Overheard at Casa Free-Ride:
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: Hey, some of the silkmoths are mating already!
Elder offspring: With each other?
Savor that moment of stunned silence!
Author Archives: admin
Garden update: the harvest.
Owing to the fact that the snail eradication project (or at least, my direct involvement in it) is on a brief hiatus while I’m on the East Coast (and while my yard is still in Northern California), I’m going to be bringing you up to date on the garden in whose service I have been trying to control the gastropod population.
Long time readers may recall that the raised garden beds are almost a year old. We actually didn’t get the first seeds planted in them until near the end of July, 2008.
Some of the seeds we planted then are just now giving us plants that are ready to harvest.
Boston dispatch #2.
The torrential rain stopped (at least temporarily), so I got a chance to walk around a little. Having met my high school friend in Kenmore Square, I walked on Comm Ave (toward the Boston Commons) and hung a left on Mass Ave.
I decided I needed to check the functioning of the Harvard Bridge.
Friday Sprog Blogging: summer reading recommendations.
The Free-Ride offspring are almost at the end of another school year, so we thought this would be a good time for them to think about some summer reading recommendations. Each of them chose two favorite books that have something to do with science. Below, they offer their kid-to-kid reviews.
Initial dispatch from Boston.
Some hold that Hell is other people.
Today, I’m inclined to disagree.
Announcing your findings (but not really).
Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne Dalcanton describes a strategy for scientific communication that raises some interesting ethical issues:
Suppose you (and perhaps a competing team) had an incredibly exciting discovery that you wrote up and submitted to Nature.
Now suppose that you (and the competing team) simultaneously posted your (competing) papers to the ArXiv preprint server (which essentially all astronomers and physicists visit daily). But, suppose you then wrote in the comments “Submitted to Nature. Under press embargo”.
In other words, you wrote the equivalent of “Well, we’ve submitted this to Nature, but they won’t accept it or publish it if the news gets into the press, so can all of you reading this just not actually, you know, tell anyone? Oh, but can you make sure that you give us credit for the discovery, instead of the competing team? Thx!”
So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I’d loooove to talk about), I’m writing about what a ridiculous fiction the authors are asking us all to participate in, for the sake of the authors’ potentially getting a publication accepted to Nature. The authors advertised a paper to thousands of interesting, engaged scientists, who are then supposed to keep their mouths shut so that the authors can get a paper into a particular journal — one that is not noticeably more influential in astrophysics (i.e. the difference between Nature and non-Nature is not nearly as big a deal as it is in biology).
The authors in this case are kind of announcing their findings to other scientists in their field — but, owing to the embargo on their results, they kind of aren’t.
What’s going on here?
Wifi in the Boston area?
I have a quick question for the hive-mind:
Where are good places with free wifi in Boston, Cambridge, and Wellesley?
Snail eradication (day 34).
Dry and overcast again this morning. I’ve never been a big fan of humidity, but I was really hoping for some today.
Coming Monday: our discussion the case of a halted international clinical trial in Cameroon.
Almost a month ago, I told you about a pair of new case studies released by The Global Campaign for Microbicides which examine why a pair of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of antiretrovirals in preventing HIV infection were halted. In that post, I also proposed that we read and discuss these case studies as a sort of ethics book club.
Next Monday, June 15, we’ll be kicking off our discussion of the first case study, “Research Rashomon: Lessons from the Cameroon Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Trial Site” (PDF).
Snail eradication (day 33).
Well, it was another dry morning in the back yard. And I was sufficiently busy with other stuff yesterday afternoon that I did not have a chance to set up any beery gastropod watering holes.