clock | March 11, 2009From Sigma Xi:
NCSU molecular biologist Jorge Piedrahita has cloned pigs and explored why they are not carbon copies despite sharing the same DNA. Now he is trying to crack puzzles that could result in transgenic animals useful in human and veterinary medicine. His studies in cloned pigs led him to an unusual family of genes called imprinted genes, involved in placental function and fetal development. Recently he found they are implicated in human diseases too and is developing stem cell technologies in swine to try to speed up clinical applications in people.
To learn more, come hear…
clock | March 11, 2009Corporate journalists are, apparently, constitutionally incapable of escaping the 'false balance', i.e., "he said, she said" mode of writing. So they are trying mightily to equate Obama with Bush in any way they can. It doesn't matter if one is a pragmatic who is trying to do the best he can, is being honest and open, while the other was a lunatic who got us into this mess in the first place.
So, they say that both of them treat the press corps the same!?!
Or that both use signing statements the same!?!
Or ignoring the people who predicted the economic calamity!?!
Dan Froomkin analyzes this…
clock | March 11, 2009Darwin issue of a magazine is banned in Turkey:
The title summarizes all the lunacy at once. After all the censorship towards evolution (and many other things), Turkish government finally took a giant step -backwards- for all mankind and blocked the whole issue of a scientific magazine.
Darwin is now completely banned in Turkey. What a shame.
(Note that the above link belongs to RichardDawkins.net, which is another banned website in Turkey. Therefore readers from Turkey can not access it)
According to the news, the cover of the biggest and oldest magazine called Bilim ve Teknik (Science and…
clock | March 11, 2009Les Lang at the UNC Medical Center News Office now writes a blog - Hard Science. One recent post immediately caught my eye - Clocking Cancer:
You might say that Dr. Aziz Sancar is trying to clock cancer.
In a nifty double play involving a pair of recent publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the Sarah Graham Kenan professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UNC found in one study that tinkering with the circadian clock can suppress cancer growth, and in the other he and his lab team presented molecular data suggesting why timing just might be everything…
clock | March 11, 2009Cameron comes up with several persuasive reasons in Why good intentions are not enough to get negative results published:
The idea is that there is a huge backlog of papers detailing negative results that people are gagging to get out if only there was somewhere to publish them. Unfortunately there are several problems with this. The first is that actually writing a paper is hard work. Most academics I know do not have the problem of not having anything to publish, they have the problem of getting around to writing the papers, sorting out the details, making sure that everything is in good…
clock | March 11, 2009Bill decided to take a look:
Fooling around with numbers:
Interesting, no? If the primary measure of a journal's value is its impact -- pretty layouts and a good Employment section and so on being presumably secondary -- and if the Impact Factor is a measure of impact, and if publishers are making a good faith effort to offer value for money -- then why is there no apparent relationship between IF and journal prices? After all, publishers tout the Impact Factors of their offerings whenever they're asked to justify their prices or the latest round of increases in same.
There's even some…
clock | March 11, 2009American Carnivores Evolved To Avoid Each Other, New Study Suggests:
How do the many carnivorous animals of the Americas avoid competing for the same lunch, or becoming each other's meal? A possible answer comes from a new study by a pair of researchers at the University of California, Davis. Their large-scale analysis shows that it's not just chance that's at play, but avoidance strategies themselves that have been a driving force in the evolution of many carnivores, influencing such factors as whether species are active daytime or nighttime, whether they inhabit forests or grasslands, or…
clock | March 10, 2009Don't watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.
- Sam Levenson, 1911 - 1980
clock | March 10, 2009Dave Winer interviews Jay Rosen about "curmudgeons, then on to rebooting journalism, Meet The Press, the broken government, and everything related...."
Listen to the podcast here
clock | March 10, 2009Because they write lies?
Bill Clinton actually used signing documents way more than George W. Bush. But No. 42 is a Democrat and his wife currently works for Obama. So No. 44 is on a big tear right now to distance himself instead from No. 43, the Republican, who's back in Texas and doesn't care but just hearing his name trashed makes Democrats feel good. (See, also more Bush distancing in The Ticket on today's stem cell changes here.)
B-b-b-b-ut!!!!???
Bush challenges hundreds of laws:
President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office…
clock | March 10, 2009Five tips for citizen journalism from ProPublica's new "crowdsorcerer":
On Thursday, the non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica named Amanda Michel its first "editor of distributed reporting." Her title alone suggests the future of news gathering, and so does her background: Michel was director of The Huffington Post's citizen-journalism effort, Off the Bus, which enlisted 12,000 volunteers to cover the 2008 presidential campaign.
Michel wrote a must-read account of the project for Columbia Journalism Review, and she expounded on the experience in an hour-long interview with me…
clock | March 10, 2009Joe Scarborough Is An Idiot and this explains why, but most importantly defines the best what Jon Stewart and The Daily Show are really all about:
First and foremost, the show is a critique of the media. It is not "fake news." It is not "funny riffs on the headlines," a la "Weekend Update." It is a lampoon of media excess. As any veteran watcher can tell you, it has ALWAYS been "attacking people like [Cramer]." George W. Bush was just value-added content.
Howard Kurtz goes further:
If you think Jon Stewart is merely funny, you're missing the point.
The Comedy Central guy is one of the…
clock | March 10, 2009Written by Allen Dodson in ASBMB Today: Communicating Science in an Online World. The PDF does not allow me to copy and paste a quote, so just click and read for yourself.
clock | March 10, 2009NY Times and 'Serious' Journalism:
Also in the Sunday edition, however, was the paper's long-demanded interview with Obama, which the Times somewhat arrogantly considers its birthright with every new president. The reporters used the opportunity to learn a few things about Obama's work and goals. But in the process one reporter, Peter Baker, asked one of the most idiotic questions I've ever heard from a reputable news organization. He asked if Obama was a socialist, and then, when Obama said no, followed up with, "Is there anything wrong with saying yes?" Obama, for his part, called the paper…
clock | March 10, 2009Richard Poynder asks an important question: Open and Shut?: Open Access: Who would you back?:
But as the OA movement has developed an interesting question has arisen: should Green and Gold OA be viewed as concurrent or consecutive activities?
This is not an issue of intellectual curiosity alone: it has important strategic implications for the OA movement. It requires, for instance, that the movement decides whether to treat Green and Gold OA as complementary or competitive activities; and if they are competitive, then where the OA movement should focus its main efforts ...
What do you think?
clock | March 10, 2009Gunnar Engblom has another hit: Twitter for birders - Part 1. An introduction - which starts introductory enough, but I am intrigued by the last sentence:
In part 2 of "Twitter for birders" I will tell you how something called hashtags will revolutionize birding and make all bird alert services obsolete in a near future.
Can't wait to see what it really means....
clock | March 10, 2009Web usage data outline map of knowledge:
When users click from one page to another while looking through online scientific journals, they generate a chain of connections between things they think belong together. Now a billion such 'clickstream events' have been analysed by researchers to map these connections on a grand scale.
The work provides a fascinating snapshot of the web of interconnections between disciplines, which some data-mining experts believe reveals the degree to which work that is not often cited -- including work in the social sciences and humanities -- is widely consulted…
clock | March 10, 2009In the Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship: The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing:
...This statement by Deutsche Bank is an astonishing comment on the profitability of the industry. The notion that Elsevier, and therefore the other commercial publishers, add "little value to the publishing process" and cannot justify the high profit margins is significant. This statement by Deutsche Bank, while aimed towards investors, reveals the skepticism of investment…
clock | March 10, 2009This month's Science Cafe (description below) will be held on March 24th at Tir Na Nog. Our speaker is Dr. David Reif from the US Environmental Protection Agency. That evening we will be talking about the interplay between our genetic makeup and our environment & lifestyles. We will also discuss human genetics with a focus on evolutionary theory. Here is a link (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1879213,00.html#) to an interesting article by a popular author, Carl Zimmer that you might find fun to read. The article gives some background on Darwin and the ideas behind his…
clock | March 10, 2009Still recovering. Flights were smooth. I finally finished Jennifer Rohn's book on the airplane. I hated my Chapel Hill neighbors, lounging at the pool in 78F, as I was leaving for the cold, snowy Boston. But now I'm back.
The first night, a bunch of us went to the Science Cafe and discussed the possibility of intelligent life in the Universe and methods to find them if they are out there.
And had some dinner as well...
On Monday, we gathered at WGBH station, in a nice, modern, green building, and about 20 of us discussed the PRI/BBC/NOVA/SigmaXi/WGBH/World project: how to build an online…