Science Practice
clock | November 30, 2006You may remember when I mentioned the announcement of the new open-source online journal JoVE, a peer-reviewed journal of scientific methods in which submissions are provided in video form. Pimm, Eva, Jonah and Nick have also commented on it and Pimm prvides a look at the rate at which the news about the journal spread over the internet.
I have been thinking about this a little and I am wondering if we can predict what kinds of techniques are most likely to be found there - and what kinds will not.
I am assuming that showing how one uses a standard kit with no alterations of the protocol…
clock | November 28, 2006I wish that, many many years ago when I was becoming a biologist, that I could have read this wonderful little book - On Becoming a Biologist by John Janovy! What a little gem!
On the surface, or by looking at the Table of Contents, this slim volume appears to be just yet another in a long line of books giving advice to people who are interested about joining the profession. And sure, it does contain important information about getting accepted into a program, choosing one's project, teaching, research, publishing, getting funded, giving talks etc. But it is also much more than that. The…
clock | November 17, 2006Have you ever read a paper in your field and wondered "how'd they done it?!" You read the "Materials and Methods" closely, again and again, and still have no idea how exactly was the procedure done. You want to replicate the experiment, or use the same technique for your own questions, but have no clue how to go about it.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I guess that a video is worth a thousand pictures. So, learn the experimental techniques by watching videos of people actually doing them. You can do that on the brand new journal, just starting November 30th:
Journal…
clock | November 2, 2006This week's question in the Ask a ScienceBlogger series is:
What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded?
The first and obvious answer is, of course, "my field", whatever it is.
But then....
But then I thought about my own field of chronobiology and I think that its funding goes as overal funding goes. When there is a lot of money to go around, clock researchers get their fair share. When everyone is suffering, so does my field. After all, circadian field is deemed pretty "sexy" - it was a runner-up in the year-end popularity lists of the Science magazine at…
clock | October 30, 2006Bill Hooker has joined the blogging stable at 3 Quarks Daily - congratulations! He is starting with an excellent and well-documented article about Open Access Publishing.
clock | October 22, 2006...the way to conduct a scientific experiment - with no oversight and secretly endangering people who are uninformed they are subject in the project.
clock | October 11, 2006Meandering Musings on evolutionary psychology and many other things (from February 15, 2005)...
I remember when PZ Myers posted this exercise on his blog. The point was to show how much all of modern biology is based on and dependent on evolutionary theory because of oft-repeated bizzare claim by Creationists that this is not so.
Now Josh Rosenau has embarked on expanding this project and has started a pair of blogs just for this purpose. One blog, The Evolution Project will track recently published scientific papers that more or less explicitely are based on evolutionary theory, while its…
clock | October 7, 2006Earlier, I wondered how many familial relationships there were among Nobel Prize winners. Commenters gave some examples. Now, Ruchira Paul did the research and found them all. Biggest surprose for me: Nikko Tinbergen's brother got a Nobel in economics three years before his more famous brother!
clock | October 5, 2006
Jean-Claude Bradley is the pioneer in the use of blogs in science in the way that too many of us are still too scared to do - posting on a daily basis the ideas, methods and data from the lab. He and his collaborators are using the blogs Useful Chemistry, Useful Chem Experiments 1 and Usefulchem-Molecules, as well as the UsefulChem Project wiki to exchange information, brainstorm and inform the public of their work. These sites serve as laboratory notebooks open for everyone to see.
So, I am delighted to tell you that Jean-Claude will be coming to the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging…
clock | October 2, 2006Rethinking Peer Review:
In reality, peer review is a fairly recent innovation, not widespread until the middle of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, many science journals were commandingly led by what Ohio State University science historian John C. Burnham dubbed "crusading and colorful editors," who made their publications "personal mouthpieces" for their individual views. There were often more journals than scientific and medical papers to publish; the last thing needed was a process for weeding out articles.
In time, the specialization of science precluded editors from being…
clock | September 17, 2006It's looking good. Certainly much smaller than the roomful of metal we are used to seeing in hospitals.
Do you remember when computers used to fill entire rooms? Now take a look at your cell phone. Now think MRI in 10-20 years...
See what I'm getting at?
I am patiently waiting for the time when MRIs are small and light enough to be mounted on heads of freely behaving animals (in the wild or in captivity), at least large animals like elephants, dolphins, horses, crocs or sharks... Then you use radiotelemetry to get the info loaded on your computer and you observe the brain activity in…
clock | September 16, 2006The phrase "Living Fossil" is second to only "Missing Link" on my list of irks-me-to-no-end abuses of English language. Darren Naish now explains exactly what is wrong with the term, using as the case study the recent rediscovery of the Sumatran rhino. This is your Most Obligatory reading of the day!
clock | September 8, 2006You may remember this chart from three days ago. Now, Rob Loftis updated his chart after the inputs of a number of bloggers and commenters over the past few days, and John Dupuis has his own chart he uses in teaching about the flow of scientific information.
clock | September 4, 2006If you need ideas how to help various science-related causes, Nick has collected a lot of information you can use.
clock | September 1, 2006 In light of the recent cases of researchers quitting animal research under the duress of threats and attacks by Animal Rights groups, e.g., Dr. Ringach at UCLA, this may be a good time to repost this old rant from May 23, 2005 (originally here, then reposted here on January 16, 2006):
The story about the class dissection of a dog stirred quite a lot of controversy, including heated exchanges in the comments of these two posts on Pharyngula.
I joined in late to that discussion, not because I missed it, but because I did not know what to say before I knew more about the case, and also because…
clock | August 29, 2006From quite early on in my blogging endeavor, I was interested in exploring science blogging, what it is, what it can do, and what it can become. So, check out some of my earliest thoughts on this here and here.
Then, over about a month (from April 17, 2006 to May 17, 2006) I wrote a gazillion posts on this topic, and many science bloggers chimed in in the comments or on their own blogs. The repost of all of them together is under the fold. Check the originals (and comments) here:
April 17, 2006: Publishing hypotheses and data on a blog - is it going to happen on science blogs?
April 20,…
clock | August 24, 2006Hsien Hsien Lei is continuing her series of interviews of science bloggers, and today is my turn. As you have learned to expect by now, my answers are long and wordy. But the questions are interesting, so I hope you like the answers as well. Check it out here.