What can we learn from Asilomar?
There was a flurry of indignation recently on the DIYbio discussion group over an article in the Wall Street Journal over the safety of bio hackers (with added ...
Category: The Narrative
Video: The Future of Science Publishing
In February, in a Barcelona restaurant, Mark Kramer caught up with me and asked me what I would be speaking about at the 3rd WLE Symposium (notes from the talk ...
Changing the journal impact factor through real-time transparent statistics
I've mentioned Mendeley before. They refer to themselves as a Last.fm for science papers, but I think it'll be much more. One thing they realize they ...
Hackspaces on the mind
I don't know why, but ever since returning from SXSW09 I've been wondering about hackspaces. As you might know, hackspaces are like a nerd collective,...
Social networking and health – notes from SXSW
I was at SXSW last week and sat in on some seminars and conversations that I found particularly intersting. One session was a "conversation," held in ...
Funny story about common chord progressions
I read this funny article about how the ‘Sensitive Female Chord Progression’ has infiltrated so many songs. Link: Striking a chord – Boston Gl...
Help NPR plan their social media activities for the US presidential inauguration
Cool. Via Perry Hewitt. Link: NPR: Help NPR Plan Our Social Media Activities for the Inauguration: Help NPR Plan Our Social Media Activities for the Inauguratio...
A good warning for writers, by Joel
Another great article by Joel Spolsky on, basically, literary laziness. Link: Anecdotes – Joel on Software This is not the way to move science forward. On...
“Taste good, sequence it” and “Look cute, sequence it.”
When I first started working in science, sequencing was just beginning to be a ‘kit’ science, where anyone could buy a kit and sequence. It was long...
Three trends for the future of biology
A chance encounter, about a year ago, with some interesting minds in the field of biomedical publishing had me going back to my roots: biology. I’ve been ...