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The Future of Online (Academic) Publishing

Talk given by Peter Binfield at the ISMTE meeting (slides and audio): The Future of Online (Academic) Publishing - Presentation to the ISMTE August 2009 Tags: journals academic publishing STM online publishing PLoS PLoS ONE article level metrics

British Museum Launches On-Line Catalogue

Gold disc brooch from King's Field, early 7th century. This cloisonné ornament has lost all the garnets that originally filled its gold-walled cells. BM 1028.a.'70. From my buddy Barry Ager at the British Museum comes big news: the museum has launched a state-of-the-art on-line catalogue. Search here. In Stockholm, being aye-tee savvy Scandies, we have of course had this sort of thing for years and years already at the Museum of National Antiquities. Search here. But admittedly our collections don't quite have the BM's scope.

Casual Fridays: Does anyone watch the local news? Anyone?

Last week we asked our readers about where they got their news. I haven't watched local news for years, and I was wondering if anyone else in the blogosphere did. As several respondents pointed out, our results aren't going to be exactly a cross-section of society at large, but it may be useful to see the relative importance of different news sources among our readers. Here's a snapshot of the results: As you can see, only two sources of local news were less important to our readers than television, and only one of those ("other print source") was significantly less important. The only…

Medium, Message, and Secondary Audiences in Public Speaking

Having just returned from a long trip where I gave three talks, one of the first things I saw when I started following social media closely again was this post on how to do better presentations. The advice is the usual stuff-- more images, less text, don't read your slides, and for God's sake, rehearse the talk before you give it-- and it's generally very good. Given the two very different types of presentation I gave over the last few weeks, though, I think it's important to add one note about the design of the visuals, which is this: when you're putting a talk together, keep the final…

Triangle Tweetup tonight

I only signed up for Twitter (@abelpharmboy) on 21 January but have found it incredibly valuable for staying up to speed on blogs, MSM articles, local and national news, and science and medicine stories. I've already accumulated 284 "followers" which is about half of our daily blog visitors. I'd say that about 60% of those are not spammers. Well tonight in the Bull City, there is an event called Triangle Tweetup, a meetup of local Twitter users at Bronto Nation Software (@bronto). I'm going as are a few bloggers our readers may know such as Bora Zivkovic and foodie, jewelry-maker, and…

Are you addicted to the Internet?

Ed and Dave on Internet addiction. If I go out of town, I am perfectly happy not to see a computer for days - there is so much more other stuff to enjoy. But at home it is a different story - it's minutes, not days, and I start shaking uncontrollably! OK, just joking. But I spend less time online than you may think, thanks to the MovableType's ability to schedule a bunch of posts in advance. I have seriosuly cut on my time spent reading other blogs. My Bloglines does not work any more. I do not go browsing aimlessly or shopping online at all. I do not watch TV almost at all. I started…

NASA Astrophysics Roadmap: The Next 30 Years

What are Origami Nanosat Telescopes? How about Kinetic Inductance Detectors? More importantly, what should we do with them? NASA's Astrophysics is doing a Roadmap exercise, with the stated intent to look at science goals, technology and capabilities up to 30 years out! White papers were solicited a few weeks ago, and about 100 were received and are archived online, about 3/4 on science and 1/4 on technology. There was originally supposed to be a workshop for presentation of selected white papers, but in the world of sequestration that was not feasible, so instead there was a two day online…

Online civility: what does it mean to be "on the same team"?

I encourage everyone to read this thoughtful post by Janet, and contribute your thoughts. Often, questions about online civility are dismissed with the comment "get a thicker skin" - as if it simply doesn't matter whether people address each other with respect online. I think it does matter. In the offline world, the "us/them" mentality fosters prejudice and misunderstanding - just turn on FoxNews. If that mentality also dominates the online world, turning it into a bunch of bickering echo chambers, we lose one of our best opportunities for constructive dialogue with people of other…

MRSA ST398 review article--free access

Just received an email from Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases saying that my recent article, The Emergence of Staphylococcus aureus ST398, will be available for free online for the next two weeks. It was submitted roughly a year ago so it's already a bit dated in this quick-moving field, but provides an overview of "livestock-associated" MRSA up to mid-2010 or so--including food-associated MRSA.

Darwin had difficult handwriting

Find out for yourself. Darwin Online has acquired a huge digital collection of Darwin's papers, everything from book drafts to personal letters, and has them scanned and available on the web. There they are in all their scribbled, crossed out, penciled over, rewritten glory — historians and antiquarians will drool over these, but me, I prefer the neatly typed versions. The collection of family photos is pretty darned cool, though.

Fornvännen’s Winter Issue On-line

Issue 2014:4 is now on-line on Open Access. Otto Blehr on Stone Age elk hunting in northern Sweden. Laila Kitzler Åhfeldt on the terminology used by 11th century rune masters to denote their own work. Pia Bengtsson Melin on High Medieval magic rings. Timo Salminen on a 20s & 30s debate over whether the Corded Ware megaculture reached Finland via Sweden or directly from the Continent. Reviews.

He's just trying to make me jealous

So Nick Anthis also has a copy of the Atlas of Creation, and I don't. I am beginning to suspect that the Muslim creationists are only sending copies to people who are smooth-cheeked and lovely in their online portraits. Oh, well. From the descriptions of the contents, it sounds like the pictures are pretty, but the story is repetitive: X looks like Y, therefore God made both!

O Solo Mio

I’m having a rough day of it today. I’m a huge fan of The Sopranos but haven’t seen the last two episodes. Reason: my better half has been out of the country and I have taped them both to share with her when she returns on Wednesday. Problem is, it’s difficult to avoid online discussion of the last episode. Maybe I should retire from the Intertubes until Thursday!

EvoDevo in the NYRB

Haven't had time to read this yet as my print copy only arrived yesterday, but there's a review of Sean Carroll's From DNA to Diversity and Endless Forms Most Beautiful along with Kirschner & Gerhart's The Plausibility of Life in this week's New York Review of Books. For those of you who don't subscribe, it's freely available online. I'm sure PZ may have something to say.

Inside the mind of the anonymous online poster

Interesting piece: ...Certain topics never fail to generate a flood of impassioned reactions online: immigration, President Obama, federal taxes, "birthers," and race. This story about Obama's Kenyan aunt, who had been exposed as an illegal immigrant living in public housing in Boston and who was now seeking asylum, manages to pull strands from all five of those contentious subjects.... Here at the Boston Globe. HT Virgil Samms

Attorneygate: Just How High Does It Go?

The more you stare at this scandal, the more you feel like one of the proverbial blind men trying to figure out what the hell that elephant is. From ThinkProgress, here is what fired US Attorney Carol Lam might have been investigating: To recap, the White House awarded a one-month, $140,000 contract to an individual who never held a federal contract. Two weeks after he got paid, that same contractor used a cashier's check for exactly that amount to buy a boat for a now-imprisoned congressman at a price that the congressman had pre-negotiated. That should raise questions about the White House…

Friday Filtered Random 16, Commercialized Version

So this is a sorta random music list, but not quite. The new version of iTunes has this "iMix" feature where it will generate a web-based collection from any playlist, so I selected the first 10 from my randomized library, threw it into a new playlist, selected iMix, and…discovered it only builds a list from music it can find in the iTunes collection. Only 3 made it. So then I threw the next ten in—seven or so made the cut. A dozen more…suddenly it spits up 16. Bleh, I wasn't going to fuss with it to get exactly ten. So here it is, the subset of a random subset of my iTunes library that Apple…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Hilary Maybaum

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 Hilary Maybaum from i.e.science 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)? What is your (…

The Friday Fermentable: France's Lot Valley, by Erleichda

Another Wine Escapade: Valle du Lot by Erleichda Sweetpea and I enjoy hiking as a platform for vacationing (when we're not partaking of some beach spot). We've managed to attract a few likeminded fellow hikers, and are now able to customize our adventurers to suit our collective preferences. One of my only preferences has been that we visit a place that is known for their wines. In early May, we and three other couples set forth for the Lot Valley of SW France. Not as well known as nearby Bordeaux, or Provence, at least not by Americans, the Valle du Lot has been a thriving…

More on Science Online 2010

Yet another blogger is calling for your input and involvement in relation to a session planned for Scioten, the Science Online 2010 conference coming up later this month. Janet Stemwedel writes: #scio10 preparation: Is there a special problem of online civility?

My picks from ScienceDaily

Living Upside-down Shapes Spiders For Energy Saving: An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Spain and Croatia led an investigation into the peculiar lifestyle of numerous spider species, which live, feed, breed and 'walk' in an upside-down hanging position. According to their results, such 'unconventional' enterprise drives a shape in spiders that confers high energy efficiency, as in oscillatory pendulums. Space Tourism: Suborbital Vehicle Expected To Fly Within Two Years: A small California aerospace company has just unveiled a new suborbital spaceship that will provide affordable…

Clegg calls for gross economic stupidity

I despair sometimes at the stupidity of our politicians. More and more it becomes obvious that the less they have to do with running the economy, the better. The latest stupidity is from Clegg: Clegg calls for RBS and Lloyds giveaway. The idea is that when the government sells its (i.e., our) stakes in RBS and Lloyds that it (i.e., we) were forced (i.e. decided) to acquire, then there should be some kind of bizarre complex free-share giveaway scheme, the biggest experiment in "shareholder democracy" since the Thatcher era of the 1980 as they put it. There are some obvious problems with this,…

The Clay Aiken Press Release

Here's the actual press release from the 9 "aggrieved fans" of Clay Aiken who are considering filing a class action suit because they found out he's gay and think it was false advertising to market him to women. And it's funny stuff: "As consumers, we feel ripped off. It is obvious now that the private Clay is very different from the manufactured packaged public Clay that was marketed to us" said a spokesman for the group. "We believe that this was absolutely fraudulent and that we may have actionable recourse against the record company". Presently, the group continues to interview legal…

Shackleton's whiskey; Powell's coffee

From Physorg Five crates of Scotch whisky and two of brandy have been recovered by a team restoring an Antarctic hut used more than 100 years ago by famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. Five cases of Scotch and two of brandy, and all of it heavy. You can see the importance Shackleton put on a good nightcap This puts me in mind of John Wesley Powell's Grand Canyon expedition, as described in his classic account of same. Powell had nearly as trying an adventure as Shackleton did â an 8, I would say, to Shackleton's 10 â and when he and his party finally emerged from the canyon into the…

What you can do about "vampire appliances"

It's Friday night, which may mean that you're headed out for dinner, to hit the bars with from friends, or otherwise celebrate the beginning of the weekend. While you're out, though, some of your appliances are still going to be drawing power even when you think you've turned them off. The fact that many of us own "vampire appliances" like TVs, microwaves, and air conditions is well known, but what can you do about it? Wait around for appliance companies to make their products better at saving energy? I don't know about you, but even if appliance companies started making energy-saving…

Answer to the Monday Night Mystery

Plega sp. (Mantispidae) Who was the source of Monday's DNA? As many of you discerned from the online Genbank database, the sequence came from Plega dactylota, a Neuropteran insect in the family Mantispidae. 10 points to Aaron Hardin, who guessed it first. For future reference, these genetic puzzles are only slightly more complicated than a Google search. Go to NCBI's BLAST page, select "nucleotide blast" (because we have nucleotide data), click the box for "others" to get you out of the human genome, enter the sequence in the search box, and click the "BLAST" button.  Any significant…

Links 11/24/10

Links for you. Science: Money CAN buy happiness...well, sort of. Bridges that resist the rust: Strong, lightweight, easy-to-assemble arches with no steel bars may solve a New England problem Other: The Fastidious President Calling Bullshit on The News The ongoing, albeit amusing, battle to save Bristol Tax the transactions? Ensign played Reid in Angle debate prep; Angle once said dictators can have "good ideas" How the elections taught me to understand a comic book

We Can Haz HandCannon!

Mark, I find your post on DC v. Heller lacking in enthusiasm. It is not often that our Supreme Court finds a new constitutional right (except when big business wants more rights). We should celebrate this, thing--the Second Amendment. It must be important, right, since it becomes before the Third and Fourth! We should exercise it too. I'm a fan of the old school Colt 45 Auto: What handcannon are you going to buy?

Food Bill in the Senate this week!

Michael Pollan has the goods: However many worthwhile programs get tacked onto the farm bill to buy off its critics, they won't bring meaningful reform to the American food system until the subsidies are addressed -- until the underlying rules of the food game are rewritten. This is a conversation that the Old Guard on the agriculture committees simply does not want to have, at least not with us. In other words, contact your Senators today!

Last Second Holiday Gift Ideas: Dr. Who

If you know a Dr. Who fan and you plan to buy that person a present, consider the following: Doctor Who: The Complete Specials. This will be a much appreciated addition to anyone's library. A Sonic Screwdriver. Don't leave the Tardis without it! A Dalek Alarm Clock, which wakes you up to "Exterminate! Exterminate!!!" These were all on my short list of items to get Julia ... I ended up getting her something else, but perhaps for her birthday...

Hellish Yoghurt Diversification

There is a genre of complaints that I usually find a little silly: the Starbucks breakdown, which occurs when somebody's offered too many options. But now I've run into the problem myself. Yoghurt diversification. I buy most of our milk & yoghurt to save my wife some carrying. And the damn yoghurt, that was a single product when I was a kid, now presents me with a four-parameter choice! I need to make sure I get: Non-light Enviro-friendly Mild acidity Unflavoured

Australian bees are BETTER than American bees

So, you thought that Colony Collapse Disorder, which is causing billions of dollars in losses in American agriculture, was an act of nature? You poor fools! It's a plot, I tell yez. We Australians have hardier bees than you do, so they can carry an infectious disease that your weakly pathetic American bees just can't deal with. And it's no accident that we sent them to you. Now you have to buy our produce! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

We need a new gender

Because I'm really sick of sharing one with these pigs. Texas male Dan Patrick is proposing to buy unwanted babies for $500 a head, but only if you promise you were going to abort it if you didn't. Sleazeball male tries to dope date, gets caught be sharp-eyed female bartender. Male in pickup truck can't get a woman's attention by harrassing her, so he runs her over instead Really, they aren't my kind.

A study of climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems

I first saw this a while back: maybe 2 years ago, but CR reminded me of it recently. As far as I can tell it is genuine; the CIA offer to sell you it, though if you try to buy you get a 404. Why you'd buy it when others have it for free I don't know. I don't seem to have blogged it then; others did but just to push their own tedious ends (yes, its global cooling come again, don't all switch off at once). There are a couple of things to look at in a report like this. The most interesting is, presumably, what did the CIA think about climate change then. Slightly less interesting, but revealing…

Links for 2011-11-29

"They've traded more for cigarettes / than I've managed to express"; or, Dives, Lazarus, and Alice "Let us consider a simple economy with three individuals. Alice is a restaurateur; she has fed herself, and has just prepared a delicious turkey dinner, at some cost in materials, fuel, and her time. Dives is a wealthy conceptual artist, who has eaten and is not hungry, but would like to buy the turkey dinner so he can "feed" it to the transparent machine he has built, and film it being "digested" and eventually excreted. To achieve this, he is willing and able to spend up to $5000. ... Huddled…

Salon made me read David Brooks!

Brooks has this new book out called The Social Animal(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which has pretensions to being all sciencey, which is, I guess, why Salon asked me to review it, because so do I. Only it turned out to not be very sciencey at all, but a lumpy mélange of sciencey anecdotes tied together by a fictional story about two privileged upper middle-class twits named Harold and Erica…a badly written story, by the way, with two characters who were loathsomely tedious. How tedious? Read the excerpt in the New Yorker and find out. As the scientist went on to talk about the rush he got from…

Are MMORPGs "addictive"?

In our discussions of violence associated with video game play, we've frequently noted that there appear to be different effects depending on the type of video game. Some games are more violent than others, and some games reward violence while others discourage it. All this has an impact in terms of real-world behavior and attitudes. Some games have positive effects. One type of game -- one of the most popular types, in fact -- hasn't been studied nearly as much as the traditional arcade-style game: massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs. One of the studies of this type…

Textbooks: Jumped the Shark

Not sure if you know what Jump the shark means. I figured it was a common term. Here is the wikipedia entry. Or maybe you would like a graphic explanation. Here it is: So, why the attack on textbooks? The main reason is that I just posted a rant about forces (or abuse of the word force) and I am going for the combo attack (more points that way). Actually, this has been in my mind for quite some time. There was a post on Uncertain Principles that started me thinking about it again. I have been afraid to really speak my mind on this issue because I don't want to completely enrage the…

Friday Blog Roundup

Lisa Stiffler at Dateline Earth reports on the newest research on PBDEs (levels of this flame retardant in household dust correlate to levels in breast milk) and gives an update on Washington stateâs proposed PBDE ban. Jake Young at Pure Pedantry has an update on Eli Lilly's attempts to block the online distribution of documents that show that the company tried to play down the side effects of its schizophrenia drug Zyprexa. Mead Over at Global Health Policy commends the 22 Members of Congress who wrote to the US Trade Representative in support of Thailand's exercise of a compulsory license…

Science Blogging Conference - even if you are not coming, you can still participate

I can't believe that the Conference is only about 10 days away! Almost everything is set and ready to go and we are all very excited. If you look at the Program page, we have assembled a star-studded group of speakers and moderators who will lead sessions on a number of interesting topics. Of course, if you are registered, you will be there to participate in person. But even if you are not, you are not completely shut out - there are ways that you can participate from a long distance away. Go again to the Program page and you will notice that each session has a link to its own Discussion…

No Trust, No Science: Blogs and Best-Sellers in the Digital Age

This past weekend I attended the UBC Future in Science Journalism conference. It was a very well-organized (thanks Eric), cozy potpourri of scientists, journalists, editors, and authors (and I burned zero carbon to attend). I wanted to share a few things from BBC environmental correspondent Richard Black that might interest sciblings and their readers most. First off: the least trusted of all media sources is blogs. Have a look at this graph as well as the poll behind it: Blogs are, unsurprisingly, the least trusted media outlet. That said, ScienceBlogs was repeatedly singled out at…

What do you look like?

Sure, you know your face in a mirror. But what do you look like to the internet? Let's be honest - you've probably Googled yourself to see what comes up. Who hasn't? Well, now MIT has come out with an online program called "Personas" which artistically "uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity." Simply put, it shows you how the internet sees you. The developers explain exactly what it does: "Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them…

Senate to Vote on Mandatory Public Access to NIH Research Results

Via A Blog Around the Clock comes news that the Senate will be voting on mandatory public access to NIH research later this month (on September 28, apparently). Such a bill has already passed the House (in July 2007). The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is urging citizens to contact their Senators in support of this legislation. Check out the site for more information and for Senator contact information. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access offers these talking points: American taxpayers are entitled to open access on the Internet to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by…

Weird sex gone horribly wrong

Fain DB, McCormick GM. Vaginal "fisting" as a cause of death. Am J Forensic Med Pathol. 1989 Mar;10(1):73-5. It's too old to find online, so allow me to summarize the short abstract: Guy and girl are fooling around, guy sticks entire hand and part of forearm up girl's vagina, girl subsequently dies. That's all I've got. Edit: you can grab the paper here. --- Ivanovski O, Stankov O, Kuzmanoski M, Saidi S, Banev S, Filipovski V, Lekovski L, Popov Z. Penile strangulation: two case reports and review of the literature. J Sex Med. 2007 Nov;4(6):1775-80. Epub 2007 Sep 21. In essence, improper (…

Can You Pass Eighth Grade Spanish?

tags: Spanish, langauges, online quiz You Passed 8th Grade Spanish Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct! Could You Pass 8th Grade Spanish? How did you do? Did you think this online quiz was reflective of what one needs to know in eighth grade Spanish?

My mailbox is a funny place

Some days, my mailbox overflows with hilarity…like today. I got the new Roy Zimmerman CD! You should, too! It'll cheer any liberal to realize that you aren't alone, and you've got a theme song. But I also get other mail that's almost as funny, although not intentionally so. For some perverse reason, there are some of you readers out there who think you are making a statement and causing me grief by signing me up for conservative magazines and newsletters. You really shouldn't. You know what happens? It comes in the mail, I flip through it, I laugh, and I toss it in the trash. Then when the…

Neuromancer, Beedle and The Uses of Enchantment

I've been re-reading Neuromancer whilst putting my daughter to bed. Fear not, she gets stuff like The Tales of Beedle the Bard instead. Of the two, N is far and away the better book (wiki tells me that the novel appeared on Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language novels written since 1923; the authors utter ignorance of computing technology doesn't detract from it as a novel, though oddly wiki doesn't find room to mention how inaccurate his vision of cyberspace has proved). It's the ultimate look-n-feel book; you just let yourself get carried away with the flow, and ignore the…

George Stallings and Rev. Moon

John Gorenfeld was on the radio this morning in Detroit (click here to listen to the show), along with the Rev. George Stallings. For those of you not familiar with Rev. George Stallings, he is a maverick former Catholic priest who quit the priesthood and established his own quasi-Catholic church called Imani Temple. He did so after he was accused of molesting a former altar boy in 1989 and his bishop requested that he go into treatment, after which he split away from the church and started his own denomination. It was a strange mix of Afrocentric politics and Catholicism, which has now…

Now Available!

Check it out! " My new book Four Lives: A Celebration of Raymond Smullyan has just been released by Dover Publications. Don't know who Raymond Smullyan is? Well, buy the book and find out! Or you can read his Wikipedia page. Smullyan is best known for his many books of logic puzzles, but he has also written widely in mathematics and philosophy. He had a big influence on me growing up. I stumbled on to his book What Is the Name Of This Book? when I was about nine, He's currently 95, and he's still churning them out. So, for me, being asked to edit this tribute volume to him was a bit…

Patent Dispute Prevents Patients From Getting Promising Drug for Lou Gehrig's Disease

Speaking of the debate over patents interfering with medical care, there's a story in today's New York Times that mentions the drug Iplex, which has shown promise for treating Lou Gehrig's disease -- a deadly and thus far untreatable degenerative disease (also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).  From the article: Iplex ... is believed to protect the motor neurons whose death leads to paralysis in A.L.S. Some patients had persuaded their doctors to prescribe the drug when the F.D.A. approved it in late 2006 for children with growth deficiencies. "I started on Tuesday," Debbie Gattoni…