Science Library Pad

Canadian microsat to look for near-earth asteroids

Canada is preparing to launch the first space mission ever to search for asteroids between Earth and the sun -- the type of asteroid most likely to slam into our planet.

Fittingly for this country, the Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite is not a Hubble-sized monster. It's a 60-kilogram microsatellite, costing a mere $10 million, yet able to deliver science results never seen before.

NEOSSat will search for asteroids that are closer to the sun than Earth. These are nearly impossible to see from our planet's surface -- there's too much atmosphere and sunshine -- but easier to spot from space.

canada.com - Canada space mission targets asteroids - May 02, 2008

Since newspaper science articles are notoriously bad at accurately explaining things, you can also read

The Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat) Mission Enables an Efficient Space-Based Survey (NESS Project) of Interior-to-Earth-Orbit (IEO) Asteroids (PDF)
by
Hildebrand A.R., Tedesco E.F., Carroll K.A., Cardinal R.D., Matthews J.M., Kuschnig R., Walker G.A.H., Gladman, B., Kaiser, N.R., Brown P.G., Larson S.M., Worden, S.P., Wallace, B.J., Cho-das P.W., Muinonen K., Cheng A., Gural P.
from Lunar and Planetary Science XXXVIII (2007)

I couldn't find a Wikipedia article for it, so I made one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Object_Surveillance_Satellite

Obscure historical sidebar: B. Gladman was also a student of my grad astrophysics supervisor.  A much, much better student.

2008 Canadian BioTalent

Teenage scientists are gathering this week at the Canada Science and Technology Museum for the Eastern Ontario regional competition in biotechnology. Eleven student projects will be displayed and presented to the judging panel, composed of local researchers and leaders in the field of biotechnology.

The Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge (SABC) introduces students to the real world of biotechnology by carrying out research projects of their own design. Each student team works with a mentor, who provides expert advice and access to equipment and supplies.

The Canada Science and Technology Museum donates an award to the project team demonstrating the highest calibre of scientific interpretation. Other prizes include scholarships at local institutions and summer jobs at the National Research Council. Nearly $10,000 in prizes will be given out at the ceremony on April 30 [2008].

Canada Science and Technology Museum - News Releases - Ottawa’s top biotechnology students compete in regional competition

In 2008, with increased support from BioTalent Canada the competition will be face-to-face where 14 regional winners will compete for the National title in Ottawa. The top 2 winners of the National SABC Competition will be able to compete in the sanofi-aventis International BioGENEius Challenge at the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s (BIO) Annual International Convention.

THE 2008 NATIONAL COMPETITION: May 6th [2008]
2008 AWARDS CEREMONY: May 7th [2008]
LOCATION: THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL CANADA IN OTTAWA

http://sanofibiotalentchallenge.ca/national-competition/

The Canada Science and Technology Museum will be having an accompanying Biotechnology Lecture Series on May 6 & 7, 2008.  A couple examples from their schedule:

May 6 - 11:15 a.m.
Dr. John Bell
“Using Viruses to Kill Cancer Cells”

May 7 - 1:00 p.m.
Dr. Mads Kaern and students from University of Ottawa
“Genetically engineered machines:  Their scientific and economic potential”

the de-zoned BL struggles with its popularity

Would that we all had such problems with our reading rooms.

in 1998 the library moved to a modern red-brick building on Euston Road, and four years ago it liberalized its admission policy. It opened its new reading rooms not only to writers and academics who depend on material from its singular collection, but also to “anyone who has a relevant research need,” a spokeswoman said.

Which is all fine. But “anyone” includes college undergraduates, and the problem with them, at least in the eyes of the older researchers, is that they tend to behave like the teenagers that many of them are.

...

Researchers have been grousing about the boisterous atmosphere and crowded conditions at the British Library for years. But the dispute — a philosophical battle, really, over who should be allowed access to a great national library — spilled out in public last week when The Times of London published an article quoting various distinguished figures complaining about the out-of-control mood over spring break.

New York Times - Shh! In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Giggling - April 28, 2008

Although there are 1,480 seats in the library, the author Christopher Hawtree was last week forced to perch on a windowsill while the historians Lady Antonia Fraser and Claire Tomalin have swapped horror stories of interminable queues. Library users complain that the line to enter the new building in St Pancras, central London, has recently been extending across its enormous courtyard.

Speaking to The Times yesterday, Lady Antonia said: “I had to queue for 20 minutes to get in, in freezing weather. Then I queued to leave my coat for 20 minutes [at the compulsory check-in]. Then half an hour to get my books and another 15 minutes to get my coat. I’m told it’s due to students having access now. Why can’t they go to their university libraries?”

Of particular irritation is the notion that many undergraduates now come to the library to relax, meet and text friends, and play on laptops, rather than to read books. “It’s become a social gathering,” Lady Antonia said.

The Times - Frustration for authors as students hog British Library reading rooms - April 21, 2008

Celebridée – Ottawa - May 2 to 19, 2008 - Chris Anderson, Salman Rushdie, Kunstler...

As part of the tulip festival, a collection of thinkers and music and stuff.

In 2008, Celebridée will come into full bloom in the Tulip Festival Mirror Tent headlining Sir Salman Rushdie, one of the world's most celebrated and controversial novelists. Other headliners include Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond.

...

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. Yale University's Amy Chua will present World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, ..., the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics will present The Mystery of Dark Matter, and Richard Florida, author of Who's Your City, will discuss Creative Cities.

Celebridée will also feature several partner events including 1783 – Subject or Citizen? an event on the Treaty of Paris by Library and Archives Canada and musical concerts including two evenings with Angela Hewitt: The Well-Tempered Clavier and Janina Fialkowska & The Chamber Players of Canada, all at St. Andrew's Church.

from http://www.celebridee.com/

Richard Florida's blog is also mirrored at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/creativeclass

UPDATE: I see Ottawa's own Clive Doucet will also be speaking.  I liked his book Urban Meltdown.

UPDATE: Since Colin mentioned he had some trouble finding the actual schedule, it's hidden away at http://www.tulipfestival.ca/en/Celeb_Events/

Facebook adds cliques: yay!

I've been wanting for a long time to be able to share information in Facebook in a very granular way.  They have finally enabled it, but the settings are not as centralized as one might wish.

Some settings are under the master Privacy control panel

http://www.facebook.com/privacy.php

whereas others are more easily found on the individual pages for particular capabilities.  For example, photo privacy, to set who can view which albums, is at

http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=photos

And very confusingly, which there are some application settings on the main privacy page

http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=platform

The very granular "let some friends/friends lists see an application in my profile, but not others" is in the Applications edit screen, under Edit Settings for each application.  Also, unfortunately, when you add a new application I didn't see any way to set the privacy before it is added to your profile, only after it is added.  So there is a brief window when it is outside of privacy control, using the default settings.

http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php

You can set access for friends either per individual, or per friend list, and you can add multiple friends lists to the allowed group ("allow only - default deny").  You can also exclude, or as I prefer to think of it, outcast specific friends lists ("allow all but - default allow").  It's like firewall rules for friends.

You can also if you want, allow friends of friends, and control access by network (networks are things like the Ottawa network, the Your Company Name Here network etc.)

This means that I can finally start adding some apps like Dopplr, which provides detailed travel info I might not necessarily want to share with the world.

In case you're wondering, yes this is a real rule in my account, it says "allow all friends to see my Dopplr travel status, except those in friends list 'random people'". [UPDATE: err to clarify, 'random people' is a friends list that contains people that I don't know very well.]

See Facebook Blog - More Privacy Options for more info.

UPDATE: As with setting complex firewall rules, getting the rules set up for all applications is quite time consuming.  Things that would help:

1. "Rule sets" - All creation of rules that can be applied to all applications, or to a subset of apps, and anywhere that privacy rules are used, e.g. "everyone in the lists 'work' and 'work friends' can see this, no one else".
2. Testing - there is no way to test the rules that I can see - it would be very helpful to have a "see this profile as it appears to user X" option.

Previously:
January 18, 2008  social networlds colliding
November 08, 2007  posting TypePad entries to Facebook
August 14, 2007  FaceBook pulls open scientists into the dark web

the Nature of Canadian science

In an editorial today, Nature expressed concerns about the position of science and science advice within the Canadian government

When the Canadian government announced earlier this year that it was closing the office of the national science adviser, few in the country's science community were surprised. Science has long faced an uphill battle for recognition in Canada, but the slope became steeper when the Conservative government was elected in 2006.

The decision in 2004 by the then prime minister Paul Martin to appoint a scientist for independent, non-partisan advice on science and technology was a good one — in principle. Arthur Carty, the chemist who secured the position, duly relinquished his post as president of the National Research Council Canada, which he had revitalized.

But his new office was destined to fail. The budget was abysmal and the mandate was vague at best. After winning power from the Liberals, the Conservatives moved Carty's office away from the prime minister's offices to Industry Canada. In 2007, the government formed the 18-member Science, Technology and Innovation Council (STIC). ... It can be expected to be markedly less independent: although it is stocked with first-class scientists and entrepreneurs, several government administrators also hold seats.

Concerns can only be enhanced by the government's manifest disregard for science.

Nature 451, 866 (21 February 2008) "Science in retreat" | doi:10.1038/451866a | Published online 20 February 2008 - Full Text - PDF

First published in 1869, Nature is a prominent international journal of peer-reviewed science.  According to Journal Citation Reports information available at in-cites.com, Nature was the second most-cited scientific journal worldwide in 2006.

UPDATE 2008-02-22: Reported today in the Globe and Mail

In a strongly worded editorial, entitled Science in Retreat and published in yesterday's issue, the British journal Nature wrote that while Canada's researchers consistently rank among the world's finest, the same cannot be said for the federal government's position on science and research.

...

In a rebuttal letter to Nature, Industry Minister Jim Prentice writes that the government is committed to "supporting world-leading research."

UPDATE: Also in the February 22, 2008 Ottawa Citizen

Under the headline "Science in Retreat," an editorial in yesterday's issue of the British journal Nature says Canada's Conservative government has a "dismal" track record on science and the environment.

The government issued a pointed rebuttal late yesterday afternoon, saying some of the criticisms are "completely misleading," while one is "incomprehensible."

...

It "has expressed what many of us feel," says geologist Andrew Miall, of the University of Toronto, and president of the Royal Society of Canada's Academy of Science.

The academy has not taken an official position, but Mr. Miall said via e-mail that he and his colleagues, as individual scientists, are "very concerned" about the dismantling of science advisory bodies and dismissal of senior independent advisers -- most notably Canada's national science adviser, chemist Arthur Carty, the former president of the National Research Council.

...

"How anyone can state that 18 bright minds [on STIC] cannot perform the task of one science adviser -- who decided to retire after years of dedicated public service -- is incomprehensible," Industry Minister Jim Prentice says in the rebuttal [to the Nature editorial] provided to Canwest News Service.

Disclaimer: I'm just the messenger.  Any statements quoted from the Nature article above, or indeed any statements I quote from any article, represent the opinions and research of the original authors alone, and don't necessarily reflect my opinion.  When it comes to anything to do with the Canadian government, this blog has no official opinions of any kind whatsoever.

an end to health care waiting - CIHR Café Scientifique

I thought Café Scientifique was just a clever name from CIHR (we do this sometimes in the Federal Government to get around bilingualism issues) but it turns out it is a Movement.

Wikipedia comes through with the info as usual: Café Scientifique

CIHR has held and will hold events across Canada, the next one is

All I ever do is wait! Putting an end to health care wait times

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008, 6 p.m.
Mercury Lounge
56 Byward, Ottawa
Please RSVP: cafescientifique@cihr-irsc.gc.ca

Also LIVE on the Web at www.webcastcanada.ca/cihr-irsc

CIHR - Café scientifique - or in French, err... Cafés scientifiques des IRSC

Open Access: it's the law

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

signed into law on Wednesday December 26, 2007

Based on my understanding of the US political system, this involves the bill's hand being shaken and possibly streamers and balloons

Widely reported.  I'm sure there will be lots, and lots of coverage over on Open Access News.

the central public library is a key civic space

I find myself in an unusual position: I'm usually the one advocating for distributed, virtual everything.  But not in the case of a central public library.  While I agree with Ken Gray that there should be library branches everywhere - why not an Internet kiosk with book pickup and dropoff at your local coffee shop? - I do think that a central public library plays a key role in the public space of the city.

Some councillors have been musing about spending $200 million for a monumental main library branch. If the city were flush with cash, that would be a worthwhile project. But one wonders if there isn't a less-expensive and more-effective way of getting the library and the Internet to residents.

When I enter the Rosemount branch, which is in a neighbourhood with some economic and social difficulties, I see about eight computers almost always occupied (often by children) near the entrance. That's a way of getting the Internet in the hands of people without the means to own their own computer.

Rather than spend $200 million on a huge downtown library, perhaps the library board should be looking at something smaller, more effective and more extensive.

Instead, let's extend the reach of the library system by creating small storefront kiosks with a banks of computers so that clients can access the Internet and the virtual library. The branches could continue with their traditional stacks and maintain their very useful function of being places where you can pick up your materials ordered from the virtual library.

Ottawa Citizen - Ken Gray . Taking libraries to the street - December 21, 2007

If Ottawa had a fantastic downtown, I might even be inclined to agree, but let's face it, Ottawa has a dismal downtown with limited public space.  A bunch of hideous glass towers.  A brutalist National Arts Centre.  An expensive condo next to a grand old hotel.  (Plus which, people are so used to private space that they have forgotten the concept of a hotel lobby as a public space.)  A giant mall.  A former train station that is now a closed government conference centre.

Out of this a great civic life of public spaces one does not make.  Even if they do manage to do the Chamber Festival hall and the new Conference Centre, it still will make a minimal addition to the available public space.  Finished skating with the kids on the canal?  Where do you go?

Done properly, an inviting central public library is an engine for citizen engagement and enjoyment, a reminder of the common benefits we get for our tax dollars.  The city spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year on roads for the private convenience of suburbanities.  You want to know where your public library is?  Your grand municipal buildings?  Our great public works?  They're all around you... in flat black strips of multi-million dollar asphalt.  Two hundred million dollars?  Ok let's say conservatively a road costs $5 million per km.  That "monumental" expense for a library?  Same cost as 40km of road.  Crazy!  Oh wait, in 2007 alone, the city of Ottawa built 200km of road.

Previously:
August 25, 2007  America, land of the grand library

Amazon Kindle: books you can never share

Ah yes, progress.  Now for only $10 you can buy a book and read it.

ONLY you can read it and ONLY on Amazon's $400 Kindle e-book reader.

Want to give it to a friend?  Sell it?  Pass it on to your children?  Donate it to a library?  Sorry, too bad, it's "licensed digital content", don't you know.

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Restrictions. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

(Some emphasis above mine.)  I find it interesting that in all the Engadget hoopla, and on the entire snazzy Kindle page, this is never mentioned.  You have to go to Kindle Support, and find the last item on the page (Amazon Kindle Terms of Use and Policies), and then you get another list of pages where you have to select "License Agreement and Terms of Use", and then find the Digital Content section within that item.

How many people do you think are going to do that?

I also like this language "you may not, and you will not".  Um, ok I can see how you can forbid it, but "you will not"?  What is this, like a contractual limitation on reality?

learn from music industry, we all can

Speaking at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, Edgar Bronfman told mobile operators that they must not make the same mistake that the music industry made.

"We used to fool ourselves,' he said. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won."

Mobile operators risk the same, he said. Fewer than 10% of mobile owners buy music on their handset, the vast majority of which is ringtones.

"The sad truth is that most of what consumers are being offered today on the mobile platform is boring, banal and basic," he said. "People want a more interesting form of mobile music content. They want it to be easy to buy with a single click - yes, a single click, not a dozen. And they want access to it, quickly and easily, wherever they are. 24/7. Any player in the mobile value chain who thinks they can provide less than a great experience for consumers and remain competitive is fooling themselves."

MacUser - Music boss: we were wrong to go to war with consumers - November 14, 2007

widely reported

All of us who are adapting to the new ways of operating in the digital environment can learn a lesson from this.

ROM unearths dinosaur... in their own collection

Or: "One small sentence for John McIntosh, one giant dinosaur for the Royal Ontario Museum".

"This is a fascinating and somewhat humorous story, and one the Museum is extremely pleased to tell,” said the ROM’s Director and CEO William Thorsell.

Dr. David Evans, new Associate Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology in the ROM’s Department of Natural History, found the ultimate “skeleton in the closet.” Arriving in May 2007 to head up the ROM’s dinosaur research program, one of his first jobs was to find a sauropod dinosaur for display in the new Age of Dinosaurs gallery. The ROM’s new gallery already included excellent specimens of three of the four most recognizable dinosaur types – T.Rex, Triceratops, and Stegasaurus – but none of the largest dinosaurs, the sauropods.

After spending months investigating options, including purchasing a cast or even digging one up, Evans found what he was looking for in an unexpected place. While on a related trip to Wyoming, he was reading an article by famed sauropod expert Jack McIntosh when something caught his eye -- a reference to a Barosaurus skeleton at the ROM. The ROM’s databases turned up a blank, but after connecting the disparate dinosaur dots Evans was able to show that what were thought to be isolated bones scattered throughout the collections room actually belonged to a single dinosaur.

ROM News Releases - Massive Barosaurus skeleton discovered at the ROM

CTV Newsnet has a good video (which is either not available or not free) where Dr. Evans says it was a 2005 article by McIntosh that said the skeleton was transferred from the Carnegie Museum to the ROM.  I did some searching and I turned up a single 2005 book chapter "The Genus Barosaurus Marsh (Sauropoda, Diplodocidae)", which is searchable on Amazon, the book is Thunder-lizards: The Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs (ISBN-13: 978-0253345424) and on page 42 it says

"These elongate cervicals (CM 1198) probably belong to a partial skeleton, field #155 (now ROM 3670), which was originally identified as Diplodocus."

Here's a direct link to Amazon book search for page 40, which shows the ROM abbreviation (I couldn't quite figure out how to get it to go to page 42, but you can scroll there).  The book is also on Google Book Search, but page 42 is a forbidden page there.

The dinosaur is named "Gordo".

Scientific American - 60 second science

Scientific American has launched an additional site

http://www.60secondscience.com/

In addition to brief news items, there is also a podcast

http://www.60secondscience.com/archive/science-podcast/

via FeedBurner Publisher Buzz

Andrew Keen and the demise of authority - TVO's The Agenda

TVO's The Agenda had Andrew Keen on, followed by a panel about the changing nature of authority.

You can watch the video, it's linked from The Agenda - Video, it's the Nov 8 2007 show (I do wish people would provide permalinks for these JavaScript popup things).  Their new video player has no time indication, so unfortunately I can't tell you when the second segment on authority starts.

UPDATE 2007-11-12: You can get the audio for Keen and for authority directly from iTunes, as well as see the entire page on Agenda audio podcasts.  The video is also available, see the video podcast page as well as the Keen and authority videos.  ENDUPDATE

Keen basically said "the kids today are too dumb to separate truth from truthiness", from which he draws the conclusion a better system would be elite gatekeepers providing "professional" content.

I still don't quite follow his idolisation of the mass media.
Journalism used to be ok, but you have to go way way back to the early days of TV to find much quality content (and maybe even then it was mostly garbage, I've only seen the highlights from those days).

There was no Web at all in the 70s, 80s and early 90s, do you want to go back and look at some of the professional mass content let through by the gatekeepers Keen lauds?  Good lord man, it was shite, particularly the TV and movies.  We have TV shows that are 10x better now, thanks to a fragmented market.

It's particularly telling to see Keen's visceral reaction of distaste to a video of a Google VP talking about the promise of Web 2.0.  I'm not convinced Keen is motivated so much by a love of "professional" content as by a hatred of Silcon Valley utopianism (possibly related to his being a former Valley entrepreneur).

In case you're not aware, Keen wrote a book called The Cult of the Amateur, which is basically All Hail Mass Media and The Professional Classes.  Which, as I said, would be a more convincing argument if both the media and the professionals had been delivering us amazing content, rather than a lot of commercial pop-cultural lazy garbage.  The amateur cult on LibraryThing has rated the book 2.5 stars out of 5, which is quite a low rating.  Personally I thought it was such utter nonsense I couldn't manage more than a one sentence review.

That being said, I am not a relativist.  I think there are absolute moral and physical truths.  I think all this cultural relativism is baloney.  Science is not one belief system amongst many, there is no "believing" in DNA, as much as post-modernist "professionals" would like to assert.  But where I disagree strongly with Keen is that only the elite authorities have access to this truth.  Professionals can and do spout utter nonsense.  Amateurs can say things that are self-evidently true.  Truth is not relative, but it is equally available.

The most notable weakness of Keen's critique is it is not the public that has been pushing the truthiness agenda, indeed quite the opposite, it is the unwashed masses who have been seeking out BETTER ways of finding factual content, through rigourously referenced Internet postings, while the minor forces of leftist cultural relativism and the major forces of right-wing "when we make a statement it becomes inherent truth" have been leading the Assault on Reason.  Indeed my major beef with Al Gore's book of the same name was that it got diverted into being an anti-Bush diatribe, when the topic of the systematic assault on truth led by the right and supported by the "professional" mass media is one of the biggest and most important stories of the decade.

In fact, so adamant are the Internet amateurs about high-quality content, in the absence of such from the mass professional media, that I think it may be damaging Wikipedia.  There are two competing visions for Wikipedia.  For me, I'd like it to be the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  What Keen sees as a flaw, the fact that its entry for "truthiness" is as meticulously referenced and detailed as its entry for "truth", i see as a strength.  Here's the thing: the Wisdom of Crowds benefits most from... a crowd.  That means a few big central sites can get much better information as there are many more eyeballs checking for bugs.  I have long been dismayed by the decline of USENET, because it used to be one central place you could go to ask a question or start a discussion and get useful responds (yes, along with ridiculous flame threads, but those were manageable).  Now if you want to find info about a digital camera, or ask a question about physics, you're faced with dozens and dozens of fragmented discussion groups and web sites.

Wikipedia can and does address that fragmentation for general knowledge, in the same way that IMDB does for the specific topic of movies.  And at a certain level I agree, very technical items about Battlestar should go on a BG wiki, Warcraft on a Warcraft wiki, Trek on a Trek wiki etc.  But there are lots of general items that still benefit from being in the larger WIkipedia community.  There is a big tension right now unfortunately about what level of "notability" warrants a Wikipedia page.  I would set the bar fairly low - it's tremendously useful for me to do a search on Number Eight and get a nicely curated Wikipedia entry. 

Unfortunately Wikipedia seems to be moving in the other direction.  Sci Foo was challenged for notability (although it survived).  Number Eight is marked as trivia (although the notice has already moved from the top of the page to a miscellany section).  The problem with this is it's going to undermine content creation.  The great thing about Wikipedia is you can put up a starter page about your particular interest, and there are enough people in the crowd that it often builds up into a useful entry.

Anyway, those are my amateur thoughts, in my blog that has created more interesting connections for me than I probably could have ever gotten from an entire lifetime of writing more professionally crafted content for major media venues. 

Turning back to the TVO episode that started this all, the panel on authority that follows Keen is ok, I wish their points had been made a bit more clearly and sharply, they were a bit drifty, but the gist is that questions of truth have been pondered by philosophers since the dawn of philosophy, that the decline of authority (in particular of respect for authority figures such a doctors and teachers) started long before the Internet, and that most people are perfectly capable of separating nonsense (like say Keen's book) from quality content (like a good Wikipedia entry).

Previously:
October 13, 2007  The Wrath of the Professional: more anti-Internet nonsense
October 24, 2006  Maclean's: the Internet sucks

27th Ottawa Antiquarian Book Fair - Oct 27-28, 2007

They don't seem to have a website, but the Ottawa Congress Centre events site says

The Twenty Seventh Ottawa Antiquarian Book Fair has become an exciting fall event for book lovers from across Canada. A display and sale, recognized as one of the finest book fairs in the country, features rare, unusual and collectible books. The fair will include over 40,000 items, dating from the 15th century to the present day, displayed by over 65 booksellers from across Canada.

David Dunlap Observatory to close, replaced by Dunlap Institute

The observatory, in a sense, has fallen victim to the urban sprawl around Toronto. Light pollution from encroaching development has "limited the reach of the telescope in terms of the objects you can actually see," explained Pekka Sinervo, dean of U of T's arts and science department.

When it first opened 72 years ago, it was surrounded by farmers' fields. Now, housing abuts the wooded site that is home to the domed observatory and its stately administrative building.

...

Prof. Sinervo said money from the sale would be used to create a new Dunlap Institute at the university's downtown St. George campus. Among other things, the institute would concentrate on the design and development of sophisticated equipment for the next generation of huge telescopes being planned for more remote and darker locations around the world.

Globe and Mail - Historic telescope blinded by the light - October 16, 2007

The article mentions the work of Prof. Tom Bolton related to black holes, according to the Wikipedia article on Cygnus X-1 the relevant article is

Identification of Cygnus X-1 with HDE 226868
Nature 235, 271 - 273 (04 February 1972); doi:10.1038/235271b0

PS The palindrome of Bolton would be "notlob"

National Science and Technology Week 2007

National Science & Technology Week
October 12-21, 2007

There are various events and tours.

Although not specifically for SciTech Week, the NRC website has a section on Student Science & Tech.

The Wrath of the Professional: more anti-Internet nonsense

There is a line of argument popular in the mainstream media, most notably captured in Keen's The Cult of the Amateur.  Another example was the nonsense in Maclean's cover "The Internet Sucks".

It goes something like this: "writers are trained professionals supported by editors", which is true, and then makes a leap to "therefore anyone who is NOT a professional and NOT supported by editors must be writing utter shite".

Yes, thank goodness for all that quality editing, that has produced well-crafted sentences of total untruth over the past years and decades.

Let me see if I can somehow craft a readable sentence even though I am bereft of an entire supporting organisation: a lot of what we get in the mainstream media is lazy, me-too, "consensus storytelling", factless junk.

I can't remember, are we still spending "blood and treasure" to clean up "pockets of resistance" or have we moved on to some other well-worn consensus story?

Remember, you must never break the narrative.  You can never write about how Google is amazing, or Wikipedia is incredibly useful, or shopping online saves time while providing vastly more information than is available in the store.

Which brings me back to the current threadbare tale of how all amateur content is junk, and it's all lonely people in their basements writing about their cats and collections of Star Wars action figures.

Of course most of the net is junk.  So is most TV, most movies, most music, most newspaper articles and most books.  But usually people don't decide to dismiss the medium entirely (although I do know people who watch little or no television).  Christie Blatchford, however, feels no such compunctions of reasonable balance, issuing a blanket dismissal:

Now, people merrily post their diaries online and call them blogs. The writing hasn't noticeably improved.

... most blogs: They are the writer's unedited, uncensored, unexpurgated thoughts.

...

So I do not read blogs, and if the day comes that, after I write for the newspaper, I am asked to write a blog for the online edition, I will take up surgery instead, or law, or social work. You know, without any training or practice at all.

   In a related vein, I do not have any Facebook friends. I do not respond to invitations to be anyone's Facebook friend.

...

   I am no one's beloved. I have no Facebook friends. I want no Facebook friends. I have no online community. I do not blog, I have not blogged, I will not blog and, furthermore, I do not care to read blogs.

Yeah, you tell it sister.  I read a book once that wasn't good.  So I guess I will stop reading books.  Oh and I saw a TV show that sucked, so I no more television for me.  Oh, and this one time, I read an article in the newspaper that was generic, lazy nonsense...

Globe and Mail - Dogs among blogs - Christie Blatchford - October 13, 2007 - behind a paywall, but available via rbcinvest.globeandmail.com

$10k US blogging scholarship

• U.S. citizen or permanent resident;
• Currently attending  full-time in post-secondary education in the United States
• 20 Finalists Announced and Public Voting Begins: 9am EST on Oct. 8th [2007]
• Public Voting Ends and Winner Declared: Midnight PST on Oct. 28th [2007]

from College Scholarships.org - The Blogging Scholarship

Phil Bradley is Typepad featured blogger

Internet Consultant Phil Bradley runs his UK-based blog around topics such as web design, search engines, and "anything that will interest librarians".

TypePad Featured Blogs: Phil Bradley

Check out http://philbradley.typepad.com/

Blog for OECD Participative Web goes live

The blog supporting the OECD Participative Web Forum has gone live.  RSS feed, comments, the usual.

I welcome your feedback; its primary purpose is as a channel for you to interact with the event and the participants there, as well as OECD policymakers, so the more comments or questions you post there the better.

Also feel free to promote it on any relevant web sites, blogs or listservs; I know you all collectively know far more venues and people who might be interested in it than I can possibly imagine.  (Plus which I refuse to use listservs :)

Kieren McCarthy and I will be liveblogging the event in Ottawa this Wednesday, October 3, 2007, starting at 9 AM or thereabouts, and finishing around 6 PM (or whenever our fingers give out).  It will also be webcast live so you may catch a glimpse of me (probably with my hair sticking out at some odd angle, if past experience is any guide).

The tag is oecdwebforum2007, but Technorati doesn't seem to be picking up the blog yet (also as usual).

It's a bit of an experiment for the OECD, opening up in this way, so as I said in the blog itself, please be gentle.

Previously:
September 13, 2007  provide your input to OECD participative web conference

Nature says dinosaur killer came from main belt collision

Globe and Mail - Far-flung asteroid crash doomed the dinosaurs - September 6, 2007

An asteroid that is believed to have wiped out dinosaurs and other life forms after smacking into Earth 65 million years ago may have been part of a much larger asteroid involved in a massive collision about 160 million years ago.

In a paper published today in the influential science journal Nature, William Bottke and colleagues argue that a chunk of asteroid that broke off from a collision in the innermost region of the asteroid belt encountered a gravitational pull that drew it toward Earth over a period of tens of millions of years, eventually smashing into the Yucatan Peninsula, forming the Chicxulub crater and likely causing the extinction of the dinosaurs.

"It shows that events that happen far away from the Earth can still have a significant influence on essentially the biological evolution, and, to some degree, the geological evolution of the planet," said Prof. Bottke, assistant director of space studies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Although not a contributor to the paper, the Globe also spoke to Dr. M.J. Duncan, a leading Canadian researcher in the field.

Martin Duncan, a Queen's University astrophysicist, said the discovery satisfies the curiosity in humans.

"We like to know more about our past," he said. "We'd like to know more about the major events that influenced life on Earth. We'd like to know more about the current hazards and kind of the future probability of events like this."

Interesting historical sidebar: Dr. Duncan was my grad supervisor for my (unfinished) studies in asteroid orbital dynamics at Queen's.  Also the only person I know who has an asteroid named after them (although there were probably a few at SciFoo).

Martinduncan 6115 1984 SR₂ MPC 27461

Discovered 1984 September 25 by B. A. Skiff at Anderson Mesa

The journal article is

Nature 449, 48-53 (6 September 2007) | doi:10.1038/nature06070 ; Received 11 April 2007; Accepted 22 June 2007

An asteroid breakup 160 Myr ago as the probable source of the K/T impactor
William F. Bottke, David Vokrouhlický & David Nesvorný

Different lines of evidence, however, suggest that the impact flux from kilometre-sized bodies increased by at least a factor of two over the long-term average during the past approx 100 Myr. Here we argue that this apparent surge was triggered by the catastrophic disruption of the parent body of the asteroid Baptistina, which we infer was a approx 170-km-diameter body (carbonaceous-chondrite-like) that broke up 160 (+30/-20) Myr ago in the inner main asteroid belt.

Personally, I think the asteroids are much more interesting objects to study than the moon.  For one thing, the moon is unlikely to smash into the earth anytime soon.  That's why I wish that Google had taken inspiration from one of the sessions presented at SciFoo 2007, and proposed a prize for sending a robotic explorer to a near-earth asteroid, rather than the moon.  Actually, I think it would be even better to split the competition into launch vehicles and rovers.  Very few people in the world can put together a launch vehicle (at least one that doesn't explode shortly after liftoff).  But lots of teams around the world could work on hardware and software for rovers.  Are you listening, Sergey?

Lancet says eat less meat, save the world

The Lancet doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61256-2

Series, Energy and Health

Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health
Prof Anthony J McMichael PhD, John W Powles PhD, Colin D Butler PhD and Prof Ricardo Uauy PhD

Because rapid reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions per unit of livestock production would be technically and culturally difficult in the short term, the prime objective must be to reduce consumption of animal products in high-income countries, and thus lower the ceiling consumption level to which low-income and middle-income countries would then converge.

The headline the Lancet put on the news item was "World meat consumption should be reduced by 10%: less meat means less heat".

The bloody Lancet has an elaborate registration process whereby you name your medical subspecialty and probably at some point your blood type, if you prefer to bypass such things, you can try BugMeNot.

The above article is part of a Lancet Web Focus Series on Energy and Health.

There is also accompanying audio from the 15 September 2007 issue (MP3) as well as from the press conference (MP3, not great quality) that launched the new Web Focus.

The Globe (from Agence France-Presse) reported the story as "Limits on meat eating could keep global warming at bay" on September 13, 2007.

schoolteacher's balloon photographs edge of the earth

While surfing the net two years ago, the 41-year-old Albertan came across some visually stunning photographs of the Earth from way, way up that a man from California had captured in the 1990s, all with a big balloon and a "regular old" camera.

Mr. Rafaat's imagination soared.

...

Using a Kaysam weather balloon (bought as part of six-pack from New Jersey), a used Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera purchased off eBay, and a global positioning system tracking device, Mr. Rafaat and two of his balloon-enthusiast friends, Barry Sloan and James Ewen, released SABLE-3 (Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment) at 9:31 a.m. on Aug. 11. The camera - set to take photos at one-minute intervals - and the GPS were put into a Styrofoam box. That payload, built by Mr. Rafaat's Grade 7 science class, was affixed to a parachute, the parachute to the helium-filled balloon.

Globe and Mail - A view from the stratosphere - September 5, 2007

SABLE-3 (Note: site is slow)

For electronics they're using a Byonics Micro-Trak 300 transmitter (it's not a data logger).  Presumably attached to one of the Byonics GPS modules.  UPDATE 2007-11-10: In the comments they indicate the GPS is from SparkFun.

Craig Venter's complete genome sequenced

It's not often that a science story makes the front page of the paper, let alone above the fold and over half of the page.  So it was interesting to see the Globe today

researchers from Canada, the United States and Spain have decoded all 46 of the chromosomes belonging to J. Craig Venter, the 60-year-old upstart American biologist whose company, Celera Genomics, compiled the private version of the human genome seven years ago. And the results indicate that those first celebrated DNA maps seriously underestimated the genetic diversity of humans - by a factor of at least five.

The new work suggests that the genetic code in the chromosomes we carry can vary widely, not only between any two strangers waiting at a bus stop, but between brothers and sisters.

"The biggest single surprise is how much we missed the boat with the human genome seven years ago, and how different we really are," Dr. Venter said in an interview. "The overwhelming message back then was that we are all like identical clones of each other. ... It's comforting to know we are more unique than that."

The findings, released today in PLoS Biology, a free, online scientific journal, give researchers a trove of new targets when hunting for genetic traits that contribute to disease. They also fuel hopes that people could one day learn from their codes which drugs best suit them, or what ills might befall them and take steps to prevent them.

This human's life, decoded

As it says, it's published in PLoS Bio, so anyone can read it.

Levy S, Sutton G, Ng PC, Feuk L, Halpern AL, et al. (2007) The Diploid Genome Sequence of an Individual Human. PLoS Biol 5(10): e254 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050254

Presented here is a genome sequence of an individual human. It was produced from ∼32 million random DNA fragments, sequenced by Sanger dideoxy technology and assembled into 4,528 scaffolds, comprising 2,810 million bases (Mb) of contiguous sequence with approximately 7.5-fold coverage for any given region.