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Author Archives: Bora Zivkovic
My picks from ScienceDaily
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Posted in Science News
Recuerdos de la Alhambra
A live performance by Johannes Moller from a concert in the Vasteras Concert Hall, Sweden, May 2005 :
Today’s carnivals
MetaCarnival: Volume One, Number 2 is up on Emergiblog
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Posted in Carnivals
Clock Quotes
Who says we didn’t have controversial subjects on TV back in my time? Remember Bonanza? It was about three guys in high heels living together.
– Milton Berle
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Posted in Clock Quotes
The Best of November
For those of you too busy to read this blog daily and who did not have time to check out each of 233 posts I published on this blog in November, here is a sampling of some of the posts you may like to check out now:
Spring Forward, Fall Back – should you watch out tomorrow morning?
Semlin Judenlager
I have voted. Have you?
Roosevelts on Toilets
Transition and the new Cabinet
Post-election thoughts
Republicans? Who’s that?
The Science Blog Meme
Will there be new communication channels in the Obama administration?
The map is in the bag, but the sequence may yet reveal if kangaroos have jumping genes
Science by press release – you are doing it wrong
Advice for potential graduate students
Obama’s Transition
Mining the Web for the patterns in the Real World
Science and Science Fiction
What is wrong with the picture?
Why does Impact Factor persist most strongly in smaller countries
The Open Laboratory 2008 – you have 34 hours left!
Twilight
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Posted in Blogging, Housekeeping
What’s wrong with Google Blogsearch?
Checking one’s incoming links on Sitemeter, Technorati and Google Blogsearch is essential tool for a blogger – it allows one to notice responses to one’s posts in approximately real time, so the blog-to-blog conversation can continue fluently.
But, for a couple of weeks now, Google Blogsearch has been useless. They have changed the algorithm so, instead of picking up only links from individual blog posts, it picks up links from all sorts of widgets, blogrolls, etc. and thus floods the search with tons of useless hits. I have no idea who just posted a blog response to something I said, and who just updated the blog and the blogroll got updated with it.
This is more than useless. Anyone at Google listening? I am sure they must be flooded with protest messages! How hard it would be to revert to the old algorithm while working on a better one behind the scenes?
Posted in Blogging
The summary of the Science Blogging Meme
Martin Fenner started it all, so Martin also put together a summary of most frequent, most interesting and funniest responses. Take a look.
And here is the Worldle summary of the Question #1 and here for Question #2.
Posted in Blogging
Twilight
Saw the movie over the weekend. Mrs.Coturnix and Coturnietta read the first book (Coturnietta is now reading the second) so we went together.
I am a horrible movie critic – I usually kick back, munch popcorn, and enjoy every piece of crap on the screen. Heck, I love B-monster movies.
So, back to Twilight – first, it was obvious it was a movie made after a book:
– it was too long (Hollywood makes them 90min by design)
– it was choppy and the story was overcomplicated (Hollywood makes simple storylines by design)
– it was missing relevant information, probably something explained in the book, but not possible to turn to the screen.
OK, so this place is, like, in the middle of nowhere and has population of 1200 and some change. That ‘change’ must be the few adults, as the high school looks like it houses about 1200 students (it was actually a Seattle suburb school where it was filmed), so almost all inhabitants must be high-schoolers.
For a place that small, the school is amazingly big, clean, bright and well-equipped. For a place that small, the diversity is amazing – just the right mix of whites, blacks, Asians, Native Americans and vampires. For a place that small, stats would suggest a total of about 2-3 prettier-than-normal people, but here, every single person is gorgeous – every guy is super-handsome and every woman is stunningly beautiful. Nobody’s fat. Nobody’s ugly. Nobody’s just, you know, normal!
Also, the movie is constantly reminding us how the two main protagonists are hawt, and self-aware about their hawtness, and self-confident about their hawtness, and too busy with their adventure to pay much attention to the mere mortals around them. But there was just a small hint (the scene in the biology lab in which they won an onion) that they are also very smart and educated. I asked Mrs.Coturnix and she confirmed that the books stress this a lot, while the movie completely omits their intelligence.
I checked the IMBD afterwards to see who all those super-beautiful actors were as only one or two seemed familiar. Apparently they all have nice long careers on TV (which I don’t watch), the guy who plays Edward also plays Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter movies, the actor who plays the Dad was in a lot of B movies, and the main actress played the daughter as a kid in Panic Room which I loved (so I could not recognize her at all). Apparently, the two main actors each got $2mil for this movie, and will get $12mil for the second one.
Oh, but I loved it, did I tell you that?
Posted in Fun
My picks from ScienceDaily
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Posted in Science News
2008 Edublog Awards – time to start nominations
This is what you need to do:
2008 Nominations Contact Form
In order to nominate blogs for the 2008 Edublog Awards you have to link to them first!
So, follow these two simple steps to nominate (nominations made without links or without correct submission will not be counted)
1. Write a post on your blog linking to a. The 2008 Nomination page & b The blogs & sites that you want to nominate (must be linked to!)
You can nominate for as many categories as you like, but only one nomination per category, and not yourself 🙂 You can nominate a blog (or site) for more than one category)
2. Use the form below to contact us, please include a genuine email address (spam free, just in case we need to confirm identity) and the link to your nominations post.
1. Best individual blog
Using Blogs in Science Education
2. Best group blog
Extreme Biology
3. Best new blog
4. Best resource sharing blog
Discovering Biology in a Digital World
5. Most influential blog post
THE MACGYVER PROJECT: GENOMIC DNA EXTRACTION AND GEL ELECTROPHORESIS EXPERIMENTS USING EVERYDAY MATERIALS
6. Best teacher blog
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
7. Best librarian / library blog
Confessions of a Science Librarian
8. Best educational tech support blog
Class Blogmeister
9. Best elearning / corporate education blog
SciVee.tv
10. Best educational use of audio
Connect Learning, with David Warlick
11. Best educational use of video / visual
B(io)log(y) Videos & Slideshows
12. Best educational wiki
Miss Baker’s Biology Class Wiki
13. Best educational use of a social networking service
Principles of Biology
14. Best educational use of a virtual world
Drexel Island on Second Life
15. Best class blog
Extreme Biology
16. Lifetime achievement
David Warlick
I can’t suggest my own blog, and I don’t think it is that great (mostly a way to get my notes up online and students can add comments, links, questions….) – but if you are interested, here it is.
Now go and do the same thing.
The Open Laboratory 2008 – you have 34 hours left!
It’s time! We are closing the submission form on December 1st at midnight Eastern time! That is just 34 hours away!
As expected, the entries have been flying in by the bushel over the past few days – it’s hard to keep up with you all and add all the new entries to the list. But, keep them coming! Is there a topic, format or style that is grievously under-represented? This is your last chance to provide the balance. We definitely need more original poems and cartoons.
Only submissions received through this form are valid. Do not add entries into the comments – this will not work!
Keep in mind that the posts will be printed in a book! A post that relies heavily on links, long quotes, copyrighted pictures, movies, etc., will not translate well into print.
The deadline is December 1st, 2008. at midnight EST – just 34 hours to go!
Below are submissions so far. Check them out and get inspired. If you see that one of your posts is at an old URL and you have since moved, re-submit with the new URL (perhaps re-post it if necessary).
Posting URLs in the comments does not work. Go down to the sidebar of this blog and click on the “Submit to OpenLab2008” button. Or click here.
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Posted in OpenLab08
Clock Quotes
The next time you feel like complaining, remember that your garbage disposal probably eats better than thirty percent of the people in this world.
– Robert Orben
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Posted in Clock Quotes
Using Blogs to Promote Science Literacy
Miss Baker’s slideshow about using blogs in the science classroom:
Posted in Science Education
If you are a University, Open Access is cheaper
Philip Johnson makes some back-of-the-envelope calculations, very conservatively assuming that all OA journals are author-pay (not true) and all author fees for publishing are born by the Universities (not true) and concludes that even with such harsh handicapping, universities that switched to OA-only policies would immediately save substantial amounts of money (also check the excellent comments on that post):
Subscription costs would obviously be nil for an open access journal: we are all free to access the content of an open access journal via the internet, with no restrictions on who can read the content. In contrast, the author would pay to publish the article. This is perhaps the biggest resistance from scientists (and I’m sure the situation would be similar in the arts, or law, or what have you) to the open access movement, many feeling they don’t have enough funding for students or experimental equipment as is, and couldn’t possibly afford to pay to publish as well. I can appreciate this argument, though some progress is being made as you can specifically request funding to cover open access publication charges from some of the granting agencies.
(Also, let’s be honest, the current situation of paying for page charges and to have colour figures means the author is already paying to publish, and sometimes non-trivial amounts.)
————————
Let’s further assume that the economies of scale would kick in if universities around the world decided to embrace this philosophy. This should lead to an overall lowering of the publication costs, all the while bringing access to academic literature to everyone with an internet connection. It is also easy to imagine the costs being even lower, as the collaborative nature of academic work means many papers now have authors from multiple institutions, all of whom could share in the cost of publishing. (Determining the rules for who-pays-what would be tricky, but should be doable.)
There are probably some key issues I’m missing here (the most obvious one which I’ve even mentioned is that we need open access journals to publish in!), and my idea is prefaced on the assumption that universities are the significant driving force in the academic literature game, but I think the take-home message is reasonably clear, at least using the University of Toronto numbers: we could already afford going entirely open access.
I certainly wouldn’t feel bad if Elsevier and their ilk went out of business given the exorbitant increase in subscription costs and the non-obvious reasoning why, and I’m sure the societies could come to embrace the open access movement, which would bring the majority of high quality journals into the fold.
Peter Suber adds some useful links and calculations, including:
# Since November 2006 several studies have give us newer data on the the ratio of no-fee OA journals to fee-based OA journals. The best current estimates are that 67% of the journals listed in the DOAJ charge no publication fees, and 83% of OA journals from society publishers charge no publication fees. Clearly if Johnson zeroed out the publication fees for two-thirds of the articles published by Toronto faculty, the projected saving would rise significantly.
# The bargain would be even more compelling if we could subtract the publication fees paid by funding agencies rather than universities. Unfortunately there are no studies yet estimating that number.
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Posted in Open Science
The Open Laboratory 2008 – two and half days to go!
It’s time! We are closing the submission form on December 1st at midnight Eastern time!
As expected, the entries have been flying in over the past few days. Keep them coming! You have only 3 or so days left to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several – no problem. Or ask your readers to submit for you.
Only submissions received through this form are valid.
Then take a look at your favourite bloggers and pick some of their best posts – don’t worry, we can deal with duplicate entries. Do not forget new and up-coming blogs – they may not know about the anthology – and submit their stuff as well.
As we did last year, we encourage you to also send in original poems and cartoons.
Keep in mind that the posts will be printed in a book! A post that relies heavily on links, long quotes, copyrighted pictures, movies, etc., will not translate well into print.
The deadline is December 1st, 2008. at midnight EST – just 2.5 days to go!
Below are submissions so far. Check them out and get inspired. If you see that one of your posts is at an old URL and you have since moved, re-submit with the new URL (perhaps re-post it if necessary).
Posting URLs in the comments does not work. Go down to the sidebar of this blog and click on the “Submit to OpenLab2008” button. Or click here.
Clock Quotes
Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader’s daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
– John le Carre
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Posted in Clock Quotes
Today’s carnivals
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Posted in Carnivals
Why does Impact Factor persist most strongly in smaller countries
The other night, at the meeting of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, the highlight of the event was a Skype conversation with Chris Brodie who is currently in Norway on a Fulbright, trying to help the scientists and science journalists there become more effective in communicating Norwegian science to their constituents and internationally.
Some of the things Chris said were surprising, others not as much. In my mind, I was comparing what he said to what I learned back in April when I went back to Serbia and talked to some scientists there. It is interesting how cultural differences and historical contingencies shape both the science and the science communication in a country (apparently, science is much better in Norway, science journalism much better in Serbia).
But one thing that struck me most and got my gears working was when Chris mentioned the population size of Norway. It is 4.644.457 (2008 estimate). Serbia is a little bigger, but not importantly so, with 7.365.507 (2008 estimate – the first one without Kosovo – earlier estimates of around 10 million include Kosovo). Compare this to the state of North Carolina with 9,061,032 (2007 estimate).
Now think – what proportion of the population of any country are active research scientists? While North Carolina, being part of a larger entity, the USA, can afford not to do some stuff and do more of other stuff, small countries like Norway and Serbia have to do everything they can themselves, if nothing else for security reasons, e.g., agriculture, various kinds of industry, tourism, defense, etc. Thus, North Carolina probably has a much larger percentage of the population being scientists (due to RTP, several large research universities, and a lot of biotech, electronics and pharmaceutical industry) than an independent small country can afford (neither Norway nor Serbia are members of the EU).
So, let’s say that each of these smaller countries has a few thousand active research scientists. They can potentially all know each other. Those in the same field certainly all know each other. Furthermore, they more than just know each other – they are all each other’s mentors, students, lab-buddies, classmates, etc., as such a country is likely to have only one major university in the capital and a few small universities in other large cities. It is all very….incestual.
With such a small number of scientists, they are going to be a weak lobby. Thus, chances of founding new universities and institutes, expanding existing departments and opening up new research/teaching positions in the academia are close to zero. This means that the only way to become a professor is to wait for your mentor to retire and try to take his/her place. This may take decades! In the meantime, you are forever a postdoc or some kind of associate researcher etc.
If each professor, over the course of the career, produces about 18 PhDs (more or less, depending on the discipline) who are indoctrinated in the idea that the academic path is the only True Path for a scientist, the competition for those few, rare positions will be immense. And they all know each other – they are all either best friends or bitterest enemies.
This means that, once there is a job opening, no matter who gets the job in the end, the others are going to complain about nepotism – after all, the person who got the job (as well as each candidate who did not) personally knows all the committee members who made the final decision.
In such an environment, there is absolutely no way that the decision-making can be even the tiniest bit subjective. If there is a little loophole that allows the committee to evaluate the candidate on subjective measures (a kick-ass recommendation letter, a kick-ass research proposal, a kick-ass teaching philosophy statement, kick-ass student evaluations, prizes, contributions to popularization of science, stardom of some kind, being a member of the minority group, etc.), all the hell will break loose at the end!
So, in small scientific communities, it is imperative that job and promotion decisions be made using “objective” (or seemingly objective) measures – some set of numbers which can be used to rank the candidates so the candidate with the Rank #1 automatically gets the job and nobody can complain. The decision can be (and probably sometimes is) done by a computer. This is why small countries have stiflingly formalized criteria for advancement through the ranks. And all of those are based on the numbers of papers published in journals with – you guessed it – particular ranges of Impact Factors!
Now, of course, there are still many universities and departments in the USA in which, due to bureacratic leanings of the administration, Impact Factor is still used as a relevant piece of information in hiring and promotion practices. But in general, it is so much easier in the USA, with its enormous number of scientists who do not know each other, to switch to subjective measures, or to combine them with experiments with new methods of objective (or seemingly objective) measures. From what I have seen, most job committees are much more interested in getting a person who will, both temperamentally and due to research interests, fit well with the department than in their IFs. The publication record is just a small first hurdle to pass – something that probably 200 candidates for the position would easily pass anyway.
So, I expect that the situation will change pretty quickly in the USA. Once Harvard made Open Access their rule, everyone followed. Once Harvard prohibits the use of IF in hiring decisions, the others will follow suit as well.
But this puts small countries in a difficult situation. They need to use the hard numbers in order to prevent bloody tribal feuds within the small and incestuous scientific communities. A number of new formulae have been proposed and others are in development. I doubt that there will be one winning measure that will replace the horrendously flawed Impact Factor, but I expect that a set of numbers will be used – some numbers derived from citations of one’s individual papers, others from numbers of online visits or downloads, others from media/blog coverage, others from quantified student teaching evalutions, etc. The hiring committees will have to look at a series of numbers instead of just one. And experiments with these new numbers will probably first be done in the USA and, only once shown to be better than IF, transported to smaller countries.
Related:
h-index
Nature article on the H-index
Achievement index climbs the ranks
The ‘h-index’: An Objective Mismeasure?
Why the h-index is little use
Is g-index better than h-index? An exploratory study at the individual level
Calculating the H-Index – Quadsearch & H-View Visual
The use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance
Citation counting, citation ranking, and h-index of human-computer interaction researchers: A comparison of Scopus and Web of Science
H-Index Analysis
The EigenfactorTM Metrics
Pubmed, impact factors, sorting and FriendFeed
Publish or Perish
Articles by Latin American Authors in Prestigious Journals Have Fewer Citations
Promise and Pitfalls of Extending Google’s PageRank Algorithm to Citation Networks
Neutralizing the Impact Factor Culture
The Misused Impact Factor
Paper — How Do We Measure Use of Scientific Journals? A Note on Research Methodologies
Escape from the impact factor
Comparison of SCImago journal rank indicator with journal impact factor
Emerging Alternatives to the Impact Factor
Why are open access supporters defending the impact factor?
Differences in impact factor across fields and over time
A possible way out of the impact-factor game
Comparison of Journal Citation Reports and Scopus Impact Factors for Ecology and Environmental Sciences Journals
Watching the Wrong Things?
Impact factor receives yet another blow
Having an impact (factor)
In(s) and Out(s) of Academia
The Impact Factor Folly
The Impact Factor Revolution: A Manifesto
Is Impact Factor An Accurate Measure Of Research Quality?
Another Impact Factor Metric – W-index
Bibliometrics as a research assessment tool : impact beyond the impact factor
Turning web traffic into citations
Effectiveness of Journal Ranking Schemes as a Tool for Locating Information
Characteristics Associated with Citation Rate of the Medical Literature
Relationship between Quality and Editorial Leadership of Biomedical Research Journals: A Comparative Study of Italian and UK Journals
Inflated Impact Factors? The True Impact of Evolutionary Papers in Non-Evolutionary Journals
Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate
Measures of Impact
Posted in Academia, Open Science, Science Practice
My picks from ScienceDaily
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Posted in Science News
Clock Quotes
Already the writers are complaining that there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.
– Tatyana Tolstaya
Posted in Clock Quotes
What is wrong with the picture?
Serbian Ministry of Health, as part of their fight against AIDS, inserted a condom inside a women’s magazine this month. The condom is German-made, named “Bumper-Bumper” and in a fun-looking package:
[Image from]
The timing is unfortunate (I’m sure it was planned months in advance and was too difficult to pull back at the last moment) – this was mailed out just 2-3 days after a guy in Belgrade killed his wife – a pretty brutal case of domestic violence that everyone is talking about (this is not something that happens often there).
Question #1: Why are condoms not sent to men? Are the guys there not reading any magazines? Sports? Tech? I am sure there is some research that shows that this is more efficient, but aren’t the guys those who should care of this thing?
Question #2: what is wrong with the picture?
Hat-tip: Danica
Posted in Balkans, Reproductive Health, Sex
ScienceOnline’09 – Friday events
The Friday page for the ScienceOnline09 is not up to date yet, but will be soon.
What is planned?
In the morning, there will be something related to coffee – Coffee Science of sorts. Place and time TBA.
For lunches, you are free to organize yourselves by editing the Friday page.
In the afternoon, we will have a set of Lab Tours starting at 2:30pm and ending around 4pm. BRITE and NC Museum of Natural Science are already set in stone. Several others are still in the process of finalizing the details (e.g., how many participants, etc.). We will soon have the complete list up on the wiki so you can start signing up for them.
The evening program will start with a Friday Fermentable (at Sigma Xi) with these guys (yes, listen to the whole show – it is worth your time) at around 6:00pm. The sign-up page will come up for this soon as well.
Then, WiSE takes over at 6:45pm with registration and a Networking/appetizers/local groups fair event, i.e., come to eat, drink and schmooze. At 8pm, we’ll get into the big room for The Big Speech of the conference – by Rebecca Skloot. Title is still TBA, but it will have something to do with science, women in science, careers and science communication.
Afterwards, I guess we’ll all move accross the road to Radisson bar for some more drinks.
Keep an eye on the Friday page for all of the details over the next several days.
Donation drive hits the number 10!
The online drive has already produced 10 donors. Let’s see if we can up that number a little….
My picks from ScienceDaily
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Posted in Science News
Clock Quotes
Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom.
– John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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Posted in Clock Quotes
Science and Science Fiction
A few days ago, Peggy and Stephanie asked the blogosphere a few questions about the relationship between science and Science Fiction. They want to use the insights from the responses to run their session – Science Fiction on Science Blogs – at the ScienceOnline09 meeting in January.
They got lots of responses – interesting reads for the long holiday weekend:
Responses from the SF Writer Point of View
- Sean Craven @ Renaissance Oaf
- Simon Haynes @ Spacejock News
- Arvind Mishra @ Science Fiction in India
- JesterJoker @ Sa Souvraya Niende Misain Ye
- Kelly McCullough @ Wyrdsmiths
- Mike Brotherton
- Robert Evans @ SciFiWriter
- David J. Williams @ The Mirrored Heavens
- Nina Munteanu @ The Alien Next Door
- Shaun Duke @ The World in the Satin Bag
Responses from the Science Point of View
- Arvind Mishra @ Science Fiction in India
- Mike Brotherton
- Ken @ Neth Space
- Kim @ All My Faults are Stress Related
- Schadwen @ Elemental Home
- Z @ It’s The Thought that Counts
- kcsphil of DC Dispatches
- Miriam Goldstein @ The Oyster’s Garter
- Ken @ GeoSlice
- Lee @ Cocktail Party Physics
- Eva Amsen @ Expression Patterns
- Scicurious @ Neurotopia (version 2.0)
- Dr. Isis @ Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess
- Martin R. @ Aardvarchaeology
- Blake Stacey @ Science After Sunclipse
- Chad Orzel @ Uncertain Principles
- John S. Wilkins @ Evolving Thoughts
- Greg Laden
- Janet Stemwedel @ Adventures in Ethics and Science
There’s also discussion of the topic going on at io9.
I did not find time (yet) to write my own responses. Perhaps I will – no promises, as I may feel, after reading everyone else’s posts, that I have nothing to add. In the meantime, you can check out (if you have missed them before) some of my old posts related to Science Fiction:
Essential Science Fiction
What Is Lab Lit?
Mokie-Koke
World 2.0 at Rainbows End
Did A Virus Make You Smart?
Sci-Fi And Building Blogging Communities
Books: Max Barry’s ‘Jennifer Government’
Most Significant SF Books
Circadian Rhythm Degeneration Syndrome?
Femicide
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Posted in Books, Science Education
…the girl on a half-shell…
Now I finally understand the lyrics! Joan Baez was really singing to Bob about prehistoric turtles!
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Posted in Paleontology, Science News
The 50 Most Important, Influential, and Promising People in Science
That is the Discover Magazine’s series of articles, which includes:
The 10 Most Influential People in Science
20 Best Brains Under 40
Teen Genius: 5 Promising Scientists Under 20
…and more (the series, as the numbers above do not add up to 50, must still be in progress).
Posted in Academia
Ten things to know if you’re having Thanksgiving with Republicans
Here – a compilation of ten facts:
Congratulations, liberal/progressive/terrorist! This is the first Thanksgiving in eight years where you represent the political majority. Because you know who voted with you? Oh, just fifty-three percent of the United States of America. HELL YEAH! Who’s a member of the fringe lunatic this holiday season? Not you!
But what happens if your right-wing relatives still want to debate the outcome of the election? Defang your conservative loved ones with these ten helpful facts!:
But since when are facts supposed to be of any interest to Republicans? Their modus vivendi is to ignore the facts, “make their own reality”, then get surprised when Reality hits them in the face (see: Katrina, Iraq, financial meltdown, etc.).
The Open Laboratory 2008 – three days left!
As expected, the entries have been flying in over the past few days. Keep them coming! You have only 3 or so days left to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several – no problem. Or ask your readers to submit for you.
Only submissions received through this form are valid.
Then take a look at your favourite bloggers and pick some of their best posts – don’t worry, we can deal with duplicate entries. Do not forget new and up-coming blogs – they may not know about the anthology – and submit their stuff as well.
As we did last year, we encourage you to also send in original poems and cartoons.
Keep in mind that the posts will be printed in a book! A post that relies heavily on links, long quotes, copyrighted pictures, movies, etc., will not translate well into print.
The deadline is December 1st, 2008. at midnight EST – just three+ days to go!
Below are submissions so far. Check them out and get inspired. If you see that one of your posts is at an old URL and you have since moved, re-submit with the new URL (perhaps re-post it if necessary).
Posting URLs in the comments does not work. Go down to the bottom of this post (or to the sidebar of this blog) and click on the “Submit to OpenLab2008” button. Or click here.
Comments Off on The Open Laboratory 2008 – three days left!
Posted in OpenLab08
Noam Chomsky’s interview about the election in Democracy Now!
What do you think? I think he has not seen change.gov and change.org yet, as they undermine his (otherwise useful) argument. But you have to read (or listen to) the entire thing – it is long and below are a few short snippets:
Noam Chomsky: “What Next? The Elections, the Economy, and the World”:
Today’s carnivals
I and the Bird #89 is up on Bird Ecology Study Group
The 152nd Carnival of Homeschooling is up on The Common Room
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Posted in Carnivals
Does Tryptophan from turkey meat make you sleepy?
It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow and the question (of the title of this post) pops up on the internets again. See SciCurious and Janet for the latest local offerings.
Short answer: we don’t know.
But there is endless speculation about it, each taking into account bits and pieces of information that we know about tryptophan and related physiology. The hypotheses tend to focus on:
a) Tryptophan itself, i.e., how it can get from food, through the intestine, through the bloodstream, to the brain and what it would do once there.
b) Serotonin, as a product of tryptophan metabolism, and how it can be produced (and where – in the brain or somewhere else) and what it would do once there.
I like to post and re-post, around this time of year, the third alternative, taking into account that serotonin is precursor of melatonin, that all the enzymatic machinery needed for transformation of tryptophan to melatonin operates in the intestine itself, that melatonin (unlike tryptophan) easily crosses the blood-brain barrier, and that melatonin does have some effect on sleepiness.
The posts (see the 2005, 2006 and 2007 versions) tend to elicit a lot of comments.
I am not claiming that this hypothesis is correct, just that it co-exists with other hypotheses that are just as untested as this one. Read it under the fold:
Posted in Physiology, Sleep
National Day of Listening
StoryCorps is declaring November 28, 2008 the first annual National Day of Listening:
This holiday season, ask the people around you about their lives — it could be your grandmother, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood. By listening to their stories, you will be telling them that they matter and they won’t ever be forgotten. It may be the most meaningful time you spend this year.
Open Game Table
Inspired by The Open Laboratory, the Gamers in the blogosphere are planning to do something similar – the Open Game Table.
If you are a gaming blogger, take a look and participate….
If you share something, is it useful and educational?
Hmmm, juxtaposing these three posts is thought-provoking….what is education all about? Is the ‘coolness’ factor overpowering the ‘usefulness’ factor? Thoughts?
Planning to Share versus Just Sharing:
But inevitably, with a very few exceptions, these projects spend an enormous amount of time defining what is to be shared, figuring out how to share it, setting up the mechanisms to share it, and then…not really sharing much. Or sharing once but costing so much time, effort or money that they do not get sustained. Does this sound familiar to anyone else? I don’t feel like this phenomenon is isolated to me or somehow occurs because of my own personal ineptitude, but you never know.
It seems that neither Tony Hirst, the person who set this operation into motion, nor any of those who are blithely praising his work, bothered to think about the data itself or what it meant. That, indeed, as Hirst himself has repeatedly stated in response to my comments, “wasn’t the point.” But if someone can advocate, and others can gasp at, such mangling of data without even thinking about what happens to that data in the process, believing it to be somehow beside the point… well, that’s a textbook case of data illiteracy as far as I’m concerned.
Am I missing the point on open educational resources?:
In the early brainstorming discussions, I staked out something of a confrontational stance… that higher education is still conducting its business as if information is scarce when we now live in an era of unprecedented information abundance. That we in the institutions can endlessly discuss what content we deign to share via our clunky platforms, while Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, TED Talks, the blogs and other networked media just get on with it… That I might not be able to legally reproduce much of the copyrighted media on the web, but I can link to it, maybe embed it, or simply tell students to search for it. This is not to suggest that sharing more of the presumably high quality content that higher education produces would not enrich the store of available information… but that the world is not waiting for us to get our act together and become a relevant force on the web. The world is moving on without us.
One of the other participants asked a question that resonated with me: if we live in an era of information abundance, why is the primary drive around OERs the publication of more content? And what other activities around the open education movement might be an effective use of our energies? What other needs have to be met?
Then read this: The Digital Youth Project – Kids Need Time to ‘Hang Out,’ ‘Mess Around’ and ‘Geek Out’:
The report notes the similarities between community norms and what educators might call “learning goals” but it clearly denotes a new position for the adult who serves as an educator. Simply stated, schools are not known for allowing “plenty of unstructured time for kids to tinker and explore without being dominated by direct instruction.”
Instead of classroom teachers, there would be lab teachers or leaders who would have a different responsibility, one that does not focus on assessing kids’ for competence. Instead, these adults would be “co-conspirators” practicing a “pedagogy of collegiality.”
Posted in Education, Technology
‘Academeology’ review in Nature
Peggy Kolm wrote a book review in Nature of Academeology by Female Science Professor.
My copy arrived some weeks ago, but it will have to wait until I read at least three other books I promised to review….eh. Anyway, Peggy says:
FSP’s stories of being a woman in a male-dominated field are engrossing. She describes the casual sexism, such as being ignored or treated as a secretary by visiting scientists, or having male colleagues comment that she received an award “because she is a woman”. These tales might be disheartening to some. But FSP also relates her successes as a scientist and in navigating difficulties as one half of a scientist couple who began her academic career with a young child. Never claiming that her experiences are universal or that her path has been easy, FSP shows that it is possible to have both a career as a scientist and a life outside of science.
Clock Quotes
If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side … when the glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time … is a very good one.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Posted in Clock Quotes
New and Exciting in PLoS ONE
There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. 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, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click.
Here is my pick for the week – you go and look for your own favourites…and in the meantime try your hand at making the funniest LOLCat to go with this article:
Whole Body Mechanics of Stealthy Walking in Cats:
The metabolic cost associated with locomotion represents a significant part of an animal’s metabolic energy budget. Therefore understanding the ways in which animals manage the energy required for locomotion by controlling muscular effort is critical to understanding limb design and the evolution of locomotor behavior. The assumption that energetic economy is the most important target of natural selection underlies many analyses of steady animal locomotion, leading to the prediction that animals will choose gaits and postures that maximize energetic efficiency. Many quadrupedal animals, particularly those that specialize in long distance steady locomotion, do in fact reduce the muscular contribution required for walking by adopting pendulum-like center of mass movements that facilitate exchange between kinetic energy (KE) and potential energy (PE) [1]-[4]. However, animals that are not specialized for long distance steady locomotion may face a more complex set of requirements, some of which may conflict with the efficient exchange of mechanical energy. For example, the “stealthy” walking style of cats may demand slow movements performed with the center of mass close to the ground. Force plate and video data show that domestic cats (Felis catus, Linnaeus, 1758) have lower mechanical energy recovery than mammals specialized for distance. A strong negative correlation was found between mechanical energy recovery and diagonality in the footfalls and there was also a negative correlation between limb compression and diagonality of footfalls such that more crouched postures tended to have greater diagonality. These data show a previously unrecognized mechanical relationship in which crouched postures are associated with changes in footfall pattern which are in turn related to reduced mechanical energy recovery. Low energy recovery was not associated with decreased vertical oscillations of the center of mass as theoretically predicted, but rather with posture and footfall pattern on the phase relationship between potential and kinetic energy. An important implication of these results is the possibility of a tradeoff between stealthy walking and economy of locomotion. This potential tradeoff highlights the complex and conflicting pressures that may govern the locomotor choices that animals make.
Posted in Science News
Mining the Web for the patterns in the Real World
Ever since I first discovered it, I loved the idea of the Moodgrapher and I wish it continued to be developed (not all the functions work any more). What it does is plot, in various ways, changes in “moods” as reported by users of LiveJournal.
For instance, you can see the spike of “ecstatic” on the evening of November 4th, when Obama’s victory became official:
Or you can track cyclic trends – here is “awake”:
I wish the tools could be refined even better, for instance narrowing down the time to just an hour or two or broadening it to months or years.
It would be also nice to narrow it by geography – imagine looking at various happy and unhappy moods displayed on LJ over the course of two hours after the Obama victory announcement narrowed down to country, state, county, precinct or even neighborhood, then comparing this with the official votes? We could figure out, for instance, if conservatives or liberals tend to use LJ more, or to use mood sign on LJ more, or if there are places in the country in which the electoral results are more emotional, perhaps correlated to the narrowness of results or to presence of advertising.
Of course, one can also use Google for similar kinds of tracking. For instance, one can use it to track seasonal events:
Again, it would be nice to be able to set the precise time limits to just an hour or to many years, as well as to restrict them to geographic locations – especially for the appearance of migratory birds and such cases.
Anyone know any more tricks like these, stuff that can be used to track natural or social phenomena by tracking how the Internet responds to them?
Posted in Technology
Nudity? On this blog?
Paul Sunstone: Why Bother to Promote A Healthy Attitude Towards Nudity?
On the other hand, there are at least two, broad reasons for somewhat caring how nudity is viewed (shameless pun intended). First, the notion that nudity is scandalous, immoral, and even dangerous contributes to all sorts of socio-political absurdities.
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Perhaps another reason we should be a little concerned about how nudity is thought of are the many studies that suggest a more healthy attitude towards nudity has profound benefits — especially for women. Here are the results of just three such studies:
Posted in Society
The Millionth Comment Winner is….
….drumroll….
Peggy Kolm! You can find Peggy on Biology in Science Fiction and Women in Science blogs.
The prize is a trip to NYCity, a brunch with bloggers, museum trips, lab tours and a big SciBlings-made gift basket.
Congratulations!
Posted in Blogging
What’s New in Life Science Research
Scienceblogs.com is…
…hosting a limited-run group blog called What’s New in Life Science Research, which will cover four separate topics in biotechnology: stem cells, cloning, biodefense, and genetically modified organisms. The blog is sponsored by Invitrogen, but like the Shell-sponsored Next Generation Energy blog, the bloggers (including our own Janet Stemwedel and Mike the Mad Biologist) will have complete editorial control over the content of their posts – we will merely provide questions about each topic to guide the conversation.
Go forth and comment….
Posted in Blogging
What goes around comes around
For instance, the Earth going around the Sun instead of vice versa. Or Copernicus starting the Scientific Revolution which eventually brought about the technology – DNA fingerprinting – that could be used to positively identify Copernicus’ remains.
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Posted in History of Science
Self-Censorship in Science Museums
From Museum 2.0, a marvelous blog I discovered last night:
Self-Censorship for Museum Professionals:
There are lots of things visitors can’t do in museums. But what about the things that museum professionals can’t (or feel they can’t) do? This week at the ASTC conference, Kathy McLean, Tom Rockwell, Eric Siegel and I presented a session called “You Can’t Do That in Museums!” in which we explored the peculiarities of self-censorship in the creation of museum exhibitions.
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1. Self-censorship is different in different museum types. In science and technology centers, there are some “can’t”s that are alive and well in other museums. For example, “Nazi science” came up several times as a “can’t”–but the Holocaust Museum’s Deadly Medicine exhibition was a successful project that didn’t bring the walls down. And while narrative-based museums have long dispensed with the concept that museums present a neutral point of view, science centers still feel that their trustworthiness rests on their objectivity. This is not to say that science centers are more censored than art or history museums–every kind of museum has its own hang-ups. Imagine an art museum that allowed patrons to bang on the exhibits the way you can in a science center.
2. Focusing on youth audiences can lead to heavy and sometimes inappropriate self-censorship. Our desire to “protect kids”–which reflects twenty years of clamping down (at least in the U.S.) on kids’ freedom–keeps science and technology museums from hard topics and edgy presentation styles. As Eric said at one point, “kids–our target audience–are living in a world of things they choose to consume that is so full of sex, so full of irony, so full of subjectivity, and when they come to the museum it is one of the few places in the world they don’t see that stuff. And so my question is, why are we keeping them away? Why aren’t we developing our audiences?”
3. Science is political, and science museums have a hard time grappling with that fact. Tom compared public perception of racial intelligence to that of sexual orientation, commenting that over the last thirty years, the left has advocated to have racial intelligence categorized as nurture and sexual orientation categorized as nature. The right advocates for the opposite. The way we think about science–and possibly the way we do it–is connected to our political leanings.
4. Museum professionals don’t have the tools to make wise decisions about when and why to self-censor. Many people mentioned the intelligent design/evolution debate, raising examples of angry homeschoolers and religious groups. Few were able to articulate a response policy that wasn’t based entirely on the volume of the ire raised. If you do offend, ask yourself–who do you offend and why? Do they have a valid claim or not? Do they represent a major constituency or not? One woman shared an anecdote about a label at a zoo that suggested that humans are crowding out elephants. She was pleased to receive angry letters about the label. It let her know that people were reading it and cared.
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Over 100 participants contributed post-its to the comfort map (shown at right) with examples in the categories of “safe,” “iffy,” and “no way.” As you can see, most of the examples were in the iffy category–the hazy borders of our comfort. To that end, I have captured the examples on the post-its in five categories, separating the “iffy” layer into three categories (creatively named 1, 2, 3). Here are the words that came up on the comfort zone map:
Read the whole thing….
Posted in Science Education
Scientists Papercraft Models
Go here to find out how to make paper Darwin, Einstein, Sagan and more….
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Posted in Fun
A Blog Around The Clock 