clock | July 19, 2008Bjoern Brembs:
Today's system of scientific journals started as a way to effectively use a scarce resource, printed paper. Soon thereafter, the publishers realized there were big bucks to be made and increased the number of journals to today's approx. 24,000. Today, there is no technical reason any more why you couldn't have all the 2.5 million papers science puts out every year in a single database.
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Precurser to this publishing reform was access reform: scientific papers are the result of publicly funded research and should be publicly accessible. This reform appears now…
clock | July 19, 2008Distribution Of Creatures Great And Small Can Be Predicted Mathematically:
In studying how animals change size as they evolve, biologists have unearthed several interesting patterns. For instance, most species are small, but the largest members of a taxonomic group -- such as the great white shark, the Komodo dragon, or the African elephant -- are often thousands or millions of times bigger than the typical species. Now for the first time two SFI researchers explain these patterns within an elegant statistical framework.
Bees Go 'Off-color' When They Are Sickly:
Bumble-bees go 'off colour'…
clock | July 19, 2008Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship by James A. Evans, ironically behind the paywall, has got a lot of people scratching their heads - it sounds so counter-intuitive, as well as opposite from other pieces of similar research.
There is a good discussion on FriendFeed and another one here.
A commentary at the Chronicle of Higher Education is here, also ironically behind the paywall.
Here is the press release and here is the abstract:
Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled.…
clock | July 19, 2008Periodic Table of Videos on YouTube:
This channel has a video about each element on the periodic table.
With help from some clever chemists, I've done all 118, but I'm not stopping here.
Now I'm updating and improving all the videos with new stories, better samples and bigger experiments.
Please subscribe to follow my progress.
Or visit the main website at Periodic Table of Videos
clock | July 19, 2008Everyone is posting these movies and e-mailing me the URL - so here it is (is there a way to enbed these?) for your enjoyment (btw, geeky me, Doogie Howser, M.D. was my favourite show when I was a kid)
clock | July 19, 2008Carl Zimmer: How Your Brain Can Control Time:
For 40 years, psychologists thought that humans and animals kept time with a biological version of a stopwatch. Somewhere in the brain, a regular series of pulses was being generated. When the brain needed to time some event, a gate opened and the pulses moved into some kind of counting device.
One reason this clock model was so compelling: Psychologists could use it to explain how our perception of time changes. Think about how your feeling of time slows down as you see a car crash on the road ahead, how it speeds up when you're wheeling around a…
clock | July 19, 2008Silly, but funny to see how people react when treated to a dose of their own medicine:
"Australian filmmaker John Safran is so fed up with mormons ringing his doorbell early in the morning that he flies to Salt Lake City Utah and tries to convert Mormons to atheism. Needless to say, the locals were not pleased."
[Hat-tip: Tanja]
clock | July 18, 2008More than print and ink, a newspaper is a collection of fierce individualists who somehow manage to perform the astounding daily miracle of merging their own personalities under the discipline of the deadline and retain the flavor of their own minds in print.
- Arthur Ochs Sulzberger
clock | July 18, 2008Tuesday July 22
6:30-8:30 p.m.
After a thousand years, it's still a great technology! Follow the story from papyrus to nano-fibrils with Med Byrd, of the Department of Wood and Paper Science in the NCSU College of Natural Resources. Q&A after his talk. Tir Na Nog 218 South Blount Street, Raleigh, 833-7795
clock | July 18, 2008JenDodd
It's Alive!!
David Hone's Archosaur Musings
Visualizing Evolution
Ruminations of An Aspiring Ecologist
BPR3 (new address)
clock | July 18, 2008Scientific Collectivism 1: (Or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved Dissent):
I want to bring up a discussion about what I perceive is a dangerous trend in neuroscience (this may be applicable to other areas of science as well), and that is what I will term "scientific collectivism." I am going to split this into two separate posts because it is so long. This first post is the weaker arguments, and what I see are the less interesting aspects of scientific collectivism-however, they deserve a discussion.
What will you be? and the related Friday Poll: Tinker, Tailor, Biologist, Researcher. So, how…
clock | July 18, 2008Policy for Open Science - reflections on the workshop:
One thing that was very clear to me was that the attendees of the meeting were largely disconnected from the more technical community that reads this and related blogs. We need to get the communication flowing in both directions - there are things the blogosphere knows, that we are far ahead on, and we need to get the information across. There are things we don't know much about, like the legal frameworks, the high level policy discussions that are going on. We need to understand that context. It strikes me though that if we can combine…
clock | July 18, 2008Just an hour or so ago I was in the car, listening to This American Life on NPR, when this story (Act Three) came up on the air:
Bob Berenz had a good job as an electrician. But he wanted to do something bigger. He came up with an idea for an invention. But as he studied physics texts to see if his invention could work, he happened upon the biggest idea of his life: a revelation about physics that would disprove Einstein, and Newton. That is, if Bob's right.
It is a great story to listen to, and quite revealing about the psychology and the emotional motivations for crackpottery.
Ah, what a…
clock | July 18, 2008Pathologists Believe They Have Pinpointed Achilles Heel Of HIV:
Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) researchers at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston believe they have uncovered the Achilles heel in the armor of the virus that continues to kill millions.
Farming At Young Age May Lead To Bone Disease In Adulthood:
Although farm chores are likely to keep young boys in shape and out of trouble, University of Cincinnati (UC) environmental health experts caution that it could be harmful to overall bone health if done too often at a young age.
Volcanic Eruptions May Have Wiped Out…
clock | July 17, 2008Entire new continent can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web page to show up on your screen. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the DMV.
- Dave Barry
clock | July 17, 2008I am currently reading - and enjoying very much - The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat by Eric Roston.
He was recently interviewed for DC Examiner and they ran a picture of him wearing a familiar t-shirt ;-)
Recently, Eric was quoted in TIME and lambasted by Rush Limbaugh, which, as Tom notes, means that Eric made it Big Time!
clock | July 17, 2008Why are so many scientists reluctant to make full use of Web 2.0 applications, social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and commenting capabilities on some online journals?
Michael Nielsen wrote a very thoughtful essay exploring this question which I hope you read carefully and post comments.
Michael is really talking about two things - one is pre-publication process, i.e., how to get scientists to find each other and collaborate by using the Web, and the other is the post-publication process, i.e., how to get scientists to make their thoughts and discussions about published works more public.…
clock | July 17, 2008I've said it before and I said it again, and I heard other people say it repeatedly (e.g., Anton): blog is software.
It's up to every individual (or group, or organization, or company, or political entity) to put it to creative use.
Blog is not content. Content is what someone puts on a blog.
Medium is not the message. Though medium affects the message, of course, and content found on blogs is affected by the ease of use, extremely low cost, and frequency of updating, as well as social communication norms that develop over time.
This, this and this are expansions on that theme, mostly.…