Björn Brembs

"who is helped by dressing up a severely disappointing setback as a “major step forward”?" - Björn Brembs via Bookmarklet

Context: "In the last few years gene hunters in one common disease after another have turned up a few causative variant genes, after vast effort, but the variants generally account for a small percentage of the overall burden of illness. With most common diseases, it turns out, the disease is caused not by ten very common variant genes but by 10,000 relatively rare ones. Today it’s the... more... - Daniel Mietchen

PLoS ONE, Vol. 4, No. 6. (30 June 2009), e6102. Background Dopamine and dopamine transporters (DAT, which regulate extracellular dopamine in the brain) are implicated in the modulation of attention but their specific roles are not well understood. Here we hypothesized that dopamine modulates attention by facilitation of brain deactivation in the default mode network (DMN). Thus, higher striatal DAT levels, which would result in an enhanced clearance of dopamine and hence weaker dopamine signals, would be associated to lower deactivation in the DMN during an attention task. Methodology/Principal Findings For this purpose we assessed the relationship between DAT in striatum (measured with positron emission tomography and [11C]cocaine used as DAT radiotracer) and brain activation and deactivation during a parametric visual attention task (measured with blood oxygenation level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging) in healthy controls. We show that DAT availability in caudate... - Björn Brembs

Now you made me think about how long it is since I went to any sort of exhibition, concert, anything... - Bill Hooker

See also: http://www.sennoma.net/main..., http://www.sennoma.net/main... - Bill Hooker

An overlooked potential benefit of OA: increased quality of science journalism, which in turn should improve public science awareness/literacy, resulting in higher demand for quality science journalism... a virtuous circle. - Bill Hooker

Of course, sometimes you can't look at the paper being trumpeted because it isn't actually available yet, even behind a paywall... - Chris Rowan

BMC Research Notes, Vol. 2, No. 1. (2009), 113. The fabric of science is changing, driven by a revolution in digital technologies that facilitate the acquisition and communication of massive amounts of data. This is changing the nature of collaboration and expanding opportunities to participate in science. If digital technologies are the engine of this revolution, digital data are its fuel. But for many scientific disciplines, this fuel is in short supply. The publication of primary data is not a universal or mandatory part of science, and despite policies and proclamations to the contrary, calls to make data publicly available have largely gone unheeded. In this short essay I consider why, and explore some of the challenges that lie ahead, as we work toward a database of everything. Vincent Smith - Björn Brembs

I initially read that as "Bob Dole," which really didn't make a whole lot of sense... - Chad Orzel

I was also wondering if Bjoern was switching to research on Viagra.... - Bora Zivkovic

I'm surprised this guy isn't more well-known. PhD in astrophysics from Harvard in '68, wrote some of the earliest computer games, one of the first developers on the Mac, helped invent podcasting, registered his own version of the semantic web, involved in open source content management systems, etc. Is now 73 and still active on the web with multiple websites and blogs. How many people like him are there on the planet? Not many I think. - Björn Brembs

Check your settings. - D0r0th34

I did. Nothing there. Some likes are duplicated, but not all, some comments are duplicated, but not all. - Björn Brembs

Love it: "Yet people love to publish papers falsifying someone else's papers. Science is a single, gigantic post-publication tool, that's how it works. What else is a paper other than a comment to all the papers listed in the references? It's just the formats that vary and that just takes acclimatization. With a common standard and a single database, all we're doing is just tapping the... more... - Bora Zivkovic

Goodness, yes. MPOW has the "General Library System," to which neither the law library nor the engineering library nor the health-sciences library, three of the biggest and most influential libraries on campus, belong. - D0r0th34

wow.. this paper is exactly what I was looking for, thx - Christopher Harris

Romuald is a great guy, btw! My predecessor in Jack Byrne's lab and developer of the whole Aplysia operant conditioning paradigm. A genius and an artist with the electrodes! - Björn Brembs

Nice summary on the state of Elsevier controvercies! - Peter Murray

How did the "show of hands" experiment work out with this audience? - Bill Hooker

In the first presentation (Charite university hospital Berlin), little more than half the people (graduate students, post-docs, young faculty) used the IF. In Potsdam, the audience was much younger, undergraduate students, and they had barely heard of the IF (but they now will never trust anybody who touts it, believe me! :-) - Björn Brembs

Straight into my quotes collection that one goes! - Bill Hooker

Updated and thoroughly revised version - Björn Brembs

That's one of the reasons I make my stuff Pub Dom -- so no one ever has to worry about attribution! - Bill Hooker

Oops, 'night'. - Björn Brembs

Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. In Press, Corrected Proof Ecological and sensorimotor theories of perception build on the notion of action-dependent invariants as the basic structures underlying perceptual capacities. In this paper we contrast the assumptions these theories make on the nature of perceptual information modulated by action. By focusing on the question, how movement specifies perceptual information, we show that ecological and sensorimotor theories endorse substantially different views about the role of action in perception. In particular we argue that ecological invariants are characterized with reference to transformations produced in the sensory array by movement: such invariants are transformation-specific but do not imply motor-specificity. In contrast, sensorimotor theories assume that perceptual invariants are intrinsically tied to specific movements. We show that this difference leads to different empirical predictions and we submit that the distinction between... - Björn Brembs

Updated with link: http://www.suntimes.com/busines... highly recommended if you don't want to watch the demo! HT Cameron... - Björn Brembs

"Obviously, any sort of peer-review is also set to profit tremendously from such collaborative editing - isn't that one definition of peer-review?" agree :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg