Blogging
oracknows | January 5, 2007Better late than never, I guess.
I should have announced three days ago that the polls are now open to vote for the 2006 Medical Weblog Awards. Polls will close at midnight on Sunday, January 14, 2007 (PST), and the winners will be announced on Friday, January 19, 2007.
I happen to be nominated for Best Medical Weblog, but the competition is fierce, with other deserving nominees including fellow ScienceBlogs Aetiology, The Examining Room of Dr. Charles, and Effect Measure, plus worthy non-ScienceBlogs such as Surgeonsblog, Flea, Kevin, MD, and the ever-skeptical Unintelligent Design.…
oracknows | December 19, 2006As hard as it is to believe, it's official. It appears that Respectful Insolence won the 2006 Weblog Awards as Best Medical/Health Issues blog. I had waited to announce this until it was official, plus a little time because I still couldn't believe it. It would also appear that one other ScienceBlog, Pharyngula, edged out Bad Astronomy Blog to claim the Best Science Blog crown.
Other nominees from the ScienceBlogs collective were also nominated in these two categories, including The Cheerful Oncologist (one of the first medical blogs I discovered and a blog whose style I still sometimes wish…
oracknows | December 18, 2006The latest Seed Magazine extravaganza happens to include a "class photo" of all of us ScienceBloggers. Orac should be easy to spot. Maybe I should have gone with the cliche of a masked surgeon, but I've got to be true to my alter ego. (No, not that alter ego.)
I guess that's just the lot of a hyperintelligent, cranky clear box of blinking lights.
oracknows | December 16, 2006I must have fallen behind in my blog reading, which led me not to notice that Abel Pharmboy over at Terra Sigillata just celebrated his first blogiversary on Friday. Here's to another successful year of science blogging!
If you want to get a taste of what Abel's about, he just posted two good analyses of articles that appeared in the Journal of Clinical Oncology this month, one about the ethics of dealing with situations when parents choose quackery over efficacious treatment for children with good prognosis cancers and another discussing a review article covering the evidence base for the…
oracknows | December 11, 2006It's that time of year again. Nominations are open for the best medical blogging:
Welcome to the third annual Medical Weblog Awards! These awards are designed to honor the very best in the medical blogosphere, and to highlight the diverse world of medical blogs.
The categories for this year's awards will be:
-- Best Medical Weblog
-- Best New Medical Weblog (established in 2006)
-- Best Literary Medical Weblog
-- Best Clinical Sciences Weblog
-- Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog
-- Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog
-- Best Patient's Blog (a new category this year)
Nominations are…
oracknows | December 10, 2006
I know, I know.
When I first found out that I had been nominated for a 2006 Weblog Award for Best Medical/Health Issues Blog a few days ago, I initially said that I didn't think I would win and didn't really care if I would win. And it was true.
Then.
Then, much to my surprise, I found myself actually in the lead by a sizable margin for a couple of days, but over the last day or so a diet blog has passed Respectful Insolence in the voting. Now that I see might actually have a chance to win this thing, I've had--shall we say?--an attitude readjustment. I've decided that maybe it's not so…
oracknows | December 7, 2006
Matt over at Pooflingers Anonymous informs me that Respectful Insolence⢠been nominated as a finalist in the Best Medical/Health Issues Blog category of the Weblog Awards. I have no idea who nominated me (I certainly didn't and was unaware until the other night that I was even a finalist), but my thanks go out to you, whoever you are. As you can see from my little logo, on the sidebar, I was a finalist last year as well but didn't win. Last year, I was in the Best New Blog Category, though, and lost big time to the political blogs. (Note how the nominees for Best Blog are, with the…
oracknows | November 24, 2006One year ago today, I discovered a rather amusing bit of chicanery on the part of an old "friend," namely J. B. Handley, the proprietor of and driving force behind Generation Rescue, the group that claims that all autism (not just some, not just some, but all) is a "misdiagnosis" for mercury poisoning. Given that today is one year later to the day, I thought it would be amusing to repost this. And, yes, one year later to the day, the domain oracknows.com still redirects to Generation Rescue, although, shamed, J. B. did stop having the domain autismdiva.com redirect to GR.
INTERNET SQUATTER: J…
oracknows | November 23, 2006Since some other members of the ScienceBlogs collective are doing it, link whore that I am, I couldn't resist putting my blog into this site and seeing where it ranked.
And here's the result:
With 516 links in the last 180 days, Technorati places http://scienceblogs.com/insolence in the very high authority group.
That makes you a A-List Blogger!
Fortunately (and yet one more thing to be thankful for on Thanksgiving), this is probably the only way I'll ever be in any way associated with Paris Hilton. I was tempted to take a picture of Orac and Photoshop him into the picture above, but decided…
oracknows | November 22, 2006So hit him.
Hit him hard.
He's 40,000 hits away from 1,000,000 visits.
Help get him over the top.
Given that I'm starting to get in that range (866,000 hits as of this morning), here's hoping someone will help me out in around two or three months, which is when I estimate that I'll be approaching 1,000,000.
Of course, I'm looking forward to the blogging death match that Dr. DB will have to participate in once he hits 1,000,000.
oracknows | November 5, 2006October was a very good month for Respectful Insolence, a very good month indeed. In fact, traffic for this blog reached an all-time high, edging out the previous best month (May 2006) by about 1,000 visits on Sitemeter. It just goes to show that, although traffic has more or less leveled off and is fluctuating around a mean, there's still room for bringing that Respectful Insolence to more of the blogosphere.
It's not as though I'm ever likely to catch PZ or Ed in traffic. (I'd need my traffic to go up nearly an order of magnitude ever to catch PZ; even I'm not deluded enough to see that…
oracknows | November 3, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger Shelley Batts is a finalist for a student blogging scholarship. Not only is she a fine blogger, but she shares with me a connection with the University of Michigan, where she is now working on her Ph.D. and where I got both my undergraduate and graduate degrees.
So, with that combination of good blogging, fellow ScienceBlogger, and fellow Michigan student (albeit separated in time by about 16 years), I can't help but urge you all to vote for Shelley for the blogging scholarship. There's only one day to go, as voting ends at midnight on November 5. What other of the…
oracknows | October 27, 2006Tired of doing Google searches for evidence-based discussions of dubious-sounding medical treatments and finding that the first 100 sites (or, if you're unlucky, the first 1,000 sites) that pop up are nothing more than altie woo, shills selling alternative medicine and supplements, and CureZone or Whale.to wannabes? Here's a useful tool. Le Canard Noir has put together a QuackSafe⢠Search Engine:
The Search Engine will only return matches from sites and blogs that are known to supply reliable information about quackery, quacks, medical fraud and pseudoscience. It is based on the newly…
oracknows | September 13, 2006With the latest edition of the Skeptics' Circle due to appear later today, I'd just like to point out that I've become aware of two new skeptical blogs:
Action Skeptics (I like its catchphrase, "Annoying stupid people, one woo at a time.")
The Antidote: Counterspin for Health Care and Health News
They're worth checking out, and I'll keep an eye on them to see how they develop. And while we're at it, I would be remiss if I didn't mention another skeptical blog belonging to someone who's become a frequent commenter here. That's right, I mean Amy Alkon, a.k.a. The Advice Goddess, who runs a…
oracknows | September 12, 2006Sometimes there are things that happen when blogging. You get accolades from unexpected sources, little ego boosts that make it all worthwhile. Such a thing happened yesterday, on the basis of my little blurb mentioning Skeptico's takedown of Hank Barnes's misuse of logical fallacies. The reaction, as reflected in the comments in Hank's blog, was quite hilarious. One reader whined:
Whenever somebody claims to be debunking something, it always means that somebody revealed an uncomfortable truth and now they've got to stuff it back in the bottle.
Well no, actually, the only thing "uncomfortable…
oracknows | August 12, 2006Thanks to those who sent me a copy of the article I requested. Sadly, the library at my university has some rather large holes in its online collection. Even some fairly common journals are not represented. I'll have to read it this weekend. You'll all get personal e-mails from me later today, after I finish rounding on our service.
As for finding the paper online at the author's website, personally, I find that to be a very uncommon situation, although I have had some luck in the past e-mailing corresponding authors. This is much the same as in the old days, when we old geezers would…
oracknows | August 11, 2006Here's a humble request of my readers. I'm looking for an article in a journal to which my university library does not offer online access. I'm interested in reading it, but not so interested that I'm wililng to pay the $40 to download it. If necessary, I can get it via interlibrary loan, but they'll just send me a poorly photocopied hard copy, possibly even a FAX. The article on evolution and cancer; so you can see why I might be interested. This is the article:
B. J. Crespi and Summers, K. Positive selection in the evolution of cancer. Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 81(3):407-24 (2006).
Would…
oracknows | August 11, 2006I haven't done this in a while; so now seems as good a time as any. I fired up iTunes and let 'er rip on "Shuffle Play," and this is what came up:
Woody Guthrie, Talking Dust Bowl Blues (from: Dust Bowl Ballads)
David Bowie, Lady Stardust (from: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars)
The Sisters of Mercy, 1969 (from: Enter The Sisters)
The Mamas & The Papas, California Dreamin' (from: Greatest Hits)
The Stooges, Little Doll (from: The Stooges)
Do Make Say Think, Bruce E Kinesis (from: Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord Is Dead)
The Animals, Monterey (from:…
oracknows | August 9, 2006I got this in my e-mail the other day that may be of interest to folks interested in countering the pseudoscience of "intelligent design" creationism:
I would like to announce the birth of CommentsOnID, a Pile-blog and ask for support.
A Pile-blog is a blog intended to offer unmoderated comments and trackbacks space, related to blogposts from blogs where moderation/censure or even absence of comments and trackbacks is the rule.
This particular Pile-blog concerns pro-ID blogs/blogposts. It was setup to circumvent the censorship practiced at the time by Dembski and DaveScot and now by Denyse O'…
oracknows | August 9, 2006I got this request the other day and finally decided to take the survey that it asked me to. It was relatively painless and it might gather useful information (although obviously it's not a scientific survey); so I thought I'd help publicize it. If you're a health care/ medical blogger, this survey is looking for you.
This poll is co-produced by Envision Solutions and The Medical Blog Network (TMBN).
WHY WE ARE CONDUCTING THIS SURVEY
Over the past few years, the healthcare blogosphere has grown in size and importance. This means that more people are blogging about medical issues, healthcare…