Category Archives: Philosophy

Physician’s industry dependency

The NEJM has an article about “A National Survey of Physician’s Industry Relationships” – a topic that I did not expect in the NEJM at least from what I have read during the recent change at the editorial office. That’s life – always a surprise. Continue reading Physician’s industry dependency

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025

Random

What is a random figure? Computer may be biased when true random numbers are needed (for example for cryptography). Here is a truly random generator, use it at your own risk…

random.png

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025

Open call to the science blog community for using a DOI in all posts

Science blogs usually refer to a scientific paper. To increase the visibility of science blogs, e.g. for a reverse lookup by search engines like “find all science blogs to a particular paper” it would be useful if science blogs would include a defined tag to which paper they relate. A http link will only partially work as single articles may be found at duplicate sites (journal or the publishers site or even through agencies like OVID and PUBMED CENTRAL). Using the DOI identifier is an alternative. To recognize any source document I therefore propose the following (unofficial) IANA scheme to be included somewhere in the body of your post
scienceblog:doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040072:
If there is no DOI available, I propose to use the link instead
scienceblog:http:www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS014067360209654X: Please note that there should be an extra “:” at the end of the string; alternatively you may use a white space.

Addendum

05.05.2007 Automatic DOI number extraction from blogs following this convention is now available at the Science Blog Finder page – just enter you rss feed address to get your blog indexed every 24 hours.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025

U-P-S-I-D-E – data sharing policy

A paper (that I found only recently) summarizes the responsibility of authorship in the life sciences. Sharing publication- related data is a key element of the life sciences and there is concern that in practice materials are not always readily available to the research community. U-P-S-I-D-E stands for “uniform principles for sharing integral data and materials expeditiously”. The authors come from major U.S. universities and companies and have developed 10 recommendations that should be in the curriculum of every PhD program – go to the executive summary at www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/doi/10.1104/pp.900068

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025

Errare humanum est

All4quotes and becontent have (mainly German) quotes. My all time favorites are

Aurelius Augustinus: Irren ist menschlich, aber aus Leidenschaft im Irrtum zu verharren, ist teuflisch.

August von Kotzebue: Menschen irren, aber nur große Menschen erkennen ihren Irrtum.

Christian Friedrich Hebbel: Die Menschheit läßt sich keinen Irrtum nehmen, der ihr nützt.

Friedrich von Schiller: Liegt der Irrtum nur erst, wie ein Grundstein, unter dem Boden, immer baut man darauf, nimmermehr kömmt er an den Tag.

Friedrich von Schiller: Hundertmal wer ich’s euch sagen und tausendmal: Irrtum ist Irrtum! Ob ihn der größte Mann, ob ihn der kleinste beging.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Nur der Betrug entehrt, der Irrtum nie.

Continue reading Errare humanum est

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025

Search for crystals

First monday has an interesting paper on the 100 most visited Wikipedia pages for the period of September 2006 to January 2007 (Wikipedia is the ninth most visited site in the U.S. with 43 million visitors). The crystal search link in the paper does not work but the table reports that science ranks at place 5 – not too bad.

crystal3.jpgcrystal2.jpgcrystal1.jpg

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025

Hypomania

The Lancet has a comprehensive review of bipolar disorders- finally I learned about the distinction between type I (includes mania) and type II (hypomania). BTW the author thinks that there is no sound evidence for the DSM-IV priority for mood changes; Kraepelin had no priority for mood, thinking or activity altering changes after all). Continue reading Hypomania

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025