by Lenny Montana
PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing : Nature News:
[Via Nature]
This is a very provocative article, especially since it starts this way:

Public Library of Science (PLoS), the poster child of the open-access publishing movement, is following an haute couture model of science publishing — relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals.

It is a little unseemly for a for-profit publisher with a closed access approach to openly attack an open access competitor. Especially since many of the PLoS journals have very high impact factors and are widely read for their important articles.

The comments are a lot of fun to read and demonstrate where online conversations are taking us. An example:

Editor Clarke, Perhaps you could then elaborate on just what the intent with this piece? Clearly many of those reading it saw it as a naked and blatantly self-serving screed against open-access publishing. In short, an attempt to undercut the business of a competitor by the method of reputation-trashing. Can you confirm or deny that this was the intent? If you confirm that this was the intent, please let us know why it was ethically sound not to make a firm declaration of COI in the piece? If you deny this was the intent, by all means please let us know what the intent actually was…?
Posted by Drug Monkey

Drug Monkey has some more discussion at his own site, especially the lack of a conflict of interest statement (ironic since every scientist who publishes in every journal today, including Nature, must sign such a statement delineating all conflicts of interest.). Also he has some more links to other bloggers, including the Online Community Manager for the PLoS journals who is taking a “Don’t feed the trolls” approach.

Then there is this little bit of dead-on snark:

Apparently the “bulk, cheap … lower quality papers” published by PLoS aren’t beneath the notice of Nature. Three of the Research Highlights articles in this issue (p 5) report on articles published in PLoS journals (two from PLoS One! and one from PLoS Genetics). If it is not interesting enough to publish in Nature, at least it provides enough free copy to help round out an issue.
Posted by Scott Ramsey

So, Nature is perfectly happy to use the freely available information from the competitor it trashes, in order to make sure it has enough content for its own journal.

Finally, it is a little weird for a commercial company that makes a profit to criticize the business model for a non-profit organization. I mean, horrors, they get grant money. That is what a non-profit can do. Many do not set themselves up to be commercial in the sense of a company like Nature.

Here are the stated mission and goals of PLoS:

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource.

Our goals are to:

• Open the doors to the world’s library of scientific knowledge by giving any scientist, physician, patient, or student - anywhere in the world - unlimited access to the latest scientific research.
• Facilitate research, informed medical practice, and education by making it possible to freely search the full text of every published article to locate specific ideas, methods, experimental results, and observations.
• Enable scientists, librarians, publishers, and entrepreneurs to develop innovative ways to explore and use the world’s treasury of scientific ideas and discoveries.

Here are Nature’s:

First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life.

Nature does really well at the first section but does it really ensure that the results are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world? Or does charging for access fulfill the ‘fashion that conveys their significance’? if you pay for something does that enhance its significance?

Interestingly, Nature did not make a profit of more than 30 years.

Despite the boom in periodical publishing in Victorian Britain in the 1860s, the fledgling Nature did not make a profit for more than 30 years and only survived because of the commitment and belief of its first publisher, Alexander Macmillan, co-founder of Macmillan Publishers, and the hard work of the first editor, Norman Lockyer.

Sounds like charity to me. Yet it is critical of PLoS after 6 years!

I guess there is one thing positive for Nature. While it might be a little unseemly for such a hit piece to come from Nature, they deserve kudos for sticking around for the conversation. even one that takes them to task.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Web 2.0

More bubblin crude:
[Via Deep Sea News]

Unlike people in the glamour states of Florida and California, folks here in Texas don’t mind a little offshore oil development. We view the petroleum industry as two parts necessary evil and one part benevolent overlord. And, we feel this way for free. We don’t get paid off like the lucky folks in Alaska. Our complacency is almost a kind of nostalgia. You might say Big Oil has it pretty easy here in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2001 there were 46 deep water rigs operating in the Gulf and the mood was one of cautious optimism. Now, thanks to escalating oil prices, the mood is more like a rich man’s bliss.
[More]

There is some discussion about our ability to suck oil that is under Mexico’s water. Many of the Mexican’s are afraid we will drink their milkshake. (Spoilers: See here for the video and here for a translation.)

But there are a couple of things. First, Mexico does not have the capability to do this type of drilling. And it may not represent a milkshake drinking proposition. From the LA Times:

It’s unclear whether big shared deposits even exist in the Gulf of Mexico. Historically, the region’s deepwater finds have been isolated pockets of petroleum, not mega-fields.

Officials at the U.S. Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that regulates U.S. offshore production, said they had no knowledge that any gulf reservoirs now under development crossed the international divide.

Shell, which is developing its Perdido platform with Chevron and BP, said the deposits they were targeting were confined to U.S. territory.

I would expect that if there does turn out to be a big reservoir and oil is sucked out of Mexico, then there will a diplomatic solution (i.e. we can get access to some of the oil across the border by sharing some of it).

I was disappointed the article did not really say how much oil was going to come out of the three fields :Silvertip, Tobango and Great White. While no one really knows until they get the drilling done, from what I could find, the fields will produce about 130,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day at their peak. The rig should be ready to start next year.

Technorati Tags: Environment

by …†∆†¡∆µ∆ 
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
Building scientific communities:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]
Here is an interesting point that should be discussed more, especially with scientific community building (my bolding).

I will start with something I have quoted all too often

Data finds data, then people find people

That quote by Jon Udell, channeling Jeff Jonas is one that, to me at least, defines what the modern web is all about. Too many people tend to put the people first, but in the end without common data to commune around, there can be no communities.

A community needs a purpose to exist, a reason to come together. Some communities arise because of similar political or gardening interests. Most research communities come together for one major reason - to deal with data.

However, standard approaches are too slow and cumbersome. When one group can add 45 billion bases of DNA sequence to the databases a week, the solution cycle has to be shortened.

Science is an intellectual pursuit, whether it is formal academic science or just casual common interest. That’s where all the tools available today come into the picture. The data has always been there. Whether at the backend, or at the front end, we can think about how to get everything together, but being able to discovery and find some utility is very important. One of the reasons the informatics community seems to thrive online, apart from inherent curiosity and interest in such matters, is that we have a general set of interests to talk about, from programming languages, to tools to methods, to just whining about the fact that we spend too much time data munging. Successful life science communities need that common ground. In a blog post, Egon talks about JMOL and CDK. Why would I participate in the CDK community, or the JMOL one? Cause I have some interest in using or modifying JMOL, or finding out more about the CDK toolkit and perhaps using it. Successful communities are the ones that can take this mutual interest around the data and bring together the people.

Part of what is being discussed here is a common language and interest that allows rapid interactions amongst a group. In some ways, this is not different than a bunch of people coalescing around a cult TV show and forming a community. A difference is that the latter is a way to transform information that has purely entertainment value.

The size and depth of these ad hoc communities, as well as their longevity, will depend on the size of the beach, just how much data must be examined. But I guarantee that there will always be more data to examine, even after publication.

So my advice to anyone building a scientific community (the one that jumped out at me during the workshop was the EcoliHub) is to think about what the underlying data that could bring together people is first. Data here is used in a general sense. Not just scientific raw data, but information and interests as well. Then trying and figure out what the goals are that will make these people come together around the data and then figure out what the best mechanism for that might be. Don’t put the cart before the horse. In most such cases, you need a critical mass to make a community successful, to truly benefit from the wealth of networks. In science that’s often hard, so any misstep in step 1, will usually end up in a community that has little or no traction.

EcoliHub is a great example of a website in the wild that is supported almost entirely in an Open Source fashion. This is a nice way to create a very strong community focussed on a single, rich topic. On the wide open Internet, though, it may be harder for smaller communities to come into existence, simply because of how hard it might be for the individual members of the community to find one another.

A grant deadline for example.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by oskay
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
15 human genomes each week:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has sequenced the equivalent of 300 human genomes in just over six months. The Institute has just reached the staggering total of 1,000,000,000,000 letters of genetic code that will be read by researchers worldwide, helping them to understand the role of genes in health and disease. Scientists will be able to answer questions unthinkable even a few years ago and human medical genetics will be transformed.
[More]

Some of this is part of the 1000 Genomes Project, an effort to sequence that many human genomes. This will allow us to gain a tremendous amount of insight into just what it is that makes each of us different or the same.

All this PR really states is that they are now capable of sequencing about 45 billion base pairs of DNA a day. They are not directly applying all of that capability to the human genome. While they, or someone, possibly could, the groups involved with 1000 genomes will take a more statistical approach to speed things up and lower costs.

It starts with in depth sequencing of a couple of nuclear families (about 6 people). This will be high resolution sequencing equivalent to 20 passes of the entire genome of each. This level of redundancy will help edit out any sequencing errors from the techniques themselves. All these approaches will help the researchers get a better handle on the most optimal processes to use.

They were hoping to be sequencing the equivalent of 2 human genomes a day and they are not too far off of that mark. At the end of this study, they will have sequenced and deposited into databases 6 trillion bases (a 6 followed by 12 zeroes). In December 2007, GenBank, the largest American database had a total of 84 billion bases (84 followed by 9 zeroes) that took 25 years to produce.

And, more importantly, the scientists doing the examining will have to appreciate the sheer size of this. It took 13 years to complete the Human Genome Project. Now, 5 years after that project was completed, we can potentially sequence a single human genome in half a day.

The NIH had projected that technology will support sequencing a single human genome in 1 day for under $1000 in 4 years or so. The members of 1000 genomes are hoping to be able to accomplish their work for $30-50,000 per genome. So, the NIH projection may not be too far off.

Maybe I should invest in data storage companies.

Technorati Tags: Health, Science

by tony’s pics
G’mornin’:
[Via Eschaton]

This has been cracking me up for days.

Signed,
Not Atrios

by dbking
Louisiana governor signs creationist bill:
[Via National Center for Science Education]

Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal signed Senate Bill 733 (PDF) into law, 27 years after the state passed its Balance Treatment for Evolution-Science and Creation-Science Act, a law overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. Jindal’s approval of the bill was buried in a press release issued on June 25, 2008, announcing 75 bills he signed in recent days. Houma Today reports(June 27, 2008) that the bill “will empower educators to pull religious beliefs into topics like evolution, cloning and global warming by introducing supplemental materials.”
[More]

I guess they just made it harder for Louisiana students to get accepted to good universities, at least if they want to be a scientist. Should be interesting as parents sue school districts about teaching religion in their science class. This typically results in the school district losing and having to pay a whole lot of money.

But what does that matter to the politicians who pander? Of course, some school districts apparently have no problem with having creationist teachers. It took this one 11 years before the teacher was fired in Ohio for directly disobeying the school board. I mean , he only burnt crosses into the arms of students while he was supposed to be teaching science.

I am always amazed at the fortitude of those amazing students who make it through this sort of ignorance. Of course, it also explains why we do not have enough graduate students from America and have to import so many.

Technorati Tags: Education, Science

by TankGirlJones

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

Column on NIH and Harvard policies:
[Via Open Access News]
Karla Hahn, Two new policies widen the path to balanced copyright management: Developments on author rights, C&RL News, July/August 2008.

A light bulb is going off that is casting the issue of author rights management into new relief. On January 11, 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a revision of its Public Access Policy. Effective April 7, 2008, the agency requires investigators to deposit their articles stemming from NIH funding in the NIH online archive, PubMed Central. Librarians have been looking forward to such an announcement, especially since studies found that the voluntary version of the policy was achieving deposit rates of affected articles on the order of a few percentage points.

Since we as taxpayers pay for this research, it should not be bound up behind access control. Now, because of the NIH’s revision, it won’t.

With the article deposit requirement, researchers can no longer simply sign publication agreements without careful review and, in some cases, modification of the publisher’s proposed terms. While this may be perceived as a minor annoyance, it calls attention to the value of scholarly publications and the necessity to consider carefully whether an appropriate balance between author and publisher rights and needs is on offer.

The norm in science has been to always quickly sign over copyright so that the paper could be published. This sometimes resulted in the absurd prospect that the author of a paper could not use his own data in slides, since he no more owned the copyright of it than any other random scientist. Now there is a little leverage for the author to retain some aspects of copyright.

As institutions, as grantees, become responsible for ensuring that funded authors retain the rights they need to meet the NIH public Access Policy requirements, there is a new incentive for campus leaders to reconsider institutional policies and local practices relating to faculty copyrights as assets. …
The February 2008 vote by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences to grant Harvard a limited license to make certain uses of their journal articles is another important indicator of an accelerating shift in attitudes about author rights management, and also reveals the value of taking an institutional approach to the issue. …

Academic pressure is coming to bear on these policies and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out. In most instances, providing open access will be the better route but now the individual institutions will be responsible for providing the necessary infrastructure.

Perhaps something like Highwire Press will appear. Here , instead of each scientific association having to develop their own infrastructure, Highwire does it for many of them, greatly simplifying publishing for all. Highwire now has almost 2 million article published with free access. Perhaps something similar for institutional storage would be helpful.

Norms are always more difficult to change than technologies. We are now witnessing a key shift in norms for sharing scholarly work that promises a giant step forward in leveraging the potential of network technologies and digital scholarship to advance research, teaching, policy development, professional practice, and technology transfer. …

What scientists expect when they publish a paper is changing rapidly. What once took 6-9 months from submission to publication can now happen in weeks. Where once all rights had to be assigned to the publisher, now the authors can retain some for their own use.

What will the norms be like in five years?

Technorati Tags: Government, Science, Web 2.0

by *L*u*z*a*
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

How Do I Add FriendFeed Comments to My Blog:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

Hey, smarter people: how do I add a FriendFeed comments module under my blog comments? I want to see all these great comments. Just found these several days later:

Man, so many great people saying great things, and I didn’t engage at all. : (

Not only is this blog entry a great example of how to start a conversation (i.e. ask your community), the comments are a great example of how the conversation progresses. They provide a solution, naturally, but there is also extensive debugging help to get it to work. Eventually, the creator of the needed plug-in arrives to help and ends up making his own software better.

So by asking for help, the community not only provided an answer to Chris, it helped troubleshoot and make the product even better. All in less than 24 hours. How is that for a development cycle!

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/D.Evans et al.; Optical/UV: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/VLA/CfA/D.Evans et al., STFC/JBO/MERLIN

Apparently, Belief in Evolution Makes You a Minority Figure:
[Via Genome Technology Online Current Issue]

What a day for creation theory. John Lynch at Stranger Fruit blogs about the latest results of a Gallup poll on political leaning and belief in creation, intelligent design, or evolution. Republicans emerged with 60 percent believing in creationism, 32 percent believing in ID, and just 4 percent believing in no-strings-attached evolution. Democrats were an even split on creationism and ID (38 and 39 percent, respectively), with 17 percent opting for evolution. Independents had the highest rate of belief in evolution — 19 percent — but still had 40 percent opting for creationism and 36 percent for ID.

While we’re on the subject, members of the American Society of Plant Biologists are urging Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to veto the creation-in-the-classroom bill that’s on his desk. Pamela Ronald includes the full text of the letter at her Tomorrow’s Table blog.

I was really depressed by this until I actually looked at the data, something worth doing. It is even more depressing. They asked “which comes closest to your views:

1. Humans developed over millions of years, God guided
2. Humans developed over millions of years, God had no part
3. God created humans as is within the last 10,000 years.

So we are not just talking creationism, where God did it. We are talking God did it within the last 10,000 years! 60% of the Republicans feel that mankind was created as is within the last 10,000 years. That is a really horrifying number. An overwhelming number of Republicans believe in a total fantasy for which there is not only no proof but actually a huge amount of information showing it is false. There is absolutely NO evidence at all for proposition 3.

The people who founded Jericho left behind tools and pottery that have been dated to 14,500-11,000 years ago. There is evidence of farming from 11,000 ago. But these Republicans just ignore that evidence. I wonder how they place Neanderthal in their histories. Probably just make stuff up.

But 40% for independents and 38% for the Democrats is not something to cheer about either. Why is this? Why are so many americans ignorant of such basic facts about our natural world. The data answers that question. It is going to church that produces this error.



Those that attend church weekly are the most likely to believe this myth, probably because they hear it all the time. Most never got any education regarding evolution in school at all. This drops to 24% for those that seldom attend church (I’d be worried more about that high number except something like 20% of those surveyed believe the Sun goes around the Earth.)

So, while religion may be useful for many things, it is substantially responsible for perpetuating a fable that can be shown to be false by a plethora of methods. Well, at least there are a small percentage of us who can actually deal with the world as it really is. I guess this is how Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho gets elected in 500 years.

Technorati Tags: Science

by AMagill
Electronic Search and Seziure at the Border:
[Via Group News Blog]

So, any laptop entering the US can be confiscated, held for several weeks, and completely copied, all because a Customs Agent wants to. I would figure a lot of businesses are going to be very unhappy with this approach. As GNB says:

As of April, Customs can take every electronic device you have.

US News and World Reports

Returning from a vacation to Germany in February, freelance journalist Bill Hogan was selected for additional screening by customs officials at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. Agents searched his luggage, he said, “then they told me that they were impounding my laptop.”

Shaken by the encounter, Hogan examined his bags and found the agents had also inspected the memory card from his camera. “It was fortunate that I didn’t use [the laptop] for work,” he said, “or I would have had to call up all my sources and tell them that the government had just seized their information.” When customs offered to return the computer nearly two weeks later, Hogan had it shipped to his lawyer.

How common Hogan’s experience is remains unclear. But an April ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Protection, does have full authority to search any electronic devices without suspicion in the same way that it can inspect briefcases.

But congressional investigators say that copies of drives are sometimes made, meaning customs could be duplicating corporate secrets, legal and financial data, personal E-mails and photographs, along with stored passwords for accounts with companies ranging from Netflix to Bank of America.

The practice of storing and duplicating material might be something that both opponents and supporters of seizure could agree to regulate, says Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, an otherwise staunch supporter of customs’ authority. Larry Cunningham, an assistant district attorney from New York, told the hearing: “I am aware of no authority that would permit the government, without probable cause to believe it contains contraband, to keep a person’s laptop or to copy the contents of its files.”

Customs insists that terrorism and child pornography are sufficient justification for electronics searches. And even civil libertarians agree it makes sense for customs to search luggage, which could pose immediate dangers to aircraft and passengers. But, says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, “customs officials do not go through briefcases to review and copy paper business records or personal diaries, which is apparently what they are now doing in digital form. These pda’s don’t have bombs in them.”

Customs doesn’t make copies of the files in your briefcase. For them to copy the files on your computer is to turn over one’s life to the government.

How are you supposed to get any work done? And can Customs hold your briefcase for a couple of weeks and copy everything in it? This seems like way beyond unreasonable search and seizure. It also seems really open to abuse. Corporate espionage got a lot more interesting, I guess. I would expect businessman to be a little worried about this.

Technorati Tags: Government

Firedoglake puts it all together. Colony Collapse Disorder is worrying because there is very little research to really determine how bad the problem is.

Most plants native to America do not require honey bees for pollination, since the honeybee is an introduced species. However, many of our crop plants need the bee because it allows us to stage large numbers of pollinators at a single time for our agricultural crops. So loss in the number of bees for commercial use could be devastating.

Again, like climate change, the worst case scenario is horrible but in this case, the research is meager in comparison. But there are some interesting developments.

Here are some quotes from Firedoglake:

A reader recently sent me an article on the deepening problems with hive collapse and honeybees:

A record 36 percent of U.S. commercial bee colonies have been lost to mysterious causes so far this year and worse may be yet to come, experts told a congressional panel Thursday.

The year’s bee colony losses are about twice the usual seen following a typical winter, scientists warn. Despite ambitious new research efforts, the causes remain a mystery….

So, how much research is being done? Not enough. This is what shook me:

So far, Agricultural Research Service Administrator Edward Knipling told the House panel, scientists believe that “various stresses” — such as parasites, pathogens and pesticides — can build up in a bee colony and cause its demise. Some research has specifically identified a particular virus, called the Israeli acute paralysis virus, which is closely associated with colony collapse.

Meanwhile, there isn’t enough money to probe all the pollen and bee samples that researchers have collected, said Penn State University senior extension associate Maryann Frazier.

There are some 2,000 samples on shelves waiting to be analyzed by the federal government for $200 a pop, she said.

“The bee research community is quite small,” she said. “The research and money has been very minimal. What we need is more manpower to tackle this.”

Further illustrating how political pollination works, Pien and bee-friendly representatives hosted a Capitol Hill briefing Wednesday that lured participants with lots of free Vanilla Honey Bee ice cream cups. Dozens of congressional staffers fluttered by for a quick taste. Haagen-Dazs has retained a D.C.-based public relations firm to help make its case, while the American Honey Producers Association paid the lobbying firm Winston and Strawn $860,000 in the last two years, records show.

The article states that the farming bill that was just approved over President Bush’s veto authorizes $20 million for bee-related research but does not guarantee that it will actually be spent. The President decides that. So, Haagen-Dazs has said it will provide $250,000 for research. That should just about pay for the testing of the 2000 samples. A lot more will need to be done as well before we can determine just how bad this could get.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

by kla4067

My mom sent me this article from the Houston Chronicle and it took me off on a fun journey through a mash-up of old media and new media. First my rant.

This article actually ticked me off, not for the content but for the way it was presented. So many newspapers just shovel their print versions onto the internet without seeing it is a new medium with its own needs and logic. Online is a conversation while print is a monolog (although LTEs simulate a dialog, just not a very effective one.)

Why is there not a single link to any of these videos? Why is there not a single link in the article to anything? It is as if a TV program consisted of simply filming a radio broadcast, microphones , sound effects man and all.

If I am going to read something online, make the content fit the medium and put in links.

So I went and googled the author. Turns out the original LA Times article does actually have the links, even to the video referenced in the article, indicating it gets the medium. But then I looked closer and found out that the reason it has links is because it’s a blog.

Yep, the Houston Chronicle published an article from a blog from the LA Times. But it was presented as if it was just a regular newspaper article, not something written for a different medium (Think a TV show that just showed us the pages from the screenplay, not the movie itself.).

No wonder the article read so different than normal. I originally thought the guy was condescending because he was someone who did not get it. No, it is from a blog where he can be condescending because It’s a blog. And a fun one to read.

Turns out that this LA TImes writer, David Sarno, whose beat is ‘ Internet culture and online entertainment,’ produces articles with lots of personality and snark. That is what is often expected with an online blog. Because there can be lots of comments to add balance. He writes with a personal viewpoint but one that invites a reaction, which can easily be seen in the comments provided.

This blog is a great example of the online medium, and how it often differs from print. It is a conversation between people, not an authority telling us what is happening.

He can be a little snarky, have his soapbox to write with a personal point of view, with opinions that may provoke. But he also provides a soapbox for anyone else who wants to add to the conversation. He is not afraid of the response from his readers and actually uses them to help write other posts.

In fact, this article is only the latest is a series of Fred posts, all adding to the conversation. The first initially brings up Fred and talks about how the author does not understand his popularity. Couple of commenters add context.

The next is a few days later, where the author tried to base the popularity not on creativity but on marketing from a company. This idea was shot down by commenters. Thus the latest article, which now adds much more depth and backstory. It really enhances the conversation, even though there are several items of controversy that the commenters bring up..

It is obvious from these conversations that the author does not get the humor nor understand it. That is a personal issue for any type of humor. But several of his commenters do get the humor and their context is available to all. Thus a conversation which we will continue as we discover just how commercial or how creative Lucas is going to be now that he has begun to find success in Hollywood. This is how online conversations work and why the medium is different than print.

Obviously the Houston Chronicle does not get this. It is like it quoted just part of a conversation from a dinner party, totally out of context. No wonder it sounded kind of off.

I wonder if the Houston Chronicle realized this or if it even cares? Just another indication that it does not really understand the online medium?

So, I went to watch the videos. I found them pretty funny.

You know, I wrote a long rant about how wrong the author of the piece was, but I deleted that and will simply put quote a commenter to the blog:

I agree with commenter Misty who said Fred doesn’t have to appeal only to kids. In my case (60 years old), I think his show is the best thing on YouTube and I can’t get enough of him. I think if one has performed on stage or in film (as I have), or have directed (as I have), you can’t help but notice and appreciate what kind of a talent Lucas Cruikshank is…and his “numbers” or “stats” definitely demonstrate that, too. You can’t sneeze at viewer numbers in the several millions. If people (adults) stand by with shrugged shoulders and “just don’t get it,” that’s their problem. Just because you get older doesn’t mean you suddenly forget human issues such as insecurity about your body (you should see mine for God’s sake) or wish someone hot would return your affections or you want to have a better relationship with your father, and so on…all issues Fred has touched on, plus many more. Also, there is an immensely sweet human being inside there, with touching hopes and dreams coupled with ruthless disappointments, and yet always there is that infectious optimism and willingness to keep on trying (which I HOPE isn’t limited to youth). I’m sorry, I don’t want to ruin Fred by dissecting him, but only the insensitive would think he is nothing but a speeded up chipmunk voice and something only computer literate kids would understand. And what makes you think adults aren’t computer literate? I’ve been on-line since before the Internet was even fully created and had one of the very first desktop computers ever made. Computers have been part of my life ever since the punch-card and reel-to-reel batch processing days…and how hard is it to keep up, really? It’s hard only for a mind that stagnates, but I think that Fred has a remedy for what ails ya.

While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea (neither is George Carlin but he could be incredibly funny), I found it pretty amusing and creative (laughed out loud a couple of times). “My mom says that if you are mad at someone, just sue them” said with all the obvious sincerity of a 6 year old who is left with way too much time on their hands by a single Mom who is out partying too much. Fred is the only person you ever see in his world and after watching a few of the videos, the humor obviously covers some real pathos in the character.

Lucas is actually a pretty expressive actor, one of those people who can twist his face into the emotion he is trying to display. He really ’sells’ the character in ways that are very real and affecting.

When Gilda Radner did the same thing on SNL, it was viewed as a classic. Is this humor that can only be enjoyed by young people? Gilda did not think so and neither do I.

Or is it only unfunny when a 14 year old does it. Heck, several of Lucas’ sketches are better than anything SNL has done for years and he is only 14!!! A 14 year old that is watched by more people than watch most TV shows. A 14 year old from Nebraska who gets the attention of Hollywood. How does that happen and how does that change things?

Spielberg at this age was making home movies in his backyard. You can bet that if youtube was available, they would have been up there. Would this blogger have liked them? Perhaps not but that is not important here.

He allows a platform for those that agree or disagree with him to have a voice. That is how he is a different sort of journalist. This is how the medium is different than the newspaper. It is why I have added his blog to my newsfeeds. He is a journalist who not only is an interesting writer but he gets the new medium.

It fosters conversations, that provide context that lead to richer information transfer.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by Darren Hester

This all started out following a question my mother had. When she says research it, I usually do. And what I found out makes me glad I don’t eat microwave popcorn and I wish everyone else would stop.

Popcorn lung is one worry of microwave popcorn preparation that I had heard about. But I found some others that may also impact all of us.

Maybe not everyone has heard about the data regarding PFOA and microwave popcorn bags from a few years ago. Perfluorooctanoic acid (or PFOA) is a surfactant with many industrial uses, such as making Teflon or Gore-Tex. It is also a suspected carcinogen.

Turns out that most people have 4-5 parts per billion of PFOA in their blood. But no one really knew where the PFOA originated. Some suspected overheated Teflon pots. This paper, Perfluorochemicals: Potential sources of and migration from food packaging, from researchers at the FDA, opened a lot of people’s eyes. Here is the abstract:

Perfluorochemicals are widely used in the manufacturing and processing of a vast array of consumer goods, including electrical wiring, clothing, household and automotive products. Furthermore, relatively small quantities of perfluorochemicals are also used in the manufacturing of food-contact substances that represent potential sources of oral exposure to these chemicals. The most recognizable products to consumers are the uses of perfluorochemicals in non-stick coatings (polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)) for cookware and also their use in paper coatings for oil and moisture resistance. Recent epidemiology studies have demonstrated the presence of two particular perfluorochemicals, perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in human serum at very low part per billion levels. These perfluorochemicals are biopersistent and are the subject of numerous studies investigating the many possible sources of human exposure. Among the various uses of these two chemicals, PFOS is a residual impurity in some paper coatings used for food contact and PFOA is a processing aid in the manufacture of PTFE used for many purposes including non-stick cookware. Little information is available on the types of perfluorochemicals that have the potential to migrate from perfluoro coatings into food. One obstacle to studying migration is the difficulty in measuring perfluorochemicals by routine conventional analytical techniques such as GC/MS or LC-UV. Many perfluorochemicals used in food-contact substances are not detectable by these conventional methods. As liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS) develops into a routine analytical technique, potential migrants from perfluoro coatings can be more easily characterized. In this paper, data will be presented on the types of perfluoro chemicals that are used in food packaging and cookware. Additionally, research will be presented on the migration or potential for migration of these chemicals into foods or food simulating liquids. Results from migration tests show mg kg-1 amounts of perfluoro paper additives/coatings transfer to food oil. Analysis of PTFE cookware shows residual amounts of PFOA in the low µg kg-1 range. PFOA is present in microwave popcorn bag paper at amounts as high as 300 µg kg-1.

You can download the paper and have a look at it. They show that very little PFOA migrates onto food from non-stick pans, even when the pans are abused. But it can migrate from the paper-coating in a microwave popcorn bag into the oil, which ends up on the popcorn we eat. Actually, what probably is important is that we ingest other types of fluorocarbons and they are converted to PFOA, which complicates things.

Eating only 10 bags of microwave popcorn a year would be enough to account for 20% of the total body load. Since Americans eat about 160 million bags of microwave popcorn a year, there is a lot entering our bodies. And uneaten popcorn ends up in our trash, along with PFOA.

But if you go to the EPA page about PFOA, there is no mention of microwave popcorn bags. They mention that Teflon is not harmful and that they see no reason for anyone to worry. Here is the EPA’s answer to the question Are there steps that consumers can take to reduce their exposure to PFOA?

At present, there are no steps that EPA recommends that consumers take to reduce exposures to PFOA because the sources of PFOA in the environment and the pathways by which people are exposed are not known. Given the scientific uncertainties, EPA has not yet made a determination as to whether PFOA poses an unreasonable risk to the public. At the present time, EPA does not believe there is any reason for consumers to stop using any consumer or industrial related products because of concerns about PFOA. EPA does not have any indication that the public is being exposed to PFOA through the use of Teflon®-coated or other trademarked nonstick cookware. Teflon® and other trademarked products are not PFOA.

PFOA stands for perfluorooctanoic acid, a synthetic (man-made) chemical that does not occur naturally in the environment. PFOA is sometimes called “C8.” Companies use PFOA to make fluoropolymers, substances with special properties that have thousands of important manufacturing and industrial applications. Consumer products made with fluoropolymers include non-stick cookware and breathable, all-weather clothing. These products are not PFOA, however.

See anything interesting. The EPA does not answer the question that it asked itself! The question was not whether the EPA believed that people SHOULD reduce their exposure. It was how they COULD.

Now scroll to the bottom of the question page. Updates on Friday, June 27th 2008. So, the latest information from the EPA does nothing to help us lower our exposure to PFOA.

And it appears that more of these are a problem than just PFOA. And that PFOA can be aerosolized and dispersed into the air.

So, perhaps even refusing to eat microwave popcorn will not reduce our intake of these compounds. Well, at least Dupont has said it will voluntarily stop production of these compounds by 2015.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Health, Science

by fdecomite
Freeing My Father’s Scientific Publications Update:
[Via The Tree of Life]

Well, I have made some progress already in my quest I began on Father’s Day to free up the scientific publications of my father (see The Tree of Life: Freeing My Father’s Scientific Publications).

I wrote to the powers that be at the journal “Endocrinology” asking about when back issues might be made available. And I got a VERY quick reply from someone from Highwire Press which is the place that puts out Endocrinology on the web

Dear Jonathan Eisen,

The Endocrine Society is currently in the process of loading back issues for all of their journals. It will most likely be six months before back content is online.

The person who wrote back was almost apologetic about how long this might take but I am personally very pleased. Given that Endocrinology says the make all articles more than a year old available for free, this likely means that my father’s three papers in Endocrinology will soon be available for free online. This then changes my tally to:

Pubmed Central: 3
Free access: 17
Fee access: 11
Unavailable: 4

Getting better. Of course, I want them all to be as widely available as possible so I am still going to work to move everything up the list towards Pubmed Central. Also, my brother suggests (in the comments to my previous post) that since my father was a government employee we should be able to just post his papers online. I think this is a good option but I still will be working on the “official” channels to see what happens.

Since I made the original posting there have been some useful comments about what I might do on some other sites. See for example, this FriendFeed discussion (I have just discovered FriendFeed and it seems quite cool but I am not sure if everyone can see this discussion or not so please let me know if this link does not work).

I will keep posting on my progress as well as what I learn about Copyright, Free Access, etc.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Social media, Web 2.0

by The Udall Legacy Bus Tour: Views from the Road
Home Depot Solves a Customer Eco-Problem:
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Home Depot announced this week that it will collect and recycle compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) in nearly 2,000 of its stores. This is great news since it eases the transition to low-energy bulbs by solving a big customer problem: what do I do with this bulb when I’m done with it? Home Depot is the not the first – IKEA and local stores have CFL recycling programs – but it brings a bigger scale and reach to solving the problem.

First, bravo. Home Depot is, in part, taking responsibility for the “end-of-life” of one of its products (in wonky terms, this is “extended producer responsibility” and it’s the law for some products in some parts of the world, such as electronics in Europe). But in the New York Times article on this program, one quote really struck me. Ron Jarvis, the company’s SVP for environmental innovation (cool title) said, “We’re trying to do the right thing…Some of the things that we do are for the community and not for the bottom line.”

The belief that doing something for the community, such as going green, is not for the bottom line usually comes from not properly valuing the entire production chain. In this case, not only is doing something for recycling good for the community, it is also good for business.

I’m always a bit frustrated at a slightly sheepish explanation for a green program that costs some money and might impact the financial performance of the company. Of course it will affect the bottom line. But I think it will help it. No doubt Mr. Jarvis meant what he said, but may be wrong, and here’s why. When are people most likely recycling a bulb? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it’s when they need a new one. Why wouldn’t they buy it while they’re at Home Depot recycling the old one? And what about that mop or plant or lumber they’ve been meaning to get? Solving a customer eco-problem can drive business.

Office stores do this when they recycle ink cartridges. It helps businesses to do the right thing when doing so actually helps everyone, including the companies. It will become obvious that a company’s influence and concern does not end when a product is sold. If done well, and with real purpose, this can have a tremendous effect.

From a strategy perspective, Home Depot is utilizing a critical eco-advantage mindset and approach: thinking about the value chain. Here’s how I’d recommend finding these kinds of business and green opportunities. To oversimplify…

1. Think about – and measure if possible – the full value chain impact of your products. Where are the big impacts for energy use, water, toxic waste, and so on?
2. Look forward in the value chain (after thinking about upstream opportunities as well). What issues do your customers face? In this case, you might hear two complaints: A) Boy are my energy bills going up; B) I have no idea what to do with my old CFL bulb.
3. See if you can solve their environmental problem. Solving A is easy: sell them CFLs (and insulation and better windows and on and on). Solving problem B is harder but possible with scale: start a recycling program.
4. Reap the benefits of a closer relationship with your customer who now thinks of you as a solution provider (and if you’re Home Depot, sort of apologize for it)

I think part of the apology stems from current circumstances, when the market does not fully value all the production costs of so many goods, including the cost for recycling. In a few years, this will not be necessary.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Environment