Links post

Animals

• Do Dogs Inherently Understand Pointing Gestures? (The Other End of the Leash): Patricia McConnell weighs in on the ongoing research and debate about the canine ability to follow human pointing gestures, and whether it is genetically mediated/innate.
• Chicken Slaughtering: a day at a mobile poultry processing unit
• Domesticating the Fennec: Dog Domestication 2.0? (Retrieverman)
• Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs (Observations of a Nerd)
  
  

Meta

• “The current phenomenon of ‘bloggers’ should be of serious concern to scientists” (Terra Sigilata)
• Science Cafes: Nice idea for getting people interested in science. How well does it work?
• The Trouble with Scientists (Speakeasy Science): “Ask yourself... whether young scientists are reward[ed] for spending time on public communication?” It would be awfully nice if, instead of being afraid that my school will notice that I am blogging, I could expect my school to reward me for trying to improve my communication skills. Just saying.

Links post

Dog stuff

• Mandatory spay/neuter laws: Follow the (lack of) money (Pet Connection): Why mandatory spay/neuter laws for pets are a bad idea, even though spaying and neutering is a good goal to have.
• Canine Dominance: Is the Concept of the Alpha Dog Valid? (Psychology Today) Article by Stanley Coren, PhD. He has written some great books about dog behavior and cognition; look him up if you want more on this.

Local food/food safety stuff

• Faeces and flies “found” at US egg farms tied to illness (BBC News): “Officials say chickens’ contact with animal faeces and wildlife are among the main causes of concern as they investigate the source of the salmonella outbreak.” I really hope this story is not spun into “chickens are healthier in cages where they can't come in contact with wildlife.” Infectious disease is a problem when animals live in too-close quarters. Well-managed farms can balance allowing chickens room to move around with disease management. I assert that I am safer eating eggs from backyard chickens (plenty of room to move around, plenty of grass to clean their feet off on, where one sick hen is not going to make all her neighbors sick, because they are not crammed together), even if those chickens interact with wild birds, than eating eggs from factory farms. I don’t have scientific evidence to support this because the studies have not been done (and are hard to do — there are a host of different factors between those two environments to control for).
• ButcherShop (Sugar Mountain Farm): Creative solutions to the lack of slaughter facilities in the Northeast: “We are building our own USDA/State inspected on-farm slaughterhouse and butcher shop... Since banks have not been lending we are bootstrapping the construction from our own cash and selling CSA Pre-Buys where customers get free processing in exchange for buying early.” Lack of local slaughter facilities for small farms is the major impediment to an increase in the number of farmers producing humanely-raised meat in the Northeast. Read more about shortage of slaughterhouses, particularly in the Northeast.

 
Meta-science stuff

• How to make a difference – Responsible vaccine advocacy (Science-Based Medicine): Nice article about how to approach the problem of spreading your viewpoint, recognizing that repeating facts over and over is probably not very effective.
• Good example of a tag cloud for blogs. This is the interface I really want to see on a larger scale.
• Online science blogregator
• Peer Review and the Internet (Science-Based Medicine): “Imagine an alternate process by which an article is published online, either on an open site or a secure site that only experts have access to. Then dozens or hundreds of experts can comment on the paper, providing feedback directly to the authors in addition to the editors, who can also respond to the commenters. The result would be more of a dynamic conversation than you get with the current review process. But most importantly, in my opinion, is that you would get a broader range of opinions, and a far greater chance to detect error or bias. An editor or editors can oversee the process, and once it has played itself out the final version of the paper can be published to the public, and become part of the official literature.” Sounds great. One question I have: how do you know when “it has played itself out”?
• Asking “Who’s a journalist?” is so 2007 (Global Vue): Proposes a list of questions we should be working on now. (It’s nice when posts don’t just explain why a question is a bad one, but constructively offer alternative questions that we should be asking.)
• Supplementary Information: should I stay or should I go? (Martin Fenner): Nice collection of the blog posts about supplemental information and the implications of the Journal of Neuroscience's recent decision to stop accepting it. Fenner comments “This is a perfect example for why we need better systems to track blog posts relating to an article.“ I concur.
  

Miscellany

• (Proposed) World Veterinary Year 2011!

Links post

• The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (Matt Might)
• The Zen of Presentations, in at least 34 parts (Neurodojo): Neurodojo has apparently been writing about the zen of presentations for a while. This link is to all of the posts so far.
• Disrupting with data (Book of Trogool): The Journal of Neuroscience has begun refusing to accept “supplemental materials” (the researchers’ raw data). Dorothea Salo reflects on why this is good news for librarians and the future of scientific publications.
• Stop and think before greeting a strange dog (Pet Connection): Video about greeting a strange dog, one of my favorite topics. Flash is broken on my computer right now, so unfortunately I can’t preview this to make sure it's interesting, but I trust Pet Connection.
• Peer review, schmeer review (Lab Spaces)
• Meta-encounters and non-overlapping magisteria (or, why Virginia Heffernan wrote what she wrote about ScienceBlogs) (John Pavlus)
• If it bites, it must be a pit bull, right? (Pet Connection): More on media bias in pit bull reporting, written by a vet.

Mechanics of virtual blogging networks

I’ve seen a few posts lately about the possibility of virtual blogging networks. Sorry if this has all been covered in more detail already by others; I am way behind on my blog reading right now. But I did want to post about how easy making a virtual network is. The hard part is just getting the people together to do it.

• Everyone who wants to participate in the virtual network has their own blog wherever they want.
• When someone posts something that they want added to the virtual network, they tag it with an agreed-upon tag (“virtual post,” say).
• The person who sets up the network has an account on a blog aggregation site like Yahoo! Pipes. They aggregate all the blogs by tag. The exact way to do this will differ for each blogging platform For example, to aggregate all Dog Zombie posts (on Blogspot) tagged “veterinary fact of the day,” the URL http://dogzombie.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/veterinary fact of the day would be added to the aggregator feed.
• Profit! Oh, wait.

Easy. The only question is: do bloggers want to write for virtual networks, and do readers want to read posts aggregated in virtual networks?

Links post

I’m catching up on science blogs reading after a few days off. I was awfully busy recovering from defending my thesis! I am now almost done with the MS part of my dual-degree program, though there will be some thesis edits to do. Then I settle in for the final two years of the DVM program.

Anyways, links!

• The PepsiGate linkfest (A Blog Around the Clock): so comprehensive, he even linked to me.
• Mesozoic Blogosphere (Chasmosaurus): David Orr considers the usefulness of topic-based networks. The comments suggest aggregators to achieve this goal.
• “Dominance” mythologies, Suzanne Hetts (The Other End of the Leash): More on dominance theory in dog training from Patricia McConnell
• Tick news? It ain’t good, Dr. Flea tells AVMA audience (Pet Connection)
• Environmental enrichment is key to happy, healthy animals (Pet Connection): This seemed like a relevant link after The Thoughtful Animal’s recent post about behavioral differences in pigs in enriched environments.
• On detecting stress endocrines in hamster poop (C6-H12-O6): need I say more?
• Learning to speak dog (Dog Star Daily): the usefulness of understanding canine body language, and some good pointers
• You are what you eat – how your diet defines you in trillions of ways (Not Exactly Rocket Science): Nice post about how populations of gut bacteria are influenced by diet in different life stages and in different cultures. “As we learn more about our bacterial partners, we might eventually find ways of influencing them to improve our health, just as breast milk appears to selectively nourish helpful species.” He suggests inoculating people with appropriate gut bacteria, which makes me a little sad. I’d rather see people change their eating habits. Anyone for some research on the effects of fresh whole foods on populations of gut bacteria?
• Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine (Wired): What is it today with links to articles about fixing problems with injections? Actually, this is a really good article about Robert Sapolsky, who did ground-breaking work on the effects of chronic stress on health. Apparently Sapolsky is now working on a vaccine to counter the neural effects of chronic stress. I have to admit that I find that a little scary. It sounds like a great answer to the problem of a society full of highly-stressed people, but the stress response is so complex and affects so many parts of our metabolism that it just can’t work without horrible side effects, can it? (The article addresses some of the issues.)
• Virginia Heffernan Is Our Target Audience (Uncertain Principles): For those who don’t know the background, Heffernan wrote a piece in the New York Times in which she criticized Scienceblogs.com for having some snarky people on it, and said as a result of its tone, she didn’t find it to be a good place to go to learn about science. Various science bloggers have opined that she’s dumb and no one should change what they are doing. Here, Uncertain Principles suggests perhaps science bloggers should be trying harder to speak to this particular audience. I’m not going to write a whole blog post about it, but I vote with UP and the others who’ve voiced this particular opinion. Who cares who’s right? The important thing is getting your message across, and it’s pretty clear that some members of the audience find a less snarky message to be easier to absorb.

Links post

• The ancestry of the domestic donkey is no longer a “wild ass” guess (Retrieverman)
• Should Doctors Have to Take Physics and Chemistry? (Uncertain Principles): I would definitely support some change in the pre-vet (very similar to the pre-med, with one or two more classes) process. The comments are almost more interesting than the actual post here.
• Welcome Scientopia, a new science blogging network (Blog Around the Clock): Oh good, it happened — a not-for-profit science blogging network organized by the bloggers. Now I can relax.
• Food scares and FDA actions: What has happened since 2007? (PetConnection): Report from the American Veterinary Medical Association convention last weekend about what the FDA has done since the 2007 pet food recalls.
• BREAKING: Bloggers Are Misunderstood (It’s not a Lecture): Another post on why being polite and reasonable is more effective than ranting. Maybe I should make a new “nice blogging” tag for these links...
• More hybrid lovin’: coywolves, wolves and coyotes… (Wild Muse): Canid soup is so interesting. Dogs are coyotes are wolves and they all interbreed like mad. If this topic interests you, definitely check out the comments on Wild Muse’s post for links to more information. The article that Wild Muse is covering is by Jon Way, who also wrote a very interesting book, Suburban Howls, about his research on Massachusetts coyotes. You can also find more on canid soup in Dogs: a new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution, (Coppinger and Coppinger) which I have recommended before.

Proposal for organizing science blog networks

I’ve been pondering the questions raised in Dave Munger’s post about how to aggregate science blogs in the absence of one central authority. In the middle of the second chapter of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, I realized that there’s no real need for a central authority to aggregate blogs; the tools exist for bloggers to do it themselves. Credit for the solution I’m about to propose goes to my boyfriend, who said “Stop thinking the Diaspora project is the answer; they’re not up and running yet. What about technorati?”

I think it could work. You register your blog with technorati. You tag your blog appropriately. (For many blogging platforms this just means tagging your blog as you usually would, but if technorati doesn’t pull tags automatically from the platform you use, you can explicitly add code to your post that technorati can understand.) If bloggers come to a consensus about shared tag names, readers can then go to the technorati site to get a feed of all recent posts using that tag.

I have been very interested in reading all the commentary about the state of science blogging and its possible future, but I’m having trouble discovering all the posts out there, scattered across so many blogs. I hereby propose (perhaps to an empty room, but why not give it a shot?) that bloggers use the tag “meta-scienceblogging” to tag posts about the ScienceBlogs diaspora, the current state of science blogging, possible futures of science blogging, etc. Register your blogs with technorati (as a side benefit, it should help increase your traffic), and it will aggregate the posts.

I’ve registered this blog and tagged this post. If everything works as it should, posts with this tag from registered blogs will show up at http://technorati.com/tag/meta-scienceblogging. There should even be an associated RSS feed. [ETA: Crankily, I declare that this doesn’t seem to be working for me. Technorati still hasn’t indexed this post under the appropriate tag. Either technorati takes too long to index things (possible) or I did something wrong (also possible). Either way, I don’t think it is the easy-to-use solution I was hoping for.]

I hope this is a useful idea.