Eureka’s top 30 blog; vote sciblogs.co.nz for top 100 Grant Jacobs Feb 05

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Times On-line’s Eureka science magazine has released it’s list of it’s top 30 blogs.

microscope-stampsWe’ve all got own own favourites, see anyone’s blogroll. Mine are listed to the right of this article. It’s easy to get locked into the ones you habitually visit. Trying others’ lists opens up new possibilities. Explore Eureka’s list, there might be some that appeal to you.

You can also send votes to them to recommend others. Go on, recommend sciblogs.co.nz. You know you want to! According to Bora, they’re asking for another 70 to make up a top 100 so please do.

You might think different to Eureka choices. I do. I’d expect most to, we’ve all go our own ideas.

First up, the last on their list should go. Watt’s Up is anti-science, surely?

I’ve two minds about The Intersection. Their science writing is OK, although I personally think there is better. (I’m very picky about science blogs!) Their advice for science communication is a mixed lot to my opinion: it often feels as if it needs more thinking through and stronger self-criticism.

I’m a fan of both Not Exactly Rocket Science, The Loom and a good half-dozen others, although I would have added Neurophilosophy.

Personally I would have excluded the “blogs” that rarely provide any truly original material, but mainly repeat others’ material in re-shaped form or point at it. They have their place, but they’re a different type of beast. They’re aggregators, rather than blogs or blog collectives. (I’m also a bit wary as these “blogs” of this style seem to be under so much pressure to “produce” that they push the line on “pirating” others’ original content and sometimes don’t really give enough credit to the original source.)

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Lancet formally retracts Wakesfield paper Grant Jacobs Feb 03

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Heading the home page of medical journal The Lancet is an announcement of the formal retraction of the Wakefield paper that in part sparked the MMR vaccination scare in the UK and elsewhere. (I write ‘in part’ as other factors, such as Wakesfield’s public addresses and uncritical media coverage have their role in the saga.)

The retraction statement reads:

Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published [record.]

Scibling Peter Giffin’s article from earlier this week reports on the findings of the UK’s General Medical Council with respect to Wakesfield’s work. I’ve earlier written about autism and it’s proported links to vaccination.

Addendum: Also worth reading for some wider context are any number of articles about autism and parent’s hopes of a “treatment”, like this article by Liane Carter in the New York Times.

Blogimmuniqué, 1st Feb 2010 Grant Jacobs Feb 01

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Just a quick heads’ up to regular readers that my blog, Code for life, will go into a restful state for a few days. It won’t last long! Commenting won’t be affected, so take the chance to wander back through my old posts (use the drop-down menu by year, then month to the right of this page) and say whatever you like. (Well, within reason…!)

Source: alexcartoons.com

To get you started, I’ve included an extra long list of other articles at the end of this blogimmuniqué. Most of the more recent articles have their own lists of suggested readings, so rummage around.

Readers will have noticed that I’ve wandered off into lighter things of late. That’s what happens when the day-job workload takes over… Hopefully when I get back to blogging in a few days I will “finally” be able to get back to my more regular topics, biology in general, science communication, computational biology and whatnot. And I’ll finally get that homeopathy series out. (Yes, it’s actually real, it’s just in a jumble of bits!)

Open commenting: did it help? It’s hard to know if the experiment with “open” commenting is paying off. While Code for life is certainly getting more comments, it’s not as if this trial is being conducted scientifically with controls and “all that”. Seeing as the spam isn’t as troublesome as it might have been, the trial will continue and maybe even become permanent. Any thoughts on this are welcome, feedback would be appreciated. Did opening the comments make a difference for anyone? Or was it just the change in topics that prompted you to comment? Is registration enough of a hurdle that it stopped you commenting when you might otherwise have?

Articles in Code for life you might procrastinate with… (or just generally have fun with)

General/fun:

Ecuadorian Amazonians see Avatar (in 3-D)

All this talk about 3-D movies and TVs is depressing

Animal babies, long snouts (cute stuff)

Singing for science

Map shows New Zealand with lowest death rate on earth in 1856, over 11 in 1000 dying

Explore ancient science books on-line

Monday potpourri: maps, malaria in the USA, cholera in Dunedin and vaccines

Neti pots now validated as sound science? (startling photo)

Royal science

Health/genetics-related:

Homeopathic remedies in NZ pharmacies

British homeopathy sceptics group aims for sugar high (with Dawkins video)

Time for disclaimers on remedies?, “alternative” or not

GMOs and the plants we eat: neither are “natural”

Genetic tests and personalised medicine

Autistic children and blood mercury levels

Medical remedies-burden of proof lies with seller

Science communication:

Framing or explaining?: don’t frame the science itself

Banished from science writing. Words, that is.

Note to science communicators—alleles not “disease genes”

Three kinds of knowledge about science and journalism

Science journalism—critical analysis, not debate

Sidebar scientists

Scientists can’t write?

Bioinformatics:

Developing bioinformatics methods: by who and how

Retrospective—The mythology of bioinformatics (Most visited article on this blog)

Bioinformatics – computing with biotechnology and molecular biology data (intended as a lead-in into the previous post, but few visit it!)

Bibliographies-why can’t research papers self-document what they are?

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $10B towards vaccines Grant Jacobs Jan 30

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Vaccines are a major weapon in the fight against disease. Today the Bill & Melinda Gates have pledged funds for a “decade of vaccines” in poor and developing countries.

(Source: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)

Their press release goes on to say

The Gateses said that increased investment in vaccines by governments and the private sector could help developing countries dramatically reduce child mortality by the end of the decade, and they called for others to help fill critical financing gaps in both research funding and childhood immunization programs.

“We must make this the decade of vaccines,” said Bill Gates. “Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before.”

A video of the full press conference is available to the right of the press release page.

The broader announcement called for a wide range of initiatives including scaling vaccine programs up, laboratory research and clinical trials to create new vaccines, introducing new vaccines for pneumonia and severe diarrhoea among other things, and improving the market and access of vaccines in developing countries.

The initiative is “in addition to the $4.5 billion that the Gates Foundation has already committed to vaccine research, development and delivery to date across its entire disease portfolio since its inception.”

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Ecuadorian Amazonians see Avatar (in 3-D) Grant Jacobs Jan 30

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What would people who have an history and culture based on living in the forests of the Amazon think of James Cameron’s film, Avatar?

avatar-movie-smllWould they see themselves, their people or history echoed in it?

It’s an intriguing thought.

This short video below (4:03 minutes), produced by Siegmund Thies, follows the journey of a bus-load of Amazonians down from the heavily forested hills to bustling Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, where they watch the film in 3-D. After viewing the movie a few of the Amazonian audience are briefly interviewed.

You can’t help hoping this is a pilot or short for a full documentary.

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Animal babies, long snouts Grant Jacobs Jan 29

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Baby animals are cute. You’ve got to admit it.

Long noses or snouts are striking.

The two videos I bring you today feature animal babies with very long snouts.

In the first video zoologist Marie Magnuson from the Smithsonian National Zoo (USA) introduces a baby anteater. Wait until you see the shots of the baby clinging on to to the rear of it’s mother’s back, or you’ll miss the fun.

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The iPad, Apple’s new tablet and the textbook / reference market Grant Jacobs Jan 28

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As almost anyone interested in Apple devices knows, today Apple announced it’s tablet device.

Interest on internet has been high. To give the scale of interest, the Arstechnica website, normally a busy site, was unable to cope with the load. I watched a small portion of the presentation live, via TVNZ’s (Television New Zealand, for those outside New Zealand) live streaming on their technology news website.

Caveat: as “breaking news”, please realise there may be errors and there certainly will be omissions. As someone with a hearing “disability”, I would welcome the day when captions were more widely available, the streaming feed is very difficult to follow, so I’ve written most of this from running around the internet picking up other’s reporting, with all the flaws that come with that!

ipad

As expected, they use the 9.7″ screens (the rumour-mill started as Apple essentially bought out large volumes of the small screen, without having a product which used them). It features a style very similar to that of the current iMacs, with the screen itself surrounded by black backing, then a thin brushed aluminium border.

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Singing for science Grant Jacobs Jan 27

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If you’re looking for science songs, especially for young kids, not a bad place to start is The Great Beyond blog. A far as I can tell, this is the latest in the series. They’re up to thirty now! You can always trying searching the blog using ’song science’, using the search box in the upper-left corner. (I’ll be honest some of them make me squirm, but some aren’t so bad, and the kids’ ones are obviously for kids!)

An earlier post in the series passes on that Jef Poskanzer has posted the entire collection of the 1950s-1960s era Singing Science Records online (for kids).

Below I’ve given a video of one of the songs (below the “fold”), which will be (very) familiar to science bloggers, but perhaps new to some of my non-science readers. The fish featured in it is a model of the Tiktaalik fossil. Neil Shubin, who the song mentions, is one of the discoverers of the fossil. An account of his work on this fossil is given in his excellent book Your Inner Fish (cover to right). The author offers an adapted excerpt  from the book, Fish out of water: Your Inner Fish, that you can read on-line.

Anyway, on to the video for you (and back to work for me!):

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Blog post about blog posts with comments about comments Grant Jacobs Jan 27

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Heads’ up: although the post this points to is hosted on a science-related blog, it has nothing to do with science. This is a deviation from normal service, which will resume when the madness of grant writing ends.

Just a little light relief.

It’s midweek, I’m working, you’re working. Aren’t you? What are you doing reading this blog? What am I doing writing this blog? We’re bored, right?

cc2This blog post, from Coyote Crossing, is an excellent meta-referential post about blog posts, particularly the kind that tries to promote herself by showing off her blogstraps. It is getting entirely more traffic than it deserves owing to the blogstraps it reveals.

Erm, no. Let me take that back. The bit about the blogstraps.

Seriously (I really mean seriously), it’s a fine post introspecting some styles of blogs, with the comment section brilliantly following in tune. It’s great when a “community” effort likes this pans out and everyone joins in so well. (Yes, I’ve added a comment to the ever-going list.)

On another note, this author’s blog got so popular (~2,500 visits/hour), that the hosting company pointed out that they’d bill extra for the excess traffic. Poor sod. Hopefully enough time has passed that their traffic has fallen to more sane levels that aren’t costing them by now. I’d feel guilty writing this post otherwise. It’s not as if I could send many readers their way given how few come my way…

HT: bioephemera.

Popularity does not mean effectiveness or sensibility Grant Jacobs Jan 26

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In recent comments to an article I wrote on homeopathy in New Zealand pharmacies, some readers suggested that because the remedies were popular, they must be OK.

Buried Alive - BondesonTo give a little light relief from the weightiness of the topic, let’s illustrate the illogic of using popularity in lieu of demonstration of effectiveness by pardoxially considering the morbid example of mausoleums.

Previously I reviewed Bondeson’s book Buried Alive. (There’s also a video of Monty Python’s “Bring out your dead” skit, if you’re a fan.) If you read the book, you’d learn that mausoleums where once popular in Germany.

These mausoleums were institutions set up through Germany to ensure that the dead really were dead by babysitting them for several days.

To their credit at least they kept good records, as German administrations seem to have a reputation to.

After a number of years, they realised that no-one was recovering from death, so the mausoleums themselves died.

From this we get two lessons:

  1. No-one survives death (Good lesson, that!)
  2. Just because something is popular, doesn’t make it effective or sensible
More articles at Code for life:

Map shows New Zealand with lowest death rate on earth in 1856, over 11 in 1000 dying

Deleting a gene can turn an ovary into a testis in adult mammals

All this talk about 3-D movies and TVs is depressing

Scientific baking. Great for those lab meetings or kids’ parties

Explore ancient science books on-line

(I apologise for the inexcusably short post, but that’s the all time I have tonight…! I will return to the homeopathy articles in time. I have nothing against Germans and there are some fine German scientists and scientific institutions.)

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