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Sunday 20 September 2009

Links I've enjoyed this last week...

...but didn't have the time to post. For a number of reasons, including:
  • madness at work (in a good way) , which is only set to increase due to the upcoming launch (yay!!) of Sciblogs. We've gotten some good coverage for it over the last few weeks, starting with Ken Perrott of Open Parachute breaking the news, and since then Media7 and Mediawatch have been giving us some good airplay too :)
  • Today, I spent 4 hours rationalising my Gmail contacts because, well, I had synced my iPhone to them, which promptly uploaded 1000+ contacts onto my phone, many of which were ancient (i.e. any email address I've ever used in the last 6+ years), or duplicates, etc. So the only way ever to use my phone's contacts feature, was to sort it.



I am, happily, now done.

So yes, the links (bear in mind that many of them end up making their way into our weekly newsletter as well, and so don't appear here)...

Sneak test shows positive-paper bias
Published in Nature, this confirms what, yes, we already know. But still interesting, and good to see it testably confirmed. And I can understand where the bias comes from although it's hardly something I'm in favour of (particularly as the originator of some genuinely negative results myself).

The Secrets Inside Your Dog's Head
An awesome article by Carl Zimmer about dog behaviour and evolution and research and things. As the owner of a dog myself, I found it particulaly interesting, but I imagine that anyone who's encountered our four-legged friends might find it interesting.

The Briefly Series
Ep. 1: The Big Bang. An awesome science communication idea, the point is to take major concepts in science and explain them not only clearly and briefly, but really well visually as well. Kudos to all the people who given freely (literally) of their time to do this.

Futurity
A completely different type of outreach, Futurity takes the research releases of a number (some 35) top American universities and publishes them in one awesome website. It's great reading, but I have two small concerns: it is, in essence, a collection of press releases (not a bad thing, just something to be aware of when reading the articles) and it does not necessarily give an accurate idea of when the research was published etc. I've notcied a couple of things on the site that seem to be really new/recent, but which I know came out some weeks ago. Nonetheless, good site.

Interphone and the US
Or not, as it turns out. I don't know how I missed this, but it would seem that the US has not taken part in the Interphone survey. * significant pause * I know. Which means they're now considering, I dunno, replicating the work? Or something? It's a big pity, firstly because the data from the US would no doubt have been really good (a very large market who were early adopters of the tech), and it also seems a waste of money to even consider doing it in an American context. Of course, one also has to ask: if Interphone's results are good enough for everyone else, why wouldn't they be good enough for the States?

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