"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." Terry Pratchett
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh 16-17 June 2009 The aim of this national conference is to bring together practitioners in the teaching of science disciplines in HE to share their experiences, identify common challenges and an opportunity to share effective practice. The programme will include keynote lectures; short oral presentations; hands on workshops; posters and exhibitions.
Anne O'Tate: A tool to support user-driven summarization, drill-down and browsing of PubMed search results. Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration
Call for the internet. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.
The Ministry of Health in Viet Nam has confirmed two new human cases of influenza A(H5N1) virus infection, the first human cases to have been reported from Viet Nam since November 2005.
Researchers have measured concentrations of bacteria in the cabin air of 12 commercial passenger aircraft and found that flying may be safer than we think.
Scientists at the University of Calgary have developed a way of fertilizing the bacteria that exist in heavy oil reservoirs in order to improve recovery of hard-to-develop energy.
EndnoteWeb, RefWorks, Connotea, CiteULike, Zotero, Mendeley. Nice summary of the state of the art by Martin Fenner. Conclusion - not much to choose in some ways - personal preference!
There is seemingly consistent and compelling evidence that there is no association between breastfeeding and breast cancer. We challenge the assumption follows that milk borne viruses cannot be associated with human breast cancer.
Ciguatera poisoning is caused by the consumption of tropical reef fish that have assimilated ciguatoxins through the marine food chain from toxic microscopic algae.
It’s a rich, rich source of information and interaction. But it’s doing my head in. That’s why Jim Hendler’s blog post last Friday hit home so well. His piece is about finding the time to blog, which itself is an issue for me. But if I add to that the distraction of Twitter, the problem is compounded. I keep thinking back to Richard Hamming’s remarks about sustaining that 10% extra effort in your science so as to reap long-term benefits in progress and productivity. And I wonder if blogging and twittering has soaked up that time from my schedule. I think it might have.
Since the reason for the variable degree of success of online social tools for scientists is largely attributed to the lack of participation, I think a great way to pull in participation by scientists would be to offer that kind of value up-front. You give it a paper or set of papers, and it tells you the ones you need to read next, or perhaps the ones you’ve missed. My crazy idea was that a recommendation system for the scientific literature, using expert-scored literature to find relevant related papers, could do for papers what Flickr has done for photos.