Blogs
In a thought-provoking post, Eva Amsen discusses the gap between the ‘two cultures’. Not the familiar CP Snow polarisation of science and art, but the less obvious separation of science and technology
It’s true, they used to go well together, and in certain fields of research they still do, but apart from areas like computer science or bioinformatics, there is no correlation between people who like to use computers, and people who like to do research…The thing is: scientists are just like normal people. You’ll find that a small group of them is hugely interested in blogging, just like a small group of the overall population is. Another (perhaps overlapping) group is over the moon about new web tools they can try out in the lab, just like there’s a small group of early adopters in the general population. But by and large, many scientists hate new things.
Barbara Ferreira neatly bridges this gap, although she’s has mixed feelings about new RFID technology. While she lays out several examples of its usefulness for stock control and even keeping an eye on infants, Barbara thinks she may have been a victim of its flaws after her bank card was used by a third party:
In fact, the video I linked to earlier does seem to indicate that RFID-related fraud can be a real threat. It shows that it is reasonably easy and cheap to buy a “contactless” reader that, if placed close enough to your card, could extract information such as the card number and expiry date from it.
You have been warned.
Question of the week comes from Kausik Datta, who asks: How do you do it?. Specifically:
How do you manage it all? How do you deal with the information overload and the urge to disseminate it, along with your views and opinions?
A growing comments thread offers numerous solutions, although ditching the TV seems to be a consensus.
Elsewhere, GrrlScientist counts parrots, Eric-Wubbo Lameijer examines the ratio between finger lengths and what it can tell us about a person, and good luck to Anne-Marie Hodge, who’s heading out to Ecuador for field research.
In other news…
Bloggers can now decide on the copyright licence they wish to apply to their blog. Various Creative Commons options are available.
This week, we’ve also been putting the final touches to a new reward scheme for Nature Network bloggers, as we mentioned a few weeks ago in the private bloggers forum. This scheme will come into effect in the New Year so keep your eyes peeled for a full announcement with details of how this will work.
Finally, the Workbench section of Nature Network is now ready for any developers who want to create scientific widgets (press release). A new blog, written by Nature Publishing Group’s Marta Rolak, explains the process of creating and submitting a widget to the site. Marta also gave a talk about the initiative at the OpenSocial conference in Utrecht this week. Her slides will be available online soon.
And finally…
Viktor Poór commemorates the landmark discovery of an arsenic metabolising bacterium with a special cartoon
