upcoming SF Bike Music Festival

…passing along this fun music festival June 20th in San Francisco. The whole think is bike powered including transportation and electricity. There are multiple locations and critical mass rides between stages in the Golden Gate Park, Dolores Park, and the Ferry Building downtown. (link)

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Online Science Resource Survey pt2

Thanks to all my friends and colleagues who responded to my email asking for online science content.  The list we generated covers a wide range of topics from Epidemiology, Environmental Chemistry, Public Health, Statistics, Microbiology and Open Science.  The formats vary widely: email alters, websites, rss feeds, expert blogs,  discussion boards, list serves, and linked news sites. One things is clear, that if you want to access science online there are many formats available– and just find the format that works for you.

NEWS / FEEDS
> Infectious Disease Resarch and Policy – http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/
> CDC selected topics – http://www.cdc.gov/emailupdates/index.html
> CDC selected news items -     http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/services/email
> Community of Science (CoS e-alerts) -  http://www.cos.com/login/join.shtml
> EnvironmentalHealthNews – http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/subscribe.html
> Science Commons (open access news) – http://sciencecommons.org/feed/
> MicrobeWold News (microbiology current events) – http://feeds.feedburner.com/microbe-news
> 60 sec science blog by Scientific American (broad topics, current events) -  http://rss.sciam.com/60-second-science-blog
> MIT Technology Review – http://feeds.technologyreview.com/technology_review_top_stories

BLOGS
> Science Planet Blog - http://blogs.america.gov/science
> Andrew Gelman, social science stats- http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/
> ScienceBlogs  – http://scienceblogs.com/channel/rss.php
> Effect Measure (A progressive public health science blog) http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/
> everyONE (PLoS ONE community blog)- http://everyone.plos.org/feed/
> Open Access News – http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogger/wPhg

DISCUSSION /  LISTS SERVES
> Recreational water quality list serve (not just for the great lakes) – http://www.great-lakes.net/glba/beachnet.html
> DIYBio (google group on homemade biology experiments) – diybio@googlegroups.com

JOURNALS
> Applied Env. Microbiol. – http://aem.asm.org/papbyrecent.dtl
> PNAS – http://www.pnas.org/rss/
> BMC bioinformatics papers – http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcbioinformatics/
> Env. Science & Technol – http://pubs.acs.org/journal/esthag
> Lancet Infectious Diseases – http://www.thelancet.com/rss
> Lancet – http://www.thelancet.com/rss
> Am. J. Epidemiology – http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/rss
> Int. J. Epidemiology – http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/rss
> Nature (short abstracts from journal) -  http://www.nature.com/nature/current_issue/rss

I’ve been trying out a several formats and hit a few dead ends.  I find email alerts annoying and delete them almost reflexively.   I bookmark sites on http://delicious.com/DaveLove but rarely visit them.  I even tried using delicious to keep a community lit review, but others didn’t use it.   The one method that does work for me is using rss feeds, because they can pile up unwatched and scanned in bulk quickly.  I drop rss feeds into Thunderbird (on my computer) and in parallel on Google Reader (for use on other computers).   I’m curious what others do?

protein gets the title: salmon

In the spirit of Laura’s BaltimOregon blog, and in honor of the NBA semifinals I’ve photographed my dinner plate and am willing to describe the labor of love that is cooking for 2.

At point guard, standing 3” tall, a great versatile food from Livingston, CA is steamed sweet potato;

At shooting guard, with a streaky temperment from Northern California is a steamed red beet;

At small forward, cut in 2” sticks, slick and buttery from Cappy Valley, CA are the anise-white wine sauted carrots;

At power forward, fresh off the grill and great on the boards are anaheim peppers and onions brushed with balsamic vinegar and oil;

And at center, standing 6” tall and pound-for-pound the richest, wildest part of the meal, grilled American Salmon.

The coach of this team, Washington State pear heffeweizen, is drunk on his dreams of being the best meal around.

online science resource survey pt1

About a week ago I sent an email out to 35 sicence colleages asking for them to send me web-based science resources that they use daily or semi-regularly. (see text of email below)

I had a response rate of 28.5%, with the majority of the responses coming from day 0 to 1 (fig 1).

Figure 1. Histogram of email responses by day

I was curious if more younger people than older people would respond, which might tell me something about who values science content on the internet.   People in their 30s and younger were nearly twice as likely to reply to my email as those 40 and older.  For example, in age brackets with large Ns the response rate was higher in 30 yr olds than 40 yr olds (fig 2).  I didn’t email enough people in the 20, 50, and 60 decades  to adequately judge repsonse rate.

Fig 2. Email response rate based on age segment of respondent.

Maybe this has less to do with their interest in online science resources and more to do with their proficiency with email.  In my next post I’ll compile the respondants suggestions and provide a list of online science resources, so stay tuned.

——————————

Hi all,
I am trying to collect a list of the online science content that you all– my friends and colleagues– use regularly.  There are so many free online resources available but finding them can be a challenge.

> My preference is to hear about *aggregated content*   So for example, instead of telling me that CDC.gov is a useful website, i’d like to know if CDC has a particular email list, newsgroup, or RSS feed that you subscribe to.
> I am also interested in user-generated content, things like science blogs, message boards, twitter/facebook users that comment on science (ex: Dr. Larry Brilliant at The Skoal Foundation has a great twitter feed).

** in a week or so I’ll email everybody that contributed the compiled results.

kind regards,
Dave

memorial day cruise

Image by eric haller via Flickr

Wendy and I cruised around Berkeley by bike for 2 hr (route).  We headed to College Ave to Ici for a meyer lemon ice cream cone and cup with scoops of cinammon-milk and chocolate.  Next we headed to Takara for sake tasting, but they were closed   We biked over the University Ave bridge and rode along the bay side greenway to get some sun. It was actually very cold, even though it looked warm.