Medical Museion is on Facebook. Not because because we love it, but because we follow the siren calls of other museums that believe they need this part of the social media spectrum to be visisble online.

Personally, I just hate Facebook. It’s not just the sneaky way they treat their customers (see the long list of their objectionable activities here), it’s also their business idea — to commercialise the need of human social interaction — which turns me off. For a short period I had a profile on it but left when I realised Facebook has effectively made the word ‘friend’ devoid of any useful meaning.

Micah White suggests that earlier protests against Facebook (like the outrage against the Beacon system) were made under the assumption that it was a cool hangout community that could be changed from the inside.

But with the new ‘social plug-in’-system that gives commercial websites access to your personal information through ‘I like’-buttons this myth is about to be shattered. White describes it as a sinister reinvention of Beacon. The bottom line is that Facebook is about to cash in its former reputation as a hip online social medium and is turning into just another MySpace.

The 11th Universeum network meeting, titled ‘University Heritage: Present and Future’, will be held in the university museum of Uppsala University (Museum Gustavianum), on 17-20 June.

The organisers say that none of the previous ten network meetings has received so much interest. Why this surge in the interest in the history of universities?

Is it the gradual implementation of New Public Management in universities that is eventually giving rise to a reaction? Are university people becoming so frustrated with managerial governance, new evaluation schemes and assessment procedures, and the nauseating hype of their central communication offices that we are looking back to those times when universites were still universities? Is the renewed interest in university heritage an expression of our longing for the good old days of university self-governance?

I would have loved to discuss these and other questions with colleagues from all over Europe (and my abstract for the meeting has been accepted). However, I must admit that the programme doesn’t look particularly enticing; the titles of many individual papers look quite interesting, but the organisers haven’t been restrictive enough when putting it together.

The result of accepting too many of the submitted papers is a terribly crowded programme — one damned presentation after the other for three long days, a mere 15 minutes allotted to each speaker and only a few minutes for questions afterward, short and inevitably rushed coffee breaks, etc. This doesn’t promise well for reflection or for networking.

More generally, academic conference culture is in dire need of meeting formats that invite to dialogue and creativity. Tech conferences are sometimes more inspiring (boot camps etc.), but academic conferences are often still held as in the 1980s when I first attended this kind of academic rituals.

Massimi Pigliucci’s essay ‘The Future of Philosopy of Science’ makes me think that articles (or meetings) titled ‘The future of X-logy’ may in fact be a symptom of X-logy being in a crisis. If scholars are really busy innovating, they will probably not think of their joint activities in these terms. They will practice the future, not talk about it — and especially not in terms of X-logy, because if their joint activities are really moving into something interesting the future discipline will not yet have an established name to be defended. If anything they will probably call it Y-ology to mark out their intentions to do something new and interesting.

I’m intrigued by a post by Ayusman Sen — a professor in chemistry at Penn State and a specialist in catalytically driven nanomotors (cool stuff!) — who writes that he spends most of his time in the lab “feeling fairly stupid”.

He says he continually feels that

either I am not asking the big questions or I am not designing the right experiments to answer them. And, to add to my predicament, I deliberately keep getting into fields that I know very little about! Small wonder that I feel frustrated so much of the time!!

I know the feeling! Always moving into something new with the feeling that the ground is always shaky.

Sen was in turn stimulated to think in terms of his perpetual stupidity by an article by cell biologist Martin Schwartz about the existential importance of stupidity in science. What makes research difficult, Schwartz reminds us, is that it is “immersion in the unknown”, which means that it:

involves confronting our `absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.

The more comfortable researchers become with being stupid, he suggests, the further they will move into the unknown and the more likely they are to do something new and interesting.

Not the ordinary unvoluntary stupidness, though. It is important to be “productively stupid”, i.e., “being ignorant by choice”:

Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time

I believe Schwartz and Sen are making an important point about one of the existential conditions for creative research work — a point which would probably be quite easy to put to test.

But — can you make exhibitions about feeling stuped?

Missed this, because there’s an Atlantic Ocean between me and the event:

But Jessica Palmer (Bioephemera) attended and has a thoughtful comment about the science blogosphere. I will be back with a comment on her comment.

There is now a petition available online for those who wish to oppose the closure of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.

We here at Medical Museion have a special love for containers. For example, one of the most conspicuous installations in the Split & Splice exhibition was ‘the container wall’ — a blown-up model of a 96-microwell filled with containers of all kinds used in medical practice and laboratory research.

But containers aren’t just innocently passive biomedical objects. It turns out that they interfere with experiments. In addition to the phenomenon of ‘sticky containers’, there’s just been published a paper which claims that DNA and protein assays may accidentally be affected by leaching of contaminants from plastics which interfere with the spectroscopic measurements of proteins and DNA:

Here we demonstrate that normal handling of laboratory microtubes causes leaching of light-absorbing chemicals into biological samples that interfere with spectrophotometric measurements … Some common laboratory techniques, including sonication and PCR, were particularly effective inducers of leaching … Leaching was ubiquitous among commercially available brands of microtubes, indicating a persistent source of error in biomolecule detection and concentration measurements.

I wouldn’t go so far as putting the ANT-ese labels ‘actor’ or ‘actant’ on plastic containers, but it’s nevertheless interesting that what was previously considered an inert container is now a active parameter that may have distorted millions of assays and research results.

I’m not sure I understand which historians of contemporary medicine Steve Sturdy is arguing against in this talk next Wednesday:

Recent accounts of the role of science in the development of medical practice have tended to concentrate on instances of tension between scientists and practitioners. This paper revisits the historiography, and suggests that historians have often inadvertently adopted essentialised accounts of scientific and clinical culture, and assumed that those cultures necessarily exist in tension with one another. Historians have reinforced these assumptions by seeking out instances of conflict, while neglecting the many ways in which science and medicine have developed in concert with one another. In so doing, they have restricted their own ability to comment on the multiple forms that modern medicine has taken, and might take in future.

If you want to find out, the answer will be given in the 5th floor lecture room on 183 Euston Road (The Wellcome Bldg) in London on Wednesday 5 May at 5pm.

Ready for some digital intoxication again:

Adrienne Fletcher, a graduate student in the Department of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida has made a social media museum research survey which says something about how (American) museums intend to and actually use social web media.

Facebook is considered the most effective medium, with Twitter on a second place. Typical time spent is 1-2 staff members for an average of 45 minutes a day. Fletcher’s summary of the results is that:

American museums believe that social media are important but are not currently using it for high levels of dialogic engagement. For the moment, museums are mostly involved with one-way communication strategies using mostly Facebook and Twitter to focus on event listing, reminders, reaching larger or newer audiences, and promotional messaging. However there does seem to be some evidence to suggest that museums are trying to increase their use of social media for more two-way and multi-way communication strategies.

Sounds pretty plausible, also for European ears.

Anyone who’s wondered why we’ve been idle for a week? Well, this was the second year that Adbusters promoted Digital Detox Week; it started on 19 April and ended last Saturday.

The first Digital Detox Week was announced in an article
by Zachary Colbert titled ‘The Era of Simulation: Consequences of a digital revolution’:

The World Wide Web has infused our society with an all-encompassing reliance on media technologies … at all times we are obligated to communicate and to be tuned in to entertainment and information. We are objectified as ‘users’ not people. The products of our digital revolution run our daily routines. We are no longer free agents – technical extensions to our physical selves have become as vital as a limb or an organ.

And further:

This is what Jean Baudrillard called ‘the era of simulation’, we are being herded in preordained directions, dictated by omniscient authors. By following hyperlinks on Wikipedia, for example, we are following someone else’s premeditated path through information and jumping from one piece of subject matter to another. All too often users mistake these connections as their own and continually follow externalized thought processes, relying less and less on their natural associations.

Colbert is pretty dystoptic:

As we move from an industrial civilization into an information civilization, we’re online and we’re locked in. Try a digital detox for even just a day, I bet you will fail, I already have.

You the lost the bet! With one post exception, we’ve been able to stay away for a whole week.

See also my earlier post on this.