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ScienceBlogs DonorsChoose Drive 2008

Every year at ScienceBlogs, we do a charity drive for DonorsChoose.org. If you haven't heard of them, DonorsChoose is a charity that takes proposals from schoolteachers, and lets people pick specific proposals to donate money to. We run our charity challenge through the month of October. For personal reasons, I couldn't participate last year. The year before that, Good Math/Bad Math readers donated just over two thousand dollars to support math education in impoverished New York area schools. This year, I'm still focusing on the NYC area, because with where I live and work, I get to…

Thinking Big About Clean Energy

I want to put a solar panel on my roof so that I am releasing less greenhouse gas into the environment. But then I hear that manufacturing solar panels causes the release of greenhouse gasses, so I have to subtract that from the good I think I'm doing. But then I realize that the people who are making the solar panels have to change their method so they release less greenhouse gas into the environment. We hear this argument all the time (for example, here). You think you are doing something "green" but it really isn't green because yadayadayada. I am suspicious of these arguments because…

Cheap Books, Random Thoughts

ADDED, ANOTHER CHEAP BOOK YOU MIGHT WANT:Dune The following random thought will eventually become a more carefully written blog post, but I want to get this out there sooner than later. Mention electric cars, or solar panels, or any other kind of thing a person might buy and deploy to reduce their Carbon footprint. Mention that to enough people and some wise ass will eventually come along and tell you how wrong you are. About how electric cars are worse for the environment than gas cars because bla bla bla, or how solar panels are worse for the environment than burning natural gas because of…

November Pieces Of My Mind #3

Irish trad session at Wirström's pub in Stockholm's Old Town One of the most annoying and amateurish things a graphic designer can do, in my experience, is to insert hard hyphens. I make a policy of keeping conservative and libertarian people in my Facebook feed and not muting them even though I don't agree with them. But lately I've had to add a subclause: I'm only keeping the smarter, better-reasoning ones. Because really, it's just unproductive for everyone if I allow my image of my political opponents to get skewed by the stupidest and angriest members of their camp. A lot of people…

First Week Of 2015 Excavations At Landsjö

2014 trenches A-E and rough locations of 2015 trenches F-H. Like Stensö, Landsjö Castle has half of a rare perimeter wall and is known to have been owned by a descendant of Folke Jarl – or rather, by his daughter-in-law, the widow of such a descendant. Last year we found that the high inner bailey has a previously unseen southern wall with a square tower at the east end, and we found five coins of AD 1250-75 in a deep layer that seem likely to date the castle's construction phase. But unlike Stensö, in three strategically placed trenches we found no trace of the missing bits of the…

Serious Mandate for National Health

It was the second-most-blogged article on the NYT when I got up this morning; now, it is the first-most-blogged.  It is the article that reports on a survey that shows 72% support for a government-run health insurance program.  The program would be similar to Medicare, but would be available to persons under 65 and not on Social Security Disability.  href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/policy/21poll.html">In Poll, Wide Support for Government-Run Health By KEVIN SACK and MARJORIE CONNELLY Published: June 20, 2009 Americans overwhelmingly support substantial changes to the…

That durned 8 things tag

I just noticed a comment in my Undergraduate Research Changed My Life post from a friend of mine; Camilo at Mercurical tagged me with the "8 Things" meme. Ok ok ok. I should just jump on this bandwagon as well. After all, Wilkins is doing it, and Tara at Aetiology issued a blanket tag for everybody that reads her blog (which I do regularly, so heck with it I better do this). Here are 8 things about me, in no particular order: 1. I was adopted out by Catholic Social Services at the ripe old age of 9 days, in Macomb IL. (Yeah yeah, that one is in order). 2. Cooking is something I like…

Women Are From Venus and Men Are Easy?

According to another groundbreaking study on mate selection, men prefer good looking women. Who knew? Wait didn't I touch on this in May? And we ladies apparently are trading off our attractiveness for 'higher quality men' or whathaveyou. Really? Before I comment (deep breath), I'll start with the research to be fair. Out of this week's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: While humans may pride themselves on being highly evolved, most still behave like the stereotypical Neanderthals when it comes to choosing a mate, according to research by Indiana University…

The Curious Case of Phineas Gage

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I'm trying to raise money for a classroom-in-need to buy some books about neuroscience, using the case of Phineas Gage as a jumping off point. (And if you haven't yet donated, they would be most grateful for even a dollar!) I thought it would be interesting and appropriate to discuss what happened to Mr. Gage and how it impacted neuroscience. It all began when a large piece of metal exploded through his brain. Phineas Gage was the ultimate average joe--a railway foreman who was laying down track outside Cavendish, Vermont in the fall of 1848. It was on the…

Seven Easy Ways to Support Disaster Relief in Japan

I've been thinking a lot about how to support victims and their families in Japan since the earthquake and tsunami struck last Friday. Ben Parr at Mashable gives us some simple, concrete ways we can help in his article, "Japan Earthquake & Tsunami: 7 Simple Ways to Help." Please do what you can. 1. Text to Donate The American Red Cross has once again launched a texting campaign to raise money for relief efforts in the Pacific region. Last year, the Red Cross was able to raise over $20 million for Haiti relief through simple text donations. If you would like to donate to the American Red…

Boilermaker, One Week Later

Last Sunday was the 30th annual Boilermaker 15k road race in lovely Utica, NY. This is perhaps the biggest event in central NY during the summer. This year, the Boilermaker attracted over 12,000 entrants along with an elite field of national and international talent. In other words, it's not your average Sunday morning 5k benefit run won in a blistering 19:36 by a guy wearing Teva sandals. If you're interested in the results, you can find them here or use the database found here to find results from prior years along with news clips and such. One of the things I like about this race is the…

Rape Is a Pre-Existing Medical Condition

This is why private insurance companies should die--or, at the very least, no American should be forced to give these parasites his or her money: Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month's worth of anti-AIDS medicine. Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable. Turner had let the men buy her drinks at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The next thing she knew, she said, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that…

Finally Wising up on Fuels?

Despite worsening problems with climate disruption and air pollution, politicians and individuals have kept making bad transportation choices for decades. As a result, weâve got an unsustainable transportation system full of single-passenger gas-guzzling vehicles, and the only âsolutionâ that politicians have been able to unite around is ethanol, which worsens global hunger and nutrient runoff without producing net energy savings. Thereâs a little bit of good news, though. Recent stories suggest that the negative consequences of bad gas choices are finally starting to steer consumers and…

Links for 2012-04-25

Taking in a concert doubleheader with Creed and Nickelback, the world's most hated bands - Grantland The moment you tell people you're seeing Creed and Nickelback in concert -- on the same night, at roughly the same time, in two different venues -- it suddenly becomes a stunt. Just describing the premise seems schlocky; it's like Def Leppard playing on three different continents in 24 hours, or maybe something David Blaine would attempt if he worked for the Fuse network. The immediate assumption is that this is some type of sonic endurance test, and that no person could possibly enjoy the…

Book Review: Davidson, Doctor Eszterhazy

Having read what I had to say about Orsinian Tales, Ursula K. LeGuin's 1976 collection of short stories set in an alternative Balkans, Dear Reader Tty suggested that I read Avram Davidson's Doctor Eszterhazy stories. For this I thank him warmly: I have just finished the 1975 collection The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, and I loved every word of it. As we meet him in the early 1900s, Engelbert Eszterhazy, seven times a doctor (counting two honorific titles), lives in the city of Bella, imperial capital of the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. This realm covers parts of our…

Recommend Some Genre Trash

Next weekend will mark the start of Vacation Season here at Chateau Steelypips. Or, rather, out of Chateau Steelypips, as we'll be spending four of the next seven weeks in other places. This, of course, will require books for me to read on the various airplane flights needed to reach our vacation destinations. And while the shelves here are positively groaning under the weight of unread books, I'm a little short on good Airplane Books, mostly because I tend to tear through those as fast as I get them. A quick pass through Borders yesterday didn't produce much, either. So I throw this open to…

Muffins and Grapefruit

After all of our hard work last week, let us begin with something a bit lighter. Via Larry Moran I came across this post, at Cosmic Variance, regarding the great muffin joke debate. I reprint the joke below the fold. I find it very amusing indeed, but, incredibly, there seem to be others who disagree. Let me know what you think: So there are these two muffins baking in an oven. One of them yells, “Wow, it's hot in here!” And the other muffin replies: “Holy cow! A talking muffin!” Actually, this joke reminded me of another one I heard when I was in college. Finding it funny or not is said…

Actions Are Less Fun Than Words

Over the weekend on FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit posed an interesting question: Assume that I'm going to get rid of $20,000 and my only concern is the "common good". Which of these is the best use of the money: give it to the Gates foundation, buy a hybrid car, invest it in a promising startup, invest it in the S&P500, give it to the US government, give it to a school, other? A lot of the discussion consists of tedious (and non-specific) banging on about the wonders of start-ups, but there's some good stuff in there if you have the patience to read through it. Buried in there with…

The Friday Fermentable: The Woody Creek Tavern for sale

If you've been to Aspen, Colorado, for a scientific conference you have no doubt made the bike ride down valley to the venerable Woody Creek Tavern for margaritas and such. (The ride back to town is a wee bit more challenging, by the way.) The Aspen Times now reports that the Tavern is up for sale: The Woody Creek Tavern is located along Upper River Road, adjacent to the Woody Creek Trailer Park. It has been a local hangout for about 27 years. It also has provided liquid refreshment, food, gossip and political cover to many diverse and famous personalities, including the late writer Hunter…

The 100-Mile Diet. Could you eat only food grown and produced within a 100 mile radius of your home?

It looks like a lot, but really it's not (hey, that rhymes) Clearly, food is a hot topic these days. You see it constantly in the cultural dominance of things like the Food Channel, Martha Stewart, or The Iron Chef. But more fittingly, thankfully even, you also see a boon of discussions that look closely (we're talking maybe even academically) at our relationship to the food we eat. And a lot of this dialogue has been spurred on by the existence of well written and engaging books by respected writers such as Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Barbara Kingsolver (Animal,…

Would you buy a Vespa?

Sales of Vespas are up -- largely because of high oil prices. Vespas and other motorcycles have significantly greater fuel economy than your average car. Part of me is happy about this because it illustrates that people are making more fuel-efficient choices. When prices go up, people use less gas. Go figure. On the other hand, I don't think I will ever get over my aversion to riding a motorcycle -- inculcated by my ER doctor father who has had to deal with the grisly remains of motorcycle accidents. Fuel economy notwithstanding, I don't think I can get over the safety issue. It is as…

Plundering Congo: 5 million reasons to be ashamed

The history of Congo (and Africa, in general) is one of unbroken plundering by the outside world. And, history repeats more keenly in African than anywhere else. More than 5 million people have been murdered, women and children have been raped, families destroyed and unspeakable atrocities have been committed in Congo in the past decade - the consequence of the world's insatiable demand for raw materials. Johann Hari writes in The Independant: the debate about Congo in the West - when it exists at all - focuses on our inability to provide a decent bandage, without mentioning that we are…

How to smile in Japanese

The emoticon for "smile" in most western cultures is this :). One of the ScienceBloggers does it backwards (: (can you guess who?), but the symbol is essentially the same. In Japan, however, the smile is depicted like this: ^_^. You might think that's just because the traditions evolved separately, but emotion researcher Masaki Yuki doesn't buy it. He argues that the difference in Japanese emoticons is related to cultural differences in real smiles. when Yuki entered graduate school and began communicating with American scholars over e-mail, he was often confused by their use of emoticons…

Highway Robbery

I'm about to enter the Spring 2009 semester, a term that will probably be one of the most difficult I have ever faced. (For me, at least, the fall semester is always good and the spring is invariably wretched.) What has made it worse is the fact that I am required to shell out $60 for a course packet for one of my courses. Chad has recently written about the difficulties surrounding high-priced textbooks, but this is a little different. This is not a textbook, but a specially-selected collection of papers and articles assembled by the professors that could very easily be made available on the…

Adam Finkel Replies to Your Comments on Newsweek, Bob Samuelson, and Global Warming

There were a lot of comments to Friday's post, in which I shared U. Penn risk assessment specialist Adam Finkel's critique of a particularly bad Robert Samuelson column in Newsweek. Now, Finkel has come back and responded in detail to all of your comments. Check it out. A very brief excerpt: Unfortunately, economists have a HUGE problem thinking adequately about uncertainty in cost, and they tend to "solve" it by ignoring it. On a good day, they can tell us something about how much money is needed to drive the "partial equilibrium" phase of a regulatory program--the one in which some people…

Pandemic, the Board Game

We spent most of last night playing a very cool board game, Pandemic. It's sort of like Risk, but instead of fighting opposing players' armies, you're cooperating against a global wave of infections. In the game scenario, four different diseases break out in different regions of the world (they're given colors, not names, though you can guess at an ID based on the games' illustrations; one is clearly a bacillus, another is a filovirus). The players have to cooperate and pool their resources to treat and control local outbreaks, while searching for cures for all four diseases. The surprising…

The Earth Day 2009 resolutions meme.

Mike Dunford initiates a meme for Earth Day 2009: I'd like you to take a minute or two to come up with three things that you can do to be more environmentally friendly. The first should be something that's small, and easy to do. The second should be more ambitious - something you'll try to do, but might not manage to pull off. The third should be something you can do to improve something you're already doing. I love this meme! No matter what habits you've already cultivated (and we've cultivated a few), there's always room to optimize them. So here are my Earth Day 2009 resolutions:…

A WTF? fundamentalist moment

I was in Lansing, MI giving a talk at MSU the other day. Although time was very constrained and I didn't get to see much of the campus at all, on the way back to the airport, I saw a very odd fundamentalist billboard. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a picture of it with my cell phone camera; so I'll have to do the best that I can by memory to tell you what it says. The billboard said something like this (I could be off considerably in the exact phraseology, but this was the gist of the sign): Forgive us, O Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Too long we have relied upon the automobile industry…

Isn't Oxygen the opposite of anti-oxidant?

Why, yes it is, and that's why I've got a stupid product for you not to buy (not that my above-average-intelligence audience would anyway ;)  ). The POD, or Personal Oxygen Device, by GO2, is simply that: portable oxygen for you to "energize" and "refresh, restore, renew your mind and body on the cellular level with oxygen". Ooooo...cellular. Sounds scientificy, let's get it! First I have to note that if your body is short on oxygen, you'll simply breathe harder. Now, why is the product harmful? Oxygen is reactive, our bodies exploit this aspect by having O2 accept the energy that we use…

Sink into Nonsensical Squid Knowledge

Have you ever wondered if it is appropriate to wink at a west-coast squid? Or, perhaps, which of his tentacles is used for deep tissue massage? If you would like to know the answers to these questions, and more, but don't have time to slip through the looking glass and ask the Walrus (who likely wouldn't give an honest answer, anyways,) then this is the book for you. Animals of the Ocean, in Particular the Giant Squid is the latest installment in the How Book Series of the Haggis-on-Whey World of Unbelievable Brilliance, following such informative delights as Giraffes? Giraffes! Dr. and Mr.…

Where Hummingbirds and Ants Meet

Time for a gear shift on the Refuge. Handy-dandy tip number 105: "How to keep ants out of your hummingbird feeders". I can't say that I blame the ants for swarming over the feeders. After all, who doesn't love a little sucrose in solution with water? Heck, as my brother, an avid cyclist at one time, used to say "I never met a carbohydrate I didn't like." Anyway, no matter how careful I am about not spilling nectar, the local ants always seem to find the feeders. I don't know if they bother the hummers (mostly ruby throated where we live), but as the feeders are hanging off of our decks, I'm…

Monetizing Networks

There's one other angle to the social network story that I wasn't able to mention in my Wired essay. Right now, retail companies are investing a pretty penny in consumer preference algorithms, that AI software which suggests books to buy on Amazon, and DVD's to rent on Netflix, and songs to purchase on iTunes. The assumption is that human preferences are predictable - if you like Bob Dylan, you'll probably like Astral Weeks; if you like How We Decide, you might like Predictably Irrational; if you like The Wire, you might like Homicide, or The Shield. These algorithms have their limitations,…

Mathematical proof that God Spoke Creation (if you buy his book)

One of my fellow SBers, Kevin over at Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge wrote a scathing article reviewing an incredibly bad anti-evolution blog. There's no way that I can compete with Kevin's writing on the topic - you should really check it out for a great example of just how to take a moronic creationist, and reduce him to a whimpering puddle of protoplasm. But while looking at the site that Kevin shredded, I can across a link to another really, really bad site, and this one is clearly in my territory: Science Proves Creation, a site set up by an individual named "Samuel J. Hunt". Mr…

Birds in the News 100 (v3n27)

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Can anyone out there identify these mysterious birds? I have no information about the birds, such as location, but several experts are already proposing their guesses (one thinks it's a Chough, another one disagrees). Several ornithologists think these birds are captives rather than wild birds. [larger view]. Birds in Science Urban birds are regular tough guys compared to their country cousins. The avian urbanites adapt to changing environments and noisy, crowded habitats, a new study shows. Birds that hang out on…

How would you like your placenta? Broiled or freeze-dried?

After nearly 11 years (!) at this blogging thing, I thought I had covered pretty much every medical topic a skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine would be interested in covering. However, if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that there's always something I've missed, some hole in my blogging oeuvre that needs to be filled. Perhaps when I've been at this for 20 years I'll have filled them all in. Even if that becomes true sometime in the next nine years, I will likely have only filled in the old gaps, while new ones will have formed. Dealing with pseudoscience is…

McMastergate in chronological order, or, Do libraries need librarians? (Updated!)

So, here's the story. A week or so ago, McMaster University Librarian Jeff Trzeciak gave an invited presentation at Penn State, tasked by the organizers to be controversial. To say the least, he succeeded. Perhaps the most controversial idea in the presentation was that he would basically no longer hire librarians for his organization, only subject PhDs and IT specialists. As you can imagine, the library blogosphere and Friendfeedosphere has had a field day with this one. You can see the slide in question here and get a bit of a background on the situation of librarians at McMaster here.…

A Spectacular Chance for Gravitational Waves

"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -Isaac Asimov One of the most spectacular and successful ideas of the 20th Century was Einstein's General Relativity, or the idea that matter and energy determines the curvature of spacetime, and the curvature of spacetime in turn determines how gravitation works. Image credit: Hyper-Mathematics - Uzayzaman / Spacetime. From the orbits of planets to the bending of starlight, General Relativity governs all gravitational phenomena in the Universe, and accurately describes every observation we've…

Combatting the alt-med stereotype of oncologists anxious to administer toxic chemotherapy

It is an article of faith among believers in alternative cancer cures that conventional oncology consists mainly of a bunch of money-hungry surgeons and oncologists who want nothing more than to cut, poison, and burn patients with cancer and charge them enormous sums of money to do so for as long as they can until the poisonous chemotherapy finally kills them. It is an evil and malicious caricature, of course. People don’t endure four years of medical school, three to five years of residency, and three years of fellowship in order to be able to cut, poison, and burn without regard for whether…

At long last, Dromeosaur tracks!

The sculpted skull of the AMNH Deinonychus mount. For nearly as long as I can remember, artistic depictions of Deinonychus and related dromeosaurs have featured the dinosaur as a pack hunter, often pouncing on a hapless ornithischian like Tenontosaurus (see here, here, here, and here for examples). After being confronted with such imagery time and time again I didn't think twice about the pack-hunting behavior in Deinonychus as a kid, but I started to wonder on what evidence all these gory illustrations were based. The popular books in my own library treated the behavior as a fact and gave…

Visualize This! Interview with Moshe Pritsker

Moshe Pritsker and I first met at Scifoo, then shared a panel at the Harvard Millennium Confreence and finally met again at the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago. Moshe is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visualized Experiments, the innovative online journals that publishes videos demonstrating laboratory techniques. 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? What is your Real Life job? I am a co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). It is my full…

From Viruses to Viral Video: Interview with Anna Kushnir

Anna Kushnir was one of the first bloggers on the Nature Blog Network, she writes a personal food blog and recently started running the JoVE blog. We first met at the Science Foo Camp last August, then at the Foodblogging event in Durham, then at the Millenium conference at Harvard, then at the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago, where Anna was on the Student blogging panel--from K to PhD. 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? What is your Real Life job? At least for the next…

Think of a Dust-Free Keypad: Interview with Rose Reis

Rose Reis interviewed me in person on the Sunday morning right after the second Science Blogging Conference in January. Then, I got scooped for the interview. But I will not be deterred - so here is, finally, the exclusive interview with Rose for A Blog Around The Clock: 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 World job? Hi, Bora! I am your biggest fan! Apart from that, I am a program specialist at the INFO Project, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of…

February Pieces Of My Mind #2

The 1844 bridal chest that my great granddad donated to the Nordic Museum in 1940. I've decided that although immigration and refugees are important political issues, I've been reading too much about them lately. Redistribution of wealth and flattening the pyramid is even more important. Because wealth equals power. I don't give a damn about the US primaries. A brother of Queen Euphemia of Norway was Bishop of Cammin, whose cathedral is famous for a Danish casket from about AD 1000, decorated with Mammen style animal art. The surname Garfunkel means "carbuncle, garnet" and is thus…

A beat up of Himalayan proportions

Newspapers such as the London Times are reporting that the IPCC is about to retract something from the AR4 WG2 report: A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035. The claim was indeed wrong. John Nielsen-Gammon has written a detailed analysis of the error with an update here. I've discovered a bit more about it, which I will get to presently, but first I want to look at the Times statement that it was a "central claim" and the New York Times statement that it was a "much-publicized estimate". Actually, the estimate does…

SOPA: Why it's a bad idea

The Stop Online Piracy Act is a piece of legislation in the US whose aims are: The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill…

Short Breaks May Counteract Toll of Sedentary Time

As Travis Saunders has explained, evidence is accumulating about the unhealthy effects of excessive sedentary time. This isn't just because sitting burns fewer calories than walking or standing, but because sedentary behavior is associated with changes in triglyceride uptake, HDL cholesterol, and insulin resistance. And bouts of intense exercise every morning or evening can't completely offset the effects of spending several hours sitting at a desk or behind the wheel. Given that a large segment of our population works at sedentary jobs, this is disturbing news. But a recent story by NPR's…

Information Insecurity

I only started using FriendFeed a few months ago because other people at the Science in the 21st Century workshop were documenting the conference on it. I quickly became a fan of the service, which not only added an extra dimension to the meeting, but has also been a continuing source of interesting material from the feeds of others. If you're not familiar with it, FriendFeed is a service that aggregates online content from other sources, and puts out a feed of all your online activity. my feed, for example, includes blog posts, del.icio.us links, YouTube videos, Flickr pictures, and…

Matthew Hughes, Template [Library of Babel]

A little while back, Matthew Hughes offered a free copy of his forthcoming novel Template to online reviewers via his web site. I wasn't able to read it fast enough to get in on James Nicoll's review-a-thon, but I finished it a few days ago. Template is set in the same basic world as Majestrum, a human civilization many millennia in the future, where Old Earth is ruled by an Archonate, and the high aristocrats have worked so hard to refine their perception of rank and status that they have difficulty even noticing the presence of ordinary citizens. The new book doesn't start off on Old Earth…

Science Online 2010: Lessons for IRs and data curators

One way and another, I heard quite a lot of talk at Science Online 2010 relevant to the interests of institutional-repository managers and (both would-be and actual) data curators. Some of the lessons learned weren't exactly pleasant, but there's just no substitute for listening to your non-users to find out why they're not taking advantage of what you offer. In no particular order, here is what I took away: The take-a-file-give-a-file content model for IRs is much too limited and limiting. Real live scientists are mashing up all sorts of things as they do their work; one wiki-based lab…

The Affordable Care Act's First Year: A Few Disappointments, Lots of Progress

Exactly one year ago, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - the most sweeping change to US healthcare since the legislation that created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. The law's most important achievement is its creation of a system that will slash our nation's shameful uninsurance rate by an estimated two-thirds once it's fully implemented. Public opinion on the law is still mixed, and that's likely due to two things. First, many of the law's provisions won't kick in until 2014. Second, for those of us with a reliable source of affordable health…