Department of the Drama

As part of a workshop on Creative Commons, I'm doing a short presentation on Open Data and The Panton Principles this week to various members of our staff. I thought I'd share some of the resources I've consulted during my preparations. I'm using textmining of journal articles as a example so I'm including a few resources along those lines as well. The Panton Principles Why does Dryad use CC0? #sparc2012 a manifesto in absentia for Open Data Information mining from Springer full-text: I ask for freedom Textmining Update: Max Haussler's Questions to publishers: They have a duty to reply…

A few weeks ago, I was notified that if I wished to continue blogging at Scienceblogs/National Geographic, I'd have to agree to new terms. After considering these terms, as well as the decision to ban pseudonymous blogging, I don't feel that the new management and I are on the same page. I have therefore decided to leave Scienceblogs. I've had to put BioE on hiatus a few times over the past few years anyway, as my career moves in a different direction, and the odds are that my posts will be infrequent in the future. So it's as good a time to leave as any. You can find me in the future at…

Photo of Vermont highway courtesy of Kyle Cornell Last week, I had my long-awaited vacation semi-ruined when, thanks to Hurricane Irene, my flight back from the West Coast was cancelled. I had to rent a car and drive across the country in a rush - not my favorite way to spend three and a half days. But based on what I saw passing through New York, and what I've heard about the damage in Vermont, I can't complain: flooding has overturned homes, isolated entire towns, and destroyed everything some families own. Vermonters are a notoriously self-sufficient bunch, and I haven't seen that much…

Gold Cortex 16 x 20, 2010 Greg Dunn I used to have a beautiful gold Japanese folding screen, which was purchased by my great-grandmother's feisty sister on a trip in the 1920s. I loved the gold patina and the surprisingly modern impact it had on my wall. At the moment, it's loaned to a friend, but looking at Greg Dunn's artwork, I couldn't help but be reminded of the best aspects of my screen: the gold leaf, crisp black patterns, and way that the scene seemed half natural, half abstract. The biggest twist Greg, a 6th year graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania,…

One of the much-hyped benefits of social networking is that it provides a way to get personalized recommendations about businesses from a wider network. If I want to tell the world that the coffee place in my neighborhood has the best cappuccino this side of Seattle, I can do that (and it does)! That's what Yelp is for - right? Well, not quite. I realized a while ago that my reviews don't show up on Yelp anymore. They've been "filtered" from the site, like thousands of other users' reviews. Yelp won't explain why (they say if they did explain the algorithm, it would allow merchants to game…

Ok, what are the people at Quirk Books on? I have to say, I love the cover of the book, and the typographical trailer is cute - but isn't this just blatant meme abuse? Quirk explains The Meowmorphosis thus. . . "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that he had been changed into an adorable kitten." Thus begins The Meowmorphosis--a bold, startling, and fuzzy-wuzzy new edition of Franz Kafka's classic nightmare tale, from the publishers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! Meet Gregor Samsa, a humble young man who works as a fabric salesman to support…

From Linda Holmes, a poignant post about how the deluge of information makes it impossible to scratch the surface in a single lifetime: there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you're well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender. Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It's the sorting of what's worth your time and what's not worth your time. It's saying, "I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it." It's saying, "I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep…

Yesterday, bioephemera got its one millionth visit.* Thanks so much to everyone who reads, shares, and enjoys my posts - you're why I keep blogging, in whatever spare time I can find. There's just too much interesting stuff out there to keep it to myself when I find it, and I've met far too many fascinating and brilliant people who defy categorization by doing this. . . you know who you are. Rabelais was gloriously learned because learning amused him, and so far as I am concerned, that is learning's best justification. Not the only one, but the best. --Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels…

This is the biologist googly-eyed dazzled-with-biological-complexity effect that my friends and I used to describe as "because little fishes have eyes!" Be warned: once infected with the appreciation for biological beauty, there is no cure. :) This is why I love xkcd. How is it possible I still run into people all the time who don't read it???

Let's be honest: the past two weeks have been horrible. On Thursday and Friday, for example, I worked for over 24 hours straight (who needs sleep) on a single project. You may have noticed BioE's silence - no, when I don't have time to sleep, shower or go to the gym, I generally don't find time to post either. Yet during the past two weeks, or two years, I have never once wished I were back in the lab. This Experimental Error post pretty much sums it up: Growing up, we were the smart ones. We were the valedictorians and the science fair champs, the celebrated nerds who read books for fun and…

I'm honored to get a brief shout-out today from the awesome Ed Yong in his post on female bloggers. I mention this not to toot my own horn, but to call attention to the amazing number of women blogging about scientific research - something I rarely do anymore at BioE, but which is very important to public science literacy, science policy, and inspiring young women to choose careers in science. Many of the women Ed mentions are already on my blogroll (Sheril Kirshenbaum, Jennifer Ouellette, Scicurious, Janet Stemwedel, to name a few), but I clearly have to add more - including my friend…

Poor, outnumbered moderates. . . I decided to wait until the election mayhem abated before reviewing Carl Schoonover's EXTREMELY outstanding new book Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. If you're tired of looking at red and blue Rorschach tests, drop by tomorrow for my review.

Mark Pendergrast writes: It's time to wrap up this ScienceBlog Book Club on my book, Inside the Outbreaks. I want to thank Liz Borkowski, Steve Schoenbaum, and Karen Starko for their excellent, insightful commentaries, and thanks too to those who commented here. I assume that you can continue to do so, and you can also contact me through my website at www.markpendergrast.com. While you're there, on the Outbreaks page, take a look at the YouTube link to the children of Niger singing. It's quite wonderful, and it also has an important message at the end. I don't regard this as the end of…

Everything is ephemeral - including bioephemera. As of today, May 31, I'm going on hiatus for at least this summer - and probably longer. While I've met many wonderful fellow bloggers and faithful readers through the blog, keeping BioE going has become a significant investment of time that I just don't have. Since I started blogging, there's been an explosion in the number of blogs covering crossover sciart topics, like Morbid Anatomy, where I found the delicious image above. So I just don't feel BioE is strictly needed anymore - if it ever was. And I need to refocus on work, life, and art…

Recently a reader commented that my painting, Fall:The Cicada, is a little, um, insect-y. Yes, I have a propensity to paint insects-lots of 'em. I have a box of dead ones just waiting for the day I get around to painting them, so I thought I'd explain why. About the same time, I was encouraging a friend who is also an artist to start blogging about her works-in-progress. I don't have any works-in-progress at the moment, but I figured why not follow my own advice, so here you go: a post about painting insects. I enjoy insects as subjects because they're like tiny jewels, each one with many…

Alan Jacobs finds a quote that beautifully expresses why I don't want a Kindle, and why I wish the iPad were a stylus-friendly Mac tablet: Of course, you can't take your pen to the screen. When it comes to annotating the written word, nothing yet created for the screen compares to the immediacy and simplicity of a pen on paper. The only effective way to respond to text on screen is to write about it. The keyboard stands in for the pen; but it demands more than a mere underline or asterisk in the margin. It demands that you write. That, of course, was the reason for the pen all along: it's a…

Hi everyone, I'm officially back from blogcation this week, so thanks for hanging in there while I was (mostly) off the grid! For the next couple of weeks, I'll be slowly wading through the emails and links I got during over the last few weeks. Plus, I'll not only be posting at BioE, I'll also be contributing over at Collective Imagination, which is focusing this month on technology and personal health, including data visualization and e-health. (These are big interests of mine that I occasionally touch on here at BioE, but are a squarer fit over at CI.) Please pop over and see what you…

By Joseph Hewitt, who clearly understands the Sb atmosphere quite well.

Update: welcome Consumerist readers! While I use my own experience to illustrate concerns about third-party online merchants, this post is mainly about the bigger long-term informational problems I see with reputation, reliability, and online communities. Please feel free to weigh in! A few weeks ago, I caught a familiar story on the local news. A local citizen had written in to the news team with a request for help after a local furniture company sold them a defective living room set, and wouldn't give them a refund. The news team went to the business, who - wary of the potential public…

Hola BioE readers, I've been blogging at Scienceblogs for two years this month, and prior to that, I blogged for another year at my own site. So it is not surprising that I am very, very tired. Blogging uses up a big chunk of my dwindling free time, which I also need for such things as reading non-work-related books, going to the gym, writing long-delayed letters to friends, and cooking with my boyfriend. Not to mention maybe painting something for once, which was the original focus of this blog long, long ago. So I'm going on blogcation, effective immediately. I expect I'll be back in a…