Moblog: Madrid, Parque del Retiro. Epidemiology ist always a cost intensive enterprise. Only those epidemiologists have enough funds for doing research who are spending most of their time on fund raising, speaking into every microphone and smiling into every camera. Continue reading The fourth major problem in epidemiology
You don´t believe that? It is possible as you can see here Continue reading Advertising on Pubmed
I attended yesterday a video talk by Jerome Groopman as he had become too ill to travel from Boston to San Francisco. His speech was one of the highlights of this year’s ATS conference – basically a summary of his new book “How doctors think“. It tells you about MDs and how they make up their diagnosis. Mostly everything goes right but sometimes everything goes wrong. According to empirical research a working diagnosis is already being made within 18 seconds Continue reading How doctors think
-moblog- In my view, epidemiology is not very flexible to adjust to new methods and new techniques. Following some discussion that I had today with STW about eQTLs (quantitative traits derived by RNA microarrays or metabolome profiles) and JMA about system biology, it is likely that we are facing huge changes. Phenotypes may no more called intermediary and we may soon forget old controversies of disease definition. We will instead use new system-terms like NonImm076Trig31Ste0098 or TLR9-096321-Auto5337. Yea, yea.
Süddeutsche Zeitung complains that data are permanently stored but never deleted. Even my irrelevant newsgroup comments have been stored (for 14 years) although they have never been intended to a larger audience. As humans we have no built-in timescale and are not particular good in judging the context of any data. This might be the reason according to SZ that Victor Mayer-Schönberger argues for meta-data when data should be deleted. I agree on this proposal and want this blog entry to be deleted until 16-May-2008 12:00:00 from any server in any world, yea, yea.
.. is the central rule of typography but is it also valid in science? More on LaTeX writing and presentation at the blog above.
Hans-Werner Bierhoff (in a recent ZEIT interview) believes that our ability to recognise a punishment as fair/just or not fair/just depends on social norms. The ultimate driving force to sense justice, however, seems to be an inborn trait. I even believe in a QTL – a quantitative trait that can clearly defined and even mapped some time to distinct genetic variants.
Monkeys reject unequal pay (scienceblog:doi:10.1038/nature01963:) in the famous Brosnan study – why should humans do?
More details may be found at tit-for-tat.
Nature magazine has an interesting essay how science works: “The security of knowing nothing” is basically arguing that we need to trust other scientists. Continue reading Landing on the moon
A Spiegel Science article reports
And how are unconscious (intuitive?) decisions made? Another mapping attempt at scienceblog:doi:10.1162/jocn.2006.18.12.2077
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
This now post no. 3 in a rather short time period about location of a behavioural trait to a certain brain region Continue reading Is utilitarian moral judgment hosted by the prefrontal cortex?
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…
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.
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.
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
Allergy (or at least an associated trait) may have its roots somewhere in Africa – where helminth infections are frequent. A new Nature Immunol Review has an overview but I am quite disappointed. From the abstract Continue reading Wormy world