You all are so awesome. I also got some offline downloads. Thanks a million Eric, Stephen and Arseni, in particular!
- Heather
For a friend: "I once read about a bacterium which lives only in a single poorly constructed pissoir in a castle. The system didn't drain properly, and when examined, there was a unique species which had evolved there. Do you have any advice on how to track down such a story?"
not quite from the pissoir, but maybe someone peed into the moat: "A bacterial strain capable of degrading chitin, strain SAY3T, was isolated from moat water of Ueda Castle in Nagano Prefecture, Japan." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed...
- Michael Kuhn
I couldn't find anything relevant either, but I did wonder if there could be some form of use for archaeological dating by genetically examining the bugs in an abandoned sewer (or wall painting) for a concestor.
- Alun Salt
Thanks! Donnie, that was my experience, too. I'll pass on the link, Michael - it looks pretty good. Alun, I'd expect that the heterogeneity of dead bacteria would make such an analysis difficult, if not impossible.
- Heather
This is the future. There's no way to achieve the sort of reduction in carbon budgets that we are going to be forced into without a severe reduction in energy-intensive travel. Online conferences are here to stay, so the better we become at them, the better it will be for science.
- AJCann
And the better that conference organizers get at disseminating them, the better for all - since there are people who would not dream of enrolling otherwise, but it can boost attendance numbers and attract more sponsors thereby (thinking, exhibit hall).
- Heather
"We are increasingly keeping scientific records in electronic form; it would be straightforward to wrap our notebook pages describing an orphan result with a bit of searchable text, generate a web page, and submit the whole thing to a database. The act of conducting research would thus become practically synonymous with the act of disseminating the resulting knowledge. Along the way, we would have to spend some energy improving the records that we keep in order to ensure that our notebooks were more accessible to outside readers and less like the quirky private diaries they often become." Heh.
- Heather
.. and if this could result in a proper citable reference on the other end, that'd sweeten the deal :) See e.g. Jean-Claude Bradleys comment near the top of this thread, about 'dumping' data to Nature Preceding to get a reference + DOI in return: http://friendfeed.com/the-lif...
- 'Mummi' Thorisson
What do you think of LabCollector? Have you heard of it? Other lab management software to which you are partial, with easily implemented "module" templates that already have been drawn up by someone? http://labcollector.com/index...
First glance ... not bad, OK UI but interesting feature set
- Deepak Singh
We are giving it a try here and had time to evaluate it. Not bad given similar tools cost an arm and a leg. However they could improve their user interface a little bit more to look more web 2.0. They seem to focus on easy deployment setup on Windows platform while in reason sense, you need a *nix deployment setup
- george
I'm sure that's a marketing decision, but I'd have been happy to have a *nix setup, true. It would have been another good reason to keep the dual-boot of which only I ever make any use. Sigh.
- Heather
thanks, Claudia. Big relief. She gave her talk again today in our seminar series, much more relaxed, it was pretty good indeed!
- Heather
http://www.truthout.org/1012096 I don't believe such efforts are going to really change an inevitable decline in the number of US/European scientists, at least.
withholding potentially relevant scientific discoveries for any period causes harm to the public good. even if it is unavoidable due to real world constraints, the reduction of the embargo is the primary goal
- Mike Chelen