famelab

The judges for FameLab are an impressive bunch of people!

lost notes of royal society

Wow. The 1661-1682 minutes of The Royal Society were found in a Hampshire home and are up for auction at Bonhams on the 28th of March. They’re expected to fetch a million pounds, which the Royal Society doesn’t have.

The unnamed family in whose home they were found didn’t know what they had, and claim the notes have been been in the family for as long as they can remember.

I find it a bit distasteful that these important records are going up for auction without giving the RS time to raise funds and/or to study them thoroughly. I hope someone comes through with the dosh and bequeaths them back to the source.

peer reviewing

Two articles about peer reviewing from The Scientist:

• Is Peer Review Broken: a state-of-the-system report. The table with odds for publication is especially interesting, for a given value of interesting = argh.
  
• Truth or Myth: 3 common complaints about the peer review process examined.

The discussion regarding signing reviews is thought-provoking:

Nature journals let reviewers sign reviews, says Bernd Pulverer, editor of Nature Cell Biology, but less than one percent does. “In principle” signed reviews should work, he says, but the competitive nature of biology interferes. “I would find it unlikely that a junior person would write a terse, critical review for a Nobel prize-winning author,” he says.

Less than one percent is mind-boggling. I understand the principles behind anonymity, the candour it provides one to have–and the ability to maintain working relationships and friendships without “you rejected my paper” being an issue–but. My ideal world has an academic environment where the expression of a considered and supported argument does not hinder one’s career, and where rigor is provoked into quality, and I only see that happening when one can be proud to sign one’s name to a review.

paper: blondes have more… fear?

That’ll be the newspaper taglines, at least.

Behavioural inhibition in young children appears to be more frequent in blue-irised American children, and now in blond(er) German children. The putative link is made between melanocyte-stimulating hormones and cortisol (stress-related) stimulators as the underlying mechanism.

Interesting stuff, and will no doubt be picked up on for its quirk value, but it is the kind of research that is a little “so what?” in terms of what one does with that information. Cuddle fair-headed kids more? I bet they already get a little more attention

I do get a bit antsy at the use of cross-cultural to describe findings such as these. I suppose it depends on where your draw your cultural boundaries (and for what purposes), but the danger is that “cross-cultural” is so very easily conflated with “human universal”. If we’re speaking of worldwide cultural variation, Caucasian Americans and Germans are pretty close to sister-taxa.

via Dienekes

paper: echolocation in bats

Once upon a time I considered becoming an evolutionary bat biologist¹. Bats are cool. They’re close to primates on the mammal phylogeny, they have interesting social systems, and some of them have astoundingly sophisticated echolocation systems.

Gareth Jones and Emma Teeling have a paper in TREE: The evolution of echolocation in bats, discussing the phylogenetic history of this trait. It may be quite flexible in the face of ecological constraints and challenges, as there seems to be convergent evolution when different types of calls are mapped onto the molecular phylogenies.

1. Now I just read comics.

ba media fellowships

Unfortunately I’m not a proper UK citizen so I’m not eligible for this, but if I were, oh my!

British Association Media Fellowships: placements for scientists to work in a media organisation to learn about how science stories become news. Deadline for applications is quite soon.

articles from PNAS

Of interest:

1. A modelling paper demonstrating the effects of the global airline network on the spread of epidemic diseases such as SARS. Colizza et al, abstract here.

2. Population genetics paper demonstrating the clustering of human genetic gradients in ancient centres of agricultural origin, and clustering near to coastlines. Amos & Manica, abstract here.

follow-up on Lawrence

Re yesterday’s post:

It’s an interesting essay. I think Science were right to reject it on the basis that it presented no positive suggestions for action. One could be left with only the message that the status quo is acceptable in some situations, if we accept that men and women bring different plates to the table.

The way I see it, there are a number of issues here.

1. The degree to which men and women are different at different things. I have no problem with this. Men and women ARE different. Different bits, different brains, different developmental experiences.
2. Where those differences come from and how they develop. I’m unable to discern what sort of take the author has here and to what degree he thinks in terms of nature/nurture and biology = unchangeable.
3. The culture of academia and how it favours certain traits–something which has a history in itself. With respect to the question of why all the women disappear as one moves into more senior positions, I think this is actually vastly more relevant than any on-average “suitability”.
4. “Is” and “Ought”. Just because women may be on-average more (for example) nurturing, doesn’t mean we ought to be happy with a predominance of women psychologists. The whole concept of “on-average abilities” should surely fly out the window when we are talking about highly skilled/intelligent/trained individuals, because we’re dealing with those people in the upper tail end of their respective curve, not the average 68%. What we should be happy with is an absence of the commercial model in academic culture, one that allows a diversity of people to be thoroughly considered on a number of qualities for any given position.

I was more interested in the mention of creativity and originality in science. It’s a tired old truism that it’s hard to be creative and viable in many areas of science, but I’d like to know what creativity actually means. How could I foster “creative” approaches to my own work? Answers, plz.

paper: men, women + ghosts in science

The leaky pipeline in science, or why 60% of biology undergrads are female yet only 10% of professors are. Science rejected this after long consideration, but it got published by PLoS Biology. I am just linking to the paper by Peter Lawrence: haven’t read it yet, haven’t read this commentary in The Telegraph, but will do so tomorrow.

phylogeny comparison applet

A nifty little web-based applet for comparing the topology of two phylogenies and identifying where the differences lie. Could be useful in the future. Works for me on a G5 with Firefox. The paper referring to it is:

Nye, T. M. W., Lio, P. & Gilks, W. R. (2006) A novel algorithm and web-based tool for comparing two alternative phylogenetic trees. Bioinformatics, 22: 117-119.