A Blog Around The Clock

Ignite talks at ScienceOnline2010

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:28:06 -0500

Ignite-style talks are very, very energetic. They last 5 minutes each and the slideshow is set to automatically change slides every 15 seconds. Thus, one cannot be slow or go over time. These kinds of talks can be very funny, yet also very powerful. At ScienceOnline2010, we will have an Ignite session on Saturday night, at the Radisson Hotel during the banquet/dinner. Here is the lineup of speakers and topics:

"Why Triangle is Better than Silicon Valley" - Wayne Sutton

"My "Little Black Book" of Scientists I Love" - Joanne Manaster

"Crowdsourced Chemistry - Why Online Chemistry Data Needs Your Help" - Antony Williams

"Blogging on the tenure track" - Janet Stemwedel

"Being mentored - not only for grad students" - Pawel Szczesny

"Dive Into Your Imagination" - Annie Crawley

"SARS, Drugs, and Biosensors" - Aaron Rowe

"The Story of NanoBioTechnology" - Mary Spiro

"Data mining the literature with Zotero" - Trevor Owens

"Games in Open Science Education" - Antony Williams and Jean-Claude Bradley

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Clock Quotes

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:00:28 -0500

Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.

- Anne Sullivan

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Tweetlinks, 11-06-09

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:57:58 -0500

Follow me on Twitter to get these, and more, in something closer to Real Time (all my tweets are also imported into FriendFeed where they are much more easy to search and comment on, as well as into my Facebook wall where they are seen by quite a different set of people):

Scientwists Twitter List by David Bradley on Listorious

FLOTUS: Elevating the social status of nerds everywhere

An open letter to the medical community - Some passionate debate about personal genomics!

The Genomic Ark: 10,000 vertebrate genomes

Beautiful electron microscopic and computer modelling images from the new book by Frankel & Whitesides

Claiming to be unbiased is a patronising fairytale, so let's just own up to our agendas

International Wolf Center Podcasts

Knowledge as a public good

Get with the times, Jay Rosen tells journos

LOL - Republicans come up with their own Healthcare plan: Congressional Budget Office Thrashes Republican Health-Care Plan. Embarassing!

This is bad, this is very bad - shooting at Ft. Hood

Polarized News? The Media's Moderate Bias

For improving early literacy, reading comics is no child's play

The age of informavore

Deals and their consequences, reports on green technology & personalized medicine

Calculating Animal Intelligence and Top 10 Smartest Mammals

On the media (or press) - science journalism, right and wrong.

Reflections on Science 2.0 from a distance - Part II

Awesome computer animation (wmv download) by Animusic.

The Secret to Learning is Unlearning

Responsibility: Shane and Joe - Health Care Organizational Ethics: "For every lone cowboy, there's a community of support"

Response to Dan Ariely's Duke Sex Toy Study Is Predictably Irrational

World-Science podcast: Swine Flu in the Amazon, Fixing Technological Fixes, Tsavo Lions and forum: Making Technology Work -- for People with Anu Ramaswami.

Student journalists wage battle for H1N1 death certificates

Year of Energy 2009

Can We Talk About Science? I Mean, Really?

Pseudo-quackery in Pain Management: a field with a large gray zone between overt quackery and evidence-based care

How Would Los Angeles Look with No Cars?

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Today's carnivals

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:32:59 -0500

Four Stone Hearth #79 is up on Anthropology.net

Friday Ark #268 is up on Modulator

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ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:38:24 -0500

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.

Sol Lederman is the Consultant for US Dept of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a blogger. He also tweets for the Department. I interviewed Sol earlier this year, after his session at ScienceOnline'09. At the next conference, Sol will lead a workshop "Make your own social networking site with Drupal".

Chris Nicolini is the Web Producer and Editor for the American Institute of Physics and runs (and tweets for) InsideScience.org.

Lenore Ramm works at Duke Center for Instructional Technology, is an artist and a food blogger and a twitterer.

Tyler Dukes is a Web producer at News 14 Carolina and a freelance journalist in Raleigh, NC. He blogs on -30- and is on Twitter.

Ryan Somma is a software developer, works in USCG Aviation Logistics Center and is an amateur scientist at Port Discover Science Center in Elizabeth City on the coast of North Carolina. He blogs on Ideonexus and is also on Twitter.

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New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:36:04 -0500

Current Status of a Model System: The Gene Gp-9 and Its Association with Social Organization in Fire Ants:

The Gp-9 gene in fire ants represents an important model system for studying the evolution of social organization in insects as well as a rich source of information relevant to other major evolutionary topics. An important feature of this system is that polymorphism in social organization is completely associated with allelic variation at Gp-9, such that single-queen colonies (monogyne form) include only inhabitants bearing B-like alleles while multiple-queen colonies (polygyne form) additionally include inhabitants bearing b-like alleles. A recent study of this system by Leal and Ishida (2008) made two major claims, the validity and significance of which we examine here. After reviewing existing literature, analyzing the methods and results of Leal and Ishida (2008), and generating new data from one of their study sites, we conclude that their claim that polygyny can occur in Solenopsis invicta in the U.S.A. in the absence of expression of the b-like allele Gp-9b is unfounded. Moreover, we argue that available information on insect OBPs (the family of proteins to which GP-9 belongs), on the evolutionary/population genetics of Gp-9, and on pheromonal/behavioral control of fire ant colony queen number fails to support their view that GP-9 plays no role in the chemosensory-mediated communication that underpins regulation of social organization. Our analyses lead us to conclude that there are no new reasons to question the existing consensus view of the Gp-9 system outlined in Gotzek and Ross (2007).

Robust Models for Optic Flow Coding in Natural Scenes Inspired by Insect Biology:

Building artificial vision systems that work robustly in a variety of environments has been difficult, with systems often only performing well under restricted conditions. In contrast, animal vision operates effectively under extremely variable situations. Many attempts to emulate biological vision have met with limited success, often because multiple seemingly appropriate approximations to neural coding resulted in a compromised system. We have constructed a full model for motion processing in the insect visual pathway incorporating known or suspected elements in as much detail as possible. We have found that it is only once all elements are present that the system performs robustly, with reduction or removal of elements dramatically limiting performance. The implementation of this new algorithm could provide a very useful and robust velocity estimator for artificial navigation systems.

Localized Plasticity in the Streamlined Genomes of Vinyl Chloride Respiring Dehalococcoides:

Dehalococcoides are free-living sediment and subsurface bacteria with remarkably small, streamlined genomes and an unusual degree of niche specialization. These strictly anaerobic bacteria gain metabolic energy exclusively through a novel type of respiration that results in reductive elimination of chlorides from organochlorines, many of which are priority pollutants. In this article, we compare the first complete genome sequences of Dehalococcoides strains that grow via respiration of vinyl chloride (VC), a human carcinogen and abundant groundwater pollutant. Our work provides novel insights into Dehalococcoides chromosome organization and evolution, identifies specific positions in the chromosomes where new genes--like the genes responsible for growth on VC--are integrated, and generates clues how these dechlorinating bacteria adapt to anthropogenic contamination. This information sheds new light on Dehalococcoides biology and ecology, with implications for enhanced bioremediation to protect dwindling drinking water reservoirs.

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Josh Jones Studied Whales and Dolphins in The Garbage Patch (video)

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:47:10 -0500

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Clock Quotes

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:57:22 -0500

I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary, I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls.

- Anne Frank

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The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:47:27 -0500

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 470 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):

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On the radio tomorrow

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:00:51 -0500

I'll be briefly on the Skeptically Speaking radio show tomorrow night at 8pm Eastern, introducing ScienceOnline2010. You can listen live here.

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Tweetlinks, 11-05-09

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:11:27 -0500

Global warming worries drive biofuels research

Research participants have a right to their own genetic data

Time to talk periods

RT @maninranks: Idea for TheRTP: Recent Imagine Science film festival in NYC. Why not here? Replay theirs? Do our own?

Another post on distributed science v. open source science: Distributed Science, Part 2

New House Bill Rejects 'Spiritual Care'

Dangerously irrelevant libraries

The picture pretty much says it all: Wife discovers allergy to husband's sperm on wedding night

2009 H1N1 Influenza Vaccine Safety

Only the Village media can spin a 98% sweep into a Dems "election loss" as in this The Fix story. Mentioning GOP in an article at all and especially without warning they are insane is dereliction of journalistic duty that keeps GOP alive. But of course, keeping GOP zombie alive is needed for the 'conflict' storytelling and HeSaidSheSaid false balance "reporting". To paraphrase: Stories about Republicans must always be written as though they aren't liars for some reason...

Rebooting the News 31

Falklands Wolf First Appeared in North America, Researchers Say

Students and faculty don't see eye to eye about state of technology use in classroom: Technology in the Classroom: Not always what you think.

Angry german kid vs how things work in busy town (video)

Professor Jay Rosen on his innovative journalism school class

A relieved and jubilant Kleinschmidt basks in Chapel Hill mayoral win

Wanted: rejection letters - "How quaint. A relic from when editors actually replied to say "No""

DPAC Exceeds Expectations

Ethics Creep: Governing Social Science Research in the Name of Ethics and Ethics Creep, Soft Law and Positivism: The Problems of Regulatory Innovation in the Governance of Human Subjects Research

You know what else is an abomination, Maine? Lobster

Lovin' the Numbers - Amory B. Lovins talk at Duke last night.

Discriminating butterflies show how one species could split into two

Where's My Elephant?

Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social Media

Shining a light on dark data - publishing the unpublished and/or unpublishable?

Reflections on Science 2.0 from a distance - Part I - "natural unit of science research is the blog post"

Google, Waves and Fireflies - Totally awesome Firefly/Serenity/biology/GoogleWave connection!

Native language shapes the melody of a newborn baby's cry

Horse genome sequence and analysis published in Science - Where's the gene for bucking the rider off?

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Cool new Scienceblogs.com widgets

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:36:57 -0500

Having difficulties following the flood of blogging here on scienceblogs.com? Well, it just became much easier. Go to this page and find the widgets with all sorts of feeds: the Select feed, the Channels feeds and all the individual blog feeds. So, if you want my feed, you click on the Blogs (A-C) tab, find my blog, click on 'Share', click on the 'Install outside Netvibes' tab, then choose where you want to download it. Then pick the way you want it to look (there is a pull-down menu with several choices, as well as several colors to choose from), copy the widget code and paste it into your site (or iGoogle etc.) and you'll get something like this:

or something like this:

Then just click through if you want to read any individual post.

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Today's carnivals

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:33:51 -0500

The 123rd Congregation of the Skeptics' Circle is up on Blue Genes - Science news

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ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants: parents and children

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:58:25 -0500

There are three parent-child pairs coming to the conference in January and all three have been here before:

John and Sam Dupuis are a father and son. John is the Head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library at York University and a SciBling, blogging at Confessions of a Science Librarian. I interviewed John last year after the 2008 conference. His son Sam blogs on Science of Sorts on My Mind. He came to ScienceOnline09 with his Dad and I interviewed him as well. At the Conference, John will co-moderate the session on "Online Reference Managers". He can also be found on Twitter.

Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove and Djordje Jeremic are a mother and son pair, originally from my homeland of Serbia. They both came to ScienceOnline09 and are coming back for more. Tatjana is a biologist and an artist. Djordje is a blogger and an origami artist. I interviewed both Tanja and Djordje earlier this year. At the Conference, Tatjana will co-moderate a session on "Open Access and Science Career Hurdles in the Developing world".

Kim and Patty Gainer are the veterans of all four conferences. Kim teaches English and writing at Radford University in Virginia. She also writes fantasy fan fiction. Her daughter Patty is a student at New River Community College.

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Science Cafe Raleigh: Boom 'n' Doom: Volcanoes, North Carolina and North Carolina Volcanoes

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:17:50 -0500

Boom 'n' Doom: Volcanoes, North Carolina and North Carolina Volcanoes
November 18th; Acro Café on the fourth floor of the Museum of Natural Sciences

8:30-10:00 am with discussion beginning at 9:00 followed by Q&A

Volcanic activity half a world away can affect us in our own state. When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted over about 4 days in 1815, the resulting debris cloud led to the "Year Without Summer" in 1816, which was marked by massive crop failures from Europe to North Carolina. Join in a discussion of recent and historical world-wide volcanic events, and find out about old North Carolina volcanoes. Learn about the new Mineral Spectroscopy Laboratory and how Museum research is helping understand and ameliorate the effects of large scale volcanic eruptions.

About the Speaker: Dr. Chris Tacker has been the Research Curator in Geology for the Museum of Natural Sciences since 1996. His work involves mineralogy and its application to understanding geologic processes, especially those that involve fluids and big explosions. Recently, the National Science Foundation awarded him two grants for mineral spectroscopy. He also writes on North Carolina geology for the general public, and appears on the Museum's PBS program Exploring North Carolina.

RSVP: katey.ahmann@ncdenr.gov; or call 919-733-7450 ext.531

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