Science Practice
clock | November 11, 2008Here is a great example by Cameron Neylon:
It's a little embarrassing...
...but being straightforward is always the best approach. Since we published our paper in PLoS ONE a few months back I haven't been as happy as I was about the activity of our Sortase. What this means is that we are now using a higher concentration of the enzyme to do our ligation reactions. They seem to be working well and with high yields, but we need to put in more enzyme. If you don't understand that don't worry - just imagine you posted a carefully thought out recipe and then discovered you couldn't get that same…
clock | November 10, 2008Tom Levenson has an interesting idea:
A Modest Proposal: A Science Initiative for the Obama Administration
But I'd like to lay down one relatively cheap marker that would, I think, have a significant impact on both the culture and the productivity of American scientific research to a degree disproportionate to the underlying amount of dollars. It's not a new idea, and hardly original to me -but seeing as it has been completely out of court for almost a decade, I think it bears repeating, even if it is old news to veterans of the business.
More on a Modest Proposal
In this post, I laid out a…
clock | October 31, 2008Duncan Hull and colleagues just published an excellent, must-read article - Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web:
Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as "thought in cold storage," and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries for the computational…
clock | October 27, 2008ScienceWoman gives us a heads-up on a new and interesting organization - UnderTheMicroscope.com:
The Feminist Press with IBM have just launched UnderTheMicroscope.com, a new site to involve young women in science and to encourage them to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math. The site is part of the Women Writing Science, a project initiated by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York and funded by the National Science Foundation.
The site features personal stories of women scientists, role models, and mentors; tips for parents and teachers; links to related…
clock | October 23, 2008The W. M. Keck Center for Behavioral Biology at North Carolina State University (which includes students, faculty and staff from Departments of Biology (formerly Zoology, my own Department), Genetics and Entomology) is a group I called home for a large chunk of my own graduate experience. Every year, on top of monthly discussion meetings for members, they organize other interesting events, including this one, coming up in two weeks:
The W. M. Keck Center for Behavioral Biology at North Carolina State University announces its 2008 Professional Development Workshop:
Publishing and Communicating…
clock | October 23, 2008
Yes, this has been in the works for a long time, and a few hints have been planted here and there over the past months, but now it is official - NASA and The Beagle Project have signed a Space Act Agreement and will work together on a host of projects including scientific research and education. You can read the details on The Beagle Project Blog - space, oceans, biology, science education, history of science, exploration and adventure: all at once. How exciting!
The text of the agreement is under the fold:
NASA and the HMS Beagle Trust have signed a Space Act Agreement for cooperation…
clock | October 13, 2008
I rarely jump on the blogging hype of noting the new Nobel Prize winners every year. Exceptions are cases when I have a different slant on it, e.g., when a Prize goes to someone in my neighborhood or if the winners have published in PLoS ONE and PLoS Pathogens (lots of loud cheering back at the office).
But usually I stay silent. Mainly because I am conflicted about the prizes in science in general, and Nobel in particular.
On one hand, one week every year, science is everywhere - in newspapers, on the radio, on TV, all over the internet. And that is good because it is a push strategy (…
clock | September 24, 2008Michael Nielsen wrote another long thought-provoking essay (for his book, I guess):
............Two clarifications are in order. First, when I say that these are examples of scientific facts beyond individual understanding, I'm not saying a single person can't understand the meaning of the facts. Understanding what the Higgs particle is requires several years hard work, but there are many people in the world who've done this work and who have a solid grasp of what the Higgs is. I'm talking about a deeper type of understanding, the understanding that comes from understanding the justification…
clock | September 21, 2008The September 2007 issue of JCOM - Journal of Science Communication - (issue 3, volume 7) is online.: Next issue will be online on the 18th December 2008. There are several articles in this issue that I find interesting and bloggable.
Contents:
EDITORIAL - The better you know, the better you make your choice. The need for a scientific citizenship in the era of knowledge by Pietro Greco:
Martin W. Bauer is right, two evolutionary processes are under way. These are quite significant and, in some way, they converge into public science communication: a deep evolution of discourse is unfolding,…
clock | September 15, 2008
First, there was the First NC Science Blogging Conference. Then, there was the Second NC Science Blogging Conference. And yes, we will have the Third one - renamed ScienceOnline'09 to better reflect the scope of the meeting: this time bigger and better than ever.
ScienceOnline'09 will be held Jan. 16-18, 2009 at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.
Please join us for this free three-day event to explore science on the Web. Our goal is to bring together scientists, bloggers, educators, students, journalists, writers, publishers, Web developers and others to discuss,…
clock | September 13, 2008Everything about the Science in the 21st Century conference at Perimeter Institute can be found here.
clock | August 28, 2008There is a new letter to Nature - Postdoc glut means academic pathway needs an overhaul - which I cannot read as I have no access, but others are discussing it on FriendFeed and there have been recent posts on the topic of endless/hopeless postdoc positions on DrugMonkey and The Alternative Scientist.
Bill sums it up the best graphically:
clock | August 27, 2008Why is the letter P the most useful for alliterative titles?
But back to the substance. One thing that bugged me for a long time is that I often see on blogs or hear in person a sentiment that "there are no comments on PLoS ONE". Yet I spend quite some time every week opening and reading all the new comments so I KNOW they are there and that there is quite a bunch of them already. Why the difference in perception? Is it due to the predictable distribution (a few papers get lots of comments, most get one or none, just like blog posts)?
So, when we saw this nice analysis of commenting on…
clock | August 15, 2008First Line of Defense:
A new facility at North Carolina State University will help provide increased protection to first responders by testing their turnout gear against potentially harmful chemical and biological threats.
The Man-in-Simulant Test (MIST) laboratory, located in NC State's College of Textiles, will allow researchers to evaluate the capabilities of protective garments against non-toxic vapors that resemble chemical and biological agents. The new facility will give researchers the necessary technological advances to provide test results and analysis faster than similar facilities…
clock | August 14, 2008My old neighbor, while I was living in Raleigh, is making some headlines now: Power to the People:
Within weeks of completing his master's degree in advanced analytics at North Carolina State University, Arren Fisher scored a job in data analysis at the Laboratory Corporation of America.
"It involves predictive modeling," Fisher explains. "In layperson's terms, super duper data mining."
Despite the tight national economy, Fisher and his classmates are getting lots of job offers because they're experienced users of the advanced software programs that marketing firms utilize to predict consumer…
clock | August 13, 2008Robert Bruce Thompson is the author of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, a book I have and like, but cannot really use as it is hard to get the chemicals. Thompson now writes a guest popst on MAKE blog: Home science under attack
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its contents.
Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He's…
clock | August 12, 2008The new blog carnival, covering the way science is changing (or not changing enough) in the 21st century - Praxis, is about to start. The call for submissions is now open - send them to me at Coturnix AT gmail dot com by August 14th at midnight Eastern so I can post the carnival on the 15th in the morning.
The business of science - from getting into grad school, succeeding in it, getting a postdoc, getting a job, getting funded, getting published, getting tenure and surviving it all with some semblance of sanity - those are kinds of topics that are appropriate for this carnival, more in…
clock | August 5, 2008Today, I have everything I need on my computer, and so do most working scientists as well. Papers can be found online because journals are online (and more and more are Open Access). Protocols are online. Books are online. Writing and collaboration tools are online. Communication tools are online. Data collection and data analysis and data graphing and paper-writing tools are all on the computer. No need for having any paper in the office, right? Right.
But remember how new that all is. The pictures (under the fold, the t-shirt is of Acrocanthosaurus at the NC Museum of Natural…
clock | August 4, 2008The new blog carnival, covering the way science is changing (or not changing enough) in the 21st century - Praxis, is about to start. The call for submissions is now open - send them to me at Coturnix AT gmail dot com by August 14th at midnight Eastern.
The business of science - from getting into grad school, succeeding in it, getting a postdoc, getting a job, getting funded, getting published, getting tenure and surviving it all with some semblance of sanity - those are kinds of topics that are appropriate for this carnival, more in analytic way than personal, if possible (i.e., not "I will…