Science Practice
clock | March 20, 2008WiSE, a network of Women in Science and Engineering at Duke University is hosting a panel Shaping the world, one job at a time: An altruistic/alternative career panel tomorrow, Friday, at noon in Teer 203. If you want to show up, please RSVP online as soon as possible so they know how many boxed lunches to get.
It will be an informal panel: each one of us will get 3-5 minutes to introduce ourselves, followed by a discussion and Q&A. We are also likely to hang around for a few more minutes afterwards. The panelists? Under the fold....
Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom: K-12 education
Dr.…
clock | March 14, 2008Got an e-mail from AAAS and will try to go if at all possible:
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and North Carolina State University, will be holding a one-day workshop "Communicating Science: Tools for Scientists and Engineers" on Thursday, April 3, 2008. We aim to extend an invitation to the faculty scientists, engineers, and Ph.D. students at your institution who would like to attend this workshop, in order to learn more about communicating science to news media and the general public. Please feel free…
clock | March 8, 2008[rant]So, if you organize a study-group online instead of in meat-space, the old fogies who still remember dinosaurs go all berserk. A student is threatened by expulsion for organizing a Facebook group for studying chemistry. Moreover, as each student got different questions, nobody did the work for others, they only exchanged tips and strategies. See the responses:
The Star:
Yet students argue Facebook groups are simply the new study hall for the wired generation.
Yes, they are.
Greg:
How much of this is a matter of administrative fear of the internet?
100%.
Larry:
Today, that sense of "…
clock | March 4, 2008Jane is the cool new tool that everyone is talking about - see the commentary on The Tree of Life, on Nature Network and on Of Two Minds.
In short, the Journal/Author Name Estimator is a website where you can type in some text and see which scientific Journal has the content closest to the text you input, as well as people who published on similar topics. If you click on "Show extra options" you can narrow your search by a few criteria, e.g., you can search only Open Access journals.
The idea is to discover journals to which you can submit your work. Most people know the journals available…
clock | March 2, 2008Anne-Marie reviews two books that appear to be useful in thinking about one's career in science: The Beginner's Guide to Winning a Nobel Prize, by Peter Doherty, and The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology, by Chandler, Wolfe, and Promislow. Read the review and, if you think this is something you need, buy the books.
And, if you have additional recommendations, let Anne-Marie know in her comments.
clock | February 21, 2008Are you confused with the new NIH Policy and unsure as to what you need to do? If so, Association of Research Libraries has assembled a very useful website that explains the process step by step. But the easiest thing to do is to publish with a journal that does the depositing for you free of charge and here is the list of such journals. Of course, PLoS automatically does that for you as well.
clock | February 18, 2008What is the difference between Free Access Beer and Open Access Beer?
You go to a bar to get your Free Access Beer. You sit down. You show your ID. The barista gives you a bottle. You don't need to pay anything for it - it's free, after all. You take your own bottle-opener from your pocket and open the bottle. You drink the beer from the bottle. You return the empty bottle to the barista. You go home.
You order you Open Access Beer online or by phone. You pick what kind of beer you want. It gets delivered to your door really fast. The delivery man opens the bottle for you. You are…
clock | February 5, 2008Open Students is a new blog for students about open access to research. It is run by Gavin Baker (who also recently joined Peter Suber at Open Access News - Congratulations!) and sponsored by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, as part of its student outreach activities.
The blog will cover the issues of Open Science as it affects the college students and will have frequent guest-bloggers (students, librarians, researchers, publishers...) - of which you can be one if you contact Gavin.
clock | January 31, 2008Aetosaurs. No, I have not heard of them until now. But that does not matter - the big story about them today is the possibility - not 100% demonstrated yet, to be fair - that some unethical things surround their discovery and naming. And not just Aetosaurs. Some other fossils as well.
As I am not on the inside loop of the story, you need to first read the background story on Aetosaurs by Darren Naish - Part 1 and Part 2.
Then, carefully read Darren's today's post and responses by Laelaps, Cryptomundo and Paleochick.
For the ethical side of the story, read Janet's take.
For the gory…
clock | January 22, 2008From Sage Ross, via John Lynch come exciting news about a new Open Access Journal - Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science
Spontaneous Generations is a new online academic journal published by graduate students at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. The journal aims to establish a platform for interdisciplinary discussion and debate about issues that concern the community of scholars in HPS and related fields.
Apart from selecting peer reviewed articles, the journal encourages a direct dialogue…
clock | January 12, 2008OK, this may not be very new, but for all of you taking a look at science in North Carolina next week due to the focus on the Science Blogging Conference, The Scientist has published a number of essays looking at every aspect of Life Science in the state - check it out: The State of Life Sciences.
For the latest news on life science in North Carolina, visit the Bioscience Clearinghouse, a very useful website hosted by The North Carolina Association for Biomedical Research.
clock | December 29, 2007Two grape genomes were published this year, one in Nature, the other in PLoS ONE. Larry Moran explains the methodologies and results of both and discusses the trustworthiness of each. The Nature paper is explained in The Grapevine Genome, and the PLoS ONE paper is discussed in The Second Grapevine Genome Is Published. Obligatory Readings of the Day.
clock | December 28, 2007In the wake of the signed omnibus bill that funds NIH and ensures open deposition of NIH-funded research, here are some thoughtful questions:
Why the NIH bill does not require copyright violation:
The great advantage of the requirement to deposit in Pubmed (rather than simply to expose on a publisher or other website) is that the act is clear. You can't "half-deposit" in Pubmed. They have the resources to decide whether any copyright statement allows the appropriate use of the information or is suffiently restrrictive that it does not meet the NIH rules.
At some stage the community will get…
clock | December 22, 2007First: the difference between theory and practice.
Second: the theory.
Third: still to come, I hope, a YouTube video of Steinn demonstrating the practice of parallel parking.
clock | December 20, 2007I buried this among a bunch of other cool links yesterday, but there was a study the other day, in the Journal of Cell Biology, that seriously calls in question the methodology used by Thompson Scientific to calculate the sacred Impact Factor, the magic number that makes and breaks lives and careers of scientists.
Apparently, it is really a magic number calculated in a mysterious way, not in the way that Thompson Scientific claims they do it. Who knows what subjective factors they include that they do not tell us about?
When we examined the data in the Thomson Scientific database, two…
clock | December 7, 2007Subscription-supported journals are like the qwerty keyboard:
Are there solutions? One reason for optimism is that changing how we pay the costs of disseminating research is not an all-or-nothing change like switching from qwerty to Dvorak keyboards. Some new open-access journals are very prestigious. Granting agencies are giving strong 'in-principle' support to open access publishing, and my last grant proposal's budget included a hefty amount for open-access publication charges. And libraries are looking for ways to escape the burden of subscription charges.
This is an interesting idea: an…
clock | December 5, 2007Communication
Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors - official conventions. The term "constrained" I used above has two meanings - one negative, one positive. In a negative meaning, a constraint imposes limits and makes certain directions less likely, more difficult or impossible. In its positive meaning, constraint means that some directions are easy and obvious and thus much more likely for…
clock | December 4, 2007Zotero is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to manage and cite research papers. They just announced that Zotero now works with PLoS papers. If you have no idea what I am talking about, Rich Cave explains.
clock | December 4, 2007JoVE, SciVee, LabAction and DnaTube are mentioned in this nice article, also found in a number of other newspapers, e.g., USA Today and Seattle Times.
clock | November 30, 2007CBC has started a series of interviews (later available as podcasts) with scientists and others about the nature of science, the public undrestanding of science and related issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to blog about individual interviews if you particularly like or dislike what someone there said.
(Hat-tip)