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Science Debate on Science Friday

Tomorrowâs Science Friday radio program will feature a segment on the Science Debate 2008 campaign, which calls for the presidential candidates to devote a debate to science-related issues. You can listen live online from 2 - 4pm Eastern time, or check your local NPR stationâs listings to see when the show airs. Hereâs what we wrote last month about why such a debate is needed and which questions weâd like to see the candidates answer: We here at The Pump Handle are particularly concerned about the way that political appointees in this administration have suppressed, distorted, and ignored…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Fruit Bats Are Not 'Blind As A Bat': The retinas of most mammals contain two types of photoreceptor cells, the cones for daylight vision and colour vision, and the more sensitive rods for night vision. Nocturnal bats were traditionally believed to possess only rods. Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and at The Field Museum for Natural History in Chicago have discovered that nocturnal fruit bats (flying foxes) possess cones in addition to rods. Hence, fruit bats are also equipped for daylight vision. The researchers conclude that cone photoreceptors…

The Best of February

I posted 126 times in February. The Biggest Event of the month, of course, was the release of The Open Laboratory 2009, the fourth annual anthology of best writing on science blogs. And the first book review came out shortly after. The Second Biggest Event of the month? It involves Science! I published a paper and blogged all about it - My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird. Third Best Post of the month? I can't have a month pass by without writing something provocative - Why is 'scientists are bad communicators' trope wrong. There was…

Pulsars, Dark Matter, and the Size of our Galaxy

Alright, startswithabang-ers, Ben, my most avid commenter, saw me online while I was eating breakfast this morning, and pointed me to this new press release. Now, before you get started clicking on everything, the guy who the release is about is Brian Gaensler, who's a really nice guy, lives in Australia, whom I met at the AAS (American Astronomical Society) meeting in Austin, TX last month. Bryan's also brilliant. Basically, what he did was he said, "well, we know what the rough density of hot gas in our galaxy is, and we can measure the timing of these pulsars to extraordinary accuracy."…

Climate Change Denialists Scolded by IPCC

But not as severely as they should have been. The IPCC, as you know, comes out with a set of reports every five years. The reports are written by groups of experts. Draft reports are widely accessible to people who register themselves as "experts" and there is no quality control in that process, in order to keep things as transparent as possible. This means that the worst climate change denialists can simply sign up as "experts" and flood the scientists trying to write these reports with irrelevant and stupid comments, thus, I presume, wasting valuable time and effort. But, such is the cost…

NYTimes 36 Hours in. . .The Research Triangle of North Carolina

I enjoy this regular feature in the New York Times where editors put together highlights of specific destinations that can be enjoyed in a day-and-a-half. In this weekend's Travel Section, now online, my adopted home gets the treatment. I've always wondered how locals in each area covered might view the choices. For us, I'd say that J.J. Goode's opening paragraph captures this scientific training and career destination pretty well: TELL North Carolinians you're heading to the Research Triangle, and they'll probably ask "Which school are you visiting?" Yet the close-knit cities of Raleigh,…

NPR cancels News & Notes, Day to Day; cuts 7% of staff

Driving home tonight, I learned that NPR is cutting staff and canceling two shows produced at NPR West: News & Notes with Farai Chideya and Day to Day with Madeleine Brand. (Full memo at HuffPo) Farai put up a blog post late this afternoon entitled, We Love You! (And, Yes, We Are Cancelled). I don't know if I'd have the gut and optimism to be so gracious in the face of having my show terminated effective 20 March 2009. The companion blog post at Day to Day certainly lacked this optimism. But Farai has many, many things going in her favor despite this setback: Chideya, who was born and…

First Post

This was my first ever on-line posting, to sci.math in 1988. The world wide web wasn't invented until 1989 so we didn't have links---I added them in 2004 when I posted this to my blog. Kristian Damm Jensen wrote: Consider a string of matching parentheses, i.e. a string of parentheses where each prefix contains more left-parentheses than right-parentheses. Now, given n left- and right parentheses, in how many ways can you order them and still get a string of matching parentheses? "The Invisible Man" replied: Here's as far as I got. Possibly far enough, perhaps…

Whew, The World: Or, GOOD Blog

Maybe it's the upcoming election and the potential change that it portends. Or perhaps it's the Large Hadron Collider, bogged down with electric failures, that has ceded the science-news space to other subjects. In any case, the last week has seen a slew of exciting, weird, and prescient science news too exciting to ignore, and too varied to all discuss in depth. For one, the impersonal blackness of space welcomed a new nation as the Chinese launched their much-anticipated Shenzhou VII spacecraft, manned with three "taikonauts" trained for the country's first spacewalk. Technologically…

Lectures. Huh. What are they good for?

As I prepare my lectures for this semester (Australian universities start the academic year in late February, early March, apart from those poor sods who have summer semesters) I am moved by Moselio Schaechter's little essay In Defense of the Lecture to ponder what propaedeutic use lectures are. Or, in other words, do they help or hinder learning? Years back, I had a friend who ran the Science and Humanities School at a small regional campus of Monash University who often said to me, with his psychology hat on, that lectures are the worst way to teach. I never found them all that helpful,…

Blogger SAT Challenge update (the question revealed!)

The data-collection phase of the SAT Challenge is complete. By any measure, this was the most successful Casual Friday ever. We maxed out the generous 500 responses I allotted for the challenge, the most ever responses to a Casual Friday study -- despite the fact that participants were warned the task would take up to 21 minutes. The survey required participants to enter at least their name before moving on to answer the essay question. The most popular name was "asdf," but no one claiming the name asdf actually wrote an essay. Clearly plenty of participants only "participated" in order to…

A Chinese Christmas and An American New Year

Well, sorry for the long hiatus in blogging, but it was nice to just have a little break and relax for the holidays. Hope everyone also had a restful and safe holidays (of whatever you celebrate--or not!). I just arrived back in the US yesterday, and after another 14 hour flight I gotta admit I'm pretty jet-lagged today. My Christmas was pretty interesting. In China, the native people swarm to American or western restaurants like Starbucks or KFC, so our initial plan to have a quick dinner at Papa John's pizza was de-railed when we saw the line out the door. I was secretly happy because i…

Graham Priest On What Philosophy Is

From what I know of Graham Priest, he's an interesting philosopher. I read his book on intentionality, Towards Non-Being a few months ago, and enjoyed it, and I read his Introduction to Non-Classical Logic a few years ago, and have recommended it. So when I saw that he had written a paper titled "What is Philosophy?" in a recent issue of the journal Philosophy (sorry, it's not online anywhere, and Philosophy is woefuly slow in updating its website), I thought I'd check it out. It was popular in the 20th century to write books with this title, or some variant thereof (I particularly like this…

Rodents can learn to use tools

Traditionally, the use of tools was believed to be restricted to humans and several other primate species, and, like language, was argued to be a major driving force behind the evolution of the human brain. However, this view is now being challenged. For example, in recent years it has become clear that birds have sophisticated tool-using abilities. Now, a group of researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have demonstrated for the first time that rats degus* can be trained to use simple tools. The new study, by Okanoya et al, is published online today in the open access…

Visa Horror Stories

Last night we hosted another instalment of our monthly "book"club at our place. It's an excuse to meet up for a nice evening of food and drink. Note that the word "book" is in quotes because we alternate each meeting between reading a book and watching a movie. As you can tell from the photos, last night we watched a Russian movie entitled Ballad of a Soldier. Capping a growing trend, members of the Whitehead institute outnumbered the folks from the Harvard Medical Campus for the first time in our bookclub's three year history. Now not only are most of our club members biomedical scientists,…

600,000 Violent Deaths in Iraq

The Washington Post reports on a new Lancet study on excess deaths in Iraq. (Though it buries it on page A12.) A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. ... The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated…

Growing a Brain in a Dish

Source. That doughnut shape decorated with bright green spots, some connected by red pathways, amidst sky blue neighbors could be an artist's creation, but is the result of a creative scientific attempt to grow an active brain in a dish, complete with memories. Really. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh published this stunning study in the journal Lab on a Chip {the full paper can be accessed here.} When I first learned how to grow cells in a lab, the technique of tissue culture, the idea of even growing brain cells was a far-fetched dream, much less brain cells capable of forming…

FDA to regulate genetic tests as medical devices

It looks as though the FDA is swooping down on the direct-to-consumer genetic testing industry in a serious way, sending formal letters to five companies informing them that their tests will be regulated as medical devices: WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration is issuing regulatory letters to five genetic test makers, the first sign that the government is cracking down on companies that claim to use DNA samples to predict inheritable diseases. The FDA letters notify each company that their tests are considered medical devices and therefore must be federally approved as safe and…

So...where can I get a copy of “Revolve”?

Jason brings to my attention an eye-opening article on the bible-publishing business: The popularization of the Bible entered a new phase in 2003, when Thomas Nelson created the BibleZine. Wayne Hastings described a meeting in which a young editor, who had conducted numerous focus groups and online surveys, presented the idea. “She brought in a variety of teen-girl magazines and threw them out on the table,” he recalled. “And then she threw a black bonded-leather Bible on the table and said, ‘Which would you rather read if you were sixteen years old?’ ” The result was “Revolve,” a New…

Islamic Creationism in the News

From the NCSE: The phenomenon of Islamic creationism was addressed by two major newspapers, The New York Times (November 3, 2009) and the Boston Globe (October 25, 2009), in the wake of a recent conference at Hampshire College on evolution in the Muslim world. (Webcasts of the conference presentations will be available on-line by November 15, 2009, according to the conference website.) The Globe's article began arrestingly, with the news that the Arabic-language version of Al Jazeera's website -- a major news source in the Middle East -- triumphantly misdescribed the recently described early…

Explaining Science With Jesse Dylan and Richard Bookman

One of the hardest parts of the day job is trying to explain why the commons works for science to people. I find that I have to start by explaining what science actually is, how science works, and how that doesn't take advantage of the possibility of the internet, which means I have to explain the possibility of the internet, and on and on. The smarter the non-scientist, ironically, the harder this can be - because the smart non-scientist frequently has a hard opinion about science and the internet. "Just get it online and everything will be fine!" is a common refrain. Several months ago, I…

Breaking news? ID can't detect design.

The "ID Report" has a post up full of "breaking news": "So much is happening nowadays in the ID controversy..." writes Denyse O'Leary. For instance, she sez "Ann Coulter, who had kind words for the ID guys, has been accused of plagiarism, but Talking Points Memo (no friend of hers) did not find the smoking gun, after a staff day working on it." First of all, this alleged news is from ... July 7, 2006. But that isn't what's so egregious. What's so egregious is that, what they found is roughly what IDolators believe to be the smoking gun that proves the existence of God! Josh Marshall…

MythBusters - I was so wrong about the see saw

I made a gamble and my gamble failed. It really wasn't my fault. In the preview, they showed this huge barrel thing dropping on a see saw. It looked something like this: (I could search for 30 minutes for a picture of this online, or just draw it) At first glance, this looked JUST like that video of the pile driver shooting the skydiver up in the air. You can see how I would make that mistake. To make up for my mistake, I will give a very simple analysis of the see saw myth. The basic idea is that something comes down, hits the see saw and sends the other thing flying up. If I assume…

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Sam Dupuis

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Sam Dupuis from the Science of Sorts on My Mind blog (and yes, he is the son of John Dupuis, if the last name sounded familiar to you), to answer a few questions. 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? Glad to…

Donald Trump Eats His Enemies

Eating your enemies is a time honored method for winning. It is rarely used by American politicians or their supporters. Here is how you eat your enemy. I'll use a generalized example based on several events during the GOP debates. Moderator: Mr. Trump, you've said 'bla bla bla bla'. Alternate Candidate, what do you have to say to Mr. Trump about this? Alternate: Yada yada yada. Donald Trump: [smiling, nodding giving thumbs up] I agree with all that. More typically, a politician in this situation would find a way to separate themselves form Alternate Candidate, playing off the moderator…

GcMAF and an unscrupulous quack, profiled by the BBC

A week ago, I noted that one of the stranger and less credible conspiracy theories promulgated by quacks and their believers was still going strong nearly three months after the first death that triggered it, the death of autism quack Jeff Bradstreet, apparently by suicide. Basically, three months ago, Dr. Bradstreet, who has long been a fixture in the "autism biomed" movement and a frequent speaker at autism quackfests like Autism One, was found dead in a river from a gunshot wound to the chest, an apparent suicide. A recent story about the investigation into Dr. Bradstreet's death included…

ANNOUNCEMENT: Get ready for the NEXT year's Science Blogging Anthology and Conference

2008 Science Blogging Conference Not to be bragging, but the '07 Science Blogging Conference was a great success, and most attendees voiced their approval of Chapel Hill as a permanent venue for the event, so Anton and I are starting early in planning for the next one. There are rumors of a mid-summer equivalent event to be held on the West Coast (Seattle or somewhere there) which would be great - more the merrier - but we will also try to find some way to help a few West-Coasters make their way to North Carolina in winter as well. We pored over all of your feedback forms and read all the…

Christopher Monckton files a questionable affidavit

Via Ed I see that Christopher Monckton, the fake expert in climate change who has been repeatedly told by Parliament to stop calling himself an Member of the House of Lords,, claims he's the inventor of a magical disease cure of HIV, MS, flu and the common cold, and recently a birther, has now submitted an affidavit (read here) pushing his bogus birther stats argument. The only problem? I think one could argue he's now opened his factually-questionable statements to legal scrutiny. From his affidavit: I am over the age of 18 and am a resident of the United Kingdom. The information herein…

Rock Stars of Science, part deux: coming to a GQ near you

The second edition of the Rock Stars of Science is now out online, and in the November 23rd ("Men of the Year") edition of GQ magazine. As Chris Mooney notes, this is a campaign funded by the Geoffery Beene Foundation, working to raise recognition of scientists' work (and scientists, period, since roughly half of the American population can't name a single living scientist). Part of the campaign is to make science noticeable and "cool;" I'll quote from the press release: ROCK S.O.S⢠aims to bridge a serious recognition gap for science, observes journalist Chris Mooney, co-author of the…

Science 2.0 (repost)

I think I have a profile on Friendster - I don't know, I haven't checked since 2003. I have bare-bones profiles on MySpace, LinkedIn and Change.Org and I will get an e-mail if you "friend" me (and will friend you back), but I do not have time to spend on there. I refuse to even look at all the other social networking sites like Twitter - there are only so many hours in the day. But I am interested in possible ways of making science communication more interactive and more Webby 2.0, beyond just blogs. Pedro, Carl and Phillip have recently written thoughtful posts about this topic as well.…

Science 2.0

I think I have a profile on Friendster - I don't know, I haven't checked since 2003. I have bare-bones profiles on MySpace, LinkedIn and Change.Org and I will get an e-mail if you "friend" me (and will friend you back), but I do not have time to spend on there. I refuse to even look at all the other social networking sites like Twitter - there are only so many hours in the day. But I am interested in possible ways of making science communication more interactive and more Webby 2.0, beyond just blogs. Pedro, Carl and Phillip have recently written thoughtful posts about this topic as well.…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Jason Hoyt

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Jason Hoyt from Mendeley to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? I am from the San…

Hunter Baker Redux

I didn't know that the men's movement had blogs until I received an e-mail this weekend from Vic (aka David) with a link to one. The subject of the blog entry, much to my surprise, was evolution and the ID movement. Is there some connection between the men's movement and the ID movement? Many of the same people who are anti-evolution are also strongly anti-feminist, so I suppose there might be, but it still seems a bit out of place. Unfortunately, the author of this blog has no permanent links to specific posts, so you'll just have to scroll down till you find the title Intellectuals Who…

How blogging has augmented my career

This morning, I once again get to join in with a group of noted journalists, authors, educators, and all-around people-who-do-things-I-can't for the annual advisory board meeting of the M.S. in Medical and Science Journalism Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Program founder and current director, Tom Linden, MD, is a Yale- and UCSF-trained physician-journalist with extensive broadcast experience across a series of California television stations. Dr Linden also recognized very early the potential value and pitfalls of…

A moment of navel-gazing about writing a science blog.

All the cool kids were doing this particular round of navel-gazing yesterday and the day before, while I was either dreadfully ill and out of commission or somewhat better and working. (Today was also quite full of work stuff.) However, it's not an unimportant set of questions, and possibly you're curious about the answers, so let's give it a go: 1. Why do you consider this blog a science blog? You know, initially I'm not sure I would have claimed that designation. This started as a blog about what's involved in being a responsible scientist -- so to that extent, the activity of science…

Lynn Margulis blog tour

Lynn Margulis has sent the opening statement for her blog tour below. You should feel free to respond to it, raise other questions of any relevant sort, or say whatever you want in the comments; she'll be along later today to respond to those that interest her. I will be policing the comments, so trolls, please don't bother; serious comments only, and keep in mind that she's only going to respond to a limited subset, so make 'em good. In addition, she'll be available later today in the Pharyngula chat room (channel #pharyngula on irc.zirc.org; if you don't have an IRC client, that link will…

A year of books: 2011

I'm including here a list of all the books I've read in 2011, as well as some commentary on my particular year in reading. I always enjoy when people post these sorts of lists online and actually rather enjoy doing so myself. I've been doing this for a few years now: 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007. If you've posted such a list online somewhere, please post a link in the comments. I'd love to see it! The list of books I'm posting below includes all the books I started in 2011, with the exception of books that I'm currently reading. In other words, it also includes a few books I've abandoned…

Removing the Bricks from the Classroom Walls: Interview with David Warlick

David Warlick is a local blogger and educator. We first met at the Podcastercon a couple of years ago, then at several blogger meetups, and finally last January at the second Science Blogging Conference where David moderated a session on Science Education. 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've been an educator for more than 30 years, starting as a middle school social studies, science, and math teacher. Every once in a while, I have to remind myself that…

You shoulda been here

It's strange…I was offline all day yesterday. I've been at Skepticon II down here in Springfield, Missouri, and unfortunately, I had no internet access while I was in the meeting, which went on all day Saturday late into the evening, and then, once the talks were over, the socializing began. The party went on at a bar until 1:30am, then moved to a hotel room until sometime around 4am, and then DJ Grothe, Rebecca Watson, and I kept it going until 6am, at which time the lesser two beings conked out, and I was the last one left standing (Rebecca will seethe at that)…when I had to take off to the…

Fact checking The New Yorker's ass!

In High-wire Act: Before agreeing to work on the opera, Albarn and Hewlett made two trips to China with Shi-Zheng. While visiting the city of Yinchuan, in Ninzxia Province, Albarn spent an afternoon lying on the floor of his hotel room recording the sound of horns in the street. There is no "Ninzxia province." Yinchuan is the capital of Ningxia. Or NÃngxià or Ning-hsia or Ningsia. Google turns out 5 results for "Ninzxia," one of which is the article in The New Yorker (the others look like purposeful hidden misspellings so that search engines will catch the sites). Not a big deal, but if…

There Once Was A....

Once again, there are three new pieces online on our website, each wonderful in its own way. But Haiku just didn’t seem to fit this batch. So, with apologies to the scientists, here are three limericks on the newest Institute research. As before, follow the links to get to our website. (Incidentally, there is some precedent for limerick writing at the Weizmann Institute. The late Prof. Amikam Aharoni, who also wrote some serious stuff on ferromagnetism, was known for his limericks.)   The Quasar There once was a baby black hole That went for a short little stroll It zigged and it zagged…

Around the Web: CHORUS & Share, Traditional librarian angst and more

Joining a CHORUS, Publishers Offer the OSTP a Proactive, Modern, and Cost-Saving Public Access Solution Publishers Propose Public-Private Partnership to Support Access to Research CHORUS: hoping for re-enclosure CHORUS: It’s actually spelled C-A-B-A-L Scientific Publishers Aim To Get Ahead Of Agency Repositories A CHORUS of boos: publishers offer their “solution” to public access All joined with a single voice to praise CHORUS, thus: “meh.” Chapter, Verse, and CHORUS: A first pass critique SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) Proposed by AAU, APLU, ARL (proposal here) ‘Federated System’…

Around the Web: Publisher push-back, Mobile vs. Social, Killing the term paper and more

50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication: How Digital Publishing Is Harming Science and the response Dr. Fields at the Huffington Post is wrong on open access and another Great Expectations For Scientific Publication: How Digital Publishing Is Helping Science Open access: why academic publishers still add value and the response Academic publishers need better defenders Mobile vs. Social Let’s Kill the Term Paper I Don't Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem Who Says Online Courseware Will Cause the Death of Universities? Amazon’s Diminishing Discounts Why scientists should care about…

Around the Web: The end of academic library circulation, Teens & Twitter and more

The End of Academic Library Circulation? Print on the Margins: Circulation Trends in Major Research Libraries Teens join Twitter to escape parents on Facebook: survey Teens slowly migrating to Twitter Academic E-Books: Innovation and Transition Is Facebook Really a Good Business? Who Does Google Think You Are? A tool tells users what the company infers about your interests and age Social Media and Privacy The (Not So) Inevitable Future of Digital Textbooks Social Anxiety (ups and downs of post-pub online peer review) 5 Foundational Principles for Course Design The nine golden rules of…

Friday Fun: Disappointment for scientists as new super-computer fails to go mad

Newsbiscuit is my favourite humour site and has been for a while. The dry British humour combined with OTT story ideas is irresistible. And speaking of irresistible, I just love this one: Disappointment for scientists as new super-computer fails to go mad Scientists at Mal-Tech University, Wisconsin have expressed their immense disappointment at the failure of their new super-computer Off White to show any signs of megalomania. The technological titan went online six months ago has since performed flawlessly, displaying nary a hint of sentience, lunacy or vague curiosity. Project leader…

Testing, testing, testing…is this thing on?

It looks like Pharyngula is back online…at least I'm seeing new comments appear. Now let's see if I can post anything. How about another pointless poll? In a web page for some TV show I've never seen, ABC is asking, "Did Arlene have the right to refuse to vaccinate two of her sons?" (I presume this refers to some fictitious incident in the program). Alas, the anti-vaxing kooks have seized upon it, and the vote is now at: 70% say "YES - The parent has a right to act on their beliefs." 30% say "NO - Her decision put her sone and hundreds of other people at risk for the measles." Wait, measles?…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

It is getting really close! You can see everyone who's registered for the conference, and I need to do only a couple of more of these posts to introduce everyone. David Shiffman is a graduate student at the College of Charleston in South Carolina studying shark conservation. He blogs on Southern Fried Science and tweets. At the conference, David will do an Ignite talk "The Online Community Environmental Action Network: How it can help you and your blog - WhySharksMatter". Katie Lord is the Associate Publisher of American Scientist, the popular science magazine published by Sigma Xi. Andre…

Gazette's Ken Ward Featured on EXPOSE

The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward, one of the few reporters in the country who writes consistently about worker health and safety issues, is featured on EXPOSE: America's Investigative Reports.  The episode entitled "Sustained Outrage" depicts Ward's approach to covering coal mine disasters like the 2006 Sago tragedy: "When other reporters are zigging, I'm zagging," describing his talent for investigating these fatalities well beyond the headline and long after the cameras are turned off.  The 24-minute episode describes how Ken Ward created a database using information from …

Potential abuse of users' privacy in Serbia

Serbia: New Instructions and Law Regulations on Online Privacy: On July 21, RATEL, Serbia's Republican Agency for Telecommunications, posted a Document of Instructions for Technical Requirements for Subsystems, Devices, Hardware and Installation of Internet Networks on their official web site. This news didn't go unnoticed yesterday in Serbian blogosphere and internet community, as many bloggers expressed various opinions as well as disapproval because of the potential abuse of users' privacy. This document of instructions defines technical requirements for authorized monitoring of some…

Obligatory Reading of the Day: Opening up Scientific Culture

Why are so many scientists reluctant to make full use of Web 2.0 applications, social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and commenting capabilities on some online journals? Michael Nielsen wrote a very thoughtful essay exploring this question which I hope you read carefully and post comments. Michael is really talking about two things - one is pre-publication process, i.e., how to get scientists to find each other and collaborate by using the Web, and the other is the post-publication process, i.e., how to get scientists to make their thoughts and discussions about published works more public.…