Category: Technology

Scientific stereotypes continue to persist, stretching even as far as recent Google acquisition, Youtube, the social video upload site. (Right click and view image to read it full size).

Today, Youtube had a period of allegedly scheduled downtime and to explain the lack of vids, they displayed a cartoon showing a marginally mad scientist (albeit a youngster rather than the usual aged, balding mad scientist). The scientist in question seemed malevolently preoccupied with pouring one green liquid from a test-tube into another. For what purpose we’re not told, but the caption beneath read:

“We’re busy pushing out some new concoctions and formulas We’ll be back soon…assuming all reactions are stable”

Inherent in that phrase is a fundamental lack of understanding of chemistry, of course. What, after all is a “stable reaction”, a reaction by virtue of being is anything but stable, it is intrinsically unstable, in constant flux…reacting! Perhaps they meant to say “steady reaction”, instead, a reaction can be steady, with a constant conversion of starting materials into stable products and byproducts as opposed to an explosive reaction, which one might talk about as being unsteady, or perhaps that’s what they are alluding to in using the words stable, somehow attempting to imply that reactions to their new concoctions might be unstable and lead to an extension of their scheduled downtime.

I suspect most Youtube readers will not care one ion. But, the pushing of scientific stereotypes in popular culture is a serious issue. With scientists repeatedly characterised as mad, malevolent or at best absent minded, it is difficult to see how the general public will ever reach a point at which they will understand or trust the scientific endeavour.

You can read a feature article I wrote on the subject of scientific stereotypes for the now defunct HMSBeagle webzine on BioMedNet here. Note the hopefully ironic use of a benevolent, slightly madcap, and certainly balding character as illustration.

Plos One the new OA science journal, the launch of which we announced here on January 1, seems to be building up quite a head of steam, it’s almost superheated in fact (more on that via the link). There are some rather fancy paper titles on their homepage, as I write, covering some very disparate subject areas, which is what the journal needs if it is to compete in the open market with the likes of Nature, PNAS, and Science. Among the latest, at the time of writing are:

• The Emergence of HIV Transmitted Resistance in Botswana: ‘When Will the WHO Detection Threshold Be Exceeded?’
• The Origins of Concentric Demyelination: Self-Organization in the Human Brain
• Gene Sampling Strategies for Multi-Locus Population Estimates of Genetic Diversity (θ)
• Relationship between Thermodynamic Driving Force and One-Way Fluxes in Reversible Processes
• Rapid Dissemination of Plasmodium falciparum Drug Resistance Despite Strictly Controlled Antimalarial Use

UPDATE: June 21, 2010: At last, PLoS ONE has now been given an impact factor of 4.351, which puts it into the 25th percentile of the “Biology” category.

UPDATE: June 19, 2009: ISI will publish its latest stash of impact factors on the evening of the 19th. We will hopefully find out then whether or not a PLoS ONE impact factor will be made public, and just how well it is rating relative to the traditional journals.

Until recently, online scientific journals were really just e-versions of the printed copy. Of course, we had advance publication online and ToC alerts etc, but now Public Library of Science will publish a general science journal to rival Science and Nature that covers primary research results from all areas of science. Unique to the new format is the use of both pre- and post-publication peer review, which are set to revolutionize the way the scientific literature evolves.

PLoS co-founder Harold Varmus says, ‘For those of us who have been engaged with PLoS from its conception, the launch of PLoS ONE is tremendously exciting–this is the moment when we seize the full potential of the Internet to make communication of research findings an interactive and fully accessible process that gives greater value to what we do as scientists.’

It has launched with publication of 100 peer-reviewed research articles peer-reviewed under the guidance of an extensive academic editorial board, and covering molecular science and clinical studies with topics including the evolution of language, the control of rabies, mimicry of jumping spiders, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Every article published is under an open access license, which means everyone is free to read, reuse, and build upon these research papers.

One of the key selling points is the possibility of almost instantaneous publication with virtually zero delay between submission and publication. As soon as a paper is published a dialog between author and reader is opened.

PLoS launched in “beta” in December, 2007 could see big changes in the way the scientific literature evolves.

UPDATE: 2009-06-16 Recent headlines added:

Open access news

• Open Access Publisher Under Scrutiny for Taking Sham Paper
• Science publishing also suffers from its curmudgeons
• What’s wrong with scholarly publishing today?
• Merck’s Ghostwriters, Haunted Papers and Fake Elsevier Journals
• Scholarly community gives feedback regarding Wikipedia
• Scitable is a Social Network for Science
• The Impact Factor Game
• Scitable is a Social Network for Science
• Guestimating PLoS ONE impact factor

UPDATE: They were so obviously (I know hindsight is 20:20) looking for information about the Wes Anderson movie “Bottle Rocket” and simply mistyped…

What on earth’s a “booyle rocket”, I hear you ask! Well, I haven’t a clue. It’s just a search term that a Sciencebase visitor used in our search box.

Intrigued, I Googled the phrase and it turns out to be a Google Whack Blatt to a rather crude dating site. Fortunately, Google also offered the option that perhaps I’d misspelled bottle…so was the visitor searching for “bottle rocket”, perhaps?

If they were then there is a stack of information on that term. 1,590,000 pages in fact in my search including reference to a 1994 (or 1996, two IMDB entries, same movie, different years) Wes Anderson movie of the same name. But, I think visitors to this site are more likely to have been looking for a science project kind of bottle rocket rather than a movie.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a bottle rocket science project to offer but this site does and it looks so quick and simple that I thought it worth mentioning.

So, if you’re totally bored with all the goodies you received yesterday already, then check it out, grab some scissors and a fizzy drinks bottle, and head out to the local recreation ground to show off your favourite “new” toy.

An advanced knowledge of electromagnetic waves, the space-time continuum, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and computer science easily explains Santa’s abilities to deliver presents to millions of homes and children in just one night, according to professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, Larry Silverberg, at North Carolina State University.

Silverberg explains that Santa has a personal wireless connection to children’s thoughts — via a listening antenna that combines technologies currently used in cell phones and EKGs — which informs him that Mary in Miami hopes for a surfboard, while Michael from Minneapolis wants a snowboard. Sophisticated signal-processing technology maps out who wants what, where children live, and especially flags red or green children who’ve been bad or good.

Santinformatics software processese all the data and programs the onboard sleigh guidance system (OSG) to calculate the most efficient delivery route. Down on earth this is known as the “traveling salesman problem”, but it’s the TSantaP at the North Pole.

Silverberg is not so silly as to think that Santa and his reindeer can cover approximately 200 million square miles — making stops in some 80 million homes — in one night. Instead, he reckons that Santa uses his knowledge of the space-time continuum to form what Silverberg calls “relativity clouds.” “Based on his advanced knowledge of the theory of relativity, Santa recognizes that time can be stretched like a rubber band, that space can be squeezed like an orange and that light can be bent,’ Silverberg says. ‘Relativity clouds are controllable domains — rips in time — that allow him months to deliver presents while only a few minutes pass on Earth. The presents are truly delivered in a wink of an eye.’

Santa’s reindeer are genetically engineered, of course, allowing them to fly, balance on rooftops and see in the dark. And, just in case you’ve forgotten, here are their names: Donner, Blitzen, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Rudolph, and Olive! Olive, you say? Yes, as in: “Olive the other reindeer, used to laugh and call him names…” These latter two were recruited to the team many years after the original poem naming the reindeer – A Visit from St Nicholas.

Finally, many people wonder how Santa and the reindeer can eat all the food left out for them. Silverberg says they take just a nibble at each house. The remainder is either left in the house or placed in the sleigh’s built-in food dehydrator, where it is preserved for future consumption. It takes a long time to deliver all those presents, after all.

Silverberg says “Children shouldn’t put too much credence in the opinions of those who say it’s not possible to deliver presents all over the world in one night. It is possible, and it’s based on plausible science.”

The New York Times this week reported that spam levels have doubled in the last six months. I’m pretty sure there was a lull towards the end of the summer, but we’ll take their word for it. The paper reports on figures released by one of the myriad spam-filtering companies, Ironport, and claims that 90 percent of the 50 billion e-mails sent across the internet (as opposed to internal company emails, which are a different matter) every day is a spam or a phishing mail.

Everyone assumes that the vast majority of the spam sent is offering pictures and videos of people in various states of undress for the one-handed surfers out there. However, the spam figures don’t quite stack up like that. The “London” Times published figures that reveal half of all spam is for health products, a third of all spam is for money and stocks advice and tips, and a mere 3 out of every 100 is adult-only content, as it were. That’s still 1.5b adult spams a day.

Moreover, the London Times’ report suggests more worryingly that spam mail has increased by 300% in the last four months, not merely doubling as the NYT has it.

The anti-spam companies claim they can trap 95% of the spam, but that leaves 2.5b spams getting through every day. The vast majority of those seem to arrive in my inbox, and I daren’t take a holiday for fear of missing that false positive when the spam trap clears the filters each week.

What do you think? Is spam affecting your work? What can we do to stem the tide?