clock | June 24, 2010We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.
- Andre Berthiaume
clock | June 24, 2010There are new articles in four PLoS journals 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, Mendeley, 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:
Mammalian Sleep Dynamics: How Diverse Features Arise from a Common Physiological Framework:
The field of sleep physiology has made huge strides in recent years, uncovering the neurological…
clock | June 24, 2010The 33rd Edition of Scientia Pro Publica is up on Southern Fried Science
Four Stone Hearth #95 is up on Afarensis
I and the Bird #128 is up on BESGroup website
The latest edition of Change of Shift is up on Digital Doorway
Grand Rounds Vol. 6 No. 39 are up on A Medical Writer's Musings
clock | June 23, 2010There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.
- Albert Einstein
clock | June 23, 2010There are 31 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, Mendeley, 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:
Evolutionary Dead End in the Galápagos: Divergence of Sexual Signals in the Rarest of Darwin's Finches:
Understanding the mechanisms underlying speciation remains a challenge in evolutionary biology. The…
clock | June 22, 2010One does not discover new continents without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
- Andre Gide
clock | June 22, 2010Tuesday - when four out of seven PLoS journals publish new articles. 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, Mendeley, 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:
Coordinated and Cohesive Movement of Two Small Conspecific Fish Induced by Eliciting a Simultaneous Optomotor Response:
In animal groups such as herds, schools, and flocks, a certain…
clock | June 22, 2010Now this is big: ScienceBlogs Welcomes the World's Top Scientific Institutions to Our Network:
We here at ScienceBlogs are pleased to announce that beginning today, we will be helping to spark the next generation of research communications by introducing new blogs to our network from the world's top scientific institutions. The initial list includes: CERN, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), SETI Institute, Weizmann Institute of Science, and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The first two of those are already live - check out the Weizmann Wave and Brookhaven Bits & Bytes. Go and say…
clock | June 21, 2010Learn from the past, set vivid, detailed goals for the future, and live in the only moment of time over which you have any control: now.
- Denis Waitley
clock | June 21, 2010There are 29 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, Mendeley, 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:
Deathly Drool: Evolutionary and Ecological Basis of Septic Bacteria in Komodo Dragon Mouths:
Komodo dragons, the world's largest lizard, dispatch their large ungulate prey by biting and tearing flesh. If a…
clock | June 21, 2010Over the weekend I stumbled upon two phrases, new to me, which I instantly loved - "monitorial citizenship" and "temporary experts". And I thought they both say something important about the role of expertise in journalism as a whole and in science journalism in particular.
Temporary Experts
If you are a very regular and careful reader of my blog, you may remember that I totally adore the student journalists now in charge of UNC's Daily Tarheel - they 'get it'! I follow them on various online places, read some articles online, occasionally pick a hard copy of the paper from the news-stand. So…
clock | June 21, 2010A couple of days ago, I had a very pleasant conversation with Brian Bedrick whose Charlotte NC based Interactive Data Partners turns massive amounts of data into visualizations, particularly in education. They take all sorts of metrics, e.g., on educational outcomes, and make them instantly obvious through visualizations. Those kinds of things are important to administrators, but there are other potential uses. For example, instead of giving a student a single grade, the work can be divided into several categories and visualization can immediately show in which areas does a student show…
clock | June 21, 2010Apparently, someone published a really curmudgeonly and regressive-thinking article about science publishing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research. Commenters there are shredding it apart. But you should also see blog posts discussing it, by Female Science Professor, DrugMonkey, Orac and Geekmommyprof. If anything, they do not fisk it thoroughly enough ;-)
clock | June 21, 2010The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art.
The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here.
You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here.
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A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'?
A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper:…
clock | June 21, 2010June edition of the Journal of Science Communication is out. Focus seems to be on communication in physical space and democracy. Check out the table of contents:
Bringing the universe to the street. A preliminary look at informal learning implications for a large-scale non-traditional science outreach project:
"From Earth to the Universe" (FETTU) is a collection of astronomical images that showcase some of the most popular, current views of our Universe. The images, representing the wide variety of astronomical objects known to exist, have so far been exhibited in about 500 locations…
clock | June 20, 2010For the first time ever in the history of mankind, the wilderness is safer than "civilization."
- Faith Popcorn
clock | June 20, 2010Republican candidate for Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction and current State Senator John Huppenthal gets schooled by Tempe's Corona del Sol High School student journalist Keith Wagner during an interview about the state legislature's vote to cut career and technical education funding by 99.9%.
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clock | June 19, 2010Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence.
- Faith Baldwin
clock | June 19, 2010It is always funny to hear how "blogs are dying", being abandoned in droves as bloggers are all moving to Twitter. It's funny how that works - you see fewer posts on a blog, or a couple of bloggers going on a summer hiatus, and the sky is falling!
In response to the latest such lament (which includes a seed of an idea that many have already developed at length and detail), I wrote this in the comments, and thought I'd repost it here for more discussion:
It is June. Blogospheric summer slump has been observed every summer since blogging started. Nothing surprising: kids are out of school and…