culture of science
ddobbs | May 12, 2010Traveling. But here's what I'm reading during train, plane, and bus rides -- and over meals:
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Gravity-defying ramps take illusion prize. This contest always produces fascinating stuff. This time, the ball rolls up. Video here.

Vaughan Bell ponders cortisol, dopamine, neuroplasticity, and other things that set off his bullshit detector. Riff launched from a post from Neuroskeptic on cortisol and childcare scare stories, equally read-worthy.
Dan Vorhaus does a wonderful round-up of reactions and implications stemming from the news that genetic testing is coming to Walgreens. Best blog-…
ddobbs | May 11, 2010
I've been deemed a pusher, and that's a good thing.
The accuser is Colin Schultz, a busy, curious, and inquisitive young journalist who awarded a story of mine his first annual prize for "push" science journalism. First of all let me say I'm pleased, mainly because the story, " A Depression Switch?", about neurologist Helen Mayberg's experiment using deep brain stimulation to treat depression, is one of the most fascinating, enthralling, and rewarding I've ever worked on.
But what is this push journalism business? Push science journalism, says Colin, is science writing that…
jdupuis | May 11, 2010I have a few conferences coming up and I thought I'd share my schedule just in case any of you out there in sciencelibrarianblogland will also be attending.
I'll list them in order, along with whatever I'll be presenting.
BookCamp Toronto, May 15, Toronto
9:30: eBooks in Education and Academia -- the glacial revolution
John Dupuis (York University)
Evan Leibovitch (York University)
Description: Despite growing public acceptance of eBooks, two areas in which they could offer the most benefit -- education and academia -- are far behind the eBook mainstream. This session will discuss issues…
ddobbs | May 3, 2010
Newscom/Zuma, via TPM
Brains, genes, and taxes won the month.
How does Williams syndrome prevent racism? It's subtle
Ed Yong, Mo Costandi, Scientific American, and others have covered nicely a new paper finding that people with WIlliams syndrome (a condition I've been interested in since writing a long feature about it for the Times Magazine a few years back) show little or no racial bias. But I wanted to add one thought about the finding.
Most of the write-ups have emphasized, rightly, that people with Williams tend to show little or no social fear -- a lack that could explain a lack of…
ddobbs | April 29, 2010I had the pleasure of attending the Genomes, Environment, and Traits conference on Tuesday. Was wonderful and strange, with many inspiring, exciting, and/or entertaining moments -- and a few things a bit worrisome.
The twitter feed from the event tracks the talks and agenda pretty thoroughly; it's far better than my own notes. I especially enjoyed the morning's main event, in which a tag team of Robert Krulwich and Carl Zimmer called to stage for interviews different combinations of 13 the 10 "pioneers" who had been among the first to have their entire genomes run. As a journalist, I had…
jdupuis | April 28, 2010A great two-part series on great computing museums from the last few issues of Communications of the ACM (here and here).
The museums they profile are:
The Computer History Museum
The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum
The Science Museum in London
The Deutches Museum
U.S. National Museum of American History
I'll include an extra bit from the first CACM article on the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. I'm choosing that one because as it happens I'll almost certainly be visiting it this coming July. I'm fortunate to have been invited to the annual Science Foo Camp, which happens to be at…
jdupuis | April 22, 2010A small selection from some tables of content from a few recent journals and proceedings. These will require subscription access to the ACM Digital Library.
Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
Connecting k-16 curriculum & policy: making computer science engaging, accessible, and hospitable for underrepresented students by Joanna Goode
Computational thinking for the sciences: a three day workshop for high school science teachers by Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, Dennis Brylow, et al.
Connecting across campus by Mark D. LeBlanc, Tom Armstrong, Michael B. Gousie
Teaching communication…
jdupuis | April 20, 2010That's the topic for the most recent Schubmehl-Prein Prize for Best Essay on Social Impact of Computing.
The Schubmehl-Prein Prize for best analysis of the social impact of a particular aspect of computing technology will be awarded to a student who is a high school junior in academic year 2009-2010. The first-place award is $1,000, the second-place award is $500, and the third-place award is $250. Winning entries are traditionally published in the Association for Computing Machinery's Computers and Society online magazine.
The winners of the 2009 contest are published in the most recent…
jdupuis | April 15, 2010A month or so ago I posted on Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?, basically on the challenges that scholarly societies face in the digital age. I got a few good comments, getting a nice discussion going.
I also posed a few questions directly to scholarly societies but unfortunately didn't get any comments from any of the various societies themselves. I did find that a bit disappointing in that the public conversation seemed to be happening without them. Never a good thing in the digital age.
Today, however, Kevin Marvel of the American Astronomical Society added a comment to my original…
ddobbs | April 1, 2010
After I wrote in my Atlantic article about getting my serotonin transporter gene assayed (which revealed that I carry that gene's apparently more plastic short-short form), I started getting a lot of email â several a week â from readers asking how to have their SERT gene tested. This led to an interesting hunt.
It was a hard question to answer. I couldn't just tell people to do what I did, for a psychiatric researcher/MD I'd known for years, who specializes in depression and serotonin, had done mine as a sort of favor to science and journalism. That researcher also stood by, had I needed…
ddobbs | April 1, 2010
from "Would dew believe it: The stunning pictures of sleeping insects covered in water droplets," at the Daily Mail
Given the day, we find both foolishness and meat.
Fun stuff first:
Science, Nature Team Up on New Journal - ScienceNOW
Does the WTF1 gene trigger the inferior supra-credulus? @edyong209 falls for the whole thing: http://bit.ly/bLlzqx
Getting real:
Is the Mirror Neuron theory unfalsifiable?: Greg Hickok thinks so.
Pfizer paid $35m to MDs and Researchers. Latter claim $ doesn't influence practice.. Somebody's mistaken.http://s.nyt.com/u/N5m
Motherly love may alter genes for…
jdupuis | March 30, 2010The second Book Camp TO is coming up in about 6 weeks or so: Saturday, May 15, 2010 from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM.
Last year's edition was terrific and I'm really looking forward to another great conference.
What's it about?
What: BookCampTO is a free unconference about the future of books, reading, writing and publishing. Ebooks have arrived, and with them great changes are afoot. BoomCampTO 2010 will focus on what happens next, how this big shift to digital is changing different parts of the book business, and how we are adapting. Our focus is not so much on ebooks as everything else.
When:…
jdupuis | March 26, 2010Wednesday was Ada Lovelace Day!
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.
The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hundreds of blogs worldwide.
In 2010 Ada…
ddobbs | March 26, 2010
from a different Daily Dish -- 365 petri dishes, by Klari Reis
House of Wisdom, the splendid new blog on Arabic science from Mohammed Yahia, editor of Nature Middle East describes an effort to map the Red Sea's coral reefs with satellite, aerial, adn ship-based technologies. Nice project and a promising new blog.
Brain and Mind
Ritalin works by boosting dopamine levels, says a story in Technology Review, reporting on a paper in Nature Neuroscience. The effect is to enhance not just attention but the speed of learning.
As several tweeters and bloggers have noted, H-Madness is a new group blog…
ddobbs | March 19, 2010
Cordyceps in glass, by glass artist Wesley Fleming -- a strange depiction of a rather horrid business. For more, do go to the source, the lovely Myrmecos Blog, which is all about bugs.
Now, the best of the week's gleanings. I'm going to categorize them from here out, and at least try to keep them from being from completely all over everywhere about everything.
Mind, brain, and body (including those gene things)
While reading Wolpert's review of Greenberg's book about depression (he didn't much like it), I found that the Guardian has a particularly rich trove of writings and resources on…
jdupuis | March 18, 2010I received an email a couple of weeks ago from Daniel Cromer of the Hrenya Research Group located in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His group was interested in expanding their online presence and had stumbled up the presentation I'd given a couple of years ago on Academic Blogging: Promoting your Research on the Web. He asked me if I could explore those same ideas in a short presentation to the group.
That was Monday. Sadly, I wasn't able to actually go to Colorado for the presentation -- it was all online using the…
jdupuis | March 17, 2010An interesting and provocative article in The Scientist by Steven Wiley iof the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, To Join or Not to Join.
The thrust of the article is that scholarly societies are having trouble offering true value to their members in the Internet age, that their business models and even their raisons d'etre are being disrupted.
In years past, the answer was easy because being a member came with tangible benefits, such as inexpensive journals and the ability to submit abstracts to annual meetings. Nowadays, these perks don't seem very important. Most society…
ddobbs | March 16, 2010
image Bill Waterson
Ed Yong, responding to a run of recent rumination about the nature and role of science journalism, ponders the value of the "This is cool" science story:
None of this is intended to suggest that "this-is-cool" stories are somehow superior to those explaining the interaction between science, policy and society, or what David Dobbs calls the "smells funny" stories. They are simply the stories that I prefer to tell. Individual journalists can specialise in one or more of these areas but across the science writing population, we ultimately need a mix of approaches.
Two points…
jdupuis | March 15, 2010ISTL is a great resource for those of us in science and technology libraries. I'm happy to report on the tables of contents from the last two issues.
Winter 2010
Evaluation of an Audience Response System in Library Orientations for Engineering Students by Denise A. Brush, Rowan University
Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography by A. Ben Wagner, University at Buffalo
Information Portals: A New Tool for Teaching Information Literacy Skills by Debra Kolah, Rice University and Michael Fosmire, Purdue University
Are Article Influence Scores Comparable across Scientific…