Seed Media Group: Blog
Friday, February 05, 2010 • Events • by Eva Wisten • #
Joy Moore speaking at PSP conference
Joy Moore, VP Global Partnerships at Seed, spoke at the PSP 2010 Annual Conference today.
The conference, arranged by the American Association of Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, addressed the new reality of scholarly publishing. It raised issues and opportunities brought on by the open access movement, the culture of free, social media and new forms of collaborations.
Seed’s Joy Moore talked about the evolution of social media in the context of our products ScienceBlogs, ResearchBlogging, and ScienceWide. The panel, Scientific Research and Social Media, explored the benefits of social media for researchers, how to engage communities, and the consequences for publishers that arise from this change.
Rachel Burley, Vice President and Publisher with John Wiley & Sons, moderated the panel, which also included Alpheus Bingham, Founder of InnoCentive, Inc and Darrell W. Gunter, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Collexis Holdings, Inc.
The conference took place at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010 • Events • by Eva Wisten • #
The value of waste
Andrew Dent from Material ConneXion, recently alerted us to an important perspective for understanding sustainability.
Andrew Dent, who holds a PhD in materials science, came by the Seed office and gave a lecture on design through the lens of materials and their availability. He showed how much longer common materials will last at our current consumption speed, before they will become so scarce, that the price will skyrocket.
To really determine an object’s sustainability and design responsibly, the material factors to consider are these:
- How plentiful is the material that the object is made of?
- What’s the impact of mining, processing, and transporting the material?
- Is the material recyclable and do we have a use for it in its recycled state?
- Does the design allow for the materials to be recycled (Can the object be taken apart? Are the materials possible to separate from each other, or covered with paint etc)?
According to these principles, looks not considered, Dent points to Crocs, the plastic clogs, as an example of excellent design. They are produced through injection molding, which generates no waste from cut away material. They are made from one material, which is recyclable. The material is died, not painted. And, best of all, they are durable, and will most likely last as long as the wearer wants to use them.
As we are depleting our natural resources, materials are becoming more and more valuable commodities.
“Like gold. No one throws gold away,” Dent says as he foresees a future where more companies adapt to the strategy that Coca-Cola and others already operate by: they see their waste - their plastic bottles - as part of their assets, and makes sure to get them back. The customer buys the content, not its delivery vehicle.
“Companies will want their own waste.”
Material ConneXion’s library on 60 Madison Avenue in New York.
Thursday, January 21, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Into the unknown
In the Space Project, French photographer Vincent Fournier, has visited The Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre of the Russian Federation, the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, the Guiana Space Centre, the Atacama Desert Observatories in Chile… all the remote, austere places where dreams of space feel a little closer.
Read the story on the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah on Seedmagazine.com:
Monday, January 18, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Anthill realism
In Trailhead, which is an excerpt from biologist and - we are thrilled to see - debut novelist E.O. Wilson’s novel Anthill, Wilson offers us a perspective that few, if any, people in the world could provide in such detail.
Wilson evokes the entirely connected, scent-driven, and beautiful but brutal world of an ant colony. The more you read, the more insights unfold that may very well apply for a species even more familiar to us than ants…
“She had become an extreme specialist: she laid eggs, while the workers performed all the labor necessary to raise her offspring, their sisters. They were the Queen’s hands and feet and jaws, and increasingly they replaced her brain. They functioned together as a well-organized whole, dividing up the tasks without regard to their own welfare. The Trailhead Colony began to resemble a large, diffuse organism. In a word, it became a superorganism…..
“Even as her body began to decay, the pheromones she had manufactured in life persisted in the minds and bodies of her colony. Her visual appearance, her stillness, meant nothing. The Queen could have lain on her back with her legs held rigidly up in the air. She could have turned red, black, metallic gold, or any other hue or shade—it would not have mattered. The Queen had to smell dead in order to be classified as dead.”
Read Trailhead here:
Friday, January 15, 2010 • New • by Eva Wisten • #
ResearchBlogging Awards seeks to honor its best bloggers
Seed’s ResearchBlogging Awards honor the outstanding bloggers who discuss peer-reviewed research. With nearly 1,000 blogs registered at ResearchBlogging.org and 8,500 posts about peer-reviewed journal articles collected, it is time to recognize the best of the best.
Any blog that discusses peer-reviewed research is eligible for nomination, and the winners will be determined by votes from their peers in the Research Blogging community. All finalists will be highlighted on ResearchBlogging.org, and winners will receive cash prizes totaling $2000.
See guidelines and complete list of categories here.
Monday, January 11, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Carol Browner on Whitehouse.gov
At 3.30PM (EST) Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate, will discuss the President’s plan for a clean energy economy.
This is part of the Obama Administration’s initiative to allow Americans to communicate directly with some of the President’s senior advisors. Every morning this week, a senior advisor will give an update on the Administration’s work in their field; every afternoon the advisor will answer questions from the public via video chat on Whitehouse.gov.
Watch the chat here:
Friday, January 08, 2010 • by Eva Wisten • #
The quest for open science
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy just launched Phase Three of their Public Access Policy Forum. The big question posed by the forum to scientists, primary and secondary publishers, librarians, universities, researchers, students, and the public is when and how research articles – funded by taxpayers but with value added by scholarly publishers – should be made freely available on the internet.
The Public Access Policy Forum invited a discussion around the following questions:
* Compliance. What features does a public access policy need to ensure compliance? Should this vary across agencies?
* Evaluation. How should an agency determine whether a public access policy is successful? What measures could agencies use to gauge whether there is increased return on federal investment gained by expanded access?
* Roles. How might a public private partnership promote robust management of a public access policy? Are there examples already in use that may serve as models? What is the best role for the Federal government?
Here’s the reply from Adam Bly, Founder and CEO, Seed
Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the Public Access Policy Forum.
We believe strongly in the potential of science and scientists to improve the state of the world and that it is the responsibility of a society that relies on science to ensure that its potential is not hindered.
To that end, we believe that new policy must recognize the critical need for an open, robust, and global online infrastructure to manage all scientific information and collaboration. In addition to rapid online access to peer reviewed articles, researchers today need a unified online environment and system that integrates data sets, applications, collaboration frameworks, and more. This system should enable public and private funding agencies, universities, and corporations to control what information can and should be shared and when, and should produce data about scientific research outputs that will indicate research trends and inform future investment decisions.
• Compliance: A unified management system for information with permissioning capabilities will allow for centralized repositories in standard formats, and open access compliance standards (formats, time delays, etc.) can be facilitated by the Federal Government and implemented as deemed appropriate by the agencies.
• Evaluation: New tools for evaluation are critical – judging success of research funding purely on publishing volume and citations is a delayed and flawed approach. To develop new metrics, there must be a standard source of data based on real-time activity through a universally-adopted system.
• Roles: Multidisciplinary, international, and public-private collaborations are essential to fostering innovation and maximizing return on funding dollars. The role of the Federal Government should be to provide the tools to public and private stakeholders to make the most of their resources and manage access according to recommended guidelines.
We urge OSTP to not only support open access to peer-reviewed research, but also to encourage investment in technical infrastructure to benefit from this access.
Thank you for undertaking this important and timely discussion.
Read all the contributions here.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
The evolution song
A new video from Symphony of Science with David Attenborough, Jane Goodall and Carl Sagan: “The unbroken thread”
Saturday, December 19, 2009 • by Eva Wisten • #
Some reflective common sense thoughts
Bo Morgan from MIT Media Lab came by this week and explained how to
make little artificial Carol learn from her mistakes.
Bo Morgan, a PhD candidate at the Media Lab, is exploring the
old but small field of reflective common sense thinking: how
to reflect, learn from mistakes and avoid them in order to accomplish a
goal. By using the models presented in the Emotion Machine
written by his advisor, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, Morgan is
trying to “make little Carol who is playing in a sand box figure out
how to fill her cup with mud”.
Morgan and his group are trying to emulate human mental execution by
steps like dividing the cognitive process into six layers, assigning
the program a goal, give it the capability to draw from memory and to
take on different identities depending on the situation. By coding
according to theories on reflective thinking, Morgan hopes to gain
insights to how we can create AI-tools that debug themselves as they
run and create robot reasoning that is as robust as our own.
“I’m programming a model that’s relatable to evolution. Algorithms
that solve problems are rewarded with survival,” Morgan says.
Morgan’s dissertation is expected in September next year. After that
he hopes to apply his knowledge to the problems of mental illness and
cognitive dysfunction by performing neuropsychological experiments to
empirically test his theories.
Saturday, December 12, 2009 • Events • by Eva Wisten • #
Neurolaw-lecture at Seed
SeedAM speaker Mike Gazzaniga talked about how neuroscience impacts the justice system.
“Our sense of self is reflected in the law. If we come to think of ourselves differently than we currently do as a consequence of modern research, then the law will change to match our new feelings about justice, retribution and punishment.”
Dr. Michael Gazzaniga is the Director of the Sage Centre for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, founder and editor-in-chief, emeritus of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, a past member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and founder of the Law and Neuroscience Project.
In the ‘60s, Gazzaniga worked with neurobiologist Roger Sperry, whose advancements in split-brain research would award him the 1981 Nobel Prize in medicine. The groundbreaking idea at the time was that the left and the right side of the brain operated as two systems that could respond independently of each other, without knowing what the other was doing.
One of the most famous experiments from the Sperry/Gazzaniga collaboration was performed on patients with split brains; their corpus callosum had been surgically severed as an attempt to treat epilepsy. The scientist team would flash an image of an apple to the patient’s right field of vision. Registered by the verbal left side of the brain, the patient would correctly identify that he saw an apple. When the image was flashed to the left visual field, the right side of the brain was unable to express what it had seen: The patient claimed to have seen nothing. But when asked to with their left hand choose what they had seen from a bag of objects, the patient was able to reach down and pick out an apple.
On this foundation, Gazzaniga went on to study concepts such as free will and neuroethics. He named the function in the left brain “the Interpreter”, observed its task of constantly narrating acts that are already committed and raised the question: how responsible are we for our actions?
“Do we have to have a guilty mind in order to be convicted?” Gazzaniga asked as he sat down in the lobby of Seed.
Gazzaniga heads the Law & Neuroscience Project, a committee formed to investigate how our new knowledge of neurobiology can be used and misused. Among other issues, Gazzaniga looks at the use of brain scans to determine a mental state. It’s about the idea of going “straight to the brain” to look for answers, and how neuroscience can be used to probe deeper than we can with behavioral psychology.
Surprisingly, public acceptance is currently way ahead of the science:
“Show Joe Six-pack a brain image of a criminal and they often quickly conclude it proves the legal argument being made at the time,” says Gazzaniga.
Neurolaw provides a lens through which we can see criminal acts as functions of a specific brain state, called forth by preceding and current situations. So do the notion of guilt rest in the intent? It’s a tricky question when experiments show that even the feeling of intent - and the memory of having had intent - can be induced in patients to the patients’ full conviction, much like the split- brain patients’ left halves would construct logical narratives explaining what the disconnected right brain was doing and why.
The philosophical challenge for the field of neurolaw is daunting. Fully integrating what neuroscience research imply into our understanding of human behavior, would have massive consequences. As Seed editor Joe Kloc asked at the end of the talk:
“The notion of determining what went wrong, fixing people, and letting them out would change law as we know it?”
“That’s right on the money,” says Gazzaniga.
Gazzaniga is now on his fifth decade surrounded by examples of the malleability of consciousness, of free will as an evasive concept. So how is neuroscience affecting our sense of self?
“We definitely see this march toward accepting the idea of determinism. My own way of thinking about the issue can be summed up by saying Brains are determined, but people are free. If you think about that, you will see what I mean.”
Thursday, December 10, 2009 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Postcard from the McMurdo Base
Jeff Hoffman and Jeff McQuaid from the J. Craig Venter Institute collect samples to determine the microbial diversity of the Ross Sea.
While sampling on the sea ice they were joined by groups of emperor penguins.
(Picture was taken on ice edge 21 miles from the NSF run McMurdo Base, Antarctica)
Friday, December 04, 2009 • by Eva Wisten • #
Sugar rush from ScienceBlogs
It’s all frosting here in our New York office today… We’re celebrating the new partnership between ScienceBlogs and National Geographic with animal crackers and cupcakes in NatGeo-yellow and SB-gray, white, and black. ScienceBlogs also just broke its monthly traffic record with the highest UV ever in November!
Read the full press release about SB+NG here.
Thursday, December 03, 2009 • Events • by Eva Wisten • #
Seed at SciCafé
Naughty vs. Nice was the theme of American Museum of Natural History’s SciCafé last night.
Biologist Lee Dugatkin from University of Louisville and the AMNH’s Rob DeSalle, Curator of Invertebrate Zoology, were on stage to discuss the mechanisms behind our behavior with a fun audience that just wouldn’t stop asking questions.
We did a give-away of books we like.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009 • Events • by Eva Wisten • #
Connecting places
Scottish, London-based artist Katie Paterson was our SeedAM speaker this morning.
Ever since she was a student at London’s Slade School of Fine Arts, Katie Paterson has teamed up with scientists and engineers to realize her ideas. For ‘Ancient Darkness’, her recent piece in the Performa festival, she collaborated with astronomers at the Mouna Kea Observatories; for Earth-Moon-Earth, where she transmitted the Moonlight Sonata from earth to moon and back to see what remained, she tapped in to the underground radio community.
With her work, Katie draws attention to nature or space phenomena from far away or long ago by connecting them to the here and now.
Today, Katie told us about when she submerged a microphone in the glacier Vatnajökul and set up a phone number you could call to hear it melt. She once designed a map of dead stars and manufactured 3000 light bulbs that emulate moonlight. Her next project is a pier in England that will flicker in cue with light storms all around the world.
“I’m planning to build a smaller window-version as well,” says Katie. “One you could take home.”
Another piece in the works employs nanotechnology. Katie is looking to make nano-sand.
“It will make ordinary sand grains look enormous,” she says.
‘All the dead stars’
Monday, November 23, 2009 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Tomorrow’s Weather in Copenhagen
Swedish artist duo Bigert & Bergström just completed Tomorrow’s Weather, a double helix-shaped glass sculpture, inside of media company Aller’s headquarters in Copenhagen.
The sculpture is fed by the digital representations of forecasts from the Danish Meteorological Institute, and in cue with tomorrow’s weather forecast, the light of the globes shifts it hues…
