culture of science
jdupuis | July 2, 2009Via Lance Fortnow's Twitter post, it's interesting to see Communications of the ACM editor Moshe Y. Vardi on Open Access:
First, a point of precision. Open-access experts distinguish between "Gold OA," described earlier, and "Green OA," which allows for open access self-archiving of material (deposit by authors) that may have been published as non-open access. ACM Copyright Policy allows for self-archiving, so ACM is a Green-OA publisher. Still, why doesn't ACM become a Gold-OA publisher?
*snip*
As for ACM's stand on the open-access issue, I'd describe it as "clopen," somewhere between open…
ddobbs | July 2, 2009What's been distracting me lately from the big story I really really need to finish writing ...
A splendid, rich fracas over Chris Anderson's Free, set off particularly by a pan from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. The net fairly exploded -- search, and ye shall find -- with many noting that a pot was calling a kettle black. E.g., Itâs like War of the Speakerâs Bureaus and a more gently titled but equally damning (to Gladwell) post by Anil Dash. ,And one young writer accused Anderson of being a feudal lord. Anderson himself has been remarkably unfiltered in his tweet-pointers to reviews,…
ddobbs | July 1, 2009
Among the many treats in Carl Zimmer's new Times piece on fireflies and sex -- go, and be enchanted -- I particularly liked this quick peek at how a life and a career can take a sharp turn for the most unplanned of reasons:
It was on a night much like this one in 1980 when Dr. Lewis first came under the spell of fireflies. She was in graduate school at Duke University, studying coral reef fish. Waiting for a grant to come through for a trip to Belize, she did not have much else to do but sit in her backyard in North Carolina.
"Every evening there was this incredible display of fireflies…
ddobbs | June 30, 2009I have suspected for some time now that the band oddly close process designed to produce the DSM-V --- the diagnostic statistical manual that is psychiatry's diagnostic guide and Bible --- would create an explosion of some sort. But I didn't think it would explode quite so soon.
As Daniel Carlat outlines in a wonderful post â a must read, very high infotainment value â this is a pretty entertaining missing match. We have Allen Frances, a prominent psychiatrist who helped produce the previous edition of the DSM, leveling some very harsh criticisms of the process designed to produce a new…
jdupuis | June 24, 2009A thought experiment.
It all started with this Ray Bradbury quote in the New York Times:
"Libraries raised me," Mr. Bradbury said. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
I've bolded the chunk that has resonated most strongly around the Internet, especially Twitter where it was widely tweeted and retweeted.
The tweeter that most piqued my interest was…
ddobbs | June 17, 2009Big psych news of the day is that a big JAMA study debunked the "depression gene" -- that is, this big new study (by Risch et alia, in JAMA, today) found that, contrary to a famous earlier big study (Caspi et alia, in Science, 2003), the short ("bad") form of a particular gene called 5-HTT does NOT make a person more vulnerable to depression. Or, to flip it:: Caspi 2003 had found that having a short version of 5-HTT, which affects processing of serotonin, put someone at more risk of depression if they experienced (as adults) repeated stressful life events. Risch 2009, crunching data from a…
ddobbs | June 16, 2009Neuroskeptic offers an elegant unpeeling of a study seeming specifically designed to find a marketing-friendly distinction for a drug -- Abilify -- otherwise undistinguished.
Suppose you were a drug company, and you've invented a new drug. It's OK, but it's no better than the competition. How do you convince people to buy it?
You need a selling point - something that sets your product apart. Fortunately, with drugs, you have plenty of options. You could look into the pharmacology - the chemistry of how your drug works in the body - and find something unique there. Then, all you need to do is…
ddobbs | June 16, 2009SciAm ponders evidence that fish hatcheries are watering down the trout and salmon gene pool.
Matt Yglesias looks at one of many lies being told by those opposing health-care reform â confirming Salon's prediction that the opponents of reform are not going to play nice. See also The American Prospect on How Big Pharma Intends to Kill the Public Option. I should add this campaign is having an effect: On the radio this morning I heard NPR Steve Insky Inskeep vigorously press the "public plan as trojan horse" attack on Kathleen Sibelius; I can only hope he'll as vigorously ask people such as…
jdupuis | June 16, 2009Some highlights from the IEEE's very fine Technology and Society Magazine, v29i2. You'll need a subscription to the magazine to access it on the IEEE's site.
Those in academic settings might want to especially take a look at Communication technology, emergency alerts, and campus safety.
Innovation as energy policy for the world [Policy Perspective] by Andrews, C.J.
Wireless nomad: Pioneer in an urban residential environment by Wong, M.A.
K-Net and Canadian Aboriginal communities by Fiser, A.; Clement, A.
Communication technology, emergency alerts, and campus safety by Gow, G.A.; Mcgee, T.;…
ddobbs | June 15, 2009Photo: Tyler Hicks, via Scientific American
What if you could predict which troops are most likely to get PTSD from combat exposure -- and takes steps to either bolster them mentally or keep them out of combat situations? A new study suggests we could make a start on that right now -- and cut combat PTSD rates in half by simply keeping the least mentally and physically fit soldiers away from combat zones.
The study was part of the Millenium Study, huge, prospective study in which US Department of Defense researchers have been tracking the physical and mental health of nearly 100,000 service…
jdupuis | June 13, 2009It's been quite a long time since I did one of these posts, but as the summer reading season approaches I thought I'd highlight a few interesting items that are coming out soon.
Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Amazon.ca)
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far…
jdupuis | June 3, 2009After last year's success, the organizers put on a another great SciBarCamp show! It was this past May 8th and 9th at the University of Toronto's Hart House.
What is SciBarCamp, you ask?
SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a day of talks and discussions. The second SciBarCamp event will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on May 9th, 2009, with an opening reception on the evening of May 8th. The goal is to create connections between science, entrepreneurs and local businesses, and arts and culture.
I'll just do some fairly detailed…
ddobbs | June 3, 2009Forgive my recent blogopause. i was fishing, and then traveling, and then writing rather head-down intensely -- all activities I have trouble mixing with blogging and social media such as Twitter, which I've also left idle these last days.
So what gives with all that? I often find it awkward to switch between blogging or twittering and engaging deeply immersive physical activities. This hiatus, for instance, started when I went fishing last Tuesday on Lake Champlain for salmon -- a piscatorial retreat before a highly engaging work trip to NY, DC, and environs to talk to scientists and see my…
jdupuis | June 1, 2009Every once in a while I get an email out of the blue from a science student who's thinking of a career as a librarian and they want to know a bit about the field and it's job prospects.
I always respond very positively because I think science librarianship is a great career and that, on balance, the job prospects are pretty good.
Christina has a post up today with a little more detail:
If you are a scientist, but you want to get out of the lab, want to have a little more variety in your life, like helping people and finding information, but still want to use your science degree and be part…
jdupuis | June 1, 2009First Principles is physicist Howard Burton's story of how Research in Motion founder and CEO Mike Lazaridis basically plucked him out of obscurity to become the founding executive director for The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. And quite a story it is.
Burton had just finished his PhD and was looking for work. He sent some CVs around and one of the responses was from Lazaridis, who was looking for do something both big and important with his considerable wealth. After a brief (and rather odd) interview, Burton got the job. It was then his job to figure…
ddobbs | May 22, 2009
Having lived with fire ants, stepped in fire ants, laid down with fire ants, and been bit just about everywhere by fire ants, the news that parasitic flies turn fire ants them into zombies by eating their brains pleases me immensely.
Speaking of pleasure: Vaughn whacks the dopamine = pleasure meme.
Sharon Begley says Obama may get a lot done, but he can't erase stereotype threat (so far).
We may be dozing, but Europe is ordering its swine flu vaccine. D'oh! Update: We're getting a start too.
"Good night, sleep tight, I love you." Why consistent bedtime routines work.
Why the best…
ddobbs | April 29, 2009Amid my flu frenzy I missed Vaughn Bell's excellent consideration of CIA psychology through the declassified memos:
I've been reading the recently released CIA memos on the interrogation of 'war on terror' detainees. The memos make clear that the psychological impact of the process is the most important aim of interrogation, from the moment the detainee is captured through the various phases of interrogation.
Although disturbing, they're interesting for what they reveal about the CIA's psychologists and their approach to interrogation.
As Vaughn notes,
A couple of the memos note that the…
ddobbs | April 28, 2009
Brandon Keim, who is part of Wired's ace science writing crew also keeps a blog, Earthlab Notes, where he recently put this nice post on The Language of Horses:
In a few slender leg bones and fragments of milk-stained pottery, archaeologists recently found evidence of one of the more important developments in human history: the domestication of horses.
Unearthed from a windswept plain in Kazakhstan, the remains were about 5500 years old, and suggested that a nomadic people now called the Botai had learned to ride a creature that had captured mankind's imagination thousands of years earlier.…
ddobbs | April 28, 2009Leave it to Vaughn Bell to find this stuff: emotional maps of different cities. Got to get a hold of this -- and as Vaughn explains, you and I can, with free download. (But leave the author some $. It's the right thing to do.)
Nold came up with the idea of fusing a GSR machine, a skin conductance monitor that measures arousal, and a GPS machine, to allow stress to be mapped to particular places. He then gets people to walk round and creates maps detailing high arousal areas of cities.
The biomapping website has some of the fantastic maps from the project.
His book, called Emotional…
ddobbs | April 20, 2009Earlier today I drew attention to a post by Questionable Authority on The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath. Says Mike,
I cannot remember ever in my life being as ashamed of my country as I am at this moment. The contents of the memos are so insanely wrong that I'd like to believe that they're fiction, but they're clearly not.
He ends by calling for the AMA to identify the medical professionals involved and help them find new lines of work. A commenter on one of my earlier posts on psychologists, doctors, and torture, T. Hunt, joins him:
While the modern…