I am currently working as the Communications Officer for a professional association, which needs to leverage the skills and interests of its members by recruiting them as volunteers, and this conversation is particularly relevant to some of the things I do as part of my job. If you are trying to recruit volunteers, here is what I think you should know:

Virtual volunteering works, and it will help you find the volunteers you already have.

All volunteer-based organizations are constantly looking for one thing: more volunteers. Sometimes they find them, often they do not. This does not mean that they do not already have a “core” group of committed people running their key committees: it simply means that they still hold on to an idea of “volunteer” that simply does not match reality. However, what it does mean is that they often ignored people within the organization or otherwise involved with it who would be willing to give their contribution if only they were approached differently.

Often, a lack (or perceived lack) of volunteers indicates that you still think of “volunteering” and becoming “a volunteer” means:

• attending all meetings in person
• being responsible for potentially everything at all times
• being responsible for an entire event or initiative, from A to Z
• being interested in every single thing the organization is doing, or planning to do
• attending in person all possible events

Let me break this news to you: this is not what being a volunteer means. In fact, someone who does or is all of the above is one of two things: a hero… or an employee of the organization.

How do you recruit and retain volunteers?

Use mailing lists, groups and e-mails, but do it wisely: do not bombard people with e-mails every week (unless this was something agreed with them in advance). Keep the lists and groups current. Always allow people to unsubscribe, either directly or through you. Keep the lists focused: they should only be for one committee, or even one specific task.

Try to find out what people are interested in doing: in this way, you will already have an idea of who will not volunteer for certain things, and of who you might want to contact directly for others.

Be extremely clear and specific when you ask volunteers to contribute their skills and time: what are your expectations? How long will the task(s) take? What kind of support are you willing to offer? Volunteers like specificity, but they also appreciate some “wiggle room”: the best way to provide both is to write some standard guidelines for your committee, or volunteer task. Circulate these through the groups/lists at regular intervals.

Never think of using volunteers. You are working with them, not using them! Often, organizations think of volunteers as “disposable people” (“we need… pens, pencils… ah, yes, we need volunteers for that event!”), and forget that volunteers are people. And they aren’t just people: you are either asking them for a favor (e.g. if you ask for advice to a consultant), or you are trying to give meaning to what you want them to be involved in, explaining why they should be involved. To do either of these things, you need to demonstrate a keen interest in the potential volunteers and figure out what they might be interested in contributing.

The last point is arguably the most important. If it sounds like a lot of work – you are right, it is. But think about it: if you are desperately looking for volunteers, and you consider them to be central to your organization’s goals, then you are fully justified in investing this time and money in them. And if you are unwilling to spend time on them, why should they invest time in dealing with you?

I like to think and say that volunteers are in fact harder to handle than paid employees and, if you can manage, recruit and retain volunteers, you will have no problems with paid employees: volunteers need to be treated well, understood, consulted and rewarded. Shouting and tirades won’t do; you can’t fire them (they do that themselves); and you cannot trick them. Basically, honesty, personal interest, integrity, passion, vision and consideration (all things which are absolutely needed in a “normal” workplace with paid employees) are fundamental to volunteer management and recruitment. And being considerate involves thinking of volunteers as people with skills, a need for meaning, little time and a whole life to live.

If you do all of the above, you will realize that, along the way, you will finally find all those volunteers you already had.

There are other tools available for nosy ex-boy/girlfriends and HR recruitment professionals out there. Some of these look to me almost malevolent: Spokeo decidedly targets HR recruitment firms and professionals, offering to go “a step beyond”, and automate “candidate researches across 41 social networks“. Other tools are targeting anyone who would like to feel more in control of their online identity, and therefore see all the information about them in one single place – Profilactic is among them. I do not know how much such a tool would really protect you, regardless of what the name might be implying…

On the other hand, as a reaction to the new generation of social aggregators, other tools are being created to allow you to basically censor anything potentially embarassing or even dangerous that has been posted about you online. The one most easy to find at this point is ReputationDefender. But if you wish that some government records or published materials were removed from the net, you are out of luck.

What does this mean for the average internet user? That you really need to be careful about anything you post on the web – anywhere. You need to be particularly careful about privacy settings in any sites that offer you the opportunity to show public profiles – and, if there is information that would like others rather not know about you, then refrain from posting that altogether. Also, be responsive and fast if someone asks you to remove from the net information you have posted about them. Last but not least, it might help to have a personal website, where people can look for up-to-date information about you, ad where you can effectively manage your online identity (or persona, for that matter).

Further reading: 20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles on Mashable.com

In this blog post, I am going to examine and summarize the paper, and trying to draw some conclusions from it. Are the results reliable? Was the follow-up long enough, and their study sample of appropriate size? Find out just below the fold.

More than 17,000 patients of both sexes were randomly assigned to a group being treated with a daily dose of rosuvastatin, or placebo. The study found that, compared to the placebo group, patients being treated with the statin showed reduced cholesterol levels and C-reactive protein levels by a significant margin (50% and 37% respectively). These patients also showed reduced incidence of cardiovascular disease over a 2-year follow-up period. While rates of cancer and other causes of death were not affected, the study noticed an increase in “physician-reported diabetes”, which the results were unable to explain.

There are two main issues with this paper. The first is the strong involvement of the main authors with the funding agent — in this case a pharmaceutical company which is involved in the production and sale of the drug in question, rosuvastatin. The second one is the relatively short follow-up time: although all subjects were in age groups prone to cardiovascular disease — 60-year-old or more for men, 50-year-old or more for women — the study does not shed any light on possible long-term side-effects of statin use in healthy people. The increased diabetes reports might have turned into a substantial figure if a long-term study were conducted, but we are not going to know that until an independently funded study will try to shed light on this. Also, levels of C-reactive protein are not, at leats until now, widely recognized as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

Going back to the issue of the strong involvement of AstraZeneca in this study, the first thing I noticed about this paper, apart from the results of course, was the disclosure statement. Authors of academic and medical papers are required to disclose their affiliation with the funding agencies, as well as any personal benefit they might get from the results. This study was done for the JUPITER study group (Justification for the Use of Statins in Prevention: an Intervention Trial Evaluating Rosuvastatin); the head of the steering committee for the group, who is also the principal investigator, has tight professional relations with AstraZeneca. Moreover, he is

a coinventor on patents held by Brigham and Women’s Hospital that relate to the use of inflammatory bio-markers in cardiovascular disease, including the use of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein in the evaluation of patients’ risk of cardiovascular disease

C-reactive protein was used in this study as a possible indicator of risk of cardiovascular disease: in fact, the study concentrated on subjects that, by normal standards (LDL levels <130 mg/dL), are completely healthy, but who have more elevated levels of C-reactive protein, which has been showed to indicate a state of inflammation.

On the positive side, the study was conducted over a wide sample, representative of both genders and major racial groups. People with conditions that could make them prone to cardiovascular disease were excluded from the study, and so were those who were affected by diseases caused by, or resulting in, widespread inflammation. This was important, as the main hypothesis behind the study was that general inflammation levels, indicated by the abundance of C-reactive protein, could be a prognostic factor for the future occurrence of cardiovascular disease in otherwise completely healthy people. The paper is therefore also suggesting that levels of C-reactive proteins might be indicative of a susceptibility to cardiovascular disease in people with normal cholesterol levels.

In conclusion, although the results outlined in this paper will need further scrutiny, if confirmed, then they strongly suggest that healthy people could greatly benefit from a daily dose of rosuvastatin, in case it is shown that the statin is not directly responsible for an increase in diabetes cases in the test cohort.

Post Scriptum: Thank you to Alex Palazzo for including this post in the latest edition of the Molecular & Cell Biology Carnival.

P. M Ridker, E. Danielson, F. A.H. Fonseca, J. Genest, A. M. Gotto, J. J.P. Kastelein, W. Koenig, P. Libby, A. J. Lorenzatti, J. G. MacFadyen, B. G. Nordestgaard, J. Shepherd, J. T. Willerson, R. J. Glynn (2008). Rosuvastatin to Prevent Vascular Events in Men and Women with Elevated C-Reactive Protein New England Journal of Medicine DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa0807646

I have only recently been back to broadband land, and I am thinking of some topics for the upcoming articles. No worries, the blog will be up and running again very soon…but I will probably have a stricter schedule, and will write only twice a week.

If you have any suggestions about things you’d like me to discuss on the blog, just leave a comment on this post: would you like to see a podcast? Are there any specific topics that you’d like to see covered more (or less)? Do you have an idea for a post? Let me know, I am all ears!

We all know the stories of mystics living in poverty, and still living a fulfilling life: but how many of us would seriously consider such a life choice? Living in poverty, owning nothing, and with no kind of security, there is no way we could really be happy. Good for them, we think. But if only we could win a jackpot, land that job, marry that person…then, we really would be happy. The fact is, the people who landed the job, got the cheque, and married the hotshot are not necessarily happier than you already are.

Now you must be annoyed. You thought this was a serious blog, talking about science, technology, skepticism and the like – but here you are, reading platitudes. But what if, for a moment, I could convince you to be skeptical of your own skepticism about the sources of happiness in your life? Just lend me, and Dr. Dan Gilbert, about half an hour. I promise you’ll laugh.

[If you cannot see the movie, you can watch it here.]

Post Scriptum: One of my posts has been picked by Tangled Bank. You can read the post here, and find more good science blogging visiting the Bank’s latest edition.

Image credits: sxc.hu, and other copyright holders

[If you cannot see the movie, you can watch it here.]

It was quite interesting, wasn’t it? Let me summarize the main points raised in the talk. Eva suggests that cancer might simply be part of a natural response mechanism aimed at repairing tissue damage. Somehow most of our body, according to Eva, has not had enough time to evolve to handle the response perfectly, so when the damage is prolonged, cancer often arises. However, there are tissues in our body, such as skeletal muscle, which are well-adapted to sustaining damage of various kinds, and is therefore able to keep cancer under control by means of either moderating nutrient access to this cancer, or by inducing differentiation of cancer cells in situ. Eva suggests that one day we might be able to use the mechanisms behind the repair system (basically, cancer) to repair tissue AND control the spread of cancerous tissue. In this sense, cancer could almost become a cure, a form of “therapy”, as she calls it.

I am not to extensively criticize her point of view, as there are some obvious issues with it. There seems to be an underlying assumption that cancer stem cells are always normal stem cells recruited to a damaged region of the body for repair purposes, and that only after getting there these cells become cancerous. This is a mistake, from my point of view. It makes perfect sense that there is an accelerated regeneration process in a damaged tissue. Think of the skin: if you cut yourself, now your skin stem cells will have to work harder to produce new cells, so to repair the damage. I am also aware that prolonged inflammation states associated with tissue damaged have been showed to predispose to cancer.

But much cancer does not necessarily happen in response to inflammation states. Lung cancer is a good candidate for the inflammation militia, but what about leukemia? Brain cancer? Breast cancer? It is known that many cancers are caused by a minuscule population of stem-cell-like cells that cause the disease: some of these probably were originally normal stem cells, but there is mounting evidence that at least in some cases, cells that were not stem cells acquire, through a mix of somatic insults and genetic predisposition, a new undifferentiated state – and that “un-differentiation” and proliferation are actually caused by separate mechanisms.

The talk often oversimplifies, but what really struck me is the idea that, indeed, it is very rare to hear of skeletal muscle cancer. In fact, this must be the first time in my life I even hear of the concept! It never crossed my mind, for a moment, how interesting this could get. Eva suggests that, somehow, skeletal muscle tissue can regulate angiogenesis to limit tumor growth. But I think the explanation she offers last is the one that makes more sense: there must be strong differentiation factors, maybe myoD itself, that are limiting tumor growth – so that, even if the original nucleus of stem cells remains, it can only rarely grow to a full-blown metastasis, as all other progenitors rapidly differentiate into muscle cells.

The idea is fascinating, and easily explorable. All you need is test it in immuno-deficient mice using tumor cells from syngeneic mice bearing a visible/otherwise detectable marker. You can look at metastatic frequencies in various tissues and, if really the frequency is significantly lower (and metastases smaller) in skeletal muscle, you could run some FACS and look at the proportion of cancer progenitor cells in the micrometastases versus the normal ones – if her idea is right, you would expect to see very few of them, as well as many differentiated cells originally derived from the tumor.

What intrigues me about all this is manly that the cancer cells are not different in one or two things from the other cells. Their entire behavior is changed – and only some form of powerful “undifferentiating agent” could do that. In cancer research, we often try to look for the “magic molecule”. But I think it is time to start thinking in terms of a system of interactions involving DNA, epigenetic modifications, proteins and the relations (pathways) between them. The whole system defines cellular behavior, and it is this behavior, not just a couple of molecular players, that is actually changed in some key cells when cancer arises.

Thus, although I am skeptical that cancer might be a therapy, the focus on differentiation and changes in cellular behavior are thing to keep working on, as well as watching carefully, in the next years. Especially for those who are working on stem cell therapies – whose most common side effect is…cancer.

Post Scriptum: I have been included in the latest edition of Gene Genie. The main topic of this edition was the inauguration of Google Health, but you will find a lot more related to health in general, and genetics specifically, by reading the Genie hosted over at Highlight Health.

To do this, the authors extracted DNA from three century-old pouch young stored in alcohol, and a dried pelt. The extraction methods including classic ethanol precipitations and sucrose gradients (to eliminate contaminants). As usual in this cases, the DNA resulted to be fragmented, but the researchers were aided in their effort to verify their results by the presence of different DNA sources, and the choice of a well-characterized sequence, the transcriptional enhancer of a collagen gene (Col2a1). Comparing the results obtained from PCR reactions run on DNA extracted from the three different sources helped assure that the DNA was not contaminated (as human collagen genes would be similar, but not identical, to those belonging to the Tasmanian tigers).

The researchers then decided to study the function of this element (reconstituted by PCR) in vivo. Multiple copies of the enhancers were added in front of the he human β-globin basal promoter fused to lacZ and followed by a polyadenylation signal – therefore producing a chimeric reporter gene to use in their assays. This reporter would reveal the expression pattern of the genetic element, as well as the strength of expression in developing tissues. This reporter construct was then injecting in murine zygotic pronuclei, and its expression assayed at different stages of mouse development.

As you can see from the third figure in the paper, you can see that the reporter is most strongly expressed in regions where cartilage is forming – the skull, the tail, and the developing limbs. In section g, you can even distinguish the digits in the developing mouse forelimb. These results indicate that, regardless of some variation in the strength of the expression, the transgene made out of the “extinct DNA” is expressed in the same pattern as that if the endogenous transgene – which is also expressed at sites of cartilage development and growth. This therefore means that the function of the modern murine element, and the one belonging to the extinct Tasmanian tiger, is actually conserved. It also suggests that this method could be used to analyze the function of genomic material extracted from extinct specimens in vivo.

While this does not mean that we will be able to resuscitate the Tasmanian tiger any time soon (if not at all), it gives us another glimpse on the practical power of evolutionary theory, and the incredible genetic conservation among species, even those that evolved quite separately from each other.

Pask, A.J., Behringer, R.R., Renfree, M.B., Svensson, E.I. (2008). Resurrection of DNA Function In Vivo from an Extinct Genome. PLoS ONE, 3(5), e2240. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002240

Xubuntu is a version of Ubuntu catering specifically to older computers. By older computers I do not mean Commodores, but computers with at least 128 Mb or RAM, 1.4 Gb of space on your hard disk, and a decent processor. My old computer has about 253 Mb of RAM, 20Gb hard drive, and an Intel Pentium III processor.

You can install Xubuntu without uninstalling Windows first, and you can even keep Windows on a partition of your computer. You can choose one of two CD options for installation, a Live (or Desktop) CD, and an Alternate CD. Only run the Live CD if you have about 200 Mb of RAM or more – use the Alternate one otherwise. Because of my specifications, I used a Live CD, and I will go over the installation procedure for Live CD users.

First of all, download the appropriate CD image from one of the mirrors provided on xubuntu.org. If you are running Windows on an Intel machine, you would pick the one called PC (Intel x86) desktop CD. At this point, your computer will start downloading an ISO image. Once the image is downloaded, it is advisable to check whether the file is corrupted before starting your installation. To do this, you can use a freeware, such as WinMD5Sum, which will calculate the checksum of the file, and compare it with the official checksum. It turns out that the official checksum for Xubuntu 8.04 is not really easy to find…so I will report it here to make things easier for you:

c83b84dc02b9e5480d64d2accdd9f3bb *xubuntu-8.04-alternate-amd64.iso
4f398cd35eaf297347f18634a5be5d77 *xubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso
0fb2297b036d9d1bf4cc0a13a4d82f76 *xubuntu-8.04-desktop-amd64.iso
665bcc283e131be4cb71ecb2bf0e3794 *xubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso

IMPORTANT: if the hashes provided here did not work for you the first time, try again! I had the wrong hashes on this post (they were for Ubuntu, not Xubuntu). Now I have corrected them, so please try again!

If you are using the Live CD for Intel chips on old computers, the checksum you need is the fourth one for the top. Now, run the checksum product, and paste the official checksum in the space provided to see if they are the same. If they are, you are good to go. If not, you will need to download the ISO image again.

If you are fine, now you need to write the ISO image to a CD. Do not be tempted to just drag it…open your CD/DVD writing program, and pick an option to write ISO images to the CD. I downloaded CDBurnerXPro, and picked the option (from the File menu) to “Write Disk from an ISO File”. Use the slowest writing speed available – this step might take about 20 minutes, but it will lower the chance of creating copying errors, and corrupting the installation files.

Once the CD is ready, you now have an official copy of Xubuntu Hardy Heron. It is completely free, it comes with free 3-year Long Term Support, and you can copy it and give it to anybody else you want.

Before you start the installation, make sure that all hard disk partitions have been defragmented. If you want to try out Xubuntu without installing it right away, stick in the CD, and the loading screen (first image from the top) will appear. On the other hand, if you want to install it, you need to change the booting order for your computer. To do this, you will need to get into your BIOS. According to the brand of computer you are using, there are different keys that, pressed very early on during startup, will allow you to enter the BIOS. You can find the most common keys here. In the BIOS, you need to go into Booting Devices (or similar), and set your CD drive as the primary booting device, your hard drive as the secondary one.

Now your computer will restart. Insert the Live CD in the CD drive, and wait. Xubuntu will now load from the CD – this might take some time, as the system will have to be loaded to the RAM. Once Xubuntu is loaded, a screen asking you to pick the booting language (second image from top) will appear. Choose the language, and choose to install Xubuntu.

Now the CD will load and you will be asked to choose your favorite language – and there are tons of supported languages.

After you have picked the language, you will be asked to configure your keyboard, and choose a configuration that is used with your language. You can try out the configuration by typing a few special characters in the text box provided (try something like $£&?^@# and other special characters you see on your keyboard). After this, Xubuntu will set your clock and time zone. You can even look for your city/town, if that helps you simplify the process.

At this point you will need to decide whether to keep your old Windows system running in parallel with Xubuntu (on a separate partition) or whether you want to wipe your drive(s), and keep Xubuntu as your only operating system. If you are comfortable with picking partitions in Linux systems, you can do this manually. If you are not, and especially if you only have one partition under Windows, I suggest you use the Guided option (that’s what I did).

This will probably take a few minutes, as Xubuntu needs to analyze your disk, and try to figure out what partitions to make. If you are not planning to keep Windows, you will be able to choose an option to use the whole disk in one of the following screens – choose that one, and Xubuntu will be your only operating system.

Once your disk(s) is ready, Xubuntu will start with the installation. You will be asked to type in your name, username and password. These are important, because the username and password will be used at login, and the password will need to be entered, for security reasons, every time you will perform an administrative task (such as installing new programs and system updates). The installation will proceed, and in the end you will be asked to restart your computer.

Do that, and make sure to take the CD out as soon as the computer is rebooting (or it will reboot from the CD!). I do this once, before changing the booting order again, to see if everything is in order with the hard drive. If all is fine, after seeing some code, you should be able to see the main Xubuntu loading page. After loading, you will be prompted to type and enter username and password. Once you have done that, Xubuntu will load. And it will look something like what you see in the last image of this post.

Nice and clean, don’t you think? If you are connected to the internet, Xubuntu should be able to activate the connection right away, and you should be able to download updates soon. Now go under Applications (top left corner), go to Help, and check out the documentation, where you will find more information on how Xubuntu works, and how to stay safe while using it. And…ah, do not forget to change the booting order again the next time you restart/shut down the computer!

What about safety on the net? Xubuntu comes with ufw, uncomplicated firewall, which you can set up through the Terminal. But if you do not want to do that, I suggest you download Firestarter. How do you do this? Super simple – Xubuntu has an Add/Remove application panel! And you can simply search for application using the search bar in the Add/Remove window, and download them directly from the web – which is what happens with Firestarter.

I have been now using Xubuntu for a few days and I have noticed some good things. Most importantly, my computer is significantly faster than it used to be when running Windows XP. Also, Xubuntu is quite easy to use.But there are a few things you need to get used to: sometimes you will have to go through the Terminal, and type in some commands, or even edit code, to fix things. Which means, you might get to know the Ubuntu Forums quite well while setting up your computer. And sometimes the computer will get stuck, apparently for no reason at all. On the other hand, you are now getting a much safer system than whatever else you were running before.

Sources: Open Source Tutorials and Build Your Own PC.

Post Scriptum: The newest edition of Encephalon is up, and it even includes one of my own posts. Check it out!