Public Lab is probably the best known - https://publiclab.org/. Here's how they describe themselves: Public Lab is a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms. I wrote an article about the DIY science community last year that tells you a bit more about how they and other "community science" outfits got started. (If the site asks you to subscribe just clear your cache).
Over at 'the other place' the guy who did some of the computer modelling for the project has chipped in with some insights that are a bit more interesting than those (dare I say it) here (there, I did). https://news.ycombinator.com/i... eg Here's a thread from there:
T-A 18 hours ago | link
So the Economist's point is that a "research" project exploring an idea about the universe which has been known to be incorrect for centuries somehow proves the value of the humanities? Really?
14113 15 hours ago | link
Yes. It provides a lot of information about the history of science. Most importantly, Grosseteste was one of the first to use what we now think of as the scientific method, and (I believe) the first to suggest a 'big bang like' start to the universe.
He's essential in the history of science for introducing aristotalean traditions and ideas, to the scientific discourse at the time, as well as being one of the early founders of science. For that reason at least he's well worth studying, and especially his ideas, which are very close to what we have now. What the science researchers are doing is helping the historians formalise his ideas in todays language and notations so that their similarities can be seen with todays ideas.
Source: I worked on this project over last summer as a computer science student visualising his explanation for the start of the universe.
Proportion of GDP spent on research is not a 'meaningless' number. The EU spent a great deal of time trying to (unsuccessfully) urging its member states to push their total spending up to 3%. They've since realized that no single metric can adequately measure a nation's capacity to innovate in science - but this measure is still part of a basket of metrics that it's perfectly reasonable to use to examine a country's commitment to science. To be clear - there's little evidence that spending a lot of money science will get you a Google or a Genentech, but on the other hand, a fair bit of evidence that spending nothing will make it extremely unlikely. ie science spending is necessary but not sufficient.
http://www.nature.com/news/polynesian-people-used-binary-numbers-600-years-ago-1.14380 >>Cognitive scientist Rafael Nuñez at the University of California, San Diego, points out that the idea of binary systems is actually older than Mangarevan culture. “It can be traced back to at least ancient China, around the 9th century bc”, he says, and it can be found in the I Ching, a millennia-old Chinese text that inspired Leibniz. Nuñez adds that “other ancient groups, such as the Maya, used sophisticated combinations of binary and decimal systems to keep track of time and astronomical phenomena. Thus, the cognitive advantages underlying the Mangarevan counting system may not be unique.”
Actually, the parallel to bonobos is inaccurate-despite the genetic similarities, they're not the closest primate model to us in terms of our secual behaviour. There are plenty of reasons to strongly suspect that humans are somewhat monogamous - eg human males and females are around the same size - for various reasons, strongly polygamous species tend to have larger males, smaller females. Of-course humans are not strictly monogamous - few stick with just one partner for their whole lives - but then neither do many other 'monogamous' species. Lots of articles about our propensity for monogamy vs polygamy eg http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/are_humans_monogamous_or_polygamous_the_evolution_of_human_mating_strategies_.html >> Like so many other animals, human beings aren't really that monogamous. Better to say, we're monogamish.
On what evidence? It seems pretty obvious that -some- sort of epigenetic changes happen in the human brain too on -some- occasions. I doubt the researchers are arguing that human pair-bonding happens in exactly the same way as in prairie voles - just that there are some parallels. In any case, the cool thing is that they've shown epigenetic changes behind pair-bonding for the first time. (There's plenty of evidence that epigenetic changes influence other forms of complex human behaviour (eg see http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100908/full/467146a.html). No reason I can see for sex/love to be different.)
Yup you're right. He's saying the vanilla version of 'inflation' is in trouble. Other more exotic versions might be OK - but none of them are really favored by the community at the moment.
From wiki, the infallible source of all wisdom: "Open access (OA) is the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal article"
'unrestricted access' is exactly what it isn't some would argue, if your licence doesn't allow text mining, for example.
Many, many advocates of open access publication say that without liberal licenses, it's not open access at all. so there is an important argument over definition here. For instance, data mining is going to be the next 'big thing' - if you need separate deals with publishers in order for researchers to text mine, that's going to risk scuppering the field before it's really gotten off the ground. Many are under the impression these sorts of issues are left behind if you publish in open access journals - but they are not.
hi - there's no conspiracy here. I have no special insight in what slashdot editors look for in a submission but I imagine that if they see a well written synopsis that helps. There's no way slashdot (nor any other aggregator site) could ever be ahead of the MSM (if you include Nature in that) on this - as research papers are sent to journalists IN ADVANCE of publication. This is supposedly to allow reporters time to put together an accurate story but also allows journals to control the news agenda a little. So this is why newspapers around the world publish the same science stories from the big journals at the same time. I live in the UK - so I tend to post stuff to slashdot during my morning. If an embargo lifts at 7 or 10pm in the UK (typical journal embargo times), I'm not around to post it until the next day. Other people often do post the same story before I can as a result. Lastly, it's no secret that I work for Nature - that's why a link to the news site and some smart googling of my user name reveals who I am. I've noticed the journal Science does the same (sciencehabit). There are good and bad things about that - news stories in Science and Nature are authoritative, in-depth and well balanced. They're far better sources of science news than newspaper coverage by and large, which is patchy and superficial by and large and often fails to address the big holes in the research. Because slashdot has editorial control, the editors get to decide which stories they take and which ones they decline. I would add that means that slashdot hasn't suffered from the same problems as some other sites, which link to pretty awful stories or worse, journalism-free press releases that are essentially advertisements from researchers/universities.
I've been posting stories to Slashdot for about a year now. I'm regularly on the most accepted submitter list and I don't spam the site with submissions so I guess I'm doing something right. I've been pretty impressed by the comments on all the stories - like many in this community I've got a PhD (protein crystallography) and/or a physical sciences background (Undergrad in physics). Like many, I'm also liberal/atheist. Comments are humorous, witty and often insightful. The level of debate is high, and move the story on or question it in interesting ways. But I'm hugely disappointed at many of the comments left on this piece - dismissing an entire genre of music? That's narrow-minded redneck stuff. You might not like much that you hear - but then any genre that includes Public Enemy, Michael Franti (sorry - I'm out of touch since the 80s/early 90s) deserves respect. There's a great deal of rock I do not like - it's misogynistic/derivative crap - but that's OK - I listen to the stuff that I like. Few would think it ok to dismiss rock music in the way I'm seeing rap/hiphop dismissed here. Any thoughts on why?
That's an interesting story (covered quite well on the BBC unusually http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4888080.stm) but my faith in/.'s editorial staff is intact. The article you link to are about mice with various genes missing - it's an engineered lab mouse mdoel. The mice in the story here regenerate naturally. MRL mice are a disease model - and carry a lupus like disease - ie autoimmune disease-bad news (I'm not sure whether that's because of the missing p21 gene but it's quite possible. Disentangling that from the regenerative abilities is going to be tough - and they haven't managed it yet by the looks of things). The fact these mice do this naturally, with no other ill-effects, is much more important in terms of making an impact on human health.
You are incorrect about Nature policy on Arxiv: http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/confidentiality.html "Contributions being prepared for or submitted to a Nature journal can be posted on recognized preprint servers (such as ArXiv or Nature Precedings), and on collaborative websites such as wikis or the author's blog"
The problem with ArXIv is that papers have yet to be formally peer-reviewed. It's certainly true that physicists post there and you can find (nearly) all papers there in some form - but many papers posted there don't make it past peer review. So that's why this is important. But you know all that as you RTFS: "Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles."
But keep in mind that subscription fee journals typically charge hundreds of dollars for color and extra pages (e.g. most IEEE Transactions journals charges $300 per page over 8).
It's true that all the organizations you anme have OA mandates BUT, crucially, none mandate that you make the research publicly accessible from the minute the paper is published. I believe the NIH policy is actually 12 MONTHS after publication - that is of limited use to scientists. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ So these agencies are actually pandering to publishers even more (in some respects) than this consortium is - libraries will continue to have to buy subscriptions so that their scientists can access the literature from day one (vital in biomed and probably most other fields too). With the deal described in the source, the costs are transparent - so it's very likely that, when the contracts come up for negotiation in 3 years or so, there will be pressure on publishers to reduce profits...
Introns are parts of genes that are excised before the DNA message gets turned into a protein. So these papers don't have much to do with introns. However, as an aside, it's well known that some introns do have biological functions....
Check out how much the Mexicans spend on healthcare at the moment, compare it to the US, compensate for numbers. Then despair American slashdotters. Of-course there's still problems - but as the NYT piece says: "A decade ago, half of all Mexicans had no health insurance at all." ie in many cases, they were not able to afford treatment. Critics sometimes seem to overlook that a public healthcare system does not mean that people who wish to get treatment privately cannot do so...
The idea that journalists should not cover findings reported at meetings because they're too stupid or the results are not ready for primetime is a little odd, specially in the heady days of the social web. The results are out on twitter - not because dumb journalists are writing about it but because scientists are tweeting about it, blogging it and so on. A more mature response might be to suggest that there should be more critical voices out there on the research as quickly as possible - so that by the time the research (slowly) reaches the printed page or is published online, it's had thorough external peer review. (Oh and journalists - good ones - we have many of those at Nature - do often provide a secondary peer review. Either questioning results or, more often, by choosing not to cover boring or incremental or simply wrong research that has reached the public domain). The reporter has an undergrad degree in chemistry by the way, as you'll see if you google his name.
A lot of slashdotters love to rubbish media coverage of science. Well here's one of many examples where the news story is more balanced and revealing than the paper. No mention of feeding the world etc From Nature's news story about this paper: "When the researchers measured the aphids’ levels of ATP — the ‘currency’ of energy transfer in all living things — the results were striking. Green aphids, which contain high levels of carotenoids, make significantly more ATP than do white ones, which are almost devoid of these pigments. Moreover, ATP production rose when the orange insects — which contain an intermediate amount of carotenoids — were placed in the light, and fell when they were moved into the dark."
In another article I read, it acknowledged that suicide bomber termites are old news. Using a crystal backpack to intensify the attack is what makes this significant.
It acknowledges it in the linked story here too: " Defensive suicidal rupturing — termed autothysis — has evolved independently in a number of termite species, suggesting that the behaviour is highly adaptive."
Then the story goes on to say: 'N. taracua has added a yet another step, by using a reaction to make its defensive chemical even more toxic. The pouches holding the copper-containing blue crystals are located near to the salivary glands. When the termites are attacked, their enemies bites cause these swollen pouches burst and the crystals mix with salivary secretions, producing the toxic blue liquid.
“It is the two-component chemistry that underlies the exceptional toxicity in this species,” says Hanus.'
Slashdot Mirror
Public Lab is probably the best known - https://publiclab.org/. Here's how they describe themselves: Public Lab is a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms.
I wrote an article about the DIY science community last year that tells you a bit more about how they and other "community science" outfits got started. (If the site asks you to subscribe just clear your cache).
Over at 'the other place' the guy who did some of the computer modelling for the project has chipped in with some insights that are a bit more interesting than those (dare I say it) here (there, I did).
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
eg Here's a thread from there:
T-A 18 hours ago | link
So the Economist's point is that a "research" project exploring an idea about the universe which has been known to be incorrect for centuries somehow proves the value of the humanities? Really?
14113 15 hours ago | link
Yes. It provides a lot of information about the history of science. Most importantly, Grosseteste was one of the first to use what we now think of as the scientific method, and (I believe) the first to suggest a 'big bang like' start to the universe.
He's essential in the history of science for introducing aristotalean traditions and ideas, to the scientific discourse at the time, as well as being one of the early founders of science. For that reason at least he's well worth studying, and especially his ideas, which are very close to what we have now. What the science researchers are doing is helping the historians formalise his ideas in todays language and notations so that their similarities can be seen with todays ideas.
Source: I worked on this project over last summer as a computer science student visualising his explanation for the start of the universe.
Proportion of GDP spent on research is not a 'meaningless' number. The EU spent a great deal of time trying to (unsuccessfully) urging its member states to push their total spending up to 3%. They've since realized that no single metric can adequately measure a nation's capacity to innovate in science - but this measure is still part of a basket of metrics that it's perfectly reasonable to use to examine a country's commitment to science.
To be clear - there's little evidence that spending a lot of money science will get you a Google or a Genentech, but on the other hand, a fair bit of evidence that spending nothing will make it extremely unlikely. ie science spending is necessary but not sufficient.
http://www.nature.com/news/polynesian-people-used-binary-numbers-600-years-ago-1.14380
>>Cognitive scientist Rafael Nuñez at the University of California, San Diego, points out that the idea of binary systems is actually older than Mangarevan culture. “It can be traced back to at least ancient China, around the 9th century bc”, he says, and it can be found in the I Ching, a millennia-old Chinese text that inspired Leibniz. Nuñez adds that “other ancient groups, such as the Maya, used sophisticated combinations of binary and decimal systems to keep track of time and astronomical phenomena. Thus, the cognitive advantages underlying the Mangarevan counting system may not be unique.”
Actually, the parallel to bonobos is inaccurate-despite the genetic similarities, they're not the closest primate model to us in terms of our secual behaviour. There are plenty of reasons to strongly suspect that humans are somewhat monogamous - eg human males and females are around the same size - for various reasons, strongly polygamous species tend to have larger males, smaller females. Of-course humans are not strictly monogamous - few stick with just one partner for their whole lives - but then neither do many other 'monogamous' species.
Lots of articles about our propensity for monogamy vs polygamy
eg http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/are_humans_monogamous_or_polygamous_the_evolution_of_human_mating_strategies_.html
>> Like so many other animals, human beings aren't really that monogamous. Better to say, we're monogamish.
On what evidence? It seems pretty obvious that -some- sort of epigenetic changes happen in the human brain too on -some- occasions. I doubt the researchers are arguing that human pair-bonding happens in exactly the same way as in prairie voles - just that there are some parallels. In any case, the cool thing is that they've shown epigenetic changes behind pair-bonding for the first time. (There's plenty of evidence that epigenetic changes influence other forms of complex human behaviour (eg see http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100908/full/467146a.html). No reason I can see for sex/love to be different.)
Yup you're right. He's saying the vanilla version of 'inflation' is in trouble. Other more exotic versions might be OK - but none of them are really favored by the community at the moment.
From wiki, the infallible source of all wisdom: "Open access (OA) is the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal article"
'unrestricted access' is exactly what it isn't some would argue, if your licence doesn't allow text mining, for example.
Many, many advocates of open access publication say that without liberal licenses, it's not open access at all. so there is an important argument over definition here. For instance, data mining is going to be the next 'big thing' - if you need separate deals with publishers in order for researchers to text mine, that's going to risk scuppering the field before it's really gotten off the ground. Many are under the impression these sorts of issues are left behind if you publish in open access journals - but they are not.
...by Carl Sagan, among others
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPoGVP-wZv8
The relevant bit comes at about 1:30
hi - there's no conspiracy here. I have no special insight in what slashdot editors look for in a submission but I imagine that if they see a well written synopsis that helps. There's no way slashdot (nor any other aggregator site) could ever be ahead of the MSM (if you include Nature in that) on this - as research papers are sent to journalists IN ADVANCE of publication. This is supposedly to allow reporters time to put together an accurate story but also allows journals to control the news agenda a little. So this is why newspapers around the world publish the same science stories from the big journals at the same time.
I live in the UK - so I tend to post stuff to slashdot during my morning. If an embargo lifts at 7 or 10pm in the UK (typical journal embargo times), I'm not around to post it until the next day. Other people often do post the same story before I can as a result.
Lastly, it's no secret that I work for Nature - that's why a link to the news site and some smart googling of my user name reveals who I am. I've noticed the journal Science does the same (sciencehabit). There are good and bad things about that - news stories in Science and Nature are authoritative, in-depth and well balanced. They're far better sources of science news than newspaper coverage by and large, which is patchy and superficial by and large and often fails to address the big holes in the research. Because slashdot has editorial control, the editors get to decide which stories they take and which ones they decline.
I would add that means that slashdot hasn't suffered from the same problems as some other sites, which link to pretty awful stories or worse, journalism-free press releases that are essentially advertisements from researchers/universities.
Apologies - typo in my submission.
I've been posting stories to Slashdot for about a year now. I'm regularly on the most accepted submitter list and I don't spam the site with submissions so I guess I'm doing something right.
I've been pretty impressed by the comments on all the stories - like many in this community I've got a PhD (protein crystallography) and/or a physical sciences background (Undergrad in physics). Like many, I'm also liberal/atheist. Comments are humorous, witty and often insightful. The level of debate is high, and move the story on or question it in interesting ways.
But I'm hugely disappointed at many of the comments left on this piece - dismissing an entire genre of music? That's narrow-minded redneck stuff. You might not like much that you hear - but then any genre that includes Public Enemy, Michael Franti (sorry - I'm out of touch since the 80s/early 90s) deserves respect.
There's a great deal of rock I do not like - it's misogynistic/derivative crap - but that's OK - I listen to the stuff that I like.
Few would think it ok to dismiss rock music in the way I'm seeing rap/hiphop dismissed here. Any thoughts on why?
This allows free access to peer reviewed literature for free. ArXiv does not.
Not sure I can be clearer than that...
That's an interesting story (covered quite well on the BBC unusually http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4888080.stm) but my faith in /.'s editorial staff is intact. The article you link to are about mice with various genes missing - it's an engineered lab mouse mdoel. The mice in the story here regenerate naturally. MRL mice are a disease model - and carry a lupus like disease - ie autoimmune disease-bad news (I'm not sure whether that's because of the missing p21 gene but it's quite possible. Disentangling that from the regenerative abilities is going to be tough - and they haven't managed it yet by the looks of things).
The fact these mice do this naturally, with no other ill-effects, is much more important in terms of making an impact on human health.
From an earlier Nature story: http://www.nature.com/news/gas-cloud-hurtling-towards-milky-way-s-black-hole-may-harbour-young-star-1.11351
You are incorrect about Nature policy on Arxiv:
http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/confidentiality.html
"Contributions being prepared for or submitted to a Nature journal can be posted on recognized preprint servers (such as ArXiv or Nature Precedings), and on collaborative websites such as wikis or the author's blog"
The problem with ArXIv is that papers have yet to be formally peer-reviewed. It's certainly true that physicists post there and you can find (nearly) all papers there in some form - but many papers posted there don't make it past peer review. So that's why this is important.
But you know all that as you RTFS:
"Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles."
But keep in mind that subscription fee journals typically charge hundreds of dollars for color and extra pages (e.g. most IEEE Transactions journals charges $300 per page over 8).
Many journals do that though - not just subscription based journals.
eg
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/cid/for_authors/charges.html
"Open Access charges are in addition to any page charges and color charges that might apply. "
It's true that all the organizations you anme have OA mandates BUT, crucially, none mandate that you make the research publicly accessible from the minute the paper is published. I believe the NIH policy is actually 12 MONTHS after publication - that is of limited use to scientists.
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
So these agencies are actually pandering to publishers even more (in some respects) than this consortium is - libraries will continue to have to buy subscriptions so that their scientists can access the literature from day one (vital in biomed and probably most other fields too).
With the deal described in the source, the costs are transparent - so it's very likely that, when the contracts come up for negotiation in 3 years or so, there will be pressure on publishers to reduce profits...
Introns are parts of genes that are excised before the DNA message gets turned into a protein. So these papers don't have much to do with introns. However, as an aside, it's well known that some introns do have biological functions....
Check out how much the Mexicans spend on healthcare at the moment, compare it to the US, compensate for numbers. Then despair American slashdotters.
Of-course there's still problems - but as the NYT piece says: "A decade ago, half of all Mexicans had no health insurance at all." ie in many cases, they were not able to afford treatment.
Critics sometimes seem to overlook that a public healthcare system does not mean that people who wish to get treatment privately cannot do so...
The idea that journalists should not cover findings reported at meetings because they're too stupid or the results are not ready for primetime is a little odd, specially in the heady days of the social web. The results are out on twitter - not because dumb journalists are writing about it but because scientists are tweeting about it, blogging it and so on.
A more mature response might be to suggest that there should be more critical voices out there on the research as quickly as possible - so that by the time the research (slowly) reaches the printed page or is published online, it's had thorough external peer review. (Oh and journalists - good ones - we have many of those at Nature - do often provide a secondary peer review. Either questioning results or, more often, by choosing not to cover boring or incremental or simply wrong research that has reached the public domain).
The reporter has an undergrad degree in chemistry by the way, as you'll see if you google his name.
A lot of slashdotters love to rubbish media coverage of science. Well here's one of many examples where the news story is more balanced and revealing than the paper. No mention of feeding the world etc
From Nature's news story about this paper:
"When the researchers measured the aphids’ levels of ATP — the ‘currency’ of energy transfer in all living things — the results were striking. Green aphids, which contain high levels of carotenoids, make significantly more ATP than do white ones, which are almost devoid of these pigments. Moreover, ATP production rose when the orange insects — which contain an intermediate amount of carotenoids — were placed in the light, and fell when they were moved into the dark."
Er, would dipping said chip in a pool of saliva accomplish the same feat?
No. Sounds like you need stomach acid to activate.
In another article I read, it acknowledged that suicide bomber termites are old news. Using a crystal backpack to intensify the attack is what makes this significant.
It acknowledges it in the linked story here too:
" Defensive suicidal rupturing — termed autothysis — has evolved independently in a number of termite species, suggesting that the behaviour is highly adaptive."
Then the story goes on to say:
'N. taracua has added a yet another step, by using a reaction to make its defensive chemical even more toxic. The pouches holding the copper-containing blue crystals are located near to the salivary glands. When the termites are attacked, their enemies bites cause these swollen pouches burst and the crystals mix with salivary secretions, producing the toxic blue liquid.
“It is the two-component chemistry that underlies the exceptional toxicity in this species,” says Hanus.'