Science Practice
clock | November 26, 2007That is, if you are a shrew and do not want to be just a dead data-point for some ingenious young ecologists....who at least clean up the tricky trash left by drunk drivers.
clock | November 21, 2007It's been a while since I came back from Boston, but the big dinosaur story kept me busy all last week so I never managed to find time and energy to write my own recap of the Harvard Conference.
Anna Kushnir, Corie Lok, Evie Brown, Kaitlin Thaney (Part 2 and Part 3) and
Alex Palazzo have written about it much better than I could recall from my own "hot seat". Elizabeth Cooney of Boston Globe has a write-up as well. Read them all.
So, here is my story, in brief....and pictorial, just like the first part (under the fold).
The Keynote
About an hour or so before the conference, we started…
clock | November 6, 2007Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry.
But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science has become such a collaborative enterprise and single-author papers are becoming a rarity, when a 12-author paper turns no heads and 100-author papers are showing up more and more, it has become necessary to put some order in the question of authorship.
Different scientific areas have different traditions. In one discipline…
clock | November 1, 2007The fifth Science Festival is going on right now in Genoa, Italy. It is a longish affair, from 25th October till 6th November, so if you just happen to be in the area you can still make it. They have hundredr of events, e.g., exhibitions, workshops, performances and shows, all related to science in some way and targeted at a broad audience, from children to senior scientists.
I wish I could attend the session on Rhythms of Life as well as the one on Where is Science Dissemination Going?:
Nowadays, almost 2/3 of press agency releases on scientific topics are based on news given by press…
clock | October 24, 2007My brain is fried. My flight home was horrifying - the pilot warned us before we even left the gate that the weather is nasty and that he ordered the stewardess to remain seated at least the first 30 minutes of the flight. Did the warning make the experience more or less frightening? I think it made it more so. Yes, the wind played with our airplane as if it was a toy, but knowing that the pilot thought it was nasty made it less comforting that he is confident himself in his abilities to keep us afloat. The scariest was the landing - we were kicked around throughout the descent until the…
clock | October 17, 2007Nobel Prizes are not the only awards given in Stockholm these day. Karolinska Institute also gives an annual Lennart Nilsson Award for photography. This year's prize has just been announced and I am happy to report that the recepient is a friend of mine (and Scifoo camper), Felice Frankel for her amazing science photography. From the Press Release:
Felice Frankel, a scientific imagist and researcher at Harvard University's Initiative in Innovative Computing, has been named the recipient of the 2007 Lennart Nilsson Award. Frankel was sited for creating images that are exquisite works of art…
clock | October 14, 2007So far this week, my blogging had a distinctly local slant on Nobel Prizes, so now I want to do something different. Quite a lot of people have noticed how many science prizes this year went to Europeans. Read the excellent treatments by Katherine Sharpe, Abel Pharmboy, Steinn Sigurosson, Chad Orzel and PZ Myers to see the range of ideas and opinions on this.
I want to add just a couple of brief points...
If you look at the list of winners of Nobels for Literature, you will notice that they come from all over the world.
If you look at the Peace Prizes, they are also from all over, though…
clock | October 14, 2007A couple of years ago, a blog post of mine appeared in the List of References of a paper. Unfortunately, the form in which it was cited was this:
#16 Zivkovic B. Clock tutorial #6: To entrain or not to entrain, that is the question. (2005); Available at: http://circadiana.blogspot.com.
As you can see, it is far from specific. The actual URL of the post is http://circadiana.blogspot.com/2005/02/clock-tutorial-6-to-entrain-or-not-to.html. When I reposted it here I added on the bottom what I thought would be the Proper Reference to this post:
Zivkovic, BD (2005/2006) Clock Tutorial #6: To…
clock | October 12, 2007Smithies is not the only winner of this year's Nobel Prize with a local connection.
The Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded this morning and one of the recepients is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The chair of IPCC is Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, a triple alumnus and former professor at my alma mater North Carolina State University:
Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), obtained all three of his graduate degrees from NC State, including a master's degree in industrial engineering in 1972, and doctorates in industrial engineering and…
clock | October 11, 2007Ghosts, drugs, and blogs:
By its hidden nature, it is obviously a challenge to determine the exact prevalence of "ghost management," defined by Sismondo as the phenomenon in which "pharmaceutical companies and their agents control or shape multiple steps in the research, analysis, writing, and publication of articles."
Of course they fight against Open Access Publishing - too much sunshine scares them and would make them scurry away in panic...
clock | October 9, 2007You may remember, from several months ago, that Attila started a contest for the best designed lab web page.
Soon, the project became too big for a lone blogger to tackle. Especially after an article about this appeared on the online pages of Nature. So, as Attila announced today, the contest goes Big Time.
The Scientist is now hosting the official contest. Of course, Attila is one of the judges. Several web-pages have already been nominated and now it is your job to think of the best-designed, prettiest, most-functional and most up-to-date laboratory homepages and nominate them for the…
clock | October 9, 2007The recent return of Journal Clubs on PLoS ONE has been quite a success so far. People are watching from outside and they like what they see.
The first Journal Club article, on microbial metagenomics, has already, in just one week, gathered 3 ratings, each accompanied with a short comment, one trackback (this will be the second) and 7 annotations and 4 discussions eliciting further 14 responses in the comment threads. The 12-comment-and-growing thread on the usefulness of the term 'Prokaryote' is quite exciting, showing that it is not so hard to comment on PLoS ONE after all, once you get…
clock | October 8, 2007Dr. Oliver Smithies, the Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA, together with Mario R. Capecchi and Martin J. Evans, won this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine:
This year's Nobel Laureates have made a series of ground-breaking discoveries concerning embryonic stem cells and DNA recombination in mammals. Their discoveries led to the creation of an immensely powerful technology referred to as gene targeting in mice. It is now being applied to virtually all areas of biomedicine - from basic research to the…
clock | October 3, 2007Before two papers passed the peer-review and got published, WHO (which was given the data) made its own interpretation of the findings and included it in its press kit, including the errors they made in that interpretation. A complex story - what's your take on it?
clock | October 1, 2007Yes, I'll be there this Friday. Come by and say Hello if you are in the building or close at lunchtime.
clock | September 26, 2007Back in July, the House of Representatives passed a bill that requires all the NIH-funded research to be made freely available to the public within at most 12 months subsequent to publication.
The equivalent bill has passed the Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this summer and will be up for vote in the Senate very soon! In advance of this important vote, The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a Call for action:
As the Senate considers Appropriations measures for the 2008 fiscal year this fall, please take a moment to remind your Senators of your strong support for public access…
clock | September 25, 2007Johanna Dehlinger writes:
In September, PLoS Computational Biology begins a series entitled "Developing Computational Biology" about the pursuit of scientific endeavors in computational biology around the world. Each country has unique features in areas from educational programs, types of research being undertaken and the ways that research is funded. The series starts with a perspective on computational biology in Mexico, followed by contributions about Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, China, and South Africa.
This will be interesting to watch - tune in.
clock | September 14, 2007BBC reports that scientists working in the UK government have adopted a Scientific Ethics Code, written by Professor Sir David King. Here is the Code:
Act with skill and care, keep skills up to date
Prevent corrupt practice and declare conflicts of interest
Respect and acknowledge the work of other scientists
Ensure that research is justified and lawful
Minimise impacts on people, animals and the environment
Discuss issues science raises for society
Do not mislead; present evidence honestly
Several bloggers have responded to this. Here is Janet's take:
They seem like quite sensible…
clock | August 31, 2007In a commentary and a blog post, the editors of PLoS Medicine ask:
....is there still a reluctance to accept that anything useful can be learned from research without numbers?
An old question that tends to generate a lot of heat. Where do you stand on it, within medicine or within your own area of research?