Changing names

Serotonin
As you can tell, I've been writing more and more about science, biochemistry, medicine, and the like. I've moved most of my mobile industry writing to Nokia Conversations, the corporate blog I run for Nokia (for now; more on that later).

Suspecting that I will be writing less things related to what I've been writing about in the past 5 years, I decided to change the name of this site to Molecularist, a name I came up with to describe a person who fiddles with molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids, much as I did before I jumped into the world of wireless, and much like I've been hanckering to do for the past year or so (and more on that later, too, I hope).

So update your bookmarks and feeds. If you want to. I would hope you'd keep reading me, just to stretch your mind (or to get it off the usual mobile stuff you have normaly read hear).

BTW, there will still be talk of Web services, since lots of the science I've been thinking of intersects with the future of the Web and social networking and other interesting stuff. Also, by finally getting my own domain name, if I ever get tired of TypePad (upon which this site runs) it'll be easier to move (but, after a persuasive talk with Sippey, I'm sticking for another year at least).

Ta.

Image from EraPhernaliaVintage

(of course, I'll be changing other things around here to reflect all this)

links for 2009-03-21

  • I heard about this woman at SXSW. And this is an OK article. But it shows that things are slightly shifting. This is getting to be real.

    "The 31-year-old ex-computer programmer and now biohacker is working on modifying jellyfish genes and adding them to yoghurt to detect the toxic chemical melamine, which was found in baby milk in China last year after causing a number of deaths, and kidney damage to thousands of infants. Her idea is to engineer yoghurt so that in the presence of the toxin it turns fluorescent green, warning the producer that the food is contaminated. If her experiment is successful, she will release the design into the public domain."

links for 2009-03-19

MIT makes all its new scholarly research publications Open Access

This is amazing. I know folks battling for Open Access in science for over 10 years. Even with heavy hitters, such as Harold Varmus, PubMed, and others supporting Open Access, status quo still dominates the science publishing industry.

Now, Peter Suber reports that the MIT faculty has voted unanimously to give the university nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license for all scholarly articles, which the university will then make available through an Open Access directory.

Might this be the tipping point for Open Access? As I see newspapers sinking while holding onto their 20th century biz models, might the big science paper publishers wake up to this change in their world (ten years coming, mind you).*

I’ll be giving a talk next week about the future of publishing. Let’s see what folks say.

[via @perryhewitt] Peter Suber, Open Access News:

Hal Abelson’s [MIT faculty member] ‘comments:

I chaired the committee that drafted the resolution and led faculty discussions on it throughout the fall. So I’m particularly gratified that the vote was unanimously in favor. In the words of MIT Faculty Chair Bish Sanyal, the vote is “a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas.”

*BioMedCentral showed that even the old model could work in Open Access, such that they got bought out by Springer.

links for 2009-03-01

links for 2009-02-26