culture of science
jdupuis | January 10, 2011
Research intelligence - Rip it up and start again
David Thornburg on Open-Source Textbooks
"Beginnings Are Always Messy": Thoughts on Transliteracy and Inquiry from a Learning Advocate
Student Blogging about Physics
Follow-up: Transliteracy, Theory, and Scholarly Language
Lib-Value Website Now Available
The Rise of 'Convergence' Science
How Will Students Communicate?
Study: Labour market outcomes of Canadian doctoral graduates
Predictions 2010: The Growth of Intimacy
'Saturday Night Live,' Floor Wax, and the Life of the Mind
10 Things Facebook Won't Say
Going beyond a single scientific…
jdupuis | December 31, 2010Ok, this is just plain hysterical. And insightful. And both insightfully hysterical and hysterically insightful.
Enjoy.
Here's a taste, read the whole thing for yourself.
50. "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning."
- Rick Cook
38. "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."
- E.W. Dijkstra
17. "If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred…
jdupuis | December 19, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, is from November 14, 2006.
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This year, during my sabbatical, I'm really trying to read a lot of science non-fiction, as opposed to my usual diet of science…
jdupuis | December 17, 2010For those that haven't heard about the NASA/arsenic bacteria story that's been exploding all over the science blogosphere over the last couple of weeks, I like the summary over at Jonathan Eisen's Tree of Life blog:
NASA announced a major press conference
at the conference they discussed a new Science paper claiming to show the discovery of a microbe that could replace much/some of its phosphate with arsenic
initial press coverage of the paper was very positive and discussed the work as having profound implications for understanding of life in the universe - though some scientists in some of…
jdupuis | December 16, 2010Two recent announcements that are worth noting here.
The first is for Digital Science, a Macmillan / Nature Publishing Group project involving some of the usual science online suspects like Timo Hannay and Kaitlin Thaney and some others in a really dynamic-looking multi-disciplinary team.
The press release is here and the about page here.
Digital Science provides software and information to support researchers and research administrators in their everyday work, with the ultimate aim of making science more productive through the use of technology. As well as developing our own solutions, we…
jdupuis | December 9, 2010Yes, it was quiet for a while there, but it seems that change and disruption are inevitable in the world of science blogging.
Welcome to Yet Another Science Blogging Community: Occam's Typewriter.
Apparently born amidst much controversy and drama, it's a new community formed mostly (all?) from former Nature Network bloggers. For at least a bit of the inside story, run on over to NN survivor Eva Amsen's blog for My friends moved away, but I have their new addresses which seems to nicely encapsulate the science blogging world over the last six months or so.
Anyways, here's the really very fine…
jdupuis | December 9, 2010...Instead of a different Creative Commons license, such as CC-BY? Or just with normal copyright restrictions?
(You can get an explanation of CC0 here: it implies relinquishing all rights and essentially means releasing something into the public domain.)
A good question, one that I attempted to answer as part of my Exploring Open Science session at Brock University several weeks back. While I was talking about the importance of Open Data within the Open Science movement, one of the audience members very properly pressed the point of why it's important for data to be open.
I think I gave…
jdupuis | December 4, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of The Republican War on Science, is from January 24, 2007.
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The is a fine and necessary book, one that uncovers a lot of history and a lot of current events that I certainly didn't know about. Being a Canadian…
jdupuis | November 29, 2010Via Bora Zivkovic, I see that there's a new blog in town -- this one devoted to the joys of scientists blogging to advance their work.
It's called Science of Blogging and it's by Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders who blog at Obesity Panacea.
I'll let them explain their mission:
Social media provides a tremendous outlet by which to translate and promote scientific knowledge and engage the public discourse. All scientists, researchers, clinicians, government and not-for-profit organizations have much to gain by adopting an effective and viable social media strategy.
Science of Blogging will…
jdupuis | November 23, 2010A terrific new edition of The Journal of Electronic Publishing (v13i2), focusing on the future of university presses and, by extension, of scholarly publishing as a whole.
A lot of terrific-looking articles:
Editor's Note for Reimagining the University Press by Phil Pochoda
Reimagining the University Press: A Checklist for Scholarly Publishers by Peter J. Doughtery
Reimagining the University Press by Kate Wittenberg
Stage Five Book Publishing by Joseph J. Esposito
Next-Generation University Publishing: A Perspective from California by Daniel Greenstein
What Might Be in Store for Universities…
jdupuis | November 18, 2010Via my York University Computer Science & Engineering colleague Andrew Eckford, two contrasting blog posts by two different Harvard computer science profs. One has decided to leave academia for greener pastures at Google and the other has decided to stay.
First, Matt Welsh on leaving.
There is one simple reason that I'm leaving academia: I simply love work I'm doing at Google. I get to hack all day, working on problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more interesting than I can work on at any university. That is really hard to beat, and is worth more to me than having "Prof." in…
jdupuis | November 8, 2010Warning: I generally don't post about religion/atheism/new atheism or any of those similar topics. I also don't generally post about my own views on such subjects. This post clearly will be breaking those habits. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Now on to the review proper...
First of all, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way. Yes, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in any god, old- or new-fashioned. I have no spiritual feelings at all really, including any vague "search for a higher meaning or sense of transcendence." I tend to find those sorts of feelings a little odd and…
jdupuis | November 5, 2010York University Computer Science & Engineering professor Anestis Toptsis was kind enough recently to invite me to speak to his CSE 3000 Professional Practice in Computing class.
He gave me two lecture sessions this term, one to talk about library-ish stuff. In other words, what third year students need to know about finding conference and journal articles (and other stuff too) for their assignments and projects. You can find my notes here, in the lecture 1 section.
In the second session, which I gave yesterday, he basically let me talk about anything that interested me. So, of course,…
jdupuis | October 27, 2010A week or two ago, in a comment on the Blogging Groups and Ethics post, I lamented that I always seem to be reading the same librarianish blogs, not mixing it up too much. I wished that we might have a blogging community to assemble around, or at least a good aggregator.
Well, Bora Zivkovic challenged me in the comments to at very least aggregate scitech librarian blogs for the ScienceBlogging.org site.
It's taken me a while, but I've done it.
Using the list I previously created for the List of Science & Technology Librarian Blogs I created a Friendfeed group which Bora has since…
jdupuis | October 22, 2010As I mentioned a few days ago, the kind librarians of Brock University in St. Catherines, ON invited me to give a talk as part of their Open Access Week suite of events.
I've included my slides for the presentation below. There was a small but engaged group of mostly librarians that turned up.
Please don't let the high number of slides deter you from zipping through the presentation. A good chunk of the slides only have a couple of words on them and another good chunk are screen shots of xkcd strips.
The slides are in our IR here and on Google Docs here.
I'd like to thank Barbara…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010The kind librarians at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario have invited me to help them celebrate Open Access Week!
Their rather impressive lineup of OA Week events (and I'm not just saying this because I'm involved, believe me) is here.
My part is a talk I'm giving on Wednesday:
Wednesday, October 20 2-3:30
Exploring Open Science
Join John Dupuis, Head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library, York University, for a discussion of how Science and Technology academics and publishers are responding to the growing open access movement and the changing nature of research in…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010It's Open Access Week this week and as part of the celebrations I thought I highlight a recent declaration by the Open Bibliographic Working Group on the Principles for Open Bibliographic Data. It's an incredible idea, one that I support completely -- the aim is to make bibliographic data open, reusable and remixable. Creating a bibliographic data commons would lead to many opportunities to create search and discovery tools that would be of great benefit to scholarship, education, research and development.
I won't try and explain the details of the declaration since it's released under a CC…
jdupuis | October 15, 2010The latest Cites & Insights (v10i11) is out and in it Walt Crawford explores some of the recent developments in the blogging landscape in a section called The Zeitgeist: Blogging Groups and Ethics. It's a very good overview and analysis of what's going on both in the science and librarian blogospheres.
It's well worth checking out. Some highlights:
Blogging Groups and Ethics
Do you blame Roy Tennant when the Annoyed Librarian writes posts that undermine librarianship and libraries?
I'm guessing you don't. Whoever the Library Journal incarnation of the Annoyed Librarian might or might…
jdupuis | October 5, 2010This year's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing took place this past week in Atlanta, GA.
I thought I'd gather together some small part of the blog posts I've been seeing floating around the Internets on this wonderful event.
Opening Session of Grace Hopper Conference - 2010
Dancing with Hundreds of Technical Women at Grace Hopper
The Impact of the Grace Hopper Celebration
It's the most wonderful time of the year
Back from GHC10@tlanta, now time to retrospect
Together, We Are Big Fish!
Grace Hopper Celebration 2010 : Day 2 (29 September)
Open Source Codeathon for Humanity (a…
jdupuis | October 1, 2010You can always tell it's Nobel season -- because that's when the Ig Nobel prizes are announced!
The 2010 laureates have been announced. Here are some "highlights:"
ENGINEERING PRIZE: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.
REFERENCE: "A Novel Non-Invasive Tool for Disease Surveillance of Free-Ranging Whales and Its Relevance to Conservation Programs," Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse,…