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Is this thing on? We're back from the upgrade.
That's four librar* blogs here at ScienceBlogs, of course, with hopefully more to come. We're taking over! I'll let Dorothea introduce herself: I'm very pleased to welcome you all to The Book of Trogool, a brand-new blog about e-research. My name is Dorothea Salo, I'm an academic librarian, and I am fascinated with the changes that computers have wrought in the academic-research enterprise. I hope to explore those changes, and particularly library responses to them, in the company of the wonderful ScienceBlogs community. My thanks to John, Christina, and Walt for paving the way, and to Erin…
W00t! The newest libr* Scibling is none other than Dorothea Salo at The Book of Trogool.
seem to be for Bing, the re-branded "new" search engine from Microsoft. So that's ok (as is USAA - I've been a member since I was a midshipman or right after commissioning, I forget). (ew, ew, ew for some of the other ads!) Which reminds me that I need to do some posts on web searching... oh and I did post already on ads in electronic journals - which seems kind of related... so this is just another random post to break up heavy posts.
No need to click through... just sayin' they're on their way.
I'm so pleased that Walt Crawford has joined us as SciBlings! I've read Cites & Insights (sometimes people tease him by calling it Sites & Incites, but I don't recommend you try that) and his old blog for years as well as a few of his books. I'm a real fan. Yay us!
(I can't find anything wrong on the back end for previous post so let's see if this one is broken, too) :( update 1.2.3 3.2.1 test complete. error fixed, or so i believe.
Please check out and comment on John's post on Looking for Ideas for the Information Science Channel. So far: Information policy including open access, intellectual property, and gov't openness Information visualization Information architecture Publisher/publishing funding models: subscriptions, page charges, article charges Information search strategies Citations - importance of (for attribution? as a proxy for "quality"? not sure) Digital preservation including data curation Wow. I can't speak for John, but I only feel 100% comfortable in one of those areas. The "voting" never closes…
I believe in libraries and librarians. I think it was Dana Roth who posted this quote to a listserv: "To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many roads." ~Jon Bing, Professor of IT Law, Univ. of Oslo I hear this all the time - why do we need libraries? why do we need librarians? If it weren't for accreditation, we would get rid of this place... Young kids today, they can find whatever they need on the web. I can find it myself - why just the other day,…
Go on over and visit ScienceBlogs' newest librarian blogger: Christina Pikas at Christina's LIS Rant.
So there I was... merrily blogging along for 5 years... when all of the sudden... the borg needs librarians (and who doesn't?). Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a librarian in a university-affiliated research lab. Our lab does mostly physical sciences and engineering. My favorite things to research go BOOM or WHOOSH! I wrote a long post on what librarians do, but what you need to know about me, is that I do in-depth literature searching and I'm embedded in some teams. In-depth means that I might work 40 hours or so on something and the completed product is an annotated…
Here I am on ScienceBlogs, moved from the comfortable confines of my old blog, where I've been active since October 2002. The opportunity to come here was never anything I really expected or pursued, but now that I'm here I'm really excited to start this new chapter in my blogging existence. How did it happen, you ask? Well, it all started last week with a post I did about the "Are You a Librarian" survey that Seed was running on the site at the time. Basically, the survey was a marketing tool trying to encourage librarians to subscribe to Seed Magazine for their institutions. I was…
This is the final post ever at evolgen. It was a fun 4+ years, the last three spent at ScienceBlogs, but it has come time for me to close up shop. When I first got into blogging, I did it as a way to share what was on my mind to the few people who would read what I had to say (usually in topics related to evolution and genetics, but not always). It was a fun hobby, and my blog gave me a public venue to talk about articles I was reading, concepts that I found interesting, and summarize important areas of research. However, the blog has begun to feel more like a burden. I no longer post because…
Larry Moran points to a couple of posts critical of microarrays (The Problem with Microarrays): Why microarray study conclusions are so often wrong Three reasons to distrust microarray results Microarrays are small chips that are covered with short stretches of single stranded DNA. People hybridize DNA from some source to the microarray, which lights up if the DNA hybridizes to the probes on the array. Most biologists are familiar with microarrays being used to measure gene expression. In this case, transcribed DNA is hybridized to the array, and the intensity of the signal is used as a…
Population biologists often want to infer the demographic history of the species they study. This includes identifying population subdivision, expansion, and bottlenecks. Genetic data sampled from multiple individuals can often be applied to study population structure. When phylogenetic methods are used to link evolutionary relationships to geography, the approaches fall under the guise of phylogeography. The past decade has seen the rise in popularity of a particular phylogeographical approach for intra-specific data: nested clade analysis (Templeton et al. 1995; Templeton 2004). Many of…
Every year, the best science blog posts are collected in a book, the Open Laboratory (here are the 2006 and 2007 editions). Last year's edition included my cartoon, The Lab Fridge. It wasn't my best post of the year, but it filled one of the niche categories published in the book. Bora has been soliciting submissions for this year's edition of Open Lab. I've dug through my archives and found a few posts that I think are worthy of submission. Unfortunately, I'm the worst judge of my own writing, so I need some help. I've provided links to the short list of my best blogging of 2008 (up 'til…
Apparently, ScienceBlogs is loaded with white people. Hell, the whitest person I know blogs in this very domain. That got me thinking. Sure, we may look white. But are we really white? I mean, really white. So white that we like the stuff white people like. We do have someone who really likes graduate school: And we've got a Canadian: And someone who likes to study abroad: We look pretty white, huh? Well, it gets whiter. We've got a lawyer: A dog owner: Guys who like living by the water: And marathon runner: Man, we're the whitest group of whities I've ever been blinded by when the sun…
I can't draw for shit. And I've got crappy penmanship to boot. All in all, I don't end up with aesthetically pleasing creations when I put pen or pencil to paper. So it's ironic that my one blog post selected for the 2007 edition of the Open Lab is a comic that I made. It's called The Lab Fridge, and it's a play off of a PhD Comic. Thankfully, I had Illustrator at my disposal in creating the comic. I don't think it's my best post of the year, but it is the best (and only) comic that I drew this year. For those of you looking to make it into Open Lab next year, go for one of the niche…
In a list of the most overrated things, we're the Churchills of popular science: Popular science: ScienceBlogs. Politics gets more hits than science, so ScienceBlogs recruits screamers rather than interesting popularizers or important scientists. More here.
This is a repost (with some edits) of an introduction to publishing original research on blogs -- a series I am reintroducing. The original entry can be found here. In April of last year, Bora pushed the idea of publishing original research (hypotheses, data, etc) on science blogs. As a responsible researcher, I would need to obtain permission from any collaborators (including my advisor) before publishing anything we have been working on together. But what about small side projects or minor findings that I don't expect to publish elsewhere? As it turns out, such a project has been laying…