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PeerJ - the science journal we need and deserve

I spend a lot of time thinking about the scientific method. I don't mean that thing you learned in high school, where you make an observation, form a hypothesis, design an experiment etc etc. That's certainly part of the scientific method, but the linear formula that freshmen are typically forced to memorize sucks the life and interest out of what it is that my colleagues and I do on a daily basis. Source: The fantastic "How Science Works" from UC Berkeley (click image) The process of doing science is messy and complicated, and most of the time it doesn't work. There are false starts, bad…

Get your climate change data here: A big list of climate change data sources & repositories

We have a Steacie Library Hackfest coming up and our there this year is Making a Difference with Data. And what better area to make a difference in than the environment and climate change? I am far from an expert on this topic, so suggestions for additions (and deletions if I've added anything inappropriate) are welcome. In particular, deeper and more complete data sources for Canada would be nice to have. I would also very much like to improve coverage beyond the North American focus with a wider variety of targeted regional and national data sources. This set of lists is not meant to be…

Treating flu in mice with monoclonal antibodies?

I'm not sure what to make of the report that scientists in Boston, California and the CDC in Atlanta have made monoclonal antibodies that protect mice against many different flu subtypes. Monoclonal antibodies are antibodies made by the descendants of a single immune cell (that is a single clone, hence monoclonal). Thus unlike natural antibodies, these are also monospecific, i.e., they are directed against one specific target. Our natural immune system "sees" a protein on the surface of the virus called hemagglutinin (HA), of which there are 16 broad subtypes and many, many variations within…

A scientific ethics of code

I'm a scientist and my research is supported by NIH, i.e., by American taxpayers. More importantly, the science I do is for anyone to use. I claim no proprietary rights. That's what science is all about. We make our computer code publicly available, not just by request, but posted on the internet, and it is usable code: commented and documented. We ask the scientists in our program to do the same with the reagents they develop. Reagents are things like genetic probes or antibodies directed against specific targets mentioned in the articles they publish. There is an list of the reagents on the…

Helping more newborns survive their first 24 hours

One of the Millennium Development Goals -- a set of goals to improve global well-being by 2015 -- is to reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate of children under age five. The good news for MDG progress is that the under-five mortality rate has been cut nearly in half, from 90 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 48 in 2012. The bad news is that 6.6 million young children still die every year, and those deaths are concentrated in the world's poorest regions. Eight-one percent of these deaths occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, many of them in babies' first 24 hours of life. A…

Local Boy Gets Obnoxious

Cool — I've been written up in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's a good story by a journalist, Tom Paulson, who I just met this week, and who seems to know what's up in the area. I've already had a relative call up and say she's glad I'm famous, so it's all just in time for the family reunion tomorrow — everyone will be prepared to take me down a peg and make sure I'm not too cocky. Since I did say a few things about the Discovery Institute, he called them up and got their side of the story. This part is the typical creationist sidestep. Not so, said John West, associate director of the…

Open Access in Belgrade

As you know, I gave two lectures here in Belgrade. The first one, at the University Library on Monday, and the second one at the Oncology Institute of the School of Medicine at the University of Belgrade. As the two audiences were different (mainly librarians/infoscientists at the first, mainly professors/students of medicine at the second) I geared the two talks differently. You can listen to the audio of the entire thing (the second talk) here, see some pictures (from both talks) here and read (in Serbian) a blog post here, written by incredible Ana Ivkovic who organized my entire Belgrade…

Why is Charlotte Allen so mad at atheists?

The LA Times offered me a little space to write a reply to Charlotte Allen in their online edition, so I did. You can read it at the LA Times or below the fold. I'm already getting lots of unhappy email from people, so I must have done it right. Charlotte Allen is very, very angry with us atheists -- that's the only conclusion that can be drawn from her furious broadside in The Times on May 17. She can't stand us; we're unpopular; we're a problem. What, exactly, is the greatest crime of modern atheists? We're boring. I can't actually argue with that. It's true. We're all just ordinary people…

PLoS 500

Yesterday, PLoS-ONE celebrated the publication of the 500th paper (and additional 13). Here are some quick stats: 1,411 submissions 513 published paper 360 member editorial board and growing 19 day average acceptance to publication 600+ post publication comments posted I am assuming that the remaining 898 manuscripts are in various stages of the publication process: rejected, in review, in revision, or in the pipeline to appear on the site any day now. The very first paper was published on December 20, 2006. The 500th paper is this one "Climate Change Cannot Explain the Upsurge of Tick-…

The Archimedes Palimpsest

After centuries of mistreatment, the Archimedes palimpsest is in bad shape. During its thousand-year life, it has been scraped, singed by fire, dribbled with wax, smeared with glue, and ravaged by a deep purple fungus, which in places has eaten through its pages. Without the use of computer technology, the Archimedes palimpsest would be largely illegible. But modern imaging technologies, similar to those that helped experts read portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1996, allow for astonishingly precise views of faded text. Image source: Nova. Has the ancient link between mathematics and…

Occupational Health News Roundup

The Center for Public Integrity's excellent Hard Labor series continues with two more stories about workers killed on the job. In "'They were not thinking of him as a human being,'" Jim Morris writes about Carlos Centeno, who died after suffering from burns to 80% of his body. Centeno had been assigned by a temporary staffing agency to the Raani Corp. plant in Bedford Park, Illinois, and he was scalded by an eruption of of a citric acid solution. According to federal investigators, factory bosses refused to call an ambulance, even as Centeno screamed in pain. More than 90 minutes after being…

Krauss on Dawkins

Physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote Nature's review of The God Delusion. The review itself is mixed: strong praise for parts of the book, exasperated criticism for others. But the following two paragraphs are what caught my eye: Dawkins the preacher is less seductive. And make no mistake: this book is, for the most part, a well-referenced sermon. I just have no idea who the intended parishioners might be. In his preface, Dawkins claims he hopes to reach religious people who might have misgivings, either about the teachings of their faith or about the negative impact of religion in the modern…

The Simplest Argument For Dark Matter

"What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with." -Anonymous If I were brand new to theoretical cosmology, I might be skeptical of a whole bunch of "dark" things that I'd heard of. "Dark matter?" "Dark energy?" Come on; you've got to be kidding me! You're telling me that 95% of the Universe is not made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, like all the matter we know? After all, I look out at the Universe, and this is what I see. Stars, galaxies, gas and dust... normal matter, all of it. Yet all I need to do is start with two very well-supported…

Science Online Advice: Blogging as a Scientist

I ended up feeling that my most valuable contribution to the Science Online meeting (other than boosting the income of the Marriott's bartenders) was providing experienced commentary and advice from a slightly different angle than a lot of the other participants. A bunch of this got tweeted out by other people in the sessions, but the format (both at the conference and on Twitter) necessarily strips a lot of nuance out of what I was trying to say (and not always saying successfully). so I thought I'd revise and expand on my remarks a little bit. In particular, I want to post expanded versions…

Links for 2012-05-09

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Adjuncts on Food Stamps The general idea isn't new, of course, but the numbers are. The story notes a threefold increase just from 2007 to 2010 in the number of people affected. I have to admit that my first response was "there but for the grace of God." Anyone who clings to the myth of the academic meritocracy is invited to explain the speed of the increase in people in this position. Yes, I work hard at my job, but so do plenty of other people; denying the role of luck is just ungracious. That said, though, I wonder if this article - and others…

Ten Years Before the Blog: 2005-2006 (Part I)

Continuing the blog recap series, we come to the "split year" of 2005-2006. The blog was initially launched in late June, so that's when I'm starting the years for purposes of these recaps, but ScienceBlogs launched in January 2006, so this year was half Steelypips and half ScienceBlogs. This post will cover the Steelypips half, June-January; I'll do the ScienceBlogs stuff in a second post, once I figure out the best way to go through those posts (the ScienceBlogs archives aren't set up well for reading straight through). In reading through this, I was amused to discover this pan of Seed's…

The Anti-MOOC Panic

I'm not desperately interested in the "MOOC" on-line course thing, though I can see that I might be in future. I don't have a lot of spare time; for example the 2 hours I had free last night I spent running + recovering, not learning. But others do, and CIP has been talking to "the enemy" - i.e. the tenured professors in minor universities who have the most to lose. John Boy is even more in favour than CIP. However, I don't want to debate their virtues but do want to note CIP's: The flood waters in Colorado seem to have washed away my comments on yet another blog by a historian at a school (…

Endowment Hoarding?

It's been a few days since I linked to Inside Higher Ed, and the Internet itself was threatening to collapse. They're got a provocative article today about university endowments, though, so disaster is averted. The author, Lynne Munson, compares colleges and universities to private foundations, and doesn't like what she sees: A recent survey of 765 colleges and universities found they are spending 4.2 percent of their endowments' value each year. Meanwhile, private foundations -- which are legally required to spend at least 5 percent of their value annually -- average 7 percent spending.…

Laser-Cooled Atoms: Cesium

Element: Cesium (Cs) Atomic Number: 55 Mass: One stable isotope, mass 133 amu. Laser cooling wavelength: 854nm, but see below. Doppler cooling limit: 125 μK. Chemical classification: Yet another alkali metal, column I of the periodic table. This one isn't greyish, though! It's kind of gold color. Still explodes violently in water, though. Other properties of interest: The definition of the second in the SI system of units is in terms of the microwave transition between hyperfine ground states in Cs-- 9,192,631,770 oscillations to one second, to be precise. Has a really large scattering…

What Counts As Successful Outreach?

Part of this past weekend's meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public was to evaluate 100+ proposals for "mini-grants" of up to $10,000 for new outreach activities. It wouldn't be appropriate to go into detail about any of the proposals or what we decided (the PI's of the proposals we decided to fund will be notified soon), but there was one issue that came up again and again that I think is appropriate for the blog, which is what should be considered as a successful effort, particularly in the online world. A large number of the proposals we were considering had "new media" components…

Religious Trivia Contest Results

There's been a lot written in the last day or so about this Pew Foundation Survey on who knows what about religion. Like most such surveys these days, they have a really easy online quiz version that you can take and marvel that anybody missed any of these questions. My first thought was to just tag some of the better reactions for the Links Dump, and leave it at that. The auto-posting feature has been broken for some time, though, and my Internet access will be spotty for the next several days, so it's easier to do a quickie post pointing out the more worthwhile posts on the subject that…

"How Washington is Nixing a Cancer Cure..."

...is the title of a Newsweek article by Jonathan Alter posted online last night that draws more attention to the Medicare restriction on reimbursements for radioimmunotherapeutic (RIT) drugs used to treat lymphomas. Surgical oncologist, Orac, and I have spoken about this issue in the last few days. Alter admits his bias a bit, as he was diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma back in 2004 and received RIT. Moreover, Alter's Newsweek colleague (and SoCal singer-songwriter), Jaime Reno, attributes RIT to his long-term remission. The article opens as follows: What if they found a cure for a…

Dumbing down science (or not)

This is "a new website that brings together images and viewpoints to create insights into science and culture." Sounds like Seed, no? It's what Scienceblogs is/are about. This page, on the dilemma of science in the public -- the "fine line between intellectualism and elitism" -- is really fascinating. The site authors "examine how the message [of science] changes as it moves from the scientific to the popular arena. We also look at the medium, at how technology facilitates engagement with science. Finally, the motive is scrutinised: why popular science is not part of a dumbing down process…

Recoil from Dollo's Law

Time always marches forward, of course, but does evolution? It's certainly easy to impose a march of progress on the course of evolution. That's why the sequence of apes transforming into humans as they march from left to right is so universal. Of course, there are also pictures in which Homo sapiens, having risen up to noble, upright proportions, begins to crouch back down again, until he (never a she, I've noticed) is crouching in front of a computer or a television or facing some other ignoble end. As I wrote in Parasite Rex, this anxiety--an anxiety mostly about ourselves and not about…

A Request For The Hive Mind: Did Darwin Write About Microbes?

Having just written a book all about E. coli, including its evolution, I came to wonder what Darwin thought about microbes. I've searched far and wide. I've looked in biographies, for example, and the awesome site Darwin Online. I have found only one reference--to viruses: A particle of small-pox matter, so minute as to be borne by the wind, must multiply itself many thousandfold in a person thus inoculated; and so with the contagious matter of scarlet fever. It has recently been ascertained that a minute portion of the mucous discharge from an animal affected with rinderpest, if placed in…

Finding information on a topic

Previously, I had a post about finding information in books using things like Google Book Search. This post talks about finding information on a topic, or more specifically, why you should start your search with a research database and more about what research databases are (like the real ones). In a post coming up, I'll give some information on some free to you research databases (the real ones). You should start your search with a research database to be more comprehensive, to cover multiple sources and publishers, to have real searching power/precision, and because of the vocabulary…

Casual Fridays: Why those annoying menus are here to stay

Last week's Casual Fridays study was inspired by my annoyance at a website form which required me to constantly switch between typing in information and selecting it from a menu. I wondered if there was really any significant benefit to requiring the use of menus, when typing (for me, anyways) seemed so much faster. So we developed two versions of the same simple 8-question quiz, one of which required users to alternate between menu-responses and typed responses, and the other which allowed respondents to type in each response. We asked respondents to answer the questions as quickly as…

The Boston Debate

Saturday I reported that AAAS had pulled together an unexpected preliminary presidential science debate at the annual meeting. The event was organized by the Association of American Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and as promised, here's what went down in Boston... Representatives of the major Democratic candidates accepted invitations to participate in a discussion of science in the next administration. Senator McCain's campaign sent their regrets that they could not attend on such short notice, while Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul did…

"Don't Know Much About Hurricanes"--the New Hit Song by Steven D. Levitt

Althought I haven't read it, I've heard great things about the book Freakonomics, co-authored by (and about the work of) University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt. Levitt is supposed to be a true original thinker, and has really shaken up the somewhat traditionalist field of economics. And now, Levitt has moved his popular blog--co written with Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner--to The New York Times online. This week he started off the new show with (among other things) a post on hurricanes and global warming. Alas, Levitt seems unaware of the history of this debate, and so…

A Cunning Disregard For Security

This seems very odd.  The Internet -- including web sites and email -- has been found to have a very serious security flaw.  Civilized places such as Sweden and Puerto Rico are already fixing the problem.  There are plans to improve security for US .gov and .mil sites (government and military , respectively).  Yet, the most important fix for the rest of us, which is under the control of the US government, is being delayed. Given that the Russian military attack on Georgia was href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0813/p01s05-usmi.html">preceded by an Internet attack, it would seem pretty…

Researchers talking to journalists should assume the public might be listening.

In the wake of some recent deaths in Edmonton of teenagers who took Ecstasy, DrugMonkey gets irritated with a doctor who made some proclamation to the press: I'm particularly exercised over an article which quotes Charles Grob, M.D. (UCLA page): Charles Grob believes there is a strong chance that a deadly batch of adulterated pills is making the rounds in and around Edmonton, though health officials and law-enforcement groups have issued no such public warning. Dr. Grob, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, was the first U. S. researcher to conduct human tests of methylenedioxymethamphetamine…

The Australian's War on Science XXV

On Saturday the Australian published a story by John Stapleton offering as evidence against global warming the fact that "the Arctic ice is expanding". Something that happens every winter. Anyway, Stapleton's piece is about biased reporting on global warming. Stapleton is oblivious to the extraordinary bias displayed by the Australian -- he's alleging that it is the ABC and Fairfax who are biased. The sole piece of evidence that Stapleton offers for this is their reporting on the question of whether global warming is reducing the Southern Ocean's ability to soak up carbon dioxide. Last year…

What was, is, and will most likely be

I'll admit, I've never been a big fan of New Year's resolutions. It isn't that I don't like setting goals... but vowing to make a major lifestyle change with a time limit does seem to be asking for trouble. After all, there will always be a touch of chaos. With that in mind, I actually made a resolution last year, and more astonishingly, kept it. In fact, you're looking at it... this blog. Chaotic Utopia was around before 2006, but rarely seen. I had a collection of essays, stories, poems, doodles, and ideas that (to me) seemed rather important (though I wasn't completely sure why) stored on…

Taking Art Seriously

Earlier this week, the National Endowment for the Arts came out with a disturbing report: Americans -- particularly young Americans -- appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills. This report builds upon a 2004 NEA analysis that offered up a bleak assessment of the American reader. It turns out that reading, especially the reading of…

On My Fossil Wish List: Homo sulawesiensis

Could 2007 see some new hobbits? I certainly hope so. In October 2004, a team of scientists announced they had found bones of a hominid from the Indonesian island of Flores. They came to the astonishing conclusion that the bones belonged to a new species, which they called Homo floresiensis, which stood only three feet tall, lived as recently as 12,000 years ago, had a chimp-sized brain, and could use stone tools to hunt. That announcement launched an extraordinary debate, with scientists arguing in favor of tiny hominids (nicknamed Hobbits), or a dwarf with a birth defect, or an unusually…

Speed of sound in football stadium

Ok - I like Alabama football (sorry, but it's true). There is a clip on youtube of the end of the Alabama-Auburn game where the fans sing the traditional "Rammer Jammer". If you don't know what that is, don't worry. I am not sure I completely approve of the cheer, but it is a tradition. If you are curious, here it is: So, what is cool about this? Notice that the entire crowd is yelling the same thing, but they are out of sync. Can this be used to estimate the size of the stadium? I made an audio file from that youtube clip and looked at it with Audacity. Although I am completely…

Environmental Puzzle Solving: Doing the Math on the Commute

Pursuant to my previous post, today's project in the decision making process for Eric and I (we'll finally see the inside of the house tomorrow) is to find how long the commute to Eric's job and our synagogue is. These two things make up about half of our total driving - only half simply because we are very fortunate, and Eric has managed to work his academic schedule so he's only on campus three days per week. We realized last night that the house is further from SUNY Albany and our synagogue in Niskayuna than we'd realized - we'd figured it would be about the same since the house is only…

Washington Post on the Global Food Crisis

The Washington Post is running a series on the global food crisis, and if you haven't read it yet, it's worth a look.  In The New Economics of Hunger, Anthony Faiola explains how what started as an apparent blip in wheat prices has mushroomed into widespread hunger and unrest: The convergence of events has thrown world food supply and demand out of whack and snowballed into civil turmoil. After hungry mobs and violent riots beset Port-au-Prince, Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Ãdouard Alexis was forced to step down this month. At least 14 countries have been racked by food-related violence.…

The Catholic League downplays the evils of child abuse

Bill Donohue must be greatly distressed right now, since a commission has blown open the doors on a long history of child abuse by the Irish Catholic Church. He's scrambling to do damage control and making a pathetic spectacle of himself. He basically belittles the trauma that those kids experienced to salvage the reputation of his beloved Catholicism…it doesn't work. Reuters is reporting that "Irish Priests Beat, Raped Children," yet the report does not justify this wild and irresponsible claim. Four types of abuse are noted: physical, sexual, neglect and emotional. Physical abuse includes "…

Study: U.S. still lags behind on health care affordability and access

The percentage of Americans who reported cost-related barriers to health care dropped from 37 percent in 2013 to 33 percent in 2016 — a change that directly corresponds to insurance expansions under the Affordable Care Act, a new study reports. On the flip side, Americans are still more likely than peers in other high-income nations to face financial obstacles to health care. The study is based on findings from a survey of patients and providers in 11 countries and one that the Commonwealth Fund has been conducting annually since 1998. Those 11 countries are: Australia, Canada, France,…

On tribalism

Some time ago I promised KK a post on tribalism, and he has never forgiven me for not writing it. I think the reason I never wrote it was because the word, or the charge, turns out to be so vague as to be meaningless. Tribalism is a charge you fling at people when you have no real arguments left and nothing of substance to say: "you're being tribal"; "no I'm not!"; "aha! see, you deny it, you must be tribal". And so on. What is it, anyway? I'd say it is when you defend views and ideas and data from "your" group even when you know it to be wrong, because you don't want your group to lose face…

Why Does Excel Suck So Much?

Yesterday's bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the "Why Does Excel Suck So Much?" post I've been meaning to do for a while. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we're more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the intro engineering course supposedly are taught how to work with Excel, and it's kind of difficult to buy a computer without it these days, so it eliminates the "I couldn't do anything with the data" excuse for not doing lab reports). This is a constant source of irritation, as the default settings are carefully chosen…

What to Do About Science and the Public

In comments to last week's rant about the low esteem in which science is held, taffe writes: Ok then, what should scientists be doing, individually or as a community? Maybe the masses just plain find political info more interesting. I mean hell, you had to use dog fans as a hook for your popular book, right? One of the maddening things about blogging as a medium is the way its ephemerality leads to repetition. I feel like I've written this before, but it's unreasonable for me to be peeved about it, because there's no reason why anybody commenting last week would've seen the earlier post. So…

To predict what will make you happy, ask a stranger rather than guessing yourself

Want to know how much you'd enjoy an experience? You're better off asking someone who has been through it, even if they're a complete stranger, than to find out information for yourself. This advice comes from Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University, who espoused it in his superb book Stumbling on Happiness. Now, he has found new support for the idea by studying speed-daters and people receiving feedback from their peers. In the first study, he found that female students were better able to predict how much they would enjoy a speed-date if they listened to the experiences of strangers than if…

HIV, AIDS, MMR, NPR and WTF?

Thirty years ago yesterday, "the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMR) published a report of five young men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia who were treated at three different hospitals in Los Angeles, California." (see This Blog Post for details). Morbidity and Mortality Weekly is a really fun journal to read. It contains the latest reports of, well, death and serious illness as a means of disseminating information in a way that will allow quick response. So, if there are suddenly a bunch of cases of some disease scattered across the country, this kind of reporting may…

Crusaders against GMOs

The New Yorker has a fascinating article on Vandana Shiva, a crusader against GMO crops. I'd never heard of her before, but apparently she has charisma and cult-like followers who hang on her every word, and her word is a rather religious opposition to scientific agriculture. Weirdly, I can agree with some of it. At each stop, Shiva delivered a message that she has honed for nearly three decades: by engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with considerable assistance from the World Bank, the…

Creationists are history denialists

My upcoming visit to Houston to join Aron and others in protesting Texas creationism is smoking all kinds of interesting characters out of the woodwork. Meet Dr. David Shormann (the "Dr." must be his first name, he sure flings the title about), who has apparently been a person of some influence in shaping the Texas Board of Education policy. He's also a flaming young earth creationist who has drunk deeply of the Answers in Genesis kool-aid, and is very, very angry at the vicious, intolerant atheists who are coming to his city to argue against his nonsense. The freethoughts activists are…

"The Myth of Black Disingenuity": Exploring the Intersection of African American History and the History of Technology

I failed to produce this post in time for DNLee's Diversity in Science carnival - Black History Month: Broadening STEM Participation at Every Level. That's mostly because I had a bunch of personal stuff going on in the past couple weeks that just wouldn't leave me alone. I think I'll be back to more regular blogging now. You might have already read my brief post on Hercules, the chef enslaved by George Washington who eventually escaped to freedom. In it I noted "It was no small thing to be a chef under such circumstances, and the degree of technical skill required was surely astonishing…

Kathleen Seidel and her opponents

Over the weekend there was a very good article in the Concord Monitor about Kathleen Seidel and her legal battle with Clifford Shoemaker, whose intrusive "fishing expedition" subpoena recently drew condemnation even from prominent antivaccination activists such as David Kirby and Dan Olmsted and was ultimately quashed with the possibility of sanctions. What this article does a good job for those new to the debate is to put things in some perspective in a relatively brief treatment; I encourage you to read the whole thing, and I will focus mostly on a couple of interesting tidbits in the…

Using Light to Put a Mirror in the Dark: "Optomechanical Dark Mode"

In which I unpack a cryptic paper title and explain how quantum superposition lets you use light to keep things from interacting with light. ------------- I joined AAAS a couple of years ago to get a break on the registration fee for their meeting, and I've kept up the membership mostly because I like having individual access to Science articles, so I can read them in the coffee shops where I get actual work done. This also gives me access to articles in the "advance online publication" stage, which is hilarious because Union's institutional subscription doesn't include those articles-- if I'…