I was really angry riding home on the bus last Friday night. Not angry because the transit system here in Toronto is royally fudged in general or that transit to York University is fudged in particular. No, it wasn't that particular aspect of the public sphere that had me upset. It was the growing tendency of publishers of all sorts to try and take their works out of the public cultural commons and place them exclusively behind pay walls. It's their desire to monetize every reading transaction that had me hot under the collar. Here's what I tweeted standing on the bus, altered a bit for…

More Evidence that Universal Health Care Would be Less Expensive

We've written quite a bit about single payer health care systems as well as other models that are a mixture of public and private spending. We've also analyzed some of the sources of excess cost of US healthcare to other countries. What is uniformly true about universal health care systems is that they all spend less on medical care per capita than the US. The next nearest country in spending to us, France, spends 50% of what we do per capita while providing top notch care, possibly the best in the world. And while the cause of our excess costs are multifactorial, one of the greatest…

Why no one should take Nexium and it should never have been approved

As Chris discussed Saturday the WSJ had a silly article in which a woman demands a prescription drug from a flight attendant, asking for the wrong drug to treat her problem acutely, and then shockingly was refused this service. Worse, Nexium is mentioned by name, multiple times, and Nexium is actually a drug which should never have even been approved by the FDA. It really is only prescribed because of intense marketing because, logically, it has no business on the market and is no different than an existing drug, prilosec. Why would doctors irrationally prescribe this drug then? Because…

Vaccination Considered in Haiti as Cholera's Spread Slows

Cholera has killed roughly 3,800 people in Haiti and sickened another 189,000, and it will continue to circulate in the population for the foreseeable future. The good news is that the number of new cases per week has dropped from 12,000, which it reached in November, to about 4,700, and the mortality rate has also decreased. Intensive treatment and prevention efforts (including provision of clean water and educational campaigns) have saved thousands of lives, and will have to continue even as the attention of the international community wanes. David Cyranoski of Nature News points out that…

She Blinded Me With... A Nova?

Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth. But trust me on the sunscreen. -Baz Luhrmann Our Sun gives us practically all of the light and energy our planet receives, and it does it, at its core, by fusing light elements into heavier ones. And even though this nuclear fushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_rayion releases a tremendous amount of very high energy photons (known as gamma…

DonorsChoose: Two New Incentives

The DonorsChoose fundraiser is winding toward its conclusion, which means I need to find some new way to raise money for a final push. So, here are two new offers, one for high rollers, one for small donations: Incentive 1: Guest Post: Taking my cue from the Seed overlords, we'll add a random element to this, to enable small donors to take part. So, any new donation this week (from Monday Oct. 22 through Friday Oct. 26) will get you a chance to win a guest-blog post on this blog. This is distinct from the "Buy This Blog" incentive, in that it's not you choosing a topic for me to write about,…

RBOC, copy&paste edition

Okay, so I finally updated our family blog with what has been going on behind the scenes here at Chez Nous, and I will share some of it with you, through the power of copy and paste and with only a modicum of overlap. Voila, I present to you my last two weeks (only some of which is work-related)! We begin my update with: what happened two Wednesdays ago, namely that my department head has announced his resignation, effective July 1. I am hoping he has sent out an announcement to all those folks who should find out from him, and not from reading this blog. It has been a very emotional year…

Woke Up, Got Out of Bed, Dragged a Comb Across my Head

One of the most amusing things about writing a blog is that people you've never met form an impression about you from your blabberings, and then, often, when they actually meet you they are astounded that you aren't "an old grumpy guy" or whatever image they had in their mind. So, in order to confuse you even more, here are some things which I've been reading and thinking about and doing while not working on efficient quantum algorithms for the hidden subgroup problem. Spanish Treasury to Exclude Italian Government Bonds. Could this be an indication of problems ahead for the Euro?…

Giving skepticism a bad name

Chris Mooney, CalPundit, Signal+Noise and others have been doing a great job of keeping track of the woeful textbook battles down in Texas. The Board of Education there has been arguing over how evolution should be presented in the textbooks they're about to buy for the state's high school students. The Discovery Institute, the headquarters of "Intelligent Design" proponents, has been lobbying them hard to present their ideas on equal footing with those of evolutionary biology. It looks this morning like they've lost (again). The conservative members of the board are disappointed--they say…

In search of pragmatism and mixed methods

I took classes on qualitative research and naturalistic research methods from researchers who follow the constructivist paradigm rather closely and who don't really believe in mixed methods research. I took statistics classes from professors who are friendly towards naturalistic methods, but who only use quantitative methods.  Other professors around me use some mixed methods, some rhetorical/critical methods, some large scale quantitative methods, (and then there's SNA)... All of these paradigms have related epistemologies*. The practitioners of naturalistic methods, in particular, are often…

Whewelling

MOUSEBENDER: Good Morning. WENSLEYDALE: Good morning, sir. Welcome to the National Cheese Emporium. MOUSEBENDER: Ah, thank you my good man. WENSLEYDALE: What can I do for you, sir? MOUSEBENDER: Well, I was, uh, sitting in the public library on Thurmond Street just now, skimming through History of the Inductive Sciences by William Whewell, and I suddenly came over all peckish. WENSLEYDALE: Peckish, sir? MOUSEBENDER: Esurient. WENSLEYDALE: Eh? MOUSEBENDER: (In a broad Yorkshire accent) Eee I were all hungry, like. WENSLEYDALE: Ah, hungry. MOUSEBENDER: In a nutshell. And I thought to myself, '…

A tale of two people in two cities, part I

My husband and I will have been "together" for 10 years this July. Of those 10 years, we have lived about 3.5 in the same city. It's a hard gig. We met when I was an undergrad and Steve was a grad student (scandalous!) over the summer when I was home from college, working in a water chemistry lab. He made goofy jokes about the carbon analyzer and wore Wallace and Gromit t-shirts, and our first date was to go see Mulan (no kidding. We now consider Disney to be bscs=blood-sucking corporate scum, an opinion we recognize we can only hold for now because we don't have kids who love them yet…

Is David Gross's evidence enough?

Well, after yesterday's revelations, blogspace seems to be split. On the one hand, we have Clayton Cramer, Steve Verdon, Jane Galt, Glenn Reynolds and Marie Gryphon who think Lott has been exonerated. On the other hand Kevin Drum and Tom Spencer are not yet convinced. On the gripping hand we have Jim Henley and John Quiggin who think that it has been established that Lott conducted a survey, but the small sample size means that Lott could not properly use it make his "98% brandishing" claim. Julian Sanchez's friend also makes the point about the sample…

Taxes and No Man's Land

A Repost of some classic TfK. I missed the Bush speech the other night, and from the coverage, I can't say I care. The idea of making No Man's Land an "enterprise zone," like the idea of auctioning off "surplus" federal lands, only justifies the fears expressed by some locals that the wealthy would be taking over the former homes of the (black) low-income residents of New Orleans. It's bad politics and bad policy. It's indisputably true that we have to think twice about how the new New Orleans will be built, but planning to integrate low-income housing with middle class homes and commercial…

Lemur Week: Ringtailed Lemurs Look Where You're Looking

In honor of Science Online, which begins on Thursday night, I will be writing about lemurs this week. Why lemurs? Because on Friday morning, as a part of Science Online, I will be taking a tour of the Duke Lemur Center. It is common among animals - especially primates - to orient their gaze preferentially towards other individuals, as well as to follow the gaze of others. Lots of attention has been paid to gaze-following, in part because the ability to recognize and orient to the behavior of others is missing or impaired in various developmental disorders, such as autism. It is well known…

Independence Days Challenge Update #1

I won't usually publish ID updates here, but I did want to remind everyone who wants to participate that this is going on - please feel free to jump in, post updates at your blog, on facebook or in the comments of the update threads (posted on Fridays) at www.sharonastyk.com. In the meantime, here's the first one: The weather of our discontent continues - weirdly warm for upstate NY in winter, plants and animals blooming or returning too early. The pussywillows have catkins, my elderberries have green buds, the daffodils are up and we saw a red-winged blackbird yesterday - all of which are…

Orac's favorite tunes from 2006

One of the great things about blogging is that I can do things that I always wanted to do but would never get hired in a million years to do, for example, to be a rock critic. Prior to blogging, the only time I ever got to indulge my critic wannabe side was in high school, where I wrote a couple of (in retrospect) badly done reviews of a couple of prominent albums from the 1979-1980 period. I don't know if I'm any better at it now, but I am a lot older and have developed much more varied tastes in music. Consequently, even from the very beginning of this blog, every year I've done a "Top Ten…

The reverse-AOL maneuver and possible futures for serials

Back in the day, Time Warner merged with AOL. It turned out to be one of the worst merger ideas in the history of merger ideas, and I believe the evidence suggests that most mergers actually turn out to be clunkers! AOL was simply at the top of its orbit, nowhere but downhill to go. I wonder, I do, whether Time Warner learned from that experience, and that's why they started shopping exclusive deals to aggregators. (For the record, exclusive deals aren't new in this market.) Grab all the money you can with the exclusivity flag—before the market value of your product declines with a vengeance…

OMG this is 2G2BT: Elephants Texting!

In Ol Pejeta, Kenya, conservationists faced a unique problem. The conservancy is striving to protect native african wildlife, like the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) from poaching and territory loss. Listed as 'vulnerable' by IUCN Red List, only approximately 10,000 elephants are in Africa today, compared to previous numbers of over 300,000. Protection has helped the elephant's numbers a bit, but a new issue surfaced: elephant territories got too close to neighboring farms, and the elephants became a menace. Bull elephants started raiding villager's crops, wiping out up to six months…

Reading Diary: Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni

"Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we’re fucked...We’re on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it. We’re fucked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable. The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place." - James Box The climate crisis is serious, no doubt about it. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth from nearly a decade ago was a kind of rallying cry for the reality-based community but it appears that we might need another rallying cry as Gore…

Previewing Books on Blogs, and "Institutionalized" by Fred Smith and Joe Schmoe

OK, this is not a re-post of one old post, but three. The first one, from December 17, 2005, introduces Institutionalized. The second one, from January 20, 2006, adds some more info about the book. Finally, the third one, from May 17, 2006, gives a paragraph-long review of the book within a bigger question - what should a blogger do when faced with a stack of books sent kindly by authors and publishers for preview? What should one do if one does not like the book? Under the fold.... Institutionalized Yesterday I received my pre-print copy of Institutionalized by Fred Smith and Joe…

New Research Suggests Global Warming Is About To Heat Up

A paper just published in Science Magazine helps explain variation we see in the long term Carbon-pollution caused upward trend Earth's surface temperatures. The research also, and rather ominously, suggests that a recent slowdown in that trend is likely to reverse direction in the near future, causing the Earth's surface temperature to rise dramatically. The graph shown above represents the ongoing warming of the Earth's surface owing to the increased atmospheric concentration of human generated greenhouse gas pollution, mainly CO2. But, have a look at the following graph of changes in…

Ten things to do to protect yourself avoid being blamed for what happens to you

Last week, 3QuarksDaily quoted Shane Austen with this list of "sexual assault prevention tips guaranteed to work". It reads in part, 5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON'T ASSAULT THEM! 6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.8. Always be honest with people! Don't pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to…

Junk Food Tax or Health Food Subsidy - Which Results in Healthier Food Purchases?

 Image by Jeff Keen. In the past few years several prominent researchers have argued for the adoption of taxes on junk food as a means of reducing their consumption.  Often, as in a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, the argument is made that money collected through the tax could then be used to subsidize healthier foods.  This is an idea that I've found very appealing - we make the bad foods more expensive, the good foods less expensive, and people will probably shift at least some of their purchases to those healthier options.  But a very interesting new study by…

Tijuana Zebras: the myth of organic vs conventional farming

Earlier this week, the Food Standards Agency upset the organic apple cart when they published a review of available literature that failed to find any health benefits associated with organic food. Moreover, the nutritional value of organically-produced food was little different to that produced by conventional farming. As the Islington set choked on their (Duchy Originals) cornflakes, the backlash was as quick as it was predictable. Nobody likes to feel they've been taken for a fool, especially those who can afford to pay £3 for a loaf of bread. The Soil Association, accused of over-…

Around the Web: Some posts on The Research Works Act (Now chronological!)

Note: this post is superseded by: Around the Web: Research Works Act, Elsevier boycott & FRPAA. Following on my post from yesterday on Scholarly Societies: It's time to abandon the AAP over The Research Works Act, I thought I'd gather together some of the recent posts on the issue. The Wikipedia article is here, full text of the bill here and status here. 2012.01.04. New US Publisher Anti-OA Legislation by Cable Green 2012.01.04. A Threat to Open Access: the Research Works Act by Lisa Federer 2012.01.05. Update on publishers and SOPA: Time for scholarly publishers to disavow the AAP by…

Food Storage Baby Steps

My food storage and preservation class starts today, and I thought it was worth reproducing this essay - the very basics of getting started on storing food. Why would you want to do this? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First of all, I don't think anyone who has tracked events over the last decade can argue that it would be a good thing for you to have enough food to go through a period of disruption. Whether we look at various Hurricanes, ice storms, earthquakes or events in Japan, we know that the kind of social disruption that can affect access to food supplies really does happen…

more on Iceland

so what happened in Iceland, where are things headed, and is it a one-off microsystem gone off the rails, or a bellwether for the developed world Iceland was a dirt poor fish+agriculture economy, under external Danish rule until 1944 when it unilaterally declared independence, the Danes being otherwise occupied. Over the next 40 or so year it grew a modern economy, very slowly, building a tight Scandinavian social democracy, with currency and import controls and a developing industrial economy. The export driver was fish - and fishing was, and is, relatively tightly regulated to sustain…

Report a bad doctor to the authorities, go to jail?

I just found out via one of the mailing lists I'm on of a very disturbing case in Kermit, Texas. Two nurses who were dismayed and disturbed by a physician peddling all manner of herbal supplements reported him to the authorities. Now, they are facing jail: In a stunning display of good ol' boy idiocy and abuse of prosecutorial discretion, two West Texas nurses have been fired from their jobs and indicted with a third-degree felony carrying potential penalties of two-to-ten years' imprisonment and a maximum fine of $10,000. Why? Because they exercised a basic tenet of the nurse's Code of…

Birds in the News 110

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Male Broad-billed Hummingbird, Cynanthus latirostris. Image: Greg Scott [MUCH larger view]. Birds in Science A new study by the University of Exeter, UK has revealed that stressed out birds are more likely to take risks than their relaxed counterparts. The research team selectively bred zebra finches to create "laid-back", "normal", and "stressed" groups of birds. These groups differ by their levels of stress hormone, which in birds is corticosterone. The research team observed the behavioral strategies of birds to…

And It Is Back...

The Food Crisis, of course. In fact it really never left - since 2007 we've had more hungry people on the planet than ever before in human history, and while we've seen brief declines in the numbers of the hungry worldwide, those declines were of such short duration that they were essentially meaningless - earlier this year when the UN trumpeted that the number of the hungry had dropped back below 1 billion, it admitted that this excluded Pakistani flood victims, the impacts of the crisis in the Russian wheat crop and a host of other late-year issues. On the lists of guests no one ever…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Sexual Harassment From Males Prevents Female Bonding, Fish Study Shows: The extent to which sexual harassment from males can damage relationships between females is revealed in a new study. Led by the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the research uncovers the effect of sexual harassment on the ability of female fish to form social bonds with each other. Fish Researcher Demonstrates First 'Non-visual Feeding' By African Cichlids: Most fish rely primarily on their vision to find prey to feed upon, but a…

Terror Bird Arrived in North American Before Land Bridge Formed

Titanis Walleri, Terror bird. artist's rendering. Image: University of Florida. University of Florida paleontologist Bruce MacFadden said his team has determined that a prehistoric 7 foot tall flightless "terror bird," Titanis walleri, arrived in North America from South America long before a land bridge connected the two continents. The bird apparently island hopped to North America on islands that make up the mountains that now form mountains on the isthmus of Panama. "It was previously thought that Titanis immigrated to Texas across the Panamanian land bridge that formed about 3 million…

Forget climategate; here's a real embarrassment for the IPCC

The revelation that at least one group of authors working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would rely on grey literature or even popular media sources for their reporting could end up being a real blow to the Nobel prize-winning organization. If you haven't heard by now, a section of the Fourth IPCC report, which came out in 2007, cited a prediction for the complete disappearance of all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas by 2035. This alone would be sufficient justification for describing the consequences of climate change as catastrophic, as something like 40…

Why I'm releasing my genetic data online [Genetic Future]

Back in June I launched a new blog, Genomes Unzipped, together with a group of colleagues and friends with expertise in various areas of genetics. At the time I made a rather cryptic comment about "planning much bigger things for the site over the next few months". Today I announced what I meant by that: from today, all of the 12 members of Genomes Unzipped - including my wife and I - will be releasing their own results from a variety of genetic tests, online, for anyone to access. Initially those results consist of data from one company (23andMe) for all 12 members; deCODEme for one…

The bad news is "AAAS Names New Science Publisher", the good news is Walt Crawford's Open Access Trilogy

It seems that the American Association for the Advancement of Science has just announced the new publisher of it's flagship family of Science journals: AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner today announced the appointment of Kent Anderson, a past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SPP), to serve as Publisher of the Science family of journals. Anderson, who in 2011 received the SPP's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, will assume the role of Science Publisher as of 3 November. Currently, he is the CEO and Publisher of STRIATUS/The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery in Needham…