I wrote about it

by celebdu

Boston Globe, Times, others: How much did FDA shift on BPA?
[Via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]

Over the weekend, the government announced that it would launch a $30 million study of the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, to determine whether it’s safe in food and beverage containers, including baby bottles.

The FDA has also changed its position on BPA–but what exactly has it done? The coverage offers multiple interpretations.

Beth Daley of The Boston Globe paints a relatively soft portrait of the FDA’s action, although she does get baby bottles in the lede:

Acknowledging there is “some concern’’ that a chemical found in baby bottles and infant sipping cups could cause adverse heath effects in children, Food and Drug Administration officials pledged yesterday to study the chemical far more closely but said there was not enough evidence to further regulate it.

Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post wrote a lede with considerably more oomph, saying the FDA”reversed” itself:

The Food and Drug Administration has reversed its position on the safety of Bisphenol A, a chemical found in plastic bottles, soda cans, food containers and thousands of consumer goods, saying it now has concerns about health risks.

Andrew Zajac in The Los Angeles Times wrote that FDA said the chemical “merited further study” but “no immediate restrictions on its use.” And Denise Grady at The New York Times wrote that the FDA “in a shift of position” was “expressing concerns” about bisphenol A, which it had “declared safe in 2008.”

The varying interpretations turn, I suppose, on whether “some concern” should be read as SOME concern, or some CONCERN. In the past, the FDA expressed little or no concern, so you might argue that any expression of concern was a big shift, or even a reversal. The other interpretation would be that the FDA had expressed some concern, but no particular alarm.

I’ll go out on a bit of a limb here, as someone who has written about the possible dangers of BPA in the past, and argue that this is a bit of an under-covered story. Environmental groups have expressed great alarm, and industry groups have tracked them very closely with press releases rebutting every argument. I’m making this claim without looking back over years of coverage; it’s just a feeling I have from being involved in the coverage. It was a little too easy to get a scoop on a new development, which leads me to think that not enough people were competing to cover this.

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I was amazed also. Lots of talk about what the FDA news meant, lots of opinions, when the facts were right there from a story that came out 2 days earlier. I wrote about it on my other blog, Path to Sustainable, but that blog is not has highly traveled as this one is.

As I mentioned ther, I have written about Bisphenol A (BPA) a lot. In fact, I thought that the results of this study, where BPA caused sexual problems in men, would have been enough to change the FDA’s views. Unfortunately, BPA can not be regulated at all by the FDA because it was put in the generally considered safe category 40 years ago. Chemicals in this group are completely outside the regulatory grasp of the FDA. AIn’t that great?

I am on the board of a non=profit now called the Sustainable Path Foundation. Back in 2004, we instituted the inaugural series of seminars that we continue to this day. The first speaker was Pete Myers, now head of Environmental Health Sciences. A major part of his discussion was on the current state of research on chemicals such as Bisphenol A. His seminar was a real eye-opener to y as a scientist.

That is because BPA was originally developed as an estrogen mimic but was not the best one so it was put on the shelf. Then someone, who was only interested in tis ability to make plastics, not its biological activity, picked it to use in polycarbonate bottle. Since it was in an inert plastic, there should be no effects.

But in the late 90s, it was found that BPA leached out of these bottle. And it had direct biological effects that could be seen in rodents. In fact, and this was the mouth -dropping thing for a scientist, was that it could be found in the water given to rats, if polycarbonate bottle were used instead of glass. So, any animal could be exposed to BPA, without any real knowledge of the researcher.

This was demonstrated when labs tried to replicate the initial research showing an effect of BPA. These labs saw little effect of BPA, not because BPA had no effect but because the control mice, which supposedly got no BPA, were, in fact, getting BPA from the water.

This actually would have ramifications across many mouse studies, because the control mice would often also be getting an estrogen disruptor. In essence, they were not really control mice at all.

Of course, the real concern for most of the scientists in the audience was that we had been using Nalgene plastic bottles since before the 70s. Using them as water bottles to drink out of!! Supposedly made out of nice, inert plastic, they were readily available and just the right size. In fact, Nalgene saw this and created the Nalgene bottle used for such a long time by hikers. But we all DRANK out of these bottle, just like the lab mice did.

Nalgene is transitioning away from these BPA-containing polycarbonate bottles (good for them) because I would not have drank another mouthful of water from a polycarbonate bottle.

The other thing that Myers showed was that exposure to estrogen disrupting chemicals during only a very short period of fetal development, had lifelong consequences on gene expression. Thus, two identical mice, only one exposed before birth, had very different expression pattern for a set of proteins. And the difference continued through out their lifespan.

Simply removing future exposure may not have any effect. The damage is already done.

The effects seen in mice from exposure to BPA –increased weight, diabetes – are also things seen in the last 40 years in humans. So we have a chemical that, if present at the right time during development, completely changes lifetime gene expression patterns, resulting in overweight, diabetic animals.

Yet, the FDA is completely unable to regulate it. And, guess what, the relevant companies are doing the tobacco company scam to keep it that way.

How come little of this context ever appears in the mainstream media? BPA is a scary compound and its makers are using tactics that are associated with known dissemblers like tobacco companies.

Why not remember this, including the companies in this list, and wonder why more reporters do not connect the dots:

Government is funny; there is a Democratic version of the facts, and a Republican version of the facts. And a Limbaugh version, and a Howard Dean version. And so on. Science writers are in possession of what I guess I now have to call actual facts, or real facts. Let’s not let the mouthpieces control the “facts,” when we know better.

[Listening to: Abaddon's Bolero from the album "Trilogy" by Emerson, Lake & Palmer]

My hope – The West Wing

I wrote about this last fall, how the West Wing began with the first term of a Democratic President, whose only first year plus was a new Supreme Court justice. Sound familiar.

The came the episode, Let Bartlet Be Bartlet. It changed everything. Because Bartlet decided doing the right thing was more important than doing the safe thing. That is leadership.

I really wish something like this was going on in the White House but I know that in reality, little will change.

Perhaps if Obama, and the rest of the Democratic leadership, knew that doing the right thing is more important than doing the safe thing, they would actually get things done. They would sure be more constructive than they have been. In one short year, they have demoralized their own base, alienated large amounts of independents and energized the opposition. That is leadership you can get behind. As long as you are a Republican.

Giving up on single payer, public options and progressive taxation while throwing pro-choice issues under the bus, may not accomplish much of anything. Perhaps actually standing firm on some basic issues would have been better.

First Draft has a nice parable about two men traveling on a road to an important destination. A wall blocks their path. The first guy says, “Well. we tried. Lets go home.” The second begins trying to figure out a way around, over or through the wall. “Because it’s more important that we get where we’re going than that we have a really good reason for going home. “

Will Obama, Reid, Pelosi and any other leaders be the first person or the second? I’m not very certain which they will be and that indicates a terrible lack of real leadership.

Doing the safe thing has not been successful. Perhaps doing the right one will at least allow them to look at themselves in the mirror.

As for me, I’m rewatching the West Wing episode and hoping that in some way reality is some small shadow of this TV show. Because we have too many really big problems that have to be solved if the US is to maintain any leadership in economical, political, scientific or human rights areas.

We should not have gotten into the situation where the only hope is a Hail Mary pass but that is all we seem to have left.

[UPDATE] Looks like Krugman just about figures that Obama is the first person.

Technorati Tags: Politics

Actually kind of a fun paper to read

by Wigstruck

NCBI ROFL: I wonder if this paper was cheer-reviewed.
[Via Discoblog]

The potential for brain injury on selected surfaces used by cheerleaders.

“CONTEXT: Although playground surfaces have been investigated for fall impact attenuation, the surfaces that cheerleaders use have received little attention. OBJECTIVE: To determine (1) the critical height for selected surfaces used by cheerleaders at or below which a serious head impact injury from a fall is unlikely to occur, (2) the critical heights for non-impact-absorbing surfaces for comparison purposes, and (3) the effect of soil moisture and grass height on g(max) (which is defined as the multiple of g [acceleration due to gravity at the earth's surface at sea level: ie, 32.2 feet x s(-1) x s(-1)] that represents the maximum deceleration experienced during an impact) and the Head Injury Criterion (HIC) at the critical height for a dry grass surface. DESIGN: Observational study. SETTINGS: A local cheerleading gym, indoor locations within the authors’ institution, and various outdoor locations… …RESULTS: Critical heights for the surfaces tested ranged from 0.5 ft (0.15 m) for concrete and vinyl tile installed over concrete to more than 11 ft (3.35 m) for a spring floor… …CONCLUSIONS: The potential for serious head impact injuries can be minimized by increasing the shock-absorbing capacity of the surface, decreasing the height from which the person falls, or both.”

Thanks to Vanessa for today’s ROFL!

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The actual paper is wonderfully open access so any of us can rad it without having to pay an arm and a leg. It is easy to make fun of cheerleaders but these are often a group of teenaged students who put their physical wellbeing in potential danger. We know different surfaces would have an impact on head trauma but not how much nor how current guidelines actually protect the students.

So, while it is a fun article, there are some important questions to be answered.

They measured the deceleration of a headform on various surfaces and then used the same Head Injury Criterion used by crash test dummies. People had done this with football players, especially with concussions but no one had looked at these factors for cheerleaders. 54% of catastrophic fall-related injuries for cheerleaders were head-related.

With all the concern now about head injuries in football, mainly because we are getting real data now rather than conjecture, these authors looked at cheerleaders. SInce some of their stunts put the person’s head at heights over 15 feet above the ground, having some firm numbers would be useful.

So, actually having some directly relate numbers would be useful for guiding the squads on where to workout would be helpful. Where this get fun is descriptions such as this:

Carpet and the vinyl tile floor were tested in the authors’ office building.

I have the vision of them dropping a headform in the lobby while people stroll by. They used the Triax 2000 Portable Surface Impact Tester.

This looks like it would be a lot of fun to set up and use on all sorts of things. One thing they failed to measure is the HIC if the headform landed on someone. This is usually what happens in real cheerleading. I’d love to think of a grad student laying down underneath the tripod waiting for the headform to be dropped from different heights.

And in order to be completely thorough they measured the ambient temperature, humidity and soil moisture. Pretty rigorous.

One thing they found was that wet, moist grass/soil reduced the deceleration pretty substantially – almost in half. But, according to their data, the critical height on dry grass is almost the same as on a hardwood floor – about 4.5 feet.

In fact, their data indicate that the guidelines used for cheerleader safety may not be effective. The American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators created these for safety reasons but these do not seem to be based on the sort of data this paper developed.

So all those cheerleading competitions on ESPN may have to be changed.

Simple scan spots stress disorder

by brain_blogger

Simple scan spots stress disorder
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

A one-minute test appears to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder with an accuracy of 90%.

The test measures the tiny magnetic fluctuations that occur as groups of neurons fire in synchrony, even when subjects are not thinking of anything.

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A simple brain scan could do a lot to help. We would still need to get people to come forward to get scanned. This hesitancy to be examined is a big hurdle.

But our continuing ability to find structural problems in the brain using these technologies holds out hope. PTSD is not just made up or in someone’s head. It produces real changes in the brain.

[Listening to: Trilogy from the album "Trilogy" by Emerson, Lake & Palmer]

The year’s first great read

by Mrs Logic

The Scale Every Business Needs Now:
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Beancounter 1: “Our new widgets business — we think it’s amazing”.

Beancounter 2: “We’ve ridden the learning curve, the product mix is optimized, the supply chain’s streamlined, the market’s tightly segmented.”

Beancounter 3: “But we’ve got a burning question for you, Umair — will it scale?”

UH: “You know what doesn’t scale? The point. Dudes, welcome to the 21st Century. It’s so not about pushing more toxic junk at people.”

Beancounters 1, 2, and 3: (enraged, attack UH with pitchforks).

That’s what happened to me not so long ago in one of the anonymous boardrooms of the universe. And it’s happened quite a few times over the last few months. So in the interest of my own personal safety, let me explain the scale every business should strive for today.

Here’s what the economic historians of the 23rd Century are going to say about the 20th.

“They built giant, globe-spanning organizations, that employed tens of thousands of people working around the clock, to produce… sugar water, fast food, disposable razors, and gas guzzlers. Perhaps the defining characteristic of the paradigm of 20th Century capitalism was its astonishing lack of ambition. Rarely in history has such a void, a poverty of imagination been so deeply woven into the fabric of humankind’s economic systems.”

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Some of these ideas may be too radical but I really think that a big problem in the biotech arena is too little ambition. Start-ups no longer dream of changing medicine. They dream of a Big Pharma buy-out. And VCs act as enablers.

The big ambitions actually beats in the hearts of many non-profit research institutions. They want to change the world, ridding it of centuries old scourges in ways that can change cultures. Their ambition scales so nicely that it may really be successful.

And the companies that recognize this will be able to tag along, making a lot of money on the ambitions of the non-profits.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

The Innovation

Scenes from a Common Craft Video Shoot:
[Via Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English -]

People often wonder what it looks like to make a Common Craft video. So, every once in a while, we take photos as we’re making a video. This video shoot is for a forthcoming title that’s under wraps, but will come out within a month or two.

To acheive the light we want, we work with four really bright halogen lights. They’re so bright that I wear sunglasses when recording – it feels like I get a bit of a tan each shoot. This is Sachi getting things set up.

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Okay, this started out as a nice post about Common Crafts video techniques. They do great work so it was interesting. It provided some isight into the incremental nature of their work (adding a monitor to see the video.

But then in the middle they mention “The Innovation”, which is so neat that it must be spread around:

Recently we discovered something that has come be known at “the innovation.” Basically, we learned that we can write on the monitor screen with dry erase markers. This was a revelation. It meant that we could mark the exact position of images to create consistency in the stop-motion process. When we needed to animate something across the screen, we could draw a line on the screen and follow it. It made our production lives easier.

You can write on the monitor! this is really cool to know and will be something I may have to try out. Just have to make sure the monitor has a glass front and not a plastic one. Although some people report using it on LCDs and it wipes right off. in fact, it seems to work really well for removing permanent marker from an LCD.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Technology, Web 2.0

Show me the qi

by AMMY.LOU
Unevidence Based Medicine:
[Via BPSDB | The Lay Scientist -]

[BPSDB]I have received a reply to my Freedom of Information request to the University of Westminster for “research papers or other documents” that support claims made by their School of Life Sciences for the qigong tuina course they offer.

You can read the reply here. As I have

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If the school is teaching it, it must be real. Right? They would not promulgate something as medicine that was not, just to make a buck?

I though the Life sciences actually dealt with science. From the description here, little science is involved. Just opinion.

Just believing qi exists does not make it so. As explicated in Alice in Wonderland:

Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

I guess the School of Life has had lots of practice. Fortunately. most scientists follow the Alice model, not the White Queen‘s.

Technorati Tags: Science

A great primer on the diffusion of innovation

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
by etcname
I Should Have Majored In Psychology:
[Via Chuck's Blog]

Way back when, I thought it useful to do two courses of study. I wanted that CS (computer science) degree, but the whole topic, while fascinating, seemed so self-contained.

At the time, I thought adding coursework in economics was the right thing to do. Even way back in the late 1970s (yes, I’m that old), I could see the two interweaving in very interesting ways.

I was wrong. I should have chosen to add in psychology rather than economics.

Because — at the end of the day — I’m finding that success with technology has more to do with how people perceive things rather than the hard facts we all work with every day.

Ever Rolled Out A Big IT Project?

I have. Several times, as a matter of fact. And — each time — I spent an inordinate amount of time lining up approval and support for what I was proposing to do.

The least of my problems was making sure the darn stuff worked as expected. My most daunting challenge was usually changing perceptions with hundreds — sometimes thousands — of people who had a vested stake in the outcome.

If you work in IT, you’ve probably come to the same conclusion — the technology will probably be ready far in advance of people’s willingness to embrace it.

Accelerating Change Creates Value

I’m not just talking about IT here — I’m talking about any leadership role in a large organization. To create unique value, we have to change the way we do things. The faster we can change and adapt, the more value we create for our organization and our stakeholders.

And — more often than not — it’s people’s perceptions that stand between where we are — and where we’d all like to be.

A while back, I was chatting with people who put together MBA coursework. Since I tend to work with freshly minted MBAs here at EMC, they wanted to know what I found missing.

My answer was pretty clear: they need at least some sort of background in behavior psychology if they expected to be successful in any organization.

After all, organizations are nothing more than collections of people.

And If You’re In Marketing

I don’t see how anyone could be successful in any form of marketing these days without a deep and empathetic understanding of the human psyche, and how it manifests itself in your target audience.

Yes, showing ROI and “business value” is essential. But I’d offer that’s just table stakes. There’s so much good technology out there today that there are many ways to solve a given enterprise IT requirement.

Worse, when we as vendors come up with something new and interesting (as is frequently the case at EMC) but is a departure from conventional thinking, it takes an inordinate amount of time to get people comfortable with the new approach.

People will often say things like “well, we need time for the technology to mature”. Fair enough. But more often, I’m thinking it’s less about the technology, and more about time needed to have perceptions change.

One of the most frustrating recent examples for me personally was enterprise flash drives. EMC launched them at the beginning of 2008. They worked absolutely perfectly at the time. But adoption was slow, mostly because it was an entirely new idea.

Adoption started to pick up dramatically during 2009. Not because the technology was any better — it was simply that people had gotten more comfortable with the concept.

Since EMC’s business model involves investing a lot in new and disruptive technologies, this inherent psychological barrier to “something new” is often front-and-center in my mind.

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Read the whole thing. This is a great discussion by someone on the ground, detailing ow hard it can be to get people to adapt to new technology.

Different organizations have different rates that innovation diffuses through them. Many do absolutely nothing to facilitate this diffusion in any way. It just happens by essentially ad hoc means.

I’ve written about how change and innovations traverse a community. A better way to facilitate such things is to put disruptive innovators and mediating early-adopters in place to evaluate new technologies. That is what they are really good at and actually enjoy. If they see the value, especially the mediators, they can often speed up the rate the new technology diffuses.

Usually, however, the people in this position are from the middle, the Doers, who really do not like the uncertainty and disruptive effects on their workflow by the introduction of novelty. They are the most hesitant to accept innovation unless informed by the relevant mediators.

But, the organizations that understand human social behavior, that put the right people in the right spots to actually evaluate and evangelize new technologies in a community, will be the ones that succeed. They will not only be able to leverage new technology faster, they will be more resilient and able to deal with failure.

Because, after all, failure is just another change. and organization that deals well with change will have little to fear from failure because it knows that is a faster route to success.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

Great timing for Olympics

by Kenneth Hynek

The science behind the perfectly delivered curling rock
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science new]

The centuries old game of curling is being put under the scrutiny of 21st century technology in a bid to help Canada’s best curlers throw their way to gold at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. University of Alberta researchers, Pierre Baudin and Rob Krepps, are analyzing the technical aspects of the game to determine the best way to deliver a curling stone. The research goal is to ensure optimum performance from Canada’s curlers at the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic games.

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I bet they already gave the Canadian team a heads up on this research. But soon everyone will know the secrets of curling, leveling the plying field. In the last 3 Winter Olympics with curling, Canada has 6 medals. Switzerland and Sweden are next with 4 each. Perhaps the US could move up from bronze.

We will know by 2018

by FlyingSinger

Spaceman
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

Methane on Mars: Esa and Nasa get down to business

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Funny to think we sent men to the moon in about the same time it will take us to send this mission to Mars. Perhaps it has something to do with an accommodating launch data for getting to Mars the most efficiently.

But they seem to have things planned out well, with a set of rovers to follow up and look at any site that has high levels of methane. One of the possibly interesting things will be if the ratios of C12/C13 in the methane (which is CH4) are different than expected.

Life on Earth likes C12 better than C13, whereas there is no selection from volcanoes. So, an altered ratio could be indicative of life.

Perhaps scientific publishing can change

by luis de bethencourt
How do you read papers? 2010 will be different:
[Via Gobbledygook]

In November 2008 I wrote a blog post called How do you read papers? The blog post was actually about different strategies to find interesting papers, e.g. browsing journal tables of content (TOC), different search strategies, filtering by papers others read, or filtering by experts (e.g. Faculty of 1000). A paper by Duncan Hull et al. published around that time in PLoS Computational Biology (Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web) also talked about finding strategies and the best tools for this.

In this blog post I want to talk about the actual reading of scientific papers that you found with one of the strategies mentioned above. There are some interesting recent developments, and I think we will see some significant changes in how we read papers in 2010.

Printed journal
Holding the printed journal in your hands is probably still the most satisfying reading experience because of professional typesetting and color reproduction. But unless you have a personal journal subscription, it is not convenient as you would have to go to the library to read the paper. Plus, many journals no longer produce a printed version, or the library has only an electronic subscription.

Photocopy
This used to be the most common way to read papers 20 years ago. But the quality of photocopies is usually worse than a printout of an electronic version, and photocopies are far more inconvenient to obtain. Reading photocopied papers will only be necessary for the small number of journals that produce no electronic version, or for older papers.1

PDF printout
This is the way most people read scientific papers today, unless they just want to look up small parts of it. Quality color printers have become affordable, and the reading experience is similar to the printed journal with the added convenience of electronic distribution. Most people use PDF printouts for reading, and later discard the paper copy, sometimes even the same day. This is not only more expensive than reading on an electronic device, but also not very friendly to the environment.2

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I was reading through this nice post about reading papers in different media when I ran across this:

Reading Web Pages
Most examples mentioned above try to reproduce the experience of reading something printed on paper on an electronic device. An alternative approach would move beyond the traditional format of a paper and rather takes advantage of the electronic medium. And it looks like the web technologies HTML5 and Flash are best suited for this. Cell Press was experimenting with this approach in 2009, and officially launched their Article of the Future with the first 2010 issue of Cell (all papers will be available without subscription for 60 days, you can provide feedback here). The basic idea of the Article of the Future is to break away from the concept of reading a paper from beginning to end, and to make navigation between the different parts of a paper much easier.

Whereas the Article of the Future tries to make navigation with a paper easier, the PLoS article-level metrics help with navigating to related content: citations, blog posts, reader comments, etc. The Notes feature lets registered users highlight text for specific comments – very much what you would do on a printed paper (but with the added benefit that everybody can see this note).

I’m most excited about projects that enhance the scientific paper instead of recreating an exact electronic version of the traditional paper. And HTML is a more promising format than PDF for these approaches. Michael Clarke (with whom I had the pleasure to do a session at SciFoo 2009) reminded us that Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW in 1991 to facilitate scientific communication (with HTML and navigation both within and between documents as central concepts), but papers and journals have changed surprisingly little in the last 18 years (Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?).

Cell is a pretty good journal to stay on top off but it used to be pretty hard to read for someone not at a university because of the cost. But now you can read a paper for free in the first 60 days. Not a bad idea.

And the new format is a nice start. I often read papers by the section, starting with the abstract, checking the conclusions, reading the introduction, following the results and then checking out the specific methods. The Article of the Future format allows me to easily do just that.

The article from Scholarly Kitchen about scientific publication has some really worthwhile observations about WHY articles are published. It indicates just how hard it might be to completely disrupt the publishing corporations.

I would suggest that much of the disruption has occurred at the enduser more so than the publisher. (And since I am mostly an enduser ant never a publisher, this is just my perspective. I am sire those who actually work in the industry will have their own perspectives.)

I think that Open Access has been very disruptive and has put publishers under varying degrees of pressure. Researchers want as many people to read their paper as possible in a reputable journal with as wide a reach as possible. Open Access permits this, particularly in journals produced by the various scientific organizations. And it really permits access from the readers, who can now read articles that were previously unavailable to anyone who was not working at a university or near a college library. In many cases, these papers are freely available to anyone within 6-12 months, if not immediately.

And in some cases, such as Circulation, these journals have high impact factors. These journals provide all 5 factors mentioned in the post but also provide articles for free to the enduser. I do not know all the economics behind this, but I would suspect that the combination of membership fees, along with built in subscribers, is involved.

Scientific publications have already been disrupted by the ability for many people, including non-scientists, to access information that had previously been hidden away. This is a big deal, if not the exact focus of the Scholarly Kitchen article.

For-profit journals have their own disruptive pressure that I continue to see played out.

Journals that are not the house organ for a scientific society, such as Nature or Cell, can not rely on society membership fees to help pay the way. Access to articles always cost money. They often require payment up front for articles that are years old. I believe that this restriction of access puts them under very disruptive pressure to change, especially those for-profit journals that may not have the impact factor of Nature or Cell.

They have to maintain their reputation by being the first or best in the field. Otherwise, the highly regarded society journals will overtake them. For them, impact factor is everything because they have no association to provide them ‘cover’. One way they have been able to do this is to limit the number of high quality papers they publish. With only a limited number of slots in such high quality journals, they keep their impact factors high.

But this becomes harder in a Web 2.0 world where journals are no longer really as limited in the number of worthwhile articles printed a month. Many of the journals published by societies are not only of very high quality, but they come with high impact factors and would be very good to have on any CV – Circulation, published by the AHA, has the highest impact factor for its field. They almost all publish 2-4 times as many articles as they did a decade ago.

Exclusivity is not as big a factor as before. Publishing in some of these ‘house’ journals is easier than it used to be and the impact factors are still quite high. The advantages of many of the for-profit journals are greatly weakened.

And, frankly, these for-profit journals know this which is why I think they have actually sought more disruption than more traditional journals, such as Circulation. They can not afford to lose their position in the field when it comes to validation, filtration and designation. They have to innovate to survive.

So both Nature and Cell have actually done much more to connect with Web 2.0 technologies than almost all others. Nature has blogs, podcasts, etc. all geared to find a sweet spot for being the first to create the disruptive technology. Cell has this new approach of displaying articles while making them available free for 60 days.

If they are the first to be disruptive in a truly positive way, they will have an advantage. If they wait for others, they will lose. That is why I continue to see journals such as Nature and Cell try some very innovative approaches. Not all will succeed but if these types of journals hope to succeed, they must be the first to adopt them, if not be the ones who create them.

Counterintuitively, I expect the for-profit publishers to be the ones that create the real disruptions in the scientific publishing area. They have the most to lose but the most to gain by changing the paradigm.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

The Haiti earthquake from the sky

UC Seismo Blog: The Tectonics of the Haiti quake easy to see (and Google) from above

[Via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]

The Tracker should have gotten this up last week. My old friend across the East Bay hills in Orinda, longtime German newsman Horst Rademacher, came upon two photos I had not seen elsewhere. Perhaps they are in some other outlets’ coverage. One hopes so. For they bring geology home emphatically in focus during this tragic time for Haiti.

Rademacher is a science reporter and former full time North America correspondent for Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – for which he still does some work. Trained in geosciences, he also finds time to blog on such matters for the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory where his wife Peggy Hellweg is on the research staff. The picture here may not have been so hard to get – it’s credited to Google Maps. It accompanied one of the two blogs Horst ran. It is stunning. There’s the gash in the crust, the surface trace of the fault that broke, not so far down, and wrought such damage and misery.

If you want to see one even more eye-popping, get yourself a pair of blue and red 3-D glasses of the sort that any science reporter ought to have sitting on his or her desk, go to the Seismo Blog site, and see how that view looks in binocular radar imagery.

For more basic background seismo info than you may have seen elsewhere much of it is in Horst’s previous post, also linked prominently in this one.

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The report at the Seismo blog has some really important information. There are some nice figures showing where the various tectonic plates are in the Caribbean. I never knew that there was such tectonic activity throughout the region.

The tectonics from space post also has some nifty data. One is that relief efforts will be hampered due to the terrain and impassable roads. So using satellite photos is helping. The Google image of Haiti makes the relevant fault pretty obvious – it is the lateral line running from left to right in the middle of the image. The image at left shows the two major faults in Haiti.

If you zoom out of the Google picture, you can see the fault as it traverses Haiti, ending in the lake. It is as obvious as the San Andreas. Zooming in reveals that a river runs through the middle of the fault.

Calculations indicate that 25 miles of this fault (which is about the length of the visible part of the fault in the picture above) slipped/ The north side went west about 9 feet and the south side went west about 9 feet. All in 15 seconds. Leaving only a single runway open, the port devastated, hundreds of thousands possible dead and millions homeless.

If you look at the area with Google Earth, you can tilt the map and easily see the scarp that is formed by the fault. You also see the towns that are along this area. You can follow it all the way out along the peninsula. I have to wonder if any supplies can make it out at all to these places.

You can see before and after photos using Google Earth. There is a lot of devastation. And then you recognize that all the little spots you see in front of the destroyed National Palace are people who have no place else to go.

It may take some time to find out just what is happening way out here, since Port-au-Prince is so devastated. At least they are able to get 100 flights into the airport today. Hopefully they have fuel to get them out.

The Department of State has a page up about the earthquake with a nice Google widget that helps people find the whereabouts of others. I hope it works.

[Listening to: The Count Of Tuscany from the album "Black Clouds & Silver Linings" by Dream Theater]

No regulation of BPA

by tiffanywashko

FDA says it’s unable to regulate BPA – JSOnline
[Via Watchdog Reports]

U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials say they are powerless to regulate BPA, although they have declared the chemical to be a safety concern for fetuses, babies and young children.

A quirk in the rules allows BPA makers to skirt federal regulation.

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Bisphenol A (BPA) is a potentially nasty chemical. Back in the 50s it was investigated as a possible estrogen mimic. It was not as good as some but it does have similar effects as estrogen. Then someone thought it would be good in making some plastics.

So, in the 60s, it was listed as generally regarded as safe. This puts it in a category that the FDA has no regulatory power over.

Great. So now that we are getting more and more information that it is not safe, the FDA can only ask the companies nicely to find something else.

It is well known that hitting developing embryos and fetuses with female hormones at certain times can cause lifelong changes in gene expression. BPA is found in all sorts of things that babies drink and eat from. It is even found in their umbilical cord blood.

Yet all the FDA can do is ask nicely. Here is the opinion of the chemical companies:

Regulatory agencies around the world, which have recently reviewed the research, have reached conclusions that support the safety of BPA. Extensive scientific studies have shown that BPA is quickly metabolized and excreted and does not accumulate in the body. BPA is one of the most thoroughly tested chemicals in commerce today

I do’t think they will be very willing to give up on this chemical. Especially since they appear to have helped write reports for the FDA in the previous administration. So I guess it will up to us. Pressure our legislators and refuse to use products with BPA in them. Of curse, this might be very hard to do since estrogen-disrupting activity have been found in water BEFORE it is bottled.

Our own pollutants may result in severe harm to us and we are powerless to regulate them. But Canada can.

Why oil is not healthy for the US

Oil Dependence Is a Dangerous Habit:
[Via Climate Progress]

America imported 4 million barrels of oil a day—or 1.5 billion barrels per year—from “dangerous or unstable” countries in 2008 at a cost of about $150 billion. CAP’s Rebecca Lefton and Daniel J. Weiss examine the implications of our growing energy insecurity in this repost.

A recent report on the November 2009 U.S. trade deficit found that rising oil imports widened our deficit, increasing the gap between our imports and exports. This is but one example that our economic recovery and long-term growth is inexorably linked to our reliance on foreign oil. The United States is spending approximately $1 billion a day overseas on oil instead of investing the funds at home, where our economy sorely needs it. Burning oil that exacerbates global warming also poses serious threats to our national security and the world’s security. For these reasons we need to kick the oil addiction by investing in clean-energy reform to reduce oil demand, while taking steps to curb global warming.

In 2008 the United States imported oil from 10 countries currently on the State Department’s Travel Warning List, which lists countries that have “long-term, protracted conditions that make a country dangerous or unstable.” These nations include Algeria, Chad, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Our reliance on oil from these countries could have serious implications for our national security, economy, and environment.

Oil imports fuel “dangerous or unstable” governments

The United States imported 4 million barrels of oil a day—or 1.5 billion barrels per year—from “dangerous or unstable” countries in 2008 at a cost of about $150 billion. This estimate excludes Venezuela, which is not on the State Department’s “dangerous or unstable” list but has maintained a distinctly anti-American foreign and energy policy. Venezuela is one of the top five oil exporters to the United States, and we imported 435 million barrels of oil from them in 2008.

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There are a lot of reasons to move off of fossil fuels for environmental reasons. But some of the best are for national security and economic reasons.

First, unstable countries are likely to suffer political chaos, making oil shipments fragile. They distort our foreign policy (see Saudi arabia for example) as we have to often go against firmly held political beliefs in order to maintain the flow of fuel.

We send an awful lot of money to unstable countries that is sometimes then used to fund organizations that target the US. In many ways, we leave our economic and security futures in the hands of unstable governments.

Why in the world are we not trying to develop sources of energy that do not make us beholden to the interests of those who would wish us harm?

Technorati Tags: Environment, Sustainability

A great way to teach

Lying for skepticism:
[Via Bad Astronomy]

Is it ever OK to lie for skepticism? I would say yes, under very specific circumstances… like when you’re teaching students to think critically:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

[...]

This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention – by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly check new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact.

This is a wonderful story, and I think makes an effective teaching method. And it forces students to pay attention… while making them eager to do so! Read the whole thing; you’ll get a smile from it.

Tip o’ the tweed jacket to Craig Temple.

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Of curse, there will be those who would not like this approach. But then they probably do not really want to learn much of anything.

I think it can be a great way to go but it also requires quite a bit of work by the professor. He can’t accidently say something wrong or he would have 2 things wrong.

Technorati Tags: General