Daniel Mietchen › Likes

Background on the study: http://www.innomed-addneuromed.com/index... . - Daniel Mietchen

OA here: http://database.oxfordjournals.org/cgi... - Claudia Koltzenburg

"Daniel Mietchen - Open Science Policy Director" Congrats, Daniel! - Mr. Gunn from Bookmarklet

I like what you're doing there, but I think you may want to think about usability. What does a prospective member think when they land on the page? Is the value proposition clear, or will it be just another site they'll have to sign up for, track activity on, etc. - Mr. Gunn

Many of you know I've been working with Mendeley as a sort of ambassador/community liaison. I started this because I've always felt a little shut out from contributing to open science/open access/open data because I don't work for a publisher, don't really write code, and wasn't in a job where I could openly share data. This was a way to influence how things develop by promoting the people who "get it". - Mr. Gunn

Yes, I got the one you sent and I really appreciate it. I do plan to follow up when I get back into town. - Mr. Gunn

Tim Gowers has some very interesting ideas for an open science project to come up with a simple theoretical model where self-replication organisms are likely to spontaneously arise. In this post he tries to formulate a question or questions such a project could feasibly attack, and discusses what would count as a success. - Michael Nielsen

I can't do justice to this post here in this short space - the whole post and the discussion thread that follows are both full of interesting ideas - but I think it'd be very interesting to get input from chemists and biologists. The spirit of the proposed project has something of the flavour of the Urey-Miller experiment. - Michael Nielsen

"So. You, and a quarter of a million other folks, have embarked on a 1000-year voyage aboard a hollowed-out asteroid. What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?" - Michael Nielsen

An interesting problem. But it seems problematic - if all our institutions (except ay the church) are of approximately single generation time spans, how do you go about hypothesizing that society X will last stably for 1000 years. - Rajarshi Guha

Make that a 'like, like, like' :-) - Graham Steel

"From 1992 to September 2003, pharmaceutical companies tied up the federal courts with 494 patent suits. That's more than the number filed in the computer hardware, aerospace, defense, and chemical industries combined. Those legal expenses are part of a giant, hidden "drug tax"--a tax that has to be paid by someone. And that someone, as you'll see below, is you. You don't get the tab all at once, of course. It shows up in higher drug costs, higher tuition bills, higher taxes--and tragically, fewer medical miracles. So how did we get to this sorry place? It was one piece of federal legislation that you've probably never heard of--a 1980 tweak to the U.S. patent and trademark law known as the Bayh-Dole Act. That single law, named for its sponsors, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole, in essence transferred the title of all discoveries made with the help of federal research grants to the universities and small businesses where they were made. " - Michael Nielsen

Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in open science. - Michael Nielsen

Nature, Vol. 462, No. 7270. (11 November 2009), pp. 169-170. The FOXP2 gene is implicated in the development of human speech and language. A comparison of the human and chimpanzee FOXP2 proteins highlights the differences in function in the two species. Some genes find instant favour in scientific culture and, like popular celebrities, remain under the close watch of their devoted following. FOXP2 has many of the qualities of an in-vogue gene — relevance to human disease, evolutionary significance and a prominent role in brain development. Martin Dominguez, Pasko Rakic - Björn Brembs

Gil Kalai's impressions of Math Overflow, the new question and answer site for mathematicians. - Michael Nielsen

It is one of the rarest giants of the ocean, and it has been caught on film for the first time.

I think you're underemphasizing some cultural factors: namely, it is FAR more socially acceptable for men to abandon their children 12h/day than it is for women. Likewise, it is FAR more socially acceptable for women to say "I'm giving up on [career] to have kids" than for men. My personal opinion is that until men step up to a fair share of childcare, nothing changes. - D0r0th34

@Björn I could make a number of comments to the nature of 'society' response to this, but given they relate to instances in my current job this is probably not the place (not relating to me in terms of childcare btw). My partner otoh, has indicated he is eager to take on any childcare responsibilities when/if the time comes (and thus considers this extremely seriously) - however, I suspect he is in a reasonable minority. Hopefully this will change. - Anna Croft

The Financial Times suggests that the IEA agrees with Herman Daly (at least a little bit), in  Did oil cause the latest recession? IEA weighs into the debate: A feature in the draft executive summary of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook, which will be published tomorrow, revisits this argument and comes to a rather worrying conclusion. It [...]

Applying for a research grant entails an elaborate folie á deux between applicant and funding agency. The applicant describes in meticulous detail a programme of work, half of which has already been completed and the other half which probably never will be, at least not in the way that is proposed. The more original and important the research question, the more likely it is that this future half will never reach completion, because there is no road map into the unknown. There are of course exceptions, such as clinical trials, sequencing projects, epidemiological studies and genetic analyses, where it is reasonable to expect that what is proposed will be carried out. The current peer review process reinforces this approach to the funding of science. Referees and panel members are complicit with applicant and funder in judging the work of fiction that characterises many grant applications. - Duncan Hull

Scientists' Next Big Discoveries Predicted in Online Report on the 150th Anniversary of "On The Origin of Species" http://www.nsf.gov/news... - chaz2b from Bookmarklet

thankyou eivind for the link, a great read - chaz2b

"We describe the system architecture and template design of "Scratchpads", a data-publishing framework for groups of people to create their own social networks supporting natural history science. Scratchpads cater to the particular needs of individual research communities through a common database and system architecture. This is flexible and scalable enough to support multiple networks, each with its own choice of features, visual design, and constituent data. Our data model supports web services on standardised data elements that might be used by related initiatives such as GBIF and the Encyclopedia of Life. A Scratchpad allows users to organise data around user-defined or imported ontologies, including biological classifications. Automated semantic annotation and indexing is applied to all content, allowing users to navigate intuitively and curate diverse biological data, including content drawn from third party resources. A system of archiving citable pages allows stable referencing with unique identifiers and provides credit to contributors through normal citation processes." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

modules mentioned: leftandright http://drupal.org/project... biblio http://drupal.org/project... cck http://drupal.org/project/cck og http://drupal.org/project/og image http://drupal.org/project... imagex http://drupal.org/project... creativecommons_lite http://drupal.org/project... simplenews http://drupal.org/project... wysiwyg... more... - Mike Chelen

pretty slick - Jean-Claude Bradley

Yes, yes. Very much like. - Neil Saunders

Very nicely summary of the problem. Really, the whole concept of a journal article about software is stupid. What does an academic article do? Alert people to a new finding/discovery. But in the case of software - well, the software is the finding. And people are "alerted" by finding it on the web, downloading it and using it. As Bosco says, the sole role of an article here is a CV tick - hence the hybrid approach. Non-academic programmers must find all of this very odd. - Neil Saunders

Many interesting tidbits on how Obama writes. - Michael Nielsen

Many interesting tidbits on how Obama writes. - Michael Nielsen

"We welcome proposals on any aspect of creating, publishing or reusing content or data that is open in accordance with opendefinition.org. " - Michael Nielsen

I have a mild photic sneeze reflex :) - Shirley Wu from Bookmarklet

I am glad to see that I'm not alone! Never considered the genetics (or not). To me, it feels like the squinting squeezes my upper nose (making it run slightly) and that sets it off. - Neil Saunders

Question and answer site that brings to it a ready-made community: the community around O'Reilly media. Looks a bit too broad to me, but it'll be interesting to watch develop. - Michael Nielsen