I’m subscribed to some search feeds at Pubmed. Here’s what caught my eye this week in the Stem Cells feed:
Continue reading ‘What’s new in Pubmed this week: Stem Cells’
Archive for October, 2007
The idea is that you add a icon to your literature review posts and have them show up in a directory of literature posts. Being a clicque-ish but rather non-techy group, the bloggers at Scienceblogs.com are no doubt going to jump all over this, but have they really thought about how it’s going to scale?
Hot on the heels of my Pubmed MSC roundup, Nature Reports has a Stem Cell Edition out, and because, you know, they’re a huge multinational publishing company staffed with professional journalists, it contains some fascinating stuff, while covering most of the recent research-related news as well.
Continue reading ‘Nature Reports has a Stem Cell Research Roundup’
A short history of the web
The first application that opened up the net to the common person was email. It was simple in concept and nearly universal in applicability. Email is just a letter that takes no time to post and doesn’t require a stamp or a physical address. Following that, the Web browser is really what brought the Web as we know it today to the common person. No longer did you have to wait for information to come to you over the radio, TV, or in printed media, you could now go looking for what you personally were interested in, or if there wasn’t anything out there, publish it yourself for other people to find. However, the people who were the early adopters here were still mostly technical. Maintaining a website required an expensive internet connection, maintaining large amounts of complicated code, and lots of time FTPing files around. The only people for whom the effort was worthwhile were computer scientists and physicists who needed to share huge datasets that required large computing resources to process them. Even as late as the mid-90s, the web remained largely by nerds for nerds.
How it’s different, and easier, now
In the past couple years, there have been extremely rapid and important changes occurring in the way people communicate and share information. Most scientists, spending most of their time at the bench doing experiments, or the desktop writing grants, have missed these changes. The truly amazing thing is that the basic infrastructure has been laid, the heavy lifting has been done, but the space hasn’t become crowded yet. The purpose of this next series of posts is to discuss these changes, what they mean for the average scientist(and I know that’s none of you), and how and why to use the new technology to advance your career.
Continue reading ‘What’s the killer app for the scientific web?’
I’m subscribed to some search feeds at Pubmed. Here’s what caught my eye this week:
Continue reading ‘What’s interesting in Pubmed this Week: Stem Cells’
James Watson said that some part of intelligence may be genetically determined, and, in support of this, says that there are differences which break down among racial lines. I haven’t seen the data, so I can’t comment on that point, but neither have the reporters. That doesn’t stop them from running to the presses with a dynamite headline like “Watson says black people are stupid”. (Did you pick up on how excited the reporter was to get this interview?)I also find it hard to believe that a smart fella like Watson, who has been previously misquoted as saying things like “people should abort their gay children”, didn’t realize that this would be sensationalized. So, based on this, I’d like to offer to him the Attention Whore Lifetime Achievement Merit Badge. Jim, please pick it up to the left of this post, thank you.
Now, I don’t particularly like painting a target on my head, but I dislike even more the implicit suggestion that there is no reason anyone would study the genetic basis of intelligence unless he was trying to push a racist agenda. I don’t like the fact that even seeming to defend him is enough evidence to brand one a “hidden” racist in the eyes of the media. It’s implicit censorship of the idea that maybe people are actually different on a genetic level, and says more about the hidden agenda or beliefs of the people who replace “different” with “better” than it does about the researcher who uncovers those differences. Those who wish to believe that everyone is identical on a genetic level should avoid at all costs having a conversation with Watson’s schizophrenic son. I think having a son with a mental disorder gives you an excellent reason to want to study the genetics of mental development. To figure out what happened to his son is one of the main reasons the Genome project was started, so one would have to be fairly heartless to imply that Watson instead has a racist agenda.
If you want to read more about this, start here:
Here’s Watson’s interview, here’s Watson’s statement, here’s some data on IQ, race, and socioeconomic status, and here’s a book for you to read.
Since I wrote that last post, it has become apparent that there’s a lot of confusion regarding citing material on the internet, which isn’t surprising given that there’s a lot of confusion surrounding the internet itself. Put your mind at ease, gentle reader, for clarity awaits.
Continue reading ‘Clearing up the confusion around citations of internet sources’
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