Science Practice
clock | May 19, 2007Chapel Hill is really becoming a big center for bringing together scientists (of which there are so many in the area) and techonology innovators (of which there are also many in the area). Not just the Science Blogging Conference, either!
Renaissance Computing Institute and Microsoft are organizing The 2007 Microsoft eScience Workshop at RENCI at Friday Center in Chapel Hill, on October 21-23, 2007:
It is no longer possible to do science without doing computing.
The use of computers creates many challenges as it expands the realm of the possible in scientific research and many of these…
clock | May 17, 2007Business customers and children can be tough to manage online, but can you imagine managing scientists! They are already hard enough to satisfy in their native environment offline (e.g., to look beyond the usual metrics when awarding tenure). I know, I am making links in this post so cryptic, you'll just have to click to see what on Earth I am talking about and make your own connections...
clock | May 14, 2007From Paul I learned about the DRIADE Workshop on Digital data preservation, sharing, and discovery: Challenges for Small Science Communities in the Digital Era, organized by NESCent (National Evolutionary Synthesis Center) and the UNC Metadata Research Center. I am not sure if the participation is by invitation only, or if it is free, but I'll try to sneak in somehow. We'll see if that works and will let you know if it does.
clock | May 4, 2007Making the second Science Blogging Conference even bigger and better, we are happy to announce that the January 19th, 2008 meeting will be hosted by Sigma Xi (publishers of American Scientist) in their gorgeous new building in the Research Triangle Park. Their conference facilities can house more people (225 as opposed to 170 we had last time) and provide more space for shmoozing between and after the sessions.
For those who arrive early, there will be Friday afternoon events, sessions and meals on or close to the UNC campus. We have tentatively secured two excellent session leaders so…
clock | May 3, 2007There is a new (nice and long) article by Laura Bonetta about science blogging in today's issue of the journal Cell.
Bloggers on A Blog Around The Clock, Pharyngula, Aetiology, Framing Science, The Daily Transcript, Sandwalk, In the Pipeline, Nobel Intent, Useful Chemistry, De Rerum Natura and Panda's Thumb are mentioned and/or interviewed. A couple of carnivals, e.g., Tangled Bank, Mendel's Garden and Gene Genie are also mentioned.
For those who have no access to The Cell, I am assuming that each one of us will egotistically quote the part about oneself (like we did last month with The…
clock | May 3, 2007I know, I know, many people are still skeptical, but opening one's lab notebooks is a part and parcel of the new world of Open Science. There is an opinion piece about it in Nature (also available on Nature's Nautilus blog). Attila Csordas added some very important points today, reminding everyone of the global nature of scientific collaboration.
The few pioneers who have opened their notebooks do it in different ways. Jean-Claude Bradley's group uses both a blog and a wiki. Rosie Redfield's group has one central blog plus each student's own blog (see them here, here, here and here).…
clock | May 2, 2007Spiked and Pfizer are asking:
'What's the Greatest Innovation?' is a survey of key thinkers in science, technology and medicine, conducted by spiked in collaboration with the research-based pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Contributors were asked to identify what they see as the greatest innovation in their field. More than a hundred experts and authorities have responded already, including half-a-dozen Nobel laureates.
The survey will roll through May and June, and the discussion will go live at an event in central London on Wednesday 6 June
What is the difference between innovation and…
clock | May 2, 2007Rob identifies some old pernicious frames, makes suggestions how to counter them and offers more modern ways to frame the question of copyright in this three-part post:
Empty Rhetoric: 'Intellectual Property Is Property!'
Copyright and scientific papers
Copyright is Censorship
clock | May 1, 2007One chronobiological pioneer is leaving and another one is coming in. Gene Block is going to UCLA and Joe Takahashi is leaving Northwestern (What are Fred Turek and others going to do there without him? What happens to the Howard Hughes institute?) and coming in to head the new Center for Circadian and Systems Biology. A very interesting game of musical chairs. Stay tuned.
clock | April 25, 2007Update: The issue has been resolved amicably and Shelley has some further thoughts. And some even more further thoughts. The discussion will continue here on Scienceblogs and elsewhere in the follwoing days....
If you read other Scienceblogs and not just me, you are likely quite aware of the "Wiley Affair", but if you are not here is a quick summary:
My esteemed colleague here at scienceblogs, Shelley Batts of the Retrospectacle blog, did what we all do all the time - what is one of the primary role of science blogs: compared what a scientific paper says to what the press releases and…
clock | April 20, 2007It has 'Coturnix' written all over it, don't you think? I am even wearing my PLoS t-shirt right now as I am typing this!
But, why is it necessary to move to San Francisco? My wife is terrified of earthquakes and CA is one state she always said she would never move to.
Looking at the job description, everything can be easily done sitting in my pajamas here in Chapel Hill, or on a submarine, or on the Moon. It's all online:
PLoS ONE Online Community Manager
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit advocacy and publishing organization located in the China Basin area of San…
clock | April 16, 2007Pimm thinks that
scientists were out of the first inhabitants of the word wide web, and most academic web pages were made by scientist-turned web geeks in the 1.0 era.
He shows some examples of good webpages. I added the Reffinetti lab as an example of a good one.
How's yours? Last updated in 2004? On a corporate template?
If you have an example of a really good one, send the link to Pimm.
clock | April 10, 2007As you may have noticed, there is a vigorous debate going on in the blogosphere about framing science (all the links to all the relevant posts can be found if you click on that link).
For the uninitiated, this may look as a big dust-up and bar-brawl, but that is how blogosphere works, ya know, thesis + anthithesis and all. Dialectics, that's the word I was looking for! Does not mean that Larry Moran and I will refuse to have a beer with each other when he comes to Chapel Hill next time!
The sheer quantity of responses, the passion, and the high quality of most posts, thoughtful and…
clock | April 9, 2007Do the survey for this week and let me and John know how you answered and why:
Most likely reason a scientist will leave research?
Can't find a permanent position
Desires to earn a higher salary
Sees no correlation between hard work and eventual success
Wants to make a greater impact on society
Feels love of science could be better expressed in another career
clock | April 9, 2007If so, go tell Bill:
There must be more. Who else is doing, or planning to do, open science? And further, how can we help each other?
My working hypothesis is that open, collaborative models should out-produce the current standard model of research, which involves a great deal of inefficiency in the form of secrecy and mistrust. Open science barely exists at the moment -- infancy would be an overly optimistic term for its developmental state. Right now, one of the most important things open science advocates can do is find and support each other (and remember, openness is inclusive of a range…
clock | April 5, 2007I was waiting until the last installment was up to post about this. Revere on Effect Measure took a recent paper about a mathematical model of the spread of anti-viral resistance and wrote a 16-part series leading the readers through the entire paper, from the title to the List of References and everything in between. While the posts are unlikely to garner many comments, this series will remain online as a valuable resource, something one can use to learn - or teach others - how a scientific paper is to be analyzed.
As you can see, it takes a lot of time to read a paper thoroughly. It also…
clock | April 5, 2007Scientists, as a whole, are very reluctant to write novel ideas, hypotheses or data on blogs, and are very slow to test the waters of Open, Source Publishing. Most of what one finds on science blogs is commentary on other peoples' ideas, hypotheses and data found in journals and mass media.
On the other hand, people in the humanities/literature/art/liberal arts side of campus have long ago embraced blogging as a tool to get their rough drafts out, to refine them upon receiving feedback from commenters, and subsequently publish them in peer-reviewed journals. If you follow History Carnival,…
clock | April 3, 2007The April issue of The Scientist contains a good article on science blogging, titled Scooped by a Blog by David Secko (Vol. 21, Issue 4, page 21) focusing on publishing data on blogs, running an Open Notebook lab online, and the way blogs are affecting the evolution of science publishing.
The main story of the article is the story about the way Reed Cartwright's quick comment on a paper led to his co-autorship on the subsequent paper on the topic. But you can read all about it on his blog, including the article excerpt on the story.
Others interviewed for the story are Larry Moran and…
clock | March 31, 2007A review of evo-devo (Jenner, R.A., Wills, M.A. (2007) The choice of model organisms in evo-devo. Nat Rev Genet. 8:311-314. Epub 2007 Mar 6.) is starting to make rounds on the blogs. I cannot access the paper (I'd like to have it if someone wants to e-mail me the PDF), but the press release (also found here) is very vague, so I had to wait for some blogger to at least post a summary.
This is what the press release says (there is more so click on the link):
The subject of evo-devo, which became established almost a decade ago, is particularly dependent on the six main model organisms that…
clock | March 29, 2007On The Scientist website you can find their new experimental feature - an article with questions to the public that will be used in forming the articles for the print version of the magazine next month. Go see Special Feature: Stem cell cloning needs you: In a unique experiment we're inviting you to participate in a discussion that will help shape our next feature on stem cell research and post comments:
We're inviting people to give us their thoughts and questions on whether we need to rethink the scientific and ethical approach to stem cell cloning to help shape a feature that we'll be…