Genetics

Don’t ask for salary

Here is what the University of Cologne published recently

An der Medizinischen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln ist unter den Voraussetzungen des § 36 des Hochschulfreiheitsgesetzes des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen baldmöglichst eine W 2-Professur für Theorie und Ethik des Gesundheitsmanagements zu besetzen. Die Bewerbung setzt voraus, dass sich die Bewerberin / der Bewerber gleichzeitig bei der DFG um eine Heisenberg-Professur bewirbt. Die Berufung erfolgt dann vorbehaltlich der Bewilligung der Heisenberg-Professur nach den Richtlinien der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Eine Zwischenevaluierung nach drei Jahren ist vorgesehen und entscheidend für die Üernahme in den Etat der Hochschule nach fünf Jahren.

It says that can try to get a salary from the German Science Association which will be honored in turn by a position at the medical faculty. When writing this post I did a typing error, writing slavery instead of salary, yea, yea.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Allergy

Screening steroid activity

A paper in J Drug Target shows a nice property of a cell line

Eight repeats of the glucocorticoid response element (GRE) were cloned into […] vector, and the resulting recombinant plasmid […] was stably transfected into the 293E cells. The stable and sensitive cell line […] was selected by dexamethasone (DEX) using fluorescent microscopy and fluorescence-activated cell sorting. […] The expression of GFP4 in the cell line was under the control of GRE, up-regulated by DEX treatment and down-regulated by phorbol myristate acetate (PMA).

as it could be nicely used for the steroid activity of any compound.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Philosophy

Finally: A true alternative to Thomson ISI® impact factors

That was even worth a note in Nature News that finally a free journal-ranking tool entered the citation market. The attack came by an article in JCB (“Show me the data“), the response was weak. Sooooooo we have a choice now which of the metric indices is being the worsest way to rate a researcher (if you can’t understand otherwise what she/he his doing).
BTW individual IF reporting was never intended but ISI but is now common use in many countries. I don´t believe (as Decan Butler explains) that there is so much difference between popularity and prestige – but there is a big difference between popularity and quality.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Uncategorized

Children research

Spiegel online reports a Pubmed listed study in the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift by 14 and 12 year old authors. Having supervised such a study at Mini-München I believe that this not so spectacular as the DMW is now marketing this event. The DMW has been one of the most renown journals here. As a medical student I even had a full subscription while today the impact is being low (0.58) and needs some marketing tricks.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Genetics

Outlook calendar export

It should be quite easy to export Outlook appointments into .ics format and let third party applications like phpicalendar stitch these snippets together into a coherent view. Unfortunately older Outlook versions are not supporting ics export. After several frustrating attempts (installing VB macros that are buggy and software like freemical that misses important fields) I finally wrote my own exporter that includes also a category filter as otherwise too may entries will have to be parsed by phpicalendar.

ol2ics.zip includes the source perl script including a compiled windows version.
|wj_olics.txt|

The ics file may then be uploaded to the phpicalendar directory using a wput call like
wput –reupload my.ics ftp://name:password@domain.de/calendar/my.ics

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Joke

Punch line

I have seen the first user looking here for the BMJ Christmas edition already 2 weeks ago — clearly the annual highlight in the biomedical world since 2000. But only today, the 2007 issue is being online. As a former recumbent owner, I can assure you that Professor Shuster’s observation is correct. Even with my folding bike in the Munich S-Bahn I get many responses from the public, usually technical questions by men but also price inquiries by women. Continue reading Punch line →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Allergy

Forgotten papers: Allergy origins in the gut

Instead of highlighting the best paper in 2007, I decided to nominate now the most under valued paper in 2007. There are so many interesting (and probably highly important) studies that do not get enough initial attention and consecutively fail to enter the high citation track. Here is one of these papers that is as interesting as on the day of publication: Continue reading Forgotten papers: Allergy origins in the gut →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Software

Do ScribeFire and Zotero work together?

— an important question for a science blogger. The answer is yes, at least in principle, as you can see from my screenshot: I am able to drag and drop a reference from the Zotero list view into the Scribefire edit pane. As the reference appears there in full text only, I have already submitted a support request at the Scribefire site as. I think we need to implement DOI support and I will look into the possibility to write a Zotero plugin. A quick fix to reformat the dropped reference would probably be a simple bookmarklet.
BTW The Endnote import into Zotero works best with the “Refman” option on the UPPER RIGHT BAR in Endnote selected before starting the text export. The resulting text file then can be flawless imported in Zotero if it contains less than 100 or 200 references.

scribezotero.png

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025
Philosophy

No scientist is always a scientist

Today I watched the full length video of the Nobel prize ceremony last week. I had to think of Stefan Zweig saying in “Sternstunden der Menschlichkeit” (my own translation)

No artist is always an artist during 24 hours of daily life; everything that is important, ever lasting and successful, happens within a few and rare moments.

in other words Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” that we are always chasing, surfing the ultimate wave, yea, yea.
img003050.jpg

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 30.11.2025