clock | July 27, 2009Lots of cool papers today in 4 out of 7 PLoS journals! 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 - you go and look for your own favourites:
Charles Darwin's Reception in Germany and What Followed:
In Germany, Charles Darwin's thinking was accepted very quickly after the publication of On the Origin of Species in November, 1859. This was due, in no…
clock | July 27, 2009Open Access and the divide between 'mainstream' and 'peripheral' science (also available here and here) by Jean-Claude Guédon is a Must Read of the day. Anyone have his contact info so I can see if he would come to ScienceOnline'10?
There is a whole bunch of articles about science publication metrics in the latest ESEP THEME SECTION - The use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance. Well worth studying. On article-level metrics, there are some interesting reactions in the blogosphere, by Deepak Singh, Bjoern Brembs, Duncan Hull, Bill Hooker and Abhishek Tiwari…
clock | July 27, 2009Miriam Goldstein of the Oyster's Garter and Double X blogs (follow her on Twitter) is embarking on a sea-faring expedition!
SEAPLEX is a Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego project studying plastics - yes, including the rubber duckies - accumulating in the oceans, specifically in the North Pacific Gyre. Miriam is leading the team of PhD students and volunteers who will be studying various aspects of the plastics in the sea and their environmental impact.
Though the life at sea is hard and busy and they will not have much time (or access) to do so, they will try to keep us all…
clock | July 27, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Sam Dupuis from the Science of Sorts on My Mind blog (and yes, he is the son of John Dupuis, if the last name sounded familiar to you), to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
Glad to…
clock | July 26, 2009Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant: No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
- Pierre Elliott Trudeau
clock | July 26, 2009A few years ago, I read Mary Roach's first book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and absolutely loved it! One of the best popular science books I have read in a long time - informative, eye-opening, thought-provoking and funny. Somehow I missed finding time to read her second (Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife - I guess just not a topic I care much about), but when her third book came out, with such a provocative title as Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, I could not resist.
And I was not disappointed. It is informative, eye-opening, thought-provoking and funny.…
clock | July 25, 2009The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night.
- Otto von Bismarck
clock | July 24, 2009A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
- Clive Staples Lewis
clock | July 24, 2009On Fridays I usually take a look at new papers in all seven PLoS journals. 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:
Circadian Clock Genes Contribute to the Regulation of Hair Follicle Cycling:
The hair follicle renews itself by repeatedly cycling among growth, regression, and rest phases. One…
clock | July 24, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 230 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks!
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…
clock | July 23, 2009Studies indicate that the one quality all successful people have is persistence. They're willing to spend more time accomplishing a task and to persevere in the face of many difficult odds. There's a very positive relationship between people's ability to accomplish any task and the time they're willing to spend on it.
- Joyce Brothers
clock | July 23, 2009Just came back from Raleigh, where Sheril gave a reading of her book Unscientific America in front of a nice-size crowd at Quail Ridge Books:
Sheril did a great job and ably fielded the questions afterwards:
clock | July 23, 2009Before the trip I did a little experiment and posted my first podcast, but as a WAV file which some people could not hear. Now, with a little help from my friends, I translated the file into the MP3 format so everyone can listen:
ClockCast1 - Bora ZivKovic
clock | July 23, 2009The new Change Of Shift is up on Nurse in Australia
I and the Bird #105 is up on Picus Blog
July's Edition of Skeptical Parents Crossing is up on On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess
clock | July 22, 2009Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.
- Rose Macaulay
clock | July 22, 2009Everyone and their grandmother knows that Impact Factor is a crude, unreliable and just wrong metric to use in evaluating individuals for career-making (or career-breaking) purposes. Yet, so many institutions (or rather, their bureaucrats - scientists would abandon it if their bosses would) cling to IF anyway. Probably because nobody has pushed for a good alternative yet. In the world of science publishing, when something needs to be done, usually people look at us (that is: PLoS) to make the first move. The beauty of being a path-blazer!
So, in today's post 'PLoS Journals - measuring impact…
clock | July 22, 2009It was hectic during the travels, but I managed to interview Peter Sommer, PLoS ONE Section Editor for Virology anyway - in the age of the Internet, one can be connected everywhere. We posted the interview on everyONE blog yesterday.