Author Archives: Mr. Gunn

About Mr. Gunn

Science, Scholarly Communication, and Mendeley

Chris Mooney in New Orleans

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The talk is “Science at High Speeds: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming”, at 5PM at the Lavin-Bernick Center on the Uptown campus and it’s part of the Focus the Nation event. Since Chris is a scienceblogger, I’d like to extend a warm blog-welcome to him from my adopted city.

Check back here Wednesday for live coverage of the event. I haven’t heard of any plans for streaming this, and I’ve been wanting to play around with Qik(my review), so this seems like a good time. I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing, so I can’t vouch for the visual or auditory legibility of anything I stream, but check out my test recording and if you are watching and have questions, you can send me an IM on jabber/GTalk.

The stream is here(FYI: this is service is alpha and may have network or other issues)
My profile page is here, in case the embedded stream is showing something from someone else (like it is now).
The parade is going to make getting from downtown a little difficult, so if you’re planning on being there in person, come early.

It looks like I’ll be fairly limited in terms of battery life in what I can show, but I have a good feeling it will show up on his YouTube channel.

Dissertations R hard

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On the off chance anyone is wondering where I’ve been, I’ve been trying to finish up my dissertation in the extremely narrow gap between the Christmas holidays and Carnival in New Orleans. More content is going to be created in my Flickr photostream than here until approximately February 5.

See in particular the tag “mardigras” and my friend Maitri’s photostream. How she manages to make it to absolutely every cool event that happens around New Orleans is amazing.

Is this a new tactic of foreign scammers?

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I just received a new email, in poorly written English of course, advertising jobs correcting “texts”.

We will provide you with the texts for our employees with the important information and you will correct the texts as an english speaking person and send them back to us.

Evidence the scammers are behind this:

  1. The email itself uses rather awkward sounding language.
  2. Scammers are known to use third-parties as unwilling intermediaries in their scams, so that when the angry fool goes to the address that he mailed his check, he finds only some idiot who thought he was “working at home” for a legitimate business, depositing mailed checks in the bank and receiving a salary.
  3. It’s always been easy to recognize a scam based on the ridiculously horrible use of language, even without considering the content. People are getting wise to this, so they need more natural sounding mailings.
      Plausible, right?

Hot Portal Action

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Two big portal plays recently: Scirus Topic pages and Google Knols. I don’t know if this is related to the recent Wikipedia infighting brouhaha, but it’s certainly timely. Wikipedia is great for what it is, but we do need something that takes identity and authority into account.

Of course, no one’s calling these new efforts portals, because that would be way too 1.0, but it’s what they are. A single comprehensive destination site, just like Facebook et. al are portals. One single place to go for people to whom the open web is too big and scary. There’s something to be said for that, as it allows the identity and authority that wikipedia and the web as a whole don’t have, but readers of this blog will know that I’m a fan of decentralization and distribution. My blog is where I create content, and the nexus of my social network. Of course, because the web is open, it automatically includes all these closed efforts, and ideally, will interlink them.

The commentary on “Defining Pluripotency in Human Cells” is up at the Niche.

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Featuring commentary on their previous article by Peter Andrews, Shinya Yamanaka, Paul Tesar, and William Gunn(aka yours truly).

I really like Paul Tesar’s idea of a “pluripotency score”, because it’s just this kind of multi-factorial definition we’ll need to really nail down just exactly what pluripotency is.

What’s New in Pubmed? Nothing!

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There’s a long-standing problem with trying to follow the literature on MSCs. The more proper name is “multipotent stromal cells“, whereas the name many people still use is “mesenchymal stem cells”. There’s also plenty of literature, on what is presumably the same cells, that uses “marrow stromal cells”.

To try to get around this problem in the past, I used the MeSH Browser to find the preferred term for relevant categories, searched on that, and created a feed from those results. That quit working about a month ago. According to the RSS feed for “Multipotent Stem Cells”[mh] OR “Adult Stem Cells”[mh] OR “Mesenchymal Stem Cells”[mh], nothing is new since the first week of November. I see today there’s an announcement from Pubmed about their update to MeSH for 2008, so I’m guessing there may be some connection between the two.

In the new hierarchy, multipotent stem cell, mesenchymal stem cell, and adult stem cell are all under stem cell as distinct categories. Multipotent stem cell is defined as “specialized stem cells that are committed to give rise to cells that have a particular function” whereas mesenchymal stem cell is defined as “Cells that can develop into distinct mesenchymal tissue” and Adult stem cell is defined as “Cells with high proliferative and self renewal capacities derived from adults.” I don’t know how they derived these categories, but clearly they aren’t non-overlapping categories.

Here’s what I get when I run various queries:

MeSH no MeSH
mesenchymal stem cell 2180 3386
multipotent stem cell 708 857
Adult stem cell 261 642
all 3 with AND 3 6
all 3 with OR 3025 4671
difference of OR and summed individual results: 124 214

So both MeSH and keyword queries lose some results when combined, and though MeSH queries lose less, they lose less of a smaller set that doesn’t contain as up-to-date results. I guess I’ll have to subscribe to each feed separately, or maybe mash them together with Yahoo Pipes or something.