Science Practice
clock | March 28, 2007And in the marketplace. Jean-Claude Bradley was one of the people interviewed for a segment on Open Science on NPR's Marketplace this morning. You can read the transcript and hear the podcast here. Thanks Anton for the heads-up.
clock | March 19, 2007Just in case you have not seen it yet, Bee of Backreaction blog has posted an interesting trio of posts well worth reading (each in the series, IMHO, better than the previous): Science and Democracy, part I, part II and part IIi. They are a little physics-centric (especially part I), but if you squint just right, you can easily translate it into any scientific field you are ineterested in. Join in the commenting over there.
clock | February 19, 2007But, apparently, that is the least of the problems of this study of sexuality in West European menopausal women.
BTW, a "visual analogue scale" looks like this:
You jot a mark where you feel is the best spot that reflects your answer. The researcher than uses the ruler to put a number on it. Perhaps once iPhone is out in July, this kind of research will be possible.
clock | February 14, 2007Jennifer Ouellette has an article in the new issue of Nature about the travails of married science couples.
clock | February 12, 2007OK, this is really ancient. It started as my written prelims (various answers to various questions by different committeee members) back in November 1999, and even included some graphs I drew. Then I put some of that stuff together (mix and match, copy and paste) and posted (sans graphs) as a four-part post here, here, here and here on December 2004. Then I re-posted it in January 2005 (here, here, here and here). Finally, I reposted two of the four parts here on this blog (Part 2 and Part 3) in July 2006.
This all means that all this is quite out of date. The world has moved on, more…
clock | February 12, 2007
Yes, I was never a member of Boy Scouts (no such thing in Yugoslavia, of course), but I will gladly join the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique, the brand new organization founded by the folks of World's Fair and the Science Creative Quarterly. Steve of Omni Brain and John Lynch have already signed up.
Above Average Physique? I am super-skinny. But OK, I am tall. And energetic. And have a deep bass voice. That should count...
So, of the possible badges, which ones apply to me? Let's see...
The first one is obligatory for all members:
The "…
clock | February 5, 2007
Last week I asked if you would be interested in my take on this paper, since it is in Serbian (and one commenter said Yes, so here it is - I am easy to persuade):
Stankovic Miodrag, Zdravkovic Jezdimir A., and Trajanovic Ljiljana,Comparative analysis of sexual dreams of male and female students (PDF). Psihijatrija danas 2000, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 227-242
Here is the English-language Abstract:
The subject of research is analysis of connection between sexuality as instinctive function and dreams with sexual content as cognitive function. The sample consisted of 656 students, 245 males and 411…
clock | February 4, 2007Alan Sokal (famous for attacking the Lefty postmodernist abuse of science in the 1990s) and Chris Mooney (famous for attacking the Republican War on Science in the 2000s) sat down and wrote an excellent article in LA Times that came out today:
Can Washington get smart about science?
The article gives a historical trajectory of the problem, how it moved from political Left to the Right and what the new Democratic Congress is doing and still can do to bring back the respect for science, or for that matter, the appreciation for reality (which, no matter what the Bushies wish, they cannot make…
clock | January 30, 2007I am so glad to see that conversations started face-to-face at the Science Blogging Conference are now continuing online (see the bottom of the ever-growing linkfests here and here). While some are between science bloggers, as expected, others are between people who have never heard of each other before and who came from very different angles and with different interests. The cross-fertilization we hoped for is happening (and if you had such an experience, let us know)!
See, for instance, what a casual chat over lunch at the Conference did to David Warlick - made him think about education…
clock | January 29, 2007The 'Basic Concepts in Science" list is getting longer and longer every couple of hours or so, it seems. Try to keep up with it. You may even want to Google-bomb (by linking using the same words as Wilkins does) some or all of the posts if you think they should come up on top in Google searches for these terms. Dan adds his own contribution on Cell Migration and Jennifer makes a wish-list for the Top Ten Physics Concepts that need to be included. To those, I'd add the series on statistics by ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: Part 1: Samples, Part 2: Probability, Part 3: Sample Statistics, Part 4:…
clock | January 27, 2007More and more science bloggers are chiming in on the story about a nasty PR campaign against open-source publishing. See Revere, Alex, Steve, Tim and Corie for a taste and several more are linked from here. Also, read David Biello in Scientific American who wrote an article about it: Open Access to Science Under Attack
Update: Now WaPo chimes in here (thanks Alex).
Please go to discuss this on the SciAm blog.
clock | January 26, 2007SCIndex is a new online project that provides a searchable database of scientific publications in Serbia. Some papers are in Serbian language, others in English (and they all tend to have at least the Abstract in English) and all papers are available as PDFs for free download. KoBSON has more information about the project.
clock | January 25, 2007While the world is moving towards an Open Science model of exchange of scientific information, there are, as expected, forces that are trying to oppose it. Whenever there is a movement to change any kind of system, those most likely to lose will make a last-ditch and nasty effort to temporarily derail the progress. So, in this case, the Big Science Publishers have decided, instead of joining the new world of Open Science and using their brand names, their know-how and their infrastructure to become the leaders in the new system, and instead opted to go all mean and nasty. Once they finally…
clock | January 22, 2007If you went to the Open Source/Open Notebook session on Saturday or checked the podcast (linked in there) of it, you are probably familiar with some of the ideas revolutionizing the science publishing world.
One of the people on the forefront of thinking about these questions is Bill Hooker who just finished the third part of his trilogy guest-blogging on 3 Quarks Daily. Just in case you missed the first two installments, here are the links to all three - but take your time and check out the numerous links embedded in them:
The Future of Science is Open, Part 1: Open AccessThe Future of…
clock | January 1, 2007The conference is only 19 [13] days from today! It's getting really exciting!
The program is shaping really well:
On Thursday (January 18th) we will have a teach-in session. About 20 people have signed up so far (update: 30, thus the session is now full). We'll use Wordpress to help them start their own blogs, so I'll have to make one of my own in advance and play around to figure out the platform before I teach others.
On Friday (January 19th), we'll have dinner and all the bloggers present will read their posts. We have not decided on the place yet, but perhaps a site that has wifi, or…
clock | December 18, 2006Just How Useful Are Animal Studies To Human Health?:
Animal studies are of limited usefulness to human health because they are of poor quality and their results often conflict with human trials, argue researchers in a study online in the British Medical Journal.
Before clinical trials are carried out, the safety and effectiveness of new drugs are usually tested in animal models. Some believe, however, that the results from animal trials are not applicable to humans because of biological differences between the species.
So researchers compared treatment effects in animal models with human…
clock | December 16, 2006Including the work on circadian clocks in fruitflies by an old friend. I'm glad she managed to lose only about 6 weeks of work. When hurricane Fran hit Raleigh back in 1996, I lost 6 months!
clock | December 10, 2006Nature is going crazy starting a bunch of new blogs:
* Methagora: The Nature Methods blog and comment forum.
* Nautilus: A blog for past, present and future authors.
* Peer-to-peer: A blog for peer-reviewers and about the peer-review process.
* Spoonful of Medicine: Musing on science, medicine and politics from the editors of Nature Medicine.
clock | December 4, 2006Brookings Hamilton Project Issues New Papers on Science and Technological Innovation:
Experts Address how Education, Patent Reform, and Inducement Prizes in Science and Technology can aid Competitiveness and Growth.
Focusing attention on the importance of science and technology innovation to U.S. growth and competitiveness, The Hamilton Project, an initiative at the Brookings Institution, today released policy proposals to spur investments in innovation, research and the education of a highly skilled American workforce. The proposals were released on The Hamilton Project website ( www.…
clock | December 3, 2006Sandra Porter is having fun collecting all the new-fangled biological subdisciplines that end with "-omics". The final product of each such project also has a name, ending with "-ome".
You have all heard of the Genome (complete sequence of all the DNA of an organism) and the Genomics (the effort to obtain such a sequence), but there are many more, just look at this exhaustive list! In my written prelims back in 1999, I suggested that sooner or later there will be an organismome...until someone whispers that the term "physiology" already exists.
There are a couple of things that strike me…