LoomWare

Is the Web Dumbing Down Research?

Interesting Research on Research

An interesting Economist post on research done to look at the citation impact of having more and more scholarly output available to researchers.

What he discovered was that, for every additional year of back-issues of a journal available online, the average age of the articles cited from that journal fell by a month. He also found a fall, once a journal was online, in the number of papers in it that got any citations at all. Indeed, he predicts that for the average journal today, five extra years’ worth of online availability will cause a precipitous drop in the number of articles receiving one or more citations—from 600 to 200 a year. Rather than measuring the length of the tail, then, it seems that modern science is actually focusing on a tiny bit of it.

The original article (needs a Science subscription) is worth reading, as the Economist piece does over-simplify the conclusions. For example, the author also discusses other work that disagrees with the article under discussion - science in action :-)

Also worthwhile is this user comment from the perspective of a student doing research in the modern library

XML Schemas and Bioinformatics

Making Sense of the Bioinformatics XMl Landscape

As UPEI develops support for bioscience data in our VRE project, we have delved into the rather daunting world of bioscience XML schemas and related tools. This article is a good intro (although a bit out of date) and a useful start if you are looking to build data repositories in this area.

Organic Better for Bee Growers?

ECOLOGY UNDERNEWS: ORGANIC BEE GROWERS REPORT NO COLONY COLLA

This on is beyond my area of expertise, but I have been following the reports of bee colony die-offs (or Colony Collapse Disorder) with some interest. This blog post from Sharon Labchuk here in PEI provides some anecdotal evidence that organic hives are not suffering from the same problem. As the post suggests, the farming practices of many big bee operations are not necessarily that different from any big farming operation, where pesticides and pharmaceuticals are in heavily used. Most of not all the reports do come from commercial operations, so this would not be surprising. One item reports that "Among [the likely factors] are mites and associated diseases, some unknown pathogenic disease and pesticide contamination or poisoning." In an interesting Library-ish twist to this story I encountered this same issue at a presentation at the Manitoba Libraries Conference last week. Rae Bridgman and 2 other authors were discussing their books and writing in general and Rae's latest is called Amber Ambrosia:

Ten-year-old cousins Sophie and Wil face a long and endless summer, until they find out MiddleGate’s honeybees are falling sick. Even the Secretariat on the Status of Magical Creatures seems unable to solve the mystery. Fearing for Aunt Rue’s position at the Secretariat, Wil and Sophie decide to find out who – or what – is attacking the insects after the symbol of a golden bee suddenly appears on Wil’s black medallion.

Rae said the story and the current real-life mystery were a coincidence, but it is an excellent example of how important literature can be to a society that sometimes puts too much emphasis on science and high production, rather than a more ecological and balanced approach to life Maybe if more kids read this one they can help convince their bee-farming parents to adopt more balanced approach.

Good Example of Where Science Output Belongs

Open access database to spur development of medicines for infectious diseases in developing world

The recently launched The Drug Target Prioritization Database is "a new web-based resource designed to facilitate the development of medicines to fight infectious diseases afflicting the developing world." The TDR Targets Database is a rich collection of resources on infectious diseases that affect millions of people annually. This is where our research efforts should go, a public, open database that aims to make research available to all and thereby help improve the lives of millions.

Voyage of the Turtle - Great Book!

I am going to create 2 posts on this book - this one and one at my Slow Library blog. I liked it a lot :-)

Carl Safina has sometimes been referred to as a Rachel Carson for the 21st century. Having just finished his latest book, Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur I can understand why. Voyage of the Turtle is a compelling natural history of the Leatherback sea turtle, the largest turtle of the day. Like many sea turtle species, the Leatherback is endangered, although it is making a come-back in some seas. As one could guess, the brink of extinction was at our hand - harvesting eggs being the main culprit. Safina's writing is beautiful and inspiring. A few examples: On indiscriminate forms of fishing:

Each nearly invisible net is one small brick in the Great Wall of Hunger with which humanity interrupts the travels of sea life worldwide.

On the ocean:

You can travel a mile across the ocean and not see any change. But travel one vertical mile into the ocean, and pressure, temperature, and oxygen change in ways so profound you pass through other realms like falling into a magic well.

On a factory sardine boat: ...

sixty or seventy tons of sardines in that hull, removed from nature mostly to feed not people but farm animals. When next you eat meat, taste the ocean.

On sea turtles in general:

Turtles may seem to lack sense, but they don't do senseless things. They're not terribly energetic, yet they do not waste energy. Turtles don't have the intellect to form opinions about greed, oppression, superstition, or ideology, yet they don't inflict misery on themselves or other creatures. Turtles cannot consider what might happen, yet nothing turtles do threatens anyone's future. Turtles don't think about their next generation, but they risk everything and provide all they can to ensure that there will be one. Meanwhile, we profess to love our own offspring above all else, yet above all else it is they from whom we daily steal. We cannot learn to be more like turtles, but from turtles we could learn to be more human. That is the wisdom carried within one hundred million years of survival. What turtles could learn from us, I can't imagine.

Voyage of the Turtle describes an incredible creature (it is amazing how far they will swim in their quest for food and a place to lay eggs) with an uncanny ability to return to the beach of its birth and is a tale of a complex ecosystem where our actions on one small beach can determine the fate of an entire species. Something we should pay some attention to.

Inform the Public About Science Issues...How?

Framing Science in a Bubble

There is a great conversation forming around an article by Matthew C. Nisbet and Chris Mooney in a recent Science article (6 April 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5821, p. 56, DOI: 10.1126/science.1142030). The authors suggest that:

to engage diverse publics, scientists must focus on ways to make complex topics personally relevant

A noble thought and one that is getting a lot of chatter on the science blogs, but there is one fundamental problem: how can scientists engage the public when the public can't hear their voices? By publishing in a commercial journal that is rarely seen outside the halls of academia, scientists guarantee that the attempts to engage the public will fail. This very article demonstrates that dysfunction in Technicolor - I am a citizen and a scientist and I don't have a subscription to Science so can't read the article. Now, publishing in a reputable and widely read journal like Science will get the attention of many scientists, but the authors ultimate goal is stymied by the continued reliance on conversing about things that matter greatly to all citizens, in an expensive bubble. One really good way to make complex topics personally relevant is to get them out there, so they can be dissected and expanded on by anyone who has the time, expertise and desire. That includes members of the public. If a scientist explains science in a paper forest, and no citizen is there, is it really knowledge?

Scraped from Science Blogs

IPCC Report Released

Climate change and the IPCC reports. Should you trust? [The World's Fair]

Sarah Burch provides a great set of posts ( 1 and 2) on the much discussed IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report, part of which which was released today (the Impacts report).

Scraped from The World's Fair

Pandemonium: What Are We Doing to Ourselves?

Finally got around to reading Pandemonium by Andrew Nikiforuk and it was a fascinating, if not downright scary, read. This is a popular treatment of the recent outbreaks of bird flu, mad cow, super bugs and other nasties on the biomedical horizon. I found some of his hyperbole a bit much at times and the research he mentions is not well documented (it is listed for each chapter), so it is difficult at time to figure out where he is getting his numbers and conclusions. Having said that, this is an important popular treatment of a science topic up there with global warming in the potential impact on our species. Just don't read it with the lights out...

Governments Continuing to Gag Science?

While science has long been subject to the whim of its political masters, most democratic societies assume that this interference is minimal at best. We were reminded of the fragility of this assumption with the current Bush administration, which took meddling in science to new heights, at least in recent memory. It would appear that the meddling may be continuing, especially with that political hot potato, global warming. The March 10 issue of New Scientist reports that the final draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the one that emerged from a meeting of representatives from 100 governments) has significant and alarming changes from the draft prepared by the scientists. Now, there is no indication that it was a particular countries' suggestions that watered down the report, but this is nevertheless another example of what can happen when one creates a system that allows peer-reviewed science to be overtaken by political interests. The analysis of the differences between the early drafts and the final government-approved version will be available on David Wasdell's website.

Whenever I see stories of this type (and even scarier ones like the rise of the Conservapedia site) it brings to mind a web application that I used many years ago. It was called Third Voice (or something like that) and it allowed the user to overlay local comments on a remote website, remove sections of the website, etc. While this is itself a powerful way to twist the facts, I always imagined that this kind of system could integrate with a remote "just the facts" site (maintained by librarians of course) that would automatically add an overlay of links and factual data whenever the page being viewed was known to be biased, in error or simply short on facts. An easy to imagine mash-up version of this would be a system that would overlay newspaper sites and provide links to reports/data mentioned in articles. We all know and hate the press's tendency to "report the facts", but not cite sources - this kind of system would automatically provide links to the data elements mentioned. It is not difficult to imagine either the technology behind this kind of system (it already exists) or the human intervention needed to do this. We could call it the Pantalaimon Librarian system, after the main character's shoulder-based daemon helper from Philip Pullman's Golden Compass book. Librarians from each country/jurisdiction would review the record from their area and ensure that the Pantalaimon Librarian database contained all that the reader needed to get the full and accurate picture. Now imagine that kind of system laid on top of Convervapedia or maybe even Congresspedia :-)

Online Worlds to Model Public Health?

Virtual outbreaks, real world ramifications - tech: Needs Subscription

An article in the latest New Scientist (needs a subscription) described an "outbreak" that occurred in the online game World of Warcraft in late 2005 and how it could have provided an interesting model of disease outbreaks in the real world. The problem is getting companies like Linden Labs and Blizzard to allow scientists to use their environments as a lab, not to mention the challenge of suddenly infecting your users without their knowledge :-( This is an issue since in order to make the model useful it needs to mirror the real world as much as possible. Despite the fact that the online world may contain things not encountered in real life (demons and other weird creatures), it is the reaction of the people controlling the avatars that is of interest to scientists in modeling what would happen with disease outbreak in the real world. As gaming environments become more ubiquitous they will be used for more than just fun - this is a fascinating example. I am looking forward to how this will develop at UPEI with our upcoming Computer degree in Gaming - especially when you mix that with the Atlantic Veterinary College and the biomedical research that is happening on campus. The possibilities are very interesting...