Twitter, what is it good for? Hunh.

There’s been rather an interesting couple of posts over at the Scholarly Kitchen, recently. What am I saying? They’re all interesting. Anyway, Kent Anderson says that blogs are for fogies and David Crotty talks about ‘talking’ vs ‘doing’. Elsewhere on Nature Network we’re re-visiting the meme of why do we blog anyway (to which I’m not going to contribute, myself having decided to do rather than talk about). You can look up the links yourself if you can be bothered.

Anyway, in the middle of a rather long and involved conversation, Eva made a throwaway comment on David Crotty’s post. Then I thought it might be fun to see if I could write a scientific paper in 140 characters.

"Clned gene _cancer_. KO in Ms. Ms dead. Cure cancer."

But why stop there? Here’s a challenge for you.

Your task is to re-write a scientific paper, a real, peer-reviewed and published one, in 140 characters. Twitter it with the hashtag #sci140 so we can track them (OK, so that’s 7 characters you’ve just lost but no one said it would be easy). You can do this as many times as you like, as many papers as you like, and it would be nice if they were your own, but they don’t have to be. I’ll see if I can get some f1000 swag for what I deem to be the best entry.

Go for it.

Via David Bradley, I came across the Valentine for a Scientist meme. This started on Kat Arney’s Facebook page, apparently, and is now taking over Twitter.

What you have to do is substitute a scientist’s name into the lyrics of a song. Such as

• Diamond and Streisand: “You don’t [Simon] Singh me love songs…”
• Jackie Wilson: “[Lord] Rees petite, the finest…”
• Stylistics: “Einstein in love with you…”
• Roxette: “Newturn me on…”
• ZZ Top: “Every girl’s crazy for a [Barry] Sharpless man”

I know how much the NN folk love a good pun, so here’s your opportunity to stretch the funny synapses a little. The sillier and the cornier the better. (I did extend the meme slightly, but that’s because I’m supposed to be working cough. Still, only 5 days until Friday afternoon.)

Have at it.

PS. Feel free to cross-post to Twitter, using the hashtag #scientistlyrics. If you don’t/can’t, I’ll post them appropriately credited.

Remember Eureka? Bora’s been trying to get hold of it. But the word on the street is that he’s going to really really try to come to Science Online London this year (um, Victor, we really need to change the date on that site), and would love to look at it.

I’m going to start collecting copies henceforth (if only so we can rag on it in the LabLit podcast); but if anyone has any back issues they’d be willing to part with, if you can get them to me I’ll pass them onto the big BZ in summer.

Thanks!

What technologies are so ubiquitous, so familiar, that we barely recognize them as technologies any more?

I went to the Libraries of the Future workshop today. This is an initiative set up to explore what academic libraries might look like in, well, the future. Today we examined various global drivers, and thought about the effect they might have on the Higher Education sector more generally (specifically in the UK).

One of the comments made was that in a few years time, the current technologies that we’re using are going to become more or less invisible. Not that they go away, but that they will be so commonplace that nobody will think them worth mentioning.

This reminded me of an exchange I had while I worked for $EVIL_COMPANY (that’s much better than “$ex_company”, which is how I tweeted it from the work account last night. Oops). I had rescued a Mac from Accounts: the company mostly ran Windows but the CSO was a Mac-head (which I think might be why he hired me) and this particular machine was said to be ‘crap’. I worked some magic on it and ran it perfectly happily for two years, much to the amazement of all, not least the muppet of an IT manager that was there.

So, this IT manager came up to me one day in 1998, and asked, “Do Macs do TCP/IP?”

I looked up from my email and my web browser, and said “—”.

Then I tried again, and managed a “Um, yes?”

(Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as a dumb question.)

When I related the tale to my friend Nigel the email came back almost immediately, “My sandwiches do TCP/IP.”

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the iPad and other devices, and EPub and E-Ink and whatnot, and we all, not just geeks, want to know about USB and 802b.11g and 3G and all that balls. The technology is still new and mostly not generally accepted. Not like, say, cars (it’s only the über-geeks who get excited about engine technology) or tennis racquets or even DNA sequencing. Heck, we’ve been talking here about MT4 or WordPress or whatever. It’s certainly not a transparent layer.

We’ll only be able to say that the digital world has truly arrived, that we are completely digitized, when we use all this iStuff to get things done, without paying a second thought to the technology itself. Rather like we do with books, in fact.

I wonder how long it will take.

Q. How many bloggers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. YOU’RE CLEANING YOUR TEETH THE WRONG WAY! EVERYONE KNOWS YOU SHOULD GO FROM LEFT TO RIGHT YOU MORON!

That’s the kind of surrealism I’ve been encountering the last few days. There is a lot I could say. Maybe I should say it—after all, I’ve found myself being insulted and (willfully? I can’t tell) misunderstood—but you know, science blogging is a very small niche in a very small ecosystem in a great big world. And frankly, it’s not worth it.

Instead, I would like to say thank you to Cath and Bob and Eva for some nice things they’ve said elsewhere. And I would like to say a word about Bora Zivkovic.

I said that I didn’t read certain blogs. I said this was because of the comments that are made. Bora pointed out, quite rightly, that there are many of these blogs, and it wasn’t fair to use such a large brush. But the thing is that a little bad does tend to go a long, long way, and Bora has found this out first-hand.

Bora, as you probably know if you’re reading this, co-organizes the Science Online unconference in North Carolina each year. By all accounts the one this year was as amazing as the previous ones—I had the opportunity to go but decided not to for reasons that don’t concern you. A colleague went instead, and had a fantastic and useful time. Unfortunately, a single session at that event has become something of a monster, gaining more and more ugly with each re-telling (and version of re-telling). To such an extent that the entire event is in danger of being overshadowed. Rather like how a small number of commenters can stop me reading what might be very interesting.

This is doubly frustrating because in the recent Scienceblogs/Nature Network spat, I’ve noticed that Bora has tried very hard to be the voice of reason. Yet I’ve heard things that make me cold: people pissing on these very small carpets are having real effects in the real word. We might be a small part of a small part of something huge, but what we say here affects people. Pettiness, bullying, outright aggression—what place do they have anywhere, virtual or corporeal? There are people with hopes and aspirations and relationships at the other end of the long damp piece of internet string. We tend to forget that, I think. And Bora, I, for one, am sorry it’s been so smelly of late.

I had lunch with Sarah Greene, the new editor of The Scientist today (so new, the yolk’s still glistening). It’s not name-dropping if I work with her (and anyway, I wrote the press release).

Where was I? Oh yes.

We got to talking about how we want to bring Faculty of 1000 and The Scientist closer together; what each can bring to the table and where, in fact, I fit in. One of the things we considered was videos. Now, I might be a little old-fashioned in many ways, but I’m pretty hip and happening when it comes to the new meeja (thinks: can I persuade Vitek to buy me an iPad?). At least, that’s what it says on my job description. However, I’m feeling more than a little ambivalent about video—at least for scientists and the stuff that they we like to do during daylight hours (once the lights go out, you’re on your own, boys and girls).

You see, when I was in the lab—and even now that I fly a desk—I feel very itchy about watching work-related videos on the firm’s time. If the video is longer than about 2’53" then I’ll either jump to near the end, if it’s like to be important; or (more usually) skip it altogether. I’ve not even watched the f1000 videos I’m supposedly responsible for. Podcasts? Fine! I’ll stick on the headphones and listen to a podcast, or preferably stick it on my iPod and listen to it on the Tube going to or from work (I’ve tried doing the same with videos, but I find watching out for tourists at Green Park a better use of my optical faculties.) I tend not to watch longer internetty videos at home either, because I usually have better things to do (films etc. is a tad different); and besides, it’s work. And the other side of the coin is that if I were a PI I’d probably have a complete benny if my post-docs were sitting round watching telly when they should be winning me a Nobel Prize.

So how do the rest of you feel about science-type videos and podcasts? What do you listen to or watch if you do? Is there room in the busy scientist’s schedule for either or both of these?

Eva Amsen, the UK welcomes you!

(I was going to post a picture of Eva, but she gets upset at that. So here’s a snowman instead)

More and more frequently the edges
of me dissolve and I become
a wish to assimilate the world, including
you, if possible through the skin
like a cool plant’s tricks with oxygen
and live by a harmless green burning
(Margaret Atwood, More and more)

As you may or may not have realized, I tend not to talk about published science here. Frankly, wittering about research isn’t exactly thrilling, and by the time I get around to it lots of nice people have already covered it anyway. Besides, these days I get paid to do it, which actually is rather nice. No, I’d much rather talk about the human side of being a scientist, or sciencey stuff as it affects me or other people. I tend to waffle a bit.

But I saw a paper today that is begging to be blogged. It’s not peer-reviewed research though so don’t run away screaming just yet.

‘Not peer-reviewed?’ I hear you gasp, ‘What manner of madness is this?’ Settle down. We’re talking Nature Precedings: which as far as I can tell is somewhere you can publish any old preliminary crap and not worry about it affecting your chances of publishing in Science. So, on to

Artificial Photosynthesis Would Unify the Electricity-Carbohydrate-Hydrogen Cycle for Sustainability .

Dr Yi-Heng Percival Zhang proposes linking electricity, carbohydrate and hydrogen in a cycle that would simultaneously solve the CO₂ and energy resource problems. And world hunger, too. Essentially it’s synthetic photosynthesis, fixing CO₂ using electricity from whatever source we care to name:

8 CO₂ (g) + 8 H₂O (l) + electricity → C₆H₁₀O₅ (s) + C₂H₆O (l) + 9 O₂ (g)

Or, more poetically,

like an insect caught by a spider, it is separated from its oxygen, combined with hydrogen and […] inserted in a chain
(Primo Levi, The Periodic Table)

Nailed there, not by a flashing form of a packet of light, but by man-made engines of electrosynthesis.

Pretty cool, if it’ll work. It reminds me of an idea I had for making biodiesel from any suitable green plant. You see, the problem with biodiesel is you’re still cutting down rainforest to grow it. So, I reasoned, why not convert off-shore oil platforms into rapeseed or palm plantations, thus freeing up valuable land in developed countries, saving the rainforest and simultaneously converting everyone to biodiesel (just don’t get me started about ethanol fuels in cars. Brr). There are of course problems with this approach, but I reckon you might make a worse start than using those same platforms for the good Dr Yi-Heng’s idea.

This does remind me of another thought I had, related to the one about letting Jenny tattoo me with GFP. While photosynthesizing ex-oil platforms might be impractical, I reckon crowd-sourcing has much more potential. Theoretically we should be able to engineer skin cells to convert the sun’s energy and all that excess CO₂ we have knocking around into sugar. I mean, we know the process, right?

Even as we speak, BlackKnight Industries scientists are toiling in their labs to produce prototype skin grafts, after which they will transfect adult stem cells with appropriate genes. Our plan is to give volunteers in sunny climes (which, coincidentally, tend to be the poorest nations of the world) one, maybe even two, photosynthetic arms. While these lucky individuals go about their daily business, these Synth-O-Arms® will silently convert CO₂ into carbohydrate, which will be fed directly into the bloodstream. After the initial trials we’ll start modifying entire populations.

Imagine: solving global warming and world hunger at a stroke. I’m just wishing I thought of publishing the idea in Precedings.

just saw AVATAR… long and a bit boring in places but GODDAM AMAZING EFFECTS

says the Elder Pawn on her Facebook profile.

Which is a succinct review, if a little lacking in insight. But she’s right: I took the Pawns to see James Cameron’s latest oeuvre this afternoon, and it is a very long movie (subjectively at least) but made rather special through the clever use of 3-D. We’re not talking about red/green glasses here, either: these are (rather nerdish-looking) specs that I suspect are made of slightly differently polarized lenses, such that each eye sees a slightly different view and the brain interprets this as 3-D.

I spent not a little time taking the glasses on and off and squinting at the screen—the bits that are meant to be given depth are fuzzy when viewed without the glasses, but you can see perfectly normally with them on. Very neat. (And someone said, as we entered the theatre, ’I wish the cinema itself was in 3-D!". Um, yeah, we laughed at that.)

Enough technology. And enough of the politics: there are a few points I want to ponder later, but Abigail Nussbaum has already dumped a load of well-informed comment into her excellent blog. Let’s talk about the science (or the biology, anyway) a bit.

So I was reading somewhere else that the complete world that Cameron has built is one that is “intelligently designed” rather than evolved, because of the whole hexa/tetrapod thing they’ve got going on. Now, laying aside the fact that this is a goddammed movie, folks, and once you start talking about consistency of alien species you may as well pick up your Star Trek collection and go home, I’m not convinced by that argument anyway. It seems to me that the land-dwelling beasties could quite happily share a common ancestor; indeed, the sloth-thingies had a joint for the extra pair of legs three-quarters of the way up the front limbs, and it wouldn’t take much of a mutation to give animals an extra set of limbs. Hox genes, anyone?

What is more unbelievable is the presence of bipedal humanoid creatures that (apparently) breathe through their noses; where everything else on the planet breathes through their chests. (A much more sensible arrangement than the Terran, one would have thought). But as we all know this is simply a case of narrative imperative: if the dominant, intelligent aboriginal species was a six-legged herbivore then you’d have no chance of manipulating the sympathy of the audience.

Being able to grow a body and transfer one’s consciousness into it willy-nilly strikes me as a reasonably original concept. This of course isn’t the message of Avatar: that’s the rather naive and insulting one about ecology and nobel savages, which has been pretty much taken apart all over the shop. Even the ability to plug oneself into the brain of another animal has been done (Terry Pratchett, anyone? “I aten’t dead”?), although I did appreciate that this was possibly related to how the ‘avatar’ mechanism was supposed to work in the first place.

What was cool, and what actually flowed naturally from this concept rather than being a stonking great deus ex planeta, was the entire biosphere being some kind of interlinked super-organism. This wasn’t given to the credulous viewer as axiomatic; rather the idea of a mass of communicating nodes giving rise to intelligence—some flavour of deity, in fact—was compared with the fact that billions of synapses make up a functioning and above all conscious brain.

And this is where it was rather neat to see Sigourney Weaver scrabbling around in the lab and saying things like “signal transduction!” in cold blood. That the signals were being transduced between trees rather than neurons is just a matter of scale.

That about wraps it up for science, so I’ll finish with some thoughts about the politics. A braver movie wouldn’t have had the Red Indians Na’vi winning. A thoughtful movie, one that wasn’t simply toeing the party line on ecological messages and being a showpiece for admittedly gorgeous special effects, would not have had a cartoon bad guy talking in clichés; would not have had the industrial-military complex being beaten by guys with sticks: rather we’d have seen the scientists save the day.

The scientists (embodied in the amazingly fit Sigourney Weaver) were treated sympathetically, even if portrayed as a little kooky (and why, 140 years from now on a planet with a hostile atmosphere, would anyone smoke cigarettes?). The scientist, just as in 2012, went up against the baddies (in this case the industrialist rather than the politician). Unfortunately in the movie common sense and compassion didn’t prevail, and Sigourney Weaver karked it at the bottom of a huge, glowing tree (and that had to be a body double, surely?). She did have a brilliant last line, though—Jenny laughed and poked me in the ribs and told me to remember—"We need to take some samples". That’s biological dedication for you.

And all this is a bit of a shame, really, quite apart from the wasted opportunity to do something interesting with the plot. Because you know what’s going to happen in a dozen years, don’t you?

A private company has managed to build a spaceship; a rather lovely one, actually, that reminded me strongly of the Discovery. They’ve had their mercenaries wiped out and been sent packing, leaving behind vast deposits of some incredibly expensive and above all useful if stupidly-named element (just what do you think was holding those mountains up, hmm?). What’s more, there’s a shedload of technology been left behind in the hands of not-too-bright-but-obviously-quick-learning natives. Natives who are incredibly warlike, too—they only accepted Braveheart Smurf on parole when he said he was a warrior (of the ‘Jarhead’ clan: possibly the best line in the movie). I’d actually be quite jittery if they were my neighbours.

And not just the technology—a scientist and a technician who in all likelihood know how to use it. Can we say ‘accelerated development’? I think we can.

So the company reps get back and go straight to the most powerful government on Earth at the time, and say hey, there’s these guys who just whupped our corporate ass, who’ve got guns as well all sorts of wildlife on their side, and what’s more they’re sitting on these deposits of magical ore. You don’t think they might be a bit sore about this? You don’t think they might be plotting revenge? You don’t think that the traitors might be teaching the natives the secrets of interstellar travel?

Don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, we should build another spaceship and nuke the site from orbit?

It’s the only way to be sure.

I should imagine that most readers of this blog do not seriously think that women are any less able, intrinsically, than men to do science. (Wired readers excepted.)

It all started when I gave a friend a Bosch cordless drill for her birthday.

Something that isn’t pink

She was glad it wasn’t pink: there seems to be a lot of pink going around and I don’t know why. Pink used to be a boy’s colour; the colour of blood, but watered down a little. Sometime in the earlier part of the last century it became a girl’s colour, and in the last couple of decades it has been appropriated by marketeers intent on selling things to girls (or their mothers). You can get pink lego, pink mobiles, and yes, pink roadside tool kits (complete with a ‘Help’ sign).

Something too pink

It’s now necessary to dress your human offspring in either pink or blue, just so people can tell what sex they are. As if that matters. And let’s not even start about the infantilization of one half the human race, and the trivialization of serious matters by corporate bigwigs who make a profit by pretending to be responsible and caring.

So this drill. I think its non-pinkness was appreciated, and that set me to thinking that anyone who really appreciated power toys tools wouldn’t want them in pink, and that anyone who didn’t know what to do with same probably wouldn’t be in any better a position if it were pink.

I find the whole thing a little distressing, because I’d hoped we’d moved on from attitudes that patronized and repressed women (which, if it’s not clear, I think pinkification does). This contributed to the depression I felt at the sheer masculinity—no, masculinity is good ; this is more patriarchalism—of the Eureka supplement. And of the cavilling response from its editor. (I notice there’s another issue of that out, but the web version looks boring, and offering to do a special piece on women scientists completely misses the point, so I’m not really keen to give Rupert Murdoch any more of my money.)

Fortunately, the state of science and technology with respect to sexual equality is not all bleak (and this is where my wireless scanner comes in handy). Jenny was feeling a little homesick last week and went and bought a copy of the New Yorker. We were quite taken by the cover, and indeed podcasted it.

The New Yorker last week

Leaving aside the “scientists=white coat + glasses” thing (and to be fair, they probably should be wearing safety goggles anyway), the representation of the sexes among the ‘scientists’ in the cartoon is pretty good. Similarly, check out the ‘engineers’ (who you can tell are engineers because they’re wearing yellow hats): three male and two female. (The dude with the ponytail has stubble. So either a man or a very testosterone-fuelled woman). Not only is 2/5 equal to 1/2 in biological terms (i.e. the sample size is too small), note that the woman engineer is quite obviously the foreman, that is, in charge. This is brilliant stuff, and The Times would do well to learn from the New Yorker.

Thumbs up there, then.

Kinda related to this directionless ramble is a little shi flurry that blew up on Twitter last week. Via @womenintech I saw that Maggie Philbin said she’d been to the Royal Society, and noted that of 50 paintings on the walls, only two were of women. Shock, and indeed horror.

But wait a minute. The Royal Society elects members according to how good they are, and (unrelated to that statement) it’s only been relatively recently that they admitted women—and I think it’s more than slightly unjust of us to judge the actions and attitudes of long-dead men by contemporary standards. So let’s have a closer look.

According to the RS itself, women comprise 5% of its membership. And 2/50 is four percent, which to a cell biologist is the same number. So that sounds fair. But isn’t that number itself discriminatory in some way? Surely more women than that deserve to elected to the RS?

Well, in the last eight years ten percent of new members have been women, which is a bit ‘better’. According to their website, candidates for election to the Fellowship must have made

“a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science”.

and seeing as the Society’s place is not to drive recruitment choices, no matter how noble the cause, but rather to recognize outstanding contributions; and given the Higher Education Statistics Agency reports that of full-time and part-time professors in science subjects at UK universities, about 9% are women, we can see that the proportion of female Fellows now elected reflects the small percentage of female professors in university science subjects from which Fellows are elected.

Again, quoting from the RS website (emphasis mine),

In August 2002, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published the report of its inquiry into the Government funding of the scientific learned societies. The report concluded: “We do not think that the present low level of female Fellows in the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering represents any discrimination against women.”

Listen up. You’ve got to be good at science to get in the FRS (certain high profile non-FRSes might consider that this is why they didn’t get elected; not because of their sex). It’s nothing at all to do with sexism or positive discrimination.

So there is a related question, the which I don’t know how to go about answering: what percentage of ‘top’ papers are authored—and I suppose we should say, in the biological sciences at least, senior authors—are women? Does it reflect that 10% figure?

And if not, why?