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Open Lab 2007 - soon in a bookstore near you!

The day before yesterday, my copy of The Open Laboratory 2007, the second annual science blogging anthology, arrived in the mail. So yesterday, Reed and I met at a coffee shop and looked it over. It looks great! Reed knows what he's doing and is a perfectionist, so of course the book looks perfect. So, I went back online to Lulu.com and approved the book to be sold in various online and offline bookstores. The book information will be sent to Bowker's Books In Print and once approved by Bowker, Lulu will upload the title to their distribution network. This process is generally completed…

Open Lab 2008!

So, Open Lab 2008 is now available, and you must buy a copy. Open Lab collects the best writing from the blogosphere and (ironically) captures them in print. It's a nice chance to read some great stuff that you knew you'd love, and some great stuff you've never even seen. The cover art by Dave Ng and The Flying Trilobite is awesome. The proceeds go toward ScienceOnline10, next year's online science writing conference, which totally rocks. Lot's of the attendees are graduate students, academics, high school students, and other types of hungry people who could really use a subsidy to come…

Scientists: why your access to the literature is about to get worse, and what you can do about it

Making headlines in libraryland is EBSCO's announcement of exclusive access to several popular periodicals in electronic form. (See also this reaction, which includes a partial list of the publications that will be exclusive to EBSCO.) Essentially, libraries who want their patrons to be able to access Time, New Scientist, and other such publications will have two choices: buy an EBSCO database subscription, or buy the publications in print. If print is undesirable, EBSCO is the only choice. It doesn't take a Nobel-level economist to guess what this monopoly on popular content will do to…

In today's papers....

When I woke up this morning and went online while kids were getting up and ready for school, the first this I saw was this tweet by abelpharmboy: Two articles on @BoraZ in today's Durham Herald-Sun. Will post links later. Herald-Sun has pain in the ass registration to access site. So, I went out and got a hardcopy of the paper, and also looked at it online (feel free to use login: coturnixfan and password: boraborabora to see the articles, thanks Bill). The first article starts on the front page of Chapel Hill Herald (I think that if you buy the paper in Durham, Chapel Hill Herald is inside,…

Around the Web: An academic ghostwriter comes clean, Mechanical MOOCs and more

An Academic Ghostwriter, the 'Shadow Scholar,' Comes Clean The Mechanical MOOC Rewriting the Journal (what will online do to journal publishing) The Siege of Academe The Self-Centered Library: A Paradox (why do we do what we do) Tweeting By Faith (calculating social media ROI for universities) Streaming content: Why buy when you can borrow so much more? Carleton U reveals new donor deal in controversial political management program >MOOCs will mean the death of universities? Not likely The Problems with Peer Grading in Coursera Building a Stellar Team (building an academic executive…

Dynamic Pricing on Amazon

Since I spend most of my disposable income on Amazon, I found this article on their pricing strategy somewhat disturbing: Imagine this: You go to a bookstore, browse, choose a couple of volumes. But you don't want to carry the books around. So you ask the clerk to hold the tomes until Saturday, when you'll come back to buy them. When you return, the bookseller hands you the items but advises you that he's raised the prices. "I knew you were hot to buy them," the clerk says, "so I figured I could make a few extra bucks." That's what it feels like online bookseller Amazon.com Inc. has been…

Grocery Shopping

In a recent NY Times Magazine, Mark Bittman (aka the Minimalist) waxes enthusiastic on the potential of online grocery shopping: That's why, to focus on things that could happen in our lifetimes, we should take a look at improving online grocery shopping. The one time I tried shopping online I was sent a free watermelon -- how does that happen? -- but that didn't make up for the even-less-than-supermarket quality of the food. This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ask and be told the provenance and ingredients of any product you look at in your Web browser. You…

Around the Web: Library school mergers, Makers in the library, Quiet makes a comeback and more

Horses, motorcars and mergers on the LIS horizon Mergers, boundaries, and image St. Kate’s MLIS program is going under the business school Maker Faire KC 2012 and what it means for libraries At Libraries, Quiet Makes a Comeback Blogs as Serialized Scholarship Why Millennials Don't Want To Buy Stuff Concrete options for a society journal to go OA I Want It Today: How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail. Online Higher Education Opening Ceremonies (changes in schol comm starting to seem inevitable) Is online learning really cracking open the public post-…

Sasquatch is ill-served

Melba Ketchum issued a press release announcing that she had sequenced Sasquatch DNA. That was back in November. It stalled out at that point. It turns out the paper couldn't get past peer review, and no one was going to publish it. We're all heartbroken, I know. But now she has overcome all the obstacles, and it's finally in print! You can read the abstract. One hundred eleven samples of blood, tissue, hair, and other types of specimens were studied, characterized and hypothesized to be obtained from elusive hominins in North America commonly referred to as Sasquatch. DNA was extracted and…

THE OPEN LABORATORY!

You kept submitting your posts all year long and watching, every Monday, to see which other posts were also entered. Then we closed the submission form. Then we made you wait a month of "electoral silence" while the judges went through three rounds of judging, until we announced which 50 essays, plus poems and cartoons, made it into print. Then, at Science Online, we announced the gorgeous new cover art. But now - what you have been waiting for so long: The Open Laboratory 2010, the collection of best writing on science blog for the year, is finally up for sale! Buy one for yourself, buy…

The fifteen years that shook the world . . . and you were there

Fifteen years isn't a long time. Most of us can remember what we were doing 15 years ago. Often it's the same thing we are doing now, job-wise. Sure our kids were just kids, not adults. But 15 years isn't a historical epoch. At least not when you are living through it. But the fact is we have gone through a revolution in that period that will seem as profound as the 50 years from 1450 to 1500, the half century after Gutenberg and the invention of moveable type. It's hard to remember what the cyberworld was like a short 15 years ago, but thanks to the internet we can retrieve -- instantly --…

Not Exactly Rocket Science - the BOOK!!!!

Folks, I have big news... I've just published a book based on this little blog. Some of you may remember me doing a quick poll about this a while back. Well since then, I've collected about 80 or so of my favourite posts from the last year and converted them from pixels to paper. The book is now available through online publisher Lulu and you can order one for the tiny sum of £9.99 by clicking on these magic blue words. It covers a wide range of biological areas - Mexican-waving bees, snow-making bacteria, viruses of viruses, the psychology of voting, the neuroscience of jazz, binge-…

Buy where you shop: Bookstores, libraries and intellectual locavores

Nice article by Vit Wagner in Sunday's Toronto Star, Tough times, but some bookstores have a different story. A couple of different independent bookstore owners/managers in the Toronto area talk about some of the challenges faced in surviving and even thriving in what should be a period of death and decline for bricks and mortar bookstores. But while some of the competition is retrenching or worse, BakkaPhoenix, which recorded a double-digit increase in sales last year, is expanding. In stark contrast to the recently shuttered This Ain't the Rosedale Library, BakkaPhoenix is readying a fall…

A quick question for my readers

On Saturday afternoon, after a morning of rounding on the service's patients and doing some odds and ends in the office and the lab, on the way home I stopped at the local Best Buy because I needed some blank DVDs. To my puzzlement, there were people lined up outside as though they were camping out for tickets for the most popular rock band in the world. There were sleeping bags, chairs, tents, and coolers. I had no clue what was going on. Then I saw this, and realized that it was the afternoon before the midnight launch of the Nintendo Wii. Can someone explain to me why people would line up…

File this away.

Because everyone is doing it, here's the card catalog entry for this here blog: I miss physical card catalogs. I would totally buy one for Casa Free-Ride if I could get my hands on one. (Although, would buying them up amount to contributing to their demise in libraries?) The sprogs have only ever dealt with online library catalogs, which I think is a shame. And they don't know from 8-tracks! *Sigh* Anyway, you are invited to make your own and report back on it.

The Paradox of Choice (Internet Version)

So the Times is reporting that online sales are starting to stall/ (Jack Shafer disagrees.) This trend certainly jives with my own shopping experiences. While I still buy most of my things online - the only thing I will never buy online are pants - I've grown disenchanted with the vast majority of online retail sites. Simply put, they offer me way too many options. Take flip-flops. A few weeks ago, I decided to get a new pair of flip flops. I dutifully went to Zappos (free shipping!) and looked in the "casual sandals" section. There were 1590 options. Just for men. In my size. So then I…

NYTimes Editorializes on High Textbook Prices

The NYTimes Editorial Board wrote at piece lamenting the high prices of college textbooks and praising Congressional action to limit them: College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell "unbundled" versions of the books -- minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-…

Mitchell & Webb: Nutritionists comedy sketch

When all else fails, go online and buy another doctorate: Hat tip to le Canard Noir.

English Language: The Best Kept Secret

"The Elements of Style". Prescriptive. Precise. Buy it for the elegant introduction by E B White. Read the original text online.

Click-Throughs, Advertising, and Branding Versus Point-of-Sale

For anyone trying to make a living at blogging, including our Seed Media Overlords, one of the major hurdles is the poor pay of internet advertising compared to magazine and newspaper advertising. This is an accurate assessment of the problem (italics mine): I think the evidence for this dynamic is weaker than a lot of people suspect. As far as I can tell, it's all based on Google. GOOG showed up and provided contextualized ads to consumers and a model that allowed advertisers to only pay for purchases that were "working". This is pretty much the only way they make money, and they make a lot…

We'll give you a deal on textbooks if you don't mind some ads.

In light of my earlier post on academia and capitalism, occasional commenter Jake asks what I think about the newish move, described in this story from the Associated Press, to cut textbook prices by putting advertisements in them. So, I'll give you some key bits of the article with my thoughts interspersed. Textbook prices are soaring into the hundreds of dollars, but in some courses this fall, students won't pay a dime. The catch: Their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx Kinko's and Pura Vida coffee. Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television…

Aleppo: UN vs private traders

In a success for the "invisible hand" over "big government", we have People gather to buy fresh produce that was brought into rebel held areas of Aleppo by private traders from a newly opened corridor that linked besieged opposition held eastern Aleppo with western Syria that was captured recently by rebels, in Aleppo versus U.N. Seeks 48-Hour Aleppo Ceasefire to Deliver Aid to Syrians. I heard the second link on R4 a day or so ago and thought to myself "how typical of a giant lumbering bureaucracy". The first, contrasting, link was a throwaway line in the FT, that I then found online.

Sustainable Energy â without the hot air?

David J.C. MacKay has a draft book out online, http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/ , which is worth a browse. He is due to give a talk here in a bit, which should prove interesting. The book is an attempt to look at renewable energy from a broad-brush numbers point of view (in which I suspect it does a rather better jobs than "Heat" by Monbiot). But the bit I want to look at is the "offsetting" section, p143 onwards, the Story of Joan and Thambo. Joan flies in a plane, and offsets her emissions by helping Thambo keep warm by not burning his pile of coal. This seems fair enough: she…

No way to run a bookstore

I love bookstores — I like the ones that have huge stacks of strange used books where you can find surprises, and I also like the big online stores where I can order anything I want. My kids are all the same way; when we make trips into the big city, the whole mess of us usually end up spending hours in places like Cummings or Uncle Hugo's. But I finally found a bookstore with no redeeming values at all, one I will never patronize. It's called Abunga, and their motto is "Empowering Decency as your Family Friendly Bookstore". What that means is that they allow bookstore members to vote against…

Last Minute Presents for Physicists

Books, of course, but which books...? One of these "be careful what you wish for" things, is that I now get a lot of requests to review books (and DVDs and online games etc), just as I reach the stage of my life where I spend most of my time doing reading reformatting paperwork instead of reading fun new things... which is a shame, because the books I get sent are pretty much generally exactly those I spent most of my very limited disposable income on when I was younger... One day soon I'll catch up on the backlog. In the meantime, here are three good looking physics books that any good…

Sun in 3D

Poor man's VR. Bought a few pairs of Red-Blue 3D Glasses (you can buy them online, I paid five pounds for five glasses) to view the 3D images of Sun produced by NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites. This image is nifty.

Please purchase Unscientific America at your local, independent bookstore

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have released a new book entitled, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. Mr Mooney and Ms Kirshenbaum also co-author the blog, The Intersection, a Discover Magazine online. I was fortunate to receive a review copy from the publisher but must admit, sheepishly, that the book has sat unread beside my home office desk because of other responsibilities. The advance paperwork says it is to be released officially on 20 July. So, my plan is to get to it this weekend and get some magnitude of a review written. During my relative…

There Will Be Books: Raven Used Books Opens in Boston

One of the things Newbury Street has lacked is a used book store. Now it has one: Raven Used Books. This could be really bad as it's about four minutes away. Unlike most Boston area used book stores, Raven Used Books' business model isn't to sell really expensive rare books and then stock the rest of the shelves with crap. They actually have lots of books you want to read at very low prices, along with books that you either can't order online or would be really expensive to do so (it seems they focus on buying leftovers from college and independent bookstores, not buying by the pound…

Stephen Fenech and The Daily Telegraph promote Q-link quackery

The Q-link is a device that purports to protect you from radiation from mobile phones using "A coil connected to nothing". Ben Goldacre and Orac have comprehensively debunked Q-link's claims. Yesterday Sydney's Daily Telegraph published a story promoting Q-link (the on-line version has now vanished) by Stephen Fenech, their technology writer. Fenech's story read like an advertisement for Q-link, with their claims for the benefits of the product presented as factual and including the url of their website where you could buy one. That's bad enough, but it also turns out that he's done this…

Danish Journal of Archaeology

Mads Dengsø Jessen of the National Museum of Denmark wrote me to say that he and his colleagues are re-launching the old Journal of Danish Archaeology (1982-2006) as Danish Journal of Archaeology at Taylor and Francis On-Line. Three papers will hopefully come on-line before Christmas, and further ones will see rolling electronic publication from then on, with an annual physical print volume appearing in ~May. Subscribers get access to the full back-catalogue of the old JDA, as well as new papers. You can also buy PDFs of single papers without subscribing, but this is jævle expensive. Whether…

Shaming in the Marketplace: who polices online sellers scammers?

Update: welcome Consumerist readers! While I use my own experience to illustrate concerns about third-party online merchants, this post is mainly about the bigger long-term informational problems I see with reputation, reliability, and online communities. Please feel free to weigh in! A few weeks ago, I caught a familiar story on the local news. A local citizen had written in to the news team with a request for help after a local furniture company sold them a defective living room set, and wouldn't give them a refund. The news team went to the business, who - wary of the potential public…

"The" Feynman Lectures

Roughly a week or so ago the ScienceBlogs front page was discussing the new online videos of the Feynman lectures. Somehow they found one of my old posts on the subject. What I haven't really seen pointed out that the new online video isn't actually "the" Feynman Lectures. "The" lectures were given as an actual class for Caltech physics undergrads, and the point was to teach them physics. There's not a lot of point reiterating the detail in my old post, but the main thrust is that the lectures are not far removed from what you'd hear if you wandered into your local university intro physics…

"Keep 'em coming"?

Longtime readers know that I'm a bit of a World War II buff. In fact, that's how I ended up developing such a profound interest in Holocaust denial, to the point where I used to write about it rather frequently. I don't write about it as often these days, not so much because I'm not still interested in countering it but rather because I don't routinely come across it in the news as often as I used to. Be that as it may, I happen to love WWII propaganda posters. American, British, Russian, German, I collect digital images of them all, and although my collection is only a couple of hundred…

Microsoft: So evil it can make smart people stupid

CNN is supposed to be a professional news outlet. But even the editors and writers at CNN's Fortune desk are no match for Microsoft's' Stupid-Ray Gun. This piece is virtually giddy about the fact that the next version of Microsoft Office will be just like Google Office. Free and on line . Now, think about that for five seconds and imagine yourself to be a writer for CNN. Do you actually believe that Microsoft Office is going to be available for free? Like, me, Greg Laden, can just decide "Oh, I've had enough of Google Docs ... I'm going to switch to the online version of Microsoft…

links for 2009-01-04

TheStar.com | Entertainment | Cultural resolutions: bigger, better, closer, stronger "No offence to those of you who buy all your books online, but whenever anyone asks why I invariably prefer to purchase my reading matter in a bricks-and-mortar establishment, I have one simple answer: because I don't want to live in a world without bookstores." (tags: economics society culture books) Iron Man, physics and g-tolerances | Dot Physics "My attack will center on the scene where Tony Stark (Iron Man) escapes from captivity with his home made iron man suit. He uses some type of rocket boots to…

Ayurvedics Are Secretly Using Pb®

Friends, many of you know the miraculous benefits of Hoofnagle Brand All-Natural Pb®. Well, I am writing to tell you that today I am filing a suit against a wide range of ayurvedic herbal supplements providers for using the active ingredient of Pb® and its sister product, As33® without licensing it from me. The New York Times reported yesterday on this widespread deception of consumers. You see, in order to make ayurvedic medicine appear efficacious, a large number of supplement providers are secretly including Pb® and As33® in their scammy supplement products: A report in the Aug. 27 issue…

Class lectures on iTunes

Old fun: Music on an iPod | Newer fun: Watching porn on the iPod | Newest fun: Listening to lectures! Apple Inc is letting NJIT Professors post their lectures, and other audio and video class information on its iTunes U website - where students can go and then download whatever material they want onto their computers, i-pods, mp3 players and even their cell phones. NJIT Instructional Design Professor Blake Haggerty says if you know you'll be able to download a lecture, "you have the opportunity of really paying attention in class, and then reviewing afterwards what was said." Ohh.. and don't…

random reads

some random links for your reading pleasure Free SF Online - indexed, mostly shorts and audio podcasts. Excellent way to get an intro to some new reads. Then go out and buy the books. eg Ted Chiang David Brin Greg Egan On a different note: "5 things you should know before dating a scientist" Chad has some good stuff going: Shameless Innumeracy Grumpy About Education I have several hundred AAS press releases in my inbox, may get to reading some

Buy Kids Science Stuff: The Mad Biologist's 2007 DonorsChoose Challenge

This year, once again, we ScienceBloggers are raising money to buy equipment for science classrooms. I decided to focus on microbiology and marine biology, because, well, microbiology is what I do now, and marine biology is what I started in. Also, if a new textbook in evolutionary biology is any indication, I think microbiology is going to be emphasized a lot more in college. Anyway, here's what I've put into my challenge: Genetic Research For Immigrants This targets a school with a mostly immigrant population, and it would buy the equipment needed to do gel electrophoresis, so they can…

Finding eBay fraudsters through social networks

The red oval on the right represents a known eBay fraudster. How can we use that information to locate others? Follow the interactions. Fraudulent eBay users typically build up their online "reputation" by conducting transactions with accomplices who give them phony "positive" feedback. These accomplices, a research team at Carnegie Mellon has found, typically interact with many fraudsters. If an eBay user transacts with many known accomplices, who aren't themselves engaging in fraud but have given positive feedback to fraudsters, then they may be a fraudster themselves. Thus, the two "…

Reading Diary: Open Access by Peter Suber

Scholars who grew up with the internet are steadily replacing those that grew up without it. Scholars who expect to put everything they write online, who expect to find everything they need online, and who expect unlocked content that they may read, search, link, copy, cut/paste, crawl, print, and redistribute, are replacing those who never expected these boons and got used to them, if at all, looking over their shoulder for the copyright police. Scholars who expect to find the very best literature online, harmlessly cohabitating with crap are, inexorably replacing scholars who, despite…

How might bird flu arrive in the US?

After all this time and no small amount of heated argument, we are still unsure how H5N1 is making its way around the world in birds. The commercial movements the poultry trade, smuggling of exotic birds or poultry by-products and the migrations of wild birds over long distances have all been blamed. Bird conservationists are fearful that pinning the virus's travel on migrating wild birds will result in destruction of their habitats and crucial stops on their flyways, while the public health community has tended to be more concerned, as has the commercial poultry industry. The bird folks have…

Out now: How to Make a Zombie

At long last, my book on zombies is out! Without doubt the maddest thing I ever did on a whim   You can purchase How to Make a Zombie at all good bookstores in the UK and USA, or online.  I'm indebted to a whole host of people for the book ever reaching the light of day, foremost my agent Peter Tallack and my incredible editor at OneWorld, Robin Dennis, and fellow wordnerd Aarathi Prasad for planting the seed in my head. So yeah, go buy ten copies of it so I can eat tonight.

Geoshagging

Geocaching is a fun nerdy outdoors hobby where you hide tupperware under boulders in the woods and publish their GPS coordinates on the web for other geeks to go look for the tupperware. Sometimes when you look for geocaches in public spaces such as parks, you get funny looks from passing non-geocachers ("muggles", in potteresque geocacher parlance). Lone guys hanging around in parks and acting as if they're looking for something are probably interpreted either as drug customers or gay cruisers. Thus, back in 2005 I came up with the ultimate gay nerd pastime: geocruising, where you publish…

I thought I understood the extent of the bureaucracy here.

I haven't mentioned it here before, but I'm currently working on a project to launch an online dialogue at my university (using a weblog, of course) to engage different members of the campus community with the question of what they think the college experience here ought to be, and how we can make that happen. The project team has a bunch of great people on it, and we thought we had anticipated all the "stake holders" at the university from whom we ought to seek "buy-in". As we were poised to execute the project, we discovered that we had forgotten one: The Institutional Review Board. Yes…

Six Months of Aard

Aardvarchaeology's been on-line for half a year today! Before I came here, I'd been blogging at Salto sobrius for over a year, so by now this blogging thing is a big part of my lifestyle and self-image. I love it -- I write about whatever's occupying my mind, a pleasurable pastime in itself, and then hundreds of people show up to read it every day! Being here on ScienceBlogs helps a lot to attract readers, and so do Stumbleupon and Reddit. (Digg, not so much.) As I've been boasting for a while in the sidebar, Aard is now the world's number one archaeology blog measured by the number of other…

The Future of the Internet

This evening, I was watching The Colbert Report--a show that, along with The Daily Show, I've been enjoying much more frequently lately since they began posting full (free and internationally-available) episodes online--and I stumbled across this interview from last night's show with Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of internet law at Oxford: Zittrain was on the show to promote his new book, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It. I have to admit that I haven't actually read the book, but Oxford is admittedly a pretty small world, so I'm at least fairly familiar with what he and his…

Libraries in Economic Bad Times: Academic Libraries

Here are some things academic libraries are doing to cope. The primary caveat is that I have less experience in this area (my research lab is affiliated with a university, but we're different). I have heard a lot about this from my colleagues in my professional association and online. I would be happy to be corrected by those in the know! Academic institutions vary widely - from large state institutions and private research universities to small liberal arts colleges - and so they also vary in how things are funded. Sometimes the various portions of the university- the colleges - will each…

Aquaria are very soothing. So are oceans.

I think the best thing to do with this video by Jon Rawlinson is let it load in HD, put it on full screen, and set back and mellow out for a few minutes. You know, the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan could have a real money-maker video here: just aim a camera at that tank for hours, fill up a DVD, and sell it online. They could do a whole series. I'd buy it. Man, it's a pretty cool planet we've got here. I hope we can take better care of it, so it isn't all confined to a few large tanks here and there.

Mirror Neurons

My Scientific American Mind article on mirror neurons is out, and includes some amusing and apt photographs and art. Mirror neurons, as the story explains, are motor neurons that fire not only when we perform an action (like reaching for an apple) but when we see someone else perform an action -- or even, as it turns out, when we read, think, or hear about someone performing that action. This mechanism, discovered about a decade ago, seems to underlie much motor, social, and even cultural learning. You can read the story here or buy the digital version online via Scientific American Mind.