August 2006

The Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen hosts a meeting on “Epidemiology from different perspectives” (“Epidemiologi set fra forskellige faglige vinkler”), 12 October, 1-4PM (room 2.1.12, CSS, Copenhagen). Our own Susanne Bauer starts with a presentation of her research project on data collection practices in recent epidemiology.
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Science blogs are not among the most popular on the net. But they exist and some are highly ranked. News-nature has just listed the 50 most popular science blogs (i.e., blogs written by scientists). The most popular (Pharyngula) has rank 179 of the approx. 51 million blogs out there (per 13 August 2006) listed by Technorati.

Being linked to by high-rank blogs will probably soon have the same status for science communication people as a paper in Nature, Cell or PNAS has for scientists, and it is therefore probably just a question of time until they will flash their blog’s ranking on their CV’s.
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An article in the current (5-11 Aug) issue of the leading weekly magazine of progressive global capitalism, The Economist, asks why economists spend valuable time blogging? Because it is “a place in the intellectual influence game” as an interviewee puts it. The article concludes that blogging professors may actually help raise the economic status of their institutions: “Prominent professors with popular blogs are good publicity” for a university — and thus for its income.
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How far has the museum world come in thinking in terms of the ‘augmented museum’ (or ‘museum++’ to paraphrase William Mitchell’s Me++: The Cyborged Self and the Networked City, 2003)? To what extent are curators thinking about digitally augmenting the reality of material artefacts into ‘augmented artefacts’?
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I hate spam! And so do billions of e-mail and web users. Most of it is (rather harmless) advertising for viagra, porn movies or on-line poker games. Nevertheless it fills the mailbox and complicates making blog comments. That’s why almost everybody, including Bill Gates, hates it.

But as Gustav Holmberg (in the Research Policy Institute at the University of Lund) just pointed out in a comment to my last blog post, spam has one good side —
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My spam mail filter (Spamfighter) is pretty efficient and I usually empty the spam folder without paying much attention to its content. But sometimes I take a closer look. Last night the filter had caught a mail that wanted to sell me laboratory mice with the following argument:

Dear Colleague,

Mice generated by Ozgene have been published in scientific journals such as PNAS, Nature, Science and Blood. For a complete list of publications visit our website at www.ozgene.com.

The latest publication involving mice generated by Ozgene was in June 2006:
York IA, Brehm MA, Zendzian S, Towne CF, Rock KL. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2006 Jun 13;103(24):9202-7

Why not get Ozgene to help generate the mice for your next publication?

Best regards,
Dr Frank Koentgen
Director & CEO
Ozgene Pty Ltd
http://www.ozgene.com/
koentgen@ozgene.com
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PRIVACY POLICY: Your email address is safe with us. Ozgene will not share your personal contact information with anyone, for any reason. If you feel that this email is of no value to you and you do not wish to receive further info from us, simply reply with “remove” in the subject line.
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Indeed I didn’t reply with “remove” because I rather wanted to discuss what is going on here. This is not an ad that wants scientists to use research animals to combat human suffering, as we outsiders always thought. What Ozgene actually say is that they sell mice to help scientists pursue their careers. Animals shall perish so that people can publish (and not perish in the academic competition).

Don’t misunderstand me —
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