Science Technology Society

And yet, even today, seventeen years after the launch of the arxiv, every attempt to set up a preprint service for biologists has been a dismal failure, as noted by both Ginsparg and Timo Hannay (whose Science21 talk notes are up at Nature Networks. You can also get video and microblogging). Contrary to what a naive outsider's opinion might suggest, biologists appear to be highly resistant to the whole idea of sharing pre-publication results.

A monthly program about science and its delightfully strange history.

Apomediation is a new scholarly socio-technological term that characterizes the process of disintermediation (intermediaries are middlemen or "gatekeeper", e.g. health professionals giving "relevant" information to a patient, and disintermediation means to bypass them), whereby the former intermediaries are functionally replaced by apomediaries, i.e. network/group/collaborative filtering processes [Eysenbach, 2008 [WebCite] and 2007b]. The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands "in between" (latin: inter- means "in between") the consumer and information/service, i.e. is absolutely necessary to get a specific information/service. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which "stand by" (latin: apo- means separate, detached, away from) to guide a consumer to high quality information/services/experiences, without being a prerequisite to obtain that information/service in the first place. The switch from an intermediation model to an apomediation model has broadimplications for example for the way people judge credibility, as hypothesized and elaborated in more detail elsewhere [

Business practice: The rise of American astrophysics, 1859-1919 Nisbett, Catherine Elaine. This dissertation takes seriously the production of astrophysical data by examining observatory practices through the lens of business models.

Story about success and failures in a neurobiology lab at UC Irvine.

research based on galactic samples from the sdss, sloan digital sky survey

Thomas Levenson. My day job has me professing science writing at MIT, mostly teaching in the Institute's Graduate Program on Science Writing.

He has an agreeably caustic and aggressive approach to outdated and erroneous ideas about the history of science. The book is a polemical essay, rather than a history, and welcome as such.

And though we may be away from those holographic representations, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey will soon be entering its third phase, in an attempt to create the biggest 3D map of the universe created so far.