clock | March 3, 2009There are 16 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites.
First, one for our new Palaeontology Collection:
Bird-Like Anatomy, Posture, and Behavior Revealed by an Early Jurassic Theropod Dinosaur Resting Trace:
Fossil tracks made by non-avian theropod dinosaurs commonly…
clock | March 3, 2009Kim Hannula of 'All of My Faults Are Stress-Related ' has just moved today from her old blog to her new blog here on Scienceblogs.com. Is this the fourth geoblogger here? I think so.
Anyway, go and say Hello!
clock | March 3, 2009John Conyers and Open Access:
Pushed by scientists everywhere, the NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge. Proprietary publishers, however, didn't like it. And so rather than competing in the traditional way, they've adopted the increasingly Washington way of competition -- they've gone to Congress to get a law to ban the business model they don't like. If H.R. 801 is passed, the government can't even experiment with supporting publishing models that assure that the people who have paid for the research can actually…
clock | March 3, 2009Chris Patil and Vivian Siegel wrote the first part of their thoughts on this problem, in Drinking from the firehose of scientific publishing:
The fundamental question is this: can the wisdom of crowds be exploited to post-filter the literature?
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A lioness doesn't bother eating individual blades of grass - she lets the antelopes do that drudgery, and then she eats the antelopes. It is similarly tempting to assign the post-filtering task to hordes of enthusiastic volunteers - intrepid, pajama-clad souls, armed only with keyboards and search engines, who would wade…
clock | March 3, 2009Under the fold:
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The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Harold Varmus
Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things With Demetri Martin
Political HumorJoke of the Day
clock | March 3, 2009One-third Of Americans Lose Sleep Over Economy:
One-third of Americans are losing sleep over the state of the U.S. economy and other personal financial concerns, according to a new poll released today by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF). The poll suggests that inadequate sleep is associated with unhealthy lifestyles and negatively impacts health and safety.
Genes Important To Sleep Discovered:
For many animals, sleep is a risk: foraging for food, mingling with mates and guarding against predators just aren't possible while snoozing. How, then, has this seemingly life-threatening behavior…
clock | March 2, 2009One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
- Thomas Sowell
clock | March 2, 2009Rural communities have big troubles persuading broadband (and wireless) providers to bring their services to them. Read this excellent article both for the compelling story and for the details of technical, economic and political angles on this problem.
clock | March 2, 2009I am sorry - I failed to link to the Coast to Coast Bio, podcast #10, where Deepak and Hari discuss ScienceOnline09
Also, there is now an article in French about Miss Baker and her students.
clock | March 2, 2009Douglas Kell: The Matthew effect in Science - citing the most cited:
The Matthew effect applies to journals and papers too - a highly cited journal or paper is likely to attract more citations (and mis-citations), probably for the simple psychological reasoning that 'if so many people cite it, it must be a reasonable paper to cite' (and such a paper is, by definition, more likely to appear in the reference list of another paper). Clearly that reasoning can be applied whether the paper has been read or otherwise. Simkin and Roychowdhury (2005 and 2007) note that a clear pointer to the citation…
clock | March 2, 2009
I forgot! But they say it was in a movie.
Mo explores the portrayal of Amnesia in the movies. Lovely!
clock | March 2, 2009Asks Nachiket Vartak:
Twitter doesn't need an introduction. The microblogging service is widely popular, and most Twitter users swear by its wonderful utility. It is a "Social Commons", as one enthusiastic web junkie put it. But a few months into using Twitter, I realised that there are very few scientists - and I mean natural scientists, on Twitter. For instance, at the time of writing this post, the Twitter account science had 2,247 followers , while some popular individuals have followers 10-fold that number.
Here are 211 scientific twitterers you may be familiar with - definitely a good…
clock | March 2, 2009Jay Rosen, on Twitter:
"Hey @Boraz: Scientists (mainly, me) are close to announcing a branching off from the curmudgeons, a new species, almost. The Replacements."
My response on Twitter:
@jayrosen_nyu I am all ears! The Replacements! Sounds like a superhero comic strip, a movie one day!
Jay, on FriendFeed:
The Replacements are those who mistakenly believe that crowing for the 1,000 time that bloggers cannot replace journalists is an important and insightful act. Identifying feature: they make a show of disagreeing with the hordes of writers who think bloggers CAN replace (newspaper)…
clock | March 2, 2009A few days back a paper came out (not OA, sorry), with a keen grasp of the obvious: Open Access is useful for those living in countries where they do not have much access. Duh! Furthermore, those who barely do any science at all, i.e., in the least developed countries, don't cite, so there is no difference between OA and TA there. And yet more, their methodology was fraught with errors galore. I am happy to report that this paper was debunked by several people already - so check them out:
Evans and Reimer greatly underestimate effect of free access
Research highlights from Dr. Obvious:…
clock | March 2, 2009A Hurdle for Health Reform: Patients and Their Doctors:
Dr. Harold Varmus, the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a former director of the National Institutes of Health, said increasing public access to the findings of medical research would be important for health care reform to succeed.
"One obvious goal is getting information out to health care practitioners about effectiveness experiments," said Dr. Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning cancer biologist and the author of the new book "The Art and Politics of Science" (Norton). "This is going to be crucial, because…
clock | March 2, 2009Senator Tom Harkin luvz him some alternative medicine. And he hates when the studies demonstrate those things don't work, so he tries to push them into the Obama Administration's health care plan by force. Read Orac, PalMD and PZ for details (and for info what you can do). This administration is supposed to be reality-based - let's make sure the wackos don't change that....
clock | March 2, 2009Archy does an amazing detective job on who stole what from whom in the old literature on mammoths, going back all the way to Lyell!
Then, as much of that literature is very old, he provides us with a history and timeline of the ideas of copyright and plagiarism so we could have a better grasp on the sense of the time in which these old copy+paste jobs were done.
clock | March 2, 2009But there is plenty of digital evidence it really happened!
Check out the #CISB hashtag on Twitter, the CISB'09 room on FriendFeed, and the blog posts:
Cromer Is SO Bracing '09 - Day One
Cromer Is SO Bracing '09 - Day Two
Cromer is SO Bracing - Friday Lunchtime update
Cromer Is SO Bracing - Pier Review
Cromer is SO Bracing - Saturday Afternoon
Cromer is SO Bracing - Sunday
Sorry to have missed this, but my ghost that "slept on that sofa" was there!
clock | March 2, 2009Pros and cons of your audience at a conference following you live on microblogging services:
How to Present While People are Twittering
Project Management helped by MicroBlogging
Conference technology planning
Discussion on FriendFeed