“Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins” is the catchy title of an article in Genome Biology two months ago (vol. 9, issue 5, 2008; see online version here). The paper has received some attention in the blogosphere—not least because Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is one of the 23 co-authors of the paper.

Celebrity aside, both the project as such and the “million minds” metaphor is fascinating. WikiProteins is the first project (so far in beta) by the new semantic (concept) web initiative WikiProfessional-life sciences. It’s a database which automatically searches for information about proteins from a variety of other databases, e.g., UniProt/Swiss-Prot, and for associated concepts in articles from PubMed, and then makes the digested information available to the public (in practice = scientists) for further curating, editing and annotation.

In other words, instead of waiting for potential contributors to start from scratch, the WikiProtein-people are initiating the wiki fun by filling the database with a lot of information, so that the protein experts (“the million minds”) out there have something to work with and improve. As they say in the abstract: “We call on a ‘million minds’ to annotate a ‘million concepts’ and to collect facts from the literature with the reward of collaborative knowledge discovery”.

Most pundits are impressed, but there has also been some criticism. On Nature’s Nascent-blog, bioinformatician Euan Adie has expressed his irritation with the hype: “There’s a very high crap to content ratio”.

This alleged hype aspect is what makes the metaphorical dimension of “Calling on a million minds” so interesting. One thing is that the title quite explicitly draws on the positive vibes of the wiki and web 2.0-movements. But aren’t there also parallells to the new forms of political process that we have been witnessing in recent years, for example in the last and the current US presidential elections? Like when Barack Obama calls on a million activists for taking part in the campaign and for fund-raising. (And hasn’t Obama too been accused of high crap to content ratio?)

So what’s the next catchy title in a systemic biology article? What about “Yes We Can: A Million Scientists Demand The Right to Curate Data for the Human Metabolome Project” (for HMP, see here).

(More comments on Scienceroll, bbgm, ars technica, The Tree of Life, Spreading Science, David Rothman, and Cellnews)

The Museum Boerhaave in Leiden is organising a conference on ‘Lessons in anatomy made easy: Anatomical models in scientific and cultural context’, 6-7 November 2008.

Anatomical models nowadays are made of plastic and so common that simple ones are sold in the department stores everywhere. The origins of these models are to be seen in the permanent exhibitions of many science museums. […] Museum Boerhaave invites historians of science, art historians and conservators with an interest in anatomical models, whether made from wax, plaster, papier-mâché or glass, to attend this conference.

The immediate occasion for the meeting is that the Museum Boerhaave has completed the restoration of their collection of papier-mâché anatomical models made by Louis Thomas Jerôme Auzoux, allegedly one of the largest of its kind in the world.

The invitation speaks mainly about comparisons with other early kinds of anatomical models, like wax models. But I guess they would also welcome papers on more contemporary kinds of commercial anatomical models for comparative purposes. For further info, see http://www.museumboerhaave.nl/anatomy/overview.html.

(right: a 24 inch long Auzoux papier-maché model of the tongue, throat, larynx and windpipe: from Alex Peck Medical Antiques website) 

(via Simon Chaplin, MUSHM-link) 

What’s a ‘liquid image’ (or ‘the liquidity of the image’ for that sake)? The answer may be given at the Second International Conference on Image Science in the Göttweig Monastery near Vienna, 16-18 October.

The conference — which is organized by the Department für Bildwissenschaften at Donau Universität Krems (with the witty German subtitle Wider den ‘Analpha-BILD-ismus’) — will discuss the classification and historiography of the recent worlds of images in art, science and popular culture; and there is something in it for museums too:

Never before the world of images has changed so fast and the way images are produced transformed so drastically like in the latest presence: Second Life, Micromovies, Flickr, Virtual Reality, You Tube, Visual Music, Scientific Visualisation, Google Earth etc. are keywords standing for a multitude of new possibilities for individual producing, projecting and distributing of visual material […] Which artistic inspirations new worlds of images have to face? What influence does the medium have on the iconic character of the image? What chances and challenges do museums and image dealers face with the “liquidity” of the image?

Probably some of the keynote speakers — Felice Frankel (Harvard, MIT), Barbara Stafford (Chicago) and Peter Weibel (ZKM) — or other announced speakers will explain what the ‘liquidity’ of the image means and how this is relevant for science, medical and technology museums. Much more info here: http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/dis/goettweig2008.

Apropos Fleur’s comment on the critical function of art — Royal College of Art student Revital Cohen‘s project ‘Life Support’ problematizes the possible future use of animals as medical devices:

Assistance animals – from guide dogs to psychiatric service cats – unlike computerised machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Could animals be transformed into medical devices? This project proposes using animals bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement. The use of transgenic farm animals, or retired working dogs, as life support ‘devices’ for renal and respiratory patients offers an alternative to inhumane medical therapies. Could a transgenic animal function as a whole mechanism and not simply supply the parts? Could humans become parasites and live off another organism’s bodily functions?

(from Cohen’s project description which also has a larger photo)

(thanks to Medgadget for the tip — in addition we make money not art has an excellent comment on Cohen’s project)

Under the heading “Journals under Threat: A Joint Response from HSTM Editors” ten editors of some of the leading international journals for history and philosophy of science and social studies of science have issued a joint declaration against the current attempts, initiated by the European Science Foundation, to establish a European rating system for humanities journals (ERIH): Read More

Like many other blogs we here at Biomedicine on Display have a long list of (potentially) useful life science and health/medical blog links—all those sites which together constitute the hypertextual inspiration base for our web presence.

It would be great if these could be visualised as a blogroll cloud (like a tag cloud or a category cloud). So far I haven’t seen one, but last night, when I was playing with the new Wordle text cloud generator (see earlier post here), I used it to see what our blogroll would look like in cloud format.

First I created a cloud out of a net list of my 35 favourite blogs (using ~ between the words which is Wordle’s way of keeping words together in sentences):

Then I manipulated the picture a little (literally manually!). By repeating the names of my most-favourite blogs 2, 3 or 5 times I could produce a weight-effect:

Both look great, I think! Much better than most blogrolls I’ve seen so far.

It’s still just a dummy, because at the moment Wordle cannot make the links clickable (or make the size of the blog names correspond to the number of times one had visited the blogs), but I’m sure Jonathan Feinberg (the software engineer who has designed Wordle) can find a solution to that problem with some hard code work.

Then I tried something else. I pasted the whole list of blogs without using the ~ character—i.e., all singular words in all names on our gross list—into Wordle’s input window. This procedure visualised like this:

and like this (Wordle has a huge reportoire of fonts, layouts and colours):

These word clouds looks nice too, but they are nevertheless disappointing because the gross blog list (below) contains many more words than those that Wordle processed into the single word clouds. For example, the words in Pimm: Partial Immortalization, Bioephemera, The Sterile Eye and many others aren’t there. Apparently, Wordle only accepts rather small chunks of text. Or maybe it has excluded singulars? (Added 21 July: Oops, I had overlooked the ‘maximum words’ function, thanks Jonathan for drawing my attention; see comment below).

Anyway, it’s a fun way of producing a visualised blogroll. And with some added functionalities (e.g., clickability) it could be turned into a useful WordPress widget.

Here’s the raw unassorted gross list (it has been accumulated over some time so there may be some dead links and other inaccuracies as well): Read More

The regulation of public health data collection and display is an interesting field of research for historians of contemporary public health. Here’s how I came to think about it:

On our way back to Copenhagen from three days of vacation on the island of Öland off the coast of SE Sweden with its beautiful and peculiar landscape (especially the alvar heath), we took a short break in Kristianopel, once (in the early 17th century) an important and heavily fortified Danish border town, now a tranquil vacation resort.

While Anna went down to the beach to take a swim in the Baltic Sea, I took a closer look at the local billboard where I found, among announcements for local flea markets and invitations to parties for young church-goers, an official report on the bathing water quality issued two days earlier by an accredited laboratory:

saying: 

• E. coli: 0 mpn/100 ml, measured by the Colilert-18 method
• Intestinal enterococci: 13 CFU/100 ml, measured according to ISO 7899-2

Zero E.coli is fine, of course, but 13 CFU (colony forming units) of enterococci (common faeces bacteria) is not so good. Wikipedia informs me that the state of Hawaii accepts only 7 CFU/100 ml before posting warnings! The municipality of Karlskrona, however, concludes that the water quality is “tjänlig” (suitable).

I’m probably about the only person visiting Kristianopel who has ever cared to read, let alone understood, the water quality report. Regulations issued by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency stipulate that local authorities must make such tests (see Naturvårdsverkets författningssamling 2008:8) and make them publicly available. But apparently the local authorities don’t have to announce the results in a way that makes sense to visitors to the beach—for example that the Kristianopel water is twice as bad as what they accept in Honolulu.

Well, Anna didn’t catch any nasty bugs and the rest is for the Kristianopolitians to consider further. But that said, I think their water quality report raises an interesting general issue. Ground-level ozone, pollen levels, etc. are heavily displayed on TV, in newspapers, etc.; for example, the National Museum of Natural History in Sweden issues a daily pollen prognosis report on the web. What other kinds of public health data are displayed in public? How are these data displayed? Through which media? And which are the political processes behind the decisions to have such data collected and broadcasted to the public?

In fact, the history of public health could be understood (cf. Dorothy Porter’s Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health From Ancient to Modern Times, 1998; read a good review here) as the continuous political negotation of such data and their public display.

Everyone in southern Scandinavia interested in genetics and democracy should take the opportunity to attend a seminar series organised at the University of Lund in October through December. Dates and preliminary speakers include:

October 27

• A. Hedgecoe, Sussex: “The Politics of Personalised Medicine”

November 17

• A. Clarke, Cardiff: “Genes, Knowledge and Autonomy: Whose Knowledge? What Knowledge? When?”
• H. Gottweis, Vienna: “Operating Biobanks: Towards the Governance of Disappearing Bodies”

December 8

• L. Koch, Copenhagen: “The Politics of Life – past and present use of genetic knowledge”
• B. Wynne, Lancaster: “Genetic Risk – expert and lay perceptions”

More details later (or contact Niclas Hagen, Niclas.Hagen@svet.lu.se, for more info).

If you think the last post was too conventional, presentation-wise, try this word cloud version:

Generated by Wordle, a free service designed by Jonathan Feinberg, which allows you to create a word cloud from any text or url, and adopt a variety of fonts, layouts, and color schemes. See Jonathan’s blog here.

Nifty! Cannot handle pics though. Not yet — maybe next functionality? (Would be great to be able to make your own picture cloud).

Here’s another variety (the possibilities are endless):

Read More

The city of Kalmar on the southeast coast of Sweden has just been endowed with a fabulous new art museum: Kalmar Konstmuseum—a tall, black, wood-covered concrete building hidden among the high trees in the old city park. Something like a hybrid between a postmodern fire watch tower and the Royal Library building in Copenhagen (the Black Diamond). The architectural innovation has received much acclaim, both in Sweden (e.g., here) and internationally (see last issue of Icon, not on the net yet)

In my mind, the most impressive of the three inaugural exhibitions is Swetlana Heger‘s ‘Smoke (Liberté Toujours)’—five collages of small photos of women, each and everyone of them smoking a cigarette.

A face and a cigarette, a face and a cigarette, a face and a cigarette … hundreds of women: posing, contemplating, inhaling, exhaling.
 
Never have I seen such a collection of images of beautiful, smart, independent, distinguished, alluring and gorgeous women devoted to the necessity of smoking. Never has the idea of the sublimity of the practice of smoking been expressed so manifestly in art. Smoking is most certainly addictive, disgusting and deadly dangerous. But it also aesthetically forceful. (This was the theme of Richard Klein’s excellent book Cigarettes are sublime, 1994).

The aesthetics, economy and politics of smoking is a difficult field. On the one hand, the health-care establishment, backed by strong epidemiological evidence, has really good arguments for intensifying the war on smoking, especially in the developing world. On the other hand, millions of smokers cannot be wrong, can they? People don’t just smoke because they crave for nicotine or are manipulated by tobacco advertisements. If smoking wasn’t a pleasure—and an aesthetically attractive (at least if you don’t kiss the smoker) one as well—nobody would buy these sexy little suicide sticks.

Swetlana Heger’s exhibition in Kalmar addresses this dilemma indirectly without becoming didactic or explicitly political. Excellent public health art!